They restructured a department to avoid one conversation

this.

Thank you, Mick. It's great to meet you and to see you and yeah, looking forward to our chat.

Okay, in a very short space of time. Yes, you're absolutely right. there's a lot of years to cover Mick, but I'm not going to go on. Yeah, in a very short space of time. So yeah, my dream was to be an actor. did lots of drama at school. I was in youth theatres. I was in, you know, kids. I really, really, it was all I wanted to do. And I was kind of hyper-focused at that. So I went to drama school and I got into a good one and trained and started working as an actor and I discovered that you can't really make a living from acting or it's very hard to make a living just from acting. you have to have other strings to your bow. So inevitably I did all sorts of other work. I worked in a warehouse for a bit. I worked in an auction room for a while between jobs. I was a waiter. I was a barman. I mean, I was virtually everything. And I enjoyed most things apart from sitting in an office. That was a thing that I didn't enjoy. And then a friend of a friend

said there's some role play work going. And this was specifically to go into an organisation who were doing assessments for people who were looking for jobs. They were interviewing them. And as part of the interview process, they did role play. I did that. And a lot of the actors that I was around doing that found the role play a bit boring. I found it fascinating. I found sitting in a room and having different delegates coming in, different candidates coming in, hearing the different voices, the different approaches to the same scenario, really interesting. And we were asked to feed back what we thought of the candidates or what our experience was. And I remember a psychologist saying to me, you're very good at feedback. I felt that here was an application of something that I had learned that I could use in a different environment that might be something that I could develop and could be more successful than the acting was. So I formed a company and here we are. so we do a lot of work with many, different types of organization. helping them to be better communicators. So the role play that it started out, it's much wider than that now. You know, we run days on communication skills, on having difficult conversations, on personal impact, and work really closely with people in the workplace to improve their communication when they're having conversations or they're giving presentations.

So we work with a huge range of companies. I would say most of them are private corporate companies, but we also work in the public space. So in the UK, we work with in the public sector, so government broadly, as well as private. We work all over the world. We work with small startups and we work with huge multinational organizations. I'm sure the website will be available for people to look at and if they want to look at our client page, we have a very, very wide range of clients on that page. it's a lot of people, guess mostly we're working with leaders in some one sense or another. They might be first time first line managers or they might be directors.

You know, this is about human connection and what we value is the human being in front of us, not necessarily their seniority or their position in a company or indeed the type of company that they run or they work in.

Great question. Yes, it definitely sharpened me. I am a better actor having done this work and a better business person having done the acting as a background. The two have sharpened each other really in terms of the value that they brought to me personally and my the colleagues who I work with. In terms of the missing pieces, that's such a lovely way of putting it. I think that we work with a lot of people who are very clever, who are great problem solvers, and who sometimes come stuck when they've got a human being in front of them who isn't necessarily doing what they want them to do. And I think the sort of problems that people have who work in organisations is having conversations with people and landing the message, doing that in an impactful way, being OK with their employees' responses. And being brave, think that it's really it's about courage to have those kind of conversations that we, because we all avoid having some conversations, right, Nick? I'm sure you've got people in your life and we won't be going into that today, who you might avoid having some conversations with, might be in your private life or in your work life. And we encourage people to do that because

Businesses can't thrive unless the people in them are speaking truth to their employees, speaking truth to power, having a sense of integrity about what they feel and think and have the freedom to be able to express that. And when they feel they can't do that in a company, you're not getting a great deal of value from your employees.

Well, and that's the art really, isn't it? It is about that balance. And I think most people want to practice. They want to have a go at it. They want to get better at it. They recognise that however skilled they might be, that there's always things that they can get better at. You one of the things that we typically do is we ask people to kind of think of a conversation before we... before we start. So there's a bit of pre work of people saying, you know, we're to be practicing a conversation. Think, think of that conversation. I don't think we've ever had anybody saying, you know, all of my communication is completely perfect. And I can't think of a thing to say because because I work brilliantly. And the rare time that they do say that, you know, I think the question is, well, why are you here then? So I think I think it's kind of universal needs that we can all get better. And It's about training for life as well as business because a lot of the tips that we give and the feedback that we give are great for, you know, your wife, your husband, your brothers, your sisters, your friends, as well as the work relationships.

