The Unsure Entrepreneur

The Unsure Entrepreneur
Featuring Ric Phillips

SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Entrepreneurship, communication skills, 3V communications, confidence, competency, emotional storytelling, body language, public speaking, pitching, self-assessment, mentorship, storytelling, audience engagement, nonverbal communication, business growth.

SPEAKERS
Ric Phillips, Roger Pierce

Ric Phillips 00:00
So it's not to say that numbers aren't important. It's not to say that details of the technical details are not important, but it's timing, and it's knowing your audience, and it's making sure that you also have the emotional story first before you go into all the details,

Roger Pierce 00:34
Welcome listeners to the Unsure Entrepreneur Podcast. I'm so glad you're here today. We're talking about why communication isn't just a soft skill, but a make or break skill for anyone starting and growing a business. And there's no one better to help us break down essential communication skills and how we can develop and embrace those skills than my guest Ric Phillips.
Let me tell you a little bit about him.
Ric is the founder of 3v Communications, an executive Communication Coach and a corporate trainer who has been helping entrepreneurs and professionals around the world master the art of impactful communication since 2007 equipped with an MBA, a background in sociology and psychology and certifications and everything from body language to Neuro Linguistic Programming, Rick's unique and holistic approach is all about aligning your three V's, the verbal, vocal and visual cues to become a more effective communicator. Beyond his coaching business, Rick is a frequent conference speaker, guest lecturer at universities, director of the York Entrepreneurship Development Institute and the Executive Director of the National Communication Coaching Association of Canada. He's also a frequent media expert and TEDx speaker. Rick, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much, Roger, glad to be here.

You know you and I are on the same page about this topic. I've long believed and long said that communication skills are the number one most important skill for success as an entrepreneur of any age, because it comes in so many forms. You know, whether you're pitching investors, selling to your first clients, leading a team, talking to the media, giving a speech, an entrepreneur's ability to communicate, you know, value and vision and their strategy is essential. Don't you think?

Ric Phillips 02:20
Yes, for sure, and it's interesting how it's not really taught at school, because, of course, it's an essential skill for entrepreneurship, but it would be really handy for a lot of other jobs, right for sales, for an office job of any kind, for any type of customer service, customer facing job. So interesting that soft skills isn't really taught frequently at your average school.

Roger Pierce 02:44
They are missing the boat. A lot of institutions are coming around and doing more entrepreneurship and communications training. Can you give me an example of I mean, those are the blatant examples, speaking and writing. When I talk about communication skills, what comes to your mind?

Ric Phillips 02:59
Confidence, I think is the first thing that comes to my mind, and it wouldn't have been the same answer maybe 10 years ago or whatever. But I think the more I'm in this world of communication skills, I think confidence is the key element that we are trying to produce, convey, to grow within ourselves and to have someone believe in our messaging.

Roger Pierce 03:23
You talk about confidence, which is another secret sauce for entrepreneurs, and communication gives that to us. I know we're going to expand on that more, but you know, really, the more you do it, the more confident you are in yourself and your business and your people. It's kind of like a self perpetuating benefit, isn't it?

Ric Phillips 03:40
Yes, I like to think of it like confidence and competency is kind of this cycle effect where the more competent you're at something, you get more confident, and the more confident you are at something, you take more chances, and you get more competent, and then you grow past your your comfort zone, which is pretty important. So I always link those two words, confidence and competency.

Roger Pierce 04:01
The winner's success. Formula, I love it. I love it. Okay, we'll get back to more specifics, and we're going to talk about different aspects of communication. But I want to talk about your inception, because we like to talk about, you know, your own journey here, what inspired you to start 3v communication, and how did it all begin?

