The Company Road Podcast
In this podcast we’ll be exploring what it takes to change a company. Taking the big steps, or the smaller steps in between.
This one’s for the intrapreneurs. You’ll be getting to know some big, brave and darn right outrageous personalities, luminaries, pioneers of business and hearing what they’ve done to fix the thorniest of problems within organisations.
The Company Road Podcast
E87 Con Frantzeskos: The Unashamed Capitalist: Building AI Ventures and Billions in Revenue
In this episode of The Company Road Podcast, Chris Hudson speaks with Con Frantzeskos, a visionary marketing and technology leader who has generated billions in revenue for giants like Emirates, Coca-Cola, and ANZ. Con is the former founder of digital strategy consultancy Penso and is currently building AI-native ventures like SalesChef.ai and Ansett.Travel.
Buckle up friends, this is a hard-hitting conversation that contrasts the short-termism often seen in Australia with the ambitious, long-term vision of the Middle East and the US.
Con shares why 70% of ASX 200 companies fail to outperform a lump of gold, and what leaders must do to stop managing decline and start designing the future.
In this episode, you’ll hear about:
- "Strategy Karaoke": Why most companies are just reading lyrics off a screen rather than building genuine strategy.
- The Gold Standard Test: Con’s analysis revealing that 70% of ASX 200 companies have underperformed against gold over the last 20 years.
- Legacy vs. Blank Canvas: A fascinating comparison between Delta Airlines (incumbent) and Riyadh Air (startup) on what they envy about each other.
- Ruthless Prioritisation: How Matt Comyn at CBA destroyed physical touchpoints during COVID to lead the mortgage market.
- The "Rattle" Test: A brilliant story from Emirates about service design—"If you shake an A380, anything that rattles is service."
- Why "The Lucky Country" is not a compliment, and how it breeds complacency in Australian business.
- The five determinants of companies that actually grow: R&D, long-term strategy, export bias, and governance.
Key Links
SalesChef.ai: www.saleschef.ai
Ansett.Travel: www.ansett.travel
Con Frantzeskos LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/confrantzeskos/
About our guest
Constantine (Con) Frantzeskos is one of the world’s most visionary marketing and technology leaders. He is currently building AI-native ventures such as SalesChef.ai and Ansett.Travel, while providing AI and digital strategy consulting to enterprises across Australia, Asia, and the Middle East. Previously, Con founded and exited the international digital strategy consultancy PENSO.
He has held leadership positions at Edelman, DDB, and Ogilvy, designing campaigns and products that delivered billions in new revenue for brands like Emirates, Coca-Cola, ANZ, and Total Tools. Con is a regular columnist in the Australian Financial Review and a former Director of Victoria’s startup agency, LaunchVic.
About our host
Our host, Chris Hudson, is an Intrapreneurship Coach, Teacher, Experience Designer and Founder of business transformation coaching and consultancy Company Road.
Company Road was founded by Chris Hudson, who saw over-niching and specialisation within corporates as a significant barrier to change.
Chris considers himself incredibly fortunate to have worked with some of the world’s most ambitious and successful companies, including Google, Mercedes-Benz, Accenture (Fjord) and Dulux, to name a small few. He continues to teach with University of Melbourne in Innovation, and Academy Xi in CX, Product Management, Design Thinking and Service Design and mentors many business leaders internationally.
For weekly updates and to hear about the latest episodes, please subscribe to The Company Road Podcast at https://companyroad.co/podcast/
Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Company Road Podcast which is dedicated to exploring how internal innovators or innovators and intrapreneurs can drive fundamental change and create value within their organizations. And today we're speaking with a true visionary. He sits at the heart of cutting edge digital strategy, marketing, artificial intelligence, and yeah, someone I've had the pleasure of knowing and working with since 2017. And yeah he's not just advised on major transformations, but he is really designed and executed digital businesses, campaigns, experiences, lots of different things that have generated billions in revenue for some of the world's biggest brands. So Con really happy to have you on the show. Thanks so much for coming on.
Con Frantzeskos:Thanks for having me on. Chris, it's really lovely to chat to you as we have for many years together.
Chris Hudson:That's it. That's it. Yeah. It'd be good to share some of the types of conversations that we usually have when we meet somewhere in Melbourne. But yeah, I just wanna introduce you a little bit more. So you are, you're a recognized global leader. You've successfully built and exited the International digital strategy consultancy, Penso. And before that you had senior leadership roles across Asia, Australia are major global firms like Ogilvy, DDB Edelman, and you've worked with huge giants like Emirates, Coca-Cola, ANZ and many more, I'm sure. And yeah, you're not resting on your laurels at the minute. It seems like you are. You are currently deeply involved in building the future and launching AI native ventures such as Saleschef.ai and Ansett.travel and advising major enterprises in their AI and digital strategies at the moment as well. So yeah, a lot's going on for you. And you're a columnist in the Australian Financial Review. You previously served as director for Launch Vic. So yeah you always have an interesting story to tell. I can't wait to get into the conversation
Con Frantzeskos:yeah, likewise, Chris.
Chris Hudson:Yeah AI might be a starting point. You've obviously you're deep in it at the minute, having worked in it very closely for years now, but it just feels you've done so much in your career it's hard to know where to start, but why don't we, maybe we just start, before we go into ai, maybe we just start with a bit about you and, the younger Con, if we can imagine that. What were the early signs of an acutely applied curiosity and creativity and where did that all come from, do you think?
