Business Innovators Radio - Andy Brown – Consultant – Brilliance Business

Episode Date: May 29, 2023

Andy Brown, is taking the scenic route through life, over twenty jobs, and similar number of houses! He has been employed, unemployed, and ran a business but for most of his working life he has been self-employed. A self starter who relishes a new challenge and as a result has some interesting perspectives. Social media and website addressesAndy BrownTwitter: andyjsbrownlinkedin.com/in/andyjsbrownAJ Stuart – Novelist!Instagram ajstuart.authorlink.v1ce.co.uk/aadxpa Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/andy-brown-consultant-brilliance-business

Welcome to Business Innovators Radio, featuring industry influencers and trendsetters, sharing proven strategies to help you build a better life right now. Welcome to Brilliant Business TV, conversations with leading experts in business. I am your host, Mark Stephen Pula. We have a wonderful guest today, Andy Brown, and our topic today is the meaning of success. We are streaming live on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube. We're also on the E360 TV network under Fresh Takes, going to go to Apple TV, Fire TV, Android, Roku and many more. We're also on business innovators radio network,

and we're also streaming through MSPNewsglobal.com. I want to make an official shout-out to our show sponsors, Dreamweaver, artists, Ranch. Let's bring in our incredible group guest, Andy Brown. And Dee, welcome to Brilliant Business TV. Wow, that was quite some introduction. Thank you very much. That was, yes, me. Do you mean me? I'm really looking forward to a conversation with you today, Andy. And I love the topic of success as well, so I'm really looking forward to where this conversation goes. So you have had a number of employments, mostly self-employments when you've started your career. Did you think it would be like that? Absolutely not. In fact, I never really knew what I wanted to do when I grew up. I still don't,

I still haven't, in fairness. Life just takes its funny journeys, doesn't it? At one point, I wanted to be a millionaire. That was my sole objective leaving school. I even had a, I want to be a millionaire by the time I'm 30 target. Don't judge me. It was the 80s. Lots of people in the 80s wanted to be, their definition of success was very single-minded and

yeah, monetary-based. But it's, yeah, since then I've just, I've done all sorts of. of different things. I'm now a consultant and I really enjoy those opportunities that it's afforded me over the last 12 years. I've travelled the world. I've spent a lot of time in Asia, which has been really interesting, talking to business people globally. And that's been a real interesting. And I could never, if you talk to the 18-year-old me and said, you know, by the time you were, yeah, age.

You'd have visited half the countries in Europe. You'd have been to 12 countries across Asia. Worked in a number of countries in Africa. I would have never believed any of it. As someone once said, I think it's a very good book that I read recently. Someone said there is more than one path to your final destination. The great Mark Stephen Pooler, I think, said that. So I think that pretty much epitomizes my route through life.

Yes, and I appreciate you getting a copy of my very first book. I really appreciate that. No worries. Would you describe yourself as successful, Andy? I used to think not. And I've been through some very dark times, particularly when I ran a business, some very dark days when you think the world is against you

and the feelings of failure just are constantly knocking on the door. So it's a real challenge in terms of overcoming those and working through. And I suppose some people's definition of success, is being able to deal with failure and to move on and to find a route through it. What I've realized is that, as I've gone through my life, is that success is something that is personal. You've got to define your own parameters, your own route, your own definitions of success. And that will be different for every person watching this.

So sit down with yourself. My advice to people, sit down with yourself and find out, what does success mean for you in preparing for this interview. I had to think about what my ingredients were for my success in terms of how do I feel what makes me tick. And being, I studied business studies, so I always like a mathematical calculation. So apologies for this if you're not mathematically minded. But I reckon for me, it's 30% family, about 20% wealth, about 20% happiness, 20% freedom. There's a good amount of freedom in my definition and about 10% recognition. Earlier in my career, recognition was everything. I needed constant people telling me,

you're doing okay, well done, this is great. And as I've gone through life, I've realized that actually, I'm much less worried about what other people think of me. It's much more about how I feel on the inside. and has made me a much, much happier person. And I must say in terms of my partner, a much easier person to live with over time. I hear you. And I think as well, I think at the beginning of my journey,

you do very much think about how people are perceiving you and what they think and like you. It just holds you back. And I think as you progress, you don't really think about what others think when you're so focused on your own goals. And also you mentioned about failure. I never see failure.

