(calm music)
- Hi, Peter Boolkah here,
and welcome to today's
edition of The Transition Guy.
Now, joining me is Spencer Gore,
CEO of the European Medical Journal.
Thanks for coming.
- Welcome.
- (sighs) Now today,
really our session today
is gonna be talking about
personal development,
and more importantly,
about how many people
actually go out there
willing to back themselves.
So, I've known Spencer now
the best part of five years.
And what really strikes me about Spencer
is his commitment to himself.
And actually, his ability to spend
and invest quite a vast amount of money
in his education so that he's able
to take his performance
to that next level.
Now, this year Spencer, I've seen you
at a number of different
events, haven't we?
- Yeah, yeah.
- Why do you back yourself?
Why do you invest in
your self-development?
- I think you could argue
I don't back myself,
and that's why I do the
personal development.
I think there's so much
that you can learn.
It's a continuous development thing.
You've gotta stay ahead of the curve,
you've gotta push yourself all the time.
We've just listened to
Jesse Itzler downstairs,
and he says when you think you're done,
you're probably only about 40% done,
and there's so much more you can achieve.
I think most people do a little bit,
like dabble, they think
they've done a bit,
but actually, you've just
got so much more you can do.
And going out and putting
yourself out your comfort zone
is the best way to do that, I think.
- And when you first
started your business,
did you really envisage
you'd be doing this
much business education?
- No, no.
I'm the typical sort of
entrepreneurial story.
I didn't do particularly well at school,
left university without
passing after four years,
which didn't go down
particularly well at home.
I never really got into learning.
I never didn't like school or university,
but it never massively excited me.
And then the subjects that did,
I tended to do well at, funny enough.
And I think I've now found
something I really enjoy doing.
So I really enjoy learning about it,
and I think that's the key.
You've gotta enjoy what you're doing.
- Now how many business events,
how many of these summits
have you been to so far this year?
- This year, in terms
of big events like this,
this is the third one.
So, I went to the Grant
Cardone Growth Con in Miami,
which was fantastic.
- Bearing in mind that
you're based out of London.
- Yeah, I'm in London.
So I went to Miami
and saw three days worth of
fantastic speakers there.
Then went up to Telford with yourself
and Andy and the guys from Fluid
and saw some fantastic speakers there,
Sir Clive Woodward was the
obvious one that jumps out there.
- James Clear.
- And James Clear as well,
another great speaker.
Tom McHavotts.
And then over to this.
So, yeah, we've come over
to Atlanta for two days
of learning and
development and inspiration
from Vern Harnish and the
guys that have been on here
including Jesse Itzler. So
yeah another fantastic trip.
- And for you, I know we've
heard the conversation where,
very often, you're an avid note taker.
- Yeah, yeah.
- One of the big concerns for
us entrepreneurs out there
is that I take all these notes
but I don't do much with it.
What's your advice on that?
- For me personally
taking notes just helps me
absorb it, I think.
- Mhmm.
- So, I was talking about this
on my podcast the other day.
I will read books on the
train, or on the plane
going back from Atlanta, but I listen to
audio books in the car obviously,
it's a better use of time
than not doing anything,
but for me reading is
much better than listening
because I tend to take it in more.
When I'm taking the notes it sinks in more
and what I'll do at the airport today is
go through the 20, 30 pages of notes
and come out with the top three thing that
I've taken away from
this, or the top three
things I want to change
as a result of this.
And the rest of it's there for future
and all of a sudden six
months down the line
I'll remember something, or I'll use it,
or a year down the line,
but it's not something
I'm going to actively do something with,
but those top three things
are things I look to
implement over the next 6 to 12 months.
- Great, and what's been
the impact on your business
since you've gone on this
personal development journey?
- Well, phenomenal. It's very
hard to quantify all of this,
but I set the business up 6 or 7 years
and I've pretty much
seen Andy, your partner,
every week, I now see
him on a Thursday morning
at 7 AM, we meet between
Christmas and New Year,
as you said, it's relentless,
sometimes 2 or 3 hours at a time.
I've done that every
week, we see him quarterly
for two days, I've had my team on a
future leaders course with him,
and we're starting a new
one next month on that.
So it's been relentless,
and the result has been
I've grown from a company
with me and two interns
to we've got a company with 45 staff now,
we work with the top 20
pharmaceutical companies
in the world, we've got
nearly half a million doctors
in our database that read our
journals on a regular basis.
So the growth has been huge.
- And do you think you'd have that growth
had you not done the development?
