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Music.
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Hello friends. I'm Amanda Barr and I'm Rebecca Lew Brennan, and welcome to Dance principles united the podcast together. We are passionate about helping studio owners with the business of running their studio Join us as we talk everything from marketing, systems, studio culture, motherhood, life and everything in between. This is the dance principles United podcast,
Unknown Speaker 0:26
hello and welcome back to the dance principles United podcast, we are doing part two with Nate about his learnings from the con conference that he just got back from in LA. I'm excited. Yes, yes, like we were, as we always do, right? We, like, got on last week thinking, Oh yeah, that might be a quick podcast, and had way too much to keep going through. So broke it up into part two, but excited to get here and chat through it. Now, if you haven't listened to part one, make sure you jump back into the podcast before in Spotify Apple, wherever you listen to your podcast, and have a little bit of a listen, because Nathan shares some incredible takeaways he had from that conference. But do you want to just give us? For anyone that's just joining us and missed last week's episode, a bit of a rundown of the event that you're at? Yeah. So it's called V con, run by Gary Vaynerchuk, who I'm a massive fanboy of, and
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so it's evolved from what, like, it started as, like a sort of like a web three and NFT type conference, but he's really evolved it into more of a marketing and media and pop culture,
Unknown Speaker 1:32
sort of very business entrepreneur driven event. And so, like, incredible, incredible lineup of speakers. It was in the LA alive there precinct where they, like, hold the Grammys and things like that was, which is where the main sessions and things like that were. But like everybody from, like, you know,
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Nick Cannon, will I am who we'll talk about a bit.
Unknown Speaker 1:53
Flavor, flav was there. We had T PAIN performing on the Sunday night. And like just all sorts of other incredible entrepreneurs and business owners, not just on stage, but also, like just out, sort of out, taking in the sessions as well. And this is probably something that you know as much as as I love your wife, and we always enjoy going to events together. I think sometimes when you go to these events by yourself as well, what it really made me do, and it was the same when I went to the first vconn, is that every room I was in, I would always turn to the person next to me and introduce myself. Is that sometimes, when we go to those events together and with Beck and things like that, we do, sort of like, you know, as everybody does, you sort of like, you know, just hang with your peeps and watch stay with your posse. Yeah, absolutely. And so, like, because I knew that there were so many people, incredible people in there. Like I said, every session I sat at every room I went into, I made sure that I was out there networking and introducing myself to people which, you know, I've picked up a load of contacts from the weekend, and look, let's be honest, I presume, most of which I might not ever contact again, but you'll never know, like you never sort of know the contacts you make, where you're going to run into those people again, and when you might your past might might cross again, and where you might be able to to help each other out, or or start, start a new business venture, or any sort of thing. It's just, yeah, amazing connections.
Unknown Speaker 3:12
It's the interesting conversations, right? You were talking, you said you spoke to some guy that was kind of had a really interesting business in was it in India? Yes, like one of the biggest solar producers, solar panel producers in India, just because I huge company, really big company, very big company, yeah, absolutely, yeah. And then, and the person that introduced me to that guy was worked at a marketing firm in LA that takes care of all the socials for Lorna, Jane
Unknown Speaker 3:44
and so, like, just, like, really, like, really impressive people all around the conference that, yeah, like I said, just making sure, and that's what we're so big on with when we work with dance studio owners, like, making sure you're getting out and improving yourself and getting to events and connecting with, you know, Just other dance studio owners, especially like you never know where developing any relationship as a business owner is going to take you right
Unknown Speaker 4:07
absolutely, and how those relationships might you know, improve your quality of business in the future. I think it's so, so important. But let's get down to some of the learnings. Who you want to share? Which other sessions did you love that you had some great takeaways that you want to share with us today? Yeah, look, obviously like Will I Am is always like pretty cool cat, right? Always, always super interested in hearing from them, but hearing about like those people that he's obviously started out as a musician and producer and all those things, but obviously has super, super mad business brain as well. But he and, I think, like he's, there's articles about it all this week as well. I saw, but he was sharing his new like, he's calling it an interactive AI radio driven app, but it's called, like, FYI, or radio dot FYI, really interesting app. He was sort of on stage talking.
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About that, and giving a basically a live demo, and things like that. So, you know, think about
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basically like you're sitting there and you're listening to the radio or listening to songs through this app now, but you're hearing some sort of pop culture reference in the song, and you're like, Oh, hey, hang on. Like, I want to learn more about that. And you can just interrupt, interrupt the radio mid sentence, and get the full background on that important piece of pop culture that the song is referring to, and then just really interactive. And, you know, the, I guess, the language model that he's feeding into that's been sort of trained really well as as well, and was sort of like picking up on certain like, Yeah, sort of language conventions and things like that was, yeah, look, it was super cool. I think, as with a lot of this AI stuff, it's so in its infancy. But yeah, as you would imagine, for something from Will i am, it looked pretty cool, right?
