Breaking the Stigma: Overcoming Addiction in the Professional Sphere

“Recovery is a program of action. It’s about action. It’s not about thinking your way out of a problem or wishing yourself better. It’s about doing stuff.”
Olly Lynch

In this episode you’ll hear about

• Olly’s personal journey with addiction: How he found himself at a career high yet in deep alcohol and drug addiction & the personal and professional impacts that came with it.
• Finding your space in new roles: The challenge of joining a new organisation and how to establish yourself as a powerful and valuable presence who is comfortable questioning the status quo.
• Ego and self-esteem: How ego and low-self-esteem can feed into addiction, but also influence/mask the way people present themselves in a work context.
• Stagnation in large organisations: The common issue of stagnant thinking and competitiveness within large organisations, and the need to break free from it to foster creativity and innovation.
• Applying recovery principles in work: How principles from addiction recovery, such as self-reflection, honesty, and taking action, can be applied effectively in a work context to drive improvement and change.

Key links

If you require treatment, information or advice for alcohol and drug-related issues, contact DirectLine on 1800 888 236.

Find a 12-step Alcoholics Anonymous Meeting: https://meetings.aa.org.au/near/

Omnico

TravelPort

Luicid App (Now Imprint) 

Avante Marketing 

Find a Helpline: https://findahelpline.com/au/topics/substance-use

About our guest

Olly Lynch is a marketing leader, Fractional CMO and consultant with over 12 years of experience, working across B2B and B2C brands in agencies, client side and as an independent consultant. He’s worked alongside some of the biggest brands in the world including IBM,Thomson Reuters, Motorola, Fujitsu, CA and Interflora and is the founder of Avante Marketing.

He is driven by the belief that we only control two things in life: mindset and effort. “There is very little that cannot be achieved with positivity, hard work and an iron will.”

About our host

Our host, Chris Hudson, is a Teacher, Experience Designer and Founder of business transformation coaching and consultancy Company Road.

Company Road was founded by Chris Hudson, who saw over-niching and specialisation within corporates as a significant barrier to change.

Every team approaches transformation in their own way, also bringing in their own partners to help. And while they’re working towards the same organisational goal, it’s this over-fragmentation that stunts rapid progress at a company-wide level.

Having worked as a marketer, transformation leader, teacher and practitioner of design thinking for over 20 years, both here in Australia and internationally, Chris brings a unique, deep and ‘blended’ skillset that will cohere and enable your teams to deliver ambitious and complex change programs.

Transcript

[00:00:07] Chris Hudson: Hi everyone and welcome to the Company Road Podcast. Have you ever wondered whether you were doing the right thing, whether you’re pushing in the right areas, either personally or at work? What if what you were pursuing all along in your organisation or personally was the wrong thing?

How would you know? When would you realise? Today’s story is one of fearless leadership and adaptation. We’re going to be tackling the deeper topic of addiction and what it means to be caught in a spiralling lifestyle and what it takes to turn things around when you’re at your lowest. For this open and very personal conversation, I have a very special guest.

Olly Lynch is an experienced marketing leader and CMO with over 12 years experience, as well as a proud recovered addict and he’s had many years of sobriety now behind him. His experiences span from D2C in the music industry to shaping battle tested strategies for B2B giants like IBM and Motorola. He brings candour and pragmatism to a field often overshadowed by gimmicks and so called gurus.

His approach to marketing is really straightforward. It’s about common sense, mastery of the basics and utilising available resources and data efficiently. He’s known for his practical and refreshing strategies and he’s propelled companies like Lickd to achieve 20 times growth in MRR. He’s not just about lofty ideas, he’s about creating real transparent and meaningful impact.

And outside of marketing, he’s committed to breaking the stigma surrounding drug and alcohol addiction and advocating for recovery in both professional and personal realms.

This episode contains some big issues, so if you feel like any of the themes we discuss today are relevant to you in some way, then please seek professional counsel. Let’s get into the episode.

Okay hey, this is the Company Road podcast and Ollie massive welcome to the show. Going back seven or eight years, I remember sitting across from you in a meeting. We had an international tech client that we shared in London at the time and we were leading the business and product innovation side of things and you were in, I think, as the incumbent marketing agency and we were discussing how the innovation marketing teams could work hand in hand and showcase some of the work that we were doing.

A few things really struck me about the way that you handled yourself in that meeting and that you lessened really well. You were really quick to build on people’s ideas and had bags of ideas yourself and you brought a lot to the party there. Your passion really filled the room and you were happy to take actions, which not a lot of people do and they often shy away from. But most of all, there was no BS, right? Something that does have a tendency to creep into the world of brand and marketing. And as I was in the room, I was picking up on a sense of, just watching you in action, just picking up on your fearlessness, your resilience, entrepreneurialism, acceptance, accountability, some of these things were springing to mind as I was reflecting today just before preparing for the show. It mainly just gave me a feeling of confidence, both in you, and I could also see it instilled in the client from the way that you were handling yourself. And these are characteristics that have probably served you well, I’m sure over the years both working within organisations and now in working in your own marketing agency that you’ve been able to set up.

And we reconnected on LinkedIn more recently as you started to post about the hard times that you’ve been through and your struggles with some pretty serious things. Addiction. And I remember thinking ‘Really, Olly?’ It was pretty unbelievable for me reading some of the posts that you were putting out there.

But the authenticity with which you were doing it was really compelling. And I had to get back in touch with you to really understand a bit more about it. So we messaged a little bit. I myself had made the decision to stop drinking alcohol, a few years ago as well. We got messaging about it and into some of the things, but I thought, this would be the perfect opportunity to ask you about some other things in a bit more detail and just have a chat in a way that not only gets to the bottom of some of these issues, but maybe helps other people in similar situations in one way or another as well.

So both of us have made some pretty serious amends to our lifestyles and to put it into perspective, I’d just love it if you could start by telling us, about the person that you were, maybe the work that you were doing, your experiences of work back then and how the story began, really.

[00:03:47] Olly Lynch: Well thank you, Chris. That’s very, very nice of you to say those things. The passion and the ideas I can get behind, being a good listener, I think that’s the first time I’ve ever heard that, so, but yeah, I mean, so a bit about me kind of work wise. I started out in the music industry years and years ago. And then I decided to leave that role and I went into I’d call it my first proper marketing job in a B2B tech company called Omnico, and did a pretty good job there, I think, and sort of worked up the ranks over a couple of years.

Then I went from there to working at an agency, working agency side, heading up the B2B team. We were split B2B, B2C, headed up the B2B team and had the chance there to work with some really big international B2B brands like Thomson Reuters, Motorola, Fujitsu, Orange Business. It’s a weird one when I think back to that time because what we were doing then seems so obvious now, and I’m talking maybe 10 years ago now.

We were taking these big pieces of content, these 50 page white papers that they were creating and shattering them into social assets and creating social campaigns around it and running paid social programs to drive demand and form fields and all that kind of stuff, which is probably a bit of a bad tactic now, truthfully, but back then was quite groundbreaking, believe it or not, and had some great success there and had access to some really big international brands and B2B clients, did lots of good stuff.

