Struggling to get started on a Monday morning, this might help...

Many years ago I use to run courses. These were face-to-face in Melbourne, way before COVID and the prolific use of video meetings. Skype era, eek! 

The picture is from my first version of 'Launch in 12 Weeks' where 12 aspiring business owners met once a week for 3 hours duration to actually start their business in 12 weeks. Genius branding I know... 

I don't run this course anymore, which is a shame as I really do love teaching this material and getting super practical with their business launches. This became an online course and retreated to the back parts of my website as I focused more on one-to-one coaching. 

The goal of the training was to start a business and get your first client at the end of 12 weeks. Some started their businesses, some didn't. Some thought this course was the catalyst that kickstarted it all for them, while others didn't get any value at all. Same course, different people.

This week one of those participants in the picture, Carol Benton, came back to Melbourne for a visit and we caught up which was fabulous! She is still so grateful for this course as it kickstarted her very successful business. Right course, right time, right person. She did the work and got the results. 

Warren Davies, The Unbreakable Farmer, was there too. He was the hardest working guy I have ever met. A dairy farmer, he woke up at 4am to take care of the cows then at night drove 3 hours each way to attend this course as he had a dream to be a keynote speaker. The only problem was he had never been a speaker before, didn't know how to use social media, didn't have a website or any resources to pay for these things. Did I mention he has five kids too? 

He was so inspiring that we let him come pro bono and we built him a website. Today he is a superstar helping thousands of people learn more about mental health. How cool is that. 

The other 10 attendees all had mixed results, some started their businesses, others didn't. We all have different journeys and sometimes the material isn't what we need or we go in a different direction. I'm not the worlds best start up coach, but I put in 100% effort every time. I genuinely care about them and their outcome. 

The point of the story is that by doing something that you find inspiring, you can inspire others to live their best lives and being part of that journey is what gets you out of bed on a cold and rainy Melbourne morning. 

So if you find yourself not getting the juice from the work squeeze, consider helping others to be their best. 

I guarantee you there is no better feeling than helping others be successful. 

Andrew

What is the alternative to plastic and paper straws? Tequila straws of course!

Love a good margarita? If you have been to a Mexican restaurant in the last decade and haven't had a frozen or fresh margarita, book a table immediately! Melbourne has seen an explosion of amazing Mexican restaurants and bars serving quality tequila and, I for one, absolutely love it. 

The only problem is the straws. I'm not kidding or laying it on because I represent a straw brand. In fact, it's one of the main reasons I went into the business in the first place - you either get a plastic straw (I mean really it's 2022 for god sake) or a paper one that lasts a whole 30 seconds. If I'm paying $20+ a drink, spend a few cents on the one thing that touches my lips and impacts the taste of the drink.

The first problem, plastic straws, will be solved in less than six months when the Governments in Victoria and NSW ban these environmentally unsustainable products. 

The second problem is solved by education. There are heaps of alternatives to plastic and paper, we are just one of them. I would rather get a renewable competitor than paper or plastic as it's better for the environment and my drink.

Tequila Straws provides fully biodegradable straws at a competitive price to other renewable products. But its advantage is that it comes from a waste product, agave which they use for tequila production. These plants use very little water in their growth so they are very sustainable. Transport aside, they make good sense. 

So if you are a bar or restaurant or just want to try some, hit me up! If you are a mate I will give you a box for free. Or you can order a sample for a few bucks.

www.tequilastraws.com.au

What are Tequila Straws and importantly why?

Before we start let me answer the basic question - no Tequila Straws don't contain tequila when you drink from them...sorry! But they are made from the very same plant that makes the world's best Tequila and are, in my opinion, the best damn straws on the planet!  But they’re made from agave, the very same plant that makes the world’s best drink (tequila) and are, in my opinion, the best damn sustainable straws on the planet.

They are super strong so they don't fall apart in your icy margarita (even if you're a slow drinker because they last up to 8 hours!), have no interfering taste and are reusable. Best of all they are 100%  biodegradable and made from recycled agave fibre.

But how did I get started in this business when I do marketing, I hear you ask? Well, like all good drinking stories it all started with a bottle of Tequila...

Mr Edwin Reese and I were at a Mexican restaurant enjoying taco Tuesday and downing a few beers and talking about his new tequila business. He has lucked into an amazing business importing premium tequila from Mexico (La Cofradia)  and it was going great guns. Then he pulls out a box of straws. 

Not that amazing show and tell, I'm sure my son will not rush off to school with them. But when you hear that these little pieces of environmentally sound goal are the Tesla of straws, I was listening. I saw huge potential for his business and a chance to do some good for the planet too. You would be amazed at how many places still use plastic - criminal! 