Ric Phillips 04:16
Yeah, it's interesting. I'd never imagined I was going to be an entrepreneur. I remember when I was at university, I was studying sociology, psychology, as you mentioned, and my girlfriend at the time was studying business, and I sort of jokingly looked down upon her, thinking, Wow, big business are bad. They're killing trees. They're just corporate greed, this and that. And it was sort of interesting how many years later I would end up not only running a small business, but also being involved with a large Canadian charity that trains entrepreneurs, Yeti that you that you previously mentioned. So when it comes to 3v Communications, what happened was I was at a certain time in my life where I just didn't know what to do career wise. That is the simplest way to explain it. I think a lot of people out there can relate. Eight when you get to a certain point, you're just not sure, should you go backwards and do something you had previously done, or should you try to take a big leap forward or go lateral? And so for myself, it was, did I want to go into the customer service world again? Did I want to go overseas and teach English again? Did I want to do some sort of social services of some kind? Did I want to try something completely different. And that was my pain at that moment. Is I was ready for a change. Didn't know what to do, and I stumbled upon entrepreneurship in some ways, because a friend of mine was helping me try to figure out what to do. And he had just kind of mentioned, almost as a as a side comment this, that he had a friend who was a life coach charging $100 for phone coaching. This is back in 2006 probably. And I was stunned. I'm like, what someone could charge $100 an hour by talking to somebody over the phone and then, yeah, so I researched life coaching at that time, it was a big thing just coming to the market. And I realized, after doing some research, that I didn't see myself as a life coach, a life coach, you know, perhaps could handle a variety of topics to help someone, you know, their relationship, finances, this and that. But one category stuck out for me, which was communication skills. And as soon as I saw that, I thought, Aha, it was like the apple falling on on the head, right? I thought, oh, communication skills. And then it just kind of quickly added up, like a secret formula in my head. I'm like, okay, native English speaker, great English and Drama student, ESL teacher, right? It was just like, body language, you know, sociology, psychology. This was before my MBA as well, and so I just thought, this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to transfer my skills of working with the English second language students, transfer them to immigrants that are working here in Toronto already not not just coming, but already established, but having a hard time getting promoted, having a hard time getting noticed, having a hard time communicating their message properly, be it English or cultural or something else.

And so that was my that was my initial target market, was to work with the immigrants who were, let's say, working at a bank, or they were engineers. They were already established, like I said, middle management, but needed some help getting through some sort of glass ceiling that was there for them, and that's what I did. So I communication coach.ca was registered in January 2006 because nobody had it, because it wasn't a word. Then I was literally the first person to put those two words together, Communication Coach, and then three of you communications came up shortly after, based on the concept of I was doing some research on communication, as you might imagine, for the research, and I come across Dr Albert Mehrabian. And to make a long story short, some of his work was published, and it created at that time, something called the 738, 55 rule, which was the idea that has kind of been debunked, but the idea that 7% of your communication was was your words, and 38% was your tone, and 55% was your was your body language, it wasn't exactly what that scientist meant. So I'll spare the long story about it, but it was enough for me to gather the concept of three V's, which I coined, verbal, vocal, visual. I thought, it doesn't really matter the percentages, right? It doesn't really matter. The idea is that we have verbal and non verbal communication, and there's verbal and there's vocal and there's visual, and then we can look at them separately, we can combine them, we can align them to to maximize our chance of communicating effectively. And that kind of holistic approach is how I, how I tackled the communication coaching industry.

Roger Pierce 08:24
So that was one of my questions. How does this method of yours work, the 3v of communication, verbal, vocal and visual. Maybe you can elaborate a bit about how you go about helping people in those three areas and what they what they get away from your training, what they take away? Yeah.

