Ross Drakes — Entrepreneur, Speaker, Podcast Host

what's involved there is yet another episode and another fantastic guest somebody I've been looking forward to speaking to do we call him an international man of mystery do we call him an entrepreneur what do we call him well I know one thing we can call him is Ross Drakes hello Ross welcome hello and thank you very much for having me on the show David I appreciate it's an absolute pleasure so let's dive straight in get into the meat and potatoes of it as it were tell me a bit about Ross who is Ross where was he born all of those interesting things so Ross is a genetically a bit of a conundrum I'm in English, Afrikaans, Scottish, Belgian so kind of each part of me dislikes the other part except for the Belgian he just sort of stays out of it and does a thing but I suppose it's that South African that's South African story that there were many people from around the world that somehow ended up here at the bottom end of Africa and and that's how I ended up coming to life I've got one claim to fame that my great-great-great grandfather is Martini Tiena Stane who is the president who joined the Orange Free State into the Republic of South Africa so that's about the the most famous claim our family can make I think very nice now in terms of in terms of what you do because you do a whole bunch of stuff now and I want to get into that but talk to me a little bit about you know did you did you go to varsity schooling you know what led you to where you are today yeah so I was a bit lost at the end of school and I did what all all good sort of South Africans did in the early 2000s and I went to the UK to go and stuff around for a few years but then one day I got a call from my father and he said listen I think it's time that you come back to SA and and do something productive with your life and I chose to study at a what was then quite a small school the Vega School of Brand Communication so I studied branding and marketing and during that time I decided that I actually wanted to get into motion graphics because I saw we used to use the school's uncapped internet connection to download all of these amazing videos coming out of places like London and New York and Tokyo decided that's what I wanted to do with my life so I I left Vega and started to freelance and at this time there was a piece of software called flash which if you are as old as I am you'll know what that is and there was a lot of people making cool flash games and adverts and actually made a my living making banners for for people like Nedbank for their their websites and attempting to animate so so sort of doing anything and everything exciting and creative but one of the people that I studied with was a man named Donovan Pew and he phoned me one day and said I've got this empty office space and I want you to come and come and work here with me and we working with a man named Louie Gavin and he said if you if you come here and you do a bit of work for Louie you can can have the office space for free so we moved in there and did a lot of fun stuff but ultimately one night on a dance floor we decided that we wanted to start our own company and that's how nice work was initially born on a on a dance floor in a in a dirty club we were both creators so we decided that we didn't want to do any of what we called then the boring stuff so any of the finances or the business or the negotiation or the contract so we roped in another friend of ours Ben Foster and nice work was born our business plan was quite simple it was borrow money from my dad spend it all on an Apple Macintosh get clients sell them work make lots of money retire young so so that was sort of the initial idea behind the business okay how's it worked out so far well it's I mean it's been a wild ride it's it's coming up on 14 years now that we've been going for so so it took us a few years of just doing crazy things we we open clubs in town the Alexander Theatre we would design flyers and posters and websites and and everything and it took us a while to figure out things like time tracking and profitability but now both Ben and Donovan have left the business to pursue their own dreams and I'm the the man left behind so yeah we're going well this has been a crazy year 2019 was quite hard and we sort of came into 2020 with all sorts of optimism and actually some really really good work and some some powerful kind of projects about to sign on and then this sort of covered 19 thing kicked in which has been a bit of a kick in the teeth tell me about I was I think back and I remember going into into this year and it was going to be 20 plenty contracts were lined up we were going to style this year and then literally got got kicked in there in the private set by COVID and said guess what everything you thought is now going to change in a lot of ways yeah yes just before we continue roster so what is nice work currently do so we are we help people build brands that people care about so so we're a brand building company and and that takes us on a quite a long journey so we can start all the way from from what is the name of this organization what is the purpose of the organization all the way through to how do we differentiate and position this thing and then we get into sort of the the stuff that everyone always sees but for us is the least important piece of it is how does it all visually come together so then what does the logo look like how do we select the right topography what is the messaging what is the website look like is there a beautiful animated video or all that kind of stuff so we help people figure out what the dent is that they want to make in the world and how to talk about it in a way that gets people to act all right are we are we allowed to throw some names around would you tell me the kind of people you work with so we work with so we busy doing a third thing which I'll talk about in a bit but our two sort of core audiences is sort of medium to