 Hi everyone, welcome to TechSoupConnect Australia. This is the newly combined TechSoup Australia. I'm Kat Milner of Create Your Change and I am one of the hosts here at TechSoupConnect Australia. Today I'm really excited to have Wendy Perry who is the managing director of Workforce Blueprint and an entrepreneur facilitator for Adelaide in the West Switch Start Scale. She's an author, entrepreneur and educator, explorer and innovator, mentor and speaker on entrepreneurship and innovation, workforce planning and development, vocational education and training and a whole host of other things. In my small business, Create Your Change, I have had the pleasure and the privilege of working with Wendy for a little over a year now and it has been wonderful to have the kind of support that she provides, the perspective and in a lot of ways, the out of the box thinking. So I know you're going to get a lot out of it and I'm so glad you're able to join us today and without further ado, Wendy Perry. Thank you Kat and hi everybody. I hope your morning is going well for you. I know that a number of people might not do this a little bit later on and what we're going to really do is hone in on the importance of having an entrepreneurial mindset. Part of this I guess could be about the language side of things and there's lots of terms and phrases that are kind of used and whether or not you identify as an entrepreneur, perhaps you are more of an entrepreneur. You might be working in an awkward profit or for somebody else where you're like an entrepreneur for your employer or maybe you're in that social innovation space. But what we're going to step through today is I guess a bunch of evidence and reasons and examples why you might want to put more of a kind of like entrepreneurial spin on things. There's also some funding opportunities that I want to kind of share that are current and available to people right now and we're going to look at a couple of models but really what we're talking about with that entrepreneurial approach is more like a mindset rather than a label of being an entrepreneur. And in my role as entrepreneurship facilitator I work with so many different people I've probably heard just about every business idea that you can think of under the sun over the last couple of years and that's here in Australia and internationally as well. So I've got some slides that I'm going to share with you. I'll just pull them up now and I've got a couple of screens here so you might sort of see my eyes looking across the different areas. But let's sort of get started and get delve into why you're playing an entrepreneurial mindset is important and that's regardless of the context that you might be in the workplace setting whether you have your own business or you work for somebody else. And I can appreciate that people listening to this there's a variety of different backgrounds and perspectives that you might have. Definitely we're seeing many more people I guess kind of taking an entrepreneurial approach or it might chunk it up more as innovation when it comes to things like government policy and programs, regional development agencies and there is a massive rise of side hustles as well. So probably the impact of COVID lockdowns, restrictions has meant that a number of people have really thought long and hard about the security that they might have in terms of their employment and where they might wanna go around bolstering that up and basically giving yourself some options that's a bit different as opposed to only thinking about working for someone else. Now I know that we're gonna have some not-for-profits interested in this content as well. So one of the key reasons that we sort of talk about having an entrepreneurial mindset is to keep pace with what's happening. And if you'd like to sort of put any comments into the question chat box feel free but just before we get onto that can you let us know in that chat box what are some of the emerging trends or things that you've kind of noticed more broadly about the economy. Now let's just say that I think most people probably in Australia but if you could put into the question chat box what are you noticing about the emerging trends around economic development, social kind of impact, government sort of policy what are some of those drivers and things that you're kind of seeing. So we're just gonna set the scene a little bit and link that to why it is that we need to have an entrepreneurial approach to things. So yeah certainly obviously we're sort of seeing a massive rise in terms of online development many more people much more comfortable with that. But let's just run through what sort of happened over this last year or two and what's emerging for 2021, 2022. Yeah pivoting comes up a lot doesn't it? So collaboration and pivoting. Now I don't know about you but one of the things that was a massive bonus through last year was that when we did have shutdowns I had to move obviously lots of different face-to-face events networking and so on to online. But what I found was that reaching out to speakers I had people speaking that were futurists from Canada for example. Another guy who's one of the biggest public speaker kind of coaches from the UK, colleagues from United Nations, the ILO you know all of these different kind of groups the European Commission for example. And it was amazing to see their openness and willingness to collaborate and speak online. Normally it costs probably a fair bit of money too but often people were doing that for free. Now we are gonna delve into the area of that economy and jobs a little bit more because it has a direct link to entrepreneurship in a minute. But the other areas is this notion of entrepreneurship and we are seeing so many corporates now basically having people in innovation kind of roles and working in things like international challenges, hackathons, it's becoming such a strong part of more like a corporate culture as well. But if you're not for profit and perhaps you're a small business or startup then you've often got kind of like more agility and flexibility and I think corporates are really becoming much more open to learning what they can. The notion of who you're collaborating with, who your clients are, where are your markets has really kind of blown out from local to national and then to international as well. And I can