EverydaySpy Podcast - CRITICAL LESSONS I Learned from AUSSIE MILLIONAIRES | Day 10

Episode Date: April 10, 2025

Find your Spy Superpower: https://yt.everydayspy.com/4lr1RvK Aussie entrepreneurs aren't that different from American entrepreneurs, only they have to work with a weaker currency and a softer workforce. That makes their business leaders and success stories all the more impressive! Here was my experience with Aussie market movers and business owners after a trip down under. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you're walking down the street in Sydney and somebody tries to mug you and you take their knife from them and stab them and run away, guess who's going to jail? You are. I just recently returned from a trip to Australia where I had a chance to work with a number of different Australian businesses. One of them was this phenomenal security company, a company called Devon, D-V-U-L-N, look them up if you get a chance. They're doing some incredible stuff in the cybersecurity landscape all across Australia and really around the world. and also to work with some high-impact business coaches and business leaders along the Gold Coast, just to the northeast of Sydney. A wonderful trip overall. And I learned some really powerful things because my entire trip to Australia was saturated with conversations with entrepreneurs.

My client in Sydney, my clients in Sydney were all independent business owners, entrepreneurs. My clients all across the Gold Coast were also entrepreneurs. So in all, I probably spent 10 days talking to about 32 different, entrepreneurs with businesses ranging from 500,000 Australian dollars a year, up to about 15 million Australian dollars a year. And for Americans who don't know the value of the Australian dollar, the Australian dollar is about 60% of an American dollar right now. And for all of my Australians listening, I am, I know how much it sucks that your dollar is 60% of the American dollar right now. Your economy has been struggling. I didn't realize that before I got on the plane. And I

learned so much about it when I was in your country. And it's a friend. frustrating thing, and I can imagine how you must feel as you watch your own government and politics play through their own cycle. But that's not what I'm here to talk about. What I'm here to talk about is that what I learned in Australia about how Australian business works and about the challenges and the woes and the frustrations of trying to build a business in Australia are different, but also somehow similar to the same things here in the United States. one of the first ones that I want to start with is what we're all familiar with, and that's the government. So inside the United States, the government changes frequently.

The government changes in some cases every two years, in other cases every four years when we elect a new president, or the government can actually change on a municipal level even faster than that when you start talking about local governments and local policy changes. And when those policies change, you can have huge impact on business. So if you're an American business owner and you're not involved in your own local politics, I want to encourage you to start. getting involved because whether you're making a hundred thousand dollars a year whether you're making a hundred million dollars a year the the changes the impact here in your own local municipality can significantly impact your business from the people that you have as talent available to hire locally all the way up to your tax base and to the to the utilities that support your business like

your internet or your water or your electricity so you want to be involved because the more involved you are the more you can protect your interests as a business owner. And I know it can feel like it's a huge waste of time to get involved in local politics, to be involved in local communities. And I would say that if you're not very deliberate in how you're involved, you're right. It will waste your time. But if you are very deliberate in how you're involved, then you'll find it's quite the opposite. For me, I become, I work with local chamber of commerce events. I go to any kind of event that's significant enough because we have someone of significant importance coming through, whether it's state legislature or whether it's

kind of celebrity status person. We had a TV celebrity come through my hometown recently and we made space to go to that event. Because when you go to those events, what ends up happening is you have a chance to network with people that are also coming out to the same event. And when you have those networking opportunities, you always have an opportunity to build out your close circle of influence and build relationships with people who can help you in the future. People who can help you find good sources of talent, people who can help you find ways around policy. your legislation that's changing, that isn't in your best interest. I actually have a phenomenal client in L.A. who's very heavily involved with the state legislature in California because he was

one of the first people to actually be involved in the cannabis industry when it was legalized in California. In many ways, his activity with the local California legislature is what helped make cannabis legal in California. At the time, of course, he was one of the first people to have access to that market. So you can start to see how important it is to be engaged as a business owner with your local government. The same I found is true in Australia, where the government is in many ways more dynamic than it is here because you have not only the changing politicians, but you also have a changing opinion across the country with regards to business and with regards to government. The biggest differences I found actually was that in Australia, when you're an

entrepreneur, it's actually quite hard to find good employees. I would have never guessed this, and many Americans are probably going to be just as surprise as I was. In Australia, there's this weird work ethic among non-entrepreneurs. There's this work ethic that kind of is permissive to the idea of not working. I don't know how else to explain it other than that. So you would have a job and you would not go to your job. And then somehow you would also not be fired from your job for not going to your job. I stayed at a very nice hotel when I was out there. And one morning in the hotel, they were replacing a door for one of the hotel rooms. And I was in a top floor and I was on my way down to breakfast on the ground floor and the elevator stopped somewhere

in the middle. And on came these three construction guys carrying a door frame that they had just removed from one of the hotel rooms. And on the elevator ride from where they picked me up to the ground floor where we all got off, they had this conversation about how there were supposed to be four of them. They were supposed to be four people working. But when the fourth guy didn't show up, one of the other guys went to his flat, his apartment, to see what was going on. And they found him laying on the floor, like he had just fallen asleep on the floor the night before. I don't know if he was drinking or playing, you know, playing a hard night out or whatever else. But they asked him if he was going to come to work. And he said that he just didn't care enough to come to work that day. So then they got

left him and then came to the job himself and as they're sharing this story the three guys in the elevator are just joking about how they all have days like that they all have days where they went out to see a rugby game or they went out to watch a soccer game and and the next day they just didn't want to go to work so they just stayed home and of course they didn't get paid for not coming to work so then it you know bothered them the next day or whatever but it was so interesting because here in the united states we don't think that way here in the united states we don't want to go to work we don't work very hard when we go to work, but we'll still show up at work, right?