Unknown Speaker 5:55
Absolutely, I was looking at it as well. And you know, it's about that personal experience. And he him talking about how he wants to personalize radio so that it's to the listener. And isn't that interesting, right? Like, that's what people want now. They want a personal experience. They don't want to be one of the masses. They want to have what they want when they want. We want on demand. We want, you know, great customer service. We want people to get us and, you know, know us?
Unknown Speaker 6:24
Yeah, I think that's an ear such an interesting thing. He must have been an interesting person to hear speak. Yes, super, super interesting. And like I said, like anybody that's done as much as he's done,
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and like, he rattled off, like, some of the investments, business investments that he made along the way as well
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was just, yeah, he's obviously pretty switched on business brain. And so, yeah, be super interested. I want to know what other businesses did. He knew you were going to ask me, but like, and I can't remember, but like, they'll be like, Twitter early on. And like, like, be like he I know Twitter was one of them, and potentially, I think he may have said Uber, but I don't want to, like, say that for sure, but, like, big, big, big, big players that would have open. Ai, Google tells me live. Google tells me Tesla feats open. Ai,
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yeah,
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interesting,
Unknown Speaker 7:27
yes, but he's obviously a very smart business person as well. Yeah, that's been able to do that. Oh, yeah, I'm doing a live Google and it's very interesting, but not so interesting for a podcast.
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No,
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absolutely. So who else did you feel like was
Unknown Speaker 7:48
incredible. What else did you take away? What other sessions? Yeah, look Nick Cannon again, another person that's just super, super interesting, and I think I talked a little bit about him last week, but something that I was thinking about as well as I was really looking back over my notes, just a couple of, like, little one liners that he sort of said. I loved when he said something like, an idea without a plan is a hallucination.
Unknown Speaker 8:13
And that's, like, so important for what we do in business, right? Like, and don't get us wrong, like, we're not the type of people that have, like, big detailed, like, you know, 20 page business plan documents around stuff. But when we want to put something together, when we wanted to put dance teacher Expo together, we got together, we came up with a rough plan of what we wanted to do, and then we got into the execution. But having that, that plan is super, super important, and something that I thought like he was coming at it from a completely different way he was talking about. He got canceled a little while ago.
Unknown Speaker 8:49
Basically, I don't even remember, and I didn't really google it, to be honest, but I do remember reading about it he said something, and essentially got it blew up online, and he got canceled for it in inverted commas.
Unknown Speaker 9:03
But he was talking about like, as he sat and reflected on that, about, you know, that he thinks there should be Council culture, not cancel culture. So council so when somebody says, like, you know, you can all make mistakes, right? Like, you know, you and I have the benefit of being able to edit this podcast, but like, Yeah, we could say something silly on this podcast that we'd be like, Oh, go and edit it out. I'm all said silly shit, exactly like social media these days is, you know, especially like, I feel free, like I sound like such a boomer for the younger generation, like, around that they're putting so much stuff out there that sort of goes up on the internet forever. But I thought that was like, what made me think about it from a dance studio perspective, is, you know, we do always see on lots of the Facebook groups and things like that, people out there complaining about, you know, this parent said this, or this parent didn't do this, or this parent did like, instead of like, always blame anymore, like canceling and inverted commas, like, what?
Unknown Speaker 10:00
What are we doing to educate them? What are we doing? Because that was his big thing around like, when somebody does something that you don't want, or that's a bit silly, instead of just, like, tossing them aside and saying you're never going to speak to them again or unfollow them. Like, why don't you open up a dialog with them? Why don't you try and, like, educate both them and you. Like, why did they do that? What like, what could you do to improve. So I think, like relating that a lot of the times to how we're dealing with our parents, that yeah, let's we can all get a little bit frustrated. That's okay, but it's also super important to reflect how can we help our parents and when we when we get those frustrations with our clients? What can we do to help ensure that that's not happening to the next client, or the things like that. So helping, like counsel them, rather than just sort of canceling them, I thought was something that I just sort of said and reflected on I was listening to
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that. Yeah, I love that so much. Now
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we have little children and our little girls as most kids, as a lot of adults obsessed with Bluey, right?
