275. Why your 13th hire is like puberty (and what to do about it), with Steve Kemish

0:00Steve Kemish:There's a moment where your company hits 13 people where everything changes. This isn't gradual. This is sudden. Our guest today calls it business puberty and he's lived through it three times.

0:10Truth, Lies and Work Host:I've been through three companies that have gone from less than about 12 to 15, 16 people through to greater than that. In fact, this organisation, we went through that period in about four months. And I always say that it's worth learning that if you're going to be involved in running a business, you wouldn't recommend to your younger self to go through puberty in four months. And it's a real challenge with an organisation.

0:31Steve Kemish:Steve Chemish is the CEO of Intermediate Global, currently ranked 38th fastest growing company in the UK. Here's what makes Steve different. He's not chasing growth for ego. He's been through the painful transition of business puberty multiple times and he knows exactly where the bodies are buried. That 13th hire, it's not just another person. It's the moment you stop being a close-knit group of people who know everything about each other's work, and become a company that actually has needs for brace yourself, processes, structures, and all that grown-up stuff. And if you think you can skip this phase or power through it, Steve's got news for you.

1:10Steve Kemish:You cannot. But you can survive it if you understand what's really happening and why recognition becomes the most critical tool you have. Hello and welcome to Truth, Lies and Work, the award-winning podcast where behavioural science meets workplace culture, brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. My name is Leanne. I'm a Chartered Occupational Psychologist. My name is Al. I'm a business owner. And we are here to help you simplify the science of work. If you are running a company somewhere between 10 and 50 people, today's episode might be the most important one you listen to this year, because there's a specific moment around that 13th to 15th employee where companies either figure it out or fall apart.

1:54Steve Kemish:And here's where it connects to something even more critical, recognition. Because when your company hits puberty, the old ways of showing appreciation, well, they stop working. What motivated your first 12 people won't motivate your next 25. So after this break, Steve's going to walk us through exactly what happens at each growth stage, why recognition becomes your secret weapon, and how to avoid the ego traps that killed his first attempt at this to don't go anywhere. HubSpot makes impossible growth impossibly easy for their customers. And here's a perfect example. Lee, your turn. Morehouse College needed to reach new students with fresh, engaging content.

2:34Steve Kemish:But with a massive 900-page website, even the tiniest updates took 30 minutes to publish. Breeze, which is HubSpot's collection of AI tools, helped them write and optimize their content in just a fraction of the time. The results? 30 % more page views and visitors now spend 27 % more time on their site. If you're ready for impossible growth like this, visit HubSpot.com.

3:02Truth, Lies and Work Host:Steve Kemmish, I am the CEO of an organisation called Intermedia Global, or IMG for shorthand. We're a marketing services agency based in the UK, but we work pretty much, as the name suggests, globally. we work with a whole range of organizations um normally fixing um ours probably the best way to put it the messy cable drawer of life if you were to describe that if you're interested in anything to do with marketing when modern marketing is technology data process content all sorts of stuff if that's all a bit of a mess and we tend to reorganize that messy cable drawer for lots of

3:38Steve Kemish:different organizations just to give people an idea the fact that you do know what you're talking about i believe you've just been named as one of the fastest growing companies on what was the

3:47Truth, Lies and Work Host:um 38th fastest growing so we have we're a top 40 hit uh which madonna did with vogue at the same time she went up to be number one i doubt we'll do that but yeah if if it gives endorsement um externally that what we do is is relevant and useful to organizations that's definitely part of it um more importantly actually for me with colleagues it's not just me there's there's about 40 of us that all worry about these things so it's endorsement to all of those guys as well that we are relevant we are useful we we know some stuff that's worth knowing i sense in the agency world

4:20Steve Kemish:there's a lot of people who just grow for the sake of growing acquisitions mergers all that

4:25Truth, Lies and Work Host:kind of thing what's your thoughts on that i think i was probably one of them back in the day so i've been i was client side my marketing career started um in various organizations up until about 2007 seven, eight, when I left to become agency and consultative. And so during that second arc, if we'd have been doing this back 2011 now, I think retrospectively, my ego might have said, yeah, well, look, well, let's grow. Bigger is better. And I've certainly learned the hard way that just building for the sake of it and saying, oh, I run a company of, and by the way, I never introduced myself as running a company.

