How To Use Online Business Networks Effectively To Build Your Business in 2022
Penny Power OBE is a British author and speaker. The former founder of Ecademy
Penny was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2014 New Year Honours for services to entrepreneurship in social and digital development.
This Weeks Main Questions
#1 – Penny, what do you think are some of the major tech trends that have been accelerated during the pandemic, and how will these affect relationship building in the future?
#2 – How do you get any insights/tips connected to how people can effectively build their professional networks in 2022?
#3 – LinkedIn – I’ve personally got a love-hate relationship with LinkedIn. Still, I think it offers some great opportunities have you got a couple of tips/insights connected to using it effectively?
#4 – With the “Me Too Movement,” many businesses in the tech sector are struggling to connect to what can be allowed in their individual companies connected to nonbusiness discussions in the office or on Slack. Have you got any insight connected to this?
#5 – How do you see this affecting company culture and effectiveness with the acceleration of remote working connected to the pandemic?
#6 – What have been some of your memorable mistakes that you are happy to share with us, and what did you learn from these business mistakes?
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Episode Transcript
Length: 38:15
(00:00)
Intro: Welcome to the WP-Tonic this week in WordPress and SaaS podcast; where Jonathan Denwood interviews the leading experts in WordPress, e-learning, and online marketing to help WordPress professionals launch their own SaaS.
(00:15)
Andrew Palmer: Welcome to this week in WordPress and tech with Penny Power OBE, which is great. This is episode 691, and I’d like to get the guest to introduce themselves and I think we’ll go with Jonathan Denwood first because he is my host, and then we’ll go on to Penny.
(00:33)
Jonathan Denwood: Thanks, Andrew. I’m the founder of WP-Tonic. We help coaches, people that want to make a business out of e-learning, use the power of WordPress, but remove some of the hurdles. Back over to you, Andrew.
(00:48)
Andrew Palmer: Penny Power OBE, we’re very honored to have you with us today. Give yourself a little elevator pitch of who you are and why you are.
(00:57)
Penny Power: Well, thank you very much, Andrew and Jonathan, I’m excited about this. I’m very excited about understanding that WordPress can also have all these plugins to make it a learning system. But I know that’s not what we’re going to be talking about today, but it was fantastic to research what you do, Jonathan, thank you very much for having me on your show, both of you.
I don’t really do, I haven’t got an elevator pitch, I don’t know, I pretty much don’t go out networking like that enough, but my world is very much around community, how you become a citizen of a community, how you build community, how community can be a really big business-led growth strategy, a community can be. So, I think we’re going to talk today a little bit about that, about networking community, all the online world post-pandemic, all these things, and I’m looking forward to it very much.
(01:51)
Andrew Palmer: Brilliant. Well, I’ll do my introduction because I didn’t do it. So, I’m Andrew Palmer from bertha.ai, which is an artificial intelligence writing assistant built right into WordPress so you can write where you work. And on that note, we’re just going to take a very short break because we’re going to pay the piper with our lovely sponsors.
(02:14)
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(03:08)
Andrew Palmer: And we’re back. So, Penny, this week’s question or number one question is, what do you think are some of the major tech trends that have been accelerated during the pandemic? And you kind of alluded to that in your introduction. And how will these affect relationship building in the future, specifically not only for you but maybe for your community as well?
(03:29)
Penny Power: Well, if I start by saying that I’ve been at technology since was 19, I joined it in 1983, so I have seen the emergence of huge amounts of things, literally from the desktop going into the office and then through to the family desk, office computers, the family, computer, I should say, all the way through to the internet. And I started the first social network in the world in 1998, the academy, which predated LinkedIn and Facebook.
And so, it’s been really fascinating, for me, as a relatively older person, I suppose, I’m 58 now, to watch all these trends coming up and, obviously the pandemic, the joy in it for me personally, was that a lot of people who resisted technology just had to get on board to it. And I think that’s one of the most exciting trends that happened because from councils that said we’re going to get a 12-year program to deliver stuff online to sort of delivering something within three days. It accelerated the motivation.
