Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Boo, Professional Speaker and Creator of the Evolution of Thinking

Episode Date: June 23, 2023

Christian Boucousis, widely known as Boo, is a world-renowned professional speaker with a reputation for delivering life-changing insights. With thousands of 5-star Google reviews, Boo is one of the most impactful speakers on individual and organizational performance in today’s high-paced digital economy. He is credited with helping global leaders, including McDonalds, Zurich, Pfizer, Microsoft, Specsavers, and Woolworths, achieve immediate and ongoing performance leaps through his secrets to creating an “Evolutionary Mindset”.As a former fighter pilot, Boo has lived at the cutting edge of human and technology integration, where speed, decision-making, and technology merge into one. He has successfully adapted the skills he acquired during his $15 million fighter pilot training program to build three multi-million-dollar businesses, including a humanitarian business with a turnover in excess of $200 million, a record-setting $42 million high-rise hotel, and a digital publishing powerhouse.Boo’s “Evolution of Thinking”, is a new way for individuals and businesses to feel, think, and do by incorporating “thought loops” to keep pace in an accelerated world. These thought loops connect Purpose to action and action to the goals that are fundamental to success.He has also developed a simple four-step process called the FEEL-THINK-DO-LOOP, which he uses to equip leaders, teams, and individuals to create a completely unique way of thinking and working together.Boo’s experience and expertise in inclusive and sustainable organizational performance in the digital age is unparalleled. He has a deep understanding of the human performance strengths and limitations and navigates his audience towards the skills needed to evolve, at a deeply personal level, forever. His authoritative and entertaining speaking style makes him a sought-after speaker at conferences and events worldwide.Learn more: https://callmeboo.com/Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-boo-professional-speaker-and-creator-of-the-evolution-of-thinking

Welcome to influential entrepreneurs, bringing you interviews with elite business leaders and experts, sharing tips and strategies for elevating your business to the next level. Here's your host, Mike Saunders. Hello and welcome to this episode of influential entrepreneurs. This is Mike Saunders, the authority positioning coach. Today we have with us, Boo, who's the professional speaker and creator of the evolution of thinking. Boo, welcome to the program. Cheers, Mike. Thanks for having me.

You know, with the name like Boo, you just have no problem having people remember your name, and it kind of keeps it nice and short and sweet. So I'm excited to get to know you. It's the irony of it, having a name which my last name is actually Bacusus. And when I started my career as a fighter pilot, it was just too much of a mouthful. So the team decided that Boo, Boo was it. And for the last, gosh, nearly 35 years, that's been the, that's what I go by.

That's your brand. That's right. That works. Well, before we dive into the evolution of thinking, give us a little bit of your background and story, what got you into this industry in the first place. You mentioned fighter pilot. So how does that fit into everything? Yeah, it's an interesting story. My life is sort of bookended.

I started my career as a fighter pilot straight out of school. And today I'm the CEO and owner of a company called Afterburner in the U.S. and AfterBurn as a team of fighter pilots that help people execute their strategies. I think one of the things you learn as a fighter pilot is not just the flying side of things. It's how to think. We have a completely different mindset, a different cognitive model. And the evolution of thinking is really the culmination of a career as a fighter pilot in 17 years as a business founder and entrepreneur.

And realizing that founding and growing four multi-million dollar businesses was the product. of the way I thought, not really anything else. It wasn't the knowledge I had. It wasn't the industry I was in. There were four different industries. It was just the analytical approach and the getting the little things done each and every day that delivers us on those big goals. You know, we can probably do a nine-hour interview just on that opening statement right there. So a couple points I'll unpack. It reminds me of an old little quip that I've heard over the years, what's easy to do is easy not to do. You know, and it's those mindset things and little small little nuggets that make a huge difference, but people almost ignore things like,

oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I've heard that before, but why don't you do it? Absolutely right. And look, there's a number of very complex reasons psychologically, while we don't do stuff and we we feel very happy imagining things and hoping for things but not doing things. And there's just no room for that in the cockpit of a fighter jet. You have to deliver. You have to get the job done. It's expensive to get us there. Our life depends on our ability to survive, but also to employ the aircraft effectively.