Con Frantzeskos:Yeah I was very fortunate growing up. My parents were in, my whole family was in the hospitality business. So very. Well-known, very famous venues such as the Melbourne Metro Nightclub, inflation, Grain Store, a whole range of venues. And they were playgrounds to a certain degree for adults, but also for me as a kid. I remember I was about 13 and my dad said, Hey, I wanna do an underage nightclub on a Saturday during the day, or a tea party as they're known in many parts of the world. How might we go around building it? And that was my first kind of experience in, in marketing, so to speak. And then doing that day in, day out and getting a sense as a teenager and then into a young adult as to, what were the numbers, how are we doing it? Filling a, an empty box four nights a week, working with some really. Entrepreneurial kids and smart adult minds as well. And also the, I'll call it the experimentation, but also the ability to say, Hey, by the way, we've got 30 or 40 kids there that we are paying money to lick stamps and send out envelopes. There's this thing called email. Why don't we, why don't we try using that? And by the time I was 18, I had an email database of about 38,000 kids on FileMaker Pro. And then the web was invented, this was all pre-web. This is in the, late eighties, early nineties. And then, so it was that sort of experimentation and creative environment that really helped. And what was really interesting out of that environment, there were a lot of really. Really brilliant marketers were built a lot of people that have gone on to run their own agencies. A lot of people that are actually working in marketing in senior enterprise roles globally. It was a real factory for kind of creative, innovative and forward thinking, but also very commercially driven, extremely commercially driven. You live or die by the amount of people that walk in the door. And so that's, that was really a wonderful foundation for me. And then went and studied economics, went and studied grad dip and applied finance.'cause I always felt that, the business of the business is the most important part of it. How does it drive revenue? How does it drive margin? How does it drive unit economics? And then worked in. I guess from entertainment and music that was an easy kind of career move. So the first probably eight to 10 years of my career were in music and entertainment, which was wonderful. And that very acutely helped me understand when running music business understand the role of content and distribution and really distribution, especially considering the tremendous, revolution, you might say, in the way in which we went from, vinyl and CDs to MP3s, streaming, et cetera. That whole business model has completely changed. So I was there for the early part of that and then thought the lessons that I've learned in the music business around distribution, around go to market will I think be relevant to every other company in the world given the changes that are happening with the internet. And again, this is all in the kind of. 20 odd years ago early, early two thousands. So then I moved over into consultancy, and I've been in consultancy pretty much ever since.
Chris Hudson:Yeah. Yeah. No, wow. What a journey. And yeah, I could see where some of the influences would've followed you through some of those times and into the present as well. And, some of the ventures that you're looking at the moment. But before we get into that, I just think that it feels like at the heart from what I'm hearing, you are able to creatively, think about what's in front of you, from a business landscape point of view, but you're also applying commercial acumen to really drive that through and focus on the things that really matter. That, does that feel like at the heartland of how you approach your consultancy and what you do,
Con Frantzeskos:It's all about, as I say, I'm an unashamed arch capitalist. The core values are that, we are here to drive business success and growth. And when I say we, we in business are here to drive business success and growth, because it's almost a truism or a tautology, if you can't drive greater margin and greater revenues and drive future demand and ensure that your unit economics are healthier. That's the only reason why we're here. How we manifest that and how we deliver that. Some people do it at a cost cutting perspective, and that's the vast majority of people. It's very easy to find places to cut costs. I prefer the other way. I prefer to say, Hey, how do we build the top line? How do we increase revenues? How do we actually build some sort of robust elasticity demand so that we can actually demand more money on a per unit basis and have that go to the bottom line. And the way in which I've specifically brought that to life is through a combination of, as you said, marketing and technology. The marketing is how do we make humans interested in doing it? And then the technology is how do we do it at some sort of scale? How do we do it at some sort of level of efficiency and effectiveness?
Chris Hudson:Yeah, I really like that. And it's yeah, it brings a lot of focus to what otherwise feels like a very, a very kind of overwhelmed, saturated landscape that we all work in and we all hear about. What are some of the major distractions that you're seeing business leaders or businesses maybe as a whole, just focusing on at the minute to get in the way of that, would you say?
Con Frantzeskos:I think it depends on where you are in the world. Because I do a lot of work in the Middle East and and the US and I tend to find in the Middle East and the US right now, in particular, in the Middle East, there is a relentless focus on growth. And long-term growth, how do we build the businesses of the future? How do we build, world beating businesses of the future? And I'm finding that really inspiring and really interesting. What is it that we need to do to set up a business, not just to be okay if we've got the existing incumbents here and we're here not to say, Hey, let's be, 3% better. But how do we actually say, look, there are lessons in what incumbency has, but what we actually think if we're gonna be building the business of the future, let's actually forget legacy. And a good example of that Riyadh Air, which is pretty much the newest airline in the world out of Saudi Arabia, obviously. There was a really interesting conversation at the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh a few weeks ago, which was with Tony Douglas, who is the CEO of Riyadh Air and the CEO of Delta. The two of them were in a panel across from each other, and the host asked the question. Looking at each other, what is it that you envy about each other's? The other person's position? In other words, Delta is the incumbent, Riyadh Air is the, the startup and. I thought that was a really interesting question. It was a fantastic question because the guy from Delta's oh, I wish I didn't have legacy. I wish I didn't have this. I wish I didn't have, I wish I had the blank canvas to do whatever I wanted and build it in the way that, that we could without any sort of, transformation, tension or inertia. And Tony Douglas is there going, I wish I had the scale, I wish I had the brand. I wish I had all those things. Yeah. Yeah. They're the sort of, I guess what I'd say is the really interesting conversations that are happening around the boardrooms in the Middle East that I'm finding that I'm, lucky to be part of some of those conversations. So I'm finding that really inspiring. I think in Australia there is a real, let's say. A lack of longer term view, and I don't mean longer term in the 10 or 20 years, even though that would be wonderful. But even in the next three to five years, very few organizations have three to five year strategies that are anything more than a kind of what you'd call a, strategy karaoke, where they've put a few words up there and they sing along. I think the distractions in Australia are with short-termism. With just, I guess what you might call catchphrases. Oh, we're using ai, or we're using this, or we're putting these initiatives in place, rather than actually saying, where will this organization be? Where will this company be in five to 10 years, and what do we need to do to get there? I know it sounds obvious, but not many organizations are thinking that way in Australia, so I see that distraction as being short-termism and tokenism. In the US I think there's probably a little bit of distraction around, what Trump's doing. And my sense is it's a bit like what Warren Buffett used to say. Don't worry about what the market's doing, just worry about what your business is doing and build your business appropriately. That's probably as good a review as I could give you over distractions.
Chris Hudson:That's all right. No, that's good. I love what you were saying about the, the Saudi example. It's kinda like darkness has being the absence of light, in that you know what you have is what you don't have. It sounds very obvious, you are, you're obviously yearning for something else, but in this market, what, if it's short-termism, that's holding us back then, where does the unlock exist and what can we do there, do you think?
