Gina Gardiner & Friends with Thomas Power

0:00It's time now for Gina Gardner and friends, the show that shares stories from inspiring people, from a wide range of expert guests, all focused on helping you live a happier, more successful, and fulfilling life. Gina Gardner is a multiple number one international best-selling author, motivational speaker, business coach, and trainer. She's the founder of Genuinely You, it has over 30 years experience of helping people step into their genuine, authentic power personally and professionally. One day I'll teach chemistry to kids. I'm going to be an architect. My dream is to be a chef. This is a world of possibilities, a world in which people who put their minds to something can really make a difference. My goal is to help the environment. Someday I'll find a cure for cancer. At the US Department of Education's Office of Federal Student Aid, we believe that aspiring minds can achieve anything, so we dedicate ourselves to making sure everyone

1:03has an opportunity to go to college. Each year we provide more than $150 million in grants, loans, and work study funds, making higher education possible for anyone at any stage of life. I can go back to college. I can change careers. I can make a difference. Federal Student Aid, proud sponsor of the American Mind. One more about money for college at studentaid.gov. And now here's your host, Gina Gardner. Hello there and welcome to Gina Gardner and Friends. I have an amazing man on my show today, Thomas Power, who is the founder of the BIP 100. He has so much expertise and experience to offer and I'm really grateful that you joined us on the show, Thomas. Thank you very much indeed. Thanks for inviting me, Gina. So before we get started, please just tell us a bit about how you came to be the founder.

2:06What's the story? I think really my training as a young man was working very closely with Alan Sugar, now Lord Sugar. So I was really an assistant to the executives at Amstrad, Malcolm Miller, Alan Sugar, Bob Watkins as a young man at 22. And what I learned from working with Alan or Lord Sugar now is the importance of networking and connecting with people and analyzing markets and understanding markets through people. Free internet, free Google. We only really had a yellow pages directory and a telephone and a company car in those days. And I just sort of fell in love with his ability to connect with people, interview people, understand markets. And so I fell in love with networking and community building and networking as a young

3:09man in my early 20s. And then in 1998, my wife came up with the idea of academy.com, which was the first social network for business. We built that up to 650,000 members by 2012. With us. Members played 10 pounds a month. In 2012 and 2014, she got the OBE from the Queen for Building Academy and the effort would put into, if you like, our digital contribution to the UK economy. So it was great to get the OBE. And then we kind of went off the scene for a number of years because there I say we were exhausted from what we had built. Yes. And we wrote some books and we did some speaking and we joined some boards as board members. But it wasn't really until the lockdown in 2012 that our daughter Hannah and Penny said,

4:10we need to build another community. Everyone is going to be stuck at home. People are going to be lonely. People are going to need support. People are going to need a place to learn. We need to run it all on Zoom or Slack or one of these online platforms. And so we launched the bit 100, which is this community of 100 experts around the world. Actually in the spring of 2020. And I've spent the last two and a half years with Penny interviewing 3,000 experts around the world to choose these 100. Okay. And it's been a fascinating experience. The interviewing 3,000 people on Zoom, I've interviewed a hundred people a month, 25 people a week on Zoom for the last two and a half years. That's an undertaking. I know from just doing the interviews by my shows that that's a hell of an undertaking. It's a hell of an undertaking. I spent virtually full time on LinkedIn for the last two and a half years doing that. And then invited people on to Zoom and interviewing them.

5:11And if they passed, they sent them to Penny and she'd second interview them to see whether they were suitable to be part of this expert's club of specialists. It's been a very fascinating exercise, but the bit 100 community has been built during the lockdown specifically to serve people during the lockdown. Now we're coming out of it and we go back to lunches and dinners and proper physical face-to-face events. It's lovely. But the whole effort was based on the fact that when we built up the 650,000 members, they were in 5,000 clubs around the world. So a club was typically a hundred to 150 people. And what we discovered is, in reality, when your community building, people can't cope with more than a hundred people in a community. They find it overwhelming. But actually, they can't even cope with a hundred. They can actually really cope intimately with about 30. Yes. But to find your 30, you need to have a hundred to choose your favorite 30.