Unknown Speaker 11:02
Pretty great show. You had the producer. Was it producer
Unknown Speaker 11:06
Louis, and look, full disclosure, this is one that I completely ended up at by accident, because one of the rooms, one of the sessions, you know, as you do when you go to these events, like I know that our peeps do a dance teacher Expo, you go in and you like, highlight the session, the speaker from each session that you want to go to. And I looked at the line for the speaker I was going to go to. I'm like, oh gosh, this is super long, 5050, if I'll get in here. And so I just jumped across to another session. And I didn't know, because it just showed the names. It didn't show producer of bluey. And so, you know, I went and it happened to be not only producer of bluey, but another couple of really impressive content creators as well,
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guys that were, like you, one of the biggest guys on YouTube shorts,
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as well as just another, like, really big started out in podcasting, and then sort of is also releasing a lot of YouTube content based on that as well. So that was super interesting. There was, like, about four Aussies we were sitting together. Gave him a big cheer when he started talking about the ABC. And he was pretty shocked that there was anybody in the room that knew what ABC was. So we got together and had a selfie and a quick chat with him about that afterwards. But just like, Yes, super, super interesting. What the whole panel was talking about there was
Unknown Speaker 12:28
that when we do our videos, and this was sort of like relating it back to how we're doing our both organic socials and paid socials, is that any video that we're running or any image that we're running on our social media feeds, has a really low barrier to exit. Now, the way he explained it was that if you buy we're just looking at buying Hamilton tickets right to go and see Hamilton in Sydney. Now we're going to, obviously drop a fair bit of money on that. We're going to book a restaurant to go. We've got a very high barrier to exit for seeing that show. We're basically going to go unless something extreme happens, because we've invested so much money into it, we've got the restaurant booking. We've made sure, yeah, and you're not going to work out after 10 minutes, exactly not that we would ever not love Hamilton, because we are big Hamilton games, but if you go to a musical, if you go to a theater, if you go to a show, even a movie, even if it's crap, after five minutes, you're not going to walk out, right? Exactly, like, that's not what's going to happen, because you've paid a lot of money, there's a high barrier there. Like, entry Exactly, there is a high Yeah, and there's a high barrier to exit, is what they were talking about. Now, the problem with with the social media landscape at the moment is that when you're Yeah, we all know how quickly we scroll our feeds if you see something, yep, like again, doesn't work so much in a podcast, but man, does there
Unknown Speaker 13:56
how we scroll quickly, but yeah, you know how quickly you scroll past something if it doesn't grab your attention immediately, it's got such a low barrier to exit that you're gone really quickly. And it's one thing that again, like, because obviously I'm a bit of a bit of a nuffy When I sit there and I think about, always think about how these things relate to dance studio owners. And it's something that I see over and over again when I'm having like, our one on ones and things like that, helping our members in studio growth club in particular with their Facebook ads and stuff like that, that they get incredible videos shot like they might have invested in a professional videographer coming out who give them this awesome, awesome content to use, but that first, like one to two seconds of your video is so important to grab people's attention and to make sure that, because that barrier exits so low that you've got to engage them and stop their scroll. So if you have an epic video, and you have your studio logo animated for the first two seconds, you.
Unknown Speaker 15:00
You've lost it.
Unknown Speaker 15:01
People get bored, right? Yeah, like a logo is not exciting. It is not exciting. What is what will draw in people that may be interested in your service, if they're a parent of a preschool person, if they see a video of a happy, happy, smiling preschool kid that's going to get their attention much more than your logo, even if, with the best logo animation in the universe, you need to make sure that, because, like I said, that barrier to exit is so low. If you want to stop their swiping and stop their scrolling, you've got to do something that speaks to them, that grabs their attention in that first one to two seconds, before you can even get the point across of how awesome your classes are, about how wonderful all those things you want to talk if you don't grab them in the first one to two seconds, it's the rest of the message isn't getting to them. Okay? So, something super exciting and that, and I presume that this goes across to the cover photo as well, right? The cover photo on images are so, so important because, yeah, otherwise you just lose them. No one's going to watch anything. Sorry, the cover photo on videos, not on images, but the cover photo on videos. Yeah, absolutely. It's just that that first one to two texts,
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one to two seconds is just so
Unknown Speaker 16:13
absolutely. So that's what you learned from the bluey guy. He obviously has worked on that and done a very good job of short because, as we were talking about right, short form content, yes, well, he was talking and how that's the same regardless, yeah, regardless if it's a blue episode, a YouTube short, an Instagram video, a tick tock. It doesn't really matter. The concepts the same. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely cool. Anyone else you want to share with us before we finish up? Yeah? Like, one really interesting guy. His name was Inky Johnson, and, like, his story was that he was a college football star and had a really, very realistic chance of being drafted into the NFL. So, yeah, big payday career set up. It's what he'd been working for. But yeah, his entire life, he was a college senior in his last year of college, which meant he was about eight, eight games away from going into that NFL draft and potentially changing his life,
Unknown Speaker 17:12
eight games before the end of the season, copped, you know, a hit. And he'd taken, obviously, 1000s of tackles over his life, but this one ended up paralyzing half of his body and lost the use of his arm, and that was obviously his world as he knew it was gone in the instant.