And then went from there and back in house working for for one of the clients, actually, that I probably had in the agency. And then I moved to a company called Travelport. I became Digital Marketing Director there and ultimately Head of New Media and Digital in that business. And then most recently I’ve been working back in the music industry in a sort of full circle move, which was not on purpose.

But back in music tech and a startup. I think what’s been interesting about that journey for me is just that there’s been a lot of change coming from the music industry to B2B tech meant I could bring something interesting and unique, hopefully, to that B2B tech space, going from in house to agency, gave another experience, then going from agency back to in house, often I was the only person in those teams that had worked the other side of the fence.

And so, I think that gave me maybe a fresh perspective. It wasn’t until I was thinking about this interview today that I… realised some of those things you don’t tend to think about in that context, but, that’s kind of the, work history in a nutshell. On the personal side of things, which you mentioned over the years, I have battled with drug and alcohol addiction not something I would have identified with at the time, it was one of those things I always describe it as it was fun, then it was fun with problems, and then it was just problems. And that’s kind of how it went, right? So it crept in, it’s progressive.

It wasn’t like a problem from the beginning, but over the years, that kind of stuff got worse and more serious and eventually forced me to make some quite significant changes, or the biggest changes I’ve probably made in my life. And then part of my motivation now for being here and talking to you and for some of the things I put out on LinkedIn and other places is to try and bring that conversation to the forefront in the professional sphere, and perhaps in some small way create a forum where people feel slightly more comfortable talking about it.

[00:06:56] Chris Hudson: That’s amazing that you’ve got to this point. And I think it brings up a series of topics that, as you say, aren’t really ones that you dive into very much. And they’re kind of accepted a lot of the time. It goes way under the radar, or it’s right there in plain sight that these things are happening all around us through the world of work.

I remember starting out in an advertising role in marketing and the behaviours were all there around you and it was almost expected of you that you would be part of that culture to some extent as well. The people that did make the choices not to take part were often, I guess in one way or another. They weren’t invited along to things. It was quite divisive. You were either in that fold or you weren’t. Did you find that was your experience? Was there anything there you experienced as well?

[00:07:39] Olly Lynch: You know what I think it is, or what I think about a lot is that the mental health conversation has taken leaps and bounds in the last few years for me. And I’m sure that people that, suffer with depression or anxiety or other issues may think there’s a lot more to be done. I’m sure there is a lot more to be done, but it certainly feels like in the corporate world, at least, it’s become okay to not be okay.

And that there is a, an official line that you can go to inside a business or an HR department or there’s a process by which you can deal with those challenges and you can put your hand up and say, I need a mental health day or I’m not. I’m not feeling my best or I have even saying I have depression or I have anxiety.

I just don’t think has the same visceral stigmatised reaction that it had 5/10 years ago. Whereas I am a drug addict. I am an alcoholic that feels- it hurts. It makes me feel weird like hearing that kind of statement out loud, and I may be wrong, but I think that lots of people who may well be on the wrong side of a drinking problem or some other problem with drugs or whatever would find it hard to say those words in a professional environment, because I know I found it hard enough to say them to myself, let alone at work.

[00:08:57] Chris Hudson: Yeah. it’s, it’s such a good point. And actually, coming back to what I was saying before around, and maybe what you were saying as well around the fun and then, the spiralling that happens from that point or the sliding scale, I guess, from one end to the other, it can catch up with you in a way that you don’t really understand.

So I guess the degree to which it changes you isn’t something that you’re always aware of yourself personally. Did you feel that?

[00:09:18] Olly Lynch: Yeah, I think that’s exactly that, right? Like we, in the fellowship that I’m part of, we refer to it as a progressive illness. It’s insidious, right, and it- Well, not always slowly. For some people it gets hold of them pretty quick, but it, for me, it was progressive over a number of years. It would be a lie to say that it wasn’t loads of fun at certain points, but at some point it moved from being a nice to have, to a necessity, to a dependency.

To every waking thought, and that happened gradually or for me, it happened gradually over time. And I often say to people that what tends to happen with alcoholism or addiction is that we cross invisible lines. We say, well, I did this, but I’ll never do this. And I draw a new line, an invisible line.

And then I cross that line and I normalise that behaviour. Okay, fine. So I did this. But I’ll never go this far you know. It might be I’ll never drink dry, okay, well, I drank dry, but I’ll never drink drive with my children in the backseat. These are the types of things that happen. You draw a line, you cross the line, you normalise the behaviour, you draw another line and before you know it, you’ve crossed so many lines that you wake up one day and you don’t recognise yourself. The things that you do, your actions, your behaviours, are completely unaligned to who you think you are, or the story that you told yourself about the kind of person that you are. And that’s quite a scary place to be, and that’s the sort of hole, I guess, I found myself in, and many others do.

And it, to your question, I don’t know how I got there. I didn’t wake up one day and it was like that. It happened over a decade or more of slowly chipping away to get to that point.

[00:10:50] Chris Hudson: Yeah as you say, it’s normalisation really through those steps. And, the spark to begin with, it was probably just out of curiosity or something that set things off, or your mates were doing it, and then you’re in, and I know there’s like a competitivity. It feels like there’s a sort of competition is part of the camaraderie, everyone is consuming in a similar way. You’re having to either keep up or do better than that. Were you part of some of those dynamics as well.

[00:11:12] Olly Lynch: Yeah, I think it’d be wrong of me to sort of imply that I was led astray or that gave him some sort of peer pressure. I would probably say I was the ringleader in a lot of those situations in my, more formative years. I definitely now believe that I was the problem. Put me in a padded room with the door shut and I’d get into trouble all by myself.

I think what you’re just what I take from what you’re describing as camaraderie and competitiveness is for me I would call ego. I had definitely a need to, you know, it’s chest puffed out and bravado and stuff. And the sad thing about that, and it’s probably veering more into mental health now, and something I hear from people, whether they suffer with drinking drug problems or not is low self esteem and a big ego to compensate. If I’m really honest, and it’s getting very honest now for this conversation, but like that’s probably my, my honest makeup. You know, like inside, feelings of insignificance, not good enough, imposter syndrome, those types of things, and very negative internal dialogue, but a big suit of armour in an ego to make up for it. So, no one else might see that, but inside it’s very different. And that’s quite a painful place to be actually.

[00:12:18] Chris Hudson: It strikes on a really interesting point for me, which is that the things that you described aren’t unique to addiction or alcoholism or any drug abuse or anything like that that. They’re actually really generally accepted and generally, you know more widely experienced through day to day things. In family and at work. The work environment is fuelled by imposter syndrome and egos and silos, some of the things that you’re describing so it’s all there and you you’d think that there’d be a simpler way or a more understood way of handling it, but even at the very least more of a conversation around it.

What do you think was behind, or what do you think is behind a lot of this getting brushed under the carpet most of the time?

[00:12:56] Olly Lynch: I think that it’s probably akin to what’s happened with mental health, right? I mean, probably you only have to go back five years for it to have not really been okay for you to say, I’m depressed, depends on what field you work in and stuff like that.

I mean some of the people I speak to who work in the trades, for example, that’s maybe still not an accepted thing to say, but I would, it almost feels like addiction is just slightly behind the rest of the mental health conversation. While I don’t think there should be a stigma because I, I know from my own experience that alcoholism addiction is incredibly misunderstood.

