AI Content Chat (Beta) logo

S 01 | Ep 5 Cultivating Connection, Ownership, and Accountability in Distributed Teams with Paul Pritchard

Episode #5 covers the topics of optimizing work in international remote teams, the necessity of learning and using the newest AI tools, building trusting relationships with customers, and being constantly enthusiastic about what you do to succeed.

 

Paul Pritchard is the Group CEO of Overdose, a leading high-growth digital commerce agency operating across nine countries. 

Paul stands as a luminary in the realm of digital leadership, leveraging extensive expertise to catalyze business growth within an interconnected landscape. With a proven track record spanning numerous industries, Paul specializes in guiding enterprises toward embracing technology and leveraging the internet to craft innovative customer experiences.

 

 

Watch the Video

 


 

 Listen to the Podcast Episode on Your Favorite Platform

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Introduction to the episode

 




All of these exciting things have happened throughout my career, and I guess to get from point A as a graphic designer to point B, which is today as a Group CEO of an amazing company with a group of amazing people, the journey was really dictated by an appetite and curiosity about what's next. 


(00:00-03:41) 

AS: Welcome to the Experience-Focused Leaders podcast. I am super excited to have Paul Pritchard here with us. He is the Group CEO of Overdose, which is an independent global commerce consultancy, originally founded in New Zealand, but now operating with a team of over 500 across nine countries and supporting some amazing brands that you love. So without further ado, Paul, welcome to the podcast and tell us a little bit about your journey from a graphic designer to a group CEO. I'm sure we have a lot of folks who would love to hear how you have built that skillset to lead an agency.
 

PP: Thank you so much for having me on, really excited to be here. I've been following a little bit of your journey as well, and I think there are a lot of parallels between the way that RELAYTO has started out and the journey that you've been on as well. So I guess, nearly 20 years ago, when I first started out, we were really at the end of the print life cycle, right? But the internet was starting to come through, and I was really designing for brands, publications, and print stuff, basically. But I saw the shift coming towards digital and was really keen to just jump in and figure out what it was about. 

And so I left that environment after three or four years having, you know, built up the skill of craft that I thought was pretty impressive, and then met a whole bunch of new people who were at the cutting-edge of building emails, websites, mobile when that started to come through. 

I remember when the iPhone came out, for example, and all of a sudden, it just changed the way people interacted with the internet. All of these exciting things have happened throughout my career, and I guess to get from point A as a graphic designer to point B, which is today as a Group CEO of an amazing company with a group of amazing people, the journey was really dictated by an appetite and curiosity about what's next. 

And I think if I look at the one thing that defines me, is this interest in everything that keeps coming at us and trying to figure out ways to interpret that to help businesses, help people really adopt and win in that space. That really is the foundation of our business as well. 

So Overdose, we were born seven years ago. You mentioned that we were a couple of guys sitting in the back office of a merchant down in New Zealand, helping them navigate the commerce landscape to figure out how to bring their products to life on the internet. Over that time and in a very short space of time, all of a sudden, the business was going, and that built our development resource. We had some really good people that we'd worked with historically out of Ukraine, and they've been on this journey with us since day one. To go from that to an appetite to expand, to become a true, respected global commerce consultancy has been our ambition since day one, and to get to where we are now is phenomenal, but I feel like we've only just started, we are less than halfway there.

 

 

 

Lessons learned

 




One is that faith in humans will pay itself off, the ability to provide safe, supportive environments for people to turn up every day and bring the best of them to work. 


 




Those two lessons: understanding how to work with people properly, give them the environment to be the best they are, support them, catch them when they fall, give them the space to be great. And then watch all of the levers in our business, particularly financially, to ensure that we're stable, we have a runway, and we can support the growth. 

 

(03:41-07:40) 

AS: This is really amazing because we share this belief that it doesn't matter where you are physically, right? It doesn't matter who you are, if you have the passion and the energy in this world that we live in, you could go from New Zealand to the world. Many small and midsize business communities use a great product built originally in New Zealand called Zero, which is a great expert of your country. And you're building the same platform for digital commerce consultancy. So tell us a little bit about some of the challenges you've run into, and I think anybody is really eager to build a global platform right now, whether you're in a large country or in a smaller country. So that could be a great lesson for our audience.
 

