Growing up, I always loved reading stories about successful business leaders. I would devour anything I could about people like Kerry Packer, Richard Branson and Gerry Harvey who were amongst the earliest people I was fascinated with. I would buy books that featured profiles of say 20 entrepreneurs or 100 businesses. I made a habit out of purchasing the BRW Rich List (now the AFR Rich list these days) to learn how successful people made their money. I was particularly intrigued by stories of self-made people and tended to skip over those based on inherited wealth or property. My fascination lay in understanding how great businesses were built and the personality traits and leadership qualities of the people who built them.
One of my favourite lessons was from when Steve Jobs was young. At 12 years olds, Jobs randomly rang Bill Hewlett, the co-founder of Hewlett Packard to ask him for spare computer parts. An amused Hewlett not only gave him the parts but a summer internship in the factory. Years later when Jobs was quizzed as to how he did it, he said, ‘I looked him up in the phone book and made the call’. His big lesson here was that ‘I’ve never found anybody that didn’t want to help me if I asked them for help.’ He also added that most people ‘don’t get those experiences because they never ask.’ It's so easy to make the call, yet almost no one does. The very best do though.
But it’s not only the very wealthiest people that have wisdom to share. There are so many people who have built successful businesses that have a less well-known story but just as much wisdom. I thought, who is telling their stories? How are they sharing their knowledge? These are the types of people I work with and talk to every day and there are many insights to be gained from them. I’ve always found them to be generous with their time and advice. So, I thought interviewing these people on a podcast would be a wonderful way to share these stories. That’s where the Dion Guagliardo Podcast started and why it exists.
My favourite part of talking with my podcast guests is when the conversation is so interesting that you almost forget you’re recording an interview. The conversation flows and you gain insights that were simply different to what you’ve heard before. A couple of months back I interviewed Vu Tran, cofounder of Go1. The business was started by four high school friends from Brisbane in 2015 and since then has grown to a $2 Billion+ tech unicorn. But as Vu explains, that’s just the start. They have very ambitious goals for the company and where they want to take it.
What struck me most during our conversation was Vu’s take on company culture. In the business and corporate world, culture has almost become a cliché. Companies will say how important it is but often fail to articulate what their culture is, and they rarely live up to the talk. Most often, companies will espouse their wonderful culture and why they look for people who will fit their culture. This is what made Vu’s answer so interesting. “We don’t want people to fit our culture” he said almost defiantly “We want people who will enrich and grow our culture.” Interesting. “We don’t want the same culture we have now in 10 years, or we haven’t grown”.
I was always fascinated by the intelligent and considered interviewers, like Andrew Denton and Michael Parkinson who seemed genuinely interested in their guests. They were so good at building rapport. I always remember watching Andrew Denton interview people when I was young and being blown away by the way he used silence or a gentle follow-up question to break down barriers and open up a guest to a whole new level of vulnerability and openness. He not only knew how but he knew when to do it. He understood nuance and subtlety. Not many people can do that, and it really stood out to me.
As I’ve got to know my clients over the years, I have found one of the great privileges to be the lessons and stories you hear about how they made the money that I now manage for them and their family. There is nothing quite like hearing about the early days from a founder starting with nothing who went on to build an empire. But what watching great interviewers taught me was that if you ask the right questions, you’ll find that everyone has an interesting story and unique insights and wisdom to share. There is nothing more interesting than meeting a guest for the first time, hearing their story, and going on the journey of unpacking how they got to where they are today. That’s my rationale. I want to learn from the best people across all fields and I want to help them share their lifetime of hard-won insights for the benefit of everyone. Now 2 years in and approaching our 50th interview, I’d like to think we are achieving that.
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