#389 Paul Dunn – Transcript

Ben Nash
Hey guys, welcome back to the ensemble podcast. And today, today’s a bit of a special day, it’s actually it’s gonna be my last ensemble podcast for a little while. For the last two years, I’ve been cranking these out every week. And through that time, I’ve had conversations with some amazing advisors and people around the advice industry. And today I’m talking to the One and Only Mr. Paul Dunn. Paul is a superstar in all aspects. But today we’re talking about business giving, and Paul’s a co founder of B1G1. he’s got, I won’t even say how many decades of experience in business but four times TEDx speaker, he has been there and done it all. And I thought no, no better guests to have on on my last last show for a little while. Paul, great to have you here made.

Paul Dunn
Well, Ben, it is great. Great to be here as well. I looked it up actually, it’s about four, whether I can count up five years ago since we met. You may remember we met up on the North Coast surf Sydney and in June. And so it’s been a great five years, it’s been awesome to see what you’ve been doing in those five years as well. We might let some people know about some interesting numbers as we go through this. But been rather obviously I’m very privileged to be here. And for those of you listening, thank you for listening as well.

Ben Nash
Well, yes, as you say, but we met almost five years ago at one of the den global trade. And Paul was there chatting about B1G1 and their story B1G1 by one give one, the business giving organization that’s taking the world by storm and helping connect businesses around their business giving and making sure that they’re having a positive impact on the world while they’re doing good business. I was immediately taken with the story and you know, perfect timing for what we will focus on at that time. I’d been in business for a bit over two years. And we’ve been doing some stuff that I thought was was pretty cool. But this just seemed to me like the the final piece of the puzzle, and I won’t steal Paul’s thunder. But yeah, looking at how we can have a positive impact and create an impact not just on our clients, but on the broader community is something that I really connected with almost immediately. And we’ve put in place, I’m happy to share a bit of that story as well. But, Paul, for anyone that is not already familiar with buy one, get one or B1G1. Can you just talk us through the story and how you guys have ended up where you are today?

Paul Dunn
Sure, I can give Ben, thank you for having me here. Let me get let me give you some context to that. That whole story. And the context is this when we’re building businesses like you, and you kind of hit it a moment ago, but when you’re a financial advisor, and you’re building businesses, what is it you actually want to build? Well, yes, you want to build an exciting business, one that brings you joy and everything else. But here’s a new term Ben that I coined last week after years of trying to find a term. And what I the term I found was that we all want to build what I call a belonging based business. And let me just illustrate what I mean by belonging based business and then then get to the story. And if I go back four years, I think was four years. Mr. Bezos CEO of Amazon fame was being interviewed, I think it is a Southwest by so whatever that big conference in the in the US is called. And we know Mr. B’s loss is pretty successful, right? And so here’s the interview. I’m interviewing Vsauce on stage. And there’s three and a half 1000 people in the room. And the interviewer turns to these Austin, and he says, So Jeff, by the way, that’s one of my goals in life, you’ve got to meet with below us and say, So, Jeff. But so YouTube says, so. So Jeff, you know, you’ve been doing things for a long time now, since the start of Amazon, what is now the market or the advice that you give to your marketing team? And Bezos looks straight at him? And he says, well, it’s exactly the same as the advice I gave them a day one, right. And so the interview is almost done. And he says to be okay, then I missed that what is what is the advice and what he said was this, to always remember that everyone wants to belong? And it’s that it’s that sense of belonging, which comes obviously, from a sense of caring and all that kind of stuff, that I think is very, very central if the if you know, COVID taught us one thing it is that we are all connected yet we seek belonging in a very real sense, and so on every turn and so, the b1 Jiwan story, which started with Asami, my then co founder, and now somewhat to support more than go Werner was in a mentoring session with me and I was mentoring her and she said, Can we can we can we do something different today? And there’s mentoring session? I said, Sure. And every all of us have moments in lifetime where and I’m really, really hopeful that this moment that I’m about to talk about is actually a moment for you as well, a moment that you remember, as a turning point in the business. And so she said to me, she’s why can I ask you a question? Because as you know, Ben, normally mentors are the ones that ask questions. And I said, Sure. And she said, Well, my question is really a what if question I want you to imagine she said, I want you to imagine a world where every time business is done, something great happens in our world. And at the time, I was regarded as an Aussie bloke, and I said, Oh, wow, that’d be amazing. And she was smart enough to be able to say that I don’t think you get it yet. And I said, Well, I hope we get it. And she said, Well, in my mind, I’ve called it by one good one, which of course, it’s no longer called, it’s gonna be one to one now. But at in her mind, it was that and I said, okay, so how’s it work? She’s, well, emergent. I hope I can make the the the people I’m about to mention I mentioned are not sponsoring the show, by the way. But she said, Imagine you want to buy a TV and you go to Harvey Norman. There you go. There’s, there’s a big name drop. And you want to buy this big plasma TV? And I said, Well, hang on a second, what is what are the things called buy one, give one? As a Masami, that’s not a very good business model. Because if I go to buy a TV, they’re not going to give me another one. And she said, No, no, you don’t understand. She said, you want that TV, on account of how you want bought bigger pixels, brighter pixels, larger, you know, all of that sort of stuff. So then, and here’s the moment and this, I want you to think very clearly about this moment. So she said, how would it be when someone buys that, or when you buy that TV?

