Spill The Tea | Episode 4 – Industry Partners:
[Ming Johanson]
I think I get a bit sad about the fact that my skin has to get a little bit tougher because I do take it personally. I do get quite upset about it.
[Kira Carlin]
Which is interesting for me because I don’t at all. I have the hide of a rhinoceros.
[Ming Johanson]
That’s the media coming through for you.
[Kira Carlin]
I’m a former journalist, I don’t care about anything.
[Intro]
What if you could learn from the mistakes of others? The Spill The Tea podcast is a great way to get information on all things related with digital marketing and business. Hosts myself, Ming Johanson and Kira Carlin break down our knowledge in various fields, including business, sales and marketing. So whether you’re new or old at doing any of these things, tune in each week and hear the lessons learnt titbits of knowledge and talk of tea.
[Kira Carlin]
Okay, let’s do this thing.
[Ming Johanson]
Hi, Kira.
[Kira Carlin]
Hi.
[Ming Johanson]
[Laugh] This is Spill the Tea.
[Kira Carlin]
It is.
[Ming Johanson]
Welcome to our podcast.
[Kira Carlin]
And if we’re talking about tea, I’m not sure about this liver detox stuff.
[Ming Johanson]
No.
[Kira Carlin]
Nah, it tastes a bit like feet.
[Ming Johanson]
[Laugh] Oh… That’s an indictment. Like I am drinking. What am I drinking? I’m drinking. It’s. It’s not. It doesn’t feel like it’s a good name, but, yeah, it’s got all the things peppermint, dandelion.
[Kira Carlin]
Burdock, Milk thistle, all the good things [Yes] but eh.
[Ming Johanson]
Things that are good for us, really do taste nice.
[Kira Carlin]
They do, don’t they?
[Ming Johanson]
So I thought we’d talk about partnerships. Industry partnerships.
[Kira Carlin]
Oh Good.
[Ming Johanson]
I have a testimonial that I wanted to read out that came in today that was actually kind of awesome from one of our industry partners who is Tiz Pereco, and hopefully I haven’t butchered his surname. I probably have. I’m really sorry Tiz. She runs an organisation called ‘Amongst It’ and we’ve been working together for quite a while now on a particular partnership with a client and she left us a beautiful testimonial today which says, “What I love about Marketing Jumpstart is the way they have earned my trust, the transparency and their ability to provide me with realistic expectations. Being an outsourced marketing strategist, I work with many marketing providers and often need to recommend them to my clients. From the time I first started working with Ming. Avi and the team for one of my clients, it has been a great experience. I have no hesitation in referring them to others and have. They are thorough and very mindful of the client’s requirements and budgets and great in explaining what can be very confusing for many. Love your work Marketing Jumpstart!”
[Kira Carlin]
Love that. Love Tiz
[Ming Johanson]
Love Tiz, Thanks Tiz. What I love about her is she’s very blunt, which I really appreciate. I really appreciate somebody who’s upfront and doesn’t mess around with what they want and what they need. Because I often find I’m talking around in circles with some people.
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah, that’s pretty fair.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
Bluntness is wonderful.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah, it’s a great quality. Great quality that I appreciate. So I kind of wanted to talk about industry partnerships and the importance of being a good team player in an industry that is full of so many sharks and so many people that take advantage of, I guess, you know, ultimately at the end of it, that client may take advantage of that client not knowing enough or not understanding enough or speak to them like they’re idiots. And quite often they’re not because surprise, surprise, they run a business.
[Kira Carlin]
Just because it’s not their expertise doesn’t mean they can’t grasp what needs to happen. [Yeah] They might not want to do it. Yeah, but they can understand the concepts.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah. So I think over the years I have found myself in this weird little vortex where I actually end up training a lot of our industry partners in what we do. And I’ve done a lot of training, you know, interstate, and I’ve ended up talking at conferences and picked up some really great partnerships along the way because ultimately in my mind, there is enough work out there for everyone. And in fact, I’ve ended up with opportunities because a competitor has decided to badmouth an event, for example.
