Simon Bowkett on Chaos to Creation Confessions: Hear how by setting outcome goals Simon wrote his 60,000 word book in just 6 months

Debs Jenkins (00:00):
Okay, we’re recording. Okay. So today we’re talking to Simon Bowkett, who is the owner of Symco training, which is a sales training company for the automotive world. After a successful career. As senior manager in the car sales industry, Simon saw a gap in the market for trainers who could bring the real world into training. And that’s why in 2000 he formed Symco Training. Simon speaks on stages around the world. He has created and developed this unique sales training platform for the auto industry. And recently he’s written his first book Words That Sell Cars. And I’ve got to admit, Simon is my favorite Australian. And over the years he has shed some great diamond under sayings, but, but perhaps my favorite is don’t pee in my pocket and tell me it’s the rainy season.
Simon Bowkett (00:51):
You no, that’s not actually what I said, but that’s probably close enough. Isn’t it?
Debs Jenkins (00:59):
But what’s your, what’s your, what are you working on?
Simon Bowkett (01:02):
Hey, listen, first, I guess I thank you very much for this invited me to come along this and Deb’s anyone else who knows Deb? She’s absolutely brilliant. And she’s the person that helps create lots of things. Without Deb, there wouldn’t be a book and there wouldn’t be lots of other things that we do. So firstly, thank you very, very much for this. I really do appreciate it. What are we working on? Listen, the world has gone online. We all know what COVID-19 has done to our businesses. Lots of coaches, lots of trainers out there. I imagine they’re all pivoting. Doesn’t that word? I’m sick of that now. Okay. But we’re working on selling our online training. And I can tell you, I wish I can tell you. I was a genius and six years ago we developed an online training platform and that’s really helping us at the moment, but there’s probably a lot of luck in it. But we’re doing a lot of online training in the motor trade. We develop our own learning management system. Cause there just wasn’t one out there that would do exactly what we needed. So that’s our main focus at the moment and with books and doing podcasts and stuff like this steps. So tell me about the learning management.
Debs Jenkins (02:16):
Cause I mean, you took her, that was a, you could have just put your stuff on someone else’s platform. Tell me how you came up with that creation.
Simon Bowkett (02:25):
Yeah. Listen, if people look at these learning management systems there there’s hundreds of them out there there’s Kajabi is and copies of Kajabi is, and there’s so many different things like that. And I won’t knock them and they’re fine. I find for the owner driver, smaller business, someone is going to pay for the training themselves and we’ll dial in. Now we train in the motor trade and I don’t want to offend anyone that I’ve worked with. But sometimes if people sell cars, they go into the motor trade cause they can’t flip the hamburger right at. And we had a system like that where we were asking salespeople to go onto the learning management system, remember a login, do their training and it just didn’t work. So our system, our portal, if you want to call it, that is simplicity in itself. We’ve kept the training.
Simon Bowkett (03:21):
Very, very small micro learning. I think the experts call it about five to 10 minutes. A video every day. It’s not PowerPoint. Most corporate training is boring. People lose the will to live doing it says short videos because that’s how the youth of today learn. I’ve got a 17 year old and a 14 year old they’re on YouTube all the time. The YouTube videos, the ones that get the big hits, they’re the short videos. They’re the other things we do is we send this training directly to the people’s laptop, a desktop or their mobile phone. So what happens is the learner just gets an email every day for the first 90 days in their business covering the different things they need to learn. Now we have five key programs. We have our first 90 day program, our sales masterclass for experienced salespeople. We have the dealing with the online inquiry, how to sell cars online.
Simon Bowkett (04:28):
And that’s the one that everyone wants in our business at the moment. We’ve got today’s service advisor and of course the management series, but all of them, we have the same format. We send the video to people every day. So it takes away every excuse and that, because it goes straight through that. All they need to do is click play. They listen to it and it’s done. And of course, then we have the test or the other thing that some of you guys might learn from this don’t test them every day. After every module, we test them every 10 days to make sure the retention is there. In fact, I remember speaking to one person when I was developing this and I was saying, I need to make sure that people are watching the video. I need to make sure that the learning is actually taken place so they can actually sell more cars.
