GOAL, not Gold 🙂
It is an honour and a privilege to hang out with Kym on the regular from WeTeachMe.
A spectacular guy with some massive goals. He’s humble, thoughtful & wants to make a lasting positive impact on the world… something that resonates with me in a big way!
Today we got to sit down & discuss goal setting.
Interesting Fact:
- 4% of the world population set goals
Enjoy the vlog
PS: If you want to follow Kym on Twitter & Instagram, I’ve linked it all up for you
Transcript
Tobi Skovron: Hey, guys.
Kim: Hi.
Tobi Skovron: This is Kim.
Kim: Hi.
Tobi Skovron: Kim’s a friend of mine. Also a member here. And actually, I’ve never told you this, but someone that I really admire. I think-
Kim: I think you’re the first person that’s ever said that to me.
Tobi Skovron: Really? Mate, I’m super impressed, not of what you’ve been able to achieve with WeTeachMe, and we’ll talk about WeTeachMe in a second. But just your character and just your demeanour.
Like, you’re a very softly-spoken person that, for me, this is what I see, that is very thoughtful. Very thoughtful. Like, really think about not yourself. You think about the wider scope, whether it’s your people who are all very, very happy working with you. But every time we speak now, we have a conversation and I can see things ticking, and you’re just very softly-spoken and I really respect that.
Kim: Thanks, Tobi.
Tobi Skovron: Especially someone that’s had tremendous amount of success that you’ve had, you would never know it, and I really like that.
Kim: Thank you. I think I should get you to write my dating profile.
Tobi Skovron: Okay. You know what, probably not, because… Sim would say I’ve got no game.
Kim: Well, you’ve done really well with Sim.
Tobi Skovron: Yeah. Well, I don’t know how that happened. I actually went and bought her the other day a horse riding helmet. Not the other day, but like a year ago. She’s like, “Wow. Why did you get me this?” I was like, “I don’t want you to hit your head and wake up one day and realize, ‘Who is this guy?’ So I want to make sure that whatever craziness is going on, that you wanted to be with me for the rest of your life, stays that way.”
Kim: That’s probably the most touching thing I’ve heard today, so thank you.
Tobi Skovron: So yeah, no, in all seriousness, WeTeachMe. So really excited about what you guys are doing.
Kim: Thank you.
Tobi Skovron: Do you want to just share with my audience, or the audience, a little bit about WeTeachMe?
Kim: Absolutely. So, WeTeachMe is home to Australia’s best and most popular classes and workshops. So think of anything from pottery classes … What’s something you want to learn?
Tobi Skovron: You know what? I would love to be able to play the guitar.
Kim: Great. We’ll tell you who the best guitar teachers are, where they teach, their reviews, their pricing and when they teach. And then you can make a decision within half a minute or less, book a class, buy a gift voucher for someone. So we just make that process super simple. So we have about 30 thousand classes all around Australia. 2016, ’16 or ’17, my timing’s a bit off, but we became the biggest school in Australia, and I’d like us to be the biggest school in the world one day.
Tobi Skovron: Amazing. That’s huge goals. So is that your BHAG? Big, hairy, audacious goal, to be the biggest school in the world?
Kim: Yeah, absolutely. We’re really driven by the vision that learning transforms lives. Your life, the people around you, and if enough people do it, then the community. So that really drives us. But we’ve always really been driven by this idea of goals and goal setting and really having clarity on who you want to be as a person, where you want your business to be, and how you want to give back to your community and what does that look like for you in 20 years?
Kim: I mean, do you do the same thing for your business and your life?
Tobi Skovron: So, yes, I do. I’m super dialled into the long game. Super dialled into what we want to achieve as the BHAG, the big, hairy, audacious goal. And then, I kind of look backwards onto a daily KPI and go, “Okay, today we need to do this.”
Tobi Skovron: Because someone said to me, “You know, Tobi, how do you eat a dinosaur?” And I was like, “I don’t know.” And they said, “One bite at a time.” And so eventually the goal is to eat a dinosaur. Not really, physically eat, but like grow to the size of or be as big as in terms of business stature. But it’s all about that small piece every day.
Kim: We can talk all day about this, but I came across a quote yesterday that said that if you focus on hitting the daily goals, then you will hit your weekly goals, and then you’ll hit your monthly goals, your yearly goals, and then your 20 year goals. And that really jumped out at me. I thought it was awesome.