So, that’s all really great, and obviously, the use of zoom, WebEx, Teams, the ability to use things like StreamYard or Restream, these types of tools so that we can stream out to lots of audiences. I have a lot of clients, so we’re very, very resistant to doing things like that, they were terrified of the camera. Absolutely terrified of it. And so, the greatest trend I think is obviously the use of technology has now expanded out. And when I look at a lot of people my age, a lot of them were hoping that they could retire before the need to be really embedded in technology would bite their bum and it’s happened quicker.
So, that’s great. And then in terms of, I suppose, more of the soft skills around technology, I’m really intrigued by that because when we first started a social network back in 1998, we were trying to convince people that you could be a friend online and literally it was four years before Facebook. No, it was four years before LinkedIn, six years before Facebook, and eight years before Twitter. And so, we were really evangelizing a concept to people and we obviously had the early adopters, the lowest hanging fruit, and we could then teach them the culture that we wanted to create, which was friendship first, commerce second.
Build your social capital. And then as we became more and more successful, the more transactional thinking people started to think, wow, here’s a huge community of people that I could sell to. And they became the hunters and they would join and they would damage their reputation because they would just burn through everybody and not be interested in being a friend and not interested in engaging. And then social media came about, and we moved from social networking to the joy for a lot of people of, now I don’t have to engage at all, I can just broadcast some stuff out and I can even delegate that to loads of people, and I don’t even have to make the effort to talk to people.
And I think that was a great shame because I think people then became hidden behind all these automated systems and they lost their personal brand really and therefore lost their social capital in doing that. And I’ve been banging the drum fiercely for years through speaking and writing about you as a person, what you do matters, obviously, it’s important because we all want to find great experts, but who you are is going to matter much greater than that.
And I think to try and close-off that question that you asked is what’s accelerated during the pandemic is I think people by being isolated, by being lonely, by not having the office water-hole or the ability to network in the same way, they have learned to engage online and through these tools spend a little bit of time asking questions like, what’s that behind you? And, oh, have I shown you my dog? And talking about their family and health. And I think that this has meant people are starting to engage at a human level and that is what I love, and I think that’s more sustainable when you’re building a business.
(07:48)
Andrew Palmer: Getting their personal brand sources. What do you think, Jonathan, about that? A lovely answer, Penny, by the way, but what do you think, Jon?
(07:54)
Jonathan Denwood: Yeah, it sounds fantastic. I wonder if you have any insights about how somebody should try and build a professional network in 2022 with a focus on LinkedIn? I have a lot of people contact me through LinkedIn and to my sense, it’s not done very well. I don’t know if it’s because of the way they’re doing it or it’s something to do with LinkedIn in general, but I tend to use the podcast as a way of trying to offer some value, but hardly any, it all seems to be canned to me.
(08:34)
Penny Power: So, how should I answer this? I am definitely somebody who prefers quality over quantity. And we’ve always joked about that, I think I said that first at sort of an academy meeting in London, we used to have about 600 people meet once a month. And I said that and there was a lot of laughter because there was my husband and I standing up on stage together, and I think they thought I was talking about something else, but I always believed in quality over quantity.
However, there is no doubt that if you can build a lot of connections and have a very open and random and supportive attitude to the way you do it, your social capital’s greater, and the randomness of your connections can be quite incredible. So, I think the gratuitousness of sending out connect, connect, connect, connect, connect without any relevance and without any resonance is a complete waste of time. But I think we need to be realistic about life.
I started being in business when I was 19 in telesales and at the time in 1983, and many people will remember this, we had yellow pages and we had a telephone and we had an index card box at the front. I would work for a computer distributor, they were selling Gillo, Packard, Microsoft, PageMaker, all sorts of software and hardware, so I was in a distributor. And there were 5,000 computer dealers and we had to make phone calls to them to try and get their business, and we would literally go through the yellow pages and say hi and ask them if they needed anything at the moment; cold-calling or whatever. Over time we built a relationship, and I remember the first order I got.
This is really relevant because I don’t think that things have changed just because it’s technology, humans haven’t changed; we all have the same needs to matter, belong, people to be interested in us. So, the first order I got when I was working for this company and I’d been sent on a telesales training course that left me cold because it was all manipulated scripts. The first order I got was I rang a guy, he had a business in Tolworth in London, near London, south London, Data Systems Electronics, they were called, his name was Roland.