Simon Bowkett (05:23):
Then the dealer can make more money and then we can send an invoice. Now to me, that was really simple. I had one guy, a leading person that’s worked with Anthony Robbins in the business. He’s with some big, big glass. And he turned around and said, Hey Simon, don’t forget the vast majority of people who buy the online training courses, don’t watch it. The vast majority of people are read a book or sorry, by the book, don’t even read it. And I just remember sitting, I think that that just can’t work, but that’s where our worlds have been slightly different. We work in a corporate world. So if I’m speaking to Toyota, for example, we’re doing training for them. Toyota pays the bill, but actually someone else has to do the training. And if that person’s doing the training, doesn’t get a result. There’s not going to pay the bill.
Simon Bowkett (06:18):
So we needed people to go through all the training. We needed people to read the book and that’s something we learned very early on. We need to take away every single barrier. We need to make it micro learning in small chunks. We test them every 10 days. And then of course we’ve got the things, the other learning management systems do. The little gotchas, it’s all timestamped. So we can ensure the person’s watched the training. Cause that’s, that’s really what people want. Now don’t get me wrong. There is a place for the Kajabi is of the world. But I think it’s for someone that I would buy a Kajabi course. But if I paid for the training, I’d make sure I went through it. But if I wanted someone, one of my employees, penny to go through some training, okay. If I paid for it, I’d might want to make sure penny got the result that I wanted her to do.
Simon Bowkett (07:13):
And that’s why we had to develop our own platform because you know what, there wasn’t one out there that did it and nothing out there. It was a big old investment. I can remember thinking, why have I done this? It would have been so much easier to use someone else’s platform. But thank goodness we have. And so now we have white label opportunities. We have other training companies that use our platform. Now they put their content onto our platform and that works well. So that’s that’s what we’re busy with doing at the moment there.
Debs Jenkins (07:43):
Well, that sounds like it’s going to keep you very, very busy. I want to deconstruct this a little bit if that’s so good. So you, you will integrity in the desire that the Toyotas of this world would get value for the money and obviously pay you because every business led you to create something, to meet the user, the learner where they are. So you’re not forcing the learner into where you want them to be. You went to where the learner is micro in their email box, on their phone rather than force them to have to come to your platform. So you went to where the learner is. You met them in that space. How did you, how did you work that out? Did you, was it a completely, was it a process or did you just know
Simon Bowkett (08:29):
It was trial and error to be fair? Now we had a platform to start with. I probably got into video training and now I’m thinking 15 years ago, Deb and I didn’t have the money to start with, to develop one of these platforms myself. And 15 years ago, there wasn’t a whole lot of plug and play situations out there or things that I could’ve done. And probably thank goodness for that. Otherwise I would have used else’s platform. If in years ago there’s a person called David Martin running the Marquee group in America. I was at a conference. He had all this training, video content. He had this platform, he built himself, which was like a Kajabi of the world where people had to dial into it. I thought, Oh, I like the idea of that. It’s not in the UK. I didn’t have the money.
Simon Bowkett (09:17):
So I’d done a deal with him where I’d start to sell his product into the UK market, using his training content until I had enough training content on myself, the big cost in all of this is when you go into a studio to actually make the videos. That’s the bit I always like to go into the studio, do it as professionally as I can with good green screens at the moment I’m in a studio. I, I think that works a lot better. So what David did is he said until you have your own content use summer, why content and we’ll start building up and he did a deal, which I had to pay 50% of the revenue to him at the time. It was a great deal. Cause I didn’t have to spend all the money on developing this whole platform to do some testing.
Simon Bowkett (10:11):
So that’s the kind of testing by somebody else who had gone there before and started leading the way. Yep. I can put my phone on the border. Very, very cost effectively. Basically. I wouldn’t say was there a market was an appetite for online video learning and there was, but what that testing showed us was people weren’t, by the way, it’s sold brilliantly. Cause we could reduce the costs. I didn’t have to have one of my trainers turn up physically to do all the training. We sold a Deb’s. I gotta tell you, we sold a lot of that to start with our real. It was brilliant, but Bermont no one else was doing it. Yeah. But what I learnt very quickly, it’s the sales people. Weren’t just watching it. They just weren’t doing it. Unless we were on the phone saying, please watch the training.
