Generations at Work: How to Build Stronger Teams in a Changing Business World with Lachie Smart

Full Transcript

Note: the following transcript was generated by AI and therefore may contain some errors and omissions.

If we apply what is the context of our experience versus someone else, we suddenly realise why we get so much of a clash, particularly between generations. That’s why I speak on the generational piece was because of that moment. And now I realise that the context of our experience shapes the way we view the world and that empathy is the tool we can use to try and understand the context of someone else’s experience. And hopefully we find a little bit of overlap in the middle and we build our relationship from that starting point.

But it’s when we’re starting from our points of difference, that’s when we’re never going to be able to see eye to eye on things. And I think empathy, great tool. Sometimes you don’t need to use it, but I think as a baseline, it’s a pretty good starting point for leaders.

Before we get started, the team here at the Coast and Commerce podcast want to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land where this podcast is created, Kabi Kabi and Jinibara people. We honor their rich culture of storytelling as we share the inspiring stories of business leaders across the Sunshine Coast. We pay our respects to their elders past, present and emerging. Let’s get on with the show.

Welcome back to the Coast and Commerce podcast. I’m Ben Amos from Innovate Media and this show is where we bring inspiring leaders from the Southern Coast business community to you to hopefully inspire you in whatever you do in business here on the coast. And let me tell you, this leader that we have here today is an inspiring guy. Lachie Smart is not only general manager at Smartline Medical here on the coast, but a number of years ago now, he actually became the youngest solo pilot

to fly solo around the world in a single engine aircraft, which is pretty crazy. I want to start there, Lachie, so welcome to the show. Can you tell us a little bit about that? What inspired you to get the Guinness World Record to fly around solo around the world in a small plane? That’s crazy.

Crazy is probably a good word for it. Thanks for having me. Good to be here, Ben. The inspiration behind the world flight was in 2013, you probably remember the media was going a bit berserk about this problem that the world was facing and that was going to collapse the housing economy. And it was just this big issue that was being made bit more of a fuss of than I think it needed to be. And that was millennials being entitled, lazy and buying so much avocado on toast that they’ll never own a home.

I know. But being in that cohort, the very tail end of the millennial generation, I was balancing this negative connotation of being a millennial in my head with what your parents and your teachers and your family and mentors, what they all say, know, dream big and aim for the stars and all those sorts of things. And those two ideas didn’t balance in my head. And so I wanted to do something to prove one side or the other right. And I loved flying. And so the idea of wings around the world was born.

So you were, I guess when you started this plan, it was before you were 18. So how young were you? About 15, 16?

Which I’d never flown an airplane solo before I’d actually been in a light aircraft once so it was a stupid idea

So you had the idea that you wanted to do this before you even knew how to fly. That’s right. Yeah, okay. Tell us more

Yeah, I mean, I aeroplanes. used to, when I was little past the time with my mum, we’d go to the Sunshine Coast Airport and we’d watch the planes take off and land with a bucket of hot chips. Just thought it was the coolest thing in the world, still do. But, you know, that developed into a passion that I couldn’t necessarily afford. My mum and dad split when I was young and I don’t complain about that. I had a brilliant upbringing and I had the luxury of being in an adult world from an early age. So getting to experience and learn how to communicate across generational boundaries pretty early. But

Unfortunately, split parents, Dad with his business, Mum running her house, that sort of thing. We didn’t have money to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for flying lessons. And so it was a passion, not necessarily something that I acted on. And so the idea of Wings Around the World was to take something that we didn’t have the ingredients for. We didn’t have the flying experience, didn’t have the money. I’d never done anything particularly big before alone either. And then turned that kid into this world record attempt.

And that was the reason I wanted to do that was to try and redefine that image of what it is to be a young person that you don’t have to fall into what the media is saying is a millennial eat lots of avocado on toast, be lazy and be entitled. So that’s what we wanted to do. We wanted to break that.

Amazing. So at the time you, I guess, took off from the Sunshine Coast in what year was that? 2016. 2016, right. So and then 54 days, I think is right. And you landed back on the Sunshine Coast. I remember that. Like, I remember being on the coast and big news at the time. you know, others listening who have been on the Sunshine Coast for a while, you know, probably remember that news as well. So, you know, I guess we could go through all the adventure stories of that flight.

for the actual flight.

Need a few hours for that one. Right. And I mean, maybe it’ll come up in the conversation here today, but you know, I definitely want to kind of explore some of that motivation a bit deeper as well. So, you know, let me just ask you, I guess, you talk about being motivated by wanting to change the perception of that millennial generation that you’re a part of. How much of the adventure, the flight itself was for you versus for the impact that you hoped that it would make?

