How to Create Long-Term Business Credibility and Sustainability with Cain Ullah

Mike (00:00.074)
Thanks ever so much for joining me on Higgle, the B2B Sales for podcast.

Cain (00:09.987)
Yes.

Cain (00:23.333)
worries. Thank you for the invite, Mike. Good to be here.

Mike (00:29.066)
Yeah, and how long, I don't know, how long have we known each other now?

Cain (00:32.707)
Long time. Yeah. Yeah, probably seven or eight years, I would guess.

Mike (00:33.578)
It is a long time, isn't it? It's a long time.

Yeah, I'd have thought so. And I've got to know you much better over the last couple of years as well. And that's part of what we'll talk about on the podcast about long -term relationship building, because you like people rather than you've got some other motive going on. So, but we will talk about that in a second. So first of all, Cain, for people listening, who are you? Kind of what do you do? What's your background and anything unusual about yourself?

Cain (01:02.757)
It's probably a lot that's unusual about myself. So my background is I'm a career consultant. I founded a digital consultancy called Red Badger in 2010 with two others. Was CEO there for 10 and a half years. I'm still heavily involved, but took a bit of a step back from the operational side of the business three years ago.

And still now I'm involved on the board, like helping with strategy and commercial. Um, and Red Badger for those that are listening are, it's a digital product transformation consultancy. So we help very large companies in the likes of HSBC, Lloyds, Barclays, Santander, JP Morgan in banking, big retailers, Tesco, ASOS, and um,

media companies mostly, so BBC, Financial Times, News UK, Reach, PLC, etc. So we help them with strategy, execution, and then capability build for end -to -end digital product transformation. And I've been doing that for 14 years now.

Mike (02:21.706)
Wow, amazing.

Cain (02:23.781)
And then what's unusual about myself? So what to choose? I met my wife at Burning Man. I think that's quite unusual. 12 years ago, and we lived a mile up the road of being to similar social events, but never met at those social events and ended up traveling out to the Nevada desert to meet her. The rest is history.

Mike (02:29.45)
Hahaha.

Mike (02:35.018)
amazing.

Mike (02:46.238)
Yeah, yeah.

Mike (02:50.664)
Wow.

I've never been to Burning Man. It looks amazing and fascinating, but I'm sure it's very different on the inside than it looks on the outside.

Cain (03:01.477)
Yeah, it's amazing. A real hub of creativity.

Mike (03:06.41)
Yeah, amazing. So we're not here to talk about Burning Man, but it's a fascinating story. So we thought we'd talk about a few questions around kind of business development as a broad topic. So let's kick off with the first one, which is why do you view relationship building as a very long -term multi -year kind of strategic pursuit? And it's not centered around you winning more work. In fact, it's really kind of the opposite. So why?

Cain (03:10.821)
I'm sorry.

Mike (03:35.69)
Why have you taken that view and just expanded on it a bit further?

Cain (03:39.813)
Um, yeah, so relationships are built on trust, first and foremost, and trust is not something that is transactional. It's not something that you can build overnight, you know, one and through one or two meetings. Um, and really the way that I do commercial, the way that I win work is almost the antithesis of

transactional sales, you know, I like people, I invest in personal relationships with people. And, you know, I try and provide value to them. So I'm that whole trust equation that is really famous. So, you know, credibility plus reliability plus intimacy divided by lack of self orientation, you know, so all of those things together.

Mike (04:22.09)
Mm -hmm.

Cain (04:39.717)
a kind of how I like to engage with people. And that takes a long time. It's not something that sort of happens overnight. So when I meet people, I don't really talk, certainly not at the beginning about, you know, what opportunities they can give me and how, you know, do they have a need and how can they help me grow Red Badger? It's more about investing in them as a person.

And if we don't get on, regardless of whether there's opportunity there or not, I don't pursue that relationship. You know, it has to be based on a relationship. Okay. I found this on the web for pursue that relationship. Sorry. That's Siri there. Sorry about that. Yeah. And so I like people, I invest long -term in people and that's the whole intimacy piece. And then I try and...

Mike (05:25.852)
That's alright.