Ric Phillips 08:40
So you take an entrepreneur or whoever they may have to do some sort of presentation or pitch, which is quite common, and if they were to ask me, you know, I've got this pitch coming up, I you know, I want to win some money, et cetera, what can I do? How do I make my pitch better? I would like to look at it in terms of reverse engineering. I'd like to say, Well, what's your outcome? How do you want your audience to feel? Not just the data that you want to convey, but what do you want them to feel? So let's feel? So let's say that they say something like, well, I want I want them to see my confidence, or I want them to trust me, then I would say, Okay, let's reverse engineer. So what does verbally speaking, which is your words and grammar, what does confidence sound like? And what does it not sound like? And what does trustworthiness sound like not sound like. So what words would we choose? What sentences would best convey trustworthiness or confidence. And then what? Which ones can we avoid? So we kind of make a list of that, and then vocally, same thing. So vocally is your your voice, right? So it's your rhythm, speed, volume, intonation, stuff like that. And so I'd say same thing. If we think of a confident speaker, what's their voice like? Or if we look at someone we really want to trust and follow, what are the what are the items that we're noticing in their voice, rhythm, speed, volume, intonation, and then same thing. Let's just take speed, for example, right? If someone speaks really fast, it's good for energy, but it could be like they're pulling a fast one over us. And if someone speaks really slow, we can understand them, but it's like, are they making it up as they go along? I'm not. Sure it's internal dialog that the audience might have. So maybe thinking about that medium volume, medium speed as a general outline to practice with. And then we can add some some fun stuff to it, and then visual body language, right? So same thing. So what are some nervous gestures we obviously want to avoid, facial gestures, hand gestures. What's going to present confidence and self and trustworthiness and what's not? So by using that, we could then synchronize these three V's. Then when the person's practicing, they've got some tools to play with besides the content, which is another thing. Of course, we can help them with content and slides and all that other stuff as well. It's all part of communication. But essentially, that's how we use this philosophy of 3v communications, like, Well, how do I look at them individually, then to synchronize them and align them to create a fourth V, which I would call the vibe.

Roger Pierce 10:45
The vibe. Oh, I love it. There you go. You have to rename the company now.

Ric Phillips 10:49
Bo way too long.

Roger Pierce 10:52
I love how you take the time to assess first. Like, you know, am I a fast talker? Am I a slow talker? Do I make it up? So you're not just throwing instructions at someone, you're really tailoring the training to them.

Ric Phillips 11:05
It's based on their outcomes and their goals. So it's, it's, I don't necessarily tell everybody what to do based on, hey, I'm the expert. You got to listen to me. It's not exactly that. It's more like, what are your outcomes, what are your goals, what's your branding? That might be a part of it, right? So we work with what we have and then what the outcomes are. At least, there's tools available, right? There's no magic bullet, just like body language, right? People talk about, oh, I'm going to become a body language expert so I can beat my buddies at poker. No, you're not. No, you're not. Sorry. I don't care how much money you spend on the body language training, that ain't going to happen. So same thing. There's tools available that give us some structure, some structure to the content, some structure to the body language of the words of the voice. And that's that's really useful. It's a life skill, too.

Roger Pierce 11:47
It is a life skill if it goes way beyond entrepreneurship. But I'm fascinated by, you know, I love public speaking. I love getting up on a stage. I've been a member of Toastmasters. It's really done my share of talks, but the body language part, maybe we can just touch upon that a little bit deeper. It's not just about the content. So many people fuss over the words they fuss over they're using the right grammar, but delivery is such an important element, isn't it?

Ric Phillips 12:08
It is. It's really a sad idea. If somebody, anybody, spent a lot of time creating a beautiful script, whether it's for a sales pitch or a speech, and if nobody listened to their speech because it was presented in a boring way with a boring voice or boring body language. And I say that not to be cruel, but just to be realistic, you can have a wonderful script written down. It doesn't mean the person is going to pay attention. So it just shows us that the nonverbal communication outweighs or trumps the verbal communication every single time, not sometimes, not 80% every single time, humans are hardwired to trust the nonverbal message they receive from their opponent or their audience or their friend whoever is in front of them, they will take that over what the person has said every time, wow.

Roger Pierce 12:59
So give me a tip on how I can improve my trust ability in body language.

Ric Phillips 13:04
So with body language, it's about creating comfort and trust. So trust comes from comfort and again, remember earlier I said maybe I thought that confidence and competency were connected. I think that trust and and comfort are connected as well. The more comfortable I can be, and then you can be, slash we can be, the more trust is going to be able to grow between us. And so if we look at that, I could say what kind of body language, or voice or words, but let's just look at body language. What kind of body language can I do or not to create trust, to create comfort? First of all, I gotta look at myself, right? What am I doing to maintain my comfort level? What am I doing, even if I'm a bit nervous, because maybe it's a very important meeting that's important meeting, that's fine. That's human. I care. It's okay to be nervous. But what am I doing to mask some of that? What am I doing to manage some of that so that the person doesn't think that I'm really, really nervous or jittery or perhaps being dishonest when I'm not being dishonest. So the nonverbal message, it can be simple things that everybody knows, like body language 101, don't cross your arms. Yeah, there's a reason why that's body language 101, and oh, well, I'm chilly. I just want it. No, I don't care if you're chilly, you know, at least not for the first impression with a with a new person, an important meeting like you can do that with your friends and colleagues later on, but you got to make sure you're managing your first impression properly. So yeah, I would think that things like fidgeting and where your hands are, if you're sort of tapping your foot or shuffling your feet, all these things, which are fairly obvious, shines signs of nervousness is also signs of discomfort. And that's what we don't want to present. We want to create an audience and a vibe of it's okay. This is a safe place. I'm comfortable. You can be comfortable. I trust you. You can trust me, there's no hidden agenda. There's no weapons hidden under the boardroom table. That's the kind of, that kind of feeling you want to you want to try to create that ambiance, almost. And if you can do that, you're going to have a much better chance of them registering your message, your verbal message.