Look, I mean, you can make an impact in a lot of ways. I definitely chose flying because that was the thing that was for me. I loved airplanes. But I think the you said before there are a lot of crazy stories. Definitely. There was a lot of discipline and motivation that was required. And I think having the value, the purpose behind what I was trying to do was what fed the motivation and the discipline to push through the very difficult times that were to ensue over those 54 days.

probably more impressively in my opinion was the two and a half years of preparation before then when you’ve got a 16 year old kid with zero credibility going to ask for half a million dollars from the world to do a basically a crazy dream. So yeah, I think the motivation, the purpose and the drive behind those things were definitely from elsewhere that the discipline to go and do the activity was for the generation. I was trying to do, rename what it is to be a millennial.

But then on the flip side, definitely the flying bit, that was what I enjoy doing, what I wanted to do. See, that was for me.

Yeah. How much of the personal growth and development for yourself personally was in the preparation in the two or so years prior versus the 54 days of undertaking the adventure itself?

Great question. I mean, the professional development for me with regards to my commercial experience, my communication, my value delivery, that two and a half years was a lifetime worth of learning shoved into a very, very short period of time. But I think as far as resilience, motivation and drive, the 54 days, there’s a before and after photo, I’ll find it for you after we finish recording. My grandma loves it. She always brings it up at all the family gatherings where

There’s a photo taken six months before I took off and then the day that I landed and I look probably seven or eight years older in the second photo, despite them being six months apart. And so she was like, look at this, look what the flight did to you. Like she brings up as this little trophy, but it did, it changed a lot for me. And I can communicate some of that, some of that you’ll never be able to communicate. It just, it happened. It is what it is. And I changed because of it.

Yeah. So for those watching this on YouTube, we’ll make sure that we’ve included the photo there at that point. But yeah, so you obviously would have learned a lot, like you said, a lot, maybe you didn’t even realize that you’d learned in that development, both professionally and personally. What would you say now that you’ve had years to reflect and you also speak professionally about some of those experiences as a motivational speaker, particularly to younger audiences, what would you say is the biggest unexpected or a surprising, I don’t know, change that you developed in yourself or a realization that you had through that process.

There’s a million things that you learn during something like this, but most unexpected one, especially considering it was a solo flight. wasn’t a, it was very much team effort for the two and a half years of planning and for the eight weeks or six weeks I was flying, whatever it was, that was a team of eight that were with us the entire time, virtually. But as far as in the airplane, that was just me. And so as much as it was a solo flight, the thing I learned most, I think, was about empathy and the not letting the context of our experiences

be the foundation for what we judge other people on, which I think is ironic given that I was solo for most of the trip. And I’ll share a story to give some context to that. one of the flights I was flying between Egypt and Oman, so predominantly the flight was over Saudi Arabia. And of course being the desert, it gets very hot. And this particular airplane, Cirrus, it doesn’t have an air conditioner in the airplane because typically it drops two degrees for every 1,000 feet you go up.

So when I’m at nine or 10,000 feet, it’s usually 20 degrees colder than on the ground. You don’t really need an air con. This particular day, I wasn’t flying tremendously high above the ground, because it was mountains and it was very hot. And so in the cockpit was still 38 degrees plus. The engine’s overheating and I was just getting hit with this turbulence, just clear air, bang, bang, bang for hours. And after I’d crossed the Red Sea and got into the main bit of Saudi Arabia,

Every 20 minutes I justify it going, this is going to end soon. It’ll be better when I get out of this mountain range or it’ll be better when the wind drops down or it’ll be better for whatever reason. And it never got better for hours. And this was an 11 hour flight. And after six or seven hours, it just was horrendous. My back was in immense pain because of all the jarring nonstop. It’s very small seat you sit in. And I was feeling sick and uncomfortable and we fought through it, landed and I got out of the airplane. was just.

