Introducing the Biggest Career Mistake

Chris Norton 0:00

So we asked everybody on this show what's the biggest fuck up they've got in their career and what have they learned from it . So what have you got , rich being a brilliant , brilliant storyteller and presenter ? I'm sure you've got no fuck ups , right .

Rich Mullholland 0:15

Oh yeah , absolutely none . It's actually been a breeze . Life is so easy . I mean , the problem is , of course , that there's too many to list . One of the biggest problems , one of the biggest mistakes I've made and let me bring it back to what I was going to say to you but because I am quite an eloquent storyteller , I don't just sell audience , I sell

The Eloquent Storyteller's Dilemma

Rich Mullholland 0:40

myself . So one of the biggest challenges facing people who are good at telling stories and persuading other people is that they actually are often very , very eloquent and simultaneously incorrect . But because I'm able to frame my argument in such a way that it's convincing to other people , I end up convincing myself . And I've made some really , really silly mistakes .

Rich Mullholland 1:02

A big one for us was after lockdown

COVID Pivot and Office Closure

Rich Mullholland 1:08

. So during lockdown , we have a presentation company . We did terribly . We went to revenue zero straight away , but actually by the end of the year , by August , we'd had our best month in 18 months with no live events . And September was our best month and at the time I think it was our 24-year history , and the reason was that everybody who thought they were great at presenting agreed that they were terrible at presenting online .

Rich Mullholland 1:32

Overnight we started picking up lots and lots of international customers and we bet the farm on the fact that we could do all business online , everything . But then what happened ? And I was so convinced of this and I was appearing on podcasts and shows and advocating the idea that we should never go back to the office again , never do any of these things , and I had convinced myself so much . But then what happened is , slowly but surely , people did want to start interacting again . They did go back to things I was still doing lots of online keynotes , as opposed to traveling halfway around the world to do them and in fact , we never reopened our office , which I mean . We had such a . We had such a cool thing going we gave away free sex toys to all the ladies and they could take them in the , as I said , proving the O in preso . In our ladies toilets . We had a shooting range . We had so much going on and we kept it all closed because we thought that we were smarter and better than that and it was such a fuck up . I had no idea .

Rich Mullholland 2:32

When you do a branding exercise and , let's be honest , that's all of our office was right . Our office was a campaign . People always thought , oh , you're doing it for your staff . The novelty of cool offices wears off for people working in those offices . After a month you know Then it's just work , it's actually for the other people . But sometimes what happens is you create a brand position in the market . You take it so much for granted that you forget that it is effective . You then move away from that brand position and only then do you see the fallout of it , which was our word

The Costly Aftermath

Rich Mullholland 3:07

of mouth engine . Effectively ended that word of mouth engine people going home and talking about our , their experience at our office overnight ended and then we had to start doing much more reaching out to people and selling . It was insane . It cost us an absolute fortune . In fact I would argue it nearly cost us the business .

Chris Norton 3:25

Why did you not reopen the office or had that ship sailed ?

Rich Mullholland 3:28

So two things . One , we gave our staff the chance to work from a distributed location , so we had even people in the same city worked hours away from each other . You know very , very far . We had staff in Joburg , in Cape Town , for a while , in Durban we have in Milton Keynes , armout and Isle of man . Where is the core ? Second of all , people become quite used to , you know , getting up late and working there , and so it became hard to convince . And third of all , by the time it got to the point where we needed to rebuild another big , massively exciting , conversation-worthy location for our clients and staff to come to , by this point I didn't have the margin and profits to make it . So now I was stuck in this catch 22 that we had to start from a product level again and build up yeah , that sounds challenging .

Chris Norton 4:17

I think we've all been through the covid pandemic scenario , where we we've met a lot of people that have had problems from that period , from online entrepreneurs that have lost millions as well . So , yeah , it was a tough period , but you did well to come out of there focusing on online presentations

Reflections on Leadership Mistakes

Chris Norton 4:35

. I think that's a nice to use the 2020 term pivot , wasn't it ?

Rich Mullholland 4:42

Yeah , it was a very real need . Everybody knew that they weren't good at presenting that way . The challenge is knowing when to . I guess that every time you pivot , sometimes it's just a swinging door and you need to understand that the door you didn't pass through it , the door , is still going to swing back and I didn't really anticipate that fast enough as a leader and I made some mistakes that probably had too many late nights . I definitely caused too much stress in late nights for my management team .