Cain (05:38.629)
help them and they help me and over time that might turn into something, it might not, but you know, get a friend, you gain friends through that approach, so it's a win -win for me really.

Mike (05:48.488)
You do.

Yeah. And you find, I mean, and we've talked about this before a lot over the years. You just find things in common that you wouldn't find out through talking about business. So, you know, I found out you have a passion for vinyl and for audio and all things audio. And I, it's one of my passions. And then you start to talk about that a lot more and about what that means and why you do it and the kind of music you're into and why high -end audio is so important and all sorts of things like that.

and that it makes it a much richer relationship.

Cain (06:25.381)
Yeah, absolutely. And I spend probably 90 % of my time cycling around town, meeting people where I have that kind of rich relationship with, like rich deep conversations about their personal lives. And then we help each other out. You know, it's, it's, I'll introduce people to other people that might be able to help them, you know, we help, I've helped.

Mike (06:43.368)
Exactly.

Cain (06:51.267)
Clients get new jobs and then they become a client in the new place. You know, it's just a, you know, a proper value exchange, but really the foundation is one based on friendship and trust. And so, you know, if you can build friendship and trust at some point that might turn into an opportunity and it might not, but you know.

Mike (07:12.906)
Exactly. And they'll, as we talked about before, they will, in conversations with their friends, they will talk to their friends about you and about what you do and about who you are as a human being. And that can lead to all sorts of just interesting opportunities, be it business or non -business.

Cain (07:32.741)
Exactly. And we're all human after all. And so a human creativity is, you at the heart of everything that we do, you know, whether it's selling or you've won a project and you're delivering the success of success, you know, a delivery is completely dependent on human connection as well and everyone getting on and trust. So, you know, sales is and

Mike (07:36.809)
Exactly. Correct.

Cain (08:00.197)
and forming new relationships is at the very beginning of a project's life cycle. And so you need to start it where you mean to go on. It has to be based on trust and integrity, credibility, reliability, friendship, human connection, all of that sort of stuff. Because without that, you're not going to get anywhere. You're not going to be able to deliver a...

Mike (08:30.506)
Exactly.

Cain (08:30.577)
project appropriately once you land it.

Mike (08:34.602)
So let's come back to the kind of delivering excellence in a minute. But just let's just delve into a little bit more about this lack of self -orientation when building trusted advisor relationships. So for those people listening that are thinking what they talking about this trust equation, there was a famous book as we both know by a guy called David Meister many, many years ago called the trusted advisor. And they were listening that's in high -end sales selling at C -suite.

If you've not read it already, I would strongly recommend you do. But it was a great piece of work, wasn't it? And it was about how do you build trusted relationships? And the bottom part of the equation, the denominator, was around lack of self -orientation. Do you want to just dig into that a bit more, Cain, and give your view of what that means and why it's important?

Cain (09:25.957)
Yeah, so it's, it's the biggest factor in the trust equation, because it's, you know, you've got the three things on the top of the line. It's the credibility, reliability and intimacy. And then all of those strings, three things added together, divided by self or lack of self orientation equals trust. So the single biggest factor in the equation is lack of self orientation. And

And effectively, that is behavior that is not focused on oneself in the process of a sale. And so, you know, you really have the best interests at heart of the person that you're dealing with, the person that you're selling to, you know, and you're trying to provide value or a service to them.

And I find that people that are the best salespeople don't necessarily need the book because they do this naturally. You know, if they, they like people, they are like helping others. Um, they provide naturally provide a value, uh, provide value and a service to others and just want to help. Um, and they tend to be the best salespeople in my opinion. Um, so naturally.

Mike (10:33.002)
Mm. Right.

Cain (10:54.383)
they kind of build trusted advisor relationships. But the book is brilliant at kind of unpicking all of those behaviors that kind of make the best trusted advisors. And so yeah, it's really about making sure that everything that you do is of service to others, you know, so we, we, myself, but also Red Badger feel that, you know, we,

We'll only engage with a client if we feel we can provide value. If we don't think the right structures or behaviors are in place, or at least the ability to get people into that right place. If that doesn't exist and we don't feel we can provide value, we won't take the revenue because it doesn't ever result in a...

good trusted advisor relationship. And those types of projects don't end up where you want them to be. So, so everything we do really has to have that kind of lack of self orientation at the heart, we want to provide value to others in everything we do, be it sales, be it delivery, be it sort of, you know, relationships or anything else that we can help the

Mike (12:03.498)
Exactly.