If someone who cannot see gets the gift of sight? And I’m like, oh, oh my god, that would be like, Whoa. And, you know, I’m surrounded by books as I was, at the time when I was I am now and, and she’s there. Or imagine, you know, author sells book and tree gets planted or, and I had a cup of coffee, they’re all mad humans on drinks, a cup of coffee, a child and he gets access to water. And I said, Can I be your mentor for the rest of your life? That was how important that was in 2007. So think about that, in terms of my choice of working with you as a financial advisor. And imagine if we have, for example, if we let’s say we have a meeting on Zoom, and during the meeting, you are at the end of the meeting, you happen to say oh, by the way, Sally, and Bill, thank you so much for being here. And this discovery session as a for example. By the way, I just want you to know that as a result of you being here, five children just got access to game changing education. Thank you very much for making that happen. What you got to you got to be kidding me? No, no, no, that’s what we do here at, you know, X Y, Zed x y. Financial Advisors, we believe that there’s something bigger than us, as it were. And of course, when you’re a client, that’s what you’re playing a part in as well. Oh, my gosh, that’s incredible. And so all of a sudden, what you’ve done is you’ve given them that sense of belonging, that sense of meaning, and importantly, you’ve got that sense of meaning yourself. So when we first started be wondering when we said, because it you know, a lot of times people think, Oh, this is like, you know, giving to charity, and all that kind of stuff. No, this is so so much different than then that it really is. Because we on that day, we said it’s about three things, it’s about impact. In other words, it should never be about the money that you’re giving, it should always be about the impact that you’re creating. For example, Ben is probably too, too embarrassed one or you wouldn’t be embarrassed, but it’s not something you’d trumpet but I’ll trumpet it for you. As we are talking with Ben right now. He has actually in the team and his clients have actually created 2.76 4 million giving impacts just think about that per minute. And I And by the way, I’m gonna give you more more, more connection to that in just a second. So first thing is it’s all about impact. Second thing is, it’s all about habits. In other words, this is not something you know, in those days, way back in 2007. The big thing was, you know, you went to charity balls and you know, after 24 hours, you go home and it’s all over and the hotel is a little bit richer. And I’m not knocking all of those things, they really do need to do that stuff. But what if What if every single aspect of your business was involved in some form, like, like I told you before about, let’s say, zoom, or you have a great meeting or something happens. And then the final thing, which is really the most important thing is connection. So it’s impact habit and connection. Now, when we first began, when we first mentioned connection, people want to think that, Oh, I get it, it’s connecting with my prospects and connecting with my clients. Wow, yeah, I really get it. That’s a good reason. And all of that is true. But the most important connection there is the connection that it has with you. And the reason that I mentioned that is one of the things, Ben that we do, and I know you do it as well. You know, we regularly talk to our members, and they’re all around the world, right now, some 3200 of them. And we ask them this question, we say to them, what do you say when you talk with your friends about vielen Jiwon. And we thought that they would say, oh, you know, you can give from one set, you can make an impact from one set, we thought they would say all of your giving goes to you know, wherever it is that you’ve worked with, you’re choosing to give across these 447. Right now projects, we thought they would say all of those sorts of things, we thought they would say, you know, you can map it, you can display it on your website, all of that. We thought that’s what they would say. But we had this word cloud, you know, those word cloud things where you were talking to people and bang, the words that they’re using comes up on the screen. And this I think is probably the most significant thing in the story is we can talk about belonging, we can talk about all of those sorts of things. But let’s talk about the next order of that. So what was happening when we do this, and we do it frequently, the word that comes out is this word, Transform, transform. And we got one word, what do you think this is about? Now? This actually, yes, it did all the things you were talking about, but actually transformed business? We go, Whoa, that’s pretty big. Why would you say that? Listen to what they say. They say, Oh, it’s because all of us on the team now have a giving spirit of giving spirit and that on impact creation spirit, if you will. And that’s something that changes up everything. So yes, all sorts of great things are happening. We’re doing amazing things in the world, you know, 319 million giving impact. So as we as we speak today, but the real essence of that story, like any story, is that the hero in that story, not necessarily the beneficiaries, although obviously that’s that’s part of it. But the real hero in that story is you and your team and your clients working together to make great things happen in their lives and in our work.