PP: How long have you got? Because the lessons that we've learned in seven years have been hard and fast.
 

AS: Sometimes, we use behavioral science. So basically, in behavioral science, anything between three and seven points will be remembered. Anything over that is sort of a hard one. So somewhere between three and seven bullets.
 

PP: Well, how about I start with one bullet, and I think the one bullet, which is the biggest lesson that we've learned, is how to work with people wherever they are and how to build trust, connection, ownership, and accountability through a team that is distributed all around the world. We've just lived through probably the most transformational disruptive, uncertain passage of time, and that has taught us two things. One is that faith in humans will pay itself off, the ability to provide safe, supportive environments for people to turn up every day and bring the best of them to work. 

I think that's a true thing wherever you are in the world, fundamentally being able to support people through these digital channels, like the one that we're on at the moment, not being able to travel for a number of years, which I think was a really tough thing to overcome, to ride the wave of global economic challenges.

Foreign exchange became such a really big, big thing for us, the ability to pay people in US dollars, pounds, and euros. I don't know if any of your listeners pay any attention to the New Zealand dollar on the FX exchanges, but it's not a very high-ranking currency. Those two lessons: understanding how to work with people properly, giving them the environment to be the best they are, supporting them, catching them when they fall, give them the space to be great. And then watch all of the levers in our business, particularly financially, to ensure that we're stable, we have a runway, and we can support the growth. 

When you grow as fast as we have, in not more than seven years, we've got close to 500 people employed all over the world. There has to be something there that binds them together. There has to be a culture that is created that allows them to feel like they're part of something bigger.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Remote Work and Global Brands

 




I think, ultimately, if you go back to that, whether they're your staff, clients, or partners, if you treat people like people, and you see the human being behind the logo and computer screen, you tend to get to the point of what's important a lot faster.

 

(07:40-11:24) 

AS: So about the culture, well, you cannot meet in person, right? especially even in the best of times, a trip from New Zealand to Ukraine would not be a trivial affair, certainly not during a pandemic. We think a lot about how we always create resources and content for internal and, ultimately, for customer experiences. What have you done to support both massive growth and this distributed structure that you have and your clients, as they can be demanding? Just to brag a little bit, what are some of the brands that are globally known that you're supporting right now?
 

PP: We work with brands like Patagonia and some high fashion brands like Karl Lagerfeld.

I think it's as much about the international brands, the ones that cross borders comfortably, as it is about the local businesses as well. Some of the best mid-market merchants in Australia, Southeast Asia, the US, parts of Europe, and New Zealand trust us to lead out their digital commerce strategies and to help them build digital assets and trade those digital assets as well. I think, ultimately, if you go back to that, whether they're your staff, clients, or partners, if you treat people like people, and you see the human being behind the logo and computer screen, you tend to get to the point of what's important a lot faster. 

Our secret source is the depth of interest, curiosity, and understanding of the businesses that we work with. When you have that enthusiasm for businesses and your team, they want to be a part of that as well. I think the other thing that stood out as well is we couldn't have done what we did so fast without a lot of support internationally. We had three or four people in Ukraine very early on who were just instrumental to our ability to build out websites really fast and then the ability to support those websites and trade them. That's the backbone of our growth. We're in a world where access to talent is just so much easier and faster to grab hold of, we just have to give them the space to be great. 

 

 

 

Technical Tools

 




We believe fundamentally in momentum, and momentum is about making decisions fast and understanding the consequences. The longer you wait for perfection, the further away you get from your goal. So we'd rather move fast, figure out what works, what doesn't, and then adapt. The major key and core is the belief that we're better together than individually, and our team is no one individual. 
 




And in fact, one of the core statements that we started off with was it's better to be different and better, which means you're not competing against people to be better than they are, you're actually looking at the market and going, “What's the differentiator? How do we be something that's not the same?” 