Cain (12:22.731)
the kind of client with going above and beyond to make them successful and elevate their careers, the individuals as well as the organizations that they work in. That is lack of self -orientation in a nutshell.

Mike (12:39.754)
Very good. Some reflections on kind of when I was taught to sell. So I was taught to sell at KPMG really, back in the day. And we were taught obviously consultative selling because we were a big consultancy. And it was really interesting. One of the things when we looked at that kind of trusted advisor model, we could start to spot people who, as you say, had natural instincts that lent itself to relationship -based trusted advisor selling. And we still like play little scenarios.

And the scenario that one of the partners said to me was like, Mike, okay, so you're meeting a C -suite exec. It's a big company. It's your first meeting. So how are you going to start to build that trusted advisor relationship? Well, of course, the instinct goes, well, I'll start to ask them about them and I'll start to focus more on them than on me. And I'll start to ask them about their issues and about their business. And I remember this guy saying to me, he said, you could do that. But he said, the

The problem with doing that with someone you don't know is that why would they open up to you? If you don't know this person, how on earth would they be trusting enough to open up with their deepest, darkest issues in their business? And he said, what you might want to do is start with the credibility piece. Gently start with who you are and the kind of work that you are involved in and some insights about their industry and some of the people that you've met like them and the kind of issues that they have, and then move into the, so.

How does that feel for you? Are any of those issues relevant to you? Have you seen anything similar? Which of these are your top three? And it always stuck with me that it's like, you can't start by building a relationship with someone at that level instantly and get to trust you. You certainly can't do it in a group meeting. You have to do it, it's one -on -one. And I guess it goes back to good old fashioned building personal relationships.

If I met you in a bar, then I wouldn't start asking you about your deepest, darkest, kind of like human issues, because you'd tell me to go and F off probably I expect. You start with something different. You start a bit more gentle about who you are as a person. It's incredible. Does that kind of resonate with your new relationships that you're building? How do you start to build that trusted relationship with a lack of self -orientation?

Cain (14:48.677)
You

Cain (15:05.893)
Yeah, so.

I agree with you is that it's analogous to cold calling someone and asking them if they would have a coffee with you. Right. They're not going to because they're very busy. Why would they have a coffee with you? Who are you? But if you educate them and you give them something that they didn't know before, something that they can learn that is a compelling reason.

Mike (15:18.314)
Right. Exactly.

Mike (15:26.718)
Exactly.

Yes.

Cain (15:37.893)
to have a conversation with you where, you know, they are intrigued, you know, that's the credibility bit. And so, you know, that's what, you know, the large organizations like KPMG that you mentioned are historically fantastic at, because they will have C -level relationships, but they will take a solution to those C -level people in a client.

Mike (15:40.36)
Exactly.

Mike (15:56.714)
They are.

Cain (16:07.461)
to a problem that that client didn't know they had until they had that conversation. So they are kind of looking ahead, going into the C level and saying this thing's coming up, be it regulation or something happening in the market, consumer behavior. You need to be able to think about this because this is how it's going to impact your business. And by the way, this is the solution to that problem. That's a great sell.

because all of a sudden you're in a conversation where that client is intrigued and they need no more. So that's where thought leadership comes from. Sales is not about persuasion. So you don't ever want to be in a position where you're trying to persuade a client to use you. You want to let them know what you have to offer. And that is...

Mike (16:55.868)
Exactly.

Cain (17:05.765)
credibility, it's reliability, you can talk about the things you do, you can run events, you can give information away for free, you can do free workshops. And all of these things are kind of, you know, our mutual friend, John Godfrey, who's the commercial director at Red Badger, it's how we met, he calls them gold coins. So it's like little nuggets of, you know, treasure.

