Podcast Transcript

[00:01:44] Sean Steele: G’day everyone, and welcome to the ScaleUps Podcast where we help first time Founders learn the secrets of scaling so they can fundamentally make bigger decisions with greater confidence, fulfill their potential, and maximise the value and impact they can have in the world. I'm your host, Sean Steele, and my guest today is lovely, Natalie Simmons from Barefoot Citizens Consulting. How are you, Nat?

[00:02:03] Natalie Simmons: Hi, Sean. I'm very well, thanks. How are you? Thanks for having me.

[00:02:06] Sean Steele: My pleasure. Now Natalie … actually, can I call you, Nat? Is that all right? I just defaulted and assumed that I could.

[00:02:14] Natalie Simmons: Of course.

[00:02:15] Sean Steele: Got to make sure. Nat, for those who don't know the brand, you are leading a consulting business called Barefoot Citizens Consulting, which is dedicated, which what I love, and you heard me introduce us that my fundamental focus and mission in life is to help people create value and impact they can have in the world. And you are dedicated to helping businesses create a more sustainable future for all of us. So, whether that's creating, building, or investing in socially responsible businesses whilst delivering bottom line results for investors and shareholders. And I know you're big on both, I guess the opportunity for social change, but also sharing your success from your impact in local and global communities.

And I just have so many questions about all that, just from the very first 30 seconds, like how often do you create? How often do you build? How do you invest? Who are these investors and the shareholders, and how does that get shared with the communities? And I've got millions of questions, but one of them that I'd actually wanted to start with if I could, because, you know, the real topic for today is about how do we get Founders of these, 2 to 20 million businesses in particular thinking differently, potential about their business, their business model, their potential impact in the world, why it's important now, how to think about their role and their identity going forward. But you have had a long and illustrious career in CI events and I wonder whether we actually met before because I've been to numerous CI events because I used to do a fair bit of development work; leadership development with a lot of flight centre leaders. So, I've been to numerous CI events, a wonderful events in the past. So, maybe you could just give me a kind of a one or two minute overview of your career and how this career in CI events led you into Barefoot Citizens Consulting?

[00:03:57] Natalie Simmons: Sure. We'll have to get into that afterwards, by the way. But I was very fortunate actually. I had a 21-year career with Flight Centre Travel Group and my entire 21-years was at CI Events and we were the largest event management agency in Asia Pac. And over those 21 years, what I noticed as I went to meetings and events was, you know, we brought groups of people together from all kinds of businesses. And they spend, whether it's one day, three day, five days in a conference room, they network, they team build, they create this real energy, they create this community. There's this real excitement to go back to the office. But after about six weeks, most things go back to BAU and we used to call that the halo effect in the meetings and events space where we create this amazing halo effect and then everything goes back to normal after those six weeks. And what I noticed is that this real energy created this kind of purpose and most of that purpose was around achieving the business goals for the year or celebrating what was, and getting prepared for the next year.

Well, a lot of businesses do some amazing CSR activities and, you know, bring in a charity and help that charity through their CSR activity at an event

[00:05:26] Sean Steele: Can you just talk to people quickly now about what CSR is in case they haven’t heard what it is?

[00:05:29] Natalie Simmons: So, Corporate Social Responsibility. So, you might do, your team building event might be around building a bike, for example, that then gets donated to marginalised communities in Australia where they can't afford to get to and from school every day. And after that moment in time, that charity was left to really try and create another contact with another corporation or continue that connection with that corporation to ensure that donations continue coming and that they can continue to create impact. And really what you saw also that purpose really drives people. And so, it made me start to think about this notion of purpose drives people, people build communities, and communities change the world. Whether you look at it from a business perspective or whether you look at it from a impact perspective, that's really how we as individuals, as businesses, you know, governments, countries, can start to create impact.

And so, this notion of; well, how do we create impact through the events that we do? How do we help our customers? Not only create impact in the boardroom and on their bottom line, but do so while they're also doing good for people on the climate. So, in the last few years while I was at CI events, one of the things that I became very interested in was how do we offset meetings and events?

