In this episode of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur, host Jim James speaks with Paul Teasdale, a former member of the McLaren F1 team, about how entrepreneurs can get noticed and enhance their businesses. Teasdale shares that he helps people apply his Formula One and McLaren knowledge to help them understand the principles and methods that make high performance accessible, no matter the context. He also defines a high-performing team as one that outperforms competitors and allows individuals to perform at their best, while coming together as a team.
Teasdale emphasises that a high-performing team has a single goal, and the secret to McLaren's success is concentration. He also discusses how he built his own brand by using his experiences at McLaren and being honest about his expertise. He advises entrepreneurs to talk to people and always focus on performance, discussing their goals and potential. Ultimately, Teasdale stresses the importance of being authentic and having deliverables of your own in order to get noticed and stand out.
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The UnNoticed Entrepreneur is hosted & produced by Jim James.
Welcome to the Unnoticed Entrepreneur. This show will tell you how to get the recognition you and your business deserve. Our guests share their practical insights and tools, which you can use straight away. Your host is International entrepreneur, podcast host, and author Jim James.
Jim James:And welcome to this episode of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur, with me here, Jim James. And actually the rather slow seat because I'm going across the awoken talk to Paul Teasdale who used to work for McLaren F1 team. So, he's gonna rev us up. Paul, welcome to the show.
Paul Teasdale:Thanks for the introduction, Jim. Pleasure to be here.
Jim James:It's my pleasure, apologies for the slightly cheesy introduction about revenue. But you're gonna be on the show and talk about how you've been building your own brand but by bridging from the F1 and the excitement around the whole franchise of F1 and McLaren as a brand specifically. And we're also gonna talk about some of the incremental, high performance teams techniques that, people can use. And about a new one you've introduced, which is about is "Infobesity", Paul we're gonna talk about there.
Paul Teasdale:Yeah. Managing infobesity indeed.
Jim James:Yeah, so we've got a lot of great things to talk about. So Paul, share with us, first of all about what you do and how you help Entrepreneurs to improve the performance of their business.
Paul Teasdale:Oh, thanks, Jim. Well, I bring my insights from the world of Formula One and McLaren in particular and help make them accessible and applicable to different people in different organizations, and that's what I do. I take my experience that I've had work in seven years with McLaren. I've also had a previous experience with other really high performing teams around the world. But the McLaren brand and the Formula One environment in particular attract a lot of people and they associate it a lot more with high performance than maybe some of the sausage making or dairy export companies that I've worked with, no matter how high performance they have been in the past. So, that's what I do. I point people towards this high performance world that they are aware of and often feel is way beyond their reach. And I help them to understand the principles and the ways of working, the methodologies that are in play there that make it accessible so they can apply those principles for themselves so they can then accelerate their own performance.
Jim James:Paul, just give us a definition of a high performing team.
Paul Teasdale:Well, I think, it's always an interesting one because you've got an easy way of viewing it in the world of F1. And that are you performing well against your competition. By definition, if you are in the F1 world and competing in F1, you are high performing. You're one of the top teams that are out there and very few teams manage to first of all make it in. And secondly, stay certainly as long as McLaren or a certain Italian team who drive in red have been in involved whose name we've rarely mentioned. But, it's about that context of where you are and you can compare yourself to competition. That's a good way of saying, "Am I high performing?" But it's also about "What is your day-to-day operation? Are you allowing people to be performing at their best and performing at their best together?" And those are some of the things that you can start to look at no matter what your context is. "Are my individuals performing at their best and having the ability to perform at their best? And then are they coming together as a team." Either in my department or a sales team, whatever it might be. "And are they doing as well as we think they possibly could be?" And then as soon as you start doing that, your level changes, your view changes as to what's the standard for high performance. And then you move that up. And I think the real high performing teams are constantly pushing that bar. That's the thing.
Jim James:Okay, and I've gotta ask you, because you're the expert and you've worked at the McLaren. What is the secret, if you can distill the enter, if you like, one sentence. What is the secret of a McLaren when it comes to them being a high performance team?
Paul Teasdale:Distill it into one sentence that's 'focus.' I think it's the critical piece. What you've got in that world in general, but in within that team is you've got a singular focus for what everybody is driving towards. If what you are doing today isn't driving towards getting that car to be as fast and as easily drivable and as maximising the points that it can possibly get, if what you are doing doesn't relate to that, you don't it. And I know you've talked to my good friend, Faris Aranki in the past about FQ and focus quotient, that allows them to have a real razor sharp view on focus. Which is if it isn't focusing on driving the car to be better, we're not gonna do it.