It could have been the taste bud high of delicious beef tacos, crisp Mexican beer and the allure of going to Mexico to drink tequila, but I was all in! I truly believe these straws can make a better world for us.

Edwin and I now partner on this business and just like that, I'm suddenly in the eco-friendly straw business. Seeing it's all new to me any help from my hospo friends would be very much appreciated! Any help from my sustainably-minded friends would be very much appreciated! 

Do you want to be part of this? Stay tuned for how it works out and if you need some super awesome straws, check out our website :) 

Cheers Andrew

P.S. Fun fact - Is agave a cactus? No agave is a type of succulent, commonly confused with cactus. Remember the rule that all cacti are succulents, but not all succulents are cacti. The main difference between agaves and cacti is the presence of leaves, cacti do not have them, while agaves do. (reference)

What is the best practice event management for the post-COVID era?

Running events post-COVID is tough. Just getting people to invest the time to show up is a real challenge. I'm sure my fellow entrepreneurs have felt this pain and I am keen to share my learnings from our recent CampusLife event. (Check out the pic here)

I am not an event manager by trade, but those that know me well will understand that I LOVE running events. It ticks a lot of boxes for me; meeting new people, helping clients, drinking & eating, doing business, and developing my team. What's not to love!

Over my career, I have run events for 2,000 plus people in Las Vegas (yes we had an Elvis...no it wasn't me...), arranged an international event in Sydney for 800 people from 12 countries including negotiating with BMW to donate 2x fully loaded motorbikes, and loads of smaller client events too. I even had my own business club running monthly events - BYOB Social Club. Some events were amazing, some not so much, but I learnt a lot from all of them.

Last week my team pulled off an amazing event with 100% attendance. Who does that?! I was so proud of them that I wanted to write this blog partly to give them some kudos and also to pass on some knowledge to help others out there. Here are my top 3 tips from rocking your next event:

1) Vibe - your tribe is your vibe. I am lucky enough to have an awesome team of Marketing Coordinators who are studying or just finished their university courses. They are motivated, hard-working, and down-to-earth and they attract similar people to our events. 

A large part of why people will show up to an event is because of who invited them and how they feel about that particular relationship. Most of the people that showed up had a personal connection to someone. If you don't have a big team, get your close friends or business associates to help bring people. 

2) Teamwork - many hands make light work. Gaby was the event manager and I put a lot of responsibility on her to do this job because I recognised she is a fabulous people motivator. Basically, everyone in my team loves her, and thus showed up and put in a full effort because she is awesome. 

That's a dozen people helping to promote the event, set up, pitch in and pack up. Which freed up my time to do what I do best, network. If the event is positioned to authentically help your target audience, you can find people to put in the effort to help run it.

3) Prepare - do the work. There is nothing like preparation to ensure your event runs smoothly. We actually moved the date a few times as it was a bit slow to get traction initially. But once we had the right team in place to run it, we went to work on refining the plan. 

We thought about what our clients and students would really enjoy on the night, reviewed it constantly and worked hard to get it done. 

So there you go, a few quick tips on how to get people to show up to your events and run them stress-free. Of course, there is a lot more detail that I could talk about and happy for people to reach out if they want some more advice.

But I would really love to hear some other tips and tricks from those more qualified and experienced than myself, so hit me up with a comment below and let's help small business owners to run better events. 

Cheers Andrew

P.S. Congratulations to my team for an awesome job: Gabriella Ishak event manager extraordinaire!; Shinyi Chin the best CMO I could hope for; Lily Schultzdream team leader; Chloe Smith bringing the best vibes always; Nako Akashicapturing the night in pics; Carmen Parker rocking the bar; Mitch Benbowpurveyor of fine wines;  Ben Jowett always helping, especially for high stuff; Andi Campisi new team member and bringing it!; Carynna Teh the quiet achiever, I see your efforts and very much appreciated; Eliza Wright off on her dream job but still came and contributed, amazing!

Special mention to Grace Pehar and Angelina Tully who were overseas but still helping out; Daniela Montes de Oca our newest recruit who helped with the tequila and that can't be underestimated!

What I have learnt about starting a new business (CampusLife) in 2022

Who would start a new business right in the middle of COVID? Me of course! Why would you choose the middle of a pandemic to risk a start-up? How has it been going with all the ups and downs of 2022? Well… let me give you the good, the bad and the ugly.

For context's sake, I have launched several start-ups in my time, so it's not my first rodeo. I began Social Star 10 years ago, right after the global financial crisis of 2009 when the tech company I was working for took a hit and couldn't afford to keep me on as their Marketing Director. It was a rough and abrupt way to begin my own business, but I loved it and never looked back.