To share a story with you when I first went to get help and I went to a meeting and found like a fellowship, my expectation of what was there, the people that would be there, the things they would talk about, the way they would look, was completely different to the reality of what happened.

I had a vision in my mind of what an addict looked like and it wasn’t me. It was a guy on a park bench, the brown paper bag with a bottle in it and a needle hanging out of his arm. I have a mortgage and kids and a wife and a car on lease parked on the driveway and a corporate job, like I can’t be an addict.

That thinking stopped me from accepting help or looking for help for a long time. And when I went there and met these people, it was nothing like that completely fabricated, mental image that I had what an addict was. There were people just like me who had solved their problem.

I do think that kind of thinking, if I believed it, then I’d imagine lots of other people do too. They think they have this idea of what an alcoholic or an addict is and because of that, I think it probably throws fuel on the fire of that stigma, which is like to say I am that in a professional context where everyone’s very buttoned up and they’re all being very prim and proper and we’re using phrases like thanks in advance and these kinds of things on email and we’re talking the corporate speak.

you know,

[00:14:43] Chris Hudson: we speak.

[00:14:44] Olly Lynch: That language we speak about or some I don’t, but some people do. That for you to identify as that brings that image up in the minds of the other people that work there.

And that’s a scary prospect, I think. That probably stops a lot of people from admitting to themselves or from wanting to talk about it in a professional environment. And I totally understand that because five years ago I had the same, bias about what that meant.

[00:15:06] Chris Hudson: No, clearly it comes down to preconception. I mean a lot of it is driven by what you hear about in the media. how you’re seeing these scenes or scenarios being built out in films and Netflix series that we watch. The way in which you think that is going to happen never plays out as you’d expect. I think coming back to your point around invisible lines, it’s almost like the preconception is also there, you’re thinking about like the worst possible version of what that could be, or very specific image, it conjures up certain things in your head. When you go through the lived experience, you’re actually, you’re seeing something completely different.

So to bring that to life, as you stepped into that fellowship for the first time, what were you seeing and what was your, what was going through your head as you’ve started to engage with it a bit more and hear about things from other people?

[00:15:46] Olly Lynch: It’s a really good question. I talk about it a lot to other people in the fellowship, never really spoken to anyone about it outside. I think two significant things happened the day I walked into that room. One was identification. Until that point, you believe you’re alone. I’m the only person that thinks this way.

I’m the only person that does stuff like this. Something’s wrong with me. I’m, you know, that kind of stuff. Something was wrong with me, you know, I was unwell. I didn’t identify it as an illness. I just thought I was not a good person. Or choose other words if we weren’t on a podcast. The first thing I got was identification.

A room full of other people who seemingly thought like me, spoke like me, had the same sort of history of actions and behaviours as me. But had resolved the problem which gave me a lot of hope, so I think identification was, was huge. It really felt like I was home actually. And that’s not necessarily everyone’s experience.

The day they walk into these kinds of places or they go to therapy or whatever it may be, or rehab or whatever, wherever they go. But that was my experience that I felt like I was in the right place. And the second thing was let’s call it kindness or hope or help. I had never experienced, and I think this is an interesting observation on human behaviour, is that within these programs and these fellowships, people there want to help you for no other reason than they want to help you.

Partly because their own well being and sobriety is dependent upon helping the next person. But besides that slightly selfish aspect of it, it’s just about helping. The whole point of it is giving back. And I found that very difficult because it’s very hard to find a community that operates in that way where people will give and give expecting nothing in return.

And that’s why I say, it’s an interesting observation for me anyway, on human behaviour, because that’s quite sad as a realisation that actually it’s not that easy to come across people that are just willing to help you expecting nothing in return. And I don’t think many people have access to a strong community of people willing to do that amount for them just for the love of it.

So that was quite a powerful thing to, to encounter.

[00:17:52] Chris Hudson: I guess the self driven behaviour that gets people to a point obviously it’s very driven by what, what it is you yourself think you want to achieve or what you’re aiming for in that moment. It’s a selfish pursuit bluntly put, and, even if you think about all the things that, that people get addicted to from drink, drugs, sugar, chocolate, pornography, whatever it is, it’s all kind of driven by what you yourself think you want to get out of that particular situation.

So to flip that, maybe before you went into that meeting you had one set of experiences and you’re talking about the visible lines, obviously that you were crossing with each wave. Maybe the flip side of that as you were going into the meeting is, you know it’s almost the giving of yourself out, the kind of helping out with your lived experience but also incentive being there to help people out and that being very much part of the program was almost drawing the invisible lines in a different direction that was allowing you to rebuild, mend yourself, progress and with each stage of that, it feels like there’s another, a new wave of hope in one way or another. I wasn’t there obviously, but is that close to what you were experiencing?

[00:18:57] Olly Lynch: There’s an interesting saying that gets thrown around, which is that if you want self esteem, do an estimable thing. And, being part of a recovery program gave me access to estimable things in a way I hadn’t had before, right? So, it starts small. It might be something simple like attending a meeting early, putting the chairs out, making teas and coffees, calling somebody to see if they’re okay.

These kinds of things, which may sound minor, but when you have been a quite intrinsically selfish person for a large part of your life or all of your life, those are the small steps that you make towards becoming a selfless person. And as the years roll by and you do more and more, lots of other opportunities have been afforded me like going into rehabs or prisons or working on helplines or helping other young men, and seeing them, their families get well and these things.

And like, to your point, lines never really think about it that way. But yes, it is- it’s like maybe they’re rungs on a ladder now rather than lines. With each rung, sometimes I do stop and look back and say, it’s a pretty nice feeling to know that actually this week I dedicated, a large portion of my time to genuinely helping others, in no special way, just in the same way that others did for me, as I mentioned.

But it is a great thing to be a part of and it does build genuine self esteem, self worth, doing these types of things. I don’t think you need to be a drug addict or an alcoholic to experience that. I think I talked to a lot of my friends about this because lots of people say the same thing, like, oh my God, it’s so good that you do these things.

And I kind of, lots of people express a desire to want to go and volunteer or help on a helpline and you can. If you’re able bodied and you have a good earning capacity and you have a family and you got everything, you know, you’ve got a good life, you’ve got everything you need in life.

What’s stopping you giving up an hour of your time a week to do something for someone less fortunate or just out of the goodness of your heart? Unfortunately, we live in a world where a lot of that work does rely on charities and charitable people as opposed to maybe how it should be dealt with.

But, I think there’s a real desire in people to want to do that stuff. Something stops them and holds them back. And that’s certainly what I hear. People saying, it’d be great to do that, but I’m too busy, but I’m this. The great thing, it sounds weird but, the great thing about being a drug addict, or an alcoholic, is that alcohol is the great persuader.

That’s what it says in our literature. It brings you to your knees and forces you to make a change. I didn’t make a change because I wanted to, I made a change because I had to. I’m no martyr. I was forced into it. Because there were only a couple of other options and they weren’t, they were pretty bleak. If you don’t have to, if life is cushy, if things are all right, you can get away with not bothering to go and volunteer at the old people’s home on Sundays, then you just don’t, it sits in your mind as this kind of, it would be a nice thing that a better version of me would probably do if I could be assed but you don’t, and I think that’s a shame, because I think people do have a genuine desire to want to, but there’s a gap between that desire and putting the action in, where they tend to fall down.

