The Latest from Kristy-Lee

Hello and welcome to Episode 346 of The People Powered Business Podcast.

Is there a decision sitting on your desk right now that you keep putting off until you feel more sure about it? Maybe it's the underperformer you've been tolerating, the conversation you've rewritten in your head a dozen times, or the change you know the team needs but haven't started. If you're waiting to feel confident before you move, you're far from alone.

I see this all the time with established business owners. You've built something successful through hard work and good judgment, yet the people decisions are the ones that stall. Most of the time it isn't a lack of knowledge holding you back. It's the belief that you need to feel confident first. That's why I wanted to bring Yasmin London onto the show. Yasmin spent 13 years in the NSW Police Force, much of it as a youth liaison officer, before co-founding the cyber safety education organisation YSAFE. She's now the founder and CEO of First Movers Co and t...

Hello and welcome to Episode 345 of The People Powered Business Podcast.

You've hired good people. You've handed things over. You've set up the systems. And somehow everything still lands back on your desk. If that sounds familiar, you're not doing delegation wrong, and doing more of it isn't going to fix the problem.

This week's episode is a little different. It's the recording of a live webinar I ran called Delegation Won't Save You. Over the last few weeks on the podcast, we've been talking about why so many established business owners stay the bottleneck, even after they've tried everything they've been told to do. This is where it all comes together. In more than 25 years of working with business owners, I've seen the same pattern every time a team grows past a handful of people: the business gets bigger, but the way it's led, structured and staffed doesn't grow with it. That isn't a delegation problem. It's a design problem, and the good news is that design problems can be fixe...

Hello and welcome to Episode 343 of The People Powered Business Podcast.

Have you ever sat in a team meeting, watched everyone go round in circles on the same problem, and thought, why can't they just see it the way I do? You can jump from the numbers to the client to the team to the tech in the space of an hour without blinking. Your team often can't, and that's one more reason so much ends up back on your desk.

I see this all the time with the business owners I work with. Most of you are wired to switch between different ways of thinking. It's second nature. But we can't expect our team to think like us, because they're not wired the same way. So that's why I've invited Dr Ken Hudson on to chat about his new book, Switch Thinking.

Ken spent around 15 years in marketing with large companies, including as head of marketing at American Express in Australia, completed his doctorate in organisational creativity, and has spent the last 20 years helping business owners and leaders solve ...

Hello and welcome to Episode 342 of The People Powered Business Podcast.

Someone on your team hands you a piece of work. It's about 80% right. You know it'll take you ten minutes to fix and thirty to explain, so you fix it yourself and move on. If that's happened to you more than once, you're not alone, and it's exactly why delegation hasn't fixed the bottleneck.

I've taught delegation for years, and I've run a business for twenty years, so I've had to get good at it myself. I'm not here to tell you delegation doesn't matter. But if delegating better was the whole answer, you wouldn't still be the bottleneck. So this week I want to look at why smart, capable business owners keep ending up back in that spot, even after they've genuinely tried to hand things off.

I get into why it actually is faster to do it yourself, at least the first few times, and why that instinct isn't wrong. I talk about what your team learns every time you swoop in and finish the last 20% for them, and why "le...

Hello and welcome to Episode 341 of The People Powered Business Podcast.

If you employ health professionals under the Health Professionals and Support Services Award, whether that's physios, OTs, psychologists or anyone else on that award's long list, you are only weeks away from the biggest change this award has seen in over twenty years. If you have been putting off looking at it, hoping it might quietly sort itself out, this episode is your sign to stop.

I'm recording this the same week the Fair Work Commission handed down its final confirmation of the new rates, so this has genuinely been years in the making and it is now locked in for the 1st of October 2026. This is part of the Commission's gender undervaluation review, which looked at a handful of modern awards covering historically female dominated professions and found this one had been undervalued for years compared with equivalent male dominated industries. The fix is a complete overhaul of how health professionals get cla...

Hello and welcome to Episode 340 of The People Powered Business Podcast.

You know the conversation. It's been sitting on your list for weeks, maybe longer. You've rehearsed it in the shower, in the car, at 3am when you should be asleep, and every day you don't have it, you tell yourself tomorrow. If that's you right now, this episode was made for you.

I keep coming back to this topic because it's the one thing I see stopping business owners more than anything else. Not a lack of skill, not a lack of care, just the simple fact that nobody ever taught us how to have a hard conversation with someone on our team. We learn how to run the business, sell the thing, manage the money, and then we're expected to just know how to tell someone their work isn't good enough, without any training at all.

Today I'm talking with Jennifer Bicknell, an employment lawyer who's spent over a decade running her own firm and now spends most of her time teaching people how to have exactly this kind of conve...

Hello and welcome to Episode 339 of The People Powered Business Podcast.

You already know who this episode is about. The employee whose performance has been off for months, the one you keep making excuses for because actually ending their employment feels like the hardest conversation you'll ever have to have. If you've been sitting on a firing decision, telling yourself you'll deal with it next month, or after this project wraps up, or once things settle down, I need you to listen to this one properly.

I'm talking about this today because it's come up in nearly every conversation I've had with business owners this week. In the last seven days alone, I've worked with three different owners who sat on a firing decision for so long that it made the exit far harder than it needed to be. No documented warnings, none of the process followed, because they'd been putting it off for months. By the time they came to me saying "I need to fire them now," I was the one having to put the brakes o...

Hello and welcome to Episode 338 of The People Powered Business Podcast.

You've known for two months, maybe longer, that you need to fire this person. You've rehearsed the conversation in the shower, in the car, a hundred times in your head. You keep telling yourself you'll do it when you feel ready, when the timing is right, when they've had one more chance. Here's the truth: that day isn't coming, and every week you wait, nothing is staying the same. It's getting worse.

I've been in business for 20 years, and I've spent most of that time helping business owners navigate what I call the mental game of being the boss. Firing someone, admitting a hire hasn't worked out, having the conversation that makes your stomach drop, none of it gets easier with experience. I still don't feel ready when I have to do these things, and this is what I do for a living. If I don't feel ready after 20 years of doing this and teaching other people to do it too, I can't expect you to feel ready either. S...

Hello and welcome to Episode 337 of The People Powered Business Podcast.

Have you softened a deadline because you didn't want to be the bad guy? Let a piece of work that wasn't good enough slide because pulling someone up on it felt like an uncomfortable conversation you'd rather avoid? Said yes to something you really wanted to say no to, just to keep the peace? None of those moments feel like a big deal on their own. But they're all quietly costing you performance, and there's one thing running through every single one of them: wanting to be liked by your team.

I've been circling a similar theme on the podcast over the last few weeks, and there's a reason for that. I'm celebrating 20 years in business this year, and reflecting on two decades of working with business owners, a handful of truths keep coming back to me.

One of the biggest is this: so many of us are chasing being liked by our team, almost wanting to treat them like family, and in the process we miss the thing that act...

Hello and welcome to Episode 336 of The People Powered Business Podcast.

You made a call to your team on Monday. By Thursday, new information landed and you knew the original decision wasn't right anymore, but instead of fixing it, you sat on it for two days. You're worried that changing your mind will make you look weak, indecisive, like your team won't take you seriously next time you make a call. That fear is exactly what keeps business owners stuck on the wrong course for far longer than they should be, and it's costing more than anyone realises.

I keep seeing this play out with the business owners I work with, and it shows up two ways. Some get so paralysed by the fear of looking indecisive that they stay on a path they know is wrong, and it ends up costing the business money. Others swing hard the other way, changing direction every other week until their team stops bothering to follow through on anything, because why would they, if the goalposts are going to move again by Frid...