It was one of those days that you just promise yourself, I can never forget this feeling. And then fast forward to when I got back from the flight, the day I landed was crazy. had today’s show filming it live and you saw on the news, there’s hundreds of people on the runway. It was just cool. I felt very honored to have had that reception coming home. And I was living this D-grade celebrity life. Like it was wild. I was just a kid from Nambour on the Sunny Coast. And all of a sudden I come back and I’m…

being flown down to Sydney to be on Today Show and I’m being taken out to air shows to go and speak and life just went crazy for a while. And my Mum, bless her, she’s one of the most special human beings on the planet. She said to me, hey, Lachie, you know, the aircon in my car’s broken. Would you mind having a look when you’ve got a second? I said, sure, mum, no worries, that’s fine. And then I’d go back to my D-grade celebrity life and speeches and all that sort of stuff. And the next day she’d go, hey, Lachie, I know you’re busy, I don’t mean to interrupt, but I’ve got to drive to work.

really be nice if I could have the aircon. So I’m I’ll get to it. A couple of days had passed do more few more things come back. Lucky I know I know you’re busy. I eventually I snap said mom, I get it. It’s hot. But you can drive for 15 minutes to work if I can fly for almost 15 hours at once in a aircraft with a failing engine over the desert while it’s hot and sweating in a fully fireproof flight suit. You can handle 15 minute drive to work. It’s a stupid thing to say but I snapped.

And I stormed off and I called my mentor and I was chatting about something else and he said, you’re upset what you’re upset about. And I was venting. I said, my Mum just hounding me. Doesn’t she realise I’m busy? I’m speaking, I’m on TV and she wants this aircon fixed and she can drive 15 minutes with the window down. I had to do this flight through Saudi Arabia and he goes, whoa, you flew through Saudi Arabia. She didn’t fly through Saudi Arabia. Why is it fair for you to have the same expectation on her of what resilience is? She didn’t do that. And it’s clicked him.

brain is like, what an idiot. Like this woman who’s given everything for me throughout my whole life, always made sure I had food on the table and a roof over my head, even when times were tough. I just treated her like that. And it’s true because I was trying to use the context of my experiences to determine what’s right and what’s wrong and what’s resilient and what’s not. That’s not fair for me to apply to her or to anyone else because they haven’t been through the same set of experiences. And intellectually, you and I can sit here and I can tell this story and you’ll understand going, yeah, obviously you’re not going to expect her to have the same level of resilience as you in that.

particular scenario about being in a hot vehicle. But if we zoom out a little bit and we apply that overall to our life a little bit more, and it be about work ethic or entitlement. If we apply what is the context of our experience versus someone else, we suddenly realize why we get so much of a clash, particularly between generations. That’s why I speak on the generational piece was because of that moment. And now I realise that the context of our experiences shapes the way we view the world.

and that empathy is the tool we can use to try and understand the context of someone else’s experience. And hopefully we find a little bit of overlap in the middle and we build our relationship from that starting point. But it’s when we’re starting from our points of difference, that’s when we’re never going to be able to see eye eye on things. And I think empathy, great tool. Sometimes you don’t need to use it, but I think as a baseline, it’s a pretty good starting point for leaders.

Yeah, that’s so good. And such a good, you know, practical and real example of that, that importance of empathy, but also that importance of recognizing the differences in where people are coming from. Right. And I think that can apply in a lot of, a lot of cases, not only in generational differences, but also in cultural and, you know, all of that. Right. But, but I want to focus in on that generational thing because you mentioned one of your motivations to undertake that journey in the first place was to kind of

break that misconception of the entitlement of the millennial generation. Now the millennial generation probably, you know, can barely call themselves youth anymore, right? So I think the youngest of the millennials are like 29 or turning 30, right? So, but now we’re talking, when we’re talking about kind of the youth of today, right? There’s still sometimes that idea of that entitlement or that, misconceptions of generation Z, right? And generation alpha as well.

So I know you speak in front of these audiences and you still have a lot to do with the youth of today. What do you see as the biggest differences between say, millennials, Gen Z, Gen Alpha? Like what’s the differences that you see? So interesting point because yes, definitely Jan Z Jan Al for now the millennials of today from when I was telling that story. You’re like the Gen Xer of, you know, who’s saying you guys are entitled or the boomer.

Yeah, pretty much. No, well, I was watching a TV show the other day, Below Deck, and one of the staff on there is a millennial going and complaining about one of their youngest staff members going, you know, Gen Z poster child. And I just thought, well, hang on, flashback. I saw that 10, 15 years ago. That’s what we were going through. And so I think it’s actually going to happen generation by generation. There’s a really interesting quote by Socrates that says, and this was like 400 BC. So there’s nearly two and a half thousand years ago.

Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority. They show disrespect for elders and they love to chatter instead of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not servants of their household. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. goes on. Sound familiar? Yeah, hashtag Socrates speaks.