[00:21:50] Chris Hudson: Yeah, there’s always a gap between thinking something and doing something. Reflecting on what you were saying just then, I think that, in my experience of stopping alcohol the couple of years or so, yeah just the one thing that you get back is time and not just the time, but all the things that go with it.

Positive memory, more intent around what you’re doing, how you spend your time, who you spend your time with is just a different way of looking at it, I suppose. It’s definitely a feeling of control and self empowerment and it gives you freedom of choice again, how did you feel about it as things were starting to open up for you?

[00:22:18] Olly Lynch: My lifestyle and the things I spend my time doing have completely flipped. I heard a great bit of advice years ago. It’s a very simple piece of advice. It just says make a list of the things you love doing, make a list of the things you spend your time doing and adjust accordingly, and I did that before I, got sober.

And those lists were very unaligned. There was a list of stuff I really loved and was passionate about or told myself that they were my hobbies, but I never did them so they weren’t really my hobbies. Since getting sober, I could say honestly, I do the things I enjoy, which sounds like a very daft comment, but I’m sure there are probably quite a lot of people in that situation and just taking drugs and alcohol off the table.

If you love spending time with your family and you love playing football on Saturdays, and you love going for walks in the woods, but you spend all your time working, you’re in the same problem, right? You don’t do the things that you want to do or enjoy doing. And now, like you say, it is kind of it’s freed up an awful lot of time because I’m not out and I’m I’m not feeling sorry for myself the next day. So, I have a lot of time to do the things I enjoy doing and as a consequence, have lots of hobbies and lots of fulfilling activities in my life. And they’re not they’re pretty simple things, right?

They’re like their family time and their hiking and their, the gym and they’re cooking and they’re not anything wild or crazy but it’s a far more fulfilling existence spending the majority of your time doing those things, or certainly for me anyway.

[00:23:41] Chris Hudson: it’s hard to describe to a lot of people, I think. People often ask us. You’re in that situation, you’re around people that are drinking the whole time, obviously, and you don’t want to be appearing to judge anybody either because that’s still very normal.

But when people say, okay, you’ve got three kids and you’ve got all this stuff going on and we’ve got kids that have been diagnosed, they’re on the spectrum and we’ve got other things going on. So how do you do it? I’ve been drinking this many bottles of wine every night. It’s kind of, it’s all part of the vernacular.

It’s all part of how people perceive that coping mechanism to be. It exists out there. And living for the weekend is definitely a thing, where you reward yourself with the things that you think you’re going to do you good, but obviously it’s not helping you it’s taking you a few steps back in a lot of cases, particularly when you take it to the extreme. I’m wondering whether also within, this is podcast about intrapreneurs and how, how within the context of work, you can think about problems in a new way, challenges that you face, the barriers that you’re looking to break down, the things that you’re trying to achieve within a work context. Love to just hear your, thoughts on, we’ve heard your personal story, but then maybe coming back to your professional journey, how was it through that, from a work point of view, was it all kind of going on at once?

Was it separate existences, or was it all kind of a blur? How did it play out through your work?

[00:24:56] Olly Lynch: I think it’s a strange one because while things were progressing and getting worse in some ways, there were some really positive things as well. So it’s a good point to bring this story up a little bit. Two things that were going really well was, you know, had an incredible family during all this time as well and a really good career. And managed to progress really nicely in my career and do some really good things. So I think, as far as how those two worlds collided, obviously I didn’t, they butted heads a lot, as you well know, drinking culture around work and stuff is sort of all part and parcel of the same problem, right?

A lot of things were accepted to a point within that context as well. So yeah, I mean, there was, there was a real bleeding of the edges between those two worlds. The good news about that is somehow managed to do pretty well and achieve some good stuff during that period. So, work didn’t suffer.

Let’s put it that way.

[00:25:43] Chris Hudson: I guess I wouldn’t have expected it to. Maybe we’ll talk about some of the things that really, I guess led to your success in some of those areas. I don’t know if you’ve got any stories that you want to share in and around the things that you did during that time, but it, yeah, might just help bring to life, some of the things that you were either working on or really proud of some of the things that you were able to change in the organisations that you were working for.

[00:26:02] Olly Lynch: So I was thinking a bit about change coming into this conversation today. And I think, as I mentioned earlier, my career having moved from different industries, kind of being industry agnostic, working agency side and in house, I think always gave me a slightly unique perspective on certain situations or on the new roles that I took on.

I found myself in roles where I was often the youngest person at that level by quite a way in some of these companies as well. And, and hopefully I, it wasn’t, I’m not too familiar with the intrapreneur name and stuff. So I was looking into it a bit coming into this and would never have referred to myself as one.But looking at it now, I think, you know, bringing fresh thinking, fresh perspectives. A lot of the roles I’ve had have been transformational roles. They may not have been labeled or tagged like that. But normally what’s happened is. the company is failing to do normally digital marketing or demand generation or marketing in general successfully and that’s normally the point in different ways that’s normally the point at which I’ve come in and a couple of the big roles I’ve had that’s been someone has been in the role who’s been let go.

They’ve been hiring in private and they’ve brought me in. So I guess it has been a transformation role, but there’s always been an element of change attached to the role and a need or desire from the business for you to drive significant change or be a change maker inside the organisation.

[00:27:26] Chris Hudson: And just coming into those roles, were there any that you I guess didn’t stick with for whatever reason. Did you always just turn up and do the job as that you needed to do? It’s quite confronting I know walking into some organisation where you think you you’re coming into one scenario and it’s something completely different from what you expected, but maybe that’s part of what spurred you on. How did you feel about that side of things?

[00:27:44] Olly Lynch: There was a time I was working at a company called Atomic and I loved that job. It was a really good job.

I worked for an incredible boss. They were a really nice size of business. They were 600, 650 people, quite cash rich, growing well, really well run, had a great product. And it was just a good team of people that really got it. A boss who was a very smart demand generation marketer, and I had a lot of free reign to do stuff.

And one of the big things that happened there was, that I did there was to look at the way they were segmenting audiences. So, they were segmenting vertically as lots of these come B2B companies do, right? So they had these vertical audiences, they had regional marketing teams. It was that pretty standard model.

And instead, we reinvented the way that we segmented audiences. So we pulled apart the vertical segmentation. The reality is we didn’t really have a different product to sell different verticals, or a different spin to put on it. So it seemed like a weird way to be segmenting audiences.

And we started to segment audiences based on behaviour and channel. So there’s a tendency to do things like somebody engages with a video on LinkedIn for our business, and that’s what brings them in. And let’s just say for the purposes of this demonstration, they fill out a form and become a lead. We can debate whether that’s a lead, but that’s another conversation for another day.

They fill out a form and become a lead, right? And then we stick them into our CRM and multi automation platform. We start emailing them, right? Now, we were struggling to engage people in that way. And I was saying that at the time was saying the one thing we know about this person for sure is that they engage with video on LinkedIn.