Because obviously being part of a multinational travel business, we already had looked at how do we help our customers in the corporate side offset flights? and that's become a lot easier to do, but for meetings and events, there was no solution. So, we worked with one of the largest carbon upsetting businesses. And we came up with the first market tool around upsetting carbon for meetings and events. So, we could offer that to our customers as an option. So just by doing the meetings and events they've always done for small additional costs, they could now offset their carbon. They could use that as an internal marketing and external marketing tool to show that they care about the environment.

The other thing was that we had come across a charity that specialises in energy poverty called Solar Buddy and I also became very passionate about this idea that, I don't like this “throw spaghetti at the wall” approach, that you support a charity for one year and then you move on the next year, because I think it.

You know, you want to create legacy, you want to create impact, and you want to create really deep impact. So, after a few meetings and a few introductions, the Flight Centre board actually decided to commit to one global charity for the first time ever. And so again, all of a sudden, the impact went from an amazing impact. But you know, a very consecrated amount of impact to this huge influx of impact that was able to be created because globally, everybody got behind this global charity. So, yeah, and then in 2020, I did what any normal human would do and I decided that I would leave my very beloved job and 21 years.

And you know, I really did love every minute of my time at Flight Centre Travel Group, but I thought, you know, it's either now or never. So, I packed my bags and I started Barefoot Citizens Consulting. So, really, yeah, trying to help other business do what they do every day, but do it in a way that's also having a positive impact on people and the planet.

And the more I dug into it, the more I realise that actually those companies that are doing this well are actually outperforming their competitors. And it just continues to grow year on year.

[00:09:31] Sean Steele: And I think that's quite easy for people to sort of hear a bit of different, it's sort of harder to get, you know, especially for smaller businesses. And so, I want to dig into that, but can you just explain the business model at the moment? So, is it only consulting or do you help build businesses? Do you actually invest in businesses? Like, tell me just about the sort of business model and how it work.

[00:09:51] Natalie Simmons: Yeah. So, I guess we've got two mainstreams, really, and the first one is consulting. And that really covers, whether you've already got an ESG, so Environmental Social Governance framework within your business, or whether you want to create one. We can come and help you either create it or help you to really generate more impact and really accelerate your ESG framework within your business. And the other part that we do, because what we see is that businesses that already have an ESG framework or ones that are wanting to roll it out, there's a real gap between leadership and really the people within the business.

So, we've created a number of different employee engagement tools, so we've got a few engagement tools that can be used at meetings and events, so, do a team build. But there it's around the UN SDGs and it's around ESG.

[00:10:55] Sean Steele: UN SDGs? Just so people understand.

[00:10:56] Natalie Simmons: Sorry, UN - Sustainable Development Goals. And the UN Sustainable Development Goals were created in 2015 by the UN. You see 196 countries signed this declaration, and they are a set of 17 interconnected goals that are there as a blueprint to help end poverty in all its forms by 2030. So pretty powerful, and yes, and most large corporations now focus on anywhere between three to seven of these SDGs. There are areas of impact within their business.

[00:11:37] Sean Steele: Yeah.

[00:11:38] Natalie Simmons: And so, we have those conference activities so we can do. And then we also have L&D platform. So, we have just released our first L&D module. So, it's a learning and development module, takes about 30 minutes. And it as a first step, it teaches people around what are the UN Sustainable Development Goals, what is ESG, how it relates to business. We talk a little bit about greenwashing and also help people understand that actually profit with purpose is possible.

[00:12:16] Sean Steele: So, let's take one step back because there's obviously a whole bunch of interconnected ideas here.

[00:12:22] Natalie Simmons: Yes.

[00:12:23] Sean Steele: And you know, most of all the bus medium business owners will be thinking; yeah, like I get purpose and having an impact on communities and so on, ESG, well, it feels a bit lofty and a bit sort of policy and a bit, you know, it's too big for me and I don't really, don't really get it. Like okay. I know I probably shouldn't be wasting paper. Maybe we should be sort of digital only, or I know that we should, maybe we should have some kind of, you know, charitable element to our business model or allowing our employees. But it doesn't often. A lot past that, unless that was a, a core intention of the business at the start. And so, you know, a lot of our community might have been running their businesses for the last 5 or 10 or 15 years. They might be in their, you know, many of them will be also in their forties plus, and be thinking, why is ESG such a big topic and how is it relevant to me in a business of my size? Isn't that just for the big guys? Can you respond to that?