appreciate that some of you might be in more of that kind of program or project delivery kind of area. And there is lots of funding and opportunities related to different kind of cohorts in our community too. And we've seen lots of significant investment going into mental health awareness. Working at home I think, I don't know about you if you love it, but I really enjoy it. I think lots of people really enjoy it but we are seeing some really significant changes around workforce redeployment as well. So one of the reasons that we need to have like an entrepreneurial mindset is because of this kind of situation and environment that we are facing at the moment too. I can see some of the comments. So yeah, traditional businesses and some of those are corporates, might be government. Even some really large private sector organisations aren't always particularly agile either and that's kind of shown through hasn't it over the last year or two. And there, the environment having a healthy space to working for sure. So you're just sort of delving down into what's happening around the economy and jobs and why entrepreneurial thinking is really important as part of this. We've seen like a reorganisation of the economy. So we used to think down quite sort of specific industry kind of side loads almost. But if you have a look at what's happened over the last few to 18 months, there's been a real reorganisation. So we've seen jobs and organisations sort of fit more into that essential kind of work or service. Definitely health, certainly it's in retail and food and other aspects as well. And the second area is this enabling sector. So that would be more driven by technology. Contact centres for example, the rise of Zoom, don't we all wish we had shares in that, but heaps of other sort of tech companies have come to the fore there as well. And you know, scout out massively in terms of their recruitment. And there has been in an Australian context anyway, depends upon your experience around lockdowns and your location, but you know, massive growth workforce numbers wise and real labour and job skill shortages in that space too. The experience economy, so thinking more tourism, hospitality, those sorts of areas even, you know, like in South Australia we love our wine industry, cellar door, that's been obviously an area that's been hit really hard and needs a lot of support. But then we've definitely seen much more acceptance, adoption let's say of an entrepreneurial kind of approach. Whether on that it's in your own business or in startups or whatever. And I can see as well, yep, Dave is making a comment about the role of government assistance to the working force enormous in growing first world economies. Yeah, and David, you might want to, you know, put in some of the countries that you've got some experience with. In the, you know, up until last year we were doing a lot of international work and travel, but countries like Indonesia, you know, Philippines, you know, it's really interesting to see how they're managing with this too. And sometimes people have no tourists around entrepreneurship either. But an entrepreneurial approach, I mean, what's kind of different about that compared to maybe how you're culturally thinking where you're situated now? Well, most entrepreneurs do have a give first kind of mentality, you know, generally speaking, people are very kind, they are warm, they open up their networks, you know, their experience, their connections, they're constantly learning, you know, they're looking for problems to kind of solve. These are the sorts of traits that we're talking about and here's some images from a bunch of events and things that we've run over the time. But there is one fundamental model and some of you might be very familiar with it that is kind of associated with an entrepreneurial approach or entrepreneurial thinking. Now, you might use other models, so perhaps you want to, you know, put into the question chat box what you think might work for you. But lean startup or lean canvas, other versions of this business model canvas as well, which is kind of like more sophisticated or next level kind of layer. But when it comes to an entrepreneurial way of thinking, what we're trying to do here is understand what is the problem that we're trying to solve really, really deeply? And how does that different to other sorts of thinking? Some other people will start more like with what's the solution that I'm trying to design and how I'm trying to serve. But this really hones in on what are those problems that you're trying to solve and who are you trying to solve it for? And you know, their question is to who people will actually pay. So you might want to put into the question chat box, you know, in whatever context you're in, start up small business, tech company, not-for-profit, whatever it might be, what are the specific problems that you're solving for your clients and customers at the moment? I wear a couple of different hats. So we switched our scale. I'm working mostly with business ideas, startups and scale-ups. And I've seen thousands of people over the last two and a half years since the contract began. It's funded by the Australian government, attended that we were lucky enough to win. And there's so much commonality around the things that people are challenged with. Confidence is a key thing, you know, focus and using your time efficiently. But getting down to sales, like that's always the number one kind of thing and having that sustainable kind of income. So regardless of marketing and all the other topics that come up, sales is absolutely key. So I can see some examples here of technology overwhelm and being able to produce live events, helping people use tech in their business. But just think through, what are those problems that you're solving? And when we're discussing that with our customers and clients, we need to actually go deeper into what the pain of the problem is. So most people will always spin up positively. And, you know, when you're at an event or you're being asked, what do you do? You know, they sort of focus on the solution side. But a key point of difference here is delving right down into the detail as to what the problem is. You then show your customers and clients that you can be in their shoes, you perhaps have been in the past and that you've got the answer or some suggestions