5:01Truth, Lies and Work Host:I work in marketing. That's as far as I'm concerned, it needs to go i have a job title that's different to others that do it but back then you may have felt like well you could puff your chest out i run a company of 50 people um but that is really in a service-based industry which typically marketing is that is a really tough gig and i think therefore if you just do it yourself um in terms of organic growth that's one thing m and a is a completely different matter again and that's a bit like trying to weld families together um you know I'm sure there are people that are listening that resonate that they've got step siblings, or maybe they've got children that are stepchildren.

5:38Truth, Lies and Work Host:They don't always necessarily get on just because you shove them in the same house together. There's all sorts of big and very small things that are different in different cultures and organisations that if you just put them together for the sake of it, it may not be a harmonious family life that you lead.

5:53Steve Kemish:What are the things you worried about when you were 20 that you maybe don't worry so much about when you're 50?

5:59Truth, Lies and Work Host:If we rewind back from 20, where I think it's really important, and I've seen this a few times in that second half of my career agency side is when you go through the puberty of running a business or being in a business so you know we all know um hopefully all of us that are on this call that the struggle that is adolescence um when a company and i've been through three companies that have gone from less than about 12 to 15 16 people through to greater than that going through as in fact this organization we went through that period in about four months and i always say that it's worth learning that if you're going to be involved in running a business you wouldn't recommend to your younger self to go through puberty in four months and it's a real challenge with an organization because you change from a room of people that everybody knows everything that everybody else is doing and it's in my head or it's in al's head or in someone else's head to your proper company where you need process and you need all the grown-up stuff and i think there's there's almost this business adolescence that i think is really important to call out for that change in organization you see culture shift again by the way when the business gets a bit bigger i think when you get to more like where we are actually 30 40 people and i'm sure there are bigger shifts but i've always been in organizations that have been around this size so around the 50 or below um so i can't talk to greater than that interesting interesting

7:16Steve Kemish:i've never heard that term adolescence or business adolescence i've only just coined it i mean it's

7:21Truth, Lies and Work Host:not that it no well it's just what i've always thought is it feels like you're going through puberty or business change so it's just a good way of analogizing for me so i tend to work in analogies because my brain's quite simple if i get it in another walk of my life i normally get it in the primary function i'm trying to understand when we last spoke you were you were using the word

7:41Steve Kemish:recognition quite a lot now i i sense that some people might not fully understand what recognition is so what do you mean when you say recognition is a big part of growing i think it's a really

7:53Truth, Lies and Work Host:very complex word recognition it should be quite simple and um if you bring in its cousin reward it's a conversation we have quite a lot this end in fact i had this conversation on an all hands meeting with all colleagues yesterday this week where if you think about reward and recognition is the same if i can meld them when you try and ask a team of 40 people um so 39 others i'll get 39 different responses to what recognition reward means and that's an important first point is you'll never get a dictionary definition of what recognition means what i might want to give or receive as recognition may be entirely different to those 39 others and that doesn't mean you can necessarily always offer that or adapt for that but trying to recognize that recognition is a is an individual thing is important in a business so that when you shape things like employee benefits and simple things like for example we have unlimited staff holiday now that's a really big thing to say um and we put it in four years ago um but it's a it's a brush strokes right it's a one size fits all and the the element of worry when we put it in was will it work we'd read that much larger organizations actually have used this over the last 10-15 years um rather cynically actually i think that it tends to reduce the number of holiday days people take um i've studied behavioral science so i find the framing of these sort of things fascinating is that if you put a particular number in front of people higher or lower then it tends to change behaviors um so unlimited is one that's just difficult because like what does that mean i don't know whether i'm taking enough holiday but in reality what we found is we are on average people are taking slightly more than they would have done on our role scheme um there's a couple of outliers who take a lot more but not because they're lazy or they don't do a great job the nuance of their work means they can and their recognition their reward system is we like to take a break i like to go on holiday others in the organization that you know what they want from recognition and reward will be entirely different um i don't work i'm lucky um that i don't work with people that are wholly money focused i'm not in that sort of company or industry but but there's nothing wrong with that either and we all have to pay bills so if recognition is actually the picture of the king on the back of a note or many of them that's all right the key thing is to try and understand what does an individual people you work with and you care about what do they need from recognition um not kind of a metaphysical pat on the head but sometimes particularly actually in my role i have a job title that i absolutely hate ceo it just sounds like frankly awful um You know, it can be used quite effectively at times, but I tend to avoid using it.