[Kira Carlin]
Or screw over their client. [Yeah] It honestly amazes me how much work comes to us because another agency or another developer or someone in our industry has completely screwed somebody.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
And we end up fixing it. And, like, I mean, I should probably send those people a Christmas card because it sends us a lot of work. But I’d rather not do it, frankly. I’d rather they just play straight the first time. So.
[Ming Johanson]
So what do you think is the thinking for them.
[Kira Carlin]
That they’re too stupid to realise.
[Ming Johanson]
Well I yeah I find I kind of feel like it’s a short term gain, it’s a short term gain where they’re looking for the money now and they don’t, they don’t think about the lifetime value of a client.
[Kira Carlin]
But honestly, the way that I have heard, you know, in conversations that have been relayed to clients when we’ve been trying to work out what has happened, [yeah] I honestly feel like a lot of the time they think that the client will not notice. [Yeah] Which is just not true.
[Ming Johanson]
In the world that we are current, where everything is google-able, everything has a YouTube video, everything has a software solution or something that literally just empowers the user, empowers the customer. It’s like the reasons why Square and Wix and Weebly exist is because of bad practise in the web industry, right? So like I think this there’s a lot to be said about tool sets that are specifically designed because of your bad practise.
[Kira Carlin]
Mhm, that is true.
[Ming Johanson]
And I think there’s a lot to be said as well about the fact that it is Google. They can look it up.
[Kira Carlin]
Absolutely. Or ask around. Everybody has a friend who’s a developer, a marketer or something. [Yeah] In the industry enough to know what is and is not possible.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
It’s not a mentality I particularly understand because you’re going to get caught.
[Ming Johanson]
On a long enough timeline. Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah, so even the amount of blackout or pad stuff that we have done. [Yeah] Where people have done terrible, terrible things to their clients’ ad accounts.
[Ming Johanson]
Or apps, I think of some of it I feel like is outsourced to people that they haven’t vetted.
[Kira Carlin]
Exactly. So they’re trying to get a cheap outcome and it looks good for a little while. And then after a time.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
It becomes obvious that what they’ve been doing hasn’t been about real traffic. It’s about getting bots to look like real traffic.
[Ming Johanson]
I think it’s wild to me that that’s still a behaviour because Google has been around for such a long time, and they have played whack-a-mole on bad practice for such a long time. But just do it right in the first place.
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah, it’ll save you a lot of time in the long run.
[Ming Johanson]
And money, like you. Imagine the amount of customers that have spent so much money on being number one on Google only to get sent to the back of the line for bad practice.
[Kira Carlin]
Exactly. It’s heartbreaking to watch, but I think as well, that’s what makes our good industry partners so much more valuable is because it’s amazing to have somebody that you can pass off something that is a little outside of scope for us so that we don’t have the resources to do it at that moment and being able to say to a client, look, no, we can’t right now, why don’t you see these people?
[Ming Johanson]
But we trust these people. And, you know, we were talking the previous episode about me outsourcing our own branding, and part of that is also a process in which I’m vetting them to see if they’re a good match for us to refer work to.
[Kira Carlin]
Exactly. And we see it a lot is, you know, in networking groups and referral groups, you say you use those services a little bit yourself first before you send your mom in. Cause if your mom goes in and has a bad experience…
[Ming Johanson]
We’ve all met my mum, my mum, my mum is a lot smarter than, than people assume she is.
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah. I think it would go worse for them if your mom had a bad experience because. Well my mom.
[Ming Johanson]
My mum taught herself AutoCAD of all things, which is like the hardest engineering design tool on the planet and she has taught herself that. So when people like to try to sell her what is it that she knows she can get far more. Yeah. It’s, it’s just, it’s hysterical for me.
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah but like, good referral partners are worth their weight in gold.
[Ming Johanson]
Absolutely.
[Kira Carlin]
Somebody who you can really trust to send your clientele to and know that they’re going to be looked after.
[Ming Johanson]
So what are we looking for in our industry Partners?