Roger Pierce 14:55
Great tips, and I'm sure you'll agree. Know your materials. You're not reading off your. Paper or your notes, that's a big, big faux pas, right? One of the things I like to recommend is go online and watch videos of TEDx, Ted Talks. Toastmasters has an international speaking competition every year, and the winner of that global competition is top shelf. Does all the things you're talking about. Go and watch some of these people on YouTube, right?

Ric Phillips 15:18
Exactly. And one thing I always tell the entrepreneurs that I come across as students is there's something called a three MT, a global competition called Three MT, which is three minute thesis. And it's for students who are doing their masters or PhD. They can enter locally, at their local university, and then carry on forward to global competition. And the idea is that they've got three minutes hence, three MT, three minutes, one static slide to communicate in simple, layman's terms, what is their thesis? So it doesn't matter if they're trying to cure cancer or they're watching migratory bird patterns or, you know, it doesn't matter, but if you talk to your peers, they get you because they speak the same language of that academia. But what about speaking to your neighbor or your grandma? If you can communicate to your grandma what it is you're trying to do. That's a different messaging so the three MT competition, which I encourage people to go to YouTube and just look up three MT winner, or three MT finalist, or three mt 2025, whatever, you'll see people from all over the world, all different backgrounds, all different educational backgrounds, communicating their thesis in a very short, powerful way, and I think that's good lessons for entrepreneurs as well, because they have to pitch the same idea.

Roger Pierce 16:25
Okay, I'm glad you mentioned that, because I want to ask you, what are some of the common mistakes that you see entrepreneurs making? I got a fun stat here before you answer, 68% of consumers have walked away from a business relationship due to poor communication. Buyer can say, Forget this. I'm not dealing with this entrepreneur, this this seller because of some of their communication faults. What can we do about this?

Ric Phillips 16:49
The first mistake, especially when I think of sales and customer service oriented conversations, the first mistake I say, is when the voice doesn't match the body, when the words don't match the or verbal doesn't match the nonverbal. So we actually talked about this a bit earlier. What this a bit earlier when, when the person saying something like, Well, I'm sorry, sir, I'd like to help you, but I but I can't, and you don't believe them, because their nonverbal messaging, whether it's their voice or whether it's face to face, is telling you that you don't believe that's sincere. So this is a prime example of what I said earlier, when the nonverbal communication trumps the verbal communication every single time. But however, if a customer service person or sales person says to you in a genuine way, at least you feel it's genuine. I'm sorry, sir, I really can't help you. I really can't go lower than this price. And if you believe them, then you're still in that, you're still in the conversation, you're still in the relationship, still in the game. I think that's the first thing. Is when people think that a script or magic words are somehow gonna cover when they're not being genuine, or when they don't know what they're talking about. That's the first mistake when it comes to entrepreneurs. Specifically. Their challenge is they sometimes focus on the wrong part of their business with the audience that they're talking to. They're talking to someone who's a generalist, maybe an angel investor, who's a generalist, but they're suddenly go really, really deep in all the technical stuff, really, really deep. And the kind of bore the person, or they're going heavy into the finances with somebody who's not interested. Maybe somebody asked them a different question, right? How is your business going to help society? And they start going on about all the numbers, numbers, numbers, numbers. So it's not to say that numbers aren't important. It's not to say the details of the technical details are not important, but it's timing, and it's knowing your audience, and it's making sure that you also have the emotional story first, before you go into all the details, great consideration.