He answered the phone with a cough. And I said, oh, hi, Roland. My name’s Penny, Ross at the time, and I work for Buytech. And I said, you don’t sound terribly well, so completely off-script here. And he said, no, I have a cough, I have a bad cough and I feel quite ill, in fact, I’m going to go home after this call. And I said, oh, I’m really sorry. I’m ringing from Buytech, and I’m actually trying to sell to you. And I bet you’re not in the mood for that, so go home and I’ll ring you another day. And that was it. And then when I went out for lunch that day and I found this little, there was this, a laid by, somebody had a tea van and sold sandwiches.
And on the counter in this van was a display of Tunes cough sweets, and I bought them for Roland. There was no ulterior motive. I went back to the office and I said to my supervisor, Suzanne, am I allowed to use the franking machine? People might not know what that is, but that’s for posting in business.
(11:55)
Andrew Palmer: We know what it is more.
(11:57)
Penny Power: Yeah. And I have a little jiffy bag and the compliments, can I send this? And she said; don’t be ridiculous, why would you send something like that? And I said, well, he’s not feeling very well and I just, and she said, no, you can’t. So, I said, well, am I allowed to buy it? So, I went to the secretary and I paid for an envelope and the framing machine, and I put a little note in there and I said, I hope you feel better too. Three days later, he rang up and he said, the call was put through to me, the first call that was ever put through to me as a salesperson.
And he said, hello, it’s Roland, you rang me the other day when I had a cough. Oh, hello, Roland, what can I do for you? And he said, well, get a pen and paper out, I have an order. And I just wrote down all these things, a little pack of this and Microsoft this, da, da, da. I wrote it all down on a piece of paper in our day book that we had, and I said, thank you, I’ve no idea how to put this into the system, can I ring you back, Roland, afterward? And he said, yes. Went to my supervisor, showed her this piece of paper and she looked at me in shock. And she said, well, how have you got an order of that size?
And I said, well, I sent him some Tunes. And from that day onward using my own values and my beliefs around relationships and caring for people and working on the long-term, I have always fought for the fact that we should build relationships, create our social capital, not look for a transactional outcome and just connect because we love people and it’s worked. So, it’s a long answer, Jonathan, to your question, how does.
(13:27)
Jonathan Denwood: I’m notorious for my winding long questions, ask Andrew.
(13:33)
Penny Power: So, how did people build LinkedIn? So, LinkedIn, at the very worst, it’s just a beast of a machine to be able to cold-call people.
(13:43)
Andrew Palmer: Sure.
(13:44)
Penny Power: And we could do that years ago and be crap at it. Now we have the ability to connect with someone and actually be interested in them, actually have a conversation with them, actually, listen to what their needs are and what their life is about, and what’s going on for them. Have they got a cough? And start to engage and look at the long-term. And that is what I’ve believed in since technology enabled us back in 1998 when we started, that is what I believed in and it’s called building social capital and being a citizen of these places.
(14:17)
Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. Just a quick.
(14:18)
Andrew Palmer: I think it’s great. Just, sorry, Jonathan’s interrupting me. I have the title for Penny’s next book, which is, ‘Have You Got A Cough’ and carry on, Jonathan.
(14:29)
Penny Power: I like that. I love that.
(14:31)
Jonathan Denwood: It’s just, I think it’s about having some personal charm, but I’m amazed at the people that contact me through LinkedIn and it’s obviously a canned response and that’s not so bad. It’s just that you think they would just offer some kind of value. I know you do the podcast, this person might be a good guest to you or I see that you’re in the learning, this person might be interested. But they don’t, they contact me and it’s just a ramble about them, they don’t offer anything.
(15:14)
Andrew Palmer: I think it’s the point that Penny’s making, you’re making that point, Penny, is you’re making that point that connection is about being kind, being helpful, being caring, but even to the degree that Jonathan said, I know you do the podcast and I think Penny Power would be great for this interview, why don’t you connect with them? And that would then make me remember that person or make Jonathan remember that person. I want to move on to another question that Jonathan can ask, it’s number three, it starts with ‘the’. Because I don’t like asking questions like this because I’m a bit funny on questions like this, but Jonathan can ask this one, you can get the blame.