large businesses in South Africa and we get to work with all of their that you know work with them all the way from sort of naming to branding to everything and then we help departments and corporations to to build out the their brand and to sort of communicates with people so we work with brands like Blue Ribbon Standard Bank Nedbank Vodacom so on that's on the sort of big brand size and then the small market companies we work with this companies like Basel which is a technology company this trainiac which they kind of learning designers so there's a myriad of people that we work with and I suppose that's one of the things that's kept us engaged for that long is that we get to step into these different worlds and I think what makes us good at what we do is this inherent curiosity so we're as excited by a heavy engineer in for anything who's making equipment for a man but as we are for technology company that's building technology that's going to change the world and we get to sort of jump into these worlds figure out or help them figure out what makes them special and get them to communicate that around that in a sort of exciting and compelling way well okay all right very humbly put but certainly very very impressive you also do a couple of other bits and pieces and one of those is you're a member of EU South Africa now I'm not nearly as clear as I should be tell me about EU South Africa so so year stands for the entrepreneurs organization and that is it's a global organization it's our aim is to be the most influential organization of entrepreneurs in the world so we are one of I think 162 chapters if I'm not mistaken and there's about 15,000 entrepreneurs around the world and essentially what year is it's for businesses that's the turnover a million dollars or more in turnover a year and to describe it in the shortest possible way it's like Alcoholics Anonymous for people who own businesses so you get put in this thing called a forum which is anywhere between seven and ten business owners who don't compete with each other and you you go through a sort of facilitated process once a month where you dip into what we call the five percent and the five percent is the that the piece of your your business your family your personal life that you wouldn't really talk to anybody else about that you couldn't talk to anybody else about and forum is designed in a beautiful way using a principle called Gestalt where Gestalt is you never judge anyone or comment or give advice all you can ever do is talk from your own experience so you say something to me and I go well David when you were talking what I what came up for me is a time when me and my brother were fighting you know and you share a sort of story and then as as the person who's opening up about your five percent you have this opportunity to reflect on other people's experiences and extract the information that you need to sort of continue your journey and expand your awareness of of the things that you you might not be super aware of okay it sounds absolutely fascinating I was going to be a bit flippant and say surely the likes of the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers got there before you they're in the one percent which is a whole nother thing I suppose that's that's probably where everyone's trying to get yeah so I think it's it's an interesting it's an interesting space because you know like I really see entrepreneurship as a journey and and for me the Ross Drake's that started nice work with two friends 13 years ago and the Ross Drake's standing here talking to you today are two very different people and I think for a long time that development was kind of happening by accident and I think what he has taught me is how you can be very intentional about this and how you know if you sort of reflect on your weaknesses and your strengths and design and build your company and your organization and your team around those things you can control not only your your company but you know your company almost sets a lot of your your world so you can control your world that you live in and you can can ultimately end up delivering better work more meaningful work and stuff that fills you up as opposed to to stuff that empties you out okay this is getting interesting when we come back we're going to be continuing my chat with Ross Drake's founder CEO of nice work amongst other things I'm going to get into some of those other things just now because that fascinates me we'll be back chatting to Ross Drake's in just a bit and we're back it is what's involved and my special guest Ross Drake's I I'm just gonna go with International Mainland Mystery because I like that but Ross you've done and you come across incredibly humbly about the stuff that you've done but you've actually managed to fit quite a lot of living into the last few years haven't you yes indeed one of the things and you know nice work is brilliant and it sounds like something you're absolutely passionate about and after this amount of time I think it's great if you can still be passionate about your business and entrepreneurship because sometimes you you tend to get caught in a bitter a bit of a rat but you get out of the rat in all sorts of interesting ways one of the things that you do is you talk about fortnight how to make in 18 months using culture and by culture you're not talking about what comes out of the tub of yogurt I'm assuming no not not at all and interestingly in a in a previous life when I when I didn't have a small child I used to play a lot of video games and I think I think the video gaming industry is is such a fascinating one because you have these these triple a studios which are you know kind of in the business world like your blue chip companies they've they're well money they've got development teams of 30 40 50 60 people and then you've got these independent studios sometimes one man band two man bands that are creating these games on passion alone and ultimately they're