Roger Pierce 18:29
And if you've got a team, if you're starting up a business, and you've got, you know, the tech team or the engineers, they shouldn't be the only ones talking. It should be, you know, maybe the one who's got that communication skill mastery, maybe the founder, maybe another manager should be there with the technical people to help explain what they talk about, right? Because it's all about conveyance and approaching this with a team attitude, yeah.

Ric Phillips 18:50
And if somebody doesn't have a team, maybe it's a new business, then maybe bring advisors in, right? So advisors could be their accountant, it could be their uncle, it could be an advisor, but bring somebody in that can help if they really have to do it by themselves, let's say it's some kind of just a converse, a one on one conversation with somebody, and that's the way it is. Have a balance between the emotional storytelling, like, what's the problem in the world you're trying to solve, and what's on the market now and why it's not good enough, and how your solution is going to help the future generations, but also have then some technical information, some numbers for credibility. So if you could at least think about that balance, whether you've got one minute, two minutes, five minutes, 10 minutes with slides without slides, even if you just come up with that balance, your pitching or conversations will be so much better.

Roger Pierce 19:32
So speaking of pitches, I was at one of your events earlier this summer and saw some of the entrepreneurs you work with do their business pitches. Wow, fantastic. On time. Clear communication, good use of slides, good conveyance. Emotional storytelling, as you said, some of them dipped into the technical, but not too much. I could tell you were there coaching them in the background. Thank you. So you know, with all the pitches you've been through and helped people to deliver, what makes a pitch stand out in your mind? Client, to an investor or a potential client.

Ric Phillips 20:02
That's a great question. As you know, with shows like Dragon's Den and Shark Tank, you can have someone do a great pitch, and you know, two people love it and two people hate it, right? So I think it comes down to if the pitch, slash the business, slash the team, speaks to you or not. I think that's what it's about. So you and I even could have could listen to somebody pitching a business, and you might love it and I might just not. Might just not be interested in it. There may be nothing wrong. I just like, Nah, I'm not really interested in that industry. I'm not, I don't really relate to that industry. But you, you might be saying, no, no, no, this is a really great idea, because your life perspective or your your business expertise is different from mine. So that is the trick with pitching. And I think it is important to mention that that that an entrepreneur is not going to wow everybody every single time with their pitch. There are going to be times when it's a perfect match. There's going to be times when it just it's just not a it doesn't match the audience or part of the audience. And so that is part of the part of the process of finding the right investors and the right partners. And that's good because you want the right partners, the right investors. You don't want people who don't understand your business, or don't believe in your business. You want people who totally get it, who are like, Yes, this is a good idea. I really want to help bring this to life. Those are the people you want.

Roger Pierce 21:09
Anyway, you mentioned a couple of my favorite shows, Shark Tank and Dragons Den. What do you see when you watch those shows? What do you notice? Maybe that other people aren't noticing in terms of communication?

Ric Phillips 21:19
It's a little bit different now, because now I'm sure just like you. Now, I've met some people that have been on it, and they told me some of the some of the stories afterwards, I'm like, oh, okay, I get the bigger picture now. I mean, those shows are great because they encourage other people to be entrepreneurs. They encourage other people to take a shot. Yeah, they make fun of some people sometimes, which I'm not a really big fan of, but I love it when they have people that have got great stories, whether it's their personal story, their family story, or the product story, trials and tribulations, and now they're there, getting a deal. The fact is, the audience, we don't know for sure if that deal is going to stick through or not, or, you know, people are going to back out after due diligence. But I love those shows when they create that inspiration, and I think both shows do a great job of that and and you would not have that without the storytelling, once again, the numbers and technical stuff, that's great. Here's our target market. If we just have 1% of the Chinese market, we're going to be billionaires. Yeah, sure. Okay, everybody will. Who cares? It's not realistic, right? But tell me the story. Tell me the story, why you believe this product or service is right, the timing is right, and why it's going to be accepted by the North Americans or the Europeans, or whichever audience you're targeting. That's interesting is when people mention proper storytelling. And the last note on that would be, don't make it a nice to have, make it a half to have, right? And so some people, I would find with apps, this is quite common, like we're building an app and it does this, this, this. And the question might be, do I need it, right? Do I Do I need it, and is maybe it's a nice to have, but it's not a have to have, and that's that business is going to struggle. But when you can find the messaging and the storytelling and the pitching to make your product or service or app, whatever it might be, to be a necessary thing that you have to have in order to save yourself a lot of headaches in the near future. Aha. Now we've got an interesting pitch.