[Kira Carlin]
Qualities we’re looking for. [Yeah] Obviously reliability. [Yeah] You know, the quality of the work can be spectacular, but if they’re not going to do the work, it’s actually… so many moons ago, I was a freelance photographer.
[Ming Johanson]
Yes.
[Kira Carlin]
And the thing in the freelance world that everybody says is with a freelancer, you can you know, there’s three things. They’ve got to be reliable, good at their job and pleasant to deal with. A great freelancer is all three of those things? [Yes] A good freelancer is any two. A fairly average freelancer is one of those things.
[Ming Johanson]
Yes. Yeah, absolutely. I think communication is really important. Yeah. Transparency of communication, which Tiz spoke to.
[Kira Carlin]
You also are not being difficult to deal with, nobody wants to deal with somebody who you walk away from needing an aspirin and a lie down.
[Ming Johanson]
[Laugh] We’ve been interviewed by quite a few businesses like, you know, so we’ll work with web guys and we’ll do the SEO component, will do Google ads and they want to know that we’re not going to poach that client. And of course, we won’t. If you’re doing good work, why would we ever do that?
[Kira Carlin]
Why would we need to? Yeah, we have our own work. We don’t need to.
[Ming Johanson]
So I think that’s the other side of it is if the job that is done by an industry partner is a good job, we would never.
[Kira Carlin]
No and we would expect the same thing from our industry partners. We would expect that they’re not going to try and badmouth this to our clients because our clients know better. They deal with us.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
And also our clients know us. [Yeah] So not every client knows us this well, but I have seen you invite clients over for lunch to your house because you felt like it. [Yeah] Like these people know us. They come to our Christmas parties.
[Ming Johanson]
Which is a big deal. Like I think a lot of people. So I have trauma around meals and a lot of me inviting people over for a meal that I have cooked is very much about me welcoming you into my family. [Exactly] And into my space, because it is such a vital piece of connectivity for me that if I’ve invited you over for dinner and I’ve cooked for you, you are somebody who is very special to me.
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah, these are people who come to our Christmas party. We know the names of their kids and their grandkids and then…
[Ming Johanson]
And their pets. Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
I’ve probably, like, frightened and traumatised their pets. At some point. They’ve shown me their dog and I’ve just run over and be like, Oh my God, who’s a good boy.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah. So, you know, the extension of our clients being a family, same with our industry partners as well. I am always looking for people who are of value alignment so that they are authentic in themselves, they are authentic in their business. They’re looking to solve problems for their clients. And you know, we’re a part of that solution. So quite often that’s who we’re looking for isn’t it and, you know, collecting receipts.
The amount of times that I have our industry partners who have collected receipts on us, and I’ve had no idea that that’s happened. And then like six months, 12 months later, they’ve gone, “oh yeah, now we heard back from my client. We checked in on them to see how they went with you. And you know, this is all the feedback that we got.” It’s like, Oh, cool, awesome. Because I do the same thing.
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah absolutely. We like to know that the person that we’ve sent to them is satisfied.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah, absolutely. And there’s that value alignment in just being authentic, having good communication, like, you know, we’re very process driven and I think a lot of our industry partners like that because they can see the processes and see how that all works and how it’s all put together.
[Kira Carlin]
I also think ‘safe’ is a big thing. Yeah. So the fact that we know if way of referral, we like to know if we’re referring somebody onto our clients or our friends or mum that they are not a neo-Nazi and they are not, you know, they’re not somebody who is going to make that person feel attacked and feel [Yeah] vulnerable in what they do. We like to know that the people that we’re referring to are psychologically easy to deal with.
[Ming Johanson]
That’s an interesting way to put that.
[Kira Carlin]
Well it’s a big part, it’s a big part.
[Ming Johanson]
Well you’re dealing with your business.
[Kira Carlin]
Exactly, you’re vulnerable.
[Ming Johanson]
There’s nothing more challenging than finding people to trust with the vulnerabilities of your business.