Ben Nash
Well, I think that is one of the things you touched on there is around team and one of the things that we found in working with with B1G1 and focusing on business giving while we’re doing the work that we do with clients is that I get excited by revenue targets, of course, as a business owner, but I found that the team probably more excited by our giving targets, and we have a campaign around, you know, having a certain amount of impacts, and people will go on for that a bit more. And it’s more exciting thing to talk about than dollars dollars in the bank. So I think that’s a real Yeah, it’s a really good news story to have internally as your as you’re focused on your growth Levers as well. Paul, can you share a few examples of some of the people that have how they’ve used b one G one or business giving broad more broadly to, to, to drive commercial outcomes within their business?

Paul Dunn
Oh, sure. I mean, it’s, you know, fundamentally, it’s great to be able to talk about the great things were doing in the world and so on. But But But yeah, it ultimately comes back to what what what happens in your business, you, you just gave one awesome example of it. In fact, last night, my time I was on a session in the United Kingdom, and this guy who was a very good business leader, was talking about how he and his clients use it, which is interesting enough, very closely aligned to what you just said. And the whole session that he was talking about, was on goal setting. I mean, I was just there because he was talking about goal setting not because he was necessarily going to relate that to be one gym on you know, I respect this guy and I There are we’re going to hit some new things on goal setting which would be Pretty cool. And what he did right up front was use exactly the thing that you just said. And that is, you know, we can set a goal or for example, $100,000, or whatever that number is, or, you know, $10,000 increase whatever it is, but how much easier is it when we set that goal in terms of the impacts that are being created. And as you just said, people, people will, will strive with considerable pride to hit that impact of for the sake of discussion, you know, 1000 young women getting access to, to education, on account of how, if you think about the situation, for example, in African countries, where, you know, young women in particular, and I don’t need to go too deep on this, but they, they only go to school, three weeks out of four, why? Because they don’t have the products that kind of protect them in that menstrual cycle, right. So when when when the when we actually create these little kids, so they get, it really does put them in school for so much longer. So we are there’s that ripple effect, where that’s changing up lives from an education point of view. But it’s changing our lives, as you just mentioned, for the people in your business because they become more attached now to the goals that you’ve set, because they’re not monetary goals, their impact goals. It’s kind of like what Tim Duggan said. And some of us may know of Tim, he, he wrote the last year’s basically was actually voted the best business book of last year in Australia. And it’s called cult status says in Cu L T, some, some financial advisors, I know, say, Oh, is that called cult status? No, it’s cut cu LT status. And he talks about his own personal journey. And he talks about how, you know, the traditional way of running a business is to set revenue goals and all that kind of stuff. And he gives you a seven step plan. And step number one in the plan is define the impact, right, define the impact that you want to have. So right up front, you you are thinking about something that is bigger than you. And when you think of those things that are bigger than you then guess what the business becomes bigger as well.

Ben Nash
I love that. And I think that in Australia, and I’m sure these sets apply out globally as well. But we’re seeing with our clients like huge focus more on ethical investing and values based investing. And so with good reason. And we’re seeing a lot of these things happening, you know, around the world negative things and people want…story, five years ago, we be were focused heavily on our sales process, and our sales process sucked at that time. And I remember still I was having conversations with you, you were fortunate enough to have a URI to help me out with a few things and we were tinkering around with all these things. But one of the things that we changed was the around with a intro meetings that we’re having with clients that we had had people not showing up or coming and wasting time and not buying and we changed it to be a bit more of a qualifier we started charging for the sessions we charge $195 And then started so but donated all… do you think that they will say yes to because they’ll say yeah… but we donate the money. Makes it as easy now.