 

(11:24-27:11) 

AS: What are the technical tools? So I'm sure you're doing a bunch of zooms and visual interactions. Is there something you're doing that's asynchronous? And what have you learned about that? Whether it's with enabling your team or with the customers. It seems like it's one of those hard problems where we figure out what to do on the website level but not necessarily in the more complex, deeper interactions. Because a lot of people are struggling with this, I'm curious what's been your journey in this? And how do you take your lessons from consumers and brands?
 

PP: I think that the need to move your whole business online and use these video format connections has been fantastic for allowing you to maintain a presence and be in front of people. The challenge that you always have when you're in these formats is that they have a start and stop time, so you have to compress everything into this fixed environment, and it doesn't allow that creative spark that passing in a hallway, mentioning something, someone grabbing hold of it, running off with it and coming back with something new. 

So we have a number of tools that work for us. We use the whole Google Suite. So that means that we're relatively connected between video, chat, and email. We also use Slack which is integral to our business, and it allows just these rapid chats to happen. It has become this community space where people feel like they've got the safety to ask any question and get a whole community behind them to answer it. But I tell you, nothing beats being face-to-face. 

I think we really suffered a lot through the 2020-2021 phase in terms of that human connection. We had a large proportion of our team currently hired within that phase who have never met one another. It was all video, and the only fun times were on Friday afternoons, sharing drinks on an online chat and playing some online games. Whereas the reality today, I can get on a plane and go to Australia, the US, Asia, or Europe, which I do a lot more now. And you can just get so much more done face-to-face. So I think we have to get back to that concept of physical human interaction. There's a lot of power there that will add more to what we do, not take away. 
 

AS: What is it about humanizing digital tools? Slack's ethos was very much that it was kind of humanizing an automatic transactional digital interaction. By the way, I need to give a shout-out to Slack and Google, we use them. We play well with every technology, but we do internally rely on Google. We also see the velocity of doing something in Google Slides. And you have an instance about microsites where you get this collaboration phase done in Google effectively. Then the experience phase, we were surprised at the velocity that comes with that versus building custom sites, which we also do.

Salesforce, one of our customers, also uses Slack, not just internally but also to connect with vendors like us. It's easier to connect with them through this medium than through email because we're all kind of overloaded through this. So sometimes microsites are a great way to connect with people because there is room for connecting there. What would you say is the breakout besides inhuman meetings, which you can't do all the time? How do you keep that humanity in all those times when you cannot meet up in person?
 

PP: I think we've just gone through a big process of reworking our behavior. The things that matter to us are the way that people interact, act and how they turn up every day. I think there are two fundamentals, and the reason Google and Slack work so well for us is that they are collaboration tools that allow multiple people to come together and arenas to be able to work together. With Google Slides, we could have 15 to 20 people working on a presentation or a proposal and see exactly where everyone is and what they're doing. We still run our reporting layer through Google Sheets because of the openness, interaction, and collaboration. We have some interaction with clients at some stage in the week. And so everyone has the ability to jump into different client environments and be pulled into them as well. So it's a really collaborative space.

I think the other thing we do is repeat things. Repeating things to audiences all around the world and saying them over and over so that they stick and settle in. We only have two jobs as leaders in our business. The first one is to create a safe and supportive environment for our staff so that they can build value-based relationships with our clients.  

And the behaviors that we value within our teams are really simple stuff. One is empathy, the ability to think, accept others' points of view and not necessarily agree with them but accept them. That covers a whole raft of things, everything from inclusion through to having a constructive conversation rather than an argument. We believe fundamentally in momentum, and momentum is about making decisions fast and understanding the consequences. The longer you wait for perfection, the further away you get from your goal. So we'd rather move fast, figure out what works, what doesn't, and then adapt. The major key and core is the belief that we're better together than individually, and our team is no one individual. 

Everyone has someone else they can rely on, we believe in dual leadership. To be able to think about leadership together rather than just one person's voice running off there. The other is courage, being brave enough to have an opinion, speak up, and share your thoughts. We create environments to allow people to come forward with that. 