That’s something we do know about them is how we got them in the first place. So why on earth would we nurture them through written copy and email? The best thing we could do is nurture them in the channel we know them to engage with, right? So we actually flipped the whole model. We built out HubSpot segmentation process based on the way the behaviours, the channels and the content people engagement. So it stopped talking about retail manufacturing, hospitality, verticals, and started talking about people that behave this way. So it’s behavioural segmentation, which was quite cool. I’m going a bit off topic now, but that was some of the stuff we were doing there.

I think it’s kind of interesting and it was just a really good role, good company. And I left that company kind of at the peak of that role to go and take a bigger job in a much bigger business. And it was a hard one, like they counted and asked me to stay and it was, one of those really difficult decisions, but I kind of my head was halfway out the door and I moved and the role that I went into- The reason I tell that story about the segmentation stuff is because at the time, going back seven or eight years ago now, that was all quite cool cutting edge demand gen stuff. And we were doing neuro marketing campaigns with creative agencies. It was all very exciting for B2B tech marketing. And I left there and I went to another company and this company had let the Digital Marketing Director go, had not told the team, had recruited me on the side and then literally a guy left on a Friday and I came in on a Monday and they had this digital marketing team that weren’t a digital marketing team.

They were a bunch of people around the business at certain points in time had been given a responsibility that someone would call digital. Like this lady manages the website, this person does this and they put them all together and labeled it digital marketing team and they were trying to build out that function, that sense of excellence inside the business. That was the role. And that was sold as seen, let’s say, not as described when he got there. And there was an awful, awful lot of work to do in that business. So I stuck at it, but that was probably an example of like, maybe it was an interesting decision to leave such an exciting cutting edge demand gen function for something which was very archaic and 10, 15 years behind where it should have been with a lot of work to do to build it up.

[00:31:08] Chris Hudson: I mean, there’s a stark difference there. What, do you remember what it was that, I mean, obviously the title and everything else that went with it. But what were you enticed by going into that complete change of scene?

[00:31:17] Olly Lynch: I think two things, really honestly there was financial motivation, we just had a baby. It was a much bigger job, a much bigger role. I was probably at the time felt like it was a role that I would imagine I would have got in two to three years and I was being offered it now.

So there was that, but there was also the challenge. The challenge ended up being even bigger than I had realised. But I do like that chall- I’ve never really sat still for that long. Once you stop learning or you stop enjoying it, it’s time to move on.

If you’ve got one of those things in abundance, you’re probably all right. But, I think probably there was an element of while we were doing great stuff at the previous company, we’d sort of achieved those things. I think that digital was now responsible for something like 60 percent of total pipeline.

So it was like it had been a really successful couple of years. And I always have an interest in taking on that new challenge and trying to fix something that’s broken.

[00:32:05] Chris Hudson: And how did it play out? If I could ask the new place with the marketing, digital marketing team, how did it all go? What barriers did you need to overcome? Tell us how that all played out.

[00:32:14] Olly Lynch: It took some time. It was an interesting role because the business went through an awful lot of change as well. So the, they were public and they went privately owned again. There was a change of leadership. There was a change of direction.

We were in the travel industry during COVID. There were lots spanners in the works. Ultimately I think the biggest challenge as I guess I regard myself as more of a demand generation marketer, I suppose to, like a brand marketer or anything like that. And so, one of the biggest things for the company to overcome was actually demand gen wasn’t what they needed, which sounds weird, this is a company that’s an established player in a world where there are only three players.

And their customer base are travel agents or the airlines, hotels, or they already had all those customers really. So it wasn’t really a demand gen effort. So I think there was a bit of and fresh understanding or a change of thinking required a leadership level. That we’re trying to drive demand in a world where there is no demand to be had, right?

So actually, it was much more of a brand play about building a story in the minds of the customers we already had. And strengthening relationships and those kinds of things. It took a couple of years, I think, for the business to make that adjustment. That was a challenge. I think a good story about that role or about some initiative, I guess, that an intrapreneur could take inside a business, is that there was a point when I’ve been there for a few years where a new CMO started, and there was a decision made to promote one of the marketing directors, I think we had five global marketing directors at that point, of which I was one. There was a decision made to promote one of them into a senior role and to roll some of the other departments underneath them, right? A bit of a restructuring. And there was a guy who was probably going to be the guy, right?

And I sort of felt like, maybe I should be the guy. And the role as described wasn’t really a role I necessarily wanted, but I didn’t think that the way they were going to structure it was necessarily the right way to do it. And so, I was thinking about that coming into this call actually of like in terms of intrapreneurs and people that are trying to drive change and bring different thinking and push boundaries inside organisations. At that point, I had a choice to make, which was that I could roll over and just let the thing pass me over and someone else take the role. But it wasn’t so much about getting the role.

It was more about what that meant for the future of the way the org was set up, the direction we were going to travel in, which I didn’t think was going to be the right one. And what I actually did was I created a presentation around- it was a pretty provocative, it wasn’t your average presentation about how we needed to think differently, what thinking differently meant, what we could do in the direction that we could go in and the results of that could yield.

I actually did it in Canva and it allowed me to export it as a video. I turned it into a video and I sent it to the CMO and the CEO and said, look, I know you’re busy, getting time and the diary stuff is obviously difficult in these organisations. It’s now a two minute video. Uploaded it to YouTube and sent them a link and said, I know you’re considering these things.

Before you make any decisions, just take two minutes of your time, watch this video. And they watched it. I’ll tell you what happened is the guy got the job, but it gave them pause for consideration. And what they did was they came back and said, we still think that this guy is right for the role we’ve carved out, but you’re also right, and we shouldn’t go in that direction.

And they created a new role that didn’t exist, a new job title, a new role inside the business for me and promoted me into it. So I felt like that was kind of a win in terms of when you’ve got to make something happen in a big organisation that’s maybe more resistant to change, already has wheels in motion heading in a certain direction, how can you either change the direction of travel or maybe just garnish the attention of the leadership of those businesses that for me felt like a bit of a win in terms of doing something a little bit different.

You bear in mind in the context of a large, relatively stagnant, old institution like that, that way of working is the unprecedented.

[00:35:57] Chris Hudson: No, I mean, you’ll know it from the world of music as well presumably and, and also, photography that, that contrasting, in whichever way you bring it to the fore can be incredibly powerful. If you’ve got a really stagnant environment and you can go, you see it straight up, you go into a team, they’ll be working a certain way.

You can see from the work that’s being created that there’s an opportunity here, but you’ve got your vision. The only way to kind of convince them that’s in any way possible is to kind of meet them where they’re at in one way or another. So, just think about that in your terms, you had to do something that was so starkly different from what they’d usually, you’d usually get your board meeting or whatever it was, the usual format set up in the same presentation format within an agenda that was pre-agreed and everything would have been sent around with the board papers and everything else. So but you cut through all that, which is really cool. And I think applying your craft, your discipline, your passion to how you do your work is also incredibly powerful.

What during that time, if I can ask about the team and the change that happened with the team, did anything happen there? Either in your management of them or in other ways, did you feel like some people gravitated towards your new way of doing things?