6:14And what we've discovered is everyone in the community has chosen their favorite 30 from the hundred. But if we didn't have the hundred, they couldn't have their 30. So it's been an experimentation, a work in progress, if you like, R&D, if you like, in community building, both for the online world, of the Zoom, Slack world that we now operate in, and the physical practicality that humans can't actually cope with more than 30 people intimately active in their lives, on their phones, on their emails, on their WhatsApp. So it's been a sort of community experiment for the last two and a half years. You know, there's a lot in there, and it really strikes me that there's such lessons to be learned, particularly around how do you create close relationships, whether they're business or private, that are in reality viable and have a win-win for both peak parties.

7:21And what struck me as you were talking, you know, the number of people who say, you know, I've got 30,000 friends on Facebook, and my immediate thought is, well, can we define what you mean by friends? You know, are these people that would have your back? And I was talking to another guest a couple of weeks ago, and he was talking about your mental wealth, and he talked about your mental wealth. One of the criteria was how many people could you rely on to have your back? Oh, lovely. And it just struck me that you can be isolated in a crowd, and what you've done as part of your social experiment is you looked at, you know, what are the optimum numbers? What's the pool size that you need in order to be fine to find your people? Because just because they are a good businessman or they're experts, they won't make, they

8:22won't necessarily be the sort of people that you want to spend time with, that you get that instant sense of trust with, or that you're ready to build a sense of trust with. Yeah, you're absolutely right. I think this is also, when you talk about Gina, the challenge of building close relationships, this is linked to what you said to me earlier about, holistic profitability, because when you're building a community, there's a sense in the community that some people are looking for information, contacts and deals to make money. Yes. And their focus is the private marketplace and paying for their membership and making sure they get a return on their investment. Yeah. And it's all about numbers and money and return. But to actually build the close relationships that you've just described, you need this mental wealth to use your other guest speakers' thoughts of people who you can rely on for

9:25your bank, because what people actually want is love, support, care, attention, personal introductions, reliability, stability, and that you genuinely are looking out for them to connect them to the right people. And it's actually really hard to deliver that, really hard, at scale, to have intimacy and scale. And if you think we've done 3,000 interviews to choose 100 to help people find their 30, in reality, we've done the work for them of choosing one in 100 for them personally, because the 30 have come out of the 3,000, really for them. I know there's another 70 in the community for each of them, but everyone's 30 I've noticed is different. Yes. I think, you know, the conversation that Thomas is referring to is actually before we started to record. And I sometimes regret that I don't have the record button on for the conversations that

10:25I have with people outside these recordings, because there's lots of gents and thank you very much for bringing it up. But I think, you know, if you just think about family, there are going to be people in your family that you adore, that you love to spend time with, and then there'll be that uncle or aunt. It might be your parents who trigger you and who, you know, are a real child. You love them to bits, but they drive you up the wall. And I think it's quite interesting that people assume that in their professional life, it's going to be entirely different. Yeah, true. There are going to be people who you warm to, that you have the same values as them, that they have a friend who talks about PLUs and PLTs, you know, people like us and people like them. Yeah, very good. And I think that ultimately, finding your tribe, finding the group of people that work with you and for you, and that doesn't necessarily mean that they're always going to say yes

11:28to you and pack you on the head. I think, you know, having the relationship you took about love and I think people think love is pink and fluffy, but when you love someone, you want the best for them and that means you're going to say, Thomas, I think you can do better than that. That's not your best game. Come on now. Get on with it. And having that trust, that love, you can actually challenge people. Yeah, I think when you talk about finding your tribe, I think that's, I like the fact you know, you've called it a social experiment. I hadn't realized it was a social experiment until you said that, but it has been a social experiment because we did it during the lockdown when we didn't really know any of us know what was going on or how long it was going to go on. But we know, we knew if we were, if we were lonely at home without conversation, traveling internationally as we used to, or going to events, if we were missing it, other people