So if you use the airplane as a metaphor for a business, right, you have to make a lot of decisions in a business. Well, you have to make thousands of decisions. in an airplane. You have sales targets, revenue targets, product launch criteria. Everything in business is measured. Well, that's the same as a mission. Everything in a fighter jet has a number, has a requirement to be delivered on the mission objective. So when you look at taking a mind that works at 2,000 kilometers per hour and then putting it into a business, which is much slower, what you start to realize is the mindset puts you well ahead of the game. It allows you to

to get in front of your business. It allows you to understand which opportunities are worth committing to and which ones aren't. I mean, even as a fighter pilot, we have a concept which is called the commit criteria. We have a set metric around when we decide as a fighter pilot

to go and prosecute a target or when to walk away. That one concept alone can be transformational for a business owner and entrepreneur, to stop saying yes to everything, to stop looking at every opportunity as something you need to invest time and effort in. So there's this,

and in my book on time, target, we unpack this and all the elements of thought and thinking that happen at speed, how to translate that into business. And afterburners train nearly two and a half million people around the world to help them have that get things done mindset rather than just let your good ideas disappear in thin air. Yeah, you probably don't espouse the idea of having a meeting to talk about having a meeting to talk about having a meeting. You know, it's like the whole in corporate America, it's like, you know, we could have

handle that in a five-minute meeting or a two-paragraph email. And it seems like we like to talk about something that we're going to then talk about. So being effective and efficient, boy, it elevates your leadership style when you are clear and efficient, right? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And one of the things about life is you're always going to influence people. There's no choice in that. What you have a choice is to not positively or negatively. And for many of us, we choose to really not leave a mark or maybe in a business, particularly the entrepreneurial enterprise, you have to leave a positive impression with every single person because the multiplier effect happens.

If you influence 10 people positively and those 10 people talk to another 10 people, you get the scale of networking. Whereas if you fail to leave an impression, you lose out on that opportunity to scale. So it's really important that we. that we approach everything in life as if our life depends on it, just like a photo pilot. Yep. You know, I love on your website the phrase, a journey beyond high performance. I feel like a lot of business people or leaders feel like their goal is high performance.

But you say, yeah, yeah, that's fine and good. But we're going past that. So talk a little bit about how you set your sites beyond. high performance. That's just the starting point. Yeah, and it's also, I think the best analogy is the money ball analogy, right? Where if you looked, if you looked at the results that the money ball approach brought to a baseball team or to any business where it's the sum of the average parts that add up to a greater whole, whereas high performance is very much about investing in individuals, machines, technology that's very, very expensive, but also breaks a lot.

So when businesses look at a high performance model, what you're effectively saying is, I want to run a business that's really expensive to run that burns people out and that means I have all of these really talented people that are difficult to work with. That's a high, because that's what high performers are. That is a high performance business. With fighter pilots, we proactively recruit and train away from that model. And as a result, we have a success rate of 98%. Even the best sports team in the world, the New Zealand All Blacks only win 77% of the time. And that's a high performance team. So what we talk about here is this concept of deep performance, which is to say it's consistently surpassing expectations all the time is the key here,

not to have incredible results every now and again. because when it comes to motivating in a business environment where you only get your two to four weeks leave every year, you're coming in each and every day, it's very easy to become demotivated. It's very easy to have a disengaged group of people in the office. So beyond high performance means, okay, well, how do we win today? How do we have these small micro wins all the time? And how do we build a business? And this is not up to the individual.

The business has to design these. And how do we create an environment where if things don't go, to plan, we capture what we've learned and work out a better way to drive ourselves forward. And in fighter pilot culture, that's called a debrief, or I personally call it a do loop, because it's how you loop what you do today back to what you want tomorrow. And again, it's just not something we do. Gosh, how many entrepreneurs start and fail in their journey? Like millions.

Millions. It's a big number. And that's because when you have a big idea as an entrepreneur and you've never done it before, you think it's easy. You think it's just going to happen tomorrow. And you're not very good at working out the small bits of detail each and every day you need to get there. So this mental model is great because when I started my first business, which was in Afghanistan, I was medically discharged from the Air Force.