or solutions that work to pull that out of it. So you can work through this model. We can do it in, you know, there's some numbers there suggested in terms of the order, but, you know, different people have a different sort of take on things. The understanding that the key customers and sometimes, you know, that could be all sorts of different groups. Like sometimes I'll have people with switch charts go and be like, okay, so who to target customer? And they're, oh, anyone, anyone and everybody. You're like, no, no, no, it has to be much more specific. Can we give a profile to who it is that we're actually talking about? The unique value proposition is really important. You know, is this something that can easily be copied or not? And in a minute, we're going to do an activity which is more around your intellectual property. Now, probably the area that I've seen significant change over the last 18 months is revenue streams. So we saw some people just like, I'm not sure if I can continue. We saw some not-for-profits and charity clients in particular hit really hard, you know, particularly where they had a, like a donation kind of model where that was, that became very challenging to ask, you know, for people to give money and donations when some of those, you know, people were sort of struggling themselves. Massive sort of competition. So a lot of innovation around revenue streams. And the key point here I guess is to think through, I mean, talk about your business model, right? What's your business model? That basically means how you're bringing cash into your organisation. And thinking through diversifying that, you know, is it government funding? Is it subscription or membership? Is it fee-for-service? You know, what are the various ways that you're bringing that funding in? And it's really important to think more broadly, creatively, innovatively about how could you use that to your advantage and how could you, you know, think a bit differently about that. Now what we're gonna do now is move into kind of like a system and it's really related to a scaling up sort of side of things because that's something that we've seen, well, a lot of people have got an ambition to do, not that many people necessarily achieve this kind of goal and most people get confused or they're not sure about what way that they want to go. So if you could put into the question chat box, you know, a bit about the organisation that's your main kind of employment or self-employment, you know, what kind of stage are you start up? You know, are you thinking about sort of scaling up? Are you working with a mature organisation? Just be good to get that kind of sense from you. And we'll work through these five S's when it comes to scaling up. So this is one example of how you can potentially systematise your intellectual property. This is using an alliteration where everything starts with the same letter and, you know, some people think our systematise means like tech systems and things like this. What we're talking about here is your intellectual property. You know, the tacit knowledge that sits within your brain and the brains of other people that are in your team, making that explicit. So we're sort of using a knowledge management model here. Tacits risk explicit knowledge. And then we're putting it into a package or a way that makes it teachable and saleable and, you know, that people will actually engage in. They can follow really closely. So systematising the way that you work in your IP is absolutely fundamental and key, particularly if you're in more of a knowledge sort of based area, perhaps a service-based area. You know, again, those programmes, those projects, those initiatives. Streamlining what you offer is really important too. You know, we talk about getting traction and that can be really hard. Traction just basically does mean sales and customers and growth and so on. And that sort of is a multiplier effect. But streamlining what you offer can help you get that traction because if you've kind of got a menu, you know, it's sort of like when you go maybe to a particular sort of restaurant and they've got like so many things on the menu, it can be really confusing and hard. So if you can hone your energy and your effort into, you know, a couple of things. And when we say scaling up, it might not be that the whole organisation is scaled up. It could just be that some of the products or services or experiences are scaled up. So having seen your clients, of course, absolutely critical and how you kind of have an ongoing relationship, you know, rather than just like a once-off interaction with them. And then, you know, with my workforce planning and development hat on, where we do workforce plans, you know, normally three to five years, sometimes longer window for companies and industry sectors and regions and towns, you know, supporting your team and putting time into capacity and capability development is really important as well. Now, we're going to have a look at a scaling up kind of model. So I'll just have a look at, yeah, Bruce, I'm happy that you're going to be able to learn how to scale systematised. So systematising and learning. People are also in startup kind of mode with an artist scaling up. So that's really good. I'll just have a look at what else is there. Yeah, and you've made some comments about the sorts of things that you help people with too. All right, so let's have a look at this scaling up model. Now, this is from Vern Harnish. So, you know, a guy that was kind of like famous for writing the book, what I've got here with me, but the book about scaling up and particular approach. This is another example of systematising your intellectual property. This is a four component model and you can kind of see the chunks and then obviously he's written his book around that with chapters to turn it into training and development programs, lots of different opportunities. Interesting in this that he puts people kind of first because you really can't achieve anything without having a strong team. Now, the part about a strategy, this is often, you know, a significant gap. I don't know if anyone here has a strategic plan to follow and it doesn't mean that we have to have something, you know, so developing huge amount of detail, but, you know, a picture of us where we wanna go to, you know, a vision, a mission, purpose