Because communication is everything, Mick. It's everything. And trust is everything as well. We were talking before we started recording about AI, and there's a lot of AI around at the moment, and we all know that. And some of the stories that we're getting now are frankly terrifying about AI. And AI is potentially a real force for good, as well as a force for something much more dangerous. But human connection. is a massive need in all of us. And to be able to connect, to be able to be free, to have the conversations that we need to have, to stand up on the stage and be able to present in a way that doesn't terrify you is something which I think everybody needs. We all have to communicate with each other. And sometimes the consequences of not doing so are really severe. can have people who, through avoidance of having a difficult conversation, will have a departmental restructure in order to kick somebody out or to give somebody the excuse to say, well, we've had this restructure. That's an enormous exercise. That's not common, but I have heard it in quite a few of the organisations that I've worked with. And really that's no way to build an organisation of trust and of excellence.

I don't know if I have a clear answer to that because none of us really know where AI is going to go and what it does. And so I think we just have to be mindful of it and cognizant of it. It's potentially something which I think can be very useful. I look, I use chat GBT as much as anybody else.

But I think it's about the application. AI does not take the place of human connection. It might at some point be able to replicate it and replicate it quite well. But when you're talking to a bot, it's a bot. It's not a real human. And we kind of know that. We yearn for human connection. And if we stop connecting on a human-to-human level, That's the end of civilization, really. I mean, it's the end of humanity. Humanity is about connecting. so that's quite a lofty statement, Mick, and I'm not suggesting that we can solve that. And we're not anti-AI because we recognize that it's something which is huge. But I think we have to work on our human connection alongside AI. It's not one or the other. You know, we have to keep connecting as human beings and have those difficult conversations because humans are complicated, messy beings. You know, none of us are straightforward. We are not computers that can be programmed. You know, we have emotions, we have feelings, we have thoughts. we have, you know, we all feel jealous sometimes, or we feel, you know, we feel disappointed sometimes. And, and all of that, I think, has to be has to be in the mix of humanity, because it's what makes humanity beautiful as well as complicated and sometimes difficult.

Well, we've been very lucky because before Frank Partners, we had been working in the same sort of field. would say we, my business partner, Anna Carus-Wilson and I were working with a different organisation. And then before that, we were freelancing on different work. So we had a lot of contacts and that was very useful and very handy. And I think what's We're quite a small organization, but we have a kind of elasticity. So we work in an associate level. So that means that we have lots of self-employed associates who we can use or not use. And so that gives us the ability to go in and do some quite meaty big pieces of work.

Yeah, I've lost, I've now completely lost the thread of your question. What was it you were talking about? What were you asking?

You were talking about marketing. Yeah, so.

Yeah, absolutely. So it's a lot of referrals. So people that we work with, then they may be going to work in another organisation and they then ask us to work with them and so on and so forth. And over the years, we've built it up. It's like a snowball, really. It's just got bigger and bigger and bigger. Our pool has got bigger and bigger. And, know, we're meeting new people all the time. Yeah, look, as soon as we make a connection with somebody, know, we capitalise on it and make sure that they're in our orbit so that, you know, they... And it's not about being sort of aggressive with that. It's really about making relationships and keeping those relationships going and having something interesting to say and keeping in touch.

LinkedIn is very useful for that. Woo. don't know if there's anything we would do very differently because Anna and I had run a different company beforehand. So we made a lot of our mistakes, if you like, before we joined Frank, before we co-created Frank Partners. And we did do it very carefully. I think one of the things we did well is that we really talked a lot about the sort of company that we wanted. the feel of it, the culture of it, what a Frank Partners programme would look like and feel like as opposed to another organisation that people might be interested in. So think having a really clear line of sight about what you're offering and what you're not offering as well. I think you've got to be really honest about that. But yeah, I don't want to sound arrogant, Mick, but I don't think I would change very much. It's all gone very well so far, touch wood.

I, you know, and Anna would say the same, think we, know, goal number one is to survive. Because there's lots of, you know, there's a lot of scary, difficult things happening in the world. And if we can survive that, that's great. And I think to continue to work with interesting people, we don't have huge financial goals, I think as long as we can turn over enough to keep us going, to keep the company going, to pay us, to pay the people that we work with and to make a reasonable profit. That's great. And I think what excites us is the prospect of working with interesting clients who are willing to use people like us who have our skills.

We have a website. I think if you, think it's www.frankpartners.co.uk. Certainly if you put Frank Partners Learning or something into Google, you'll get it. You can see, we also have a LinkedIn page as a company. I have a personal LinkedIn page and I'd be very happy to have a chat with anybody that wants to find me through that. Those are those I think are the two the two main channels where as with everything the great thing about tech is that it makes everybody very easy to find

It totally is. It was great to meet you Mick and good luck with your podcast as well and all the things that you want to develop too. It sounds really exciting and from what I've heard and met from you so far, which has only been the last 40 minutes, I think you're going to be very successful.

Thank you very much.