12:30were missing it, we knew, we knew we didn't have the energy to build a big group. Yes. We knew it needed to be fairly small, the number 100 was kind of like a guess coming from our experience with the academy, that groups were typically 100 to 150. We had to model the price so economically, it wasn't too expensive to join, but it was enough to cover the costs of running it for, because we've got a team of people that run it, so it had to pay for all of them. But the, the discovery about the smallness, as your friends had about the people who, you can rely on to have your back, when I looked at the military data and I looked at platoons, platoons are typically 30 and three platoons make a company and ten companies make a battalion, so that's 30, a hundred and a thousand. So interestingly of platoon in the military, when you're putting yourself in harm's way,

13:35it can be as little as 20, it can be as high as 50, but it's typically around 30, and I've spoken to some military people around that, and they just said it's the most efficient for people to remember 29 names. If you give people 40 or 50, they can't remember the names, and even if your life's at risk, you've got to be able to remember that's Gina. Yeah. We're going to have to go for a short break. Okay. I think we're going to go away. It's fascinating conversation, Thomas, and I can't wait to continue it, so please, back with you in a moment. Arnon, mama, how you feeling? Great, and I'm ready for you today. I'm checking in, Ananya, morning meditation. Check. Dressed and ready to work out. Check. Check your blood pressure yet. And check. Boom. Great job, mom, and about those gold ear rings. No, ma'am. Now, more than ever, it's important that we protect our hearts and the hearts of those we love. Monitor your blood pressure daily and help each other stay motivated. Rally your squad to take the online pledge and release thepressure.org. Brought to you by the Release the Pressure Coalition and the Ad Council.

14:38Are you or loved when struggling with addiction? Rancho Molotro Recovery is an accredited drug and alcohol addiction recovery program treating the whole person through their lifelong recovery process. Our process incorporates both medication-assisted treatment and psychological therapy to help all aspects of an individual's mind, body, and spirit. Our lavish accommodation sits on 60 acres of outdoor greatness where your privacy and discretion is our utmost concern. Find lasting recovery and walk away from addiction one step at a time, Rancho Molotro Recovery. Com. Welcome back. Before the break, Thomas was talking about the optimum number of people to get together so that they actually can form meaningful bonds and the military having the tunes which were anything between 20 and 50-bit, typically 30. I'd like to move the conversation on. I'm absolutely fascinated that you've chosen a hundred people. Interestingly, you said that you needed to have a manageable number, but 3,000 interviews

15:42to me sounds like, you know, a very significant experiment in order to find your hundred. What were the criteria that you used to determine, okay, you're in, but you're not bearing in mind, we've got one in a hundred out of 3,000 people. Yeah, so first of all, I had to set up the process of the interviews. So I had to organize to get 25 interviews a week from my LinkedIn contact. So after, bear in mind, I've been on LinkedIn for 20 years. So I'm like a digital fossil in internet terms, I've been online for 33 years, so you know, they've been making oil out of me next. I've been online since I was 25 now 58. So I've been online longer than I've been offline, if you like. So I have this vast network on LinkedIn of 33,000 people that I've met over the last 20

16:47years. First thing I had to do was organize my calendar to have 25 interviews a week, because I knew I had to do a hundred interviews a month, because I didn't think I could find more than one in 25 would be suitable. In terms of finding that they had to be a specialist in a niche, they had to be able to evidence that they were a specialist in that niche, and they were an expert in that niche. So they had to have client testimonials to prove that they were an expert at that niche. And they had to be different from the other 99. Of course. It's one because we didn't want a hundred the same. We wanted a rich cocktail of skills covering all the different disciplines. When you look at the complexity of trying to find a hundred different people who are experts in a niche, somewhere in the world who like Penny and Thomas, they wanted to be long to a community. They wanted to be part of a gang, part of a club, part of an international group, and would happily contribute both physically, mentally, emotionally, financially to the group.