I think there's no such thing as failure. I think failure is a big part of success. Do you agree with that? Absolutely, absolutely. But when you're in that dark place, I think it's so much easier to have that thought process when it's in the past than have that thought process when you're in it.

It takes a very, and it takes, I think it takes others to help you see that when you're in the moment. So it can be really helpful to have really strong people around you. So when you're in that place, try not to annoy the people closest to you too much. I agree. Because there'll be the people who will help you out and help you see that actually this is just a step in the journey. And it'll make you a better person. It'll make you more resilient.

It'll make you be able to cope with similar situations in the future. Yeah, so yes, absolutely. I agree with you 100%. So what makes you get up on a morning, Andy? Well, since COVID and sort of leaving the rat race, I suppose nothing is the answer. So nothing makes me get up. I quite happily lie in. I've got to a point in my life, I'm very lucky.

I work, I think what, I think my dad, if he was to, I don't know, I'll share the link to this, see if my dad watched it, but if my dad were to watch this, I think he'd question whether I was work shy. I think I've got a right balance in my life in terms of what I do. So when I do get up, it's always something new, it's always something that I've never done before. Those are the things that really make me enthused in the morning. But sometimes it's not. It's not. It's always something. not at getting up time. This can be two o'clock in the morning, four o'clock in the morning. I would suddenly awake and I'll think, okay, I've got something going on in my head. I need to go and sit in my office and write it down, think about it, flesh it out. And I think what my career

has given me is lots of different times. So I'm often working in the middle of the night, thinking of things that I could be doing. I love it. And the world has changed, Andy, for many, and is changing still. You've written a novel set in the future. What does work look like in 20, 40, by you? Well, it was really interesting. I'm a big fan of shows like Black Mirror and things that take us just into the sort of near future

with sort of small but significant changes. And as I started to think about what are my characters in this novel. This is a novel, so don't hold me to any of this, but what might happen. And I think one of the possibility routes that we might go as a human race, if that doesn't sound too pretentious, is to move away from the concept of work and think about the things that we do as activities. So if you take away the concept of work and play and switch that up for activities, There are things things that some of us do, like me writing my book, for example. At the moment, it's my first book.

I'm an independent author. I'm doing it pretty much by myself. I am paying for someone to publish my book. For me, it's very much at the hobby end of the spectrum in terms of this activity. But there are some people at the other end of the spectrum who, for whom writing is their day job. If they weren't being paid for it, they wouldn't be doing it. Yes. So everything, every activity we do, whether it's playing golf, some people do it for fun,

it costs them lots of money, some people do it to earn a living, cleaning, playing music or whatever it might be, the activities that humans do. And if we change the dynamic away from what is a job and what is not a job towards what are the activities that we do, some of them we do them for fun, some of them we do them, because we have to. Then we start to see where I think future might go. And I think what artificial intelligence, robotics, technology, all of that, it's going to push away at these activities that we do where they are, where we have to do them, the job end of the spectrum. I'd like to think that we get a situation where we're all doing things that we love to do and that we would do

whether we were getting paid for them or not, but that we do get paid for them. That would be a great world to live in, Andy, wouldn't it? That would. We can make it happen. Let's start the moment. Let's make this happen. So, Andy, going forward,

are you a consultant, an educator or an author? A colleague said to me recently, I said, I don't really know what? If people, because we're obsessed with this question, aren't we? You meet someone from the first time, and they immediately say, as if that's the most important thing about someone.

And I'm never sure that really is. I think who we are is more important than what we do. But that's a debate for another day. I had a friend who described me as having a portfolio career. This is flavour of the month. I mean, it makes it sound like it was planned. My life's not being planned. My publisher asked me, how do I describe myself?