all end up sort of competing with each other and I think fortnight for me is is a fascinating one and I think there's a lot of lessons for for business owners and brand builders in how fortnight has grown and and managed to sustain it so so generally in the world of gaming the natural cycle is you you launch a big game you spend millions of dollars marketing it runs for a season which can be anywhere from a year to a year and a half and then you need the the follow-on you know version two version three version four to come out to kind of sustain that type now fortnight was a game that they had that was doing okay it was it was a mediocre kind of mediocrally successful title from from quite a big studio and they flipped it to a free-to-play model and they've created a game that's managed to stay at the top of its if it's industry with massive competition well-funded competitors coming in fighting for that same sort of space and they've kicked that that space for almost two and a half years now which I think is quite quite interesting and then the thing for me that really excites me about how they do it is they they're at the forefront of and they are creating kind of the culture all the time so so they have these strange things where you you buy skins for your character that do nothing other than make your character look different and you can also buy like a pickaxe or a ninja sword that helps you smash up smash up these things and and essentially they do nothing for the gameplay they don't make you a better player they don't make you stronger they do nothing they are literally just cosmetic items but essentially by tapping into the zeitgeist they've created a business where the game is free to play but you can purchase all of these items and I think on average the last time I saw that the average iOS purchase was about 90 rand I mean $90 per player so if you've got an audience of a hundred million players on iOS alone you can see how the money there stacks up and I think what interests me is how this it's a great teaching tool for me because most of the the people I speak to are too old to play this game so so they kind of know about it because often their children are spending you know hundreds of thousands of hours playing the game so they know about it and they're interested in it but they they don't actually have the first-hand experience of it so so I love talking about it because it's it's it's got some great lessons for for brand builders and company owners but it's also an insight into how some children are living I think you know people think fortnight is again but I think at the core most of this online gaming and fortnight is just one of them is actually part of how the generation the younger generation beyond us kind of how they get together how they engage with each other how they are creating their identities have been created in these digital spaces it's fascinating that you say that because as I think back I mean in my younger days I also used to be a rabid gamer but mine was in the in the days of Wolfenstein and doom and those kind of things except at the moment in the house I have a 21 year old who is absolutely addicted to to playing fortnight and and he showed me what to do and how to do it and I'm just I don't know I don't have the interest anymore but it is certainly something that has changed lives I mean and when I sit in oak is it a single-player game and he looked at me like I was absolutely insane man he was like what why would you want to do something like that it's about the teams and his mates and everybody's got this set and the next thing and obviously as avid gamers there are certain times when they do complain and go yeah if you want to get this then you have to pay it and yeah well you know it's it's one of those things and it's certainly is a model that seems to have worked for the creators of fortnight well if you think about it when when we were gaming you know when when it was our our generations gaming you used to go to your friend's house and then you would sit on the couch and watch your friend game so it was a way of you getting together and it was an activity now essentially going to your friend's house has been replaced with with you connect over the internet and you play but we we interestingly had a guy who worked at our company for a while and he had a small son who he wasn't allowing to play fortnight because he was like I don't want this person to play this and essentially what was happening is his son was being left out of the experiences that the other children were having at the school so he started to lie and he started to make up stories about playing for fortnight because he felt so left out of what was going on but ultimately as all children are they found out and then there was he used it to kind of make his life an absolute misery so ultimately they let him play the game because it's such a part of their culture and they're growing up that it's not just a game and I think there is that generational gap where you see it as a game but it's it's much more than that yes you are playing a game but it's how they kind of connect and identify with each other well just speaking of that one of the most amazing things is I'm very lucky and privileged enough to host another podcast as well which is called the education show and I've just recently chatted to one of the teachers and she is she's using mine craft to actually help students and teach students and they creating this wonderful little repository in Minecraft and initially I was like you want to what and then suddenly it all began to make sense for me and you know to get across that that kind of learning and that experiential learning I mean it's a brilliant way of doing it I definitely I think these so interesting one of the things nice work did right at the beginning of covered is we helped a few some of our clients on the education space and we help them get online and I think the biggest leap has been for the