Con Frantzeskos:One of the things is, how competitive is Australia? Yeah. And my sense is that, Australia is the lucky country. And for those who have read the book, the quote, lucky Country is not a compliment. Lucky Country is about basically the comfort of basically having, incredible mineral resource wealth that's paid for everything. And therefore the business model for Australia largely is that, it's good quality of life paid for by minerals that then funds immigration that then makes property prices go up, which makes everyone feel wealthier and more comfortable. Therefore, they don't have to work that hard at work to compete because, we don't wanna compete too hard in Australia. That's the sense that. One of the things there that I think is really acute and really necessary is to say what does that growths look like? Are we actually wanting to grow? What is our frame of reference? Or are we happy to just track, I guess the benchmark? Now a couple of months ago, or a bit close to a year ago, I put together a paper, a submission for the R&D inquiry that was happening for the federal government. And that was a, it's a really interesting inquiry of which there is a kind of a preliminary paper that's been released, but there's more to be released. And that board, it had people like Robyn Denham, who's obviously the chair of tesla Dr. Kate Cornick, CEO of Launch Vic. Others, some really great people on that board. Yeah. And they asked me to submit just some thoughts and one of the things that I did is I did a short analysis of the top ASX 200 listed companies over the last 20 years. Yeah. Against the benchmark of gold. In other words, gold an inert metal, yes. It's a store of value. Yes, it's a benchmark. But how have Australian organizations or listed companies compared in their total shareholder returns over 20 years versus just holding gold now? The results were not very good. So what it showed was in Australia that 70% of listed companies of the ASX 200 underperformed versus gold. Yeah. So only 30% of companies were better than a lump of metal versus the US. Any guesses as to what the number was in the US? So in Australia it was 70% underperformed. Yeah. In US it was 70% overperformed over or 30% underperformed. Yeah. And Europe. That everyone talks about. Europe. Oh, Europe's. Europe's a basket case. It's basically an open air museum. Oh. There's no good companies there. What was the number in Europe? Take a guess. Australia's 70% underperformed in the US only 30% under formed what was Europe. Fifteen? No, in Europe. 40% underperformed. So in other words europe was just behind America and Australia was way behind the rest of the pack. Yeah. Yep. Interesting. And so what drove those? So I looked at the determinants of that growth. What makes for a company that actually exceeds gold? In other words, the vast minority of companies in Australia. Now that doesn't include things like great startups like Canva, et cetera, et cetera. It is just listed companies, so I know there's only a limited sample set there. The analysis showed basically there were five determinants to what makes you better than a lump of metal. In other words, we turn up to work or I could just simply just buy some gold and keep it in the bank. So the first thing was a research and innovation budget. So one of the great examples was CSL close to 10% of their revenues on research and innovation. Yeah, most companies in Australia, it's less than 1%, but when I say most companies of the ASX 200 cohort, and that was the difference between the ones that were in the top 30 versus the ones that weren't a much bigger focus on r and d, innovation, et cetera. The second one was, did they have a long-term strategy? Not, was it good or bad? Did they simply have one? Yeah. Most don't. The third one, and again, in no particular order was export bias, and the other two were largely around governance. In other words, what was the mix of people on their boards? Were they all just risk people or did they actually have people who were subject matter experts, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. But the point I'm making is, you see what I'm saying? A genuine bias for forward thinking. A genuine bias for growth. A genuine bias for how do we get there, a genuine bias for innovation and these things that that you and I loved so much. And that was the difference between, the successes and what we might call the people that were just floating along. Now, the other damning point about this was that I hadn't factored in population growth into those, into that. Yeah. And as population growth in Australia has been quite radical. I think 1.5% is the number I can't recall exactly off the top of my head. So if you're actually then factor in the fact that, most of the organizations in Australia are selling just to Australians and the fact that Australia has grown, plus we've had, inflation that number would actually be even more damning if I'd factored in population growth which I didn't. So again, the point I'm making is, these organizations have a role of their shareholders to grow. There are some pretty clear things they need to do. And I guess that's what you and I are here to do is to help these organizations, bring those tangible things to life. Yeah. But I think part of the issue in Australia is the need or the want.'cause do we really wanna, at a corporate level, at an enterprise level, do that? And I'm not convinced that the majority, or at least the data suggests that the majority are not interested.
Chris Hudson:Yeah. It's hard not to agree with some of those facts. And obviously if you are, like us, we have a lot of conversations with leaders, around the market and, we come up against the things that are prioritized. You know what is your read on that? Because, there, there must be some platitudes happening out there where, the money and the time and the resources being invested in areas that maybe wouldn't, lead to that extent of productivity. So yeah. What, what's getting in the way, because there's a lot of obviously like a customer first mindset. There's a lot of things there. There's investments in technology. There's investments in people. Investments in, probably programs of work that have been running for a long time and maybe the legacy systems that are running, licenses, where do you think the money's going and where, where do you see some of the main tensions happening in that area?