Did you feel that some felt uncomfortable with it? Did some leave? What was the story there?

[00:37:08] Olly Lynch: It’s interesting. I was thinking about this this morning as well is that one of the things I think drive, motivate, well, if we think about how people actually get motivated and actually believe in your ideas, that it’s maybe a sad reality, but for me, certainly seems like it’s proof, right? So people don’t tend to believe you until you prove it.

And that’s certainly what I’ve found. And that business was a very clear example of that because I remember distinctly flying over these team members from the States and I had, it was a, it was an interesting team culturally, right? There were people in that team who had worked in that company longer than I’d been alive.

So you think of what that looks like for them. And this guy comes in. I think I was, I don’t know, 32 or something at the time. They’ve worked there for 35 years. I’ve only been alive 32. And all of a sudden you’re in there and you’ve got your shiny presentation of how we’re going to drive change in digital.

And they don’t care. No, they didn’t. I mean, it was, that was a real learning for me. Like, I thought they were going to be enamoured and bowled over by all my great idea. You know, I genuinely thought that, like, I thought they were going to be inspired and lit up by it and, um, flew everyone over and because it was such a mixed team, it was like we had a day at the office and then we went out in London and we went to see a show and I took them out for dinner and this kind of thing, thinking, yeah whatever, gee everyone up a bit.

And I remember sitting at the dinner and saying, so, we’d had given them the two hour presentation of how I was gonna drive change and all this stuff, digital transformation. I said, so what did you think of the plan and this woman who’d been there for 35 years said, everyone who comes here has a plan.

[00:38:37] Olly Lynch: That was it, balloon popped and she’s just, of the 20 different bosses she’s had, she’s outlasted all of them just because some kids turned up with his new plan. That was her thinking, right? And fair enough, In hindsight, fair enough. And so to answer your question about the team, yeah some did leave. It’s a big organisation. So we moved some people to other teams that they’re better suited, freed up some headcount, hired some actual digital marketers, changed things up a bit and ultimately we did build out that, we grew that team from, I think there were only about five of us at the beginning, we grew it to 10, 12 people by the end of, you know, some, good digital marketers with a better structure and built a true kind of, centre of excellence inside the business with the right sorts of people in it.

But yeah, it took a bit of time and it was a bit of teeth pulling.

[00:39:21] Chris Hudson: I love that story on a number of levels, but I’m wondering how the delivery of that put down was given to you anyway but anyway yeah, i’m just thinking a bit about followership and I think on this show we hear from a lot of people that find ways of getting momentum going in some way or another.

And often that comes down to followership or I guess finding the right allies. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the leadership endorsement, but other people as well that can really just, push the thing in the right direction, work alongside you, get it done. What are some of the strategies that you would typically put in place to attract the right people to your cause, but also then convert that into some momentum?

[00:39:55] Olly Lynch: I would say, I’m probably no expert on being a great, it sounds awful now, a great motivator of people. Because I probably am a better independent contributor than I am real leader of people, which is, when I got that news, that news was given to me by somebody.

Right. Who said, you know, I think we’d be better as an independent contributor after I’d been running teams for the last 10 years. And I kind of actually hurt at the time, like I took it as an insult. In hindsight and reflection though, I think a whiteboard and a couple of weeks and maybe another smart person to bounce ideas off.

And like I, I’ve done some pretty good stuff. But it can be hard. To be a really, a good people manager is a genuine, genuinely amazing skill, being a good motivator of people. I would say the one thing I maybe have been good at and probably do well is. maybe to inspire people more than more than motivate them, right?

So, often when I’ve joined businesses in new roles, I like to think I’m quite good at getting to the bigger picture quite quickly, at kind of cutting through some of the myriad of being down here in the weeds. Like I am a bit more of a bigger picture thinker. So I try to transcend above that.

And I’m a kind of big believer in the majority of marketing or the majority of the success I’ve had in marketing for a better way to put it, has been down to common sense. There’s been a couple of cool creative campaigns along the way, but it’s been more about getting the basics, right.

Tightening bolts, pulling levers and just doing the stuff that works well, and so cutting through that noise of maybe where someone is today and being able to quite quickly show people the bigger picture of where we’re going and why we’re going there is something I’ve tried to do when I join new businesses.

I think that probably most recently when I joined Lickd, it was received very well from a, a startup that had struggled to get its marketing going with any real momentum, and had been through three or four other marketing directors. I think there was a sense of, okay, everyone’s sort of behind the message that this guy’s talking about.

And then quickly, as quickly as possible, following it up with proof. Like I said, then the stuff that you talk about needs to actually work. Those are probably my strategies, tell people what you’re going to do clearly and in a way that ignites a bit of inspiration and excitement in them and then do it, and execute on it well.

[00:42:08] Chris Hudson: Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot in that. And there are many analogies that are used in and around, you know, setting a clear path and where you’re aiming, you know, the analogy of the treasure on a desert island with the treasure on it and the sailboat that goes to it and how you’re going to get there and what gets in the way and how do you overcome those things?

There are all sorts of workshopping techniques that sit around that exact analogy. So yeah, good to see it in action. With I think a bit of sizzle to at least show, how it can be exciting, gets people to pay attention in the first place. And obviously if you’re working in a marketing role and that’s your bread and butter, then you know how to do that quite easily.

[00:42:43] Olly Lynch: I’ve found when I join new organisations, I I have been overcautious at times. I think there’s a tendency when you join a new organisation that you, you’re observing, right? They say that first couple of weeks, you’re in the meetings or you attend one of the companies attended like an away day before I even started officially in the role.

And you’ve got sales and marketing in a room. Everyone’s talking about this stuff. And you’re hearing things and thinking, that sounds like a weird way to do that, or I’m not sure I would go about it that way. But I definitely reflecting on it have been overcautious and thought, well, they must be doing it that way for a reason because these people have worked here for a long time and they get the company and they get the market and there must be a method in this madness that I’m hearing, right?

And so I have anyway, held back from maybe saying exactly what needed to be said or what I really thought about some of the tactics or strategies that are being implemented and then as the weeks roll by and you’ve been there a little bit longer and the barriers come down a bit, you sort of push that door open a little bit and go, is there a reason we’re doing that like that?

And then you end up, I’ve found that you’ve ended up in with these kind of dumbfounded answers. It’s oh, we’ve just always done it that way or no one actually knows any better, right? You make this assumption that they know what they’re doing and there’s a method to it, but actually it’s not. It’s just that no one’s pointed it out.

And I think it’s interesting when I look back retrospectively at some of the roles I’ve been in and think, well, that was the reason I was employed. I was employed to bring different thinking, to come there, to challenge the status quo and to implement change. Even if I didn’t realise it when I arrived, we were trying to be more amicable, whatever, when you get there but looking back, there was some, there’s some really, it’s why I say there’s some really simple things, like separating a website from a product so that you have more control over your website and that the tech team don’t have to be involved every time you want to make a change. These things are very simple.

But in four marketing directors, nobody had done it and it wasn’t until someone pointed it out that the business went, actually, it makes a lot of sense. We should do that. It’s a six week project. It costs 10 grand and we never have this problem again. It seems obvious, but that’s why I say I’m a big believer in kind of common sense.