teachers who are trying to figure out how to take the classroom online and but for their students it's actually quite easy for them because they're so used to things like twitch and discord and live-streaming games and you think while you live-streaming a game you are chatting in text sometimes you're also chatting over audio you're playing a game you're paying attention you strategizing you know so the kids are used to multiple layers of communication multiple layers of information coming at them whereas the teachers are used to a single you stand up there and you deliver content you know so so I think the biggest shift has been for the educators and the most successful ones are the ones that you know like this lady you're talking about or are using the tools that exist because that's how to keep your audience engaged and if you come back to it as just simple simple business if your audience is on LinkedIn you have no reason to be talking to them on Facebook you know and I think we very used to in the business world thinking okay I'm gonna go to where my audience is and I'm gonna communicate to them there that's for some reason in education that that leak didn't happen as naturally and the children are on things like discord and twitch so and Minecraft and and fortnight so if you can deliver your history class in a fortnight match you know do you think your your kids are gonna be more or less engaged by doing that so so that sort of makes me very excited that people are shifting and embracing these new new sort of technologies and using them in exciting ways well I gotta tell you I mean my my fiance is an instructional designer and before covert that some of her clients that you worked with you're saying to them you've got to get this stuff online we've got to get it online it's the way of the future and everybody's going yeah well you know and they were like why should we change because it's always been done this way and then obviously covert happened and everybody suddenly went whoops we now need to make a plan and have been scrambling and scrambling furiously ever since then but enough enough of this sort of it because I got a couple of more things I need to get through with you aside from whatever the new thing is that you're doing because you're not a stranger to podcasting and being on air we're going to talk about that when we come back my special guest is Ross Drake's this is what's involved we'll be back in just a bit and we're back with what's involved in Ross Drake's my special guest just before the break we were talking about you not being a stranger to this radio podcasting thing now you pretty much like me and I don't know where you fit this into your life but you host two podcasts at the moment am I correct yes and potentially a third in the near future okay so so tell me tell me a bit about your podcast so so the first podcast that I started is called radio and and coming back to the entrepreneurs organization every time I would meet somebody in here and just have this conversation about their life journey and how they've ended up where they are and what their business entails and what their philosophy on life is it was so interesting to me and at the time I was the communications chair of the local Joburg chapter and the then president was a man named Rich Mulholland and he was like let's put this into a podcast I know Rich okay yeah so that was how radio was born and and now we just have these amazing conversations with entrepreneurs in South Africa and around the world who've just done amazing things and you know some of the conversations you know one of the one of the members was a coder and he ended up hacking into NASA and nearly got a criminal record in the US but ultimately got out of it because he built some software for that you know there's just these these like rich and vibrance and different stories and I've always been a curious person and I think that's why I've ended up in the career that I've ended up in so this was a way of me asking those stories and reaching out to people and I'm doing that for a while so I carry on I was gonna say how did you get into the second one but please do carry on yeah so after I'd done that for a while I was like well you know we kind of do the same thing at nice work so so every single meeting that myself and my team go to generally a few things I said one is can we just ask you one more question which is normally as we walking out the door we see something or we forget that we didn't ask something and we ask another one and the other one is that people always say like you ask such interesting questions so so we started one more question to to scratch that itch and to to have these conversations more regularly and with more intention and to to allow us to sort of expand our worldview a little bit so so we just about to finish season two which has all been around purpose but not not that's Millennials on Instagram purpose or an amazing campaign by your agency purpose but like people who've used the organizational purposes are driving factor as a navigator as a as a compass so just exploring how people have used purpose tactically to grow their business and to give themselves direction and our next season is all around branding so so now we're expanding how does how does a brand impact people's lives and how do people think about branding okay that that is fascinating and I mean when I think about you know just the fact that you run your own business and you're doing these podcasts and you've just said you've got a little one that's in the picture as well I just wonder where you find the time for this because it is quite time-consuming yeah I suppose with the podcasts the the challenge has always been just setting up a really good workflow so so we've got a bulletproof workflow and for me personally most of my time is spent in the the researching who I want to talk to in the actual interview and luckily I've got an amazing team who then picks up from there and