statement, whatever you wanna call it, we need to know where we're kind of headed. I mean, that's gotta be flexible as well, but this model talks about having a truly differentiated strategy. So point of difference is, you know, something that we discuss all the time. Now, you might wanna put into the question chat box, what's your point of difference in terms of your product services and experiences? This can take a little bit of time to think about and I guess it's more like an operational sort of practical level, but here we're talking at a strategic level. And, you know, the model talks about defining your core values and your purpose, who your customer is, and at least looking at a couple of years. So if you're comfortable to and you can put in there what you think your point of difference is, that'd be really great. The execution, so, you know, that culture of accountability and it links back to your people as well. Fine tuning out those processes, the sort of tech and systems and everything else that you're kind of using too. And then obviously there's a part about the money side. Now, this can be a tricky area. Some people, even though they might even be in business for themselves, don't like to discuss this in too much detail. As an entrepreneurship facilitator, I do often see people with, you know, all sorts of amazing ideas and it's like, okay, how can we do a budget for this? What does the cost structure kind of look like? You know, what is it gonna take to start things up and then sort of keep things going? What kind of forecast and sounds? Now, I generally just use a really simple, you know, profit and loss kind of template. But a key area here is that people often underestimate all of their expenses. We have like line by line here as well. And if you want to talk about this model in a bit more detail, you can have a look online. You can download chapters and things for free. So it's start up by Fern Harnish. But what I'd like to do now is just delve a little bit into that resourcing and that kind of funding side. I can appreciate that if you're not for profit or you're a relatively new kind of business, then, you know, a key question I get asked all the time is, is there any grants for, you know, starting up a business? Depends where you are located. If you're in Australia, sometimes councils do have grants, some state and territory governments do. But generally speaking, there's not just kind of like a magic funding. There's funding for certain things. So I'm just gonna put the author of Scaling Art. It's Fern Harnish. And chat, thanks, catch. And the book is just called Scaling Art. And the model. Well, since I don't think anyone's been brave enough to put what their point of difference is, but that's a really key thing to kind of understand and then flow that up to what your actual strategy is. So if you could put into the question-tap box, you know, what's your kind of business and model at the moment? Is it FIFA Service? Is it membership subscription? Is it grants and funding? Is it philanthropic money donations, bequeathments? Whatever it might be. And if I said that one, bequeathments. If you could put that into the question-tap box, that'd be really good. And we're just gonna touch on some different options in terms of, you know, thinking about that investment, the resources, the cash on the side of things. Now, I think it's really tricky if you only have one of these. And yeah, the comments about diversification is really, really important. So you do really have to have kind of like a FIFA Service base. If you then happen to get grants, donations, funding support or whatever, that's great. But the cycle of constantly going for grants and funding and initiatives and things is ridiculously tiring. And it can be, you know, really wearing on yourself as somebody leading, perhaps, or working with a team of people. It's getting incredibly competitive. I think more and more people are thinking about these options as they kind of come up. Sorry, I can see, you know, donation, FIFA Service subscription for sure. So we are gonna touch on some of the opportunities around funding and fellowship. And I guess the way to think about some of this is that it's like a massive bonus if you happen to get some of this. Applying an entrepreneurial mindset though is thinking about where the opportunities might be and also opening up your mind as to where you actually look. Many times, and I've run webinars before specifically on grants and funding, for example, when many clients, we've helped with them with their applications or whatever. But they just didn't even know that any of this sort of even existed. So I'm gonna start to run through a couple of key opportunities that are available and open right now, some of them I'm writing even for our own organization. And just see how they fit. And you'll see the different kind of locations as to where you could potentially look out for them. And, you know, it's kind of like, how can you put an innovative creative spin on this? Because these opportunities are kind of like broadly shaped already. And whatever it is that you've got that you wanna do, you'll have to figure out a way to sort of fit it in. I just wanna say a note about fundraising and investment. I don't know if anyone's raised any funds, you know, specifically through capital raise or whatever, let us know. But often people say, oh, I need an investor, I wanna get an investor. Okay, and I do have a hat as an investor as well myself and my husband and a few of our connections we invest in early stage startups. But people often think that they need an investor, but they only still have a concept. They don't even necessarily have customers or clients. Now it would be really rare for investors to, you know, go ahead with something which is just conceptual unless it was something that was so different and innovative and unbelievable, almost still proven of course, but that would be incredibly rare. So the point of getting an investor, you know, the values have to match yours, the interests have to match. And you know, there's that saying, if you ask for money, you'll get advice. If you ask for advice, you'll get money. And often that's quite hidden as well. It's hard to find people who are in that space. But a lot of the time it is, you know, net worth, high net worth individuals, family trusts. You know, if