The Australian Small Business Show

Join the waitlist for The Australian Small Business Show Club by clicking here.Hello and welcome to this week's episode of The Australian Small Business Show.If your team brings you every problem, every decision and every disagreement, the standard advice is that you need to delegate better. In this episode we argue that delegation usually isn't the real problem, and that delegating more can leave you doing even more hand-holding. We compare it to a trapeze: you hold a team member's hand to swing them to the next platform, then you have to catch them again for the one after that.We unpack the three underlying reasons business owners end up as the bottleneck. The first is not understanding how you naturally operate as a leader. We walk through four boss styles: the Driver (direct, wants people to get on with it), the Cheerleader (makes work fun and inspires the team), the Peacekeeper (avoids conflict and wants everything calm) and the Perfectionist (loves data, analysis and detail). Every style has blind spots. A Driver, for example, will often hand over a task and then swoop in and fix it because that's quicker, which only teaches the team to wait to be rescued.The second reason is structure. Most small business teams get Frankensteined together, adding a person here and another there to solve whatever problem is in front of you. What works with two people falls over at ten, and the org chart ends up looking like a spider's web with reporting lines crossing everywhere. When nobody is clear on who makes which decisions, everything lands back on your desk. We also talk about how good intentions, like giving people extra responsibility so they feel valued, can create double and triple reporting lines that confuse everyone.The third reason is the people themselves: lovely people hired for roles that no longer exist, the wrong personality for the job (a big-picture Cheerleader as your bookkeeper, for instance), or gaps where nobody on the team has the skills you need. We finish with the order to fix it in: get to know yourself as a leader and put practical hacks in place, build the structure your business needs right now, then find the right people to fill it.Have you been asking yourself, why does every problem still end up on my desk, no matter how much I delegate? This episode shows you where to look instead.Key Takeaways:Why delegating more won't help if the team is still relying on you for every answerHow the four boss styles (Driver, Cheerleader, Peacekeeper, Perfectionist) shape the habits you create in your teamWhy a Frankensteined structure with unclear reporting lines sends every decision back to youHow to match people to roles based on what the role actually needs, not just who you likeThe order to fix it in: yourself first, then structure, then the teamWhy taking the slower route and coaching your team to bring you solutions is a gift to your future selfFree webinar: Want to go deeper on this? Join a free one-hour webinar on 13 October that walks through all three reasons in detail and helps you work out which one is affecting you most right now. Register at https://www.peoplepoweredbusiness.com.au/delegationConnect with Us:If you're an Australian Small Business Owner, we'd love to connect with you on socials. You can give our Facebook Page a like here: https://www.facebook.com/theaustraliansmallbusinessshow Or follow us on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/aussmallbizshow/Subscribe to The Australian Small Business Show newsletter by visiting our website here: https://www.theaustraliansmallbusinessshow.com.au/Disclaimer: The information shared on The Australian Small Business Show is general in nature and does not constitute professional advice, legal or otherwise. We recommend consulting with your advisors on your specific circumstances.Mentioned in this episode:Delegation Won't Save You - Free WebinarYou've built a business. You've hired a team. You've delegated. So why does everything STILL come back to you? If you're running an established business and you're still the one making all the decisions, solving all the problems and answering all the questions, I want to invite you to something. This Tuesday, 13 October, at 12pm Sydney time, I'm running a free live webinar where we're going to unpack the three real reasons business owners get stuck in the middle of everything. And more importantly, how to work out what's actually happening in YOUR business, so you know what needs to change. It's free, it's practical, and I'd love you to join me. Head to peoplepoweredbusiness.com.au/delegation to save your seat. I'll see you Tuesday!