does all the heavy lifting radio has been less regular as of late because it's it's a lot reliance on me to do the actual work and I've struggled to find that time but interestingly I see it I think the the job of the the CEO or the the leader of a business is to to keep one foot in the future I think I think you've got two jobs the one is to make sure that your team is is is grounded and safe and focused and included but I think your other one is to keep looking forward and to keep going out there and testing and for me the podcasts are a great way of doing that it's a great way of of reaching out to people who you would ordinarily not have any reason to speak to and picking their brain for a little bit it's a great way of getting a sense you know once you've spoken to 10 11 12 people around a topic you start to to pick up the patterns of success you start to see how people have used that you start to get these little nuggets so even though it does take back time for me I think the the payback has been tenfold you know from what I've put into it but let's let's talk about this a little while because I about two years ago I said you know what I think podcasting is the future and I'm a radio person and for me to say that as a radio person people looked at me and raised eyebrows and I said yeah I said I firmly believe that you don't have to have one or the other but in terms of being able to promote yourself your business what you do and getting involved more importantly I believe to show and to give back to people specifically if you've been successful in a certain line or a certain part of your life to give back to people and to say to people this is what we do something which maybe wrongly so I'm talking to a master I'm talking to a marketing genius now but I used to call it incidental marketing because we're trying to sort of seriously sell anything to anybody but you were talking about your brand your company whatever the case may be have you found that to be true with you is podcasting growing is it something that is going to grow more so I think podcasting is definitely growing I think people potentially feel disillusioned with podcasting when they go into it for the wrong reason I think it is definitely one of those long play you know so there's something that you invest in over a period of time but the really powerful thing is is that we found is actually not so much the podcast themselves because I think the people who are willing to put aside 30 minutes 40 minutes you know to to listen to a podcast those are your fully engaged audience those are the ones that really care about what you do but very interestingly what we found is that people see that you're doing it and we do a lot of work of extracting out little video clips little one minute is 60 seconds 30 seconds and putting that out there and that has a great sort of halo effect around the business so people that haven't necessarily listened to the podcast they haven't necessarily gone through the whole episode but they do know that you're doing it and that's quite powerful and then we do a thing where we quite intentionally if we have a meeting with someone and they talking about struggling with a thing or they trying to unpack a concept you can actually start sending those content on to people to say hey listen I know you are talking about how to differentiate in a in a commodity market and here we spoke to you know a man who took popcorn and elevated it to sell it for seven dollars a bag you know so then it's becomes an interesting tool that people are like okay not only did he listen to me and cares about my problem but they've also already created this bank of content and information which is something that's that takes time and energy and effort and I think people notice and recognize that yeah absolutely well at least I feel a bit of validation and I do need that because I'm over 120 episodes in already so yeah otherwise I would have been seriously barking up the wrong tree Ross one more thing I know that you do currently do and then onto the new thing when we come back we're gonna wrap up and find out what Ross does as well and then you know we're gonna find out where to for Ross Drake's and nice work we'll be back it is what's involved and we're back with what's involved wrapping it up with Ross Drake's and sure you know what I'd say this always and people probably second title but Tom flies when you're having fun at the end of our at the end of our time and I feel like I haven't even spoken to about half the things I want to let's get on to creative mornings Johannesburg what on earth is that so creative mornings is a series of free talks that happen once a month around the world and it's essentially creative people celebrating the talent in their cities and we have been hosting creative mornings in Janiceburg for almost eight years now and it started at a time when we were doing a lot of particularly boring particularly profitable corporate work and we were looking to scratch an itch so so we brought creative mornings here it was started in New York and now it's been sort of turned into this network of volunteers across across the globe but I see it as something that is is is good for our soul and is good for the soul of our industry so we just invest in finding these amazing talented brilliant people and giving them a stage to to talk to other people who might need to to hear what they say brilliant stuff I seriously don't know where you where you find time to fit all of this in but more importantly because in terms of your business when COVID struck it must have all come to a grinding halt and yet as I understand it you guys have done quite well during this time and I think that is so inspiring and uplifting yeah I mean it was like I said it was a kick in the teeth like we had we had a whole bunch of works like in in the final phases of like getting signed off and kind of March it all just came tumbling down I mean our revenue in April was 