10:37Truth, Lies and Work Host:But internally, it can just sometimes be good to go, well, the CEO said I did a good job. Just for the tape as well, you said you thought I was a great guy earlier, just in case that gets missed from the cut from this. As he puts his ego back in. But it's, you know, sometimes you need to recognize that just being a nice person and a kind person with your seniority, with your experience can go an awful long way. That's recognition for some. But others, you know, actually it needs to link to something tangible.

11:07Steve Kemish:Well, this is perfect segue. Because you said if you ask 40 people what recognition means, you'll get 40 different answers. You've just given us two potentially amazing ways in which you can provide recognition. but that's only satisfied two of your 40 people so how do you how do you even reconcile this how did you how do you work out what you're going to do to recognize people well you need to spend

11:30Truth, Lies and Work Host:time with them first so um when we as i mentioned earlier we we forged three businesses together about five years ago now the collective sum of that company new company was only about 15 people so smaller than it is and that's part of as you've said we've grown um and the sunday times thing right we're really proud of it but it's just a headline number there's stuff underneath it that that's more important to us but but a part of that is when you've got more work you need more people um it's not quite a linear line um but when i first came in and it's something i try and do with everybody that starts is i have this basic stop start continue principle with one-to-one people which when we first all came is like look you don't know we did know each other not as well as we did from the three different practices was okay look in your view what what do you think in your day job micro or a macro level in the company we should stop doing we should start doing we mustn't we must continue to do see you know i'm lucky because it's the size of organization and i i'm i'm interested in people's views to try and disseminate those to get some input rather than just in an ivory tower that said that the test and learn i'm a marketeer my whole professional being has been taught that you have to test and learn you'll never get it right first time so you can take that culture I think into trying to make change around if we're talking about reward systems or recognition of peers be it colleagues or otherwise try it if it doesn't seem to to work then change it it's in it's in the gift of a much smaller business it's one of the reasons I love now working in a smaller company in my client side days when I started my career I worked in very large organizations and I learned so much but you move at the speed of a super tanker and you're a tiny cog in that super tanker that you know if you if the cog fell out the bit the ship may not notice whereas when you're this size everybody's got a voice and it makes a difference you also can go a lot faster which is terrifying in some ways because um i don't know if you've ever been on a speedboat um and i don't think i've ever been on a speedboat but i've been on boats that go fast and that feels quite terrifying and compared to the safety of something bigger so So it's not always the case for everybody career-wise.

13:40Truth, Lies and Work Host:Whatever you do, smaller is not always better. It can be quite terrifying and it's not the right journey. Safety in the big ship or in the slower moving kind of waters of what we do.

13:51Steve Kemish:So I want to move on to the impact and I'm going to start quite specific and then move a bit more general. So something you said there, stop, start, continue. First of all, can you tell us, give us an example of how you might implement that one-to-one and then also what the impact that has on the person you're talking to i mean my basic for 22

14:11Truth, Lies and Work Host:years of managing people i have a very basic rule which if you and i this is ridiculous al because we're on a podcast but if you and i were in a one-to-one i have two rules which are look we're in a virtual physical room the door's shut nothing leaves this room unless we both agree it leaves the room um i.e you can tell me whatever you want and back to my point around job title earlier that gets harder when your job title changes and and the bigger the company because it's like well i don't know them very well can i trust him his job title says that he could fire me you know those are all the cynical bits in the unconscious brain that might come out so it's a case of step one is look nothing leaves i'm here to to collaborate with you um and second point is the only exception and i've said this for 23 years and never used it is unless you tell me something so heinous i think i have to take it out on behalf of both of us but i've never needed that so it's i think first is setting an environment and whether that fully works all the time or not and it's my way of doing it rather than the way it's try and get people comfortable to go look you can trust me tell me what you mean and tell me stuff that you think i might not know i'm not interested in good news it's always nice to get plaudits right but for me you can't change and improve a business or a working relationship if you just focus on how great it is well what's what's not what's getting to you what's the bit of grit in your shoe that if you leave it in there will become a blister and become uncomfortable and therefore what you tend to get the you the really interesting stuff are quite small minutiae that um get quite big change the um the one percent change from somebody saying do you know what i wish we didn't do these meetings well why are we doing them don't know we always have and that you know that legacy of or somebody i don't know somebody set it up once we just do it we humans form habits quite quickly um that can be quite important to somebody or my desk I could do with this thing and I won't give you specific examples because I wouldn't want to embarrass anybody but they're often quite small requests that feel like they're a big thing to ask for it's like oh great yeah we can do that we can make immediate change good yeah absolutely and then it becomes a bit viral because everyone else goes well well yeah that would be useful to me as well and and then suddenly one person's confidence to go this could be better if we started doing this or stop doing that.