Mike (17:23.882)
Yep. Absolutely.

Right. Yeah.

Cain (17:33.573)
that you just lay down, take a step back and then you lay down another one and then the client's kind of intrigued to come towards you and pick up the gold coins to learn more. And really that's kind of the credibility bit really, you know, you're not trying to persuade the client to use your services, you're informing them about what you can do and then at some point in the future where there's a need.

Mike (17:51.178)
It is.

Cain (18:03.841)
they might give you a call. But, you know, that credibility bit, as you said in the question, is kind of how you might open up doors to a new conversation. And then that gives you the kind of ability once the door is open to start building the trust, like through lack of self -orientation, offering help, you know, getting into a bit of a deeper discussion about.

Mike (18:17.738)
Exactly.

Mike (18:28.65)
Absolutely.

Cain (18:31.735)
personal relationships, the intimacy bit. So yeah, that's, I agree. It's not, you know, you can't start with intimacy. You know, you need to start with credibility. But underlying it is the lack of self -orientation all the way through.

Mike (18:43.85)
No.

Mike (18:48.138)
Exactly.

Mike (18:53.16)
Yeah, definitely. And I was, someone summarized it to me years ago as being you've got to, you have to earn the right to build trust and you earn the right by starting a relationship, you build on credibility and then you're naturally drawn towards each other and you start to discuss deeper and deeper issues. I mean, I'm sure you've had it Kane, a lot given who you are. People call you years later. I mean, I've had like people literally, I see them every like three to six months.

And then five years down the line, something happens that I never expected. Because I wasn't looking for it, but something great happens. And that's brilliant. But you have to invest in the long term for the right purpose led reasons.

Cain (19:38.469)
Exactly. And this is why...

I don't like things like, so you get a lot of agencies like Red Badger where they will use an SDR, an external agency. We'll give them our value propositions. We'll build a list, phone them up and see if you can get me meetings. And it's throwing mud at a wall and seeing what sticks, but there's no element of trust in that approach at all. You can use an SDR.

Mike (19:50.888)
Yes.

Cain (20:11.013)
to remind someone to come to an event, but the trust has to already be in place by that point. It's all about relationships. So I want to invite people into my circle or to an event that I'm running or to some sort of compelling reason to have a one -to -one meeting based on the relationship with me, with people that I like. It's not something that I would like to outsource.

You know, so I don't. That's not how I operate.

Mike (20:46.538)
That's a very, very good point. Yes, exactly. And a lot of agencies, because markets are tough at the moment, a lot of agencies are trying the, I'm going to outsource, lead gen. And I'm like, I've asked quite a lot of agencies, is it working? And they're like, not really, no. Works for certain, yeah, certain types of businesses, which are very product oriented. I think it...

Cain (20:48.249)
Yes.

Cain (21:06.597)
No, it's very, very hard.

Mike (21:14.986)
It is working for some of them, but it's a very, very specific product, solving a very particular problem and they're relatively lower value. But for higher value sales, it doesn't work at all.

Cain (21:27.173)
No, no. And you know, in the past, my, the less experienced K -Nalla has definitely tried it. And it, and it's, it has never worked for us. They say, you know, I don't want to sort of say they're all rubbish or anything like that, but it is just about, um,

Mike (21:51.314)
Nope.

Cain (21:55.205)
kind of that whole, if you want to do trusted advisor selling, it's got to be based on personal relationship that you build yourself.

Mike (22:02.954)
Yeah. And it's, uh, you have to invest for the longterm because where you are now, your network is an imagine exceptionally strong. So it becomes the flywheel is kind of self -fulfilling at that point.

Cain (22:05.669)
Yes.

Cain (22:13.861)
Yeah, yeah. And we win. You know, we've got people, you know, I've got people in my network that have been my client four or five times in four or five different roles. We've elevated them, their career, they've elevated us. And, you know, we all work very well together and they just, every time they move companies, they take us with them. And that, that is the sure sign that, uh,

Mike (22:34.922)
Exactly.

Cain (22:42.393)
you've provided value to them.