Jim James:That is fantastic. And well done because I didn't prep you for that. So you answered that on the fly, and I was worried, just because you gave me that look of like, "We weren't gonna talk about that." But Paul Teasdale, that's a great answer. Focus. Now, you work for McLaren, but you have your own business now. How have you managed to bridge from a big company like McLaren, which has got brand recognition. Let's face it. And with all due respect, your own personal brand, which is on a journey, which I'm sure will become very successful, but is currently less, less well-known in the McLaren. Tell us how have you been doing that? Have you been using the McLaren name to your own purposes?
Paul Teasdale:Yeah. I mean, it is very much a case of as any Solo-preneur or anyone who's going out there. You've got to recognise and maybe it is something I didn't really recognise until I got into this industry myself is people don't know you. And if people don't know you, like you, and trust you, then they're not gonna do business with you. So the first point, the call is to get them to know you. And so, I want to use my experience and the lessons that I've learned in order to help people to accelerate their own performance. And in order to do that, I can use the value that has already been built in the world of F1 and the the brand of McLaren, without being disingenuous. And that's the bit that's critical to me. I'm not McLaren, I'm not bringing McLaren to you. I'm bringing Paul Teasdale's experience of working in that world. But that's what I've done my whole career is bring different experiences and different expertise, different angles and perspectives to allow people to access performance that they weren't necessarily thinking of. And so that, that's how I will always talk about my experiences from working with McLaren or working at McLaren. I'm not ever positioning myself as McLaren or F1, but people are interested and intrigued by F1 and McLaren. So that gets them at least starting that conversation.
Jim James:Yeah, and I think you've raised a really key point there about not being disingenuous about being authentic, which is a topic that's come upon a few shows about the need to show up, as you promised. So that's really good that you're completely transparent upfront with everybody about that. Once people have, if you like, gone down that, "Oh, that sounds interesting. That Chap used to work for McLaren. He must know things that the rest of us don't know yet." What do you do next, Paul, in order to get people to be interested in working with you, because it's not enough just to say, "I used to work at McLaren." You then have to have some deliverables of your own, don't you?
Paul Teasdale:Precisely. And there's a couple of things really, and one of them, the main thing is just talking to people and it's talking to people. My focus is always about performance. So, I talk to them about the performance that they're trying to drive, the performance that's in front of them, the opportunities there. What are the results that you are looking for? And it's not just profit, it's what are the results, what's the context of those results? Are you an organisation who wants to have good profitability while still being incredibly sustainable, or ethical, or something like that? Whatever the real strategic drive is that cuts you apart from the rest. You've got to make sure that you can drive to results in different ways. But actually, the how you want to deliver that is crucial to making sure that you are not only setting yourself the north star, you are also giving yourself some guidelines to say, "I'm not going to go out of those lanes." And also it's a aligned to your values. So it's a really about those values. So let's talk about people, about their results and their values. And that is often through initial conversations, but it might also be through a speaking events. It might be through a workshop or activity, but generally, the speaking events is a kickoff point for a lot of these engagements. And I like to make the titles of the you gotta entice people in as well, and the F1 angle gets a certain number of people involved. But there are people out there who aren't interested in F1 and that actually turns them off. "If it's all about F1, I don't want to hear." So you've gotta position things correctly, and give people a bit of intrigue as to what they're gonna be hearing about or what they could potentially be hearing about. I've got one of the talks, for instance, or one of the topics I'll talk about is, "If you want to change tires, then bring in the ballerina." And so, I'm bringing those expertise and that interest and that experience from that world of F1 and the changing tires and also the ballerina's, funnily enough. But that's a different story. But you're putting something in there that's getting people interested.
Jim James:Yeah. Okay. I'm interested. So how do you get ballerinas into the pit-lane?
Paul Teasdale:I mean, that story in itself was all about, "How do you continually focus on improvement and look externally for different ways of doing that." And one thing that was recognized in the McLaren team was that the people who are doing the pit stop, it's efficiency of movement. It's almost a flow of dance when you're looking at the pit stop. When you're trying to do something in about two seconds, you've gotta be really precise with your movements. Who else is really good at this? Let's bring in the Royal Valley. And so, that in itself is a whole different topic about how do you think outside the box in order to bring in external expertise and open your mind to different ways of thinking.