I just approached it completely objectively. I said, the only skill I have is how to fly an aircraft in combat. That is not transferable into the civilian world. I want to start a business. I don't know anything about business. I need to go to a country where even if I don't know what I'm doing, I'm going to be useful. And this was just post-war Afghanistan where they needed everything.

And that drove home a really important lesson to me in business, which is whatever you do, be useful. Solve a problem. Correct. And what you do today might not be the solution. And the only way you find out what the source. solution is, is to always make it about the customer, is to ask them, hey, what does good look like? How's that going?

Where are you at the moment? What can, what, what, if someone helped you, not me, just in general, if someone could solve a problem for you, what would that problem be? And then once you start to get to that point in the conversation, you start to give yourself situational awareness and the opportunity to respond in a way that creates a great outcome for these people. So, so I think, and again, that's what being a fire part's all about. You know, it's all about you.

There's only one seat in the airplane. So you're fully accountable for the success or otherwise of everything you do, just like an entrepreneur. But we're trained how to be that person. Everything about how our brain works, about how our body works, about optimizing ourselves in the moment, we are trained to do that in a cockpit. With Afterburner and my practice personally, we just translate that. to make it useful in business.

And the results speak for themselves, almost a 300% ROI or improvement in a business as a result of adopting fighter pilot mindset. You know, you've mentioned mindset a lot, and you've got the get it done mindset, which I think too many people are just like, oh, yeah, well, let's just scoot this project down the road a little bit. Well, how about just get it done?

Because, you know, the minimum viable product, MVP. It's like just get something started, test it. And I love on your website, we talk about to achieve deep performance, you have to understand the relationship between these elements. And one of them is reflection. So what did you set out to do today? Okay, let's write that down. What did I do? Okay. And then was there a shortfall? And if there was a shortfall, why and what am I going to do about it tomorrow? And that's kind of like that after action report that you had mentioned previously. It's like, I think that 99.99% of people don't take the time to do that ever, much less daily. I've never once in 17 years of being in business come across an individual or an organization that has the debriefing practices as fighter pilots do in our culture. And it's because we do it every day and making time to reflect is more important than the time we commit to the mission. We say debriefing is more important than the mission itself.

That's how committed we are because what we've realized is it's that moment of reflection. that moment of honesty and the timing of it, which is, well, I just went out and did something. So my memory and recollection of the events is never going to be better than it is right now. And our ability to take the lesson away, but commit to apply the lesson tomorrow. So if I went out there and one of the things you do as a fighter pilot is you have to shoot your missile at, let's say, 20 miles, and I might have done it at 19.8, which is too close. the next day, that's the one thing I focus on, and I'll guarantee you that next day, the fighter pilot will shoot that missile at 20 miles on the dot.

Exactly. The mistake won't be made twice. Now, that's just an action and a measure. Now, in a business, the action and a measure might be a sales target. It might be a prospecting target. It may be a conversion metric off a website or off a social media campaign. It doesn't matter. As long as you have actions and measurables or objectives and measurable,

so you're either have something in the future or something now, as long as you can measure it and you commit to it, you can debrief it. And if you do that every day and entrepreneurs work weekends, right? So, you know, you've got 365 opportunities to learn. You figure out one or two things every day. By the time you get to the end of the year, you've got between 700 and 900 contextualized innovations that you've applied inside your business. Yep. And every one of them could and should build upon the other because you'd mentioned that

before. And if you get just a little teeny bit off course and you think, that's close enough, in time, you're chasing your tail and you're way off course. Oh, it's profound. You're right. It's 1% on top of the 1% the day, the day before. So it's compound, it's compounding growth. And equally to offset that, you, you don't have the drag anymore of the same things going wrong all the time. And committing all of this energy into a problem that just never gets fixed. And, you know, I've built a $40 million hotel building, set up a company, built a, built a hotel out of nothing. I had a humanitarian in projects business that was turning over in excess of $200 million,

from a paper magazine to a digital magazine. There's always a problem to solve in the world. And because the world moves fast, whatever you're doing now is going to change in the future. So get on the bus. If you get on the bus now and you apply this technique, what you're going to make revenue off in two years is different. So get ahead of it.