Tobi Skovron: Yeah. So, I’m a little frustrated with some people that come into my path that they kind of look at me and this is not to big myself up at all. I think this is just really to call a spade a spade. They look at me and go, “Oh man, what you’re doing is … how amazing.” I’m like, “Man, I’m working my butt off.” I almost refer to myself like a duck on the water, so I’m very gracious on the surface-
Kim: But paddling underneath it.
Tobi Skovron: Paddling like a maniac underneath. And so, a lot of people fail to be able to put that one foot in front of another from a goal setting perspective. And I’m hyper focused, much like you, in trying to execute that daily, weekly. And really, I look at it … I remember several years ago, maybe like 14, 15 years ago, I kept my head down for like a serious quarter. I stayed in my program at the gym. I ate really clean. I focused on executing my goals day in, day out on the business level. And then I turned around and three months later I’m like, “Wow. Look how far I’ve come.”
Kim: Yeah, absolutely.
Tobi Skovron: And so, I think it’s critical, goal setting. And those that don’t really set those goals … I mean, I don’t know how one expects to achieve.
Kim: Well, I’ll throw a few things at you and these are just things that have come at me on my journey which have resonated with me. But the idea is that if you don’t know with crystal clear clarity where you want to be, then no wind is a favourable wind. Or no direction you run in will take you closer to your goal.
Kim: And in all the people that I come across, I find it really rare to come across someone that knows with clarity, crystal clear clarity, what success looks like for them in 20 years. That long game that you talked about.
Tobi Skovron: I think, yeah, no. I think that’s a really scary thing to think about. Really scary. Especially when you’re like, like Sim just asked me, “What do you want to have for lunch today?” Because she’s about to [inaudible 00:06:10] like, “I don’t know.”
Kim: I totally understand. The first time I had a meeting with one of my mentors, I walked into the room and he said to me, “Kim, where do you want to be in 20 years?” And I laughed at him and I said, “I don’t know what I want to do tonight.”
Tobi Skovron: Sure.
Kim: And if you had asked me that question 20 years ago, I would have said, “Watching Power Rangers. I was really gunning for the good guys.” But can I do this exercise with you?
Tobi Skovron: Yeah, please.
Kim: This is great. Okay. So if you told me about how scary it is to vision something. So close your eyes. The year is 2038, so 20 years into the future. You will be how many years old?
Tobi Skovron: I’ll be 57, 58.
Kim: Isn’t that a scary thought?
Tobi Skovron: Yeah.
Kim: You’ll be 58. We’ll be our dads. Okay. What does your world look like?
Tobi Skovron: I think my daughter just picked me up in her driverless car and took me to see a doctor about my incontinence.
Kim: Okay. What sounds can you hear around you?
Tobi Skovron: I hear the Jetsons.
Kim: Love that.
Tobi Skovron: I don’t know if that’s real, but this is what’s coming in my head.
Kim: What smells can you smell?
Tobi Skovron: Like cleanliness. Like you’re in the woods and you’ve just got this really fresh air, and it kind of smells a little bit rank but it actually is pure.
Kim: What do your friends and family communities say about you when you’re not around?
Tobi Skovron: What do they say? I’d like to think that they say, “He’s a good dude. Always thinking about others.” And I’d also like to think that people would say, “The guy always puts everyone else first.”
Kim: And what does your business look like? Or your businesses?
Tobi Skovron: Yeah, I think my businesses are at the centre of a lot of communities. At the centre of a lot of people doing some really great things and leveraging my network, my properties, and the people that reside within to make themselves bigger and better. And I’d obviously have a positive impact on the world, the greater world.
Kim: Amazing. Okay. Open up your eyes and bring yourself back. Isn’t that amazing that you can vision all these things, right?
Tobi Skovron: Totally, yeah.
Kim: And the amazing thing is, when I go through this exercise, so I do this every year and I go to a park or the beach and I just sit down with a pen and paper and I just ask myself these 20 questions and I really visualise it.
When I open my eyes, then I have a direction that I can run towards. And this makes my day to day decision-making so simple. When someone comes to me with, “Kim, you should do this project. You should do this.” I say, “Does that take me closer to my 20 year vision?” If yes, I’ll do it. If not, forget about it.