(15:55)
Jonathan Denwood: Oh, you want me to ask question three?
(15:59)
Andrew Palmer: Yup. With ‘the’.
(15:59)
Jonathan Denwood: So, I think it’s linked to the last conversation really.
(16:03)
Andrew Palmer: Number three or four, it’s with the meeting.
(16:06)
Penny Power: Number four. I know which one you’re saying.
(16:07)
Jonathan Denwood: Oh, no, the me-too. So, I don’t want it, I know you don’t and I definitely don’t, I don’t want it to go into a political discussion. I have another show for that, Penny. But the me-too movement, the reason why I selected this as a topic for our discussion, Penny, is that in some of your other interviews you talk about the balance between don’t think business isn’t about relationships because it is, it is personal. I think you stated that in one of your recent other interviews and I agree with that, the idea that you can divorce your business from your personal, but in some ways, you do have to do it, but it is all intertwined.
And there’s been a lot of discussion in the tech community, especially in America where people have been taking personal discussions and they’ve been discussing it at work. Specifically, there was a company called Basecamp that has a very popular project management software, and literally, their company imploded through discussions. So, I was going to ask you, where’s the balance, where do you see the balance, Penny?
(17:36)
Penny Power: I think what we have and I know with sort of the me-too movement is what you were also intonating earlier. Let me start with this. A friend of mine once said to me, and she was a specialist in psychology and neuroscience and behavioral change, and organizational change. We were having this really interesting conversation about change. And it was actually personal to me because I went through a real crisis of confidence after the academy came to an end and then I went into business with someone who was just unpleasant.
It was a real accident but possibly done in scarcity from my point of view. And as a result of it, I became quite untrusting of people and she said, you’ve obviously had pain in business and this is becoming relevant, you’ve always said pain in business, Penny. So, if, I don’t know whether, does this go out as a video or does this go out just as voice?
(18:36)
Andrew Palmer: It’s live as a video, but we’re technically, but it also streams.
(18:41)
Penny Power: Okay. So, if anybody’s listening to this, rather than watching it, I’m going to just hold a pen up and I’m just going to have it straight line and horizontal. And if that was a pivot point, like a Seesaw in the middle, sometimes things can go far too much to one side, it’s unbalanced. So, for me, for example, regarding trusting people, I’d gone way to the left and the seesaw was now really shooting up to the sky. And she said, sometimes the way that change has to take place is you go all the way to the other side when you want to address a problem. You overcompensate, and then eventually it balances into the middle.
And that’s been a really interesting thing to learn because when you look at the me-too movement, in some respects, some of us will think it’s gone far too far to one side because people are becoming so sensitive and I’ve experienced this. I referred to the female entrepreneurs within BIP100, I wrote, Hello, ladies. Two of them told me that was really disparaging, and I’m a woman.
(19:53)
Andrew Palmer: Sure, it’s difficult. This is why I don’t even like asking the question because it’s just ridiculous.
(19:59)
Penny Power: Exactly. So, I was flushed with embarrassment and I was doing this on WhatsApp, they couldn’t even see it. And I said, oh my goodness, I’m so sorry; I had no idea that was disparaging. What should I call you? And they said, call us female entrepreneurs or women. I didn’t even know that, but that’s a fact, and to a certain extent, I thought, oh my God, help me here, I’m a woman and I’m doing this wrong. So, it’s very scary for anyone.,
(20:20)
Jonathan Denwood: I don’t want to interrupt you Penny, but my reaction would be, if I utilize the word ‘girls’. I do feel that’s pretty patronizing, but to say ladies or women, but I think you’re pointing out we have a.
(20:41)
Penny Power: We don’t know the kind words. So, I had a conversation with my daughter about this. Now, this is taking this talk to a different level in a way and I apologize if this triggers anyone.
(20:51)
Andrew Palmer: Don’t worry, carry on.
(20:52)
Penny Power: But our daughter in 2016, when she was 24, went away skiing in Morzine. And unfortunately, a car drove up when she was walking between a nightclub and a bar, three men in it, dragged her into the car and abducted her, and raped her.
(21:09)
Jonathan Denwood: I’m so sorry.