Jim James:Yeah, I love that. And my daughter, by the way, who is quite high up in her ballet levels also loves F1. So, she would've come to your talk, Paul Teasdale. Now, you also are wearing a Paul Teasdale polo shirt. For those people that can't see, it's very nice. It's black with silver lettering, embroidered on saying, "Helping People Perform." How important is the sort of personal branding merchandise being for you because of course it's tax deductible. If you wear clothes that are branded, it becomes a uniform, right? And you can offset tax for that.
Paul Teasdale:It is. I've got two of these polo shirts that I have on rotation, one's getting washed while the other one's being worn. It has its advantages. And I've started to see the advantages from a brand recognition piece and went out and about people see your name. That's great. It started off more practical for me. In the classic sort of Mark Zuckerberg, " What am I gonna wear when I'm out there?" I don't have to make that decision anymore. I've got my uniform already sorted out. And it also brings consistency when I'm recording podcasts, when I'm doing podcast, hosting as well. All that sort of stuff. So people get consistency of that brand is when they see me. They tend to see me online anyway, wearing this, in this background. You start to get to know and trust the brand on that front.
Jim James:Paul, that's a great idea. And I should definitely take a leaf out of your book with that one. You've worked with big companies that also work with other big companies. Can we just touch on, I hate to go back to McLaren, but just because of your experience there, how do companies like McLaren structure their partnerships and marketing? If you're allowed to share with that because it's a unique insight that you've got. Can you give us some ideas about how big companies that are very focused on going faster and anything else you said they don't do but they have huge commercial operations, don't they? So, how do they get those sponsorships, those partnerships going?
Paul Teasdale:So, the part of the organisation that I worked in, for the majority of my time there, it did switch it a little bit towards the end, was called "Applied Technologies," or "Applied" as it's now known. And Applied as in itself was set up in order to create a new revenue stream because recognising that your revenue stream, your marketing income is only directly related to how well you're performing on track. And if you're performing well, brilliant. If you're not, you're stuck. So how do you actually get some more revenue coming through? And that was how the Applied Technologies Arm came about. And we had a smallish team, so relatively small in terms of the people who were sort of client facing, like myself, only two or three of us who were doing that work. And then we would bring in Specialists in data analytics, modeling, simulation, predictive analytics, the wonderful stuff that was the technical aspect of the expertise that McLaren had driven over the years. But, in order to get the big clients and to work on the big clients, that's a lot of work to do that business development to go out into the market as McLaren and say, "We're McLaren, we're doing this." There's gonna be a lots of questions as to, "Why would I go and work with McLaren? When I could work with a different consultancy?" And so what McLaren did really well was they partnered up with, I mean, firstly when I was there, it was with KPMG, and then the relationship switched to Deloitte. And as part of that sponsor relationship, which is sort of in the racing side of the organisation, they had an agreement that would be a working partnership where the Deloitte would bring in the big clients for instance. And then, we would work together with some of their consulting expertise. We would come in with our sort of experience, people and performance expertise, which is what I would bring and some of our technology expertise. Which would be the sort of pick of some of the simulation and modeling team. And then we would work on a client issue, typically, developing a proof of concept to help them with some form of decision support. So, it might be in airport operations. You know, how can you develop a bit of software that predicts if you move one plane here, what are the knock on impacts over the rest of the day or the week, or whatever that might be. Or interesting in the first project I did was 'modeling supermarket shelf stacking.' Which why would a big supermarket ever come directly to McLaren? But because we had the relationship with KPMG to bring that and it worked for them because that KPMG or Deloitte partner would say, "We've got something else that other, you know, our competition doesn't have. The other big four don't have this shiny state of the art modeling and simulation team that we can bring through McLaren."
Jim James:So the technology transfer. I think it was McLaren also that got involved in using its Fin Technology to help at the air conditioning.
Paul Teasdale:That was actually Williams. But we do a similar thing. Yeah.
Jim James:Right. Okay. My, I'll better edit that out. But great, this technology transfer. So the key point is that they manage to keep focus on their core objective.
Paul Teasdale:Yes.
Jim James:But by marketing through, if you like, value added resellers, they could leverage the technology that they've got in-house. So that's a really smart strategy. Paul Teasdale, you've left the hallowed halls and now you're an Entrepreneur, which is brilliant, and you're building up your own brand. Can you tell us what has not worked? It's always slightly edifiying and reassuring to hear that not everything's going a hundred percent for everybody all the time. It's useful to learn and share so other people don't make the same mistakes.