The thing is, you know, when we’re young, we’ve got an aversion to authority. I think that’s pretty natural for most people. Even if it’s not overt, you’re not trying to break rules, but we still think there’s something wrong with the world. And so we, we struggle and we try to shift and work and bend the world over many, many years until eventually we think we finally got it and now it’s right. And then the next generation come along and they start their struggle. So no matter what, I think we’re always going to look

at the next generation go, wow, this young generation, they’re lazy and entitled because they’re not doing things the way that we did. And again, it comes down to the context of our experience because what shaped us to be the way we are with the struggles that we had, the fights that we fought, and the things that we thought important may be dictated by society and technology and what was happening at the time, those things have changed. The world’s different now. And so there’s a new set of circumstances that are shaping our young people today. And so they are going to be different.

And that’s okay. Again, it’s about finding that point of middle ground or more importantly, using a little bit of empathy to try and understand what shapes their motivations, values and beliefs. And then being able to work within that, even if we think it’s wrong, because who’s to say that we’re right just because we’re older. We’re just being shaped by the circumstances that were around when we were their age. And that’s the thing, as long as we can break out of that mentality to go, they’re not right, but I’m also not right because there is no right. There just is. We just find that overlap in the Venn diagram of their experience and ours, and we work from there.

Yeah, yeah, couldn’t agree more. I think a couple of episodes back in season four of the Coast and Commerce podcast, we spoke with Tara Jacobson from Groei Education and we spoke specifically about, I guess, Generation Z in the workforce and how Sunshine Coast businesses can adapt their approach to, you know, working with and employing and retaining that generation, the youth, I guess, of our workforce here on the Sunny Coast today. Now, I know that, you know, as you talk about these generational differences.

You also talk about not only the benefits, I guess, for businesses to embrace a younger generation in their workforce, but you also talk about the benefits of multi-generations all kind of overlapping and working together. And I think that’s exemplified by your company, Smartline Medical, where you’ve got, I think it says five generations pretty close to your company.

So tell me about like, what are the benefits for a company, for a business here on the Sunshine Coast to not only embracing the younger generation, but considering how all of the generational differences can work within their organisation.

Good question. Let’s focus on entitlement, right? That’s the one we’ve brought up a couple of times. It’s a good one because I love watching people’s reactions. Half the room lean back and go, this is uncomfortable. I don’t want to talk about it. And the other half lean forward and go, yeah, let’s talk about this because they’re upset by it. But entitlement, if you have a look at the data, a lot of the studies, you’ll see that on the flip side, so we always talk about the bad side of entitlement being that, you know, people are hard to work with, they expect to be given more than they give.

But on the flip side of those displaying entitlement-like behaviors, you also see much higher levels of creativity and problem solving. And whether the root of that might be that they’re not used to seeing failure because they’ve been given the win, the success, even if it’s not necessarily earned in the past, we can go into the things like participation awards later. But if we want to limit the downside of entitlement, we should also be careful not to limit the upside, which is that creative and problem solving.

So if we look at entitlement with relation to having generations in the workplace, if there are young people and they are displaying high levels of entitlement, which is also arguable, that that applies as a whole in a generalisation. But if they are, we can pair them with another generation that’s in the workforce, potentially one that has more experience and displays less of the entitlement-like behaviors. And that person could sit there, not as a disciplinarian, but just as a mentor for when that young person then is using their creative problem-solving skills and they might fail.

You know, inevitably we’re all going to hit rock bottom and we’re going to make a mistake at some stage. But the role of the mentor shouldn’t be then to solve the problem for them. It should be to give them the knowledge, the experience and the motivation to go, what can we learn from this failure? What did you pick up that you wouldn’t do the next time? Maybe in defence, they’d call it the after action review, which would be what did we do well? What did we do poorly? And what would we change for the next time we do this mission? And I think having the experience of a mentor there who has no authority to discipline them.

Paired with a younger person who’s then not losing the will to be creative because they’re not being smacked down. Instead, they’re having the failure, they’re applying the learning and they’re having their resilience built because of the mentor with them there. That’s when you start to see the power of having multiple generations in the workforce. And it can be as simple as a mentoring program. It’s a great one. It’s just have to be very careful that it doesn’t become a…

a teacher and a student role as far as the discipline goes and as far as the instruction goes. It should be allowing that creative freedom to be maintained, but to be there to help pick up the pieces when necessary. And that’s hard for a leader to do, for a manager particularly, you know, don’t want to necessarily give your staff the scope to go and make mistakes because that costs resources. But those resources, I think are a very good investment in that young people to allow them to fail and pick themselves back up rather than be too scared to fail in the first place or to fail and then be punished for it.

because that’s a great way to just bash out any form of risk taking and creativity from them and instead replace it with blinders, closed box thinking. So I think that’s a great example of how mixing generations in the workplace can be a really good tool. Aside from that, then you’ve also got, you’ve got native capability and interests in a digital side as well. Tara, no doubt, will have spoken about that, but the brain’s ability to learn decreases a little over time.