Simon Bowkett (11:04):
Please watch the training. Please watch the training. In fact, we were turning up saying, please watch the training. They just weren’t doing it. And of course we needed them to get the knowledge so they could actually some more cows, some more products. So we could actually remember the person paying the bill, so they’d want to pay us there. So that’s where the testing phase started. And whilst I was still using David Martin’s platform and he’s still a good friend, we still talk to him today. Whilst we do that, I was looking at everything else around there and there just wasn’t anything there. So I started to develop this. We we’ve had to find a developer. I don’t know if you’ve ever had to deal with the developer. I can remember speaking to one lady said that she married three software developers and they’re all bonkers.
Simon Bowkett (11:55):
They’re all mad, but I love them, but they just speak a different language to me. And they talk about medical orients through flux capacitors. And how does this work? I just glaze over and I went through two or three different developers until I could find someone that could actually understand exactly what I wanted. Okay. I just want it not a huge portal. I didn’t want it to look like Facebook. I just wanted this training video to come through to people’s phone, like click play. And it happened when they had to do a test, it went straight through to their phone and it happened. I wanted it so, so simple. And for, for some of our clients in the motor trade, there’s a company called see it now and see it now is a simple idea where they send a video of the car through to a customer or a video of the customer’s service what’s getting done on their service car, through to the customer.
Simon Bowkett (12:58):
It was so simple because the video just come directly through to the customer’s phone with no logins. So I actually developed our platform. It’s called the sales fitness platform on the basis of see it now. And we finally, we found someone, we tested, we tested, we tested it, fell over so many different times. I, I would always recommend finding someone. That’s not the cheapest out there. We all know this, you get what you pay for. The first one that was nice and cheap, it just didn’t work. We found someone else. I had to stretch myself there, but it was worth it to get that robust system that didn’t keep falling over. And here’s the kicker to this store. Now, some people might say, well, hold on, you were doing a deal with David Martin, you developed your own thing. Is he not unhappy with, you know, on the country? Because he was having the same issue. He now in the States has our same platform. He calls it the bootcamp and he actually now delivers the training and Zach was same way as we do. So we’ve helped each other out there because we found the problem. We looked for the solution. And we finally got the final solution there
Debs Jenkins (14:15):
Out here. A fantastic light. One of the things I want to come back to is simple. I think lots of people when they’re creating something imagined like a very complex, huge, gigantic thing and dive in trying to create this complex system. But you look for where the problem was, where the pain was and then creating something simple to solve that. So they solve that problem
Simon Bowkett (14:38):
Has to be dense. It’s gotta be simple because you know, I started washing cars for a living. In fact my biggest word is corrugated iron. That’s why I needed you or help to write my book because I’m half a literate, but actually on that’s a big word, count up all the syllables in that. But yeah, it had to be simple because otherwise, if it just wouldn’t get used and any training, if it’s the best training idea in the world, if it’s not used, it’s actually pointless. And I see so many of these entrepreneurs out there, these these education people out there that are selling these online programs, but actually people aren’t going through all the training. They’re not going through the training. Sure. You might get the training junkies. The go from training costs, the training costs to the training course. And I’m sure there’s lots of people out there, but don’t, we need to actually give the solutions to the problem.
Simon Bowkett (15:36):
The reason why I keep coming back and working with you Debs is because I tried and tried for six years to write a book. I just couldn’t do it. I tried everything. I keep coming back to you because you took me by the Scruff of the neck and beat me up until we got this book written. And that’s because it’s that simple approach. And the other thing, if I can share this with some of your audience, we talk about goal setting. And I had this conversation with Debs and we talked about this book and honestly it was five or six years. I had this thing written and then rewritten and then rewritten. Okay. It kept on changing. The name of it changed three or four times. I thought I wrote the wrong book at some point. And Deb’s, I don’t know if you remember this conversation, but you said to me, you don’t have a goal.