17:53You actually whittle yourself down to basically a hundred and three thousand. So just before we move on, did you have a questionnaire? How did you determine whether or not to invite such people? What clues did you go for? Well, interestingly enough, I actually wrote to everyone on my LinkedIn. Okay. All 33,000 often. And I sent all 33,000 my calendar link from Canada. And 3,000 people booked into that calendar link. Okay. So roughly, roughly 10% of them, what I didn't realize is when you book into your calendar, when you book 1,200 meetings a year into the calendar link to actually have 3,000 takes two and a half years because 1,200, 1,200, 600, that's how long it takes.

18:54So some people were replying back to me saying, Thomas, I've looked at your calendar and I can't get an appointment for 13 months. And I used to say, well, look, this is the challenge we face. We're trying to find these right hundred people. I can't get to you until I've interviewed the others. So from a social experiment point of view, it wasn't possible for us to do it inside to in a half years. It just wasn't possible. But what strikes me is that you're only going to get the people who are truly committed. You know, other people, so people are so impatient, they won't wait. So you're already sorting the sheet from the goats from the point of view that I'm really interested in this. I'm really committed. So you've already sorted quite a few people out of the arena. You have. And you're absolutely right, the interview process qualifies people out. But the other thing, the other thing, Gina, is the people who were harder to get were

19:58actually better than the ones who were easy. Well, that doesn't surprise me because if you've got peace of mind. To get tips on the cynics were actually better than the easy come because those who came easily could disappear easily. And also, they probably had got less busy diaries. They got time, whereas the people who were hard to get, I suspect that they had busy and full lives, which is what you want, not somebody who's sitting there waiting for something to drop in from LinkedIn. That's true. That's true. Well, based based on that, based on the busy lives scenario, you've just described, we must assume that 90% of the people on LinkedIn don't because they didn't respond. But 10% of them did. Yeah. Well, you may be that they didn't, they weren't, didn't look, didn't have time, or simply they thought, do you know what, that's not for me.

21:00Yeah, that's what people are right. The other thing, the other thing we had to do, we had to invite people from LinkedIn on to a Zoom. So they had to book into the calendar themselves. That will have put people off, seeing a busy calendar. That will have put people off, actually finally getting on the call and then having the conversation with me. That may have put them off. So that there's a lot of reasons which make either us unsuitable for them or them unsuitable for us. You know, there's a lesson in all of this, isn't there, for our listeners? And that is, if you want something hard enough, you do have to be persistent, you have to look for a system and then keep going. And I wonder how many people thought, I'm both sides of the coin yourself in terms of you wanted to do this, you know, recognize this is going to take you three years.

22:00And there are many people who turn around and think, I don't want to spend three years of my life interviewing 25 people a week. Now, it was a dream, but it's not practical, but you did it. And from the other side, you know, 13 months for an interview to have, to see whether I'd be suitable. It's no guarantees. Nah, I don't think I'll do it. Yeah, absolutely. All the time. It's almost like corralling, you know, a cattle into a smaller and smaller and smaller space until you get in the corral, the ones that you actually want. Yeah, I mean, I hate to describe all my business friends as cattle, but it's a good metaphor. So beautiful wild horses, how about that rather than catching? Going back to your beautiful wild horses much better, going back to your thing about persistence and it taking three years, the reason why the persistence was there was because we didn't know how long the lockdown was going to go on. No, no. And when we were first sat in front of the TV on Monday, the 23rd of March, 2020, and we

23:02were told, it's the end of the world, this virus is going to kill us all and we need to stay at home. I was thinking, it was like Armageddon, that, it was like 9-11, it was, what the hell is this? So it was a case of this, this might be the only way we work in the future. So the reason Penny and I put three months of, three months, three years of effort into it was because we didn't know what else was there. The other thing was that I didn't realize in doing the interviews was that people wanted to talk because they too were stuck at home. Yes. And so I've spoken to people in Ukraine, Afghanistan, Pakistan, in China, I've spoken to people south America all over the world that I wouldn't normally speak to because they wanted to speak because they were also stuck at home. So there was, there was a lot of people who were just, just joining the call because it