I’ve also started a few other enterprises, a beer app called Closest Beer and an influencer company called Tribe. So, you could say I knew a thing or two about navigating new things.

But a pandemic is a strange time to start a new business that revolves around university students and helping small businesses with marketing. It all comes down to your perspective. I'm an eternal optimist so, in the middle of 2021, I thought the troubles with COVID were behind us and that everything would go back to normal. Well, I was right in some ways as lockdowns were coming to an end, but the impact of the pandemic on the global economy was just beginning.

The good thing about starting CampusLife is the amazing team we have assembled. The talent I have found among university students is so good I have been able to grow Social Star too, hiring five additional people. With a bit of guidance and confidence, it's amazing what these motivated students can do.

The bad things are the growing pains of new businesses. This has been especially, challenging with the double-sided marketplace we have at CampusLife. We started out with a bunch of small businesses wanting candidates and not enough students. Then we had a rush of students to the platform and not enough businesses to match them! Until you have a great scale, it's always hard to balance between the two sides.

The ugly things are the technical headaches. It's tough to get a new platform started and just how you envision it, while you are still forming your ideas. New businesses always have loads of pivots while they test their ideas on the market. Since technology doesn’t pivot as fast as your ideas, it's never quite like version 1.0 of the plan! You sign a contract for a technical build and six months later you get it delivered but your ideas have progressed. That's the real challenge as it costs a lot to go back and adapt the software.

So, there you go folks, the good, the bad and the ugly truth of my last year building a start-up from a concept in my brain, to a team of five making revenue and helping clients. I would love to hear your experiences building your own businesses during the last year- we are all in this together!

Regards Andrew

If Facebook is doomed, what's next?

Facebook seems to be in trouble (again), if you missed the headlines it lost more than $232 billion in value last weekand I feel this is just the start of a steady decline. 

Perhaps it can rise from the issues it faces using Meta as the 'new thing' but my feeling is that it is the end of social media as we know it. And if I am right, what will take our attention over the next five years?

Before we get into his topic, let me be clear that I am writing this from my place running a social media agency and working in this space since MySpace was the dominant platform. I didn't drive the DeLorean at 88 miles per hour into the future, so I don't really know, it's my best guess based on working in this space with my companies Social Star and CampusLife.

My last prediction that Facebook would fall and LinkedIn would surpass it in 2020 (blog here) was heading in the right direction. People have moved off Facebook to other platforms. However, the traffic got fragmented between TikTok for youngsters, Instagram and LinkedIn for business people (seen any baby pics or engagement stories on LinkedIn lately? yes LinkedIn is social media now) and others. 

LinkedIn still doesn't have the traffic or revenue of Facebook, but it surely owners one specific nice. Plus it was purchased by Microsoft for $26 billion in 2016, not bad for a 14-year-old company, mainly because it continues to grow year in year out.

So without further ado, my prediction for social media over the next five years:

1) Facebook goes from bad to worse. I feel Facebook is at risk (and Instagram) because they are trying to push advertising so much that they are really annoying their core users. 

Their algorithm has been getting worse for years and now people are simply switching off. Kids today don't bother with Facebook, but even scarier is that they aren't even on Instagram. They are TikToking their way through social media, watching YouTube and gaming. 

I don't think the Metaverse will save Facebook either. I think this project will be a massive white elephant. They have spent $10 billion thus far and they have billions more to invest if required. But the issue is money can't buy the attention of the public for long. For those that forgot the lessons from Google + let me remind you. Google, with all the expertise and money in the world, couldn't get people to use their social platform that was meant to be a Facebook killer. So they euthanised it.

Plus, I am old enough to remember Second Life which was good and still has millions of users, but do we really need another virtual world? I really feel that post-pandemic, people will want to return to face to face contact, not more online worlds.

2) Gaming is crushing it. You might have noticed that your kids like games...duh. The rise of high-quality games is gaining the attention of a lot of youngsters and big IT is noticing. They are buying gaming companies flat out. This will continue and I'm sure here is where the Metaverse will try to take advantage of VR to get more attention of gamers. The issue is their business model of advertising doesn't really work in this space. So how do they capitalise on it without interfering with the user experience? 

3) Private social media. My prediction isn't that all social media will fail. More so the domination of Facebook will reduce and more niche products will emerge. Tik Tok for short video, YouTube for long video, Instagram for visual imagery, LinkedIn for business people, Clubhouse for audio, Twitch for gaming, Twitter for news and many more.

My most bold prediction is that there will start emerging a new form of social media that is very niche and private. Just like Facebook groups that are really popular and have tens of thousands of members, but within its own social media where you can share your content freely without risk of being scammed, trolled or hit on. A place where you can feel safe and your privacy is ensured. Everyone is verified, content is moderated and there are no algorithms to push sensational and often incorrect information to the top of your feed because there is no advertising! Imagine that, no ads and seeing your friends content first. Dream :) 

How could this be possible? Where does the money come from? I hear you ask...