Simon Bowkett (16:30):
I can remember thinking fuck off. I trained goal setting for a reason for living. I know goals. I know exactly what it is. And you beat me up. You said, ah, you’ve got an outcome goal. Haven’t you not a process goal. I can remember guy. Yeah, you got an outcome goal. You can see the book written. You can see it on the shelves. Okay. You can see it in the dealerships, but you’ve not broken it down. I thought, Oh, she’s got me here. You know what? I’m one of these numbers that I had a picture of my book in w H Smiths. So I could visualize it was completed. What a lot of crap that is okay until you just turned around and said, and I’ve never shared this with you, is it right? How long this book going to be? You said 30,000 words.
Simon Bowkett (17:21):
I said, that’s crap. It needs to be 60,000 words. So we actually broke it down. Listen, it’s 60,000 words. You need to write this 12 months. You want the book to come out. So listen, let’s do this in six months. That’s 10,000 words you need to write every month with actually that’s two and a half thousand words I need to write every week. Actually that’s 5,000 words, no 500. It me a calculator. That’s 500 words I have to write every day. And by the way forgive my language. Okay. I hope I don’t offend people, but in my family, my books called words that sell cars. But in my family, it had another name. It was called that fucking book because I hated that thing around at the moment. But I knew Debs. I had to write 500 words every working day. I knew I didn’t have time to do that.
Simon Bowkett (18:21):
I was so busy. So I set my alarm one hour earlier. I got a Costa coffee before I went in to do my training in that dealership. And I wrote 500 words every day. Now I’d love to tell you I do that every day. It didn’t some days I missed it. I remember once I missed it for the whole week, but then Saturday morning I’d write two and a half thousand words. And you know what? I learnt, never do that again because that Saturday I didn’t finish until about 10 30 at night. Oh. And by the way, I’m half illiterate. So writing those words was me speaking into my phone and it wasn’t 500 every day. Obviously some days were more, some days were less. We had the plan of the book. When I started writing, I didn’t have the plan. I go, I just don’t want to write a book.
Simon Bowkett (19:11):
Let’s just do what to do on training courses. This will be easy. Okay. But we put it into that plan that you wrote for me, Debs. Okay. And then I just had to fill in the boxes on that plan. But here’s the funny thing I said to myself, six months to write the book and I want it to be 60,000 words. And this is the bit that someone wants to speak to us. Let me get rid of that. But this is a bit that I never told you, Debs. Okay. The final version, this is before editing and this was before Lucy got hold of it and cut the guts out of it. But on the final editing, it was 59,450 words. And I finish it on the 10th of June. And what that taught me is goal setting. It’s not an outcome goal. It’s the process goal. I mean, sure. That might be a coincidence, but it’s when you broke it down into those small chunks. No, I’m not telling anyone. They don’t know. How do you eat an elephant? We all know this, break it down into small chunks and have a process goal, not an outcome goal. And that was one of the best things I learned.
Debs Jenkins (20:24):
And I think this really fits in beautifully at the moment with my new way of thinking about this. We’ve got, we kind of live in a chaotic world and we have lots of chaos going on in our heads. And our goal is to create things like a book or a course or a platform. And that there is a gap between the chaos of our thinking and the creation at the end of it. And I think that that thing that bit in the middle is constraints. So I constrained your creativity, your chaos, your ideas. I constrain them and told you, Hey, let’s do this. What’s your outcome goal? What do you want the creation to be like? But these are the constraints that we have to work in. Now I want to talk to you about constraints. Cause I think constraints, I love constraints and that’s got nothing to do in life. Three ex-husbands constraints for me are the only way I can work. If I don’t have a constraint, I don’t create that. That’s. So I want to talk to you about constraints because
Simon Bowkett (21:22):
Mmm.
Debs Jenkins (21:24):
You are quite prolific in the videos that you create for your training. Cause you’re pride prolific, but do you have a process for constraining? I put also you talk about small chunks, micro learning and simple. So how do you constraint all the things you want to tell somebody in a video to the smallest possible unit that’s valuable to them?