Mike (22:46.058)
So this will sound, it sounds so obvious on paper and I talked about this with a CEO friend of mine literally yesterday about delivering excellence. Why is delivering excellence so important when you're building trusted advisor relationships at the C -suite?

Cain (23:04.965)
Well, it's all about value. You know, can't eat...

Mike (23:10.122)
I mean, it sounds obvious, doesn't it? It's like asking the question, I'm like, well, if you don't deliver excellence, that's going to be clearly a problem. But...

Cain (23:17.669)
Yeah, you can't sell based on trust with credibility and reliability being part of the equation and then fail to deliver because that's credibility and reliability out of the window and disintegrates right away. So you get, I've, I've met a number of companies. I'm not going to name them obviously that are excellent salespeople.

Mike (23:29.834)
Exactly. Exactly.

Cain (23:46.693)
You know, but they're quite aggressive in the sale. They win work and don't deliver, you know, and you look at the, the kind of longevity of their client relationships and they're kind of not longer than six months, you know, and they're permanently in the sales cycle, just trying to fill the gaps of opportunities that are ending because they're not delivering. And, uh,

Mike (24:02.186)
Yep, exactly.

Cain (24:17.221)
That's a way of doing it and you can build a successful business on that. But I feel like it has a shelf life because everything is about reputation. And eventually if you get build a reputation for not delivering and not really caring that you're not delivering, which is often the case, you know, that people will eventually start to not use you and your reputation will, you know,

kind of get around, so to speak. So, you know, for us, and certainly for me, as you know, I don't do delivery, I never have, not at Red Badger. You know, I've been CEO, always been quite commercial, you know, holding the senior relationships. But that is so hard to build, you know, to sell and build trusted advisor relationship if the rest of your team that are in charge of delivery.

are not very good or not doing a good job. Whereas at Red Badger, it makes my life so much easier that I can talk about actual success stories. You know, being at HSBC for four years and moving the time it takes to open a bank account from 30 days to five minutes, you know, and those types of, those types of stories, we have loads of them. And without, without...

Mike (25:17.674)
Exactly.

Cain (25:42.661)
that credibility around our ability to deliver my job would be a million times harder. But also, you know, you continue to sort of provide value and the client continues to buy from you. So you have long term relationships, which means that gives you a foundation of stability financially as a company upon which to grow. You're not always trying to replace lost deals.

Mike (25:48.714)
Exactly right.

Cain (26:12.745)
lost up, lost clients and you haven't got the same utilization issues. Obviously utilization in my world as a digital consultancy is everything pretty much. Um, unless you've got different sources of revenue, but for TNM work, timing materials, utilization is number one, really, you know, you need to end obviously day rates and things like that. Um, so.

You know, you don't want teams coming off of client accounts and then having to resource them again. And it's really hard to manage and that. So do a good job. The client continues to buy from, from you. You don't have to worry about teams suddenly being on the bench, you know, and you've got to then find new opportunities to, to, to resource them onto. So.

Mike (26:47.868)
Exactly.

Cain (27:08.197)
Um, yeah, so at the heart of everything really is, you know, quality excellence in everything you do being really driven to provide value to the client, um, make them look good, but move the needle on all of the metrics that, you know, that you're accountable for. And, uh, you know, that is very, very, um, kind of, uh, good for the trust equation. And it makes my life.

a lot easier when I'm then trying to open up new doors with credibility. As we discussed previously, credibility being the door opener. You know, don't have that credibility then, you know, it makes it a lot harder.

Mike (27:53.29)
So a friend and colleague of mine, I work with, a called Kevin Gibbons, very talented guy, runs an SEO agency. And we, about three, four years ago, we were in a room with a whiteboard and some pens and thinking, and there were some tough times. And we came up with a really simple mantra, having spent a lot of time thinking it through, which was excellence, retention, and growth in that order.

Cain (28:21.229)
Hmm.

Mike (28:21.898)
So we'll start with delivering excellence. That will allow us to retain clients, which solves the utilization problem. And they'll refer us to other people because we do such great work and they'll be referenceable. It's taken us three or four years to make it work, but it works. Then it works sustainably. But you've got to invest in it for the long run.