Roger Pierce 22:59
Let's double down on that. And you mentioned story. I mean, I'm guilty of this. I tend to describe things, and I realize, wait a minute, I should just tell a story. How important is that in the pitch, the case study, the example, not making it up, but can you relate? You know, if I have a good customer use story, that's something I should bring up in my pitch, isn't it?

Ric Phillips 23:18
Yeah, absolutely. Case study, customer use story, target market. Ideal persona. Your Own Story is the best when people can relate to you. This is what I call a founder story, or an AHA story. Again, we go back to the apple falling on Isaac Newton's head. It's like, what made you get into the business? And if a person stumbles with that question, like, oh, I don't know. I just wanted to make more money than I was making at my job. You know what? You're allowed to make money as an entrepreneur. There's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with with wanting to make some money. But that can't be the reason why you set up the business and why you want your business to succeed and grow past your lifetime. So that's that's a question that needs to be answered, is, what's the reason? What's the why? And then if you can answer that, that's really going to help with your storytelling. But yeah. But just, I think that the founder has to have, have to present him or herself as a person who's passionate for the right reasons, and what's, what's the reason that they're going to sacrifice themselves and do all this entrepreneurial long hours? I want to believe in that, in that, in that cause of the person.

Roger Pierce 24:16
Profit is not a dirty word, but it's important to marry it with a good story, a good reason why you're doing this thing, why you've invented this app, why I've invented this product, the solutions it's going to provide, and how it's going to make people's lives better. Really important advice. So what if I don't think I'm a good communicator? What? What if I'm an entrepreneur, or getting an entrepreneurship, and I'm hesitant because, oh, I don't have those skills. Rick, you know, maybe I'm more of a technical person. Maybe I'm more of a people HR, person. What if I don't have those skills? What should? What would you say to someone like that?

Ric Phillips 24:49
Yeah, 3v communications.ca, there's people around us. There's people around us that are accidental mentors, role models. I would ask that person, look around there's their. Family circles, social circles, business circles. Is there somebody that you admire the way they speak? Maybe it's their actual way they speak, their voice, maybe it's their body language. Maybe it's the way they convey complex ideas into simple, easy to understand ways. But then dig deeper. What's their secret? What's their style? Maybe ask them. Maybe imitate them. I think that's one thing we can do. We can still, of course, research more communication skills, podcasts, YouTube channels, books still around, quite popular these days. Lots of resources available. Toastmasters, you mentioned earlier. There are some things for free. There are some things for cost, but there are a lot of things available. But the first thing is for somebody to acknowledge that they want or need the help, because if they don't, it goes back to this nice to have, not have to have. So if they can get through the initial stages of entrepreneurship without improving their communications dramatically, they'll probably do it. But it's usually when they hit some sort of roadblock, or they get specific feedback from the world about their communication, about their pitch, about their sales pitch, whatever it might be, then they go, Oh, I better work on this. And so rightfully so. That is the world giving you feedback, and you should, you should pay attention. So definitely, there's, there's a lot of options, and they should do some kind of coaching, training, self study to make themselves more confident.

Roger Pierce 26:17
Good advice. And this is one of the joys of entrepreneurship. You can learn, constant learning.

Ric Phillips 26:23
Yeah, it's very hard to do things by yourself. It's and then why? Why do you have to do it? Even if you could do it, even if you're really, really clever and talented, and you could do all these business functions, that's great. But what if you had some help? What if you had someone helping you with this aspect or that, or this picture, giving you some feedback. That's that's just amazing. So definitely find those mentors, find those role models. Maybe they become official board of advisors or board of directors. Maybe not. But I think there are people around you, if you think about it, that you can get some initial advice from, help from and I think it's, I think that's really good step in the right direction to start building a team.