[00:13:16] Natalie Simmons: Yeah, of course. No, it's not just for the big guys. I think that one of the most interesting trends that we're seeing at the moment is, this shift of the millennials coming into middle management and senior management. So, by 2025, 75% of the workforce will be millennials, which also means that they will become 75% of the consumer base, and they are making very different decisions to the decision of us, who are just past up millennial stage used to make

[00:13:54] Sean Steele: Just sneaking over the line.

[00:13:54] Natalie Simmons: Maybe just. But that we used to make, and they're making those decisions around employment, around purchasing, and you know, a recent survey by a Harvard Business Review actually showed that 69% of Millennials and Gen-Z, have said that they would pay a premium for a product if they knew that they had a robust ESG strategy versus one that doesn't.

So, whether you're a small business or you're a large business, if you want to exist and continue to grow and continue to generate profits for the next 5, 10, 15, 20 years. It's a must because actually, the consumer base is dictating where businesses are going to go, and we're seeing that shift already. And the NASDAQ runs a report every three years about the top performing businesses, and for the past 15 years, companies with a strong ESG focus have outperformed their competitors by 138%. Now that's not a coincidence, and it's easy to measure on those companies, obviously, because all the numbers are public. But I think if we did exactly the same on small business, you would find a very similar number.

[00:15:24] Sean Steele: A couple of things that I wanted to call out on, or chat about there. One is that, I think you absolutely called out this. This is about a shift in values and what's important to people. And so, if you're a consumer business, you're a B2C business and you are not just servicing Boomers, then you've got a big and swelling market of people that you need to service, and you actually need to understand what drives their decisions, which goes a lot in the same way as it always has. It goes a long way past features and benefit. It goes to the association to the brand or the product and servers, how connected they are, how it fits their values and their value system, which is why, of course we have to sell. You wouldn't think twice about the fact that you might need to change. Let's just say you went into a new country, you'd probably think; well, I probably need to understand the value system of the people in that country because that they value thing. How exercise happens in China is quite different to how Australians think about exercise and how that fits into their life and what time they do it and how long it should take, and all these sorts of things. So, there's a different value set. And in the same light you've got these, so you've got this big consumer base that's changing.

And then if you are a B2B business, and I saw this with a client very recently. We're having a great conversation. This is a client where the Founders are over the age of 50 and where most of the people they sell to are C-suite executives who are over the age of 50. However, they know that all the future opportunity in the next 10 years relies on their team, who are in their 30’s, selling to another team, which are the up and comers senior, currently senior and middle level managers who are in their 30’s and 40’s, and they're the ones who are going to have to sell to those people who have a different value system. So, I think to your point, it's not avoidable that the value shift is occurring. And so, we can stick our heads in the sand or we can actually think about it a little more deeply and think, what does this actually mean for my business, my products? That's how we sell who we are. And I think you touched on it, but I'm sure we want to chat a bit more deeply about this is. Who are your employees? Because I interviewed recently Liz Wiseman, who wrote Impact Players, and we had a big conversation about the fact that great people have choices. And if we haven't figured that out in the last three years, then we’ve definitely had a hedge in the sand because great people are making choices, and you do not attract top performing people without caring about how it is that they think they have got lots of alternatives. And there was this wonderful period for business owners where it was like, I was doing a favour by offering you a job, and you were so grateful to me for just paying you a salary.

And like, that's kind of our age and our generation of how we grew up. We were like, no, no, you just take the job, say thank you, put your head down, deal with any crap that you get, and just keep going. That is not the current talent market, let's be clear. And what are these people asking for? What are one of their first questions? Like, what are you about? What is your purpose? Who are you helping? Tell me more about the DNA of the business. Is that what you are seeing in the talent market? Does that have become a big priority?

[00:18:37] Natalie Simmons: Absolutely, a hundred percent. And again, you know, there's been a number of different studies recently that have shown that people would take up to a 20% pay cut to work for a company that has a moral compass as they put it. And when you are trying to retain and attract the best in the business, and as we all know, there's a real shortage in some areas of good talent at the moment.