Con Frantzeskos:I think it's about leadership and aspiration for those organizations. I is it about saying, do we want to be as good as anyone else in our specific cohort or category? Or do we actually aspire to be great in ways that might be let's say new or out of the ordinary for our category? Yeah. And I'll give you a very specific example of a client I've worked with for 12 years. Emirates constantly aspires to be known for things that you would never expect in that category. Yeah I'll give you a very specific brief. One of my former clients at Emirates who was leading a service delivery, which is largely, as he described it, if you take an A 380 and you shake it, anything that rattles is called service. Now he wants said, I want us to be known for things that are again you wouldn't expect from an airline. One of the examples was, I want us to have the best coffee in the world. So when you're on a plane, an Emirates plane and you have a coffee, you think. I dunno whether I've had a better coffee now. What needs to work? What needs to work in the organization for that? Firstly, to have that aspiration is the first thing. Then to work backwards from there through that moment of truth through the entire organization shows the priority there. A another one, and I'll give you an example from Australia, and I really admire Commonwealth Bank and Matt Comyn, I think is one of the best executives in Australia. Matt Comyn, during COVID had a very aggressive approach towards the non-physical nature of the mortgage process. And largely that if no one was able to touch each other or be near each other during COVID, and there was still, I think. The team there had counted something like 27 physical signatures that needed to occur, or the movement of documents between person A and person B, physical, literally, okay, I'm about to hand you something and potentially give you COVID. He said, let's completely destroy that and let's do it within weeks, and took the approach that I want every single physical touchpoint destroyed. And if anyone causes any or comes up with any objection to that or any reason why this shouldn't aggressively be pursued. They have to report to me personally as to why they are the blocker. Yeah. And it got done within about six weeks. And CBAs mortgage leadership. Is a result of that type of what I'd say ruthless and reckless or reckless I don't mean reckless in a bad sense. I mean he just went, Hey guys, we are destroying any barrier. And I think that sort of visionary thought is quite rare in Australia. I think it's very rare, but it's to be applauded. The reality is that the. If you look at the share of mortgages of CBA, it is way above any other bank in Australia. And I think it's the result of that type of thinking and that type of leadership that has led to that. Yeah, and Emirates, going back to the Emirates example, it's why Emirates is just such an astonishingly great product because you have that vision that then drives the outcome and those visions, again, aren't built on some sort of, fancy theoretical rubbish. It's like, how do we make awesome coffee? How do we make it really easy to get a mortgage? There's a not, they're not tricky observations. They're not crazy, theoretical things. But it's about saying, where do we wanna be in three to five years? I want us to have the best A, B, or C. It might sound mad, it might sound wonderful, but, let's make it happen. I just don't see a lot of that. In the vast majority of organizations, I just see incrementalism.
Chris Hudson:Yeah. True. Yeah, it's interesting. Once you put it that way where you say it's actually a small thing to have good coffee. You package it up and all of a sudden it's this visionary, it's this visionary piece. And actually if you think about actually it does had to be prioritized and teams have had to work on that. And, it's taken business away from this. And it's, how many programs of work we put on the back shelf, because it was. Because it was deemed more important. You're having to make that decision. So how does that kind of come about in a way? And, is it one leader? And I feel that leadership is quite democratized, with, with boards and execs and, there's a lot of discussion still. How does one person make that difference? Do you feel like what's the key to unlocking that?
Con Frantzeskos:Again, ag, again, I think, what are the motives, as a culture? Again, this is where I go back to the Middle East in particular Saudi Arabia. What's happening in Saudi Arabia at the moment? There is a sense, irrespective of who you talk to, whether it be, government ministers, or whether it be people at a junior level working within an organization, that they are there to build a country. They are there to build and show the world and recapture. I guess some of that the golden Age of Arabism and how they might say, Hey, we wanna show the world what's possible. Yeah. Yeah. And having that culture built truly it's saturated and embedded in every part of Saudi Arabia under NBS. It's really impressive the work that he's doing there in, in modernizing and improving the I guess the entire country. Through Visions 2030, everyone has bought in and therefore every single part of what they do in their day to day is like, is this the best it could be? Is this something that will be able to almost be the benchmark going forward for this category or this sector or this thing, or even this tiny little execution we're doing. If we're building a, webpage that shows A, B, C, is this the best webpage of its type in the world? Yeah. Yeah, and it's not about spending more money. Actually, most of the time it's not any more expensive or less expensive. As a matter of fact, sometimes I find it much cheaper because if you have a very clear vision of what you want. You can just get it done rather than as you said, the democratization of, I don't know what should we do? Should we be similar to our competitors, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. Yeah. I tend to find that having that very clear cultural and values-based view of what great looks like is probably the biggest driver.
Chris Hudson:That ties to personal values to one level. But it also ties to national pride. If you scale it up, it's anchored to the whole success of, the nation, its economy. You know that there's a bigger play and that puts them on the map. Precisely. It has been the case. If you think about, all of the, all of the construction, like all the aspirational architecture, building islands whatever it is, formula one's probably the same. It's kinda like it has to be the best of the best to get to the next level. And that's aspirational. But yeah it's not always happening. It's not always happening. Yeah.
Con Frantzeskos:And when people do it you, you see it so clearly. Look at Canva. What a wonderful success story. Melanie Perkins wanted to basically, start off with, pretty humble but, pretty interesting, first pitch deck. I can't remember what Canva was called before. It was the canvas. I think it was something like that. But the point I'm making is that their vision of what they wanna achieve to democratize the world's design is just brilliant. And that's, they're gonna be the biggest company in Australia by far. If and when they ever list, it's a very simple vision, and I'm not even saying it's gotta be something complex. It's just about saying, do we have that permission to be able to be bold and interesting in our thinking? And that's something that I've, I really admire that and I, I just see it as being the key to success because executions, execution's obviously tricky. Enterprise shifting. Enterprise is hard. Let's, I'm not being naive and saying, oh, you just get a guy in there with a bit of a, generic slide deck and the rest looks after itself. But what I'm saying is to give everyone that true sense that when they walk into a meeting, the values, because values drive behaviors. What are the behaviors that will be rewarded in this organization and what are the moves and shifts that we have to make at a tangible, critical level every day to actually make sure that happens and make sure that we're making progress. I think that's really the key.
Chris Hudson:Yeah. Yeah. It's almost easier to work outside of the system than within it. And you know the point, the points that you make around within the system, it's not just your own, what and what value you think that could bring because that, that can feel very hypothetical and a little bit vague until you do it obviously and you have, but it feels like within the system, the systemic. Situation of being, in highly complex hierarchy, thousands of you're feeling the weight of that, and as an intrapreneur you are, you're not sure how to navigate that a lot of the times. So yeah. Any kind of any tips around that for, personal sanity and, how do you feel your own drive and stick to your, stick to your vision if you can see it, but want to make it and want to see it through, despite all of that adversity being right in your face. Yeah.