I think looking at that, finding those things and then not being overcautious in bringing that information back to the business in the right way. No one likes the guy who starts the new job and then goes around kicking everything to pieces and tormenting everybody. I think sometimes we do believe that we’re wrong or that a business is doing something a certain way just because there’s incumbent people there, they’ve done it a certain way for so long, and that may be the only reason, actually, just pointing that out and showing them how they can make a change is often, it’s often one of the ways to bring it about.

[00:45:11] Chris Hudson: I mean even if they’ve been there for 35 years you think or was that a different case?

[00:45:15] Olly Lynch: That’s a whole new set of problems when you’ve been there 35 years.

[00:45:17] Chris Hudson: Oh yeah, there’s definitely a school of thought and it’s something I’ve thought about as well myself where you go through a hiring process and obviously that’s something in itself, not on the topic of the conversation, but you’re almost feeling like at your most valuable when you’ve gone through the hoops, you’ve presented yourself you’ve been made an offer, you accept it, but you’re almost, before you’re starting, and you’re about to be introduced and welcomed into that new world of work, you’re kind of untarnished, untouched by all the things that have happened in that organisation. And then all of a sudden you’re there and you find yourself just really, I don’t know if it’s empathy or something, but you’re just being sucked into all the things that either exist in the way of, standard meetings, rolling meetings, or you’ve got, work streams that have been going for the same way for a long time.

But all of a sudden after three months, six months, nine months, three years, whatever, you’re just part of that culture and it just sweeps it with you. How do you yourself keep your own sense of self through some of those stages, through, you know, reflecting on how you do it what keeps you true to what you believe in in a corporate setting, do you

[00:46:15] Olly Lynch: Yeah, no, that’s a really good question. I think that to add to that list of stuff, stagnant thinking in corporates is, so common and it becomes incestuous, right? The longer you’re there, the only people you’re bouncing ideas off is that same set of people.

And it’s like a ping pong ball going around in a room and eventually it’s like a vacuum. Nothing new is coming in, especially when you have industry specific marketers. I’ve always been sort of industry agnostic. I don’t really care what industry I work in. I just like problem solving.

But when you work in these organisations and you have people who like, I’ve worked in retail tech or whatever forever, and it’s full of just retail tech marketers, there’s no new air being breathed into the room. So you get this kind of incestuous kind of thinking. And then the other thing is, silos, which we all know about, but this I see not only walls come up, but in the worst cases, actual competitiveness.

As if we’re not on the same team, right? Like as like it’s me versus you. Like I’m the head of brand, you are the head of demand or whatever. or I’m APAC and you are EMEA and we’re like, banging heads, as if we’re not on the same team. And I found myself at times having to. remind myself and others like, you realise we’re all playing on the same team here. I’m assuming everyone came to work today with the best intentions. We didn’t come here to destroy this company. We came here to try and make it more successful, right? We’re all playing the same game. We may have a disagreement about the tactics and strategies to get us from A to B.

But we are all on the same team, like it’s crazy to me when that happens, right, which is one of the blessings of smaller organisations, well, you’ve got 30 people in an attic, a tech startup with one mission, it’s a lot easier to all get behind that, shared incentive.

I think, how I kind of protect myself from that, I haven’t always done that well, I’ve actually, when I, there’s a business just like that, that I’ve worked, I worked at for a long time and I used to describe it as I, felt like I was getting thicker by being here because I wasn’t letting new ideas in because you know, your life’s a, it’s a whirlwind of meetings and meetings and the same things and the same people and the same discussions and lurching from one campaign to the next were probably all not great ideas to start with.

And no one’s stopping and going is anything we’re doing any good? Shall we look at this a different way? Like what are other people doing?? I don’t mean our competitors who are also terrible. I mean, anyone who’s actually good at marketing, what’s inspiring? What’s different? And so, I felt like I was becoming dumber as a marketer while I was doing, going through that.

And since then I’ve kind of promised myself not to let that happen. So I, I try to take in the new ideas and new thinking as much as I can. And yeah, it comes through, I guess, the same way as other people do, right? I listen to podcasts, I’ve a certain number of smart people on LinkedIn that I follow.

There’s some good marketing resources. I just try, it’s difficult, isn’t it when you’re busy and stuff like that. But I try to take in new ideas. A great one for me is, I’m not a great reader. So I’m more of a visual learner. There’s an app called Lucid which is someone’s done that thing where they’ve taken books and turned them into digestible chunks, but they visualise them with diagrams and stuff.

You can take down the key principles from any sort of nonfiction book in about 15, 20 minutes. And you can bring in other ideas and not just marketing stuff. I’m talking about, psychology or history or anything. That’s another quite cool one for just keeping the ideas fresh and and making sure that you don’t become stagnant again in your thinking because it’s a killer.

[00:49:25] Chris Hudson: Do you find yourself though through that experience of, a stagnant environment, do you feel like you are really aware it being that way? I guess through every encounter, through every conversation, or is it something that comes up from time to time?

Because, yeah, I’m just wondering what your personal, is it your own personal drive that’s kind of saying, well, it doesn’t have to be like this, I’m just going to put that to one side, I’m just going to keep going with it or are you’re very aware of it and kind of tuned into it or tuned out of it?

What’s keeping you safe from it in a way?

[00:49:49] Olly Lynch: It’s a really interesting point. I think when you’re in it, I don’t think you see it and what actually happens is that your level of excitement or creativity or everything drops to a point. So that when something seemingly creative or exciting inside that bubble happens, it feels like, whoa, we’re doing something really different and exciting now.

But if you expand beyond that company you’re in, it is actually pretty lame or pretty boring or pretty uninteresting or uninspiring or uncreative. There’s a friend of mine who used to work for a private jet company. So we go out to Austria a lot and there’s in Innsbruck Airport, there’s a private jet firm based there.

And one of the jets is owned by the guy Ron Swarovski. And this friend of mine, she worked on the plane. Did a two week trip with these Russian billionaires, and they were flying around different places and the woman on the flight, who was in charge of this flight, asked to buy one of the champagne glasses on the flight, and they said it’s not for sale.

The plane’s owned by the guy who owns the company Swarovski. And the lady’s not used to being told no. So she was furious, right? There must be

a price. There isn’t a price, right? The Swarovski guy, they’re his glasses and he ain’t selling them. And then similarly, they went out for dinner and one of the knives at the table setting had a smudge on it.

And the woman was apoplectic. She hit the roof. And the way it was described to me is that when these people live in a world where everything is perfect. The whole world bends to their will all the time, they have to invent drama because there is none, like that never happens to her because she gets what she wants all the time, everywhere she goes, the plane waits for her on the runway, the meeting starts when she gets there, and when you live in that world, you need light and dark to be a normal human, so she creates it, like the smudge on the fork becomes, an earth shattering event in her mind, and I kind of think about that in context of these businesses, right? They’re like, we then we sort of bring in the scope of what’s exciting, what’s inspiring, what’s creative into this vacuum that we live in. And then something, remotely good happens. Like we get 50 downloads on our white paper and we all up in arms, like we did something really great.