This is the one differentiator. And what we are also seeing is that, as I mentioned before, top level management might be doing something. They might say, yep, we've got a plan. We're going to do this. This is how we're going to start. And no one's expecting you to be a hundred percent perfect. I think that's the other misconception.

You know, when people are looking to work for businesses, they want to work for businesses that are progressive and that are taking active steps. They're not looking for perfection. Okay? And they're not looking for tick box. That's the other thing. And so, people are going in to be interviewed and often they're not interviewed by the C-suite

[00:19:45] Sean Steele: Oh, that's very true, yes.

[00:19:46] Natalie Simmons: Yeah, that middle management unfortunately doesn't have the information at their fingertips, which is why we created this L&D module, so that it can filter throughout the entire organisation. And they go in and they're like, okay Sean, so tell me, what do you do from an impact perspective? What's your company’s outlook for the next five years on ESG? And they're saying, I know we do some stuff, but I don't have all the information. I'll have to get back to you on that. But as the person being interviewed, that reads as, and this is what we're saying time and time again, it reads as; well, clearly you're not doing a good enough job because if this senior leader doesn't know what's going on, then clearly it's not actually part of your way of doing business. It is just an afterthought for you. And so, it's very interesting. You know, I think that's one huge opportunity for businesses.

[00:20:44] Sean Steele: Do you think, Natalie, I mean, you've made a change during Covid, right? And I know Covid was, it may have been disruptive, but it also feels like it was a real, it was such an accelerator when you think about the great resignation, it feels like in the old model of the world, we used to go to work and then try to find purpose outside of work. And now people are like, you know what? I've just had enough of that. I don't want to have these two separate lives. I actually want to work somewhere where I feel it's meaningful. I feel like my contribution is valued. I don't want to just make money and then try to find value and purpose and meaning somewhere else. I actually need the two things to be together because my whole life has almost become intertwined, quite flexible, like, you know, it's all sort of integrated. Do you think that is a driver, what’s your perspective?

[00:21:24] Natalie Simmons: Yeah, I think, to be perfectly honest, I think it started before Covid, but I think Covid accelerated it.

[00:21:31] Sean Steele: Right. Yeah.

[00:21:31] Natalie Simmons: Dramatically. Especially, in this country. And I think that we would've been here regardless of Covid. It might just have been another two or three years down the track. Because ultimately, and you know, you touched on it a bit earlier, that we used to go to work and we used to be like thankful for getting the job, but you knew about the company because of what they put out into the world. There was nowhere to really find any other information. Now, we all live in glass boxes. Everybody knows everything. People can find out exactly what it's like. You can say A, but ultimately, you know what B would be like.

[00:22:09] Sean Steele: You know how to find it.

[00:22:11] Natalie Simmons: Yeah. And so, I think that people are now making different decisions because they're like, well we do have choices and you know, there's a lot of new skills that are coming into the market that we didn't have 10 years ago but that we now need. And these people are saying, I know I can be valued, but I'll be valued where they value the communities in which they operate. And I think that that's what we're seeing.

[00:22:37] Sean Steele: Could you give us Natalie, some examples? So, you know, when I think about a lot of the members of our audience might be running a digital marketing agency or a chain of chiropractic businesses or sort of osteos or their property services or a technology service, like a whole, quite often services, not always, you know, manufacturing businesses, but many in that sort of, you know, 5 people to 50 people kind of range, sometimes larger, but a lot in that 5 to 50. Can you give me an example of like a client who's maybe come to you who said, I've got this business that works well, it's fine, but I want to do more. And I don't feel like there's kind of a heart connection there where you've been able to sort of help them dig, to find something that's more meaningful and find a way through to creating greater impact through that business. Can you think of a client, just imagine there's a lot of people who want to do something but don't know how, and then how do they elevate that business through that process?

[00:23:32] Natalie Simmons: Yeah, I think, we start with the process of, it's a survey really, and we survey six key groups, and employees, customers, shareholders, have got them stakeholders, supply chain in the community in which you operate. And what we come up with is a net purpose score. So, I'm sure a lot of people have heard of Net Promoter Score.