it's more of a corporate world, you will see that sort of stuff publicly out there. But fundraising and investment is massively challenging and relatively rare in an Australian sort of context as well. Now, another thing to think about is, who else can you work with your objectives are going to be similar? So are there some partnerships that you can create? And a note that you wanna make here, something that I found that really works really well is to do like a partnership kind of map. So if you think of like concentric circles, you put yourself in your organisation at the centre of that. And then, you know, the next layer out, who are you collaborating with and so on. It really helps you think through, okay, who needs to come closer? Who maybe needs to move a bit further out of that inner circle. It's a great visual way of representing to others where those connections and partnerships might be. And then we've touched on subscriptions and memberships as well. So entrepreneurial thinking means that we are opportunity spotting and we're saying how can some of these things, you know, fit with the sorts of objectives and goals that you have. So a fund that's open and available at the moment. Has anyone heard of this, the National Priority Fund? If you have, maybe put this like a yes, no. If you've heard of it or not, into the question chat box. And look, I'm just picking, you know, a real variety of different things at the moment. But with this one, this is more connected to the local employment facilitators. So this is, I guess, an indication from a government point of view as to where their priorities are. This is Australian Federal Government Department of Education, Skills and Employment. And what's sitting behind this is that there are significant pockets of unemployment. You know, then there's other areas where there's massive labour and school shortages. This National Priority Fund is really interesting because it's at an expression of interest stage. It actually closes on Monday. There are 51 employment facilitators around the country. So it depends upon, you know, where you might be located. You do need to have a chat with a local employment facilitator if you're going to put in an expression of interest or at least email exchange a little bit so they know what you're doing. But reading through these guidelines, and I'm working on three or four expressions of interest at the moment, really open in terms of what you might want to do. And it's basically to help people get back into the workforce. It does cover things like transport, for example, childcare, infrastructure, skills development and training, working on the employer side or with industry sectors or, for example, if there's a number of people in not-for-profits, you know, you could think down industry lines or you could think down the types of organisations and what they kind of need in terms of jobs, you know, within their businesses. There's points here about more like workforce retention and succession planning and free development. So a very flexible fund that, you know, you could probably look at for yourself or come out with some sort of program for your own organisation. It's a great kind of opportunity and you can check out that link as well. The next one is more like a fellowship. So the Sydney My Foundation, they've got opportunities open at the moment, innovation kind of fellowships opportunities for you to tap into more like personal development, education and learning. So you can kind of see that, you know, up to $120,000. You know, there's certain programs attached to them that sometimes there's flexibility around what you can use that for. So if you're looking to develop yourself in terms of your profile or positioning, maybe thought leadership, then there's lots of opportunities like these that are popping up, you know, that are more a bit more in that philanthropic sort of field as well. Now, has anyone looked for opportunities outside of Australia or the country that you are in? Can you say yes or no if you've looked at international opportunities? So just pop into the question chat box if that's something that's on your radar because often, you know, we're looking locally and maybe nationally, but we're not sort of looking beyond that. Interestingly, the United Nations have got Ian Innovation Fund, which is up to $100,000 US and equity investment. If you've kind of got solutions that are going to sort of benefit this case, this one specifically about children, but the world more broadly. So they are really looking at early seed stage investment. They're looking at emerging technology solutions. And, you know, if it's more like a start-up stage, that the sorts of things that they're looking at. They have looked at things like official intelligence, data science, blockchain, drones, you know, extended reality, all sorts of things in the past. But I guess what I'm just sort of suggesting to you here is United Nations, you know, ILO, OECD, these kind of really large organisations that have got member countries have got significant funding often. And I just want to tell you a quick story, which was back in 2018, there was an opportunity advertised by the United Nations, and it was to do an action report and project on entrepreneurial education in Australia. Or no, you didn't have... It wasn't Australia specifically, it was in your country. So with workforce blueprint, we applied for that. We were the only people in Australia to even put in anything, and we won the opportunity. So that was significant funding that came into the organisation, plus, you know, a trip to Bangkok in Thailand and a trip to South Korea to present the work, go on to a conference, and to meet with a dozen other countries. Amazing that nobody even had seen it or that there was no competition, basically, from Australia to sort of put that in. So that was an amazing opportunity. And with that relationship with United Nations, it built upon a previous connection where there was a program, again, that came out of Bonn in Germany, out of United Nations HQ, which has an education focus, this is sort of some of the background. And I contacted the guy who was running this program, which was kind of like a specific industry area, excellence in a program with leaders from all around the world. And they were looking for some facilitation, got the opportunity to do