I believe people will pay for privacy. Before you tell me that people will not pay for social media remember that LinkedIn makes its money from premium subscriptions. So does Spotify, Amazon, Netflix etc It's possible if you provide enough value. 

I believe this so much that I am banking on it myself with CampusLife, a private social ecosystem for University students but more on that later...

For those in the industry, what are your predictions for the future?

Do university students need a resume to get a job? Or is LinkedIn or something else more important?

Once upon a time, the resume was the king of job search. Resume or Curriculum Viète (CV), those few pages of text were the difference between landing your dream job or returning to the queue of job wannabees. 

But times have changed. Digital has overtaken paper. So the question is, do you even need a resume these days or can we just rely on LinkedIn and other digital media?

Like 90s fashion, ‘old school’ still has its appeal

The answer actually depends very much on the industry youwork in. Having coached hundreds of people through the job search process over the years, I have seen a massive change in the way people apply for jobs in certain industries. Others, not so much.

For instance, if you are in the medical profession or academia. It’s likely your resume is still a key part of your job search process. These very detailed and specific documents capture your key work experience, professional development, training and accomplishments such as published papers. They are quite long and elaborate. 

In those industries, LinkedIn and having a digital brand isn’t quite the thing. So resumes are still key.

The Bold and the Creative

However, on the other side of the fence sits marketing, advertising, entrepreneurship, and tech roles. These industries are fast adaptors of new systems and have rapidly moved away from traditional hiring methods. They still expect you to have some type of resume, but it’s not a big part of the process. What matters more is how you position yourself through your online presence and in the interview. Here, personality and character matter as much as previous experience and education.

As an example, a kooky friend of mine was going for a creative role at an advertising agency. The ad agency asked not for a resume, or even LinkedIn; but asked to be tagged in four of his most recent Instagram posts. One of the posts my creative friend chose was a picture of him riding a blow-up unicorn, drinking a cocktail in a fancy pool - as his resume. He got the job. 

These examples are two extremes in the industry and for most of us, we will be in the middle. My advice to clients is to still have a resume with enough detail to satisfy the old school hiring managers. You can’t predict who will be conducting your job interview so the best strategy is to have both resume and digital covered as well. 

Ideally, you’d have your own personal website to send hiring managers to which you can reference in your resume and on LinkedIn. This would be a simple website where you can store all of your greatest achievements and showcase your personality. (We will cover personal websites in another blog)

So let’s explore how to write a killer resume with my top 4 tips to resume gold:

Size does matter but content is still key

Make it 3-4 pages and include the details that you can’t publish online. Some people say keep it under 2 pages but I disagree. The HR person will scan the resume for key points, so take the time to list all of your achievements. But make it clear and easy to find content, not long paragraphs of irrelevant material. 

Include particular grades for courses, specific company achievements that might be slightly commercially in confidence. If you work in sales, you can include specific deals won or revenue targets achieved that you wouldn’t like to publish online. If you are in marketing, you can list your key clients and the campaigns you worked on.

Don’t neglect the often underrated cover letter

Ensure you have a robust cover letter as they read this first. The cover letter isn’t just about you, it should demonstrate how well you understand the company and the role you’re applying for. So take the time to research the company and the role. Your cover letter is where you showcase the effort you’ve put into research and demonstrate your keenness for the position.

The money is in the detail (and spellcheck)

Pay particular attention to detail. Any spelling mistakes or typos can get you disqualified, regardless of how awesome you really are. Remember, the average number of applicants for a job is 250+; and the HR person sorting the applications spends an average of 7 seconds on each applicant when sorting into piles of yes, no and maybe.

Any little thing that makes your cover letter and resume stand out (in a good or bad way) is important, so watch the details. Grammarly is your friend here. If you don’t know what that is, Google it and send me a thank you note. You're welcome.

(This post is not sponsored by Grammarly)

Keep it simple, but significant

Simple formatting is best. I have many friends in the recruitment space - they just want the information and not fancy hard-to-read fonts. Don’t be tempted to show your Canva skills and have a black document with white text because that’s what your iPhone looks like. Simple sans serif fonts on white paper with clear headings and short paragraphs is recommended.

And there you have it! Some simple tips to rock your resume. But this is not the end of the story. Next, you’ll need to ensure your LinkedIn and digital presence is up-to-date, looks professional and not giving off too much amateur-student vibes. But more on that in the next blog…

If this was helpful please hit the ‘like’ button and drop me a comment if you want me to cover any specific items of job search. Happy to help!