[00:23:55] Sean Steele: Mm-hmm.

[00:23:56] Natalie Simmons: But we measure Net Purpose Score. So, we run it through our little algorithm. And what that does is it gives you your baseline of your company's alignment to purpose as it's perceived by those stakeholder groups. And I think that's a really good place to start because there's a lot of companies that just do good innately, and they don't actually really know it, they don't necessarily measure it, but how they operate, they're already creating positive impact.

We then help businesses, we take that purpose goal and we go through a bit of a strategic session and we look at areas of impact. So, for example, it might be, you know, you spoke about finance, it might be a financial services business. And there's not a lot of women, let's say, in financial services, so how can they change that in the future?

So, it's not about changing the way they do business, but it's about, okay, well how do we attract more women? How do we get more women uplifted in this area of business in order to create gender equality?

[00:25:12] Sean Steele: Okay.

[00:25:13] Natalie Simmons: Just as an example.

[00:25:14] Sean Steele: Yes. Good example.

[00:25:15] Natalie Simmons: Yeah, and that could be anything from aligning yourself to a financial literacy charity. It could be around uplifting girls because we also know that if the one thing that needs to be solved for all of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals to be achieved is actually educating girls.

[00:25:40] Sean Steele: Education for girls. Yeah. Big time.

[00:25:41] Natalie Simmons: Yeah. Because girls, you know, they'll have less children. They'll have them later in life. They harvest much better plots. There's a lot of things which has a huge impact on the climate. They're all into, I could go on for about two hours, which I won't. But ultimately as a, you know, if you're in finance, if you're in engineering, that is one thing that you can already focus on that might not have an immediate impact today, but you're building a legacy that will create a complete turnaround in the future.

[00:26:16] Sean Steele: And so, do you encourage people to… tell me about, like, let's take that financial services client example. Do you encourage them to think about whether that becomes the entire purpose of their business, or that actually just becomes a way of them doing good. That is a way of creating stronger impact and having a more meaningful contribution to the societies in which they work, but actually their purpose might still to be to create financial freedom for their clients. How do you talk to people about that?

[00:25:05] Natalie Simmons: Look, it's interesting and it takes a while because we don't want to go in and completely destroy the company's vision, the company's purpose, their value set. That's not what we are here to do. We're here to help businesses take their purpose statement and create a meaningful call to action around it. And so, you know, if you think about, let's say, you know, financial services, to your example, it's, we want to help you grow, we want to help you grow your portfolio, we want to help you be successful. And that's absolutely fine, but you want to do that for everyone, right? You want to be able to provide that for everyone. So, you want to be financial freedom for all. Right? And I think it's about understanding that, and it's not about attaching an area of impact into your business that has nothing to do with your business either, because ultimately we're all in the business of something. Even if you are manufacturing cogs, we need the cogs, but you can do it in a way that's environmentally and socially responsible. And I think it's about breaking down what the business is about and building it back up with the same fundamental blocks of what you're about, but integrating into it layers of impact. Does that make sense?

[00:26:49] Sean Steele: Yeah, it does. And it raised, because I care a lot about this space and so I've really thought about it deeply when we've been building, you know, different businesses in our portfolios and so on. One of the businesses we had was a trades training business. So, it's essentially teaching people skills of carpentry and brick lying and painting and decorating and stuff like that. And, you know, you could easily go to the team and say, well, what's our purpose? And they're like, well, to create skilled workers to solve the skill shortages in Australian's construction industry.

You like, okay, like, who cares about that? Like, I don't know. Does that get you out of bed? Does that get you excited? What are the customers care about? What are they here for? Anyway, one of the, just cut a long story short, one of the things that was really super interesting, we had a lot of international students and I said, are these international students coming from?

Oh, they're coming from the Philippines, Columbia, you know, a whole bunch of nations are quite often developing economies. I said, how do they get funded? Well, usually the whole family gets behind them, raises a whole bunch of money to send this individual to Australia where they have to leave their family, start here, completely isolated, totally alone.