that for a week in Bonn in Germany with 25 countries and their leaders from those organisations, unbelievable experience. Made a connection whilst I was there with the head of the European Commission that had that education focus again. A guy that would normally be pretty untouchable, via LinkedIn, Humboldt Hussle, we call it. So I guess an entrepreneurial thinking here is to make the most of these opportunities. Caught the train to Brussels, had an amazing lunch with him and a partnership grew out of that bizarre and kind of interesting connection. But, you know, that was set up on LinkedIn before, then that opportunity kind of emerged. So with these opportunities, if you basically just looked at United Nations, ALU, you know, Labor Organization and OECD, those three, then that would help you cover off on lots of opportunities. And you can just subscribe to their e-news and their updates. This is another one that's happening at the moment, which I'm working with a client on, too, who has got connections into Africa. So the other sorts of things that get put up, you know, is this challenge or innovation call. Again, there's funding and opportunity attached to this. You can see how it's the 17, you know, UN Sustainable Development Goals are kind of the common ground. That's with United Nations as well. So a lot of people are investing time, energy, effort and money into solving those problems that are attached to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. If you're not yet familiar with those UN goals, then it's certainly something in terms of some homework to check out. A lot of people that are in Not For Profit or, you know, they're more environmentally conscious or full-purpose kind of space, they are often familiar with the goals, but they may not directly link it to their organization or their business. So with that differentiated strategy that we looked at before, if you can integrate the UN Sustainable Development Goals, this is if it's relevant, you know, then that makes a massive kind of difference. It puts you on a different playing field, let's say. So lots of opportunities connected to that. And then there's things like, you know, innovation challenges like MIT, you know, Massachusetts out of Boston has worldwide innovation challenges that you can apply for and get funding for. So it's just like, make sure that you're open-minded, that you're sussing out different kind of opportunities that you do subscribe at least, you know, to the e-news and that you're across what's kind of coming up. Okay, so now I'm going to do a really practical activity which takes us back to the importance of systematizing your intellectual property. And I'm just going to give you a couple of examples and then get you to do this for yourself. So what we'll talk about doing here and if you've worked with me with Sweety Starts Girl, we probably would have gone through this. But this is sort of something that builds upon the education experience, the packaging, the marketing, whatever. So if it's just you and yourself employed or it's you and your startup or small-media enterprise, then you need to think about what's in your head. If you've got a team or other people involved, then this might be something you want to start and then take back to the team. Now, you might already have parts of this or some of this in the mix of what you're working on at the moment. So we're talking about systematizing that IP. Two examples is Take Action. That's the system that is the overarching approach for workforce blueprint. So originally, this company is 19 years old now, but originally we had a five-step model to doing a workforce plan. And then we were funded to create tools and templates and we shared it a lot and it became really kind of like common and a lot of people adopted it, which was great. But then the IP wasn't really uniquely belonging to the company anymore. And we'd also realized where people get stuck when they're doing that strategic picture. So the five-step model turned into Take Action and each letter stands for something. So this is an acronym. The full picture at this time, know what you want, evaluate the gaps. And then with action, we either keep it as one word or we break it down to address the gaps, coaching and mentoring, timelines, inspiration, ongoing review and next workforce. So I'm hoping that that kind of makes sense in terms of six steps. And when we do a workforce plan, we follow those steps. The document follows the whole process. Something different then, so that's an acronym version, is all the S's in Switch Start Scale and then we talk about self-employed, subcontractor, start-up, scale-up, small-medium enterprise, side hustle. So seven S's. So that's an alliteration, everything starting with the same letter. The other way that you could represent your intellectual property is in a diagram or a picture. So for example, that four-part scaling-up model, it's still got words on it, but it's kind of got those four colors that relates to the chapters of the book, it's color-coded, that sort of thing. So what I'd like you to think about doing, I'm happy for somebody to volunteer, but if you could put into the question-chat box, if you consider the overarching thing that you help your customers and clients with, can you brainstorm anything in relation to what we're saying here? Can you represent it as a diagram or a picture? Can you make it into an acronym? Can you make it into an alliteration? And the best way that I find to do this is to just like brainstorm out loud, with somebody else at least to bounce off of. You might have something like this already, as I say, but it might not be represented in one of these three ways. Five to nine is the number of components within the system that works best. And sometimes people are like, well, why is it five to nine? And even I break my, well, with my take action, because it's 10, but hey, we need to make it nice chunks, easy to digest, easy to sort of work people through. And Kat has said about unmuting, so this would be really good, Kat, if we could perhaps work through an example for you and your business. Let's see if we can do some brainstorming, and hopefully that sparks my views for other people listening as well. Cool, happy to do that. I thought it might be easier than going back and forth with the chat. Yeah, for sure. I hope you can still put