24:02was nice to have the call with someone intelligent. And I think that that's really what, we're sadly going to have to go to another break. Okay. So much to talk about. So please don't go away, we'll be back in a minute. Text and whatever, just don't text and drive. Visit stoptextstoprex.org, a message from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Ad Council. Hey there, I'm Lance Bass and this is Chip and for more than 100 years, American Humane has been protecting animals in times of crisis. And if you're like me, your pet means the world to you and you want to keep them safe if disaster strikes. American Humane's first responders are always prepared to rescue animals in danger, but you can also help. To learn more about disaster planning and keeping your animal safe, please visit americanhumane.org. Before the break and welcome back everyone, Thomas was talking about how many people he interviewed, but how often during the pandemic, people were phoning because they were having

25:03someone interesting to talk to and I think, you know, you look at the value that what you're doing has created at so many levels, the outcome, just what you were planning for, has something huge to offer people in the sense that they've got a bank of experts that they can go to. I'm going to talk about how that works. But just giving people the opportunity to have someone who is interested in them and what they do and to have that conversation with them, I would say to you, has actually made a significant and positive difference to 3,000 people, or at least a large proportion of those. Yes, I think you're really right about that. I think that fits actually into your enlightened leadership label or category because I was, I was very enlightened by the stories they told me, and hopefully they were enlightened

26:05by the stories I was telling them, but the whole, the whole experiment to use your word social experiment, the whole experiment of interviewing 3,000 people, actually for me has been a joy in my life because I'd forgotten what it was like to do that because I was just sitting on an airplane going around the world to, I've got board seats in Australia and New Zealand of America and the UK, so I was just going around and around on an airplane every month, going to board meetings, freak over. So I lived, I lived an airport, I lived at board meetings, I lived in hotels. Now I sat at home for two and a half years, 3 years nearly, interviewing people on Zoom and I thought, there's a much better way to live, going on my bike in the morning, eating better, being more healthy, not sitting on an airplane every couple of weeks a month. It actually physically and mentally, a great joy, plus meeting all these interesting people.

27:09And I would say to you, it's actually, it's not actually quite the plus, it's because of, and for me, I think the quality of one's life is hugely affected by the, of the relationships you have and they come at very different levels, just having a conversation with someone who is interested in you and where you are interested in them has a quality that is very special. It's so important that, you know, I can't believe you said that, it's so important. When we have the dinners, when we do the dinner interviews and we do a dinner each month in London to interview people and 12 people come and we ask people to share their personal story. Penny gives everyone a book, Businesses Personal, which is the VIP, the Businesses Personal. We ask people to tell their story, where they've come from, where they are now, where they're heading next. And just tell their personal story, not their business story, not a resume, not a CV.

28:11And literally every month we do this, we start at six, we finish at nine, every month we do this, people tell these stories that make the whole room cry. And everybody's got a story. Everyone's got a story that upsets you and it's just, it upsets you or it inspires you, it makes you think. And one of the things I would say to you, if you're listening to this, go and talk to people. And when I say talk to people, come and listen to people, you got two years in one mouth for a very good reason. When you scratch the surface, most people have a really interesting story to tell. Where can people get hold of you if they'd like to know more about what you're doing and what you can offer them through your group? They can just type in BIP 100, bit 100 dot club to Google and all the information is there. Sadly, we've completely run out of time. So Thomas, thank you very much for joining me.

29:13Please do contact me at Gina, G-I-N-A at Genuinely, Hyper-New, at G-E-N-U-I-N-E-L-Y, Hyper-New.com. Any questions, any themes you'd like us to cover, and if you'd like to know more about the work that I do, you'll find it at Genuinely, Hyper-New.com. Take care now. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for listening to Gina Gardner and Friends. The show that helps you live a happier, more successful and fulfilling life. To learn more about Gina Gardner, go to genuinely-u.com. If you would like to work with Gina or book her as a speaker, email her at Gina at Genuinely-u.com.