(21:10)
Penny Power: And that is the most extreme form of abuse of a woman and absolutely, we have to do something about this way. But she said to me, the thing about me-too, mom, is you don’t create change for the huge scale of awful things that happen to people without redressing it at the very, very minimal side. And that’s why it’s maybe gone so far over, as I was showing with this duct list, but it needs to because it’s been really bad.
And therefore, I think we have to learn and educate ourselves, and equally, if you make a mistake as I have with those female entrepreneurs, learn from it, respect it, and move on, but I don’t think while you’re learning, people should be too reprimanded in those things.
(22:10)
Andrew Palmer: I’m with you all the way on that one because we are still learning, so you.
(22:15)
Penny Power: Yeah. We’re all still learning because we have generations and generations of treatment and habits that are laid down in DNA and in the way we behave that has to change.
(22:28)
Andrew Palmer: Well, especially for us, we all grew up in the sixties, I was born in 1960. And Jonathan, I think 1934 or something, but.
(22:39)
Jonathan Denwood: That’s the kindest thing you’ve said to me.
(22:41)
Andrew Palmer: We’ve had different culture shocks all the way through our lives, we had the sixties, we had the seventies, we had the eighties, the nineties, the whatever it was. So, we’ve had culture, and I call me-too a bit of a culture shock because it is, it’s to us, we say. Actually, you’re right. You are right about that, and I agree with you and I’ll move on, I’ll try and draw a line like the accounts say, draw a red line under it and move on. Now, next on from that.
(23:05)
Jonathan Denwood: Oh, we need to go for our break.
(23:07)
Andrew Palmer: We have to go for a little break for a little second again, want to pay the piper, but our wonderful sponsors; we could not do this without them. So, we’ll in a second or two.
(23:19)
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(24:40)
Andrew Palmer: We’re back. So, number four, we go with another question. We kind of mucked around with the questions a bit here today, so, you’ve kind of answered this, but I’m going to ask this question. And how does it affect you because I know that you’re a child of the same kind of decade as myself? And how would the acceleration of remote working be connected to the pandemic, how do you see that affecting company culture and effectiveness with the people that you’re working with currently?
(25:16)
Penny Power: Well, it’s a very frightening time for leaders I think because they’re also human and they’ve also had to learn to adapt. I remember the first time I ever saw a teacher, when I was at school, walk into a toilet, I thought, oh my gosh, teachers use toilets as well.
(25:33)
Andrew Palmer: Yeah. They are human.
(25:34)
Penny Power: Leaders are no different from any of us. They have the same vulnerabilities. They have to go through the same learning. They have to hopefully, be motivated to do that. But we were all thrown into chaos, these senior leaders; they were thrown into children at home, homework challenges, and technology challenges. How do I keep my team psychologically safe? How do I keep motivated? How do I get them onto the technology? They’ve all been through hell, and so I think, again, there’s a little bit of tolerance at the beginning, need it to happen and I hope it did happen.
Now, it’s bedding down and it’s not going to change because the actual workers are asking for this hybrid world.
(26:20)
Andrew Palmer: Well, we have government ministers walking into their parliamentary offices and going into the civil servants and leaving little notes and saying, I popped by to say, hello, I look forward to seeing you in soon, and that’s kind of not the attitude that we want, certainly, I don’t want that. I want people to accept that this is the new norm. I’ve worked from home for 20 years, we have StreamYard, we have zoom, we have all the connectivity that we need. And it’s kind of demonstrated we needed to up our game in broadband and internet access about five years ago, if we’d been at this level five years ago, we’d have been much, much better off, but I totally agree with you.
We have a work from home mentality, we have people wanting to get on with their lives, which we can do now, we’re saving. So, a friend of mine that we used to commute into London at 5:00 AM in the morning and get home at 8:00 PM at night, just so that he could do his nine to five job, has saved what? Five hours a day.
(27:22)
Penny Power: I know, it’s amazing.
(27:24)
Andrew Palmer: And it’s enlivened them.