Con Frantzeskos:Great. Great question. I think one of the ways in which I've had some success in this context is, there's only one CEO for everyone else in the organization. How do they set the vision for what's great in their area? Yeah, and what I've always inculcated in my teams and within enterprise and within my clients is how do you make your bit or your part of that puzzle, the most visionary outcome it could be. So sometimes, and I'll give you a very specific example. I was working with the head of digital at a major retailer. And I've gone in there as their interim head of marketing. The guy felt that he was almost playing an incremental role and actually the whole team. And there was a team of 70 people. It was a really quite a large e-commerce function. And what I'd said was, okay, what might great look like from a, from a. From a moments of truth level, how might search be the absolute best it could be? How might the ability to monetize and work with the merchandise teams to build out more or less a marketplace so that every single product that was sitting on the top left of the website was clearly monetized, almost as if you had a media agency mentality towards that. I see. Yeah. What I started doing was looking at the incremental part. Sometimes it's as literally as easy as just pointing at a specific product and going, how might you make that as magical as it can be? So what I started to do was build out a series of what we called these basically core aspirations. We work with a group on these core aspirations. One of them was a approach a kind of an approach that I call magic handoff. And what's magic handoff? We're all incredibly sick of every time we have an issue and we call a business, we call them. Then when we put onto someone else, it's almost like you have to start again, and then we go online and then we have to start again. Magic handoff was this concept that the user or the customer had this almost anticipatory design where irrespective of the touch the touch point or the framework it was as if, they never had to reintroduce themselves again. So that was one of our core aspirations, and we built about eight or nine aspirations across the team. Okay, great. What does great look like? And we ranked it 0, 1, 3, 4. Yeah. Zero means we're either not doing it at all, or if we're doing it, it's utterly terrible and we need to kill it. One means, yeah, we're doing it. It's not great. There was no two. Why was there no two? Because otherwise everyone would've grouped their stuff in two. Oh, that initiative I'm working on is two. This thing in my project Slate is two. Yeah, it's in the middle. Three was best in category and four was Best in the world. So I asked the team to go through every single initiative that they were doing, every single project they were working on, every single task they were working on. And I said, rank it 0, 1, 3, or four. And at the beginning, everyone had their stuff largely at one and three. A few even had them at four. I said, best in the world, and we're like, yep. Then what we started doing was we started looking at those things and saying, okay, let's go and research and understand what the best in the world looks like. I said, I'll let you do that. I'm not the expert. You guys go and work out what best looks like. And it could have been the most minor thing. You know what an email subject line is all the way through to, returns policy, whatever it might have been. Yeah. A number of payment gateways, you name it. Again, we're talking about a substantial legacy e-commerce business and bit by bit, and we have this on the wall in the boardroom and bit by bit people were moving their notes from three and four to zero and one, and what they then did is said, now that I know what fall looks like, I know what best in the world looks like. It was like great, that intellectual humility and that understanding what brilliance looked like. They then said, okay, what will it take for you to get to four? And they mapped out very clear journeys of what it took to get to four. Yeah. And then I said, great. How much money and how much time? And then we'd go off there and we built a backlog of about 591 initiatives. We grouped them under those things. And then obviously I went to the CEO and the CFO and said, Hey, by the way, here's our 591 initiatives under our eight or nine kind of project pillars. Here's how much money we'll need and here's how we're gonna do it. But of course, if you want this slower or quicker, the only lever you need to pull is investment. We've got the rest planned out. We've got the risk framework planned out. PS of each of those defined. Yeah. Now that wasn't coming to them and going, I want to change everything. I wanna change the world. I wanna go in there and we're gonna be the best in the world.'cause they would've just laughed me out of the room probably. Yeah. But I did say, Hey, by the way, here's just a very boring, very simple investment framework that you've got transparency over what the next was at probably about two and a half to three year framework looks like. Now, to them that was. BAU to a certain degree, but to my team, that was highly innovative approach that actually was gonna lead to this business potentially being the best in the world in a certain way. Yeah. Yeah. And I've done that a number of times and it tends to build, what you might call a best practice innovation or best practice aspiration. Without it looking like a best, without it looking consultant speak or, rubbish or fantasy stuff.
Chris Hudson:Yeah. No, that's powerful. I think I think what you realize is that, it's the very human nature of not feeling like you would be, focused on the wrong things. That's the human, the human aspects of say I feel like I'm doing the best in my capability and in my role in service of what the organization needs and what the leadership's expecting of me. And you'd like to think that goodwill exists. But at the same time, there's distortion, right? It feels there are legacy programs of work. There's a backlog that's three years already. What should take priority against the other thing. Like how do we prioritize that? Why is that more important? And which stakeholder's voice is louder than this? Stakeholders. Yeah. And those things come into play.
Con Frantzeskos:And also what motivates the stakeholders?'Cause sadly both innovation, these things that, I get out of bed for are not necessarily everyone's cup of tea. And that can sometimes make people like me look very, unpopular in an organization. Oh, guys. This guy's too passionate. He's making it too hard for us. We're gonna have to do heaps more.
Chris Hudson:Can we talk about that point around unpopularity? Because I had a similar conversation just yesterday on recording the previous episode with Jet Swain. And she was talking about how she's made a career of being unpopular and acting as a rebel uh, only to realize that it's got her nowhere. It some and and she should have just, played the more positive role, throughout. But what are your reflections on that in the way that you've played that role?
Con Frantzeskos:I have nothing further to add. I agree. Yeah. Again, I think I think it depends on the nature of the organization. It depends on the nature of the culture, of the leadership.
Chris Hudson:Yeah. Okay. Yeah,
Con Frantzeskos:there are a lot of people that talk up the fact, of course we want growth, of course, we want innovation when in fact it's all too hard and they're not interested. Yeah. And there are others that do, and I think it's just a natural process of finding self-selection to a certain degree. But yeah, to be honest, I have nothing further to add. I almost take it as a mark of pride when my clients or colleagues say, oh God, you really, you're really passionate about this, aren't you? But they don't say it as a compliment. Yeah, you re God, you really want want the customers to be like, blown away by this, don't you? Yep. Yep. Yeah, I do. Yeah.
Chris Hudson:Unrelenting.
Con Frantzeskos:Yeah. And it's and it is a source of tension. Some people are not there for their careers. They're not interested in the jobs. Just wanna turn up some, most don't. Now in their days of work from home. And so that, that's a challenge in itself, especially when I am particularly passionate, very energetic ideas factory. Now, these descriptions that I use of myself have been used by others of me, not as a compliment. Yeah. Yeah. You are an ideas factory con, you are very passionate. God, you're energetic, These are things that have been in, and I use them as a badge of pride, but yeah, that can make me unpopular. Yeah. Yeah. All right. But it depends in the right organization. Awesome. In the wrong organization, fine. That's fine. Not everyone's gonna want, wants to change the world. That's fine.