For example, video groups. I've been on all staff calls multiple times this year just to show my face and share my thoughts. But it's a great environment to allow people to come in and ask questions. But even those ones that don't feel comfortable, we do a whole bunch of internal anonymous surveys that allow us to get that raw feedback. So those people who have got this kind of burning question, but they're afraid to ask or people who are not that happy about certain things, they have a channel like a digital suggestion box, where they can go in. Then we act on it. I think it's hard because you have to work at it continuously, but it's always worth it. 
 

AS: One of my professors at Stanford was a gentleman by the name Chip Heath, who wrote a book called Made To Stick. He was covering the materials in the book in the class before the book was written, and then the book became quite popular in the geek community of communication, which I'm proud to be a member of. It was using a lot of behavioral science and neuroscience concepts to illustrate communication goals and how creating a sticky experience is important. Chip later wrote a book about experiences. I think experiences are one of the things that allow us to break through the noise of every day minutiae. 

The ultimate goal is to actually drive behavioral change that becomes a pattern. So one of the tragedies we see in the typical B2B communications as an example is that you pay a lot of money and spend a lot of time to get a customer or potential customer engaged, to bring an employee into the team, and then you dump them in front of a PDF of some kind or something that's completely uninspiring. It may be on brand, but it just doesn't create anything special. Since it's one of the first interaction points, it ought to be more memorable. 

So I'm curious, what do you do in your consumer practice? What are some of the challenges of working with clients that have more complex content? What have you seen work, and what have you seen starting to work?
 

PP: I think when you talk about complexity, it means different things to different people, and in our business, we fundamentally shy away from rinse-and-repeat thinking. So there's no belief that we can distill everything down into one way of doing things. And in fact, it's almost the opposite. The way we win and the way we help our merchants grow is by helping them find their unique place in the market. And so I think a lot of businesses think about how you fit in and how you become similar. Our job is to help our businesses stand out. So we look at ways of being different. And in fact, one of the core statements that we started off with was it's better to be different and better, which means you're not competing against people to be better than they are, you're actually looking at the market and going, “What's the differentiator? How do we be something that's not the same?” 

I think that goes down to a couple of key points. One reason we repeat things over and over again is that we try to stay simple. We try to stay focused on simple things so that we don't get overwhelmed by the complexity. And that’s part of the challenge when you are particularly dealing with big B2B companies who have very complex environments, both from a technology stack, potentially from a product set or a service set, and to the scale of operation. 

You're thinking of the international supply chain and the types of organizational structure that they have, everything from sales to manufacturing, even to people that literally count nuts and bolts. The organizational structure, as well as the technology structure, is a really difficult thing to overcome if you don't spend the time understanding it. And so building intimacy with the businesses that we work with, particularly the ones that we're looking at bringing in as a new client, we spend a lot of time trying to understand who they are, what they're about, what makes them stick, and what the real problems are.

Most businesses will come to us and say, “We need a new website’’, and the answer is, “Tell us why and show us what you've currently got.” And often, we actually spend a year working with them on the existing platform because they're just not getting the most out of it. For instance, think about buying a new car. You don't buy a new car and then see another one that you like the next day and go buy that one. You use your car for a number of years, and get some mileage out of it. You get to a certain point that makes you feel comfortable, feel you've got value out of it, and then you're willing to move on. Well, digital assets are the same thing. There's no point in jumping on to the next best trend if it's not going to be significantly more valuable for you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Keeping the Humanity in a Digital World

 




So you're not talking necessarily about purely commercial outcomes. You're talking about the presentation of someone's passion, their life. They've built it from the ground up, maybe mortgaged the house 10 years ago, and they've come out of the back end of that, and now they're in a great environment where they've got a proper business, you can't take that away. 

 




I think that there are two parts to it. One is that it's an educational journey, and you have to be excited about learning new things. That curiosity and ability to see the benefits of just diving into something, figuring it out, and adding it to your arsenal is really powerful, and we have to be excited by it. 