Join the waitlist for The Australian Small Business Show Club by clicking here.Hello and welcome to this week's episode of The Australian Small Business Show.Last week, Loren Bartley showed us how she uses Claude Skills as her marketing team. For some listeners that was a big leap. So this week we've stepped it back and shared the everyday ways we're using AI in our own businesses, so you can borrow what works for you.We start with the one habit we'd recommend before anything else: keep your own source of truth. The tools change constantly, and custom GPTs are being retired as we speak. So every set of instructions we give an AI lives in a Word document, Google Doc or spreadsheet that we own. When the next tool comes along, we hand those instructions over rather than starting from scratch.From there we get practical. AI is now our starting point for building lead generation tools. Quizzes and calculators that once took a week or two to build, or cost over a thousand dollars a year in software, now take a morning. We use it to read our weekly Google Analytics and Search Console reports. It tells us which old blog posts are quietly pulling readers every week, shows when tools like ChatGPT have found us, and gives us a short list of actions. We've rebuilt one of our websites page by page so AI search can find it more easily, and learned a lot about the technical side along the way. We're also turning static membership templates, like a guide to difficult conversations, into tools that build a full script in the user's own style.Just as important is what we're not handing over. We don't use AI to give client advice. We've seen it make things up, and if you didn't build the advice yourself, you can't deliver it well. We're also not using it to write our thought leadership, including our weekly newsletter, because it still doesn't sound like us.We finish with a few extras. We talk to AI by voice rather than typing, including a weekly planning conversation on a Sunday walk, and the outputs are noticeably better. We also share some personal uses: fixing a struggling hibiscus, a 12-week fitness plan, and tracking the value of rookie footballers' collectible cards.Have you been asking yourself where AI should actually fit in your business, and what you should keep for yourself? This episode gives you a practical starting list, plus a simple way to protect your work as the tools keep changing.Key Takeaways:Store all your AI instructions in a document you own, so you can move them to a new tool without losing your work when platforms change.Use AI as your first stop for building lead generation tools like quizzes. Ask it to talk you through your options before you pay for software.Feed your weekly analytics reports into AI to find out which content is working, whether AI search is finding you, and where to focus next.Turn static templates into guided tools that do the implementation for your clients or members, not just the instructions.Keep advice and thought leadership in your own hands, because you can't deliver advice well if you didn't create it.Try speaking to AI instead of typing, since conversational voice notes often produce better quality outputs.Tell us how you're using AIWe'd love to hear how you're using AI, in your business or at home. Come and share your tips with us on Facebook, Instagram or TikTok.Connect with Us:If you're an Australian Small Business Owner, we'd love to connect with you on socials. You can give our Facebook Page a like here: https://www.facebook.com/theaustraliansmallbusinessshow Or follow us on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/aussmallbizshow/We’d love to hear from you!Subscribe to The Australian Small Business Show newsletter by visiting our website here: https://www.theaustraliansmallbusinessshow.com.au/Disclaimer: The information shared on The Australian Small Business Show is general in nature and does not constitute professional advice, legal or otherwise. We recommend consulting with your advisors on your specific circumstances.Mentioned in this episode:Delegation Won't Save You - Free WebinarYou've built a business. You've hired a team. You've delegated. So why does everything STILL come back to you? If you're running an established business and you're still the one making all the decisions, solving all the problems and answering all the questions, I want to invite you to something. This Tuesday, 13 October, at 12pm Sydney time, I'm running a free live webinar where we're going to unpack the three real reasons business owners get stuck in the middle of everything. And more importantly, how to work out what's actually happening in YOUR business, so you know what needs to change. It's free, it's practical, and I'd love you to join me. Head to peoplepoweredbusiness.com.au/delegation to save your seat. I'll see you Tuesday!