Chris Hudson:What are your what are your mechanics or mechanisms for resilience in light of that? And when you come up against it what do you do to cope?
Con Frantzeskos:I am a, an obsessive curious and voracious reader. So I always tend to find that, no one ever went wrong listening to the customer. And people may disagree, but, I tend to find that evidence. Is a pretty powerful let's say resilience builder. You can be kind of gasoline in organizations to think that you are the crazy one and then see over time that no, the market's right. And so I've always. Taken a very obsessive approach to understanding what what the consumer wants, what the customer wants, what the, what are the analytics saying, what's the data, what's the market data saying what's the ABS data saying what's the sales data saying? Where's it happening? Why is it happening? And then getting to the understanding of why and what those barriers and drivers are. I feel that even though sometimes it can be very tough, but sometimes I'll look around at an SLT meeting or an ELT meeting and say, there's only nine people in this room. Yeah. But there's another, 8 billion people out there that would disagree. And I try as hard as I can to. Present that data of what the 8 billion people in the world are doing and behaving and what they're, how they're going about their lives in as objective and simple a way as possible, and try and inform and guide my colleagues to actually understanding that. If they disagree, that's absolutely fine. That's their prerogative. We don't have to agree, but my sense is agree on the reality. You don't have to agree on the solution. Matter of fact, it's wonderful if you don't agree on the solution because that's where ideas come from disagreements. But at least let's agree on the reality, on where we are as an organization, the reality of the organization or the reality of the market more accurately.
Chris Hudson:Yeah. Yeah. I mean there are definitely the parallels there to the world of politics, which is another area I know you are interested in and have read a lot about. Yeah. So do you see any other kind of yeah. Do you see anything else in the politicians tool set that could be applied to intrapreneurs that, that springs to mind?
Con Frantzeskos:Very much so. I think what's really interesting about politics and my involvement in politics over the years is that in some ways politics is highly sophisticated in terms of data and understanding at a local. Street by street level yeah, or even house by house level in some instances. But the biggest problem with politics is that unlike the sovereign individual, where we as consumers choose every day, whether or not we are gonna vote for a particular business, product, or service politics only has, the purchase consumption occasion only happens once every three or four years. We only get to vote once every three or four years. And I think that's a very blunt instrument that sometimes politicians can infer the wrong things from that purchase occasion. So in a way I think they're particularly good at reading the play day to day, probably better than most organizations. But I guess the purchase consumption occasion is so rare that it skews the, motivation not motivations. It skews the actions somewhat to optimizing for that single purchase occasion and then bundling the products up in such a way in the form of a variety of policies and personalities that if they can mask some of the bad products with some of the good products they'll get there. But yeah, look, I think it's a really interesting question. Again I think the reality is that no one ever went wrong listening to the the consumer or the voter. And I think where most politicians get it very wrong is when they don't.
Chris Hudson:Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Con Frantzeskos:Spend a lot of time communicating too, but. But really, and I think especially now with some of these particularly interesting and modern data gathering tools and AI tools the ability to read the play is actually greater than ever. And I think that, the vast majority of political parties desperately getting on that train. And that's, and I think that's a really interesting evolution of how political parties are actually understanding more about the voters.
Chris Hudson:Yeah. Yeah. It's almost the, the responsiveness curve in relation to data that you might be seeing. It feels like an election and a result from the election might be, like it's a less frequent occurrence but if you can get down to the conversational level and the interaction points and really understand, what people wanting, what they're saying and how that's theming up and you know what to do about it, then that, that feels like it's much more interesting. Yeah. Yeah. The potential political model as well. Yeah, precisely businesses that do that. But yeah, businesses can not all of them are doing that as we know. But hey, I remember our last conversation which yeah, somewhere on Spring Street, we were having a bit of a chat and you asked me a question, what, what problems do you see in the world? And you know what? What should we try and fix, yeah. And I think you are working on something, so maybe if you could tell the story of, one of your AI ventures that's coming up, just so that people get a sense of, what's possible in the way of, understanding the market, reading the signals, turning into something that's real and tangible. And you've made a couple of really amazing products. I'd love to hear about those if you've got the time. Yeah.
