What Still Excites You in Business?

Freedom Through Business

DATELINE: Brisbane, Australia

My weekly emails are focused on practical theory you can execute in your business, so common feedback is to include more case studies. This week’s article includes 4 companies I have worked with in the past.

But do tell me – what excites you in business? What do you use to motive your team, or yourself? If you share (and it’s ok – I will check with you first) then I might include some more stories in a future email.

What Excites Jacob?

My mission is to create “Freedom Through Business”, for my family and the families of all my clients.

So what still excites me? Creating a profitable business with the flexibility to travel the world and spend time with my beautiful wife and our daughter.

Since April 2006, I’ve been an international business advisor providing bespoke solutions for privately-owned businesses with 12-96 employees. From 2025 I will also be fully remote, visiting 6-10 countries per year while still delivering the premium coaching support (and availability!) that has seen me twice named among the world’s best business coaches and nominated for the Virtual Speakers Hall of Fame.

My clients need 1 person they can trust, who can show them how everything in their business is connected, and which areas to prioritise first. That’s demanding, powerful, and requires me to continually learn and develop my skills … which is a great fun way to live life.

Could I make more money working for a massive corporation? Absolutely. Would my life be easier if I retired into the sunset with my family? Sure would!

But that’s not my vision. Freedom through Business means living the life, and owning the business or businesses that you choose. Doing that myself and helping other people do it too? That still excites me!

What still excites you in business? Hit reply and let me know.

Blackboard Fridays Episode #91 – What Still Excites You in Your Business?

Happy Friday Blackboarders… or is it? As you may have experienced, as the years go by, the happiness on a Friday morning, happiness on every morning, starts potentially to wane.

As you’re well aware, the energy that you as the business owner bring to your team has a massive impact on their energy and commitment. And through your team a massive impact on how happy, satisfied, (whether they’re raving advocates) your clients happen to be.

Today, I wanted to talk about understanding what still excites you in your business. Getting in touch with that thing that still gives you some drive and some purpose. It may have changed since the business started and that’s great, but if you’re hanging onto something that you’ve communicated previously you’ve possibly got a team that are wondering whether this is really as legitimate a culture as what you say it is.

I’m going to share this through four specific case studies, four business that I know who have got in touch with what still excites them after years in the industry or even years in their business. In the hope that you can see through their stories what still drives you and maybe work on how you can do that more and communicate that with your team.

[2024 Edit: Thank you again to these incredible business owners for being open about their dreams. This video was first shot in 2018, so some of the milestones and numbers below have changed.]

1. Bright Humans

Let’s talk first about Bright Humans. This is an organisation here in Queensland, who’ve won a number of awards and frankly they’re incredible when it comes to managing your conference from the marketing through to the event production.

More importantly, they host a number of their own events around Australia every year – including Something Digital and Something Fest, which is a festival of innovation that rivals the best in the world (I’m thinking of you SXSW).

It’s pretty easy after an amount of time in an industry to slip into a groove, to keep fronting up and doing the same old same old year after year. Bright Humans have a super clear purpose, however. They call them ALEs, Awesome Learning Experiences and they’ve got a goal to get to one million ALEs in their business.

In other words to deliver an awesome learning experience to one million individuals through the events that they host themselves and for others that they support and manage. That’s a heck of a cool goal and when they sit down with team members and say you’re helping us get closer to the million, when they update the chart that they’ve got in their office with the new number, whether they adding one person to that or whether they’re adding a thousand from a big event seeing them getting closer to the million target is incredibly energizing for everybody that interacts with them.

2. The Tate Brownlee Team, Banora Point

This over here is one of the real estate clients I work with, and a big shout out to the Tate Brownlee team. Tate loves helping people. He sees his role in real estate as helping them to move from one house to whatever they’re going to achieve with the rest of their life.

That may include buying another house off him, or somebody else. There’s a whole lot of reasons why people sell and Tate just wants to help them achieve their goals.

As a result he recently won a big award for being the top sales person in Queensland despite working in a small market that’s nowhere near the highest sale prices.

Now the impact that has on his team is enormous, because his passion and drive as a leader is infectious. They want to learn from him, they want to work with him, they want to be part of his team, because they can see how excited he is year after year going out, not just selling houses, but changing peoples lives.

3. The CFO Centre

Hey, if you want to talk about changing peoples lives I love this story, the founder of the CFO Centre. Very experienced financial director what we call in some countries like Australia the chief financial officer.

Now being experienced and being great at what he did, he had a life where he’d get up, jump in the car, drive to work at a big corporation, go home at the end of the day. Doing great things, achieving great results, but the excitement wasn’t really there. He wanted something more. He wanted freedom and his focus as he achieved that for himself was actually going well how do I create freedom for a whole lot of other people.

So instead of thinking “How do I take these very specific skills into one big organization?” he created a business that took CFO skills into small business on a part-time basis. 17 years later they’re the number one provider of part-time FD and CFO services worldwide. They’ve got a series of sister businesses that are applying the same approach, bringing the same freedom to specialists and bringing a solution to small businesses that previously couldn’t have afforded it.

By getting in touch with what excited him, with that freedom, and of course by having the support and love of his family and his team he’s now managed to change the lives of not just 800 1000 people that work in his business globally, but all of their clients as well.

And he still gets up every morning excited to be running that business.

4. Suburban Pest Management

The last case study I’ve saved, because it’s an example of a business that from the outside many people might see as being pretty boring, uninspiring and uninteresting, this is Suburban Pest Management. They provide pest management solutions to residential, commercial and industrial buildings across Southeast Queensland. They’re pretty good at going in, spraying the chemicals or putting the traps in place to kill those insects … and for most clients that’s enough.

If I’ve got ants, Suburban Pest Management come in and get rid of the ants, then I’m happy. But that’s not enough for the business owner. His drive is not just to be really good at pest management. His drive is to change the industry and in particular, to educate the industry, both the personnel who work in it and those of us who are consumers who maybe don’t fully understand and appreciate the importance they play in our lives both residentially and commercially.

So his team get up every morning asking themselves how can I do this job better, how can I be more efficient, how can I deliver a better customer experience or a better customer outcome? Even after being named the top Pest Management company in Australia, they’re not resting on their laurels or following training that they did 10 or 15 years ago. They’re continually as an organization looking for ways to do things better.

As a result they’re slowly but surely beginning to change the face of that industry.

None of these businesses are revolutionary. None of these businesses are the billion dollar unicorn Amazon, Facebook, Google kind of thing that you might read about in a lot of the press, but every single one of these businesses has an energy that when you walk in the door you go I want to be a part of this, whether this is a client, as a team member, or just as a service provider or somebody who likes going into cool businesses like I do.

Rediscover the Joy in Your Business

So think now for you. What is it about your business that still excites you?

  • Is it the same thing that got you into this industry years ago?
  • Is it something that’s evolved over time?
  • Is it nothing?
  • Is there nothing left for you to achieve, in which case maybe it’s time for the next thing that excites you.

Frankly I’d be surprised if “nothing” was the case. There are very few business owners where, after just two or three questions, I don’t get them to a point where they reignite with their passion.

Once you’re reignited with your passion, the team, the clients, the whole industry changes. That’s what freedom through business is all about. And maybe one day I’ll be talking about you in a Blackboard Fridays video?

With Love,

Jacob Aldridge
International Business Advisor
WhatsApp +61 427 151 181
Visit my website
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