Young people are much faster at taking in new information and what I’m saying by that is when they’re young in this age, they’ve grown up with digital technology. Things like social media, traditional media, consumption has decreased but social media has increased and the use of digital technologies is now commonplace in school. When I was in school, it was all pen and paper up until grade 11, grade 12 and I think they started handing out iPads but there was no securities around them so we barely used them. They were just for games but all the assessments still got done pen and paper, but now everything’s done digitally. 

And so I think you’ve got that skillset that’s inbuilt. You would have had to train in other generations. This generation’s coming with that skillset for free. Great. Utilize that. Pair that with other generations so that learnings can go both ways. It’s about utilizing the best of each generation as opposed to writing off an entire generation just because they’ve got one downside. Every generation is going to have them. It just happens. As I said before, there’s no right or wrong. just is.

When you talk about kind of those frictions between generations in the workforce, when you’re about entitlement there, and we kind of default to talking about the entitlement of the younger generations, right, that the older generations feel that they’re entitled. you know, I’d probably dare say that that sometimes can be flipped in that the younger generation feels that the older generation feels they’re entitled to something, they’re entitled to respect because they’re older, or they’ve been there longer, or, you know, they maybe, you know, have a bit more life experience, but…

That doesn’t necessarily, particularly in a workforce and in a career, that doesn’t necessarily mean that being older or having been there longer means that you’re in a better position to achieve results. So how do you think in business that we can deal with that potential friction with the older generations in our workforce, whether it be the boomers or the Xs in our workforce as well?

Good question. again, it comes down to when I speak about this, I’m never going in saying, we have to change our way to suit for young people to come in. Right. I don’t think that necessarily we do need to change the way business happens. I think the movement has to happen on both sides to meet somewhere in the middle. So I’m not saying, you know, I always kick off the presentations with don’t worry, this is not a give them free dress and bean bags, and free dress Fridays and bean bags, because that’s not this kind of presentation. 

We talk about people and we talk about what makes people tick. What we talk about is actually general leadership principles. I just happen to put the lens of generations over the top because it’s a problem that people face and they struggle with. And it’s also a vitamin, not just a painkiller, it’s also, we can have benefit for it. But I do think that movement needs to happen on both sides. And I think, I do hear that a lot, particularly talking about Generation X, the boomers.

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you know, they think because they’ve had a higher length of service that they are more valuable to the company. Well, maybe they are. It could be that that experience is actually worth more to the company because they’re less likely to make mistakes. Also might be wrong. I don’t go in saying any particular side is right. It comes down to both sides being able to make it work. And again, that comes down to leadership principles, not down to necessarily having the answer for that question. If that makes sense.

Yeah, 100%. So you’re in your company, Smartline Medical, and it’s not your company, you didn’t start it, you didn’t found it. So tell us a little bit about that because you’ve moved into a leadership role in Smartline Medical. But tell us the journey about, you know, how you got into that company.

Yeah, I started there in, I moved back from the United States at the end of 2018 and joined the team there. It’s a family business. My Dad founded the company, but I just started as a sales rep. So was nothing special. I was at the bottom of the sales pecking order and I was looking after Queensland and a little bit of New South Wales, selling equipment into hospitals. And so you’d go in and the thing with medical equipment sales is it kind of high dollar ish.

but it’s very low volume and very long sales cycles. So it’s something you gotta learn a lot of patients with. And I went in and at first, know, it was tough learning all the acronyms and learning about how the health system works. We sell into the sterilization and endoscopy departments. So learning how those departments ran. Over time I started to get it though, because as I said from the beginning, I like working with people. I like understanding what makes them tick. And so when you apply that to sales, you know, I turned out to be quite an effective salesperson.

within a year or starting to top our sales performance charts across all of the salespeople in the company. And then after a couple of years, I said to my old man, said, I’d like to have a crack at running the sales team. And he said, no chance, you’re way too young and you don’t have enough experience. I said, okay. And I left it pretty much where it went. And I’m not, don’t think he was wrong for that either. know, I was very fresh into this. There people with a lot more tenure than I had, but I was outperforming them be so entitled.