Con Frantzeskos:Great. Of course. One of them that has received a lot of coverage is Ansett, so Ansett.travel book your flights holidays, hotels, adventures, activities, destinations with Ansett travel. Ansett travel's a really interesting one. Online travel agencies, OTAs it's a very competitive market, but my sense is that the suppliers of assets such as airlines hotels, et cetera they are really pushing hard to DTC, but what they don't have is they don't have the ability to work across the entire travel journey. As much as flights, accommodation and rentals is a key part of that. It is only a very small part of what I call, not just travel, but traveling. And what I mean by that is the entire travel experience, some bits are good, some bits are not good. And so therefore is there a concierge service and AI concierge service that can actually weave the entire thing together from, Hey, you're gonna need this power adapter, or here's a battery pack, or by the way, you might need, that type of luggage all the way through to, Hey I've, I can see by your biometrics and your meeting schedule that you've had a stressful week. Why don't you go and have a massage and a dinner on Friday night to relax? That to me is the future of. I guess what we might call travel concierge, and that's what I'm building out with Ansett. So early days very little of that functionality is there now building that out. But that's largely where I see travel going. And then the providers as much as they might disagree will find their own natural balance as to how they, that they interact as at A DTC, in a DTC context. The other priority of mine actually is is Saleschef.ai. Saleschef is an a largely built on the premise that people that make product are no good at selling it. And by that what I mean is if you are looking to buy a television. And let's say an LG G5, which is one of the best TVs in the world at the moment, sold all over the world. If you go to the Best Buy website, the Curry's website, jumbo, JB Hi-Fi, and I'm talking about the major consumer electronics retailers all over the world it will be an almost identical experience. And when I say almost identical, largely same photos, same spec, same key five dot points, same bland, you know, copied and pasted from lg. So therefore the only way in which these retailers are getting people to look at their pages by spending literally tens of billions of dollars on Google ads. And then when they get there, there might be a bit of a price comparison or a price lever. Now, what sales chef does is solves that problem. Sales Chef takes the raw product specification, and hence the name Sales Chef turns it into a feast of sales and marketing material. So it's a seven step AI process that takes, it, cleans it, harmonizes it enriches it with about 500 different sources of content from all over the world. Anything from reviews to use cases and everything else, it then use a number of strategic frameworks to enhance and work out what the best selling points might be, and in a competitive context also, then it creates a range of content that could be everything from product detail pages to sales training documents, to standard operating procedures as to the house shops. Put it on display to ticketing, to retail media networks, and interestingly also to training AI models such as chat bots or AI call centers, or any of these things that are now happening, making it machine readable and discoverable so that the content isn't just bland content, but it's actually content in the voice of the retailer, in the voice of that particular seller of things, and it's the same use case, interestingly, whether it be retail or travel, because again, with travel, it's the same thing. If you are buying a tour to see a particular thing, the people that have written the tour or created the tour aren't necessarily great at selling it. So it goes through the same thing for whether it be retail product, whether it be physical product or whatever. Where it gets really amazing, where sales shift gets really amazing is the optimization phase, which is the last phase where it takes a whole lot of data from the world. Could be anything from weather to consumer sentiment to holiday schedules, to anything happening at a local or global level and says, Hey, by the way, I don't know. It was Black Friday, or we are heading up to Mother's Day in a couple of months. You should optimize your content because we believe that these products would be ideal for Mother's Day gift, or by the way, it's really gonna be hot in, that particular part of the world. You have 10 stores there. Maybe you should sell more of these umbrellas and call them, keep the sun off your head with these umbrellas. So it acts almost as a, I call it the hustle phase. It looks for all the data, not only within the organization. External to the organization and says, Hey, how can we sell better? How can we get some of that slow moving stock off the shelf? How can we actually contextualize the promotion of the product? And that's. That's what Sales Chef is. And it adds tremendous value because it means people don't have to spend as much money on content operations on, on performance media, et cetera, but also helps them. Largely the bottom line is that it increases conversion across omnichannel conversion. Average. Conversion across omnichannel and in store is about 1.5% globally. And my sense is that sales Chef should hopefully up it buy anything from half a percent to 2% because we're gonna have a much better selling experience.
Chris Hudson:Yeah. Amazing. Thanks so much for articulately pitching that you've got a very rounded and compelling, couple of products there. I, I particularly like that they're playing in the white space, where the industry is a kind of not, they're not thinking in those areas. It feels you'll remember when omnichannel was banded around, right? Yeah. It feels like you're actually delivering it for once. Yeah.
Con Frantzeskos:Yeah, omnichannel ended up being multi-channel. Yeah. We a website, we've got an app, we've got some social media stuff.
Chris Hudson:A shopping list. Yeah.
Con Frantzeskos:Genuine omnichannel. It still hasn't been brought to life and my view has always been content has always been one of the key barriers to that being effectively done because it is just not scalable or at least until now, hasn't been scalable. Content is hard. It's manual, boring. Building SOPs is not fun. And that's where sales shift takes it and automates that entire process. And genuinely unlocks omnichannel sales.
Chris Hudson:What you've been able to achieve is put a thread through the experience off, off a single interface effectively, which hadn't been possible before, because you are usually designing in silos for each of those different touch points. Yeah. Even if you have blueprint for your service or your customer experience, you've done your journey mapping. This actually brings all that together. So I'm interested in that. And also AI and in how you. How you went about it. You don't have to go through all the details, but it feels like there's a big shift now from or needed shift, probably I should say, from moving AI, it's not a tool set. It's not just a piece of software that you learn and you press the buttons and you put the prompts in, and then it gives you the answer to, to actually something that, that partners with you. And it's moving from tool set to native and just becoming. Part of an organization's mindset and a person's mindset, rather than it being this sort of side companion. So what, through your experiences of putting those two ventures together, what's been your experience of using it in a more native way, would you say?
Con Frantzeskos:Yeah I've always taken the approach that AI should be seen more of as a teammate than a tool. Yeah. And I think that if we anthropomorphise ai. In other words, if we see AI as, and I've been guilty of this a, a really smart 22-year-old intern that knows everything that we can just say, Hey, by the way, can you help me arrange the meeting with Chris? Or, Hey, that thing over there, I need you to summarize my emails. Or, Hey, I've got all this data. Can you turn it into a PowerPoint presentation? Now that's actually great. Don't get me wrong, they're great use cases, and most people do those well, but where I see the true unlocking of AI is using these tools in the sense that we might never have imagined that humans were able to execute these certain things. And more more interestingly, even if we were to say, okay let's treat them like humans. Let's assume that you have thousands of people doing very small things in a completely unec economical sense. In other words let's again look at a retail environment. What if you had a thousand people there looking after that one customer? Buying a hammer at a hardware store, it's a nonsensical thought, nonsensical. But I would then ask okay, it's only nonsensical because you are thinking in terms of humans costing lots of money. But what if that was not a barrier? What if it would completely doable? What would you optimize for and what would be the sort of things that you would like to build out, and what would be the sort of vision for that customer that you could then deliver? As unrealistic and crazy as it sounds, what would those thousand people be working on? Now if you unlock it that way, then what it does, it opens up an entire, entirely new way of looking at service and looking at the way in which businesses might be operating. And by, by the way, when I say customer, that could be internal customers, external customers. Clients, colleagues workflows, you name it, right? Yeah. What if you were to have a thousand people solving the, I don't know, Chris and Con needing to arrange a meeting? What ha and not just by optimizing existing broken process. But by saying if we were to just start again and we would have those thousand people redesigning something from scratch and looking at it completely in a completely new way, how and what might be achievable, that is where I see AI already playing an amazing role, and that's the way that I'm deploying it. That's the way I know many others are deploying it in that way and using it as a way to say, let's not be deterministic. Let's not take legacy. Let's optimize for something that may be completely fantasy and see how that might be brought to life. With AI already I'm doing that sort of stuff and I know many others are, and the results are astonishing. So amazing. Like just breath. At times, breathtakingly scary. And that's really where I see the great promise of AI is not in making services for, the CEO to have a better life or a better way of building a business, but for anyone working in an organization to actually be able to achieve anything they wanted to because they've properly built a team of thousands of people around them in the form of amazing ai. And even if you transcend the idea of humans and say let's just build some sort of fantasy. Way of bringing things to life. What's achievable is astonishing, and I know everything I've just said there sounds highly theoretical and all the rest of it, what it does is it comes down to just the idea of what do I want to achieve? And then the way that AI can bring that to life is actually incredibly easy. Very tangible. And also the cost of implementation now is, or free or nearly free.