Paul Dunn
It’s not for us. I mean, what you’re saying is it’s not for us. It’s for something bigger than us. And interestingly, what the transition is there, that the people then get, oh, working with Ben is actually bigger than us to you sort of and so it develops this extra attraction and so instead of us sort of pushing stuff that people were really doing is just building in magnets which attract them and which inspire them as well.

Ben Nash
Well, look at Yeah, I think that that’s so important that that thing, that it’s not just about the money, and it’s funny that the people that we work with in our business, they’re typically doing pretty well, they’re, they’re, you know, we’re fortunate we live in a lucky country, we’re a wealthy country. And people come to us as financial planners, that they’re looking to build their wealth and get ahead financially, but they do also, you know, we think you think about Maslow’s hierarchy, and people want to do more and be a good person and be a good member of the of our global society and community as well. And it’s funny that we’ve had clients that have come to us with, you know, eight figures plus in in wealth, and you sort of when you look at some of these clients, some of them, you know, $50 million, or 100 million dollars in investments, and it’s like, these people can do any, like, they’ve got enough money that they can basically do almost whatever they want, maybe they’re not quite at businesses, boat, boat stage quite yet, but it’s through remember, we’ve picked up this client and we gave, we put together a couple of impacts from some of the things that they mentioned in their, in the intro meeting that we had with them some things around education, there was a thing on animal welfare, there are massive animal lovers and gave them to them. And the actual, the donation that we made to achieve that was was relatively small, particularly, you know, when you relate it back to $50 million plus in wealth, but they were so so amazed, I think it when we’d send it to them, that immediately we’re building a deeper connection with them. And I think that’s something that people talk a lot about in business, the, the, like, maybe authenticity is not the right word, but the human connection, that it’s like people come to us because we’re professionals, and they want professional help. But they also to your comment like that belonging, the feeling like we understand them, and it allows you to build a deeper relationship with people more quickly. And also then to build longer term relationships that people know that they’re, you know, we’re on this, this, they’re on a journey with their money, but we’re on a journey to have an impact with them as well. And I think, I don’t know that for me, particularly after you, you know, you get through those first initial years in business, which are always a hard slog, you start thinking about what sort of business do I really want to be running? And what is the legacy for the team that the clients are the impact and yeah, that that lines up pretty well with us. I know that there’s some other people in the Bitcoin community who’ve done some amazing stuff in this in this space, and I think people then it sort of transcends that it’s not just about the money becomes about the relationship and something that that we get a big buzz out of, but also get some good, you know, commercial outcomes from building good longer term relationships with our clients around.