(27:11-39:57) 

AS: There is no guarantee that you'll get any better at using the next one if you have to figure out how to use the one that you already have. So we see people that are like, “Oh, I don't want to create any more PowerPoints”, and then you look at their PowerPoint, and you’re like, “You don't even know how to use PowerPoints.” So maybe figure that out, then we can help. Some people don’t know how to create a beautiful thing and believe once they buy a new widget, magic would happen, and then they can become a wizard at creating beautiful things. What's your take on that?
 

PP: Well, I think two things. In the businesses that we work with, particularly the ones built from the ground up, there's definitely a piece of heart that's attached to the business and the brand. So you're not talking necessarily about purely commercial outcomes. You're talking about the presentation of someone's passion, their life. They've built it from the ground up, maybe mortgaged the house 10 years ago, and they've come out of the back end of that, and now they're in a great environment where they've got a proper business, you can't take that away. 

But I guess there are so many more advances in technology to make it easier to launch things. You think about low code and no code and about some of the work you're doing, the pace at which you can take an asset and translate it into something new. AI will literally transform the way we operate in good ways, although some are bad. But I think fundamentally it's good because it will extend our skillsets. It will give us more capability to do better, faster, and smarter work. 

If you look at that, the ability to get something experienced, customized, personalized, and deeply oriented towards human interaction and learning all the time. Therefore, our job is to lead that journey and take our clients and team members on that journey so they can find their place in this new world. 
 

AS: When I think about AI, it's the velocity of doing business. We just launched our own AI Content Chat, which allows you to read anything. It could be a 1000-page book or presentation, and you would get the analysis and even get to the right page to get more context if you want to learn more. You are instantly bypassing a ton of research, and you're not doing some Google or some sort of fantastic AI that's confusing things. You're actually just reading stuff that you've put together. And so that's kind of a velocity for consumption.

But there's also velocity for creation. So where do you see this sort of consumption? Around AI, I think so far, a lot of talk has been about creation, people think you're just generating new stuff all the time. But I think part of it feels like we're making it easy for humans to navigate through complexity. What are your thoughts on that sort of creation versus consumption?
 

PP: I think this is a really big topic. I was fortunate enough to sit on a panel two weeks ago at Google Marketing Live, their premier event, to announce new ad tools and platforms. They run this globally, and it was the first time that it was in New Zealand. Everywhere you look today, there’s AI; whether you're writing an email and it's already suggesting what next words to say.
I think that there are two parts to it. One is that it's an educational journey, and you have to be excited about learning new things. That curiosity and ability to see the benefits of just diving into something, figuring it out, and adding it to your arsenal is really powerful, and we have to be excited by it. 

I think a lot of people are worried about the impact that it will have on everything. From jobs to the environment to privacy to different challenges that we're already addressing anyway, with the power of the internet and technology. AI is here, and it's not going away. Unlike trends, it's already baked in. 

So we either grab hold of it, and all of the big, scary questions that people are asking will either be answered or forgotten. We use a lot of tools that are AI-driven from the ground up. I'm super excited about it for our business because it actually helps us branch into new spaces that we can't do at the moment. We're very good at user experience and conversion rate optimization and all of those nuances of making websites better, faster, and more attractive to consumers. But what we're not great at doing is taking content assets and extending them out. As you said, taking static assets and turning them into moving assets is going to become a lot easier and faster. The challenge, I think, is that if we let it, it will all race toward the same place because that's what it's designed to do. It's designed to aggregate things, not to branch out.
 

AS: That is kind of an interesting dilemma. You can tweak it to maximize creativity. I think one of the things that annoys me a little bit about some of the people that are writing these research pieces about AI taking over everything is that I don't know how credible they are. 

You're using AI tools, your personality clearly is somebody who loves to use new technology to advance challenges. You work at an organization that achieved hyper-growth in a people business, which is even harder than in a technology business like ours. So hat's off to you for doing that. 

So you're in this innovation mode, you've had a long journey in the tech world, and you've always adopted new things. What's your general take on the opinion setting and congruence between the people who actually do it and people who talk about it or advise on it?
 