And so I thought that counted for something. So I left it for a little while longer and instead I went and spoke to all the other people with influence in the company. Not necessarily ones with authority, but ones with influence, particularly over him, my dad. And I worked with him to say, is the strategy I would roll out if I was running a sales team. I think we can do better here, here and here, particularly around managing our big key clients, trying to sell in bundles rather than to individual hospitals.

And eventually I went back to him six months later and I said, I’d to talk about this again. He said, no, I’m too young. And then all of the managers and other people with influence in the company just dove on him and said, no, give him a crack. And so because they had been able to fight for me in that scenario, I was given an opportunity to try it. And from there, you know, we did pretty well with our national sales management and we moved up. I moved up into different roles through into international sales with export management and now into this role for the last three years being general manager of the company.

There you go. So you set your, you set your sight on a goal and you figured out how to do it. Sounds like very similar to how you approach the flight around the world as well.

Yeah, I think there’s not a lot of new things in this world. mean, we just put new flavors on them, but you find things that work and they can work in a lot of circumstances.

Yeah. So in your role as general manager now at Smartline Medical over the last couple of years, what sort of challenges has come up for you now in that more direct leadership role, particularly with managing generational differences within your company?

I think COVID threw a spanner in the works because we had to work from home for a period of time. We had to shut down for a period of time. And then for us, most of our work is as a result of elective surgeries. A big part of our income is through the endoscopy side of health. And a large part of endoscopies is you can choose to do it. It’s not a forced thing by the government or you don’t have a sickness that would force you to have an endoscopy. A lot of it’s diagnostic preemptive. 

And so when they closed that down during COVID we had a huge drop in revenue. Almost all of our business dried up overnight. And then we started trying to figure out how to send people home, work from home. And then the gap in technological skill sets really played a huge part there because some people were very adept at working from home and they had no problem doing it. But then you had some who just wanted to come back to the office. They hated being at home. They could never get the technology to work. And we did see that along generational lines quite a bit.

And then that started to cause some friction. The other half for us was we also had a big part of the team was production based, meaning that they are in the workshop, physically making things. We’re a manufacturer. That’s our core part of our business is making things. And obviously you can’t work from home when you’re manufacturing. And so we had to be very careful not to end up with an us and them situation within the company. And that can happen more often than not as a result of the generation piece where the person becomes the problem.

rather than the problem being the problem. And it happens lot in middle management. We were quite lucky to avoid that for the most part. We had one instance that we had to work on a solution, but in that instance, we had someone creating an us and them mentality because it’s an easy trap to fall into as a leader. It’s very easy to create a person as the problem because they’re an easy target. And people like having an enemy sometimes. Good to be able to blame someone else for things going wrong, right?

But in that scenario, it’s not good and it’s a poor reflection of them as a leader. That person ended up leaving the company and we had someone else come in to fix that and we worked very hard not to create that us and them and bringing it back to our focus is the problem whether in this case for us was a product mix that didn’t sell well in times where we don’t have elective surgeries and so we started pivoting into other areas.

We were the first company in Australia to start offering those sneeze screens, for example, you know, the plastic perspex guards, see, yeah. Yeah. And one of our other manufacturing partners airplane going overhead. One of our manufacturing partners helped us with the manufacturing of that. And we did the sales and distribution and, know, within a month we’d started to bring $40,000 of those in and wasn’t much, but it was enough. started bringing importing masks and selling masks to hospitals through our networks and distribution pipelines.

It’s one of your friends taking off.

Bit by bit, we just found other product lines that would help us get through that period where the health system had shut down and through to the other side where we could start resuming sales of our core product lines. But yeah, definitely during that time, the us and them mentality was very hard to keep out because it’s easy to sneak in. It’s also easy for people to blame people rather than problems. And so really important for us to reframe that, go and keep our eyes on the prize, but not on our fellow workers.

Yeah, such an important takeaway for those listening and watching that us versus their mentality and watching out for that.