Paul Dunn
I think so. And I had an example of that last week with a major bank based in the United Kingdom, without names dropping, they used to be known as the Queen’s bank. And they are talking about you know, it’s a different, slightly different thing than you were talking about there, but they’re talking about are creating family offices, you know, for, particularly for wealthy Chinese. And you know, here in Singapore, it’s you’ve got to put in 100 million that, you know, to get in. And what they said was, it’s very interesting because when you, when you get the sort of like the the, the first generation that in a sense has been, you know, generating that wealth, and then passing it on, it’s when you get to the later generations that they start thinking, Oh, my goodness, we really need to build this in as in building some form of impact creation, right at the start. And then they said, it’s very interesting how the older generation get that. And I think, let me just speak to that, because I think it’s really, really important. And then I’m about, let’s see, 20 days away, this is where all of the financial advisors listening to us now, and again, thank you for listening to us, we’ll get out your calculators, because I’m gonna give you a little calculation. And in about 35 days, I will be 29,000 days old. So there you go. So you’re going to divide it by 365. And you’re going to figure out how many leap years were in there, and you’re gonna go, Oh, my God, is he still here? And I’m gonna draw them whether it is, you know, a function of age, but what actually happens at some point, and as financial advisors, we, we, I think we just have to get into this. At some point, we, we talk, we talk about we, we start thinking about legacy. And the sooner we start thinking about that, of course, the better it is. But what’s interesting is when we think about legacy, we think about it often as leaving a legacy, right? That’s the word leaving a legacy. And I’m a great one for alliteration, you know, stringing string of words together that begin with the same letter, so they make even more sense. And so I think that as we’re listening to this right now, and we’re realizing that one of the things we’re we meaning you are doing in terms of legacy is to realize that it’s not just about leaving a legacy, because we don’t have any choice as to whether or not we leave one, we have a choice as to what it looks like, is it one of consumption? Or is it one of contribution? And let’s imagine that we want it to be one of contribution. And so instead of instead of just thinking about the end point, which is like leaving the legacy, why don’t we think about Living the Legacy every second every day? And in every way? In other words, rather than thinking as we used to, and in the charity space? Oh, you know, let’s do this big, quote unquote, donation, why not just build it into everything that you do so that, as you know, in the meeting, you can just give them a little envelope, which says, By the way, please don’t open this to you leave. And then they open things up. By the way, thanks for a great meeting, we thought you’d love to know that. You know, so many people just got access to water or so many trees were planted or whatever it is that you choose, it just is an incredible, incredible way of connecting. So that’s living in every day. But then you think there’s another L Word. So the other one is leverage it right? And how would you leverage it Well, precisely in the way that I just we just talked about? So you, you live it, you leverage it so that you leave it and have a gas, right? Have a guess what happens when when the people who you just had the privilege to serve that is to say the people who signed up with you have a guess what they talk about when they talk about the financial advisor that they’ve chosen? Do they talk about the big things and all of that kind of stuff? No, they talk about the little things and they say things like, you’ll never guess what happened when we saw Sally, you know, the financial advisor already want him or we had this great painting, she gave us this little things had done open listen to you leave and we opened it. And we found to our surprise that just by having the meeting, something great happens specifically, you know, 22, kids got access to education and three trees got planted, and the person that sadly is thinking you are kidding me? No. That’s exactly what happened. So what’s interesting is if you if you think about the fact that there are you know, what I would call standard financial advisors who do the normal things and the normal way and all that kind of stuff. So what Ben and I are talking about here is moving from standard to stand out, because you stand for and you stand for something that is bigger than yourself and incorporating big one into the things that you do just like Ben has done again. 2.7 million is really, really, really cool. And by the way, you should go have a look at how Ben just displays that on his site. And you should also look at all the other financial advisors because we track every single cent of your giving, so that you can in fact, leverage it in a very beautiful way. So, yeah, it’s, it’s I think it’s, you know, as we started out by saying, you know, this is all about building belonging based businesses with reducing churn, and attracting more people in not root people falling out of the funnel. happens that when we do this, great things happen in our world as well.

Ben Nash
I think that the leverage pieces is a is an important one. And for us, it’s like, yes, it does make it easier for clients to refer and they’ve got some some, you know, non financial things to say instead of saving, we saved them $20,000 in tax, they can say, how we save, you know, 20 meters of rainforest or something like that. Also talking about leverage with them getting the message out there, I know that we’ve run some big campaigns particularly focused around the impact. And, again, like it’s a really nice marketing message to talk about, rather than saying, We’ve got 25 new clients, it’s like we had 25,000 impact. So the message is, is one that people want to hear more than people I always feel weird talking about business goals or success, because I feel like people don’t care. But they don’t care. The way that we care. Maybe that maybe I’m wrong. Maybe that’s belief. But either way, I think talking about those impacts and campaigns, and I know that there has been like, inspire.

Paul Dunn
Yeah, exactly where people are joining in right from the get go.

Ben Nash
Yeah, absolutely. Paul, I could talk about this all day. But I know that you’re a busy man with places to go and people to see. I really, really appreciate you sharing your insights. And it’s so great to be to hear about the story and to be part of that journey as well. For anyone that’s listening that’s interested to to learn more about V one, G one, what’s the best way for them to go about doing that?

Paul Dunn
Well, the simple way right now is to just simply go to be one G one.com. And that’s people in the United Kingdom call it biggie. So it’s actually B and then the number one, followed by G followed by the number one.com. Or if you like you can people say Ben, I should never do this on a podcast. But let me do it anyway. Because I’m nearly 229,000. You can drop me drop me a note as well. I’d love to have a conversation with you. So Paul, as in pul at B one gmail.com. And let’s, let’s have a conversation. Let’s see some of the magic that we can build together.

Ben Nash
Awesome, mate. Well, thank you again. And yeah, like I said at the start. Great to have you here very fitting for my last podcast for the ensemble crew for for a little while. Guys, I will catch you soon. And Paul. Thanks again, mate.

Paul Dunn
Hey, thanks for leaving a great legacy on the podcast. Thank you, Ben. Great stuff.

Ben Nash
Cheers guys. We’ll catch you next time.