PP: I would generally take most advice from people who are practitioners, people who are already in that space, and showing real-world examples of where it works or doesn't. We play with a lot of technology and jump on a trend too early to see the fast starters fail and then the second. I think people who sit and proclaim big, bold opinion statements about AI as a concept are missing the nuance of the fact that this is not just one thing, it's a million different executions of it. 

But you think about when social media came out, right? When Facebook popped up, everyone kind of jumped on because it was brand new; before that, you had Myspace and other blogging platforms. The reality is that when good things happen and people see the power of it, it will survive. And AI has been here for way too long for it not to have an impact, and it already is having an impact. It's how we decide to use it going forward. Let's talk about dead things, for example, the Metaverse. It was such a huge thing, it was all that was talked about in the creative industry a year and a half ago, and now it's forgotten. As business owners, we look at the power that it can have as a tool for us to be better at what we do, then we have to be excited. Test and learn how to use it. It's called a tool for a reason. You don't just turn up at a building site and figure out how to build a house, right? You've got to learn, you got to go through that phase. That's what excites me; the fact that our people have more to learn because anyone who stops learning stands still. 

 

 

 

Ownership Working Culture

 




It’s about the concept of controlling the things that you can control. One of those things is yourself. You can turn up to any situation, you can control how you turn up and what you do with yourself. No one else can. No one else is in charge of you or telling you what to do. No one else can control you. So that's the first place you start. How do I turn up every day for my staff/team? How do I turn up to the meetings that I have with my clients and partners?

 




Energy, passion, drive, curiosity, and the hunger to learn are infectious, and people get in behind that stuff. They want to be part of that. And if you show that to your clients, you show that hunger to listen and learn about their business, what drives them, what makes their business work and what doesn't, all of a sudden, you can have this really simple conversation with them that are really powerful, simple statements that have a very deep and long tail impact.

 

(37:34-53:42) 

AS: There is no excuse not to learn anymore. In the past, to learn about AI, you really did need to attend top-tier schools and get mentored by top-tier faculty. Now I think, at least at a basic level, you don't need to do that much anymore. The bar has been lowered. So why you won’t take advantage of that is the question. As parting words of wisdom, how do you help your clients and yourself accelerate this excitement and shrink the fear of messing up or not doing anything?
 

PP: I learned this lesson really hard and wish I had known it in my twenties. It’s about the concept of controlling the things that you can control. One of those things is yourself. You can turn up to any situation, you can control how you turn up and what you do with yourself. No one else can. No one else is in charge of you or telling you what to do. No one else can control you. So that's the first place you start. How do I turn up every day for my staff/team? How do I turn up to the meetings that I have with my clients and partners? I turn up with enthusiasm because if I'm not enthusiastic about it, there's no point in me being there.

 

AS: That's interesting. So you're basically bringing the energy of ‘if you're gonna do something, you're gonna do it well’. Since this applies to you, it probably applies to the digital work that you're doing.
 

PP: I think once you come to this pure realization that no one else controls the way that you are going to approach something, it frees you up to be able to look at anything and see potential and possibility. For example, what happened in Ukraine, we had over 200 people there, and when that kicked off in February last year, that was the hardest thing that I've ever had to face personally when I know 200 people that I talk to weekly are in trouble. So I think that stuff really comes home to roost when there's nothing you can do to stop that. All you can do is what we turn up every day to do, which is to support our people. When you have that really pure baseline, then you realize that you can only do what you can do. It's quite empowering because it means that you free yourself of worry and being overwhelmed. The reason I said that is because I believe that people need to hear good things often. They need to hear things repeated so that it becomes second nature for them. 

As soon as I start saying the two things that are important to me, my team repeats them immediately. And that's great for me because it means they actually get it, and they start saying it to other people, and it's infectious. Energy, passion, drive, curiosity, and the hunger to learn are infectious, and people get in behind that stuff. They want to be part of that. And if you show that to your clients, you show that hunger to listen and learn about their business, what drives them, what makes their business work and what doesn't, all of a sudden, you can have this really simple conversation with them that are really powerful, simple statements that have very deep and long tail impacts.

 

AS: So it's really about caring and listening and then bringing that energy in.
 