Tell me a bit about you, Sue. itself in the back of sleeve of the book. And the word I came up with is, I'm a flitter. I'm like a magpie. If something new comes along, it's like, ooh, something shiny, something interesting, I'll try that. So several times during my career, I've started back at zero because it was a new direction. It was something interesting. Obviously, I started back at zero after my business wasn't as successful as I'd hoped it would be and I had to leave under a cloud. So, I always try and do things,

lots of different things and to see what I might enjoy because life is short. It's not a rehearsal, as they say, this is it. So try many things and take opportunities as they come along. My book's the latest thing. I really enjoy it. Whether I'll be a successful author, who knows? So I'm a, yes, who knows what the future holds.

It's, as we know in the last, you know, three or four years, it's taken some paths that none of us could have imagined. Well, I would like to talk about your book a little bit, Andy. So tell us a little bit about the book. Who is it for? What's it about? Well, it's quite, it was therapy for me to some degree. So I wrote it during COVID.

So I was writing it mostly 2001, early 2002. So it's set in the future in a community that's been built to protect against some of the challenges that we've faced over the last three years. So it's a community that can be closed off that protects you from maybe another pandemic. maybe the effects of climate change. Both of those are key features in my book. But it follows this character, Sam, whose non-binary in terms of their self-identification, because I find gender to me is fascinating

and the challenges that we have with gender currently. So we follow Sam's journey as they become mayor of this community. and then bad things happen. So we end up in pandemic number two. We end up with a climate change disaster hitting Europe. And it's Sam's way of dealing with those. They close the borders. They close their community off.

But then the challenges that they face are within the community, not without, thus trapped. So I hope that's. not too much of a spoiler. That takes you to about chapter three in the book. So hopefully people won't feel that that's too much of a spoiler. And it's about the human dynamics, really. So there's some element of my training in there on terms of how people building trust, people building relationships, how to build strong relationships. So that I've sort of weaved in a bit of behavioral theory into it. And I hope that won't put people off. But it is really a journey of

one person battling against the odds and you'll have to read it to find out whether whether Sam succeeds or not. But yeah, really enjoyed writing it. I mean, it's given me opportunities to all sorts of things. Now I've done book signings. I did open mic afternoon, which was really quite interesting. So lots of opportunities it brings. So my tip to people, if they say everybody has a book in them, start writing, write it down. It'll give you a distraction. If nothing else, you've got a busy job, a stressful job, stressful business that you're running, whatever it is that's taking the focus of your mind. I've always thought bringing in something that's a bit more artistic that allows your brain to do something creative will help you and help

you become successful, help you do different things. Well, I've thoroughly enjoyed having a conversation with you today, Andy. I would encourage everyone to grab a copy of Trapped by A.J. Stewart on Amazon. That's trapped by A.J. Stewart on Amazon. Is there anything we have not covered that you would like to share, Andy? Oh, that's a very long list. But maybe we can do this again sometime and we'll talk maybe. my day job is teaching people how to negotiate better.

So maybe we could do something on that, on the future call maybe. Definitely. And just tell us a little bit about that, Andy. So it gives us a flavour for next time. Well, negotiation is a personal skill. I love teaching it because it adds value to people's personal lives as well as their business lives. Most of my audiences are business people who negotiate as part of their their jobs, but it's a real life skill. I'll leave you with a sort of a taster in terms of

the best negotiators. The best negotiators in the world are children. The reason why children are the best negotiators in the world around about the age between seven and ten. So if you've got a small human in your household who's between the ages of seven and ten, they will probably outsmart you. They know who has the power in their circle of people, whether grandma is more powerful than auntie or is more powerful than their parents, whoever it might be. They are persistent. And most importantly, they believe in the mission. And they know how to get what they want. Absolutely. So linking negotiation to success, top tip, believe in your mission. Andy, I love it. Thank you so, so much for being my guest today. I thoroughly enjoyed having

a conversation with you. Absolutely my pleasure. Thank you everyone for joining us for Brilliant Business TV, conversations with leading experts in business. Until next time. Thanks for listening to Business Innovators Radio. To hear all episodes featuring leading industry influencers and trendsetters, visit us online at businessinnovators.com today.