And why are they doing it? Because they see that there is an opportunity in Australia to build a better life, not only for them, but for their family. They're actually trying to create opportunities and prosperity, not just for them. You can guarantee that, you know, 60% of that pay cheque is going straight back to the family because that is multiplied probably by 10 in terms of the prosperity it offers as an opportunity for their family.

And eventually maybe there's some opportunity to create opportunities for their families to pathway. So, do they really care about carpentry or brick laying? Like I can guarantee if we said, brick laying is a thing you should do. They'll be like, okay, I'll do bricklaying. It's like, where's the opportunity's going to be?

I need an opportunity at the end of it. And so, the whole purpose, you know, once everyone really thought about that, it was like the business mindset shifted entirely about, the reason we are here is actually to help these people who are going to take a massive risk, and a huge investment, create prosperity for their families.

It's not about teaching carpentry. Yes, we need to get that to be a high quality, so Australian employees get what they need, but that's not actually the purpose of this business, and it's not where the real impact is. And it just, I don't know. I loved being part of that business because of that, because of actually what it stood for, and it was far easier to get people to be engaged because it was meaningful. And so the opportunity to your point then to go, okay, well, if we had another way of helping other communities in the country doing exactly the same thing, consistent with our business model. Well, we knew that there were, um, that there was, like project managers that were developing housing for people in Australia, whether it was people experiencing domestic violence or people who didn't have food stability, you know, they were actually building housing projects. Like, well, that's a pretty amazing place for us to deploy our efforts where we're doing exactly the same thing and this is the skills we already have, but now actually our students can also get involved in that.

So, all of a sudden you're creating a real opportunity, doing exactly not disconnected from the business model core and part of the business model, and aligned with actually what the customers actually care about.

[00:31:24] Natalie Simmons: A hundred percent. And it's in every step of business. You know, think about the supply chain, like where you get your materials from and how you dispose of your materials. A lot of what we dispose of doesn't need to end up in landfill.

[00:31:36] Sean Steele: True. Actually, we got the majority of our materials from other people who are going to dispose of them.

[00:31:41] Natalie Simmons: Exactly. And so, you know, it's that thing of like, well, you know, and if you think about, let's say technology companies like, and I'm talking about more hardware, You know, you have to get rid of so much hardware every single year, and so much of it goes into landfill, but a lot of it can actually be recycled. Now you don't have to recycle it, but if you make that commitment to recycle 80%, for example, of all of your hardware and you know that, then that goes for a specific company that repurposes it. And then that gets into, let's say, first nation communities who don't have access to a lot of power, hardware, computers, all of that. Then all of a sudden, just by doing what you do every day and just changing the way you dispose of your rubbish can create a huge amount of impact. And I think it's all of those elements and it's big, but it has to start small. And I think that that's what we really work with businesses on.

It's not about changing everything. It's about starting to take steps towards a bigger goal, and you've got to understand what that bigger goal is. And it might take you 10 years, it might take you 2 years.

[00:32:55] Sean Steele: Yeah. So, if you were going to guide a small business owner to self-help, you know, we've got a whole bunch of people listening today who are like, okay, maybe I'm not ready or don't want to take on a consultant or whatever, but I want to do something about this. You know, I've got this business. I know we can do more. I know that we can contribute in a better way. How would you get them to think about it? Like what sort of steps or questions would you ask them to walk through?

[00:33:18] Natalie Simmons: My first question always to CEOs is, what kind of legacy do you want to build? Because I think that puts a very different lens on what we do today versus what we do in the future and beyond profit, what do you want to be known for? Do you want to be known for the company that destroyed the planet? Do you want to be known for the company that was good for the planet? Just as an example. And I think it sounds like a simple question, but when you really think about that, it really starts you thinking of like, yeah, okay, I want to leave a different legacy. And I think once you know, the next big step is understanding, okay, we're in the business of doing this and this is areas of impact that we can look at. And we encourage people to divide it between being very clear cut on what's an environmental strategy we can take on and what's a social strategy we can take on? And it's about picking one of those, and it's starting to then look at those six key stakeholder groups that I mentioned earlier and understanding how it will impact every single one of them. How will it impact your employees? How will it impact your customers? How will it impact your shareholders? How does what you do impact the community in which you operate? What do your suppliers think of it? And that's how I would start, because it's one small step and one small action can start a tsunami of change.
And I think to me, I would start with, and my advice always is, is start with your people. Because ultimately happy people, make happy customers make happy profits.