30% of of what it was the month before and Wow but but we you know so we batten down the hatches any non-essential spend was cut and thrown out the door and we just went through a process of looking at what do we have that people need and and I think you know unfortunately the world we sit in in terms of branding and communication it's often seen as a nice to have so anybody who is a little bit scared or a little bit worried about finance just I think stop spending in that that realm I think that was the first thing that happened so something it's always a sorry it's always a strange thing to me that whenever there is sort of financial uncertainty the first thing to go is marketing and advertising which just doesn't make sense in my head it doesn't but I think it's it's partially the the creative's fault is a creative people don't like to be measured and I think when times are tough and people are freaking out they want stuff that feels concrete and and it doesn't you know kind of pretty design doesn't feel concrete it doesn't and and I think that's to our own faults but if you look at how people like Dane and BSG and Accenture and instant young where they expanding where they putting more and more energy into its into creativity it's into marketing it's into communications it's into branding but they are doing it in a way that's that the sort of traditional creatives have not and they're happy to be measured because a lot of them are like X auditors and you know it's all about measurement so so I think I think that'll shift in the in the next while and I think we're seeing companies that that continue to market through this time are gonna in the long term do much better than those that just sort of shut down and went dark now how is it affected you the the pandemic I mean it sounds like there was a lot of reflection than had to happen yeah so so it was tough and but I mean to my team like my team hustled super hard in the beginning of of lockdown we were back we tried all sorts of things like I said we helped some schools get online we released a report called finding north which is how people would think about communicating in this time and and we also went back to a lot of our clients and said okay well how can we how can we help you at this time and sometimes it was doing work for a much lower rate than we normally would have but good to sort of keep the wheels turning and and interestingly I think a lot of that work has started to bear fruit but the the question we were asking ourselves is how do we how do we offer the value we know we provide but at a much more affordable rate because I think I think cash is gonna be such a killer in the next sort of 18 months in South Africa so so we've actually gone through a whole journey of taking a lot of the work that we do and we've turned it into a series of courses so coming the beginning of September you're gonna be able to go through all of our purpose finder workshops and our brand impact studies and and how to craft a brand that people ultimately care about we turn those into self-service courses and that allows us to do an interesting thing it allows us to switch from a model of one-to-one which is sort of the last 13 years of nice work to a model of one-to-many which has allowed us to look at a pricing structure which is would never ever ever be feasible you know without sort of doing this and we can still do some really amazing things and this is where I think it all starts to come together so so we are really doing podcasts we want to start doing sort of more video work and it can all start feeding into the same world of helping people and teaching people because I think ultimately our purpose is to to make things that people care about and and I think this is the next iteration of our business if we were to think of ourselves as just the just another branding agency you know then the solution is how do we sell more branding but but we don't think of ourselves as that we think we have something of value that people need and we'll always have our core clientele which are people who a) see value in what we do and b) have the budget to spend the money that they need but there's a whole nother group of people so you know we seeing lots of people who were in large corporations as consultants they've been let go and now they need to almost become a business overnight and when the one of the first things you need as a business is is that that question to you know what do you do and why should I care and and that's that's our bread and butter that's where we love to work and this is an opportunity for us to serve a much broader audience and ultimately a global audience because it doesn't require us to be physically in the same location. Now would you say those because I love the way that you that you talk about this and the fact that you know a lot of people are and still to date are going can't wait to get back to normal can't wait to get back to normal my feeling is there's not going to be a normal like we were used to at all but do you think that so yeah there is no new normal there is this is the new normal like this is we are only gonna we are here and we are just gonna iteratively change from this point on I think the world that we left behind is never coming back again and I think anyone who is believing in that is is basing it on hope or you know something that doesn't exist. Yeah now I absolutely agree with you but in terms of this and in terms of this crisis and everything what is it done for the soul of your business has it has it changed it to become more about how because you mentioned a few times how how you can actually help people has it become a more soulful business? I think one of the things we've always been very good at is is caring and and like actually genuinely wanting the people we helped to succeed I think the gift that that COVID has given us is we realized how passionate we are about this work and how we want to work with people who we respect