Chris Hudson:Yeah. Yeah, because I guess there would be a, maybe an assumption that if the AI wasn't pointed at a specific thing in relation to a company's productivity, for example, or a particular task, that as soon as you elevate it, that the pitch becomes so intangible and so blue sky is like what? You're gonna reinvent the whole company that we've got 3000 people working in by plugging it all through your machine, and we're gonna have all the answers. We're gonna rip it up and start tomorrow. I don't think so. Yeah,
Con Frantzeskos:so you are right. You're right. And but also the other way is. If I said to you that, most people in organizations move information and curate information, right? Yeah. What I'm not suggesting is, Hey, Chris, what if you had a thousand people working on your email to me? Why? The point is this, why and how does that information go from there to there? Why does it even know? Go from there to there? Why can't it just be solved at source? How do we make decisions in this organization? Why would you send me an email? Maybe it's a total waste of time. Yeah, maybe may. Maybe there should be decisioning agents within organization that understand risk, that understand the elements, and actually decisioning at source, decisioning at the edge. I. Therefore, all I need to do as a senior executive in an organization is actually define the values, the risk profile, and the aspiration, and then let AI do the rest of it. Yes, I need to know what's happening. Yes, I need to have some sort of dashboard, but largely, instead of actually spending most of our time in organizations, moving information between ourselves so that we can be either more informed, make better decisions, be more creative, I'm going, yep. Let's just get rid of all that stuff and be more creative, be more visionary, understand the levers and the metrics that matter, and actually say let's actually do what we can to improve those key metrics. Now again, that is a deeply theoretical, but very doable today.
Chris Hudson:For sure. Yeah. I mean if even if you took your 0 1 3 4 model and you use that as a framework, then it would only be recommending things that would be capable of, being best in the world, for example. Yeah. And. Gear up your business planning around that. So yeah, as a decisioning tool, obviously the decisioning itself, there has to be, every, everyone needs to feel their own influence with, within these organizational structures. So there'll be a, robust discussion about it. But yeah, particularly if it's evidence-based, then yeah, why not?
Con Frantzeskos:Well, precisely. And that's the key. Have you got the plumbing right for data? Yeah. And I think that in the future that the only real moats in any organization will be data, brand and subject matter expertise or domain expertise? I'm not sure that I'm not sure that there are too many other really tangible and very deep moats or wide moats. Yeah.
Chris Hudson:In the long term,
Con Frantzeskos:I don't mean in the short term, I mean in the long term.
Chris Hudson:We'll all be reading books somewhere trying to think of other things. Yeah. Yeah. Good. Yeah. Yeah, on and on a personal note, those are obviously some very specific and well thoughts for examples, but where are you drawing inspiration from more generally? And what's your approach to that? You're saying you read a lot, but Yeah. Are there any other kind of personal motivators that come into play as well?
Con Frantzeskos:Yeah, I'm I've always I've always been, as I said, unashamed, un unashamed, capitalist. But, my, my view is that, companies, business and markets are great. Great opportunities to to build great things. And I think companies in the sense of, groups of people IP and systems coming together to solve the problems of the world and to build great products and to, delight people with stuff and have people hand over their money as a result, I think is a really noble cause. I don't see any shame in saying, I like building stuff that other people like buying, and I make money out of it. I think it's actually beautiful and, again, going back to that whole political thing, every dollar is a vote. Yeah. We work really hard. We get taxed particularly badly in Australia. And for us at the end of that to choose organizations to hand over their money to them should be seen by those organizations as a true honor that, that they've been chosen and that we in our day-to-day have handed our money over to these people in return for goods and services. And I think that's been my motivation is that every single time that I walk out in the world and I, go to the supermarket, go to the shops, do anything. I always look at it through the lens of, how might this experience be better? How might I be better served? And I take that every single day, every single data point that I have in my own life as an inspiration to say how might I build better experiences, products, and businesses for others? It's a bit like, and it sounds a bit odd, but it's a bit like being a doctor and there's this constant illness out there in the world. How can I fix that illness? And I see that, every single time there is any sort of customer or business opportunity, it's an opportunity to improve it. And those opportunities aren't just, just a token, let's just make the website slightly better. Yeah. But about truly building businesses that that generate value for people and make every single moment like that a genuine delight. And that's what really motivates me. I really love building those beautiful experiences and building those beautiful businesses that make money.
Chris Hudson:Yeah. Wonderful. That's really inspiring and I think a great note to finish on and something that I think we should all take away and do more of. So thanks you so much, Con and yeah, really appreciate the candid, highly articulate, expansive conversation that we've had. We've jumped around a bit. Yeah. Always.
Con Frantzeskos:Chris,
Chris Hudson:you I love chatting
Con Frantzeskos:to you, mate. I love our conversations. I love yeah. I always love catching up and, for the first time we've had microphones and cameras capturing it.
Chris Hudson:I know. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe it'll turn into another one. Like I was hoping for the first like, Joe Rogan three hour episode, but we'll do that next time, eh?
Con Frantzeskos:Yeah, that's alright.
Chris Hudson:Maybe I'll book in more time. Book. But yeah, thanks so much again, and if people wanna reach out to you Con or hear more about, Sales Chef or Ansett, how would they find you?
Con Frantzeskos:Yep. So Ansett.travel or Saleschef.ai, the two websites there that that you can go and access and and my contact details are there.
Chris Hudson:Perfect. All right. Thanks so much. Con we'll leave it there.
Con Frantzeskos:Good on you Chris. Great to chat.