[Kira Carlin]
Exactly. And knowing that anyone who comes from us is not going to be a nightmare vulture person.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
Is really important to me.
[Ming Johanson]
Yep, Yeah, absolutely. And I think the interesting thing, because I’ve had a few occasions where this has happened, where I’ve referred to people who I thought knew and trusted me only to hear back about them being confronted that I was in the room. It was like, Well, I just referred you to a client like.
[Kira Carlin]
Also that’s good referral practice is to sit down with the referral and the client. Yes. And introduce and make sure the way has been cleared.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah. Yep. Just want to make sure it’s a good handoff, really.
[Kira Carlin]
Make sure that there are no weird misunderstandings and everyone in the room is comfortable.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah. So, you know, I’ve had a few occasions like that, but, you know, you learn and I think I get a bit sad about the fact that my skin has to get a little bit tougher because I do take it personally. I do get quite upset about it.
[Kira Carlin]
Which is interesting for me because I don’t at all. I have the hide of a rhinoceros.
[Ming Johanson]
That’s the media coming through for you.
[Kira Carlin]
I’m a former journalist, I don’t care about anything.
[Kira Carlin]
Part of my job used to be getting sworn at by the elderly on the end of a phone. People I would never see would never know me. I would ring up the radio station for someone to yell at and that person was me.
[Ming Johanson]
[Laugh] You have said to me probably quite early on in the business when you were working for us that I have a terrible habit of taking responsibility for shit that is not even my responsibility.
[Kira Carlin]
Shit I think I’ve said that to you this morning?
[Ming Johanson]
Probably. Yeah, you did. Yeah, it’s. Yeah, we. We revisited that conversation. Yes.
[Kira Carlin]
You’ve a terrible habit of taking on all the world’s woes.
[Ming Johanson]
Because I care. I’m invested.
[Kira Carlin]
You are. You’re invested.
[Ming Johanson]
I’m invested in people’s success. You know I am. I do really care about the outcome.
[Kira Carlin]
I know you do. And that means that you get upset when people don’t behave perfectly, not perfectly.
[Ming Johanson]
Just Reasonably.
[Kira Carlin]
Reasonably. When people don’t behave reasonably.
[Ming Johanson]
I don’t expect anyone to behave perfectly because everybody is. Everybody doesn’t have their shit together. Everybody is struggling.
[Kira Carlin]
Behaving in good faith in the term I was searching for.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah. Yeah, Yeah. I don’t, I don’t like it when people don’t do what they say they’re going to do. It frustrates me because it’s like you’re trying to shove a triangle shaped thing through a circle hole and it’s not fitting. [Mhm] Because you seem like I think, I think and I’m maybe I’m wrong but I think part of it is the driver for that is I think they’re trying to avoid conflict in some way.
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah. I think as well it’s a very different business culture from what’s out there a lot of the time.
[Ming Johanson]
So yeah, that’s a thing.
[Kira Carlin]
That’s something we talk about within the business quite a lot. That’s something you talk about is the fact that you want psychological safety for your employees. You want everyone to, you know, to feel safe and seen and to be able to have the environment to get the work done. I mean, this is probably not everybody’s experience, but I have worked in organisations who have literally said to me, if you want a friend, get a dog. [WOW] I have a dog.
[Ming Johanson]
Wow.
[Ming Johanson]
It’s yeah, I get yeah, I get very challenged and I know, I know that our business is not the norm, which might maybe makes me a bit sad and I am trying, I guess to be the leader in that. And I probably am. I don’t I don’t really see it because I feel like it’s a constant battle. The psychological safety of our team is more important to me than money. I can always make more money.
[Kira Carlin]
But also if we’re a mess, then making the money [We can’t do the work] becomes difficult.
[Ming Johanson]
And we spoke about this recently at a talk that I gave for DDD Perth was the fact that we all work remote. Our psychological safety is even more important because the work is being done at home and you can’t just leave your office and go home and escape from your work because they’re one in the same.