and who respect us so so the huge change for us is we've actually we've moved away from some relationships suppliers and clients that just weren't they weren't feeling us and they weren't feeling them so so we've moved on from that and I think it's emboldened us to lean into that a lot more and to know that the work we're doing has value and it helps people and I think with that as fuel it allows you to ideate and to explore things with a lot more kind of vigor and intention. Yeah makes makes sense to me you mentioned something else right at the beginning of our interview that you're going to talk about was that the online courses or is there yet more? No no so so this is this is it so we launching we launching this this these courses and and for us it all comes down to to purpose to organizational purpose we think that there's there's three components to any kind of company or thing that grows in a sustainable way and when when I say sustainable I think COVID has shown us how many businesses were unsustainable you know how many of them were growing at a rate that they just couldn't continue to grow at and they had to sort of gear themselves from a debt perspective you know in a way that was unfeasible or how many businesses were trading on such fine margins that's that's being shut down by even a week or two was just enough to kill them so so I think there's three pieces to that the first is I think being a purpose-led organization I think if you understand what danger you are trying to make in the world you've got something really special that you can talk about and if you can take that and translate it into an impactful brand and when I say an impactful brand I mean a brand that has an audience in mind and is trying to solve something do something make their life better in some kind of a way and if it communicates in that way then then you get the the final piece which is is the most powerful for us but the one that you can't replicate with money and that is an engaged audience and you know I studied drama many many years ago and I think the definition of an audience has changed in the social media world but I like the one that that comes from theater and that is people who have chosen to show up at a certain time to sit in a seat and to listen to what you have to say and I think if you've got an audience you're in a really really powerful place and I think people say we have an audience but it's it's so often not the truth they have some likes on Facebook or some people that they once talked to we've always for our client lists I won't list any client that we haven't worked with in the last six months because I think every company goes out there and they show this amazing client list and you go okay well when did you work with Nike oh we worked with Nike back in you know 2001 we did one project with them they're not a client anymore they're not part of your audience they're not part of the group of people that's listening to to what you have to say and I think if you see the businesses and the people that have done really well in this time it's because they have this audience and they care about them and they've been been doing right by them for a long time and those people stick by you and and I think when we try and when we were helping people communicate in this time it's about what is that what is the difference you're making these people's lives and how do you help them in this time because ultimately those relationships are what's going to stand you through the next four years five years six years of your business well that's time for us to to wrap up for us before I let you go though a piece of advice that you would give to somebody listening to this show whether it's a business owner perspective business owner or somebody that's just caught in this downward spiral what piece of advice would you give people like that to just sort of lift themselves out of this yeah and just you know something what can they do I think for me the the biggest lesson I've had on a personal thing is is a little bit of forgiveness and it's forgiveness of yourself because I think we're also you know and I think it comes back to the conversation we're having about the new normal we're all expecting to be in a world where this anxiety and pressure and tension of COVID and the impending economic collapse is not there anymore and I think that's going to be with us for a while and I think you know while while nice work and the team we trying really hard and we're building a lot and we're doing a lot some days are better than others and some days you do nothing and other days you do a lot and I think being kind to yourself and forgiving yourself in those down times is such a powerful thing because it allows you to stand up the next day and try again and as opposed to stacking the the guilt up again and again and again and again because eventually that just becomes an uncarriable burden and I think that can make people just stand still and do nothing some wonderful advice Ross thank you so much for taking the time out of what is apparently and obviously a very very busy schedule I really do appreciate it if people want to find out more about what you do your podcasts you say one more question season two is coming out very soon is that available on things like iTunes etc etc it's available everywhere you get podcasts if you just search for one more question if you want to find me just look for Ross Drakes everywhere or Ross drakes.com and if you want to see our work it's nice work dot CEO dot ZA you can find all of our work there Ross drakes dot com or nice work dot CEO dot ZA Ross thank you I really really appreciate it's been a great set and I hope we can do some more of them because I don't think we've even scratched the surface there but I'd love to chat again I always enjoy having good conversations wonderful stuff that is my special guest Ross drakes this has been what's involved into each and every one of you thank you for listening