Roger Pierce 27:01
One of the other entrepreneurs interviewed a while back, Chala Dincoy. I She said something about coaching that you'll you'll like. She says the best investment I ever make is in my invest in coaching. I don't care what it costs. She said, Because I know it's going to pay off three fold or 10 fold in the new skills that I develop. And I thought that was such an amazing attitude to have, not trying to give a plug for coaching and other do. But it's this, don't be afraid to invest in yourself, right?

Ric Phillips 27:27
You invest in yourself because you want to produce something for the world, right? Again, going back to entrepreneurship, so you can think of it that way. If somebody's feeling guilty about investing in themself or the money or the time, you can think of it that way, I'm making myself better because I'm the visionary of this product or service. I'm trying to create something for the world. And so there's my reasoning.

Roger Pierce 27:48
So putting on your entrepreneurial hat, Rick, you've been at this game for a long time being your own boss. Think back to when you first started out. What advice would you give to someone who's way back there thinking about getting into their own small business.

Ric Phillips 28:01
I think you need to assess yourself as an entrepreneur and find out what are your strengths and weaknesses. There's literally like entrepreneurial self assessment tools online, or there's courses back in the day, I took the biz launch course with yourself. Today, we have Yeti and other and other incubators and accelerators and university and college programs out there, I think that's what I would recommend, is if someone's got a great idea, I would say before you spend a lot of time and money and energy yet find out, is this for you? Is the lifestyle Correct? Is this? Is this the timing is correct? Is maybe doing some initial market research, you can go to Fiverr, things like that, and spend 20 to 60 bucks and get fantastic market research to decide if you if this is a good timing or good market for your product or idea. So that's what I would say. And again, going back to talking to mentors too, that's what I would do, find out if you're on the right path before you jump in with both feet.

Roger Pierce 28:59
Perfect, perfect. And on my own website, unsure entrepreneur.com there are some self assessment tools linked to self assessment tools like BDC and others that I think, you know, it's part of the journey. You got to check these things out, and they're fun. They're not they're not definitive tools. I don't want people to say, Oh, I didn't rate well on the tool. I shouldn't be an entrepreneur, but they certainly help self assess, right? Make you understand yourself better, which is great advice.

Ric Phillips 29:21
I think self assessment is a coaching tool. Just going back to coaching, I think that coaches, of any however, they learn their coaching techniques from I think that self assessment is a big one, not just yourself, but when you're working with a client, you're not trying to feed them all the answers. You're actually trying to get them to self assess. And so I think for entrepreneurs, it's the same thing. It's like, you know, you can get help, you can get education, you can get advice, but self assess all the time too. Like, where are you at? Is this the right path, and do you need to pivot? All that's very important, especially if you're in a leadership role. Presuming that you're the visionary and you are the main person, then you're definitely going to have to have self trust. And so self assessment is going to really be useful,

Roger Pierce 29:55
excellent. Know yourself better than others, identify your strengths. Delegate your weaknesses. Learn, learn, learn. Well, good advice. Sounds good. All good advice. Well, listen, that's all the time we have. But I want to thank you very much, Rick for sharing your entrepreneurial journey and your communication expertise. I really enjoyed talking to you, and I know it means a lot to our listeners. But before you go, if someone wants to get in touch, how do they connect?

Ric Phillips 30:21
Well, thank you, Roger. I enjoy talking to entrepreneurs and enjoy meeting people. Anybody can email me. LinkedIn is a great place to find me. Ric Phillips, and that's Ric with. without the K — R, I, C, because my name is Richard, and nobody but my father ever called me Richard, and we like to keep it that way. So it's Ric. You can also find me on the website, 3v communications.ca I'm happy to answer any questions from your audience,

Roger Pierce 30:45
Wonderful, perfect. And as you've heard here, listeners, communication makes or break. An entrepreneur, as Ric reminded us, how you speak, listen and present yourself, can decide whether doors open or stay shut. Put these insights into practice and watch the difference it makes in your business. That's it for today. Thank you for being here. Be sure to follow the podcast and check out the website too and hope you return next time for more insights on the Unsure Entrepreneur. Bye for now.