[Kira Carlin]
Absolutely. Well, I mean, for example, right this moment, my dog, who is sitting in a studio, who is my closest, my physically closest co-worker, is currently trying to eat your feet.
[Ming Johanson]
Yes.
[Kira Carlin]
You know, this is the world we occupy. It’s not the aircon is five degrees too cold to accommodate an office there. Those aren’t the problems that we have now. The problems are much closer to home because we are literally in our living rooms.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah, I was talking about the fact that, you know, the psychological safety of the team is so much deeper and we feel each other’s challenges so much more because of isolation, because we tend to be more vocal and communicate more about what’s going on for each other. And, and, you know, testament to the fact that we all feel safe around each other, that that’s actually kind of awesome. Could you imagine that happening in an office?
[Kira Carlin]
Not really, no. And I’ve worked in a lot of them and not really. I think we all have office friends. We have people in the office who we feel safe around. [Yeah] But we all always have people who are not.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
It’s, it is what it is but what it is, often isn’t great.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah. And so, you know, it also comes back to who are we picking to be in our teams, who are we picking to be in our, slightly outside team, which is our referral partners and our industry partners. It’s the same thing. Are we psychologically safe with those people? Is my team going to be psychologically safe with a referral partner who likely will spend 90% of their time talking to my team instead of me?
[Kira Carlin]
Hmm.
[Ming Johanson]
Because as well as we have realised on numerous occasions, cloning is illegal and I only have so much time in a day.
[Kira Carlin]
People keep telling me cloning is illegal. I shouldn’t worry so much, the technology is prohibitively expensive. I’ve looked into it.
[Ming Johanson]
But the point is, if you’re not okay with working with my team, then you’re actually not okay working with me and like trusting the fact that my team as somebody that I have trained, that I’ve onboarded, that is a part of our culture that lives, breathes, sleeps, eats, our culture. You know, that’s so important and hard for some businesses to adjust to.
[Kira Carlin]
I think that’s probably very true. Yeah, I think the transition because of course the business was you for so long. [Yeah] It’s a transitional thing.
[Ming Johanson]
I think they find it really confronting the type of business like I had the conversation with people a few times around “Oh but don’t you, do you not trust your team?” or the opposite “Don’t you mistrust your team to screw around at home and not do the job?” And it’s like, oh, I absolutely know, without a shadow of a doubt that there will be moments where they will walk into that garden and walk away from their laptop, or they will do the laundry, or they will procrasti-chore till the end of time, because I do it.
[Kira Carlin]
Absolutely. But it gets done is the important thing.
[Ming Johanson]
But I also know they’ll do the damn job.
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah.
[Ming Johanson]
They’ll get it done. They don’t have to sit in front of a computer 8 hours a day to actually do the work that we need to do, because we are experts in what we do.
[Kira Carlin]
But also because part of this, I think, is the neurodiverse nature of the team. But part of it is the fact that people just don’t work like this. Nobody actually gets a productive 8 hours.
[Ming Johanson]
And it’s laughable, it’s laughable.
[Kira Carlin]
It is laughable the amount of times in office situations I have spent solving a co-worker’s romantic life, or whingeing about upper management or making extended cups of tea. Because if I go back in right now, I’m going to punch someone in the face. Nobody gets a productive 8 hours.
[Ming Johanson]
So much so that we’ve actually deliberately and intentionally made watercooler chats in our business a thing.
[Kira Carlin]
Absolutely!
[Ming Johanson]
It’s almost enforced water cooler conversations because we’ve realised that the social component within our business is missing because we spend so much time talking about work and nothing else.
[Kira Carlin]
Exactly. So now we make time for me and Avi to talk about classic sci fi, or for Derek and Mikey to talk about whatever they talk about. [laugh] Hell I’m putting a creative project chat in discord because I want to see what everybody’s doing.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah, yeah, because we’re all creative.
[Kira Carlin]
Well, because Avi makes watercolours and Verne collects vintage cameras and like, I mean, you roller skate and I’m yet to see pictures of that.