Unknown Speaker 17:31
Yeah, and so obviously, like, he was a very, very good storyteller, but like, he was just super interesting, and was talking very much about personal development and growth, and very inspiring.
Unknown Speaker 17:45
And he had, like, quite a couple of things that really sort of, like, hit home and made me listen and thought, you know, oh, okay, like, you know, and like, one of the things he talked about, and he was very, like, very physical in how he spoke, and things like that. And I think it's something that, you know, dance studio owners sometimes we get caught up in the in the day to day of of the negatives. But like, you know, one thing he said was, like, you know, if you are there doing, you know, if you're a business owner, whatever you're doing, like, act as if what you do makes a difference, because it does
Unknown Speaker 18:16
that. Was it like? Like, what does he mean by that? Tell me what that means, like, like. That means by that, well, so like, for like, you know, like, all the incredible things that dance has bought you as a dancer, as a dance teacher, how different your life is because of dance. For those that are listening to this and you're giving that gift to so many students on a daily basis. Yeah, what you do does make a difference. So make sure that you take time to sit and reflect in that, that you celebrate it is celebrate it and enjoy it. Because, yes, look, we can't predict, like being a business owner. There's some shit things that go with it, too, 100%
Unknown Speaker 18:56
but absolutely, if we reflect on the overwhelming majority of what we do makes a really big difference in so many people's lives. Make sure we sit and celebrate that and don't let, don't let the other stuff outshine that or weigh that down. Yeah. Okay,
Unknown Speaker 19:12
I love that. So, so good. And like a couple of other things you said, like making sure, and this is something that can be so easily done that you don't judge each day, by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds that you sow. And
Unknown Speaker 19:25
I think that's, again, something, yeah, it's deep, right? But I think sometimes, as business owners, you know, you can get to the end of the day, and you can, yeah, like, we all have those days, right? You get to the end, you're like, What the hell did I do today? I swear I've worked like, I feel tired, and I was at my computer all day. Like, what did I actually get done? Like, and we again, like, we can get a bit down on ourselves, right? Because, but those that are working, and we always talk about working on your business, not in your business you might have, and that's why it's important to, like, make sure, like, we talk about.
Unknown Speaker 20:00
Time blocking lots and things like that. But you might have not have like, felt like you've harvested a lot that day. You might have not have felt like that. What you've done that day's bought money into rewards, made you lots of money, made you lots of money there today. But have you done some tasks that are going to pay off next week, next month, next term, next year. Like, so good seeds, yeah, have you put in long term work into your studio today? Like so making sure that again, it's all about sitting, sometimes just sitting back and taking those couple of minutes to reflect on things like that can be, I think, super, super important for us as dance studio owners that get sometimes too caught up in that, in that day to day stuff, and always running and always feeling like we're always feel like we're chasing something rather than celebrating. I so love that, because, you know, we've been talking a lot. I know last week, Beth did a session in tribe
Unknown Speaker 20:58
on connections with parents, and a lot of people were talking about, you know, it was just a question, like, I just don't have time to do that sort of thing. I don't have time, you know, unfortunately, that's the thing that goes, by the way. So there's connections with the parents. And I totally get it, because we're all doing 4000 things and making a connection with that parent and, you know, chatting to them for 20 minutes about
Unknown Speaker 21:26
how school's going for Susie, and, you know, like, whatever that is, right? Chatting them to them for 20 minutes about the, you know, and that, and just building relationships and connections, that's not making you any money today. You know, it's not helping your routine get on stage, you know, next week, or anything like that. But is it sowing incredible seeds that this family is going to feel so special and so part of your studio, that they're going to stay with you for 15 years, quite possibly? Yeah, so you're sowing these incredible seeds rather than getting like that harvest or that, you know, that instant gratification, that we've just made money, or we've just done this, or whatever that is absolutely but it can be so, so valuable. I love that lesson. And I was talking about that, was that, like, similar topic, talking about with someone in one of our one on ones last week, about how like, and it's something that you struggled with, is that, you know, you went through that, like, you went through a bit of a stage where you're like, I just feel like I just get nothing done between, like, from about three o'clock. I just feel like at the studio, especially that, like three till four, I just feel like I get nothing done until what day you realized, well, what were you getting done? Because you weren't doing any work in inverted commas. You weren't, like, sitting at your computer and like pumping out content or doing things like that. But what were what did you then realize that you were doing that was sowing those long term seeds,
Unknown Speaker 22:44
absolutely, making connections with your staff, making connections with your clients, all of those things, yeah, which built an incredible business moving forward. Because, especially, like, you know, because we, like our staff, loved working at DS and so for their 345 class, like, they had to be there 10 minutes early. That's fair, but they would start rolling in from three o'clock. And so Amanda would sit there and, like, the first person would come in, and she'd have a chat about what they did on the weekend or their day, how's the parents going, but like, and then the next person would roll in seven minutes later, like, and so, but having those, like just those informal check ins with staff,
Unknown Speaker 23:24
doesn't sometimes doesn't feel like work, but it's just super important connection building, because it makes your staff feel more invested. It makes them feel appreciated. And we know that keeping your staff is so much more beneficial and saves you so much money in the long run than having to buy new stuff all the time.