And we did some work with another client recently, I won’t name names, during a workshop, one of the, again, middle level managers, and I’m not saying there’s a problem with middle level management, I think it’s one of the toughest gigs in business. Because you’ve got to be able to speak two languages, you’ve got to be able to speak executive and corporate to those above you, and you’ve got to be able to speak frontline worker to those who are on the frontline working. I think it’s a very tough position, but they came to us and they said, I’m really struggling here because the younger generation, they just…

always late for work, they don’t have any work ethic. And it was always the problem was the younger generation, the younger generation, there was no desire to examine the underlying factors that might be at play. And they might have been right, know, could have just been a batch of people who were entitled or didn’t want to work hard and didn’t like the job. But I think there were other factors at play. And so when we’re able to dig further into that,

You actually did an episode with Dave Neal recently. He speaks about it as well. You don’t want to overtly tell the person that they might be the problem. He does this brilliantly. The whole EigthMile team do. But rather you highlight some of the issues that could be at play and some of the theories that they might want to consider it eventually they came to the realization that actually hang on, I might be part of the problem. And then you go, oh yeah, maybe. And once they’ve had that high moment, we can start to work through what the solutions could be as well.

Because as I said, there’s nothing new in the world. They probably were having the same thing said about them 20, 30 years ago when they were in those positions. It’s just about reframing for them to go and help understand their younger team, what the drivers and motivators and surrounding factors were, and then where they sit in that spectrum. And they were able to come up some pretty cool solutions. You’ll never get it 100 % right, but that team is now much higher performing.

And more importantly, they feel a lot better understood, which I think is a core human need is to feel understood by the person you’re talking to. That’s why serial killers make documentaries. They’re not gonna get let out any earlier, but they still wanna tell their story. I think for that reason, the empathy piece is very important.

Yeah, that’s so good. And shouting back to Dave Neal’s episode from season three of the Coast and Commerce podcast for those didn’t catch that episode. There’s actually a lot of crossover in some of the stuff we’re talking about here today as well. So I recommend that people go and have a listen to that episode. just as we wrap up here, Lachie, I want to just talk a little bit about like you’re in a relatively niche kind of area of industry on the coast here in that med tech space and manufacturing. and I believe the company Smartline Medical has been based here on the coast the whole time, right? So tell me about some of the, for you guys, some of the challenges or maybe the benefits of running and growing and scaling a med tech style manufacturing business. And you’re also exporting as well, right? Here on the coast from Yandina, right?

Yeah, exporting in manufacturing, sorry, in Australia is a tough gig, especially on the export front for a lot of reasons. One, know, our costs are higher everywhere, materials, labor, freight. And then most importantly, speaking of freight, know, we’re sort of at the back end of the world. If you want to sell to any other territory, there’s always manufacturers that are closer to that territory than Australia is. And so it’s always been an uphill battle.

The benefit lies in the fact that we’re not just a manufacturer, we’re also an R&D house. So we’ve got a big research and development capability internally. And that’s how we’re able to distribute and compete with, but also distribute through some of the biggest organizations in health globally, who their marketing budgets are hundreds, if not thousands of times multipliers of our entire revenue annually. We’re able to work with them because we’re always bringing the best.

the newest technology, the best innovations, where I was able to stay at the forefront. And I think Australia’s got a really big leg up compared to lot of countries in that space. And we’ve got a lot of highly intelligent, highly capable people here. And somehow we’ve got a pretty naturally creative skillset that seemed to happen within Australians. And so, you we leverage that to stay at the forefront of the technology, but manufacturing on the coast has just become a lot, a lot more fun over the last few years.

organisations like the Manufacturers Excellence Forum. Not sure if you’ve spoken to Tim Kelly.

Yeah, we had Tim on in season two of the podcast.

That’s a guy. But having the ecosystem around manufacturing now, we’ve been able to bring a lot of our supply chain, which used to be, we used to get a lot of stuff from Sydney and from Melbourne and Brisbane and import a bunch from overseas. Now on the sunny coast, we’ve got a lot of these capabilities here. lot of our machining happens here, our plastics, even some of the electronics components we’re getting made right here on the sunny coast. We’ve brought something like 75, 80 % of our whole supply chain to now.

within 20, 30 kilometres of the business, which is great for us as a manufacturer because our lead times come down, less time shipping. We’ve got much better ability to do things like rapid prototyping because we can drive down the road and go, hey, actually we need to change this part or what do you think about doing this? And we’ve got experts in lots of different fields right here. So Sunny Coast is becoming a really brilliant spot to make things and it’s overcoming a lot of the hurdles that we used to face of manufacturing in Australia in general.

A lot of that’s being overcome because now we’ve got a really great ecosystem very close to us. And so it’s a good thing, a good time to be a manufacturer on the coast.