[00:35:03] Sean Steele: Yeah. Big time. And you know, if we loop right back, your people… If in a cold-hearted business model of the world and every CEO wants to access the discretionary effort of their team, well, I can tell you discretionary effort, there's a lot of things that impact it, right. But no one's getting out of bed to work extra hard for you over the long term if they don't think that their efforts are actually creating good in the world, because people, generally speaking, want to do good in the world. They want to serve us. They want to create a positive impact. It is part of the DNA. I'd say every single person that's in your team today and they are far more likely to go above and beyond for you and your business to serve your customers if they actually think the output of that is doing, you know, you don't know where they're actually going to become, where that heart kind of connection is going to be made. Where actually you might think it's a small thing, you know, recycling the computers, for example, but perhaps they've grown up in an environment where actually somebody gave them a computer once and it completely transformed their experience.

I was listening to. Tony Robbins again the other day. And, you know, he continues to come back to the fact that he grew up with food insecurity. And, you know, it was one man who gave his family a Thanksgiving dinner. And now I think this year they've done 982 million meals for Americans who are hungry. And that's continued to become the core part of their way of generating value beyond all their trainings and all that sort of stuff that people pay for, for people who can't afford to get access to that.

[00:36:37] Natalie Simmons: Yeah. And I think we want to be valued and we want to value as individuals. And you know, I think to that point, it's, you never know what's going to trigger that one person. But if you are successful in triggering 80% of your team, you've done well, you're never going to please everyone and not everything is going to talk to everyone. But I think that when you, even those 20%, even if what you are doing doesn't speak to their, you know, doesn't tug at their heartstrings, so to speak, they will value the fact that they work for a company that cares.

[00:37:18] Sean Steele: That cares. Yeah. If I was going to summarise, you know, Natalie, because I'm conscious that we're out of time for today, but I think it's been a fantastic discussion because I think people can get very easily overwhelmed and go, oh my God, there's like this ESG thing and then there's, you know, then there's like 17 goals and I don't know where to start and I don't want to develop policies and I'm just a small business and all the rest.

And what you are saying is, forget all of that. Talk to your customers, talk to your team, talk to your stakeholders. Think about, you know, talk to your suppliers. Talk to them about where the opportunities for impact are. Pick one, you know, pick an environmental strategy or pick a social strategy and actually just do one thing and start the wheels turning, you know, you can do it with your team. It doesn't have to be complicated, it doesn't have to be sophisticated. It actually just needs to come from the right place, and it starts to get the wheels turning.

[00:38:06] Natalie Simmons: Find out what your net purpose score is. Find out where you're starting, and you know, make a plan off that. Because what you think is important to your people and your customers might not be actually the key driver for them.

[00:38:23] Sean Steele: Well said. Thank you so much, Natalie. I really appreciate your time today. For people who might like to hear more or see more or experience more of yourself and Barefoot, where would you direct them to?

[00:38:34] Natalie Simmons: You can email me directly, [email protected], or head to our website to barefootcitizensconsulting.com.

[00:38:44] Sean Steele: Beautiful. Thank you so much, Natalie. Folks, I really hope you enjoyed the show today. My absolute pleasure. And I'm sure you got value from Natalie's Wisdom today. You can really help other people get access to that by doing just one of two things, you know, hit subscribe while leave us a review on the podcast platforms because it just helps other people find it more easily. Or you may or may not realise last year, we were in the top 15% of podcasts shared globally, which is super exciting. Which means when I say, hit the share button on your phone, send this episode to somebody that you know would also love it or really needs to hear about it. It really is the thing that actually starts to generate real impact for us and get this kind of wisdom into the hands of more people and which helps us for fulfill our purpose. So, thank you very much for your support. You've been listening to the ScaleUps Podcast. I'm Sean Steele, and I look forward to speaking with you again next week. Thank you so much, Natalie.

[00:39:32] Natalie Simmons: Thank you.