16:23Truth, Lies and Work Host:You've got a whole complete business change without really much effort. And it's not come from on top. It's come from, you know, you're not dictating, we will now do this. You're just listening to what people want and trying your best to give it to them where you can.

16:35Steve Kemish:So for someone who's not doing this, they might think, oh, that sounds like a lot of work. I sense there's a lot more reward for you in doing it than not doing it. Definitely, yeah.

16:47Truth, Lies and Work Host:I take greatest pleasure in working with people and seeing people achieve and succeed. Minor things, major things. So again, back to our values, right? And this is where, not unashamedly, I don't think it's quite the right word, but I have had a heavy influence on the values that we work to just because I've been around longer than others that I work with. I'm not necessarily the oldest in the company, but I'm one of the most experienced in the company. And the two top ones for me are make people look good or make others look good and make their problems go away and and it's quite easy to that first one to have been made customers look good but it's in it's intentionally others and that could be a colleague um it should be a colleague right there shouldn't be an ego in this so if you and i are working on something and my position is more senior or different to yours um why can't you have the credit for it you might be the one that asked the seemingly daft question um which was a or gave a daft answer but someone else in the room went well no that's not right but i wouldn't have thought of this and i've now thought of that well that should probably trace back to that's something you've done i've been in rooms in my earlier career where people will ignore me or steal my good ideas or make me feel like the one thing that i used to dislike the most at large companies is if you haven't got the right job title you shouldn't possibly speak that kind of culture and and it wasn't we're talking a long time ago but and and it was it was rare but it happened i've always thought well i don't want to i want the person that's got um and again actually one of our values is experience is not necessarily a monopoly on good ideas just because i'm older than you doesn't mean i've got a better idea the most insightful people are often ones that come in and go oh hiya this is why i do the stop start continue where i can is that people have come in new and go sorry this is a really dumb question but why do you do that why do we do that and everyone looks around and goes no if there's not a good answer then it's just it's that it's that kind of inertia that's crept in that we just have always done it let's change it and i think that is my being but it's also professionally because marketing is always about test and learn um three words there right not one test easily done in marketing and learn is the bit that often gets missed well what has that taught us um rather than we tested it did you learn i didn't have time so 2007 2008 i think was the

19:09Steve Kemish:the year that you went out kind of on your own. Client side, that's right, yeah, and hoped. Well, when you jumped into that pool, had you already learned the lesson that recognition was going to be a large way of your management style?

19:21Truth, Lies and Work Host:No, I don't think so. I didn't even think I had a management style and I don't necessarily think I do now. I just, I try and treat people like they're decent human beings and treat them with respect where I can. I don't care what your job title is or your functional experience. You're human, you should be kind of respected and looked after. um so no i don't think i did and i didn't actually leave client i was managing a team when i left but i went from that to be a consultant kind of i'm going to tell the world things that uh i need i need to tell them plus also to be honest al the main reason i left if i'm being brutally honest is i worked and i loved the brands i worked for but they were big companies that no one's ever heard of because they were in business to business industries um and i just thought i'm sick of my mum asking me what I do so I was like right sod it I'm going to try and work for companies she might have heard of and I was very fortunate my first two consultancy jobs were with British Airways and Skype now Skype in 2007 was a big deal right for this post kind of Zoom Teams era Skype is probably known but it was it was really growing and I was terrified going into both of those organizations and Skype if you don't know is from Estonia Estonia's got a really good history of of innovative startups but that was based in london but british airways everyone you heard of them and it was like oh my god what am i going to know how am i going to be relevant in there but the interesting thing um and it's a drift off management but i think it's a useful one for anyone that's in whatever career you're in if you're considering that move from being client side um to supply side so whether it's a consultant agency for me or whatever version in your industry it might be um fundamentally most companies have the same problems in the worlds that i work in um my stock phrase now 20 years later is if you change the surnames you change the haircuts and the logo nothing else changes and and therefore i learned this in british airways in their headquarters near heathrow putting in a room i was like okay he's he's the expert he'll know i said well just explain to me the context and i was like oh yeah this is like everything else i've learned in the last 10 years it's just a different industry but it's the same problem So I think there's a comfort in that confidence that if it's back to management style or dealing with and just working with people, yes, there are nuances.