Tobi Skovron: Amazing. So it’s really cool. I guess someone could call you a goal digger.
Kim: Goal digger, I like that, yeah.
Tobi Skovron: Not the Kanye West version, but actually positively impacting not only yourself but other people and people within your ecosystem. Especially with, what, 30 thousand classes?
Kim: Yeah.
Tobi Skovron: Is that annual or daily or-
Kim: Annual.
Tobi Skovron: Wow. That’s a big number.
Kim: Yeah. It’s exciting. I used to do this dance with my business partner, Demi. Every time we sold a ticket, we’d get up and start dancing. And I said, “The day that we sell a ticket every hour, that’ll be amazing.” And that happened really quickly. And then now I say to her, “The day that we sell a ticket every minute or every second, that would be amazing.”
Tobi Skovron: I like that.
Kim: I really like that idea.
Tobi Skovron: We have something very similar but it’s not dancing. I think maybe it should be dancing. There’s Demi now. But we celebrate with rockets.
Kim: Rockets? So you…
Tobi Skovron: On our Slack channel. No, no, no. Not the moon-
Kim: Okay, yeah.
Tobi Skovron: Yeah, like the emoji rocket, when someone does something great. It doesn’t matter, whatever it is, so long as they’re pushing forward, rocket ships light up on our team Slack channel.
Tobi Skovron: I want to continue to have these conversations with you because I think that it could be very impactful for the greater community. I look at like … And I don’t want to change too much off the topic, but I definitely want to just touch on something which could be a to be continued vlog. But learning and school for me was not fun. I think, if you ask any entrepreneur, they feel the same way. I feel like … My kids are in school. I’ve got two little beautiful girls, and they’re in school and they’re in a very different school environment to when I grew up in the ’80s and ’90s, right?
Tobi Skovron: And so, I really love this free learning aspect. Do you think what you guys are doing at WeTeachMe could take out the traditional school? Or do you think it’s a complement in addition to? Like, how do you visualise that?
Kim: I’ve always seen WeTeachMe as a complement, right? It’s this idea that we can spark curiosity and joy in learning. And I think people are different. I learn differently, you learn differently. I learn when I can see someone doing something. I can copy. That’s how I learn. But my sister, for example, she learns by studying, being meticulous, going through her notes, highlighting everything. So I think we shouldn’t discount avenues of learning or channels of learning. But we should really celebrate the diversity in people’s methods of learning.
Tobi Skovron: I love that. I love that because I think, historically, and I think it’s just evolution. I went to a great school. It’s one of the best schools in Sydney, where I grew up. Obviously we’re in Melbourne now. But the learning aspect was not for me. It was very book, textbook, reading, theories, math. I did okay in some of it, but I wasn’t really engaged.
Kim: Yeah. I’ll tell you a little story. So I think that goal setting in life, whatever, it’s important to always be flexible and creative. And when I was in law school in my international human rights law class, I wasn’t very engaged with the assignments that the professor was giving us. So I said to her, “Rather than me sit down and write a five thousand word essay on what are the holes and benefits or issues currently in the international human rights law, why don’t I write a song? I’ll write a song, I’ll get it professionally recorded, performed, and I’ll give it to you.” And wow, she said yes.
Tobi Skovron: Wow.
Kim: And I celebrated because I knew this is something that I would be completely fascinated by. But also, how do you mark a song? It’s an automatic H1 distinction, high distinction.
Tobi Skovron: This guy. See? What I’m talking about.
Kim: I never told her that. Just for this video.
Tobi Skovron: “Oh, by the way …” Mate, thank you so much for taking the time.
Kim: My pleasure.
Tobi Skovron: I love it when you’re in the building. I’m really excited about the potential of hosting you guys on the regular on a weekly basis, where other people can learn from some of your great content. From some of your great connections. From the guest speakers. So guys, stay tuned to more from Kim and WeTeachMe.
Tobi Skovron: Tomorrow we are going to shift gears. We’re going to go back to This Week In Startups, and next week I’ve got some really cool guests coming on the show. This is the awkward part. Kim just sits here. I run around and quickly turn off, so hopefully you enjoy looking at him for another minute or so. Thanks, guys.