And it’s if we could stop and gain that perspective and take a step back and look at this thing holistically in context of everything else. that’s going on in the marketing world. We’d realise that what we’re doing is actually pretty naff in a lot of cases. And I think we accept naff when we’re in that incestuous, stagnant environment.

So, the answer for that, for me, is to constantly find ways to break outside of the industry, the company that you’re in into much, a much broader view of what’s going on out there so that you can keep your ideas fresh and exciting.

[00:52:20] Chris Hudson: That takes a drive, obviously, inside of you, a determination and ambition and actually ideas, really, courage. You’ve got to be able to face the adversity that you’re going to come up against when not everyone’s going to believe why you want to do something or what, they’re not going to do, but something is driving you on there.

I want to make just a, although this is just a question, and maybe a link to what we were talking about at the start of the conversation around the addiction. I don’t know if this is a connection that can be made, but let’s talk about it and see if it goes anywhere. But it’s just around, I guess, addiction in itself being something that, really spurs you on right?

You’re obviously driven to, it’s in pursuit of something that you believe is for you and you’re getting satisfaction from that. Do you think that addiction for good can be a thing? From the point of view of, what we were just describing, ambition in your experience, has it helped you in other ways?

For positive things, right? For achieving the pitch that you had to make, or if you were able to make the change in the company that you were describing, do you feel like that kind of self motivation is also at the heart of it?

[00:53:21] Olly Lynch: I do actually. I think it’s helped in a couple of ways. I think there’s, as addicts, the obsessive thought process is a big part of that, right? Like addiction is made up of two things. It’s made up of a mental component, an obsessive thought, constant thought of whatever it is you’re addicted to and then the physical component of when you start doing it, you can’t stop, right?

And so that mental obsessive component, it definitely serves me well in other aspects of my life because you can become, hyper focused on things sometimes or single minded about things. That has to be watched carefully for me because I can wake up in the morning and before, you know, now I’m doing this business out at the moment, I’ve got loads of exciting, I’m excited by it and I’ve got lots of ideas and lots of stuff going on, but I can wake up in the morning and before I’ve even rolled off the side of the bed, a million different things about the proposition, I need to change this and that Google Doc and it’s like, crikey, like I have to find ways to give myself a break from that head, but I think although that obsessive mind can be useful, I think the most helpful thing about addiction in a work context has been recovery from addiction because recovery has taught me some very basic principles, which can be really easily applied in the work context. Without boring all your listeners with all this, if when you go through a 12 step program, there’s a few component parts of that. One of them is taking a personal inventory, basically having a good hard look at yourself, and acknowledging where you’ve made mistakes and done things wrong and stuff.

That serves you very well in business, right? If you think about this in context of the conversation we’ve been having, coming into new businesses and driving change. The first place to start is where are we today? What are we doing that’s working? What are we doing that’s not working? Let’s be really honest about it.

Let’s not be egotistical and, blow smoke up our own arses and pretend that it’s great because we had, whatever, 500, 000 impressions and we told the board it was great. Let’s be really honest with ourselves, like what’s actually working, what isn’t, right? From that place of honesty, we can decide what we need to change and what we need to put right, and that’s very similar to what you do when you recover from addiction.

So that served me well, being able to think about things through that lens. The other key thing about recovery is that recovery is a program of action. It’s about action. It’s not about thinking your way out of a problem or wishing yourself better. It’s about doing stuff, right? It’s about actually getting off your ass and going and helping others and putting in the action a daily basis. That’s how you get and stay well and that served me well at work too because I was a big procrastinator, personally and professionally. I have a good idea and I there was a fear or gap between idea and execution and like you can’t afford to have a gap in when you’re working in marketing and things move really quickly and you need results now. And especially most recently, working at Lickd we’re a D2C, MRR focused business selling, an online subscription product.

Every move that I make is immediately visible in the revenue figures. So it’s right there. There’s no hiding. It’s, everyone can see it. There’s a big dashboard and we can all see it. So that’s super exciting. It should be exciting as a marketer. If you’re not a charlatan then it should be exciting because you immediately get first hand feedback.

And as I’m sure you well know, I don’t… Big B2B corporates is like you don’t get that kind of same immediate feedback of whether what you’re doing works or not. You can tell a pretty nice story about why it works and explain what worked meant and what ROI is in the context of how you want to contextualise it.

But, recovery and that’s served me well in a work context.

[00:56:51] Chris Hudson: Yeah, I mean, you’re still getting that hit in a way from something working and having an instant result and I’m wondering, through a dopamine hit or whatever it is, that in some cases that’s getting people, the nudges, all the stuff that’s been built into, behavioural design through the apps, through the websites, the tech giants are all over this stuff and marketers are doing it now as well, obviously, it’s driving behaviours.

Yeah, I think we can become aware of that in our practice at work as well. What behaviours are we demonstrating? What behaviours are we seeking? What are we aiming for? What is it going to result in? How is it going to make us feel? I think self awareness is a big part of that.

But I love the way that you’re describing it. Obsessive behaviour can actually be incredibly powerful as a creative force. It’s just incredibly powerful, for manifestation really, but you have to know how to control it and you have to be aware of what you’re doing as you’re doing it by the sounds of it.

[00:57:42] Olly Lynch: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:57:43] Chris Hudson: Was there anything else that you wanted to kind of chat through based on bits and pieces that you had there?

[00:57:48] Olly Lynch: I think anything from my end. I guess the only thing to say is it’s, you know it’d be good to connect with your, listeners. Well more importantly than that is my main motivation for being here in the first place is to help break through this stigma in some small way around addiction.

Love talking about marketing, love talking about any of those things. But really for me, like as when I put things out on LinkedIn, if there’s one or two people that hear something and I have the courage to make a change or whatever, and I have had people from my past colleagues, friends, associates, reach out since posting things online, that’s a win for me, so, yeah, if there’s anyone out there struggling professionally or personally, like I’m all ears.

That’s what I would say.

[00:58:29] Chris Hudson: Oh, that’s brilliant. Thanks so much, Olly and yeah, I really enjoyed having you on the show. Lots of discussion, obviously, around both the business side of things, personal, and I really appreciate you being so forthcoming and, so personally invested in telling your story in a way that can help and inspire other people as well.

So, so really appreciate that. Before you maybe just tell us a bit about where people can find you, and we’ll just wrap after that.

[00:58:50] Olly Lynch: Sure. Yeah. So, you can find me on LinkedIn. Olly Lynch is the name should just be www.linkedin.com/in/ollylynch/. You can also find my company at avante.marketing. And you can get me at olly@avante.marketing on email if you want to reach out that way.

[00:59:04] Chris Hudson: All right. Well, thank you so much, Ollie. Really appreciate the chat and looking forward to seeing where the new agency goes and what you end up doing with it and what happens after that. But yeah really enjoyed hearing about your journey and thanks for sharing it today.

[00:59:15] Olly Lynch: Thanks so much, Chris. Really appreciate you having me on.

[00:59:17] Chris Hudson: Okay, so that’s it for this episode. If you’re hearing this message, you’ve listened all the way to the end. So thank you very much. We hope you enjoyed the show. We’d love to hear your feedback. So please leave us a review and share this episode with your friends, team members, leaders if you think it’ll make a difference.

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