Small consistent actions and the three Cs, with Chris Watkin

Culture and conversation first

Culture came first. I told Chris it might be the culture of your team inside a bigger business, and I think it comes from your values, your vision and how you celebrate wins. Values have to be lived. If trust is top of your list, do you actually trust people? I'd almost start in reverse. Look at how you show up, then put words to it.

My test for vision is a simple one. "If I go and ask the person that just made me a cup of coffee what that is, can they tell me?"

And when something goes right, most of us jump straight to what's next. I said I'd rather people took a pause long enough to feel good about it first.

Then conversation. "Every interaction we have with another human being is a conversation." Blog posts, videos, one-to-ones, presentations. So read the comments. Reply to them. Never send emails from an address nobody checks. And when someone's talking, listen to the words coming out of their mouth instead of waiting for your turn. "Conversation is about listening as much as it is about talking."

It's no good doing it once

The third C is consistency. "It's no good doing it once."

I used the diet everyone recognises. Salad on Monday, gym on Monday night, a Chinese takeaway as a reward, then Tuesday morning you decide there's no point and give up. Marketing works the same way. Somebody makes a Hollywood-style promo video once a quarter and puts it on Facebook once. "You're better off picking up your phone and creating a crappy video" for 45 seconds every single day.

I've done a lot of sales on the phone, so I know the days when you really don't want to make the next call. Go for a little walk. Get a glass of water. Put on some music that makes you feel good. Get yourself in the right state, then keep going.

The hard bit is that you can't see it working. "The results sometimes take time to pay off. That's the point I'm making." It's like losing weight. You see yourself every day, so you don't notice. Someone you see once every three weeks walks in and asks what you've been doing. The changes are there, "they're so small you can't tell."

"It's accumulated, isn't it?" Chris said. Exactly that. Sometimes it's the hockey stick. Nothing, nothing, then a leap, and it feels like one thing did it.

I'd been listening to Andrew Ridgeley's autobiography on Audible. The way I remember it from the book, Wham weren't even in the top 40 for their first Top of the Pops. They were around 42 or 43, a band dropped out, they were local and a producer had seen them, so they got the slot. The week after, they were number three. "It was everything they'd done that meant that Top of the Pops appearance went well." If they'd held off performing until Top of the Pops came calling, they'd never have got it.

Twenty-five people in a training room

Then I told Chris about Jamie Oliver's Big Feastival, a music and food festival I got to speak at. Lots of people asked me how that happened.

Back then I was doing a lot of health stuff. I ran a small juicing workshop for about 25 or 30 people in a supermarket's training room, more of a function suite really. One of the people in that audience was booking speakers for the Big Feastival, and I got approached. "I got spotted speaking at an event for 25 people by someone that was doing the booking for Jamie Oliver's event."

If I'd turned that small room down, there's no festival. "Not always in the way we expect, not always in the timescale we'd hope, but they pay off. But if we don't do them, we never get the result."

The little rooms are where the bigger ones come from, even when you can't see the line between them. There's more on the waiting part in Some things just take time.

Before we finished I made a point of saying Chris is consistent with his videos. If there'd been an audience on that sofa, I'd have had them clapping him, because he actually does this stuff.