Be your first mover. And the way to be your first mover is do what you do today, better, a little bit better every day. And by the time you look back in a year, you've just innovated. You just, you didn't even realize it. And it doesn't have to be massive innovations and change. Darren Hardy wrote a book called the one or the compound effect. And it's like if you just have that like a 1% improvement in several areas,

that's not huge dramatic change. But the compounding effect is massive. So huge, huge point that you bring up there. And I know when you work with teams and organizations to work on, improving their output, what is the lowest hanging fruit, the biggest point that you bring up to them of quick wins? What are you seeing most of the time that they come to you for? And where is it that you're starting with to make some quick wins for them? Just start debriefing. Just start that conversation at the end of the day. Even if you find five or 10 minutes, just find that 1%, that little

tiny action. And that action might be, wow, we learned something in the debrief today. Let's make sure we do this again tomorrow. If you just start with that conversation, and the conversation is four questions, very simple. What's my objective? What did I set out to achieve? What actually happened? Why did that happen? And what am I going to do about it this afternoon? That's it. So if you just start there, everything else falls into place. There isn't a single element of your business or the idea or whatever you're trying to create, it can be anything. It's always you're trying to create or do something.

And it's called get it done, get one thing done at a time, not get things done. That's a really important point as well. You don't want 50 lessons per day. You don't want to learn 30 things you did wrong. You just want one. Because if you try and do 20 things, nothing will happen. If you try and do one thing, it'll get done. You know, it's just that simple approach to, you know, work the problem that's in front of you,

knowing that at one point in the year, let's just say you do a yearly, you know, review to look forward to the next year. As long as your compass is set on that true north and you've got things dialed into where you want to go, then you don't need to worry about every single day looking, you know, at the broad spectrum and seeing all the goals and tasks you need to do because that will get you overwhelmed. like you just said. But now that you've got that dialed in, you focus on today. Okay, what do I get, what's that one thing? Okay, got it, got it. It reminds me you ever see that movie back in the 80s city slickers with Billy Crystal?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, it really is. It's like, what's that one thing? Do it. True. Yeah. It's good. It's funny, isn't it, how profound some of these simple concepts can be.

Yeah. Given that we're human, we tend to seek out complexity and try and make things harder than they actually need to be. It's really interesting. I don't know why we do that. I'm still, that's part of my practice, trying to, trying to work that out. I just, I just know we have a lot going on in our minds, you know. We have almost 11 million thoughts a second. So, you know, we've got to tame that beast a little bit. Well, I think that as society gets busier and busier, and we want the instant gratification, we've got the AI bots to do this, we've got the instant message,

We've got text messaging, and we are in the instant gratification society. We don't feel that we can afford ourselves to take time to think and plan. It's always got to be go, go, go and do. I mean, you think way back in the whatever, the 1920s and where life was used so much laid back and not as fast, they probably had a lot more time to kind of go, okay, let's go ahead and let's put this plan into action. Today, we've got people waiting on us and it's just like things get, people cut corners. They don't do as good of a job. But the encouraging thing is for people listening to this, it does not take much for us to stand

out as exceptional leaders and doers because, boy, if you just do what you say and you do it and you do it with executing it with precision, boy, you stand out. 100% and it's not that hard. We make the excuse that it's hard. one's lucky and if only I just had this opportunity that you had. We all have the opportunities. We all have the moments in time. It's the people who are committed to a vision, a really clear sense of purpose, who are constantly toiling away at it, that they just have the same number of lucky moments we all do, but they're just aware of it when it happens. For the rest of us,

we're just not aware when luck and happenstance finds us. Yep, exactly. Well, I'll tell you, Boo, It's been really neat listening to your insights. If someone is interested in learning more about your firms and book and all of the things that you do to serve your clients, what's the best way they can do that and reach out and connect with you? Keep it simple. My website's call me boo.com. If you find me there, have a look around. I'll be more than happy to help.

Excellent. Well, thank you so much for coming on today. It's been a real pleasure for talking with you. Thanks for having me, Mike. Real pleasure. You've been listening to influential entrepreneurs. with Mike Saunders. To learn more about the resources mentioned on today's show or listen to past episodes, visit www. www. Influential EntrepreneursRadio.com.