Join the waitlist for The Australian Small Business Show Club by clicking here.Hello and welcome to this week's episode of The Australian Small Business Show.This week we're joined by Loren Bartley, founder of Impactiv8, who helps service-based businesses build more profitable marketing systems in partnership with AI. Loren runs the AI Mega Success Academy and AI Mega classes, along with speaking, team training and coaching, and she's built out an AI "marketing team" of around 150 Claude skills that now do the work she used to need a much bigger human team for. We get into what a skill actually is, and why it's a completely different thing to a prompt: a skill is a saved, self-contained set of instructions for one specific job, built with your standards, your examples and your edge cases already baked in, so you're not explaining yourself from scratch every time you need something done.We also talk about why narrow, specific skills beat one giant "do everything" skill every time. Cramming every instruction into a single skill means it has more to read, more decisions to make, and a much higher chance of missing something or getting it wrong, not to mention the extra cost of all those unnecessary tokens. A skill that does one small job well, and does it brilliantly, is worth more than one skill trying to do it all.For anyone starting from scratch, Loren's advice is clear: build your brand voice skill first, because that's what stops your content sounding like generic AI output. From there, look at the repetitive, mundane tasks eating your time, and build skills for the things you already know how to do well before you try to hand over tasks outside your own expertise. She also recommends pacing yourself, building and actually using one skill at a time rather than ten at once, because each new skill needs feedback and refinement, much like training a new team member.We finish with the practical how-to: turning a chat you were genuinely happy with into a reusable skill, using Claude's record feature to walk it through a process step by step, or asking it to research frameworks for something outside your expertise and turning that into a skill. Loren also explains "coordinator" skills, where one skill knows which of your other skills to call on for each part of a job, and how Claude Projects let the same skills work across multiple businesses or clients, because the business-specific knowledge lives in the project, not baked into every individual skill.Have you been asking yourself how you're supposed to keep AI output sounding like you without rewriting the same instructions every time? This episode is our answer.Key Takeaways:Understand what actually makes a Claude skill different from a prompt, and why that difference is what saves you real timeKnow which skill to build first (brand voice) and why it lifts the quality of everything that followsLearn how to spot the repetitive, mundane tasks in your business that are worth turning into a skillBuild skills for what you already know before trying to build skills for work outside your expertiseUnderstand coordinator skills, and how a "team" of skills can work together to complete one jobSee how Claude Projects let you reuse the same skills across different businesses or clients without rebuilding themLoren BartleyLoren Bartley is the founder of Impactiv8, where she helps service-based businesses build more profitable marketing systems in partnership with AI. She runs the AI Mega Success Academy and AI Mega classes, and offers speaking, team training and one-on-one and small group coaching, with a particular focus on helping business owners build their own AI-powered marketing teams using Claude skills.Connect with Loren Bartley: Website: https://www.aimegasuccess.com/ Claude skills resource: https://www.aimegasuccess.com/claudeskillsConnect with Us:If you're an Australian Small Business Owner, we'd love to connect with you on socials. You can give our Facebook Page a like here: https://www.facebook.com/theaustraliansmallbusinessshowOr follow us on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/aussmallbizshow/We’d love to hear from you!Subscribe to The Australian Small Business Show newsletter by visiting our website here: https://www.theaustraliansmallbusinessshow.com.au/Disclaimer: The information shared on The Australian Small Business Show is general in nature and does not constitute professional advice, legal or otherwise. We recommend consulting with your advisors on your specific circumstances.

Join the waitlist for The Australian Small Business Show Club by clicking here.Hello and welcome to this week's episode of The Australian Small Business Show.We sat down this week to talk about something that's been frustrating Matt for months: marketing that used to work just doesn't anymore. The core concepts of sales and marketing haven't changed, but everything around them has sped up, and the touchpoints that used to build a relationship with a customer now have to happen faster and smarter than they did even a year ago.The biggest shift we're seeing is where people go to find answers. It's no longer just Google, it's AI tools, and even when people are on Google, it's often Google's AI doing the summarising. That means the old SEO playbook of giving away just enough to get someone to click through doesn't work anymore. Your content has to actually answer the question, properly, or AI skips straight past it. Matt's been rebuilding his own website with this in mind, researching what's landing in those AI-generated answer boxes and making sure his content earns a spot there too.But being found by AI is only half the job. Once someone does land on your website or your socials, they're still checking whether they like you, whether they trust you, whether you're their vibe. That hasn't changed, and if anything it matters more, because trust has taken a hit across the board now that so much content is AI-generated. Kristy-Lee's approach has been to let AI analyse her own analytics and tell her what's resonating, without letting AI write the content itself, because the trust piece has to stay genuinely hers.We also talked about where to actually spend your energy. Referrals, recommendations, testimonials and Google reviews matter more than ever. Your email list is one of the only things you truly own. And rather than trying to be everywhere, it might be smarter to pick two or three platforms and do them properly instead of spreading yourself across five.We'd love to hear what you're noticing in your own marketing right now, what's working, what you've quietly stopped doing because it wasn't earning its keep anymore. Come find us on Facebook, Instagram or TikTok and tell us.Key Takeaways:Why the fundamentals of sales and marketing haven't changed, but the speed and format of every touchpoint hasWhy website and blog content now needs to directly answer questions to be picked up by AI search tools, not just rank in GoogleWhy trust matters more than ever, and why that's a reason to be cautious about outsourcing your content creation to AIWhy analytics are worth paying closer attention to right now, and how AI can help you interpret them without writing your content for youWhy referrals, testimonials, Google reviews and your email list deserve more of your attention than chasing every new platformWhy focusing on two or three platforms you can do well may beat trying to maintain a presence everywhereConnect with Us:If you're an Australian Small Business Owner, we'd love to connect with you on socials. You can give our Facebook Page a like here: https://www.facebook.com/theaustraliansmallbusinessshow Or follow us on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/aussmallbizshow/We’d love to hear from you!Subscribe to The Australian Small Business Show newsletter by visiting our website here: https://www.theaustraliansmallbusinessshow.com.au/Mentioned in this episode:Delegation Won't Save You - Free WebinarYou've built a business. You've hired a team. You've delegated. So why does everything STILL come back to you? If you're running an established business and you're still the one making all the decisions, solving all the problems and answering all the questions, I want to invite you to something. This Tuesday, 13 October, at 12pm Sydney time, I'm running a free live webinar where we're going to unpack the three real reasons business owners get stuck in the middle of everything. And more importantly, how to work out what's actually happening in YOUR business, so you know what needs to change. It's free, it's practical, and I'd love you to join me. Head to peoplepoweredbusiness.com.au/delegation to save your seat. I'll see you Tuesday!