[Ming Johanson]
It exists. It’s on TikTok. There’s evidence.
[Kira Carlin]
Okay.
[Ming Johanson]
Follow Michelle, she takes all the videos of the TikToks. Because I’m too close to potentially trying to monetise everything.
[Kira Carlin]
You’ve been banned?
[Ming Johanson]
I have been banned. It’s funny that that has actually stuck because normally I would just rebel.
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah I know you would.
[Ming Johanson]
But like that whole thing in terms of people coming in and accepting our business for how it is and accepting the fact that the job will get done and like even that and the fact that we don’t price ourselves exorbitantly. No, we don’t price ourselves out of existence. The efficiency in our business is next level because we’re not just talking to somebody the other day who works for the media in software development. And he had spent the entire 8 hours in five meetings.
[Kira Carlin]
Oh my God.
[Ming Johanson]
And had said to me…
[Kira Carlin]
Hearing that makes me tired
[Ming Johanson]
Well. And said to me “When does the work start? The meeting? There’s no work actually getting done in the meeting. When does the work start?”
[Kira Carlin]
This is exactly it. I don’t see the purpose of that. I have sat in many meeting that should have been an email.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
Or better yet, a text.
[Ming Johanson]
Dot point.
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah.
[Ming Johanson]
Dot Points.
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah. A single dot point and there’s just no purpose in it. And I think that’s what happens when you get many, many layers of management creeping into a situation, is that you have to then tick all the boxes, which shouldn’t really be a box at all because you just do the thing.
[Ming Johanson]
I think we spend more time, certainly as we’ve started to grow, we’re spending more time helping our team members to self-manage because that’s a really hard thing to come to. Like it’s, it’s easier for the team members that we’ve had that were sole traders that did their own thing and they knew how to shape their week. Whereas people who’ve come, interestingly enough, who’ve come from corporate backgrounds and come into our business have gone, ‘WHAT THE HELL! How do I shape my week? What, how do I even focus on these eleventy billion tasks that I have created for myself.’
[Kira Carlin]
Even creating outside of office systems to get the work done because it’s something that I think we’ve all thought about from time to time as well. If I didn’t have to sit in this stupid over air conditioned room.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
What would I be doing?
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
And finding those systems takes a little bit of time, like I do a lot of the copywriting in the business. I copyright better with Disney movies playing in the background, I just do.
[Ming Johanson]
Tavern music.
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah, I can’t. Okay, so if it’s something serious. Like seriously.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
Disney is probably not the best choice.
[Ming Johanson]
Black hole? Black hole sound?
[Kira Carlin]
No, it will still be something with TV, it’ll still be something playing in the background that I’ve said a million times.
[Ming Johanson]
It’s usually Brooklyn Nine-Nine for me.
[Kira Carlin]
You know, like Shetland or something like that. If it’s serious, like if I’m writing about restraining orders or something like that. Yeah, but 99% of the copywriting I do, Disney is playing in the background because of all that light, highly curated musical language just gets in my brain and the things that come out of my hands are then more like musical and arranged. [Yeah] And could I do that in an office? Nah!
[Ming Johanson]
No, no, not at all. And yeah, so that I think, yeah, we probably spend a year figuring that out with each of our team.
[Kira Carlin]
I think that’s pretty fair. So figuring out that it’s not actually slacking, if I write the piece that I’m working on, on a laptop, on my stomach while I’m on a sofa with a Disney movie playing in the background [Eating snack], it’s actually productivity. [Yeah] it’s better work.
[Ming Johanson]
I think. And I think you probably, out of everyone, have been challenged the most by that, in terms of you’ve sort of, there’s been a few moments there where you were expecting me to yell at you.
[Kira Carlin]
Oh, yeah.
[Ming Johanson]
And expecting me to go, why aren’t you argh? And I’m like, How can I support you? How can I help you to get to the finish line? How are we setting you up for success?
[Kira Carlin]
Exactly. Working out that what looks good is not necessarily what is good.
