Scale-Electric-Trucking, Empowered Femine Leadership & Setting Fire to $13k

Imagine all our road freight, powered by renewables, with zero emissions. Except you don’t have to imagine, it’s happening, and in support of Anthony Headlam and the NewVolt team, I’m proud to introduce you to the Electric Truck Education Centre I built for them. Have a watch at the introduction on Linkedin below:

You can also go directly to https://bit.ly/auselectrictrucks or visit the Learn section of the NewVolt website.

Question: How do you keep stakeholders and investors aware of your leadership in industry, and how do you bring partners together to support your goals?

What got you here, won’t get you there

My Fiancée Nicole Stewart is hosting her final event of the year on Tuesday the 12th of November - a half-day workshop for driven women;

“.. During the past 8 months, I've successfully set up my business in fashion bags, completed two business programs, pivoted, and rebranded. Throughout all of this, I've been breastfeeding my two kids. Unfortunately, a couple of months ago, I experienced burnout and ended up in the hospital with vasovagal syndrome. That's when I met Nicole, who played a crucial role in re-centering my core.

Her Embodied Feminine Leader workshop empowered me and helped me reconnect with my inner strength, teaching me how to build sustainable confidence through meditation with a hand-on-heart approach.

It's been an incredibly empowering journey since.” Donna Sherwani ~ Founder & CEO

For you (if you’re a female leader) or the women in your life, register at https://bit.ly/embodiedfeminineleader

Question: Do you know a woman that would be interested in hearing about this? Can you let them know about it?

Ever blown $13,000 on software that didn’t do the job?

This was a painful lesson for me in 2022, and I promise you I won't let a sales team offer me 30% off if I sign up for an annual contract on a new implementation ever again.

And I'm supposed to be good at this! I've been working with client management and business software since 2002, building and selling customised CRMs since 2004 and working with businesses that implement Atlassian (Jira / Confluence etc) for the biggest companies on earth through 2016-2020.

Though unify my own systems into a singular 'professional services automation platform'? Didn't happen. At least not with this particular vendor.

And the point of this isn't to express my surprise that software implementations don't go to plan, that's been part of my experience in life and why it takes so much work to do well.

In this instance, my business manager and I had a clear set of requirements, had checked out the vendor over several months, watched the tutorials, and made in-depth requests of how exactly the sales teams promise that 'yes, of course that will work how you want it to' would map to our current technology stack.

The thing that caught me out, is that when we got 6 weeks in and the implementation team kept repeating versions of 'no, it doesn't work like that, you will need to restructure your consultancy process and other systems to match how we've set the software up' there was no way out.

"This clearly doesn't do what you promised it would" - myself and the business manager, 6 weeks in.

"That's not our problem, talk to sales" - the implementation team.

"You signed a contract, that's not our problem, talk to collections" - the sales team.

Directly reaching out to the Executive management via phone and on Linkedin - * silence *

"We'll refer you to our lawyers if you have a problem" - Correspondent for management.

We never went live or progressed past 6 weeks, though they took our business credit card details, a $3,000 implementation payment and 1st quarter billing, then for 3 more quarters, drained the rest of the money.

It was an expensive lesson, and for small business owners, getting stuck between commission-based software sales team and investor-backed business leaders trying to hit growth targets, backed by gnarly legal teams, is a shitty place to be.

And for business owners with fickle customers, ensuring you have adequate protection is also necessary! I do see both sides, and I've reviewed and written many contracts with CEOs and lawyers to balance these interests.

Sometimes, it just goes wrong - I've shook hands with 2 clients in the past ten years and given them all of their money back, once when we simply didn't fit and another where the team made a technical mistake. It happens.

Though remember, don't get sold up the river;

If you're doing a new implementation, pay the monthly premium until you're sure it works.

Question: How do you document and learn from your own failure? Are there things repeating in your organisation or life, that could be easily fixed with some external support and focused attention?

".. Keep close to Nature's heart, and break clear away, once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.." - John Muir

We’re off to the forest for 5 days. Have a great weekend!