(27:26)
Penny Power: Exactly. And there are two things about this. Obviously, the subject of mental health and wellbeing has really shot up and I think that’s really powerful. And what worries me is that some companies are burning their staff too much. So, there was a company in New York that hired me to do a talk on wellbeing and company culture. And when I was doing the briefing, the HR girl very proudly said, well, we allow the green light on Slack, which that might not mean much to some people, so we can explain it, but the green light on slack to be off for 30-minutes a day.
So, now the green light on Slack, so Slack’s this project management tool, whatever it is, but it can also work as an internal social network on staff. And it has a green light and you can toggle it to a red light when you go off to the lou because it means I’m not available. So, they had a company policy of that, and the other company policy that they were very proud of is that they had bought all their staff a year’s subscription to Calm.
(28:36)
Andrew Palmer: Awesome.
(28:37)
Penny Power: So, what they were doing is very task-related and delegating it out, they weren’t actually sorting the culture and the leadership and making this a very loving space and a great place to belong to, and my philosophy in life, business is personal, sits alongside the fact that Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which many of us know, the pyramid. Number three in that, after physical needs and safety, is love and belonging.
We all need a set of love and belonging, and that doesn’t stop the minute you walk into a business, in fact, to a lot of people, it’s where they spend most of their time around people, and they need that even more because that’s where they get the sense of attachment and self-esteem and the fact that they matter.
(29:28)
Andrew Palmer: I actually quite like the green light and the calm bit, but I get what you’re saying because we don’t have the water cooler moments anymore if you’re working remotely.
(29:36)
Penny Power: No, we don’t have anything to make us have that sense of belonging and that place where me as a whole person gets regarded and respected. We had a scenario with somebody, one of Thomas’ clients; Thomas found out that one of the members, their brother had committed suicide; just that nobody in the company knew that.
(30:02)
Andrew Palmer: Because the online world isn’t really where you discuss that and also there are triggers within it. We’ve actually had two big triggers in this one, one where you described the ski resort incident and one where you’ve just disregarded that, and now there’s a very good podcaster out there that actually warns people for there’s a trigger warning and everything.
And we have in our society as WordPress, we have a thing called Big Orange Heart, which looks after the wellbeing of all the people, the WordPressers and stuff like that, and so being kind of associated with that and donating to that occasionally, we’ve learned how to be more caring to people and help their mental health. Jonathan and I have conversations occasionally and we’re very appropriate around it, and sometimes we have the inappropriate conversations that two blokes would have when they’re just having a chat, so I absolutely get that.
Now, Jonathan, we have one more question so that we keep to the time, we’re three minutes away from the normal time. I’ll let you ask this one.
(31:11)
Jonathan Denwood: I just want to respond to what.
(31:13)
Andrew Palmer: Oh, yeah, carry on.
(31:14)
Jonathan Denwood: My reaction, and then we can wrap the podcast and then we go on for 15 minutes beyond this. But, Penny, my reaction to Calm was totally different from you and Andrew’s response, as soon as you were saying that, I just thought this is just company tokenism.
(31:36)
Penny Power: No, I agree.
(31:37)
Andrew Palmer: That’s what we were saying. We were saying it was tokenism.
(31:40)
Jonathan Denwood: It’s just pure tokenism, but.
(31:42)
Penny Power: Oh, absolutely.
(31:44)
Jonathan Denwood: What is a caring company and what is a company that’s just engaged in tokenism, Penny? A slightly large question, Penny.
(31:56)
Penny Power: Well, I’m really pleased you asked that Jonathan, because I felt there was a little bit of a loose end on that. Listen, I have a lot of empathy for companies, they’re there to make money, be able to pay the staff’s salaries, make a profit for their shareholders, it’s a hard world for large companies and small companies. However, if we don’t look after the wellbeing, we will get massive staff attrition, we’ll get massive mental health days off, et cetera; so it’s something that people cannot ignore. And what makes it caring, it has to come from the leadership, and, to me, it’s always like a family.
I run communities, we have BIP100, which is businesses personal, and we have embedded into it, the culture of kindness, we’ve embedded into it that if you are part of this community, you have to be in the spirit of that. We’ve also embedded into it, every Tuesday morning and hours, wellbeing, zoom. And we have a specialist TJ Power, who happens to be our son, but he’s done a Masters in psychology performance and neuroscience, and we facilitate wellbeing conversation, and also we have another session once a month called Let’s Talk Session, where members come on and they know it’s where they can really close the gap between their identity and their truth.
