Do you find ever your nerves change about material when it's more personal?

It used to, but then you see, here's the thing.

The audience, for the most part, just want to be entertained.

Forget the Edinburgh Festival, that's a slightly different vibe.

But even then, I've poured my heart out and talked about all sorts of deeply personal things.

And people will still come up to me after a show and I'll think, oh, maybe they've had to deal with, you know, someone they care about getting attacked.

maybe someone they love has died or whatever it is and they'll always nearly always say oh hi just wanted to know are you really from cornwall and i'm like what so that's how invested certain audience members are for the most part they don't care they want to be entertained make me laugh yeah and i'm like but but do you not care about my friend dying oh you know that's fine but you know oh i do love a pasty You know, so I think to put it into perspective as well, and I do think that there's nothing wrong with showing emotion on stage, but what I've learned over the years is that, and I'd love to know what you think of this, it's the tone of voice that you adopt.

What are you thinking?

So is that something that you've seen from a creative leadership point of view? Has that changed your approach to creative leadership and how you run your teams?

Yeah, massively.

I think earlier in my career, I think leadership felt more connected to the output of a creative team, if that makes sense.

Like you said, like how many tickets are you doing? How fast are you shipping? You know, what's the spend? Did it move a metric? Which is obviously very difficult within that creative sphere to do that.

I think now... what's shifted is that creative is about raising the quality across the entire company, right? And across the company means across the wider sector and category and various things like that.

And I think my point is that it's how do I give... a clear problem, strong context and enough space to surprise people.

I think that's very much what my role has kind of shifted in.

But I guess my question is, what compelled you to go ahead and build it yourself? And do you see that now as being the role of the creative leader in today's era? Fundamentally,

... are created?

A cool thing about this season, honestly, was that we, I think, it was our largest writers' room.

Which wasn't big.

It was still, it was six people.

But it was, like, you know, the three of us, Toby Jones, Michelle Cavin, and, uh, Minty Lewis, all super funny people, all people who'd worked on the show before.

And so, but this time, almost more than ever I think, because we were so excited to work on this again and be together again, people were bringing their favorite things to the table and things they learned about.

So I believe Toby was really into blade games.

Yeah.

should say.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I've worked with people who... have all levels of facility with research from people who sort of, you know, think of themselves also as researchers to people who do not even want to know anything about the process.

They just want me to do it.

I think typically it's great to have a research professional write your instruments, right? And by instruments, I mean your survey questionnaire, your discussion guide, your interview guide.

And there are a few reasons for that.

I think one is certainly what you mentioned, Ray.

And I think a lot of executives and people are focused on their thought leadership, but don't know how to use it.

And this is what we're seeing now within AI is that if you just use it to answer queries that the customer had in the past, then you'll get a certain ROI.

But what we're seeing is companies moving, now you can be moving customer care from the back door of the organization where it's super hard to find.

to the front part of the website.

And they're saying, hey, we're open for service.

Anybody who wants to ask any question, come and ask us.

And we're seeing companies are getting three times the amount of engagement that they would have done before, which would have been terrible before because you've got three times the amount of inquiries with the same amount of staff and service would have degraded.

I can actually give some examples,

actually.

Was there something in particular or an event or something that made you want to dive into the digital world?

Short, long story.

I played golf with a guy named Steve Prechtel way back in the day.

And Steve worked with my mom at City National Bank in Columbus, Ohio.

And Steve one day got moved over to the card side of Bank One, which became Bank One Columbus, City National.

And he called me up one day.

I was actually on a hostess truck.

Wow.

think he could become like a Leonard Cohen type performer.

I'm fascinated by Adam Green.

He seems to do many side projects.

I don't think they're side projects.

They're his projects.

He's somehow managed to make, I think, a really cool career out of collaborations with people.

Those people just love.

He's

So, you know, like, uh, does it start with a daily standup? Do you have an end of day wrap up? Do you do a Monday toolbox meeting or an end of week? How did you manage to go from full control to less control but elevate the team up?

So that was done a little bit by force almost.

So back when Matt was my coach, we had a long talk about leadership and what it means to be a real leader.

And to be a real leader, you don't always have to be there.

You need to be able to guide people.

You're going to be able to show them, teach them, train them, give them the confidence they need.

Right.

Where do you want to take the business now? Like, you know, what is your business maturity or your three to five year target look like? Have you dialed that in yet? Is that still to be done? Or like, where do you think the business is going to go?

What is that looking like and what is that landscape right now?

I guess you have to, first of all.

show the whole canvas of what a plumbing company is made of because the assumptions for people that you know it's a a truck with pipe racks on it and two guys with mud on their boots and they stop by the supply house and and head to the job site afterwards so our business is very different so we have around 300 employees Um, 55, 60 of those are office and warehouse staff.

So you have the different phases of, of crews out there, the underground, the mid construction phases, the rough phase, then you have the trim and warranty.

And then we have service crews also service and reno remodel crews.

So, you know, you could be stepping in as a, you know, a trainee on one of those crews that's dispatched, you know, to the public to help our customers, um, and work your way up.

But you could also be in the office.

what does it look like with student debt when you go into a trade compared to when you go to school? What have y'all seen in your field regarding that aspect?

Okay

... it's actually this," then we can talk about, "Well, don't you agree that this steak is more tender at this temperature than at that temperature? Wouldn't you agree that if it's more tender, it's easier to chew, and I can get a good crust on it, and, and get all the things that people love about a well done steak, like the exterior of it being really charred, but I can also give you a more tender product as a end result at this temperature?" It's like, "Oh, I still get the thing that I like about a well done steak, but I also get something I'm not used to if I'm eating well done steak, and the fact that it's more tender, it's more juicy, not all the fat is rendered out of it."

Let's go.

[laughs] Uh, mrmakeithappen.com is where you can find my website, all of my recipes.

mrmakeithappen.shop is where all of my products are.

You can find me on YouTube.

Basically any, uh, social media platform, Mr.

Make It Happen, you type it in, it'll, it'll pop up.

Okay

... it's actually this," then we can talk about, "Well, don't you agree that this steak is more tender at this temperature than at that temperature? Wouldn't you agree that if it's more tender it's easier to chew, and I can get a good crust on it, and, and get all the things that people love about a well-done steak like the exterior of it being really charred? But I can also give you a more tender product as an end result at this temperature." It's like, "Oh, I still get the thing that I like about a well-done steak, but I also get something I'm not used to if I'm eating well-done steak, and the fact that it's more tender, it's more juicy.

Not all the fat is rendered out of it."

Let's go.

[laughs] Uh, mrmakeithappen.com is where you can find my website, all of my recipes.

mrmakeithappen.shop is where all of my products are.

You can find me on YouTube.

Basically any, uh, social media platform, Mr.