- Yes, because I always
back myself, I don't think
it would have been as
quick, but I think we would
have got there. I think
what this has done is just
really sped things up. There's times when
you're not sure about a
decision or what route to take
and it's great to have
someone to give you some
thoughts and ideas on
whether you're making
the right decision or not.
I think there's times
when you simply don't know
what the best route is, and
it's great to have someone
there to give you that advice.
- What about the business
education side of it?
So not so much having
the coach in your life,
but actually the development you've done
and you've, I'm thinking
about it more from
the expanding your
reference point of view.
- Right, okay, yeah. Talking
about personal development
a great book by Matthew
Sayid called Bounce,
and he talks about your ten thousand hours
and anyone can become an
expert with ten thousand hours
of purposeful learning, not just doing
the same stuff over and over again.
And for me, going into
the office day in day out,
that's just photocopying the same day
a lot of the time, I'm asking the same
sort of questions, dealing with the same
sort of client issues.
This is the purposeful
learning, this is the
learning the new skills
that I don't know, and it's just
how quickly can I get
those ten thousand hours.
- So if you were going to
give other entrepreneurs
some advice about, sort
of, personal development
and actually them
raising the glass ceiling
that they artificially
impose upon themselves,
what advice would that be?
- Just do as much as you can.
As well as all the stuff
we've talked about here
I'm a member of something
called the supper club
which is an organization,
the members are predominantly
based in London, but
there's about 450 members.
You've got to be a business
that's turning over
£1,000,000 plus to be a member, but
some of the people I've met have got
businesses that are 3 or
4 hundred million plus.
And I think that the beauty of that is
it just makes you realize that
most people have the
same problems in business
it just so happens that some
have more noughts on the end.
Yeah, whether it's 10 staff,
100 staff, 1000 staff,
or whether it's one million, ten million,
a hundred million, it's
still the same problems.
- It is.
- The same changes and so
just talking to the people,
the guy I spoke to today, Henry McGovern,
he's just sold his business
for 3.9 billion pounds,
but he was just another person like us
he's got two arms, two legs, a head
he's no different, he's just had
different circumstances. So I think
you can achieve anything in life.
I always reference Sir Jim Radcliffe,
richest guy in the
country, he's no different
to me or you, he's just
been very successful
in the way he's done things.
So getting that personal development helps
you grow and get there quicker.
- A catalyst really.
- Yeah, definitely. Very much so.
- This is probably one of the things
that really I'm passionate about.
At the end of the day,
if you take the last
hundred years, say up to 2003.
It really was the industrial age,
so you could work really hard
and you'll get well rewarded.
Unfortunately the market
place has changed,
the landscape has changed.
Working hard these days
alone, isn't enough.
You've got to, as Vern would say,
out learn the competition.
- Yeah.
- Out learn the marketplace,
and if you're not prepared
to out learn the marketplace
then you have a very limited
time span in the market
before either someone else
comes and takes you over
or you become no longer relevant,
and you get swept to the,
sort of, side of the road
so to speak.
Now a lot of people out
there I know are quite
nervous about learning and like yourself
most people didn't
particularly like school maybe.
Didn't finish their
university, a lot of people
didn't finish school, and
that kind of put them off
to learning. At the end of the day
there's so many different ways to learn,
you said it today, you've
got the audio books,
you've got the podcasts, you've
got the books you can read,
I know dyslexia was once
considered to be a big issue,
these days there's so many
different ways of learning,
dyslexia shouldn't really
inhibit one's ability
to grow, and a lot of my clients
have dyslexia themselves.
- My oldest son is dyslexic, and so
I've spent quite a lot of
time learning about that
and I think there's
probably an element of that
about myself as well. I've
got a lot of similar traits
and the more I've looked into it
the more you find how many successful
business owners are dyslexic.
Richard Branson being probably
the most famous of all,
and I think he actually has
on his LinkedIn profile,
under skills: dyslexia.
Because he sees it as,
if you're dyslexic you tend to see things
differently to other people, and therefor
that gives you a huge
opportunities in life
to do things differently.
- But he's still an avid learner.
- Massively.
- Which is the interesting bit.
- Massively.
- So if personal development
has resonated with you today
and you're thinking, yeah
you are the glass ceiling
in you business, or maybe
you are the glass ceiling
in your life, cause that's often the case,
and you're not quite where you want to be
but you don't know quite
how to break through
to that next level,
head over to boolkah.com
and get in touch.
Spencer thank you very
much for your time today.
- It's been a pleasure Pete.
- And remember failure to learn
is learning to fail.
(calm music)