Because what we don't want to do is be someone who doesn't show up. There's this weird thing in the United States where we're willing to go to work, but not actually work at work. We'll read a book, we'll surf the internet, we'll play on our phone, we'll do whatever. We won't actually work,

but for sure, we're going to show up to work. And we somehow think that that's better than what they're doing in Australia when they don't even come to work at all. So it was a very interesting thing. And as a result, it makes it so that entrepreneurs have a very hard time hiring people because you can't rely on the people that you hire. And because of the government in Australia, it's a very liberal government.

So there's a lot of protective elements in place for the people and for the employee. But there's not a lot of protective elements in place for the business owner or the entrepreneur. So the employee who doesn't show up is actually better protected by the government than the entrepreneur who's taking the risk on the employee. That is completely different than here in the United States, where in the United States, the government protects the CEO, the government protects the employer, not the employee.

The employee has rights, but those rights can't infringe on the owner's ability to execute on a profitable business because the U.S. government cares the most about a profitable business. That's why businesses are seen as individuals in many ways inside the United States. But this whole idea of what the government chooses to protect

and not protect in Australia doesn't just end at the protection of the business owner versus the employee and the way that it protects the employee over the business owner. I also found out that in Australia, I've known for a long time that Australia has very strict gun laws. And you probably know this too, especially if you're an American or even if you're not American or Australian, it's worth understanding.

Australia has been praised for its gun control, for its gun laws. And when I was down there, I found out that the gun control laws that we, we celebrate or we laud here in the United States about Australia are not so positive in Australia itself because the efforts to control gun proliferation in Australia have also turned into a place where they prevent individual Australians themselves from really even being able to defend themselves against an aggressor. So more so than just the gun, right? If you defend yourself

against an attacker, the law is that a local police officer or magistrate will have to determine if you in your self-defense were fair and reasonable in response to the attacker. And if the magistrate decides that you were not reasonable in your self-defense, you could actually be the one who goes to jail for assault. So what that means is if you're walking down the street in Sydney and somebody tries to mug you with a knife and you take their knife from them and stab them and run away, guess who's going to jail? You are for unreasonable self-defense. If you were to get their knife out of their hand or if you were to punch them in the face, that would be considered reasonable self-defense and then hopefully you wouldn't

be prosecuted. But for sure, you don't have the ability to use a gun, a baton. You don't have the ability to use a bigger knife. You don't have the ability to use pepper spray or anything like that that that might be seen unreasonable. And then even crazier to me, you don't have to go in front of a court of your peers to be found guilty of breaking the law. There are at the local level, a local magistrate,

a local police commissioner, essentially, is going to be the one that determines whether or not your response was fair and reasonable or whether your response was a violation of the law. And then you would have to pay the penalty from that. It's a very, very wild thing. So in addition to the fact that generally people can't have guns, criminals can because they don't follow the local laws.

So criminals can execute criminal activity and they can actually bully not just innocent civilians but even the local police themselves because police forces and citizens are both kind of forced by the law to withhold any aggression against their attacker. Only when you are able to confidently execute your self-defense in a fair and reasonable way, does anybody actually execute their self-defense? And as a result of that, there's a very different culture around self-protection and self-preservation

that I saw in Australia. There's a sort of flippance, a sort of resignation that people have to understand that they are a contributing member of a society, but that society won't necessarily protect or defend them in the event that they're attacked. For my American brothers and sisters, think about that.

Think about what it must feel like to live day in and day, out not not knowing, not being unsure about whether or not your government will protect you, but in fact being sure that if you defend yourself, you would potentially be in the wrong, right? So actually walking around day to day feeling like you're not supported and you're not defended the way that you feel like you should be by the same government that you pay taxes to. And if you don't know what the tax rate is in Australia Americans, it's significant. I think the average rate is like 42% taxes. So Australians are paying nearly 50% of their paycheck in

taxes to a government where the police force doesn't protect itself and for sure doesn't protect them against attackers because you have to use fair and reasonable defense in the event of an attack, in the event of a home intrusion, in the event of a carjacking. So for us here in the United States, where we actively take efforts to be prepared and to be able to protect ourselves, they don't have the same thing in Australia. So why am I saying all this? I'm saying all this because I had this phenomenal trip to Australia. It gave me a great opportunity to have some different perspective.

It gave me a great opportunity to connect with Australian entrepreneurs and understand more about the challenges that they're facing, bring them some spy skills that we have here in the United States, and of course take some pretty awesome spy skills back from Australians. And for anybody who doesn't know this, Australia is not only a close ally of the United States. It is a very formidable force in terms of its military and its intelligence service. I've always had huge respect for Australian Special Forces and Australian Special Intelligence, ASIS. They are a phenomenal group of people, their first world capability, very intelligent, very aggressive at taking the fight to their enemies. What I never imagined in a million years was how different it was when you have to fight back at home.

And that was a very interesting and enlightening experience for me. And I want to share it with you for anybody who's considering traveling to Australia, for anybody who does business with Australians or for anybody who's thinking about it. doing business in Australia. What a very cool place. What a very cool experience. And thank you to all of my partners, peers, clients that I visited down there. You guys were awesome. Folks, if you learned anything interesting today, please leave a comment, like the video, share it with a friend. Subscribe to the channel. And for sure, if you want to learn more about anything that I'm doing, visit Everydayspy.com and I will see you on the other side.