Cain (28:43.845)
Exactly. I know Kevin very well. He's a great guy.

Mike (28:47.146)
Yeah, he's a lovely guy, isn't he? He's just a very really genuine, decent, humble human being.

Cain (28:55.075)
Yeah, he's a he's a trusted advisor, for sure. And but yeah, it's, it's, you know, revenue becomes a byproduct of quality. Yeah, focus on quality, and then the revenue will look after itself to a degree is not fully. But it will certainly make it a lot easier to generate.

Mike (28:57.834)
He is.

Mike (29:16.234)
Exactly right. So last question, because we're about to run out of time broadly. Just about about you've talked about value creation quite a lot. When you talk to clients and you're at the early stages and you're developing the relationships and you're talking about some of their biggest challenges, particularly in the banking about, you know, time to open an account, for example, how do you start to build that kind of what I would call a kind of a value equation, a value map?

How do you start to map out the value for the client so that it's not just, we're going to deliver some digital products, but we can link that directly to value creation. Cause in a lot of agencies find that really hard to be honest about quantifying the value we're going to create based upon the fee we're going to charge. It looks like this. You know, some of it is, um, financial and some of it is non -financial. Have you got like a framework for doing that or is that just part, an inherent part of how you.

Cain (30:03.875)
Mm -hmm.

Mike (30:13.002)
talk to clients and how you sell your work.

Cain (30:15.845)
Um, so we have many different types of engagement and it depends on the client, depends on what they want, first of all, but also depends on the complexity of, of the business, you know, so, um, if you're talking about a company, the size of HSBC that has, you know, close to 40 ,000 people in the IT department, uh, owning, owning metrics is hard, like without.

Mike (30:40.616)
Wow.

Yes.

Cain (30:44.133)
very, very complex dependency management. Having said that, the perfect project for us is one where we can be fully accountable for an outcome. And that outcome will generally have some metrics that are defined around what does success look like. And so we'll work in the early stages of a client engagement.

in the discovery phase or pre discovery and, you know, even in the, for free sometimes in the sales cycle, um, we'll, we'll start helping them work out what those metrics should be. Um, so, you know, we do Northstar workshops, for example, where, you know, for example, you know, you might have a metric around loyalty that is reward redemptions, but you have to then look at kind of breadth, depth, frequency, efficiency, all of the,

all of the things that kind of, kind of cascade up to that North Star. And then all, and then you can work out what the kind of features or kind of activities that are required to move the needle on all of those different types of metrics that ultimately will result in the, you know, so, so HSBC, for example, we were accountable for

Mike (32:04.81)
Exactly.

Cain (32:12.869)
the speed to open a bank account, conversion. So conversion was very low there. And so improved conversion rate for account opening specifically.

Mike (32:24.97)
So this is someone that would start to open an account but then abandon. Right.

Cain (32:28.261)
Yes, exactly. And then there were technical metrics as well. So they were only able to deliver three production releases per year. And so it's kind of how do you actually increase the frequency of value delivered to customer? And, and so, you know, we, we got them to a point at, you know, after a couple of years,

It was continuous deployment into production. So as soon as a line of code was written, it was in the hands of a customer. So it was multiple times a day. And so, you know, we will try and work with the client to understand what those metrics should be. And then that can kind of really focus everyone around moving the needle on those metrics. And ideally, we like to own the outcome in, you know, so we can do value based pricing and things like that. So.

Mike (33:04.712)
Wow.

Mike (33:24.778)
Yes.

Cain (33:25.637)
We'll have an element of T and M, but then you'll also have shared risk, shared upside. In an organization like HSBC for a company like Red Badger, that was impossible to do that just because of the size, the nature of complex dependencies, lawyers involved or other teams involved. You couldn't fully own the outcome. Whereas the smaller organizations, you really can. And then you can.

Mike (33:54.428)
Exactly.

Cain (33:55.621)
You can kind of put your money where your mouth is by taking some risk and saying, we are very confident in our ability to deliver and we will reduce our rates. But also if we do deliver, we want a percentage of, you know, the upside. And we have a very strong confidence in our ability to actually make more money out of.