their ideas in the chat. Oh, absolutely. We can do a live example. So Kat, what's the number one thing that you're helping your customers and clients with? Okay, we can either pick the live events and summits, the virtual events, or the podcasts. I do podcasts, production, and distribution. Okay, have you got a preference for what you want to hone in on? Probably the live events at this point. Yeah, okay, live events. So what's the actual problem that you're solving for people with the live events? What are they concerned about or worried about? Okay, so basically it's a technology question where they have to take the time and the energy to learn how to put together an event, often have to learn new programs or even buy, like for example, video editing software, and learn how to use that so that they can then take parts of their summit or their event and use that in their marketing and be able to snip that out. And a lot of technology overwhelm. Okay, so tech overwhelm is kind of like the chunked up thing, but it's specifically in the context of live events. Yes. Okay, and then what are the sorts of supports or services that you provide? Okay, so I have a background in event management and I've learned how to set up an event from the registration to how to promote, to how to actually operate the event. I facilitate those events so that they don't have to keep an eye on the chat and I make them aware of things so that all they have to do is focus on their presentation and making that connection with their audience. Yeah, so I'm not sure what's jumping in your head. Is there anything in relation to a picture, a diagram, an acronym or an alliteration that's coming through for you yet? I've got something in my head. Yeah, because I've been trying to play with that. I hadn't really gone with the idea of the diagram yet. I've been looking at the name of my business, which is Create Your Change and trying to find an alliteration or anagram or whatever for either Create or Change, but it's not quite there yet. Yeah, and I mean create your changes. You've got scenes sort of going on there, but what sort of came into my mind as you were talking is a diagram and it's almost like the sort of flow of it because we said from planning through to kind of like the full execution and you said what all the kind of steps are. So I could see a system that is more like a diagram that is like chunking the key parts of it or the key steps of it and then the detail that's involved in each of those steps. And then clearly that could then turn into or like a checklist tool or something like that. But on one page, you could represent to your customers and clients. Okay, you know, I'm helping you with technology overwhelm so that your live events run smoothly and here's all the different sort of like components. Yeah, I think you'll have a clear path of how they would achieve those events. Yeah, and because you've got that overall event management, you know, you are going to be quite logical. It's going to be step by step. Yeah. Then what you could do in terms of productising that is think through, okay, there's a full done for you solution. Yeah. Or say your client is confident maybe with the registration side but not the actual facilitation sort of part of it. Right. So, you know, you could use it almost like as a bit of a needs analysis or assessment to then figure out, okay, where does your products and services fit? Where are they comfortable during it? During themselves. Yeah. Then the other thing is that if you wanted to, you could easily turn that into programs to teach others to. Right. So I guess there's another kind of thing in terms of an entrepreneurial way of considering things. And we talk about four for one, right? So we do something once and then we use it at least four times. Right. Like we're recording this session, we might turn it into a blog or a podcast or we might chop it up with social media posts. So, you know, we're always thinking what can we do? How does that kind of sound in terms of a bit of a starting point anyway, Kat? I think it sounds great. Yeah, awesome. If anyone else has got any other ideas as to what's coming into into your mind, then feel free to put forward those suggestions. But essentially what we're trying to do is on one page, we start with that overarching concept that you're helping your customers and clients with the problem really and flipping it to the solution of products and services diagram or picture acronyms so it spells a word or a little ration is a great way to do it. Then we can, you know, expand that out, map that out. But that would be that it takes them more time to do that. But thanks, Kat, for doing that example. My pleasure. Now, just in terms of thinking about an entrepreneurial mindset specifically, there are, you know, a number of 21st century capabilities and it doesn't matter if this is you, you know, your kids, your grandkids, whatever, the different industries that you're in, the locations that you're in around the world that are absolutely critical for any role running your business or whatever. And I'm not going to go through all of these in sort of detail and I do just want to hone in on the next slide where we talk about 21st century STEM and entrepreneurship. The thing that I just want to highlight here and there might be other words that you've heard before like employability skills or key competencies or whatever. This is more like a contemporary version of that. Communication is always in the mix of course, but we're not just talking about basic communication. We're talking about being influential persuasive, being able to pitch, public speak, being able to do that for 30 seconds, a couple of minutes, an hour, you know, online, on a stage, wherever the context might be and increasingly that cultural and global capabilities becoming really, really important too. Having purpose and vision, not just, you know, the notion of, you know, learning all the time, but mastering. So what this is implying is that you need skills of depth and you need skills of breadth. Okay. The 21st century STEM and entrepreneurship. Well, this has a natural sort of connection in a relationship with new discovery technologies as well. You know, everything from AI augmented reality and autonomous vehicles, you know, through to UI, user interface, virtual reality, you know, wearable