Simon Bowkett (21:45):
Yeah. I still wish I knew that one. I’m still trying to learn that all the time. And that’s why it took me so long to write the book. Cause I didn’t have those constraints. It didn’t have any accountability where it had to be done. So what I did is I kept on going off into different areas. I remember starting thinking, do I have enough ideas for a book? And then I realized, well, hold on, I’ve got too many books in my head and what you kept on saying is no, no, no. Get it back to back to, and we started talking about first book, second book, third book. And you put the constraints around. No, no, no cut. Because look at this book is 60,000 words in a business book. That’s probably too big and what a lot of people would say, but that’s part of it because I always struggled with those constraints.
Simon Bowkett (22:33):
And same as when I do the video work, I am, I have a structure of things I want to cover. I, some people work really, really well with doing a a teleprompter or something like that. I just can’t do that. Again, cause I can hardly read I write three or four points down that I know I want to cover. And I just imagine my audience is in that little camera there. And I’m just speaking to that one salesperson, even though I know it’s going out to 13,000 people, I picture that one person that I’m trying to help on this one thing. And then I have my sales director. So many times I cut your 18 minutes now and they’ll go, Oh crap. What can we cut out of that? I need him there. Cause if he didn’t tell me that I’d let a few 18 men, that ones go out, cause I’d say no, but it’s good stuff.
Simon Bowkett (23:29):
I can’t cover that up. And I need someone else to give me that constraint. Same as deadlines. I need someone else to give me a deadline and I I’m just really bad with that. I, that accountability. And I think what’s really helped me with the video programs, the podcasts, the the book is I started telling people the books coming out. And I, it’s a trick that I probably plan on my own mind when I told people it’s coming out. In fact I have the next business partner though. Wasn’t very happy with, I made sure he knew I had a book coming out. Cause then I had to bloody do it. I don’t know if I listen to listen to some of these other podcasts that you’re doing in the series Debs, I’m sure other people will talk about the same thing they need, the reason why they got to bloody do it. I think we do as humans don’t we?
Debs Jenkins (24:30):
Absolutely. And I think, I think accountability is one of the strongest constraints we can set. And I want to know, I’m going to ask you another question on that constraint, but you set yourself, which was telling this guy that you were going to be doing it. Is that was that a push constraint or pull constraint. So were you doing it to satisfy yourself?
Simon Bowkett (24:55):
Yeah. Great question. Good question. I don’t really know. Because it’s, I know I was making a rod for my own back, but bear mind, six years, I tried to get this book done. I needed to get it done there. I had you beat me up, which was good, but when you’re paying someone to beat you up, they’re always going to beat you up in a nice way. I needed some other internal beat up and this guy, it was good cause I needed to make sure I get it before he did it. I needed to make sure it was out there before he did that really gave me that push. The other constraint is, I dunno, is it constraint dibs or is it the accountability? This 500 a day. I really beat myself up lots over that if I didn’t do that.
Simon Bowkett (25:50):
And I didn’t want to do it so many times, but the date in Starbucks quite frequently to check up on, yeah, it was Starbucks or Costa coffee, actually. It was, yeah, it should have been sponsored by Costa. But that day that any of the parents out there when I had to work all day, so I didn’t finish it until 10 30. I had Sean coming in and saying, dad, we playing football. Dad, are we going for a ride? And I’m like, no, I just got to do this flip book. Okay. you know, next time I didn’t want to do it in that cost of coffee. You know, that thought process there it’s the pleasure and pain, isn’t it? I had to beat myself up to get this completed. It’s it’s, that’s what worked for me. I’m sure everyone’s slightly different there.
Simon Bowkett (26:40):
And then sometimes when I thought I’ve no idea what I had to do just by sitting there and forcing myself to do something, sometimes that inspiration come once the bumps in the seat, you got to do something. And I remember sitting there thinking I’ve got nothing today. I’ve got nothing. And many times if I had nothing and that’s where I would then not do it. But then when I forced myself to sit there, then that Saturday, that 10 30 at night, that was, it happened. Cause that week I had nothing, I had absolutely nothing on what I was going to do. Okay. And I don’t know if any of other, your clients got this, but I got this bit that I find it hard to admit to my my own clients. Cause we all need to be confident and let’s can we do it?