Yeah, well, it’s very cool to hear and that’s definitely supported by the other conversations we’ve had here on the Coast and Commerce podcast. You know, also shout back to last week’s episode, which was with Dave Biggar from Zone Manufacturing as well. talked all about the manufacturing of composites and plastics here on the coast as well. So great to hear that that story is coming from multiple places and that aligns with you as well.

It’s cool as well because we’re exporting 25 countries around the world now and seeing the money flow into Australia but then be kept here on the region, within the region. It’s very cool as opposed to before we used to come in and then we’d split it out along long way. So it’s nice from a personal perspective to be able to see that happen throughout business.

Excellent. So what’s the goal for SmartLine Medical over the next, say five years here? Is it just continuing growth as normal or taking over the world?

No, we’re always upwards. One of my personal values is growth. So that always plays into our strategic direction. But we’ve just launched into China. I was over there in November and be heading back over again in the next couple of months. That’s looking for us to be really big territory. And we’re also heading over to the United States in April this year. We’ve intermittently had a few attempts at the US market, but we haven’t had the right product. So we’ve gone from the ground up, had a look at what’s unique to the US market.

regulatory and sales wise, and then built a product that is just for that market. And so we’re launching that in April, which is very cool. So yeah, with those two big territories plus India potentially and continuing our growth through Europe and South Africa and Asia and the Middle East, it’ll be big growth for us. We’ve just improved our facilities over the last 18 months. So we’ve got a lot of manufacturing capacity now to grow. So we’re ready to do bigger and better things. Nice.

Another Sunshine Coast business success story that’s probably flying under the radar for a lot of people listening and watching this show. So just to include in conclusion here, Lachie, I wanna talk about you personally, obviously right from a very young age, from 15, 16 years old, you had a mission to make a difference, you know, through the inspiration that you can provide to others, right? And now you do that through your speaking and through running workshops and all sorts of stuff, both in a corporate environment, down to schools and things like that. 

Can you tell me like, what’s some personally, what’s your kind of next goal, your next big mission that you’ve got in that space? That’s a question. I’ve just released a new bit of content called Vinyl to Virtual. And that’s our flagship keynote. It’s where we talk about the concept of having generations in the workplace and what makes it great, what makes it terrible. And then we smash them together and go, how can we make it work? It’s a lot of fun, but off the back of that, we do another one day workshop. It can be shorter form as well called the Future Leaders Workshop. And we’ve built that just for new and emerging leaders or people who have capability to be a leader. So that would be…

Generally, we have a high school version, which is for 15 to 18 year olds, 14, 18 year olds. That’s brilliant fun. We host that through universities. We’ve got a bunch of those coming up this year in Sunshine Coast, Brisbane, Gold Coast, Lismore, Coffs Harbour. We’re in discussions for Toowoomba and other areas as well. So that’s super exciting because it is building these foundational skills to go, you’ve got the ability to make a difference, but now we’re going to give you the framework to follow to do that. So you feel like you’ve got a set of steps.

But then on the flip side, we do it for corporate. And I think that’s where some of the most fun sessions are. We did it for a short form one for Colgate a year ago. And being able to watch young people start to look at the world a little bit differently and still fall within the values of their organization, but watch them start to utilize a new skill set and go, hang on, maybe I can take a couple of risks here and I’ll know I have a safety net because I’ve got the right relationships in place.

That is really, really, for me, it’s very fulfilling to watch that happen. And so I think that’s where we’re going to be spending a lot of our time this year is in the Future Leaders Workshop space, developing those new emerging leaders in partnership with their executives who hopefully we’ve also done some work with on the flip side to build that bridge.

Excellent, very cool. Exciting stuff and congratulations on everything that you’ve done, know, since the world record achievement through to what you’ve been doing in Smartline Medical and what you continue to do in schools and for organisations around the country as well. It’s awesome. So best place to go is lachiesmart.com. L-A-C-H-I-E smart.com. That’s where to, and you also, is there other places you want to send people to maybe connect with you or if they want to connect further?

if they’d like to connect, of course, on LinkedIn as well, just on there as Lachie Smart. So I’d love to connect on there and through the web if I can ever be of help, would love to as well. It is a challenge to do it, but it is worthwhile when we do work together. Thanks so much for having me.

Awesome. I know we’re gonna get a lot of great feedback on this episode. So if you’ve enjoyed today’s episode, make sure to hit like and also subscribe if you’re watching on YouTube. And why not share this episode with someone in business on the Sunshine Coast that you think would be inspired by hearing Lachie’s story and understanding bit more about the differences between generations in our workforce. Thanks for watching. I’ll see you in the next episode.