[Ming Johanson]
Because we have a team member that works, is a night owl. Is 100% like an elf. That works and is a cobbler for shoes. [laugh]
[Kira Carlin]
He is our shoemaker’s elf and we all go to bed and we wake up and the work is mysteriously and miraculously done.
[Ming Johanson]
And, you know, he still shows up for meetings and he still interacts with clients. But for the most part, and like I’m a big believer that everybody has different bio rhythms and you should work to whatever your bio rhythm is. So if you are a night owl and that is healthy for you and that’s the keyword ‘healthy’, then work towards that. That’s, you know, we have flexible hours. I don’t care when you work, so long as you’re able to communicate with the rest of the team and so long as it’s healthy for you.
[Kira Carlin]
Exactly.
[Ming Johanson]
Like if your mental health is tanking because you’re working at 4 a.m. in the morning because you can’t get it out of your brain, there’s maybe some better, healthier ways that we can help structure that day.
[Kira Carlin]
It’s all about what works for you. And I think that is lost in a lot of what we do for work.
[Ming Johanson]
Well, I think the office model is designed for a very specific neurotypical person.
[Kira Carlin]
Given the air conditioning setting. It’s designed for a very specific older man. No, the research has been done. It’s like across the world, the air conditioning is too low for most women.
[Ming Johanson]
Yes.
[Kira Carlin]
You know, I used to see it in office jobs, I would go in and all the men would be like in their business suits, walking around in perfect temperature. And all the women would be huddled under a series of shawls.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah, yeah.
[Kira Carlin]
You could tell which was a woman’s desk, because there was a cardigan or shawl draped on the back of the chair at all times.
[Ming Johanson]
Absolutely. So coming back to the whole partnership’s conversation.
[Kira Carlin]
I think we drifted.
[Ming Johanson]
We have drifted a little, but that’s okay. I don’t think that’s a terrible thing, especially if those people who are listening in, who are our potential future partners, is understanding how we work and how, yeah, that’s important to us. Our mental health is important to us.
[Kira Carlin]
And a small plug if you want to hear Ming talk about this more. She recently did a talk about this at ‘DDD Perth’, which we will link in this podcast.
[Ming Johanson]
Somehow we’ll figure it out.
[Kira Carlin]
We’ll find a way to link it, but at any rate.
[Ming Johanson]
It would probably be on our Facebook.
[Kira Carlin]
‘Ming Johanson – DDD Perth 2022’ Look it up, it’s well worth it.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah. So I think coming back to our partnerships, that piece of transparency and them understanding how we work, that piece of transparency in terms of where we are very much an open book about everything that we do. We do not hold back on any information. We don’t go, this is a secret squirrel business.
[Kira Carlin]
Secret squirrel business!
[Ming Johanson]
So none shall pass! You must pay an entry fee! This is none of that shit, because it’s just like this. This information is readily available. We have tested this till the nth degree and some and a little bit extra. We are definitely extra on that. But we spend a lot of time researching and developing different things. And because we are in an industry that is a constant moving target, we have to be on top of it. And our industry partners trust us to be because we are also painfully curious.
[Kira Carlin]
Like probably problematically curious.
[Ming Johanson]
[Laugh] In like an obsessive sort of way.
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah
[Ming Johanson]
It’s okay. It’s fine.
[Kira Carlin]
It is until you find out that you’ve got Cheetos in your hair and have had for several days. Not going to say how I know that one.
[Ming Johanson]
[Laugh] Anyway, thanks for listening. Thanks for tuning in to Spill The Tea. I can’t remember what we’re talking about next episode, I’m sure we will figure it out.
[Kira Carlin]
I think we should probably talk about work from home productivity because that was a whole spiral.
[Ming Johanson]
Yeah, yeah, Let’s talk about that.
[Kira Carlin]
Yeah, Let’s talk about that.
[Ming Johanson]
All right.
[Kira Carlin]
Okay.
[Ming Johanson]
See you then.
[Kira Carlin]
All right, talk to you then, bye.
[Ming Johanson]
[Laugh] Bye