Simon Bowkett (27:36):
But deep down inside, I’ve got this shit. Am I really good enough? Can I actually write a book? Who the hell do I think I am? Yeah. Cause I would read all these Anthony Robbins books and all these other books and these geniuses there. I remember thinking, can I really do this? And this is the daft thing. I would go on stage. Okay. I’ve had feedback that it was the best conference people have been on. It’s the best idea ever. But I had one little comment. People say, yeah, I’ve heard that before. Yeah. I beat myself up over that. Then when I’m going to write this book, you know, I see all of these geniuses that writing these books. I remember thinking, am I really good enough? Can I do that deep down inside? When I put, put my head on the pillow at night, I had that little bit where I’m thinking, who are you kidding?
Simon Bowkett (28:35):
Who do you think you are now? Listen, I tell you how silly that is. Since the lockdown we’ve sent out 13,482 training modules to people, we’re doing a lot of training there. I don’t say that to be arrogant. And I hope it doesn’t come across that way or to break any way, shape or form, but just let you know that we’ve clearly got so many people like what we do and how we do it, but I still sit there and think it’s shit. Am I really good enough? And that’s what stopped me so many times when I sat down there, I forced myself to have to write something. And back to that Saturday again, I keep coming back to that. I sat there for probably about, I don’t know, it must’ve been two and a half, three hours. I got sucked into all the procrastination stuff if anyone’s heard.
Simon Bowkett (29:27):
But Tim urban [inaudible], that was me. I was going online and having looked at Anthony Robbins, I’m going to be the next Anthony Robbins of the motor trade and thinking shit, he’s good. I can’t do all that. But about two and half hours into it, I put it all aside. I just started typing this time. Okay. Actually, no I didn’t. I used a pen. I just started scribbling. I just started scribbling and scribbling and scribbling. And then I thought I’ve got it. And then I got my phone and then that’s when I got to 10 that night. Cause I was actually on a roll. And if I look back to that completed book, Debs, that section that I did like that, that was the four fundamentals. And it’s the four fundamentals are the bits. I’m glad you’re laughing there. You’re laughing because you thought it shite. Well, it’s the full fundamentals.
Simon Bowkett (30:25):
It’s the four fundamentals that I get from so many, not just in the motor trade, in selling in general, people saying you’ve hit the nail on the head. It’s those forfeit on the mentally is covering everything. And that was that Saturday, the whole basis of those four fundamentals I come up with tell us the full fundamentals. I got a four fundamentals of buying anything is these fundamentals have to be satisfied for people to make a decision. So in a nutshell, it’s comparison. People who feel like they got a good deal. I need to compare it to something else. There’s value. They need to see value. And there’s a set of value scales where one side we’ve got the product service. The other side we’ve got the now the money, their value is always a moving feast. Okay? A Louie futon, a M bag, these big, heavy thing that people spend nine and a half thousand pounds on might have lots of, lots of value to some people.
Simon Bowkett (31:22):
However, after they’ve loaded onto the plane, the plane crashed. Okay. They have to get into a life. Rough. What’s more valuable. Now that Louie futon or that life rough value changes all the time. That’s why we have a set of value scales. Next one is scarcity. So if something scares like a diamond, okay. The value tends to go up, but scarcity, is it always scarce? Can we create scarcity? Cause actually a dime is a scarce as we’re led to believe. Of course, last one is urgency. Okay. Now listen, that’s in a nutshell as I told you, it took me to 10, 10 30 at night to write all of those. But when you look at why anyone buys anything, buying, selling, training courses, buying, selling a keynote speaker, buying or selling a car, if you haven’t sold something, you come back to it.
Simon Bowkett (32:20):
It’s one of those four fundamentals that you’ve missed. Okay. My business is built on those four fundamentals and I was my, my, my struggle with this is I think, and hold on. Is that too complex? Just for the car salesperson, is it maybe for some, okay, but it’s those four fundamentals and how we flesh it out in the book. That’s the bit that now is getting me into other sales industries. Now I’m getting people saying, can you just talk about those four fundamentals for our business to business selling? But I suppose the point in creating something dibs was forcing me to sit down and do it and knowing I’d have to put up with you saying, are you there yet? What have you done yet?