tech. That part of the skills mix could be seen perhaps as more technical, but increasingly, you know, multiple job roles are needing that beyond digital capability into more that 21st century STEM and entrepreneurship. And there are many examples too of where, you know, digital people and digital humans are being introduced. So beyond just, you know, faceless AI or even humanoid robots, but into a digital people concept. So a really excellent example, if that's something that you like to, you know, know, whereas some examples of amazing technology is a company called Soul Machines and they have a basis in New Zealand actually and the US, but they have digital people working for significant brands now like Westpac and, you know, public safety in New Zealand with police and all that kind of thing. So check that out if that's an area that's of interest to you. Okay, so just sort of like a more final sort of slide to wrap up and some takeaways for you as well about extending your thinking and your experience. How do you actually do that? Right? Yes, you can do it in your day-to-day kind of practice because it's about the approach that you take, but there can be quite specific and purposeful activities that you can engage in. So you could go along to entrepreneurial challenges or even create them yourself. So often there are a day, two days, maybe five days max where you are uncovering problems, you're developing a minimum viable product as quick as you can. So this is going back to the lean startup model and the key point of difference with this and traditional business is that, you know, you're doing things in hours and days, not like weeks, months and years. Okay. So really speeding up that kind of cycle. You could think about what's an entrepreneurial or innovative approach to maybe run some of your events and networking opportunities a bit differently. You could think about how you get involved, you know, who you partner with, what speakers you have, the format of it. There's so many different kind of methodologies and approaches that you could use, you know, borrowed from adult learning sort of concepts that you could try out and experiment with, you know, growth hacks or hackathons. So, you know, they're being run all the time on different sort of topics. I'm involved in one coming up on Friday night, which is about aerospace sort of industry. If you're not already connected into your local entrepreneurial ecosystem, that's really important. Now, sometimes they can be a bit hidden below the surface, depends upon, you know, your location, your city, your town, your country or whatever. But generally speaking, if you find a little hook-in, you know, to your local startup groups or whatever, then a whole thing opens up for you as well. And there's, you know, a real point of being around people that do think differently and having some friends and support to do that. And then a very specific example is startup weekend. I don't know if anyone's gone through that, but normally it is, you know, a fight or a Sunday night. Random group of people come together. Sometimes friends and colleagues or teams are slightly formed, but not normally. People pitch all sorts of ideas. There's a thing called the hustle, which is amazing to watch because people's ideas are normally spread around the room and then they hustle, try and get people on their team and check out their skills and capabilities. If your idea is not popular, it gets dropped. It's harsh, but that's how it works. And then you're on a team, generally with people that you don't know in a 54 hours and you get the thing as quick as you or as far as you can get it, often with sales and things like that, a great opportunity or experience. So if you don't really know about these things, you might want to suss them out or create your own, but they are fantastic ways to, you know, see it in action and, you know, very practical, pragmatic way to apply and extend your entrepreneurial thinking. So hackathon, a question here is a hackathon. So a hackathon is generally again over a day or two days. Sometimes can be a little bit longer with a hackathon. They're often data based. So gov hack is a really good example where government agencies open up their data sets and teams form often it's more tech based this time. They turn that data into an app or some sort of, you know, insider information. So a practical example was, you know, one where what are all the parks and playgrounds, you know, near you, we've got all data and information about that and let's hack that data into kind of like an app which does geolocation. And then that's something that could be tested and put out to the public, you know, to find your local playground or, you know, park. So just a really simple kind of example and start up weekend. We do have them in Australia. We have them in lots of locations. They normally come around once every, every two years as well. So great opportunities for you to involved. Okay. I'll just wrap it up there and see if there's any other questions or comments that people might have or anything that you wanted to clarify. But I guess why do you need an entrepreneurial mindset where you need it for every job? You definitely need it if you're running your own business or you're involved in not-for-profit space as well and you need it so that you can spot opportunities and be ahead of, ahead of others and also open to collaboration. Awesome. Thank you so much, Wendy. I just want to invite everyone, if you, if there's any other last minute questions or anything that you have for Wendy to please drop that in the chat so we can make sure to address those before the end of it. Um, I have to admit, I didn't know quite what to expect today and I knew it was going to be awesome and you definitely did not disappoint. So thank you, Wendy. It has been really educational, really looking at things from another perspective. So I want to thank again, Wendy, from workforce blueprint and switch start scale for taking the time to meet with us here on TechSoup Connect Australia today and thank everyone for joining us. And we will see you next week, next month, sorry, when we are going to be talking about storytelling hacks for non-profits and why that can be important. So thank you so much, everyone, and we'll see you next month. Noria, thanks for that. I appreciate you having me. See you everybody.