Join the waitlist for The Australian Small Business Show Club by clicking here.Hello and welcome to this week's episode of The Australian Small Business Show.In this episode we unpack single person risk from three angles. On the team side, we talk about what happens when one person holds all the knowledge in your business, prompted by a recent client experience where a well-structured team was still genuinely shaken by one unexpected resignation. We discuss why documenting processes and SOPs properly, rather than letting a team member build their own undocumented system, is the single biggest thing you can do to protect your business, and how much easier that's become with AI tools that can help capture a process as you talk it through.We then move to client concentration risk, sharing our own experiences of losing a client that made up a significant share of revenue, and why we think 20% of income from any one source is a sensible ceiling to work towards. We talk honestly about how easy it is to let marketing slide once a big, comfortable client comes along, and the flow-on risk of giving one client enough power to push down your prices as well as your time.Finally we cover supplier risk, particularly relevant right now given how many businesses across industries like construction are going into liquidation. We share an example of a manufacturing client who built a genuine three-tiered supplier strategy, with backup suppliers they maintained real relationships with, not just names on a list, so they were never completely exposed to one supplier's problems.Across all three, the common thread is control. If someone else, whether that's a team member, a client or a supplier, holds the power in the relationship, your business carries real risk.Have you been asking yourself, "How reliant is my business on any one person?" This episode gives you a practical starting point for finding out, and for building in the contingencies before you're forced to.Key Takeaways:Document your processes and SOPs properly rather than letting critical knowledge live in one person's head, and use AI tools to make capturing them easier than everAim to keep any single client below 20% of your revenue, and keep marketing running in the background even when a big client makes it tempting to stopBuild genuine backup supplier relationships before you need them, not just a name in a drawer you've never actually ordered fromWatch for situations where a team member, client or supplier holds enough power to start dictating terms, whether that's pricing, timelines or decisionsAssume loyalty isn't a long-term plan; build a simple contingency matrix so a resignation, a lost client or a supplier collapse doesn't mean panic stationsConnect with Us:If you're an Australian Small Business Owner, we'd love to connect with you on socials. You can give our Facebook Page a like here: https://www.facebook.com/theaustraliansmallbusinessshow Or follow us on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/aussmallbizshow/We’d love to hear from you.Subscribe to The Australian Small Business Show newsletter by visiting our website here: https://www.theaustraliansmallbusinessshow.com.au/Disclaimer: The information shared on The Australian Small Business Show is general in nature and does not constitute professional advice, legal or otherwise. We recommend consulting with your advisors on your specific circumstances.Mentioned in this episode:Delegation Won't Save You - Free WebinarYou've built a business. You've hired a team. You've delegated. So why does everything STILL come back to you? If you're running an established business and you're still the one making all the decisions, solving all the problems and answering all the questions, I want to invite you to something. This Tuesday, 13 October, at 12pm Sydney time, I'm running a free live webinar where we're going to unpack the three real reasons business owners get stuck in the middle of everything. And more importantly, how to work out what's actually happening in YOUR business, so you know what needs to change. It's free, it's practical, and I'd love you to join me. Head to peoplepoweredbusiness.com.au/delegation to save your seat. I'll see you Tuesday!