Debs Jenkins (33:05):
Brilliant, because you’ve actually identified another couple of other things here. So I’m going to deconstruct you again,
Simon Bowkett (33:12):
Go on
Debs Jenkins (33:14):
Four fundamentals you named your IP. So then other people know when they talk about it, they can name it and they can request it. And they can say, actually, how does this apply here? How does this apply here? So you created intellectual property that you can now create more things from, which brings us background in my, my crazy loop of chaos constraints, creation, and naming something is a constraint you constrain it to within that name. So what has naming it for you creative for you? Does it, I mean, cause one of the things it created is it, I think is it changes the way other people can buy you?
Simon Bowkett (33:55):
Well, that’s a great question. I’ve never even thought that we’ve got a nother IP that we could sell there. I’ve really not even thought about it that way. But I suppose we have and it’s quite interesting. It’s maybe speaking to a musician, what comes first? The music or the words I’ve always struggled with the name until it was written. I mean the, the book to be fair, the book I had the name for six years but it’s not the name that ended up being there’s a guy called Joe. I don’t know if you know him from rethink press really, really good guy. He turned around and changed the name words that sell cars. And he had a great idea that this could be just the words that sell series. So it could be the words that sell real estate, the words that sell B to B, the words that sell.
Simon Bowkett (34:46):
So that’s the series that we’re going to do. And the generic book will be words that sell, but that come after the initial name, but to think it through Deb’s the name was just can be it was all about, I can’t remember the original name, but it was words that work selling. That’s what was going to be words that work in selling cars. So I had that to work for name I’m just not sure does the name come first? I think the name comes after writing it for me. Maybe everyone’s
Debs Jenkins (35:25):
Not lots of people find that. So when I deal with clients, what we find is that then that they are doing things naturally. So they are delivering training or their mentor or their coach, or they’re doing it naturally. And they help people make naturally, and they don’t necessarily realize that massive value that they are, they realize the value, but they don’t realize how they doing that value. And so when we deconstruct what they’re doing in this chaos bit, we can sometimes find like your full fundamentals, what are the four things that you do? And if you do these things, it always works. What are the three steps that you have to take? If you do these three steps in this order always works. And then now you can, from, from that chaos, you can create your IP and IP is the value that you have in the business, the value that’s there when you will not their IP or intellectual perspective, I’ve started calling it an app I pay is the way of the way that you see the world. That’s different Trevor party house. And that’s your special way of thinking about things.
Simon Bowkett (36:26):
Yeah, I like that. Yeah. Very good.
Debs Jenkins (36:29):
So, okay. I have I have another question for you. I’m going to start leading us to a, sort of a conclusions that I I’ve heard on the grapevine that you and seen some lovely photos of your gorgeous that you and your son fly planes. Tell me, I want to know about this plane that you and your son fly and your 17 year old son.
Simon Bowkett (36:51):
Yeah, I listened. This was very proud. Dad speaking at the moment. My little boy on his 16th birthday he went solo in a plane. So to, to people who don’t fly, whatever that means, he jumps on plane, no instructor, taxis out Emma, my wife and I, and my youngest son, Sean, we’re sitting there watching him. He just flying off and it’s, it’s a scary thing as a senior 16 year old boy out there, you know, your pride and joy up there in the air. I mean, he could have broken the propeller. He could have broken the landing gear or something like that. It was horrendous though. Sorry, that was a joke, but it was very, very proud on his 17th birthday, he’s got his full pilot’s license now and it’s still, he can’t drive a car yet. Well, legally he has no license, but he can jump on a plane and fly to Europe.
Simon Bowkett (37:42):
And when COVID-19 stops, it seems mad. He can do that. And flying is one of the things I’ve done for 17, 18 years now. And it’s Deb’s, it’s one of the few things that I, it helps me relax. Cause I can’t think about work. I’m one of these people business owner that I’m always working. If I’m on a beach in Spain, my mind’s thinking about work. I just find it hard to switch off, but flying a plane is, is nice because you can’t not think about it. But here’s something I don’t know if I’ve ever told you, if we’re talking about creating things. And you gotta think I’m completely mad now, but that plain dibs, I stuck together myself in my garage. I built that over three years, made your own plane and then sent your 16 year old son and he on his own.