21:38Truth, Lies and Work Host:Different people need different things. Back to the starting point of this whole thing around recognition. But ultimately, the more you kind of invest in trying to understand them, the more actually you can be relevant and helpful because often quite a lot of us need or want for similar things. It just may not always come out in the same language, but it will probably be getting to the same sort of heart of it.

21:58Steve Kemish:It's so interesting. What you've just said there has clicked in my head that marketing is a psychology of finding what people want and giving it to them. And what you've just described there is that workplace culture is kind of finding what your employees want and giving it.

22:11Truth, Lies and Work Host:Yeah, I always say if I get bored at a dinner party, not that I go to dinner parties anymore because it's post-COVID times, but the idea that I will often say, you know, marketing fundamentally is to get you to want things you don't need. That's at its more cynical core of it, which I don't know that that is a bit too cynical for me but the idea of actually marketing is a very much a behavioral science topic hence as I was saying to you I think offline I've studied behavioral economics I find it a fascinating subject to understand what is it that makes people decide to do or not do something when it comes to in the context for behavioral economics of commerce but in in life that can be used the government should and they do use behavioral economics, but not enough, in my opinion, to try and make changes to society in a good way.

23:00Steve Kemish:Billion Dollar Moves, hosted by Sarah Chen Spellings, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination of business professionals. Join venture capitalist and strategist Sarah Chen Spellings as she asks the hard questions and learns through the triumphs, failures and hard lessons of the creme de la creme, so you too can make billion dollar moves in venture, in business and in life. Maybe start with episode 124, where you're going to hear how industry giants from Canva to YouTube, Define Leadership. Listen to Billion Dollar Moves wherever you get your podcasts.

23:34Steve Kemish:Some people think that professional development is a type of recognition and some people argue that, well, they should have that anyway. Where do you stand on that thought?

23:43Truth, Lies and Work Host:If I come back slightly from it, so I don't always look at, I don't ever look at somebody in our organisation or any organisation I've worked in if it's their job. What they are is they're with us for a period of their career so for me professional development would be that's something that makes complete sense for the organization to offer in the same way they'd offer a desk and maybe water and coffee is that if you want somebody to flourish then that professional development you i think you have a responsibility as an employer to try and make the your colleagues as effective as possible and if you do that you will benefit from them in the period they're with you um now that's not enough alone but my my my experience is if you create an environment where people are happy are rewarded are recognized as safe then they don't necessarily have as much reason to leave you um and therefore it's you know i think it's a bit short-termistic professional development we're just going to improve their career cv for the next job well yeah you are but they may not take that next job for a number maybe two years uh later than they would have done without it and just think about the recruitment savings in terms of cost as well as effort and the continuity of having somebody and the fact that they might also not leave because you can open up a new job because that professional development helped them to be better at something that means they fulfill a new role in a senior position or in a new position or wherever it may be so yeah I'm a huge I studied I spent 12 years teaching as a lecturer alongside my day job so everything to do with education to me is really important particularly in work is you should never stop learning um and again not to make this about our seven values but um always be curious is really important but you can always learn something um so why not go and do it if that's packaged in professional development great if it's unprofessional development i.e it's unstructured learning then that's also good as well just being curious curiosity didn't seem to kill the cat it just made the cat smarter i think do you think everyone on some level needs recognition or are

25:44Steve Kemish:there just some people out there who can just crack on with the job and they don't care i'm

25:47Truth, Lies and Work Host:not a psychologist but um my gut says everybody does it's just different recognition so for some it might just be a kind of an unemotional a kind of rational practical well done cheers thank you versus some people need it much more open and much grander um for some they're and it's why link recognition to reward their reward system i remember when when we worked um when i worked client side in a large department we were allowed to go home half an hour early on a friday it's like it's like we've won the lottery it was amazing and not least because i worked on a business part that if you left the standard time everyone else did it took you an hour to get off there and so there were i think there were quite small gestures but if you've got family for example we're pretty flexible this end that we're lucky right we're in an organization size with people that we don't need to monitor and track they have a job they know what their job is if they can do that whilst also going to pick up or drop off children or go to sports day or something like that the important stuff there's the practical i've just got to do it so recognition might be oh he's a great job on that look i know you've got this come out just get out early and do it or go out do that get back later and pick up the work the work will be there we know we trust that you'll do it that's a real privilege in our industry in our company i know there'll be people listening in that might take jobs where it is much more structured i used to work in retail when i was much younger um i couldn't just disappear off the shop floor of clark's shoes in oxford whilst i was doing my a not whilst doing my a levels on a saturday for my a levels i'd be i'd be in trouble um so i get that as well but i think there is even within there the ability to just be a little bit more human with humans to to try and support and and and recognize it's a long answer but yeah everybody's different um i think everybody wants some form of recognition it will just be different