Paul Teasdale:Yeah. The thing that hasn't worked or hasn't worked as well as I would've hoped or I've taken the most lessons from might be, another way of saying it, is in the early stages of going independent and bringing all these thoughts as to what messages can I get out to the wider world. I've heard this mentioned by some of your other guests as well. I took the build it and they will come approach. So, I built an online course around the rapid performance, which is the sort of main framework that I use to help clients with their performance and put that into an online course. Spent the time developing the materials, recording it, putting it all together. And then said, "Right, let's put that onto LinkedIn and speak to some people and then everyone will want to buy it," right? Yeah, it's hasn't done too badly. But I haven't paid off the mortgage yet, put it that way. But it is one of those things of, I mean, and it's a great asset to have. And lots of learnings that went through it, both from a technology perspective, my early video recording, my speaking, everything that went along with it. There's always ways which you can improve, but I took that approach of, "If I build it, they will buy it and there are lessons to be taken from that."
Jim James:Yeah. Thanks for that, Paul. You're not alone. I also did the "Lockdown Course Building Exercise." But you still have it as an asset. That's the main thing. Paul, we talked earlier on about this term, "Infobesity."
Paul Teasdale:Yep.
Jim James:And how does that sort of impact a business? And especially when it comes to getting notice, which is this show's re-met. What do you think about that, 'infobesity'? What is that? And what does it mean?
Paul Teasdale:So it's a term I came across a while back, which relates to essentially people gorging on data and information in all of its different formats. So, it's the social medias, but it's also internally within organisations. It's the excess reports. It's the report that has 50 lines of data instead of the two or three that you actually need. It's all of these assumptions that if I provide people with more data, their decision will be better. Interestingly, whenever you're generating data, you tend to think that's gonna be the case. Whenever you're consuming data, it tends to be the opposites. And if you look at a report and go, "Why have I got all this? I only need that." But if you are creating a report, you tend to give them everything and give them more and more. And it's just about that lack of communication between the two channels as to what are you actually using this for? How are you using that data? And I love the term because you know, firstly it's intriguing and it brings people in. But it also speaks to a challenge and a problem that we all have individually and as organisations as well. And it relates to this rapid performance framework that I developed, which is all about putting data last on your list. So, just to get you a brief overview and this is what the online course is all about, by the way. So all the details in there. Brief overview, it's about putting results first. And the background to this is in a Formula One car. There's lots of data coming off the car, huge amounts of data coming off the car on a race weekend. But the more data you want to generate, comes at the cost of sensors and telemetry, which adds weight to the car, which has a negative impact. And so, I relate that to people's headspace. The more data you put in, actually, the negative impact on headspace has an impact on the performance that you're trying to drive, which is better decisions. So, I help people understand first and foremost results, then actions, people insights, and data. And that's the rapid framework and I love a good acronym. So how to do that. And it speaks to the Formula One space. Yeah.
Jim James:No, that's very nice, "Infobesity." So we must think about that as well when it comes to like production of social media content and so on. That actually volume as we are finding when I'm working with Simon Chappuzeau, the LinkedIn Safari. Volume is not key, it's the value and the engagement that are key. Paul Teasdale in Woken. If people want to find out more about you and how you help people perform better, how can they in touch with you?
Paul Teasdale:So the two main channels, one LinkedIn very active on LinkedIn, but probably the best one is to go to my website at 'paulteasdale.co.uk.' And one of the first things you'll see there is a button, there's a popup as well, to set up a free 30-minute chat with me. And that's you know, no obligation sales piece. It's not trying to sell you anything, it's just about understanding how I can help you add value to your situation. So get in touch, please do through there. And I'd love to hear people's challenges and how they can relate this world of high performance in F1 to their own organisation.
Jim James:Paul Teasdale, thank you so much for sharing. We've only had 20 minutes, so it's been a bit of a race to the finish. Thank you for joining me on the show.
Paul Teasdale:Thanks so much for having me, Jim.
Jim James:So you've been listen to Paul Teasdale. He's over there in Woking in the UK, not far away from me here in Hilperton, in Wiltshire. If you've enjoyed the show, do please share it with a fellow unnoticed Entrepreneur. And also review it on your player, all really helps. And remember that this conversation is one of a number that we convert into text and make them into articles, and then we put those into books. The first of which Volume One published by Wiley is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and also selected outlets, including Kinokunuya in Singapore. Thank you for listening to this episode of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur. Until we meet again, I just encourage you to keep on communicating.