Simon Bowkett (38:39):
Yeah, I know that sounds completely mad. Doesn’t it? Okay. Now maybe not as mad it comes in a kit. Okay. it was three is my life. Okay. On weekends, sticking it together in my garage. I have photos or I’ll send it through to you you’ll have a good old laugh. And as it turns up in the box, okay. And I stuck it all together. But it might not be as mad as you think in the UK and around the world, there’s different associations that do this and it happens more than you think. And there’s associations with the light aircraft association. Now when you building it, the authorities, don’t just let you build a plane and go off and fly it and see if it works. Okay. It has to be approved to be forehand. It’s approved kit. You have to have an approved inspector.
Simon Bowkett (39:30):
And I think it was something like 60 times, Dave Garney was my inspector. He had to turn up to make sure that I’d built it right when it was completed. I had to get a test pilot to fly it for the first five hours. Okay. Now the steel, now again, I could have done the test line myself by elected to get someone who knew the type to do it. Now, again, he chested everything. And sometimes if you have a composite part that Maya cross made out of a composite, it’s a it’s a mix of beginning fiberglass and so forth. You have elementary ones, but sometimes when you build something, they ask you to build two of them. So you can come along and break the one you’re not going to use to make sure it’s at the right breaking strain, these, all their things they do to test to make sure that it’s strong enough.
Simon Bowkett (40:25):
It’s all approved, but I suppose you’re talking about creation. That’s not that dissimilar to, I suppose, to the online training program we developed we knew what the whole vision was at the end. That’s pretty straight forward. There was two big manuals or things I had to build. There was, I had an outside influence and inspector that I was paying for. And I knew that he was turning up on a certain date. So I had to make sure the under carriage was on by this bit. I had to make sure that I don’t know the [inaudible] was completed by this bit because I knew he was coming along to inspect it. It was all broken down into small chunks there. I had money constraints that was built, I dunno, 15, 16 years ago, something like that. So I had to sell more training courses to by the engine guy.
Simon Bowkett (41:20):
I then had to buy the avionics after that that had pay for the full painting of it. I cheated that I didn’t paint it. I got an expert to do that. I suppose it’s, it’s very, to what you’re talking about. Brilliant metaphor. Fantastic. And it’s the pride, when you have that book that you’ve developed, you’ve got that online program where, you know, 13 odd thousand sessions, we sent out the sinful lock-in locked down, lock in, lock down. What do we call it? Lock-Ins when you get to drink a lot. Yeah. I’m plenty of that. But I’m flying a plane and allowing your son in fact, I’ve got one photo when it turned up, it must be older than that. Where James is actually on Emma’s hip, where the whole box has been delivered. She’s looking at me like, what has he done now? Okay. My long suffering wife and she was still on his hip. So he must’ve been 18 months old or maybe younger than that. And now that same plane they built all those years ago, he goes off and fly solo and did all these lessons. And it was, and was a very, very proud dad. And talk about creating, taking chaos and creating something. I, now I want to build another one, but we can’t talk too loudly cause my wife won’t hear this.
Simon Bowkett (42:52):
Don’t be doing that. They’ll be doing that. I’ll be in a lot of trouble. I need to do some other things first. Fantastic. Okay. Is there anything I haven’t asked you that you want to tell me? No, I think we’ve covered lots there. We said it was going to be half an hour, but we’ve called her. I’ve rambled on maybe a little bit more than that. Sorry about that. Listen, I just hope you guys listen to this. Get some ideas from it. I’m not perfect at all. So many different things I wish I’d done differently. Learn from my mistakes, as I say if anyone wants to look at our online training platform, sales fitness, get in contact with Debs. Look for me, it’s nice and easy to find me. Linkedin is where we do everything on Simon. [inaudible] On LinkedIn. Just have a look at there or go and find the words that sell cars. If you need to get hold of us have a look at it, online programs, and if I can help with anything, get in touch.
Debs Jenkins (43:49):
Fantastic. And I’ll put all the links below in the comments so that everybody can get in touch with you Simon. Thank you. And you’ve demonstrated yet again that you are my favorite Australian in the world. The only Australian, you know, surely.
Simon Bowkett (44:06):
Good to speak again. Bye bye.