Unknown Speaker 23:44
Absolutely. Tell us the quote again, you don't judge each day by the harvest you reap, but the seeds that you sow. I
Unknown Speaker 23:54
love that Yes. And then the like,
Unknown Speaker 23:57
oh, sorry. The last like, the last thing that I really took from Inky Johnson as well, was he challenged? He's challenging people to think like, making sure that you like, is your personal software updated? Was the question he asked. And yeah. Again, just coming back to what we're super passionate about is, are you investing in bettering yourself? Whether that comes from, you know, making yourself a better business owner, investing in your own personal health and well being, whatever that is looking like for you, going for a walk, eating better whatever that is, is your personal software updated and like. And he was, he made the the direct link between software updates on your phone, right? Because whenever, sometimes we see that software update on your phone, and it feels like a pain in the ass, right?
Unknown Speaker 24:44
Or, like, you open Instagram one day and they've done an update, you're like, oh, just like, This is so hard to use. Like, we've all had those feelings, right? But at the end of the day, like, if our iPhones were still running on iOS two from when iPhone came out.
Unknown Speaker 25:00
Back in 2007
Unknown Speaker 25:01
like, it'd be a shit product, and nobody could use it, right? So sometimes we just got to push through and after that first like day or two, let's be honest, it's not that long, quite often. But after those first couple of days of getting used to the new operating system, we do actually realize that it's 10 times better. The putting in that everything's performing better, the Facebook ads, the Facebook apps working better, the mail apps working better, all of those things, which does that mean your business is running better because you're putting the work into yourself? Personally, absolutely, that's why it stuck with me, right? I love that. I love that so much. So so good. Any last things that you want to share with us. Great experience. Did you love it? Yeah, absolutely. It was very, very different to the first one I went on. I think I've just sort of chatted about that with you. But like I said, I think it's just, again, super important, just getting outside for me personally, getting outside my comfort zone. And, like I said, like heading to an event without you and Beck, which forced me, and don't I sound like a bit of a globetrotter, but I'm going to another event. It's in the Gold Coast, this time
Unknown Speaker 26:07
on Thursday, in a couple of days here, but just putting yourself in those rooms where you've got to, where you don't know anybody, and so you've got to just, you just got to turn to the person next to you and have a chat and make those connections. And because, like I said, you never know what's going to come of them. So I think, like, yeah, the biggest thing to take from it is make sure that you're putting yourself in those situations and go and make sure that you're working on making yourself and investing in yourself, because it's just super, super important, and gets you back into your business feeling inspired, right?
Unknown Speaker 26:40
Yeah, I love that. Updating your personal software, yep, 100% so, so good. Thanks for joining us, friends on the dance principles United podcast. It would mean the absolute world to us if you took a second and you wrote a review if you like our podcast. You know, we really need reviews on our podcast. We're feeling a bit lonely. We haven't had some for for a while, so like it would be in the world to us if you took a second, jumped on your Apple or your Spotify app and wrote a review, and if you'd be ever so thankful, we absolutely wouldn't. If have any ideas, we had somebody reach out a couple of weeks ago with a couple of things that they would have loved to hear that they're going to love to hear on the podcast, and we will be absolutely recording some episodes around those as well, because they were great ideas. And the reason we do this podcast, guys is to help dance studio owners out. And so if you're giving us feedback as to what would help you out, then we would love to record an episode on it.
Unknown Speaker 27:39
Thanks guys. Bye. Thanks bye. We hope you enjoyed this episode of the dance principles United podcast. If you'd love to learn more from us, we have a special offer just for our podcast listeners, go to the link in the show notes right now to get two weeks free in dance principles United tribe. We would love to see you there.
Unknown Speaker 28:02
You
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