27:40Steve Kemish:recognition this is coming back to what you said at the beginning is that you know you get 40 different definitions of recognition based on what they personally want i apologize for asking this again but i'm still just trying to get my head around if you've got 40 people and they all might want different things where do i even start working out how to motivate each one or recognize

28:03Truth, Lies and Work Host:each individual individual well it's not a it's not a one-player game again so you know i don't i don't manage 39 people there are there's lines of management in there so there's a collective of if we we can kind of um i was going to say divide and conquer but that sounds the wrong phrase but we can just divide and succeed in terms of helping people we i think in an organization of any size there are benefit systems that are much more progressive these days so um whether it's um salary sacrifice schemes for example in the uk which are pretty popular the ability to say well rather than um i don't know what's an example the ride to work scheme okay that's been around for a few years where you get a tax efficient way of buying a bicycle that arguably speaking as long as hmrc aren't listening in people will use for commute but they also will get benefit outside of work as well that's just a great scheme but not everyone wants to ride a bike um where i think you can go a bit further so if i'd had 39 people and 24 said i want a bike and 15 others don't want a bike then a bike scheme is going to be roughly about what 57 successful um salary sacrifice and benefits modern benefit schemes um allow for flex we have a a system through a company where it's got a collection of different subscriptions so some of it's for mindfulness apps for well-being apps for weight loss apps for addiction apps so giving up smoking or and then in the post-modern world vaping and gym membership heavily discounted or free there's quite a smorgasbord of stuff in there and that's um a relatively easy way to solve the problem you've rightly posed which is you can't necessarily do one size fits all um again are we unique no we're a fast-growing company we are profitable in as much as we want to we need to make more money than we spend but not we're not gratuitously so it's not again i don't think what i've described there is no i couldn't be the gift of most organizations in most industries you you want to um to use if it's such a thing as a steveism i always talk to staff about keeping a grip on finances and i can almost see colleagues here we go again um but grip stands for growth reward uh investment and protection so running a small business this is very important that when you've got excess money and again i've just coined this as a way to try and say to people that rewards really important but we also must grow as an organization we need to um grow as individuals we must invest and p is for protection that's making sure we've got a rainy day or a rainy month or a rainy year fund the best we can so i'm not advocating just go and spend it all on cool perks see that as part of the mix as i said earlier with professional development if you give benefits to people um i think you're just being a decent human being firstly but more than that if you need to make a return on that investment you may well keep the people you retain staff longer and that just takes away the stress and hassle or minimizes the stress and hassle of recruitment of continuity loss when you've you know that member of staff that's gone on to another thing or indeed you find you get loyalty in a different way it doesn't all just become i want more money i want more money that people are much more grown up and mature about the world um to just stick with you when times are tough and we don't get me wrong our we've we've had an amazing four years but we've had tough times through it too and when you're a service-based business as we are it is you are constantly fighting the have we got enough work have we got enough of the right kind of people and that is an impossible marriage to ever remedy and rectify it's always going to be a case of you've either got too much work too few people or both so it's not all a bowl of cherries from 38th fastest growing sounds sexy and we've got a cool little red piece of acrylic somewhere in the office but there's a lot more underneath it that can be difficult so i think i'm i'd like to think i'm fairly representative of a business rather than just that's just a glamour business it is uh humans are humans we're dealing with the same sort of challenges in any as any business would do like you said change the haircuts change the surnames and it's the same problem change the logos yeah correct absolutely agree i don't mean that ghibli by the way i think it just gives a confidence to people that if you are thinking can would i know anything in outside of my business yeah you probably would in your particular discipline you'll find quite quickly similar patterns the clue is normally you sit with somebody go have you worked in our industry no I haven't okay well our industry is a bit different to other industries that's normally the tale for me that it won't be different at all but you you want to enumer that and go okay well have you got these challenges in my world is it do you have challenges with sales and marketing alignment people getting one in those two functions is your data bad have you got too much marketing technology too little times process difficult is it hard to get campaigns out the door is it hard to measure campaigns is attribution the holy grail of what you do i.e you spent some money on sales and marketing but you can't tell what it is you spent it on that's been effective yeah and and again that's well that's because in pretty much every organization you ever work in those of the problems relevant to where i come into a business everyone here listening in will have their own version of it depending on their skill or professionalism what