Mike (34:01.948)
Absolutely.

Mike (34:13.994)
The upside.

Cain (34:24.837)
those types of engagements because we always deliver. But also it's kind of easier for the client to buy because of the shared risk piece, which is, you know, builds trust immediately.

Mike (34:29.034)
Exactly.

Mike (34:41.226)
you know, how do we know that we're building trust? Well, we know because our interests are aligned. If we have misaligned interests, very hard to trust each other because we're pulling in different directions.

Cain (34:47.001)
Exactly.

Cain (34:51.397)
Yeah. Yeah. So alignment, shared goals. Yeah, we did, we do quite a lot of work upfront on all of that type of stuff, as well as the kind of quant, you know, the metrics that need to be moved. And we have all of that packaged right at the very beginning before we, you know, and it might evolve, but generally we're all kind of

It's singing from the same hymn sheet and ready to go. And then it's, you know, we have very, very robust reporting throughout every stage of the delivery, you know, and obviously at the beginning, it's a bit woollier because, you know, lots of unknowns are being tackled and some of the big complex pieces are being unpicked. But once you get into a real cadence, you can be really accurate with kind of the...

Mike (35:47.72)
Exactly.

Cain (35:48.325)
with the forecast and those sorts of things. So, you know, transparency, good communication, and shared goals, also shared problems, you know, so often, there'll be some dependency that is out of our control that's blocking us and some organizations across their arms and say, well, this isn't our problem. We're on the clock, we're still billing you that you can solve that. Whereas,

Mike (36:11.786)
Yeah, exactly.

Cain (36:18.053)
The badges will very much of the mindset that let's roll our sleeves up and let's sort out any blockers, you know, regardless of whether it's in our domain or not, we'll go and speak to lawyers or we're going to, you know, we'll do whatever it takes to speed up the delivery. So yeah, that's that's that whole shared shared goals, you know, all singing from the same Pimchi.

Mike (36:33.93)
Exactly right.

Cain (36:47.973)
But then also having the metrics that you're all kind of aligned on around what needs to be moved is all very, very important when it comes to quality of delivery.

Mike (37:04.49)
And I think if I look at non -digital agencies, I either not building digital products, they're delivering more traditional type marketing services, that would be a good lesson to learn actually, is that I'm often saying to people, look, if you do upfront some kind of discovery workshop, value mapping exercise with the client, and even when you're pitching, if you show them what a value mapping workshop looks like and why it's so important and how goal alignment is so important, because we know that...

whatever's written in a client brief is never actually what the problem is. It's merely an interpretation of the problem. More of that being done would create more trusting relationships with clients and agencies, one would argue.

Cain (37:51.397)
Yeah, absolutely. For sure, I agree.

Mike (37:58.307)
Kane, I've taken up plenty of your time. I really, really appreciate having a discussion with you. I always enjoy having a discussion with you about all sorts of topics. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you for joining me. Where can people find out more about you?

Cain (37:59.491)
Yeah.

Cain (38:14.661)
So you can look at my LinkedIn or Red Badger's website, so red -badger .com or you can email me at cain .ala at red -badger .com.

Mike (38:27.088)
Perfect. Kane, thanks ever so much. It's been a real pleasure.

Cain (38:29.369)
Likewise, next time let's do a podcast on vinyl, shall we? You can...

Mike (38:33.674)
Definitely that would be outstanding vinyl and associated audio equipment.

Cain (38:39.237)
Yes, exactly. Top five records and the equipment that you like to listen to it on.

Mike (38:45.418)
Top five records and the equipment. Oh, that could go on for a while. That's an excellent idea, Cain, definitely. I might do a special episode, which is on this series, nothing to do with sales, everything to do with vinyl and audio. I'll take you up on that. That's a brilliant idea. Perfect. We'll organize that. Thanks, Cain. It's been a real pleasure. Cheers, on you, mate. Right, I'll stop recording.

Cain (38:48.645)
Let's try that.

Cain (39:00.197)
Yeah, brilliant.

Cain (39:05.145)
You take care.