And they can talk with each other about what’s affecting their performance and it could be a business issue, or it could be a personal issue that’s affecting their performance. And I think businesses can build these in, these moments where people can join in and know that there’s a culture where vulnerability and just being human is okay, it’s not affecting your credibility or your productivity, it’s the reverse. Once people have been heard and they know they matter, their productivity will go up, there’s nothing nicer than having a sit with a friend, talking through something that matters to you.
Sometimes you only need them to be a so sounding board, you’re not even asking them for solutions and you feel better. Companies need to build that into their business and the way I teach that is to create community, to create a community within the company.
(34:12)
Andrew Palmer: And I’m with you on that. And I just need 30 seconds on this. I’d like the fact that somebody gave me a Calm subscription, I’d love it, and I love the green light thing and everything like that, but that has got to be married with almost an HR department becoming what it used to be. An HR department in corporations now are just looking at headcount, they’re not really concentrating on the health and wellbeing of all their staff, so I’m for that, I have a 10-minute meeting with my guys every morning.
And the first question we ask is how are you? How are we going? What’s going on? It sounds a bit noisy out there, what’s going on? I totally subscribe to that. So, Jonathan, you can end this podcast if you like, or this section of the podcast and let’s move on.
(35:04)
Jonathan Denwood: Yeah, sure. It’s been a great interview. Penny’s going to stay on for another 10, 15 minutes. We are going to be doing another dive; I’m fascinated by this question of remote working and building real culture. And our last question really. You can watch all this on the WP-Tonic YouTube channel, the whole interview plus the bonus content. Penny, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and your fabulous ideas and insights?
(35:39)
Penny Power: Well, at the moment, and I’m very proud of this talking about LinkedIn. If you are paying for Sales Navigator, or you can toggle creator mode on. And when you have creator mode on, you can create newsletters, very clever. So, tomorrow I release my ninth one in the newsletter and some great discipline. So, I suppose, nine weeks ago I did my first one and it’s around community-led business growth. And it’s a story I’m building up, in fact, I think I’m going to extract it and turn it into a little book because it’s a fascinating subject this, so if I want anybody to sort of think what’s Penny all about?
It is community and it’s about what community gives to a business. And I believe in revenue-generating communities, I think it’s part of a business model. So, you can follow me on LinkedIn and have a look at my newsletter and I’d love that and connect with me on LinkedIn also, if you like. I have a website, pennypower.co.uk, absolutely overdue being updated.
(36:45)
Andrew Palmer: I wouldn’t make apologies about your website, please, it’s fine.
(36:47)
Penny Power: How many people say it needs to be updated? I did it two years ago, but obviously, you advance.
(36:54)
Jonathan Denwood: I think you’ve been unfair to it, Penny. I’ve seen a lot worse.
(36:57)
Penny Power: Oh, you’ve seen a lot worse. No, I’m quite happy about the way it looks, it’s just the content on it isn’t completely, I haven’t got this community stuff on it, for example. And then BIP100 is this community that we run and it’s there’s a bip100.club, it’s the URL for that, if you wanted to look that up. So, thank you, that’s very generous of you both to let me share that, but it’d be lovely to look at.
(37:17)
Jonathan Denwood: No problem, Penny. So, Andrew, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what your thoughts are?
(37:24)
Andrew Palmer: You can find me at thisisandrewpalmer.com, Bertha AI, and on Twitter, you can find me at Arnie Palmer, A R N I E, Palmer.
(37:35)
Jonathan Denwood: Oh, thanks, Andrew. And thank you, Penny. We’re going to wrap up the podcast, as I said, to watch the bonus content and the whole interview go over to the WP-Tonic YouTube channel. Please subscribe to that as well, it really does help the show. We’ll be back next week with another fabulous guest; we have some fantastic people coming up on the show in the next couple of months like Penny. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye.
(38:00)
Outro: Hey, thanks for listening, we really do appreciate it. Why not visit the mastermind Facebook group and also to keep up with the latest news click wp-tonic.com/newsletter. We’ll see you next time.
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