PP: So when you put it that way, it sounds pretty soft. But I think there's a lot of power in it.
 

AS: Well, that's oversimplifying, but let's complicate it. In the sense of digital body language, are you paying attention to what the clients and the team are doing? You can't hop on a Zoom with them. What have you found from working with so many clients and great brands around digital behavior? How have the bars changed during and post-pandemic? Is there another change around the recessionary environment right now? Any words of wisdom across that spectrum would be helpful for all of us. 
 

PP: The one thing that is constant is change. So, if we are not comfortable with change, if we're not comfortable being uncomfortable, then it's hard to navigate through. That's where I think a lot of our businesses get really stuck because the technology landscape changes. They're stuck with legacy tech, and they're trying to figure out how to get off it because their whole business is now anchored into this technology space that is holding it back, and we're helping them find ways to strangle that out, creating a better interface for that customer experience layer. One way of doing it is by helping businesses navigate the next step. 

To your point about people who write long papers about the danger surrounding AI, the reality is none of it is true until it happens. Therefore, don't wait, don't fear it, because if you don't move forward, if you don't take that next step, then what are you really missing out on? 

A lot of the businesses we work with always and currently leave so much opportunity on the table because they're paralyzed by what to do next in the technology space, and our business is designed to help them decide what's next.  Most merchants lose sales every day because they don't have really basic stuff set up to follow up on a customer's interaction. Sending an email to a customer can have a massive impact on conversion. Our biggest advice to most businesses is don't think about the destination, think about the journey, think about what that next step in the journey is, and it's gonna change everything.

 

AS: There is actually value in this sort of incrementalism because it helps you get momentum, and it helps you not get overwhelmed by the complexity and the cost, right?
 

PP: Technology costs a lot of money. We are working with some fairly big numbers to implement transformational projects within companies, and that's really exciting. But we also work with smaller businesses that have very tight control over their budgets and they need to extract exceptional returns from their spending. So you have to be adaptable in that space. We will definitely take that million-dollar project, but we'll also say yes to the $5000 a month piece of work that will help a business take the incremental next step because a year down the track, that business is growing. We wouldn’t believe our business would look like it is today. So it's just the power of being open, adaptable, and always hungry.

 

 

 

Final thoughts

 

(53:34-56:22) 

AS: That's brilliant, Paul. I think the easy next step for our audience is to go to Overdose Digital, take the next step, and learn more about what they could be doing for their brand. What other ways can our audience get in touch with you?
 

PP: Linkedin is a really good way. Our website is straightforward. There are contact details there, or you can reach out to me directly on Linkedin. I'm the only one in New Zealand.
 

AS: Excellent, Paul. Thank you so much for the conversation and examples. We are going to take some of your lessons in building amazing consumer experiences. Thank you for inspiring us and sharing your insights.
 

PP: I appreciate just having the opportunity to have this conversation with you, it's been really exciting.
 

AS: And on behalf of all of the Ukrainians, as a former Ukrainian USSR native from Kyiv, I was just delighted on a personal note to hear how you've managed to build a business in Ukraine and stick with the hard situation. It's been an inspiring example to see some of our Ukrainian colleagues persevere in a terrible situation.
 

PP: It's a very strong country with very strong people. I'm in awe and humbled by our people.
 

AS: So there you go, even war can inspire us to do better. Thank you for a great conversation, and best of luck to you and the team.

 

 

 

 

 

Other Episodes

 

Godard Abel | CEO of G2

S 01 | Ep 6 Where You Go for Software: Reach Your Peak

 

 

 

Dean Stocker | CEO of Alteryx

S 01 | Ep 8 Turning Your Customers Into Your Biggest Champions

 

 

 

Peter Fader | Co-Founder of ThetaCLV

S 01 | Ep 10 Turning Your Marketing Into Dollars

 

 

 

 

 

 

Author 


RELAYTO Content Experience

RELAYTO Content Experience

The fastest way to build digital experiences. We empower businesses to convert PDFs, presentations, and other content into interactive experiences & webpages with instant branding, analytics & more