Matt Best
speaker
628 appearances
20 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2024
last heard 30 Aug
Matt Best’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Hello and welcome to the Growth Workshop Podcast with your hosts, me, Matt Best and Jonny Adams. In this podcast, we'll be sharing insights from our combined 30 plus years experience and hearing from other industry leaders to get their thoughts and perspectives on what growth looks like in modern business.
We'll cover all aspects of leadership, sales, account development and customer success, alongside other critical elements required to build an effective growth engine for your business. This podcast is aimed at leaders from exec all the way down to line managers. Hello and welcome to the Growth Workshop podcast with myself, Matt Best, and my colleague and partner in crime, Johnny Adams.
Great to see you, Johnny, as always.
So today we're joined by Mike Conan, who is an exec coach and a successful executive working in the hospitality sector with a focus on supporting services businesses to drive the right culture and focus on client service. So Mike, it's fantastic to have you on the podcast. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to Johnny and I today.
So I guess as is customary on our podcast, we like to kick things off with a bit of something interesting that's happened in your past week. So Mike, maybe I'll come to you first. What's been going on in your week that you could share with our audience, maybe provide a bit of inspiration?
Why do you feel like you might be the odd one out?
We do tend to talk a lot about, obviously, about the business side and it all comes back to sort of growth. But I think, Mike, what you just shared there is exactly the point of this, right? There's the people side of things and how important that is. I mean, that's great, Mike.
That's quite a high level of maturity in terms of from a leadership perspective that a leader is willing to say, look, that's exactly what I need. I know I'm not sort of going to step out of the numbers for a minute and go back to the roof of my business that might be the people. So, yeah. Absolutely looking forward to digging into that with you a little bit more today.
I mean, Johnny, how do you follow that?
Mike, I can see you're sort of chomping at the bit.
I often share some experiences with family and that I've had with family and I was lucky enough to have my parents over visiting recently. So I think something that I've really taken away in the last couple of weeks probably is just that we will talk about sort of work life balance and how important it is.
But actually, outside of all of those discussions, it was just reconnecting with family and reconnecting with people that you love and then trying to find that. They're trying to find that balance. But I think the most interesting thing is how that's provided motivation in other areas. So, for example, I went on a little jog on the weekend, which has been a long time since I have.
And it was just sort of I felt like it had been inspired by just sort of reconnecting with other parts of my life. And it's given me more drive than in a sort of in a work environment. and a business growth context. So just being able to be conscious of how these things all intertwine and connect with one another, I think is really, really important. So that's my reflection.
But Mike, I think that example that you gave is just demonstration of your sort of credibility in this space and what people really look for when they want to embark on a conversation with you or they hire you to provide services. I mean, tell us just a little bit about your journey so far. How have you come to be where you are today?
Here's something you said there. We've got to work out what works for us. And it's this sort of concept that it's individual and everybody's is going to be slightly different and is going to look ever so slightly different. And I think it's sort of corporate culture. Sometimes it's, well, this is what the business defines as good work-life balance. I'm going to use that term again, but
does that apply to everybody absolutely not it can't possibly apply to everybody so it's understanding individual situations and providing that sort of autonomy maybe control like but it's just even that mindful being mindful about it as an individual and having conversations about it with your organization or your business and sort of working out how how that works best for you and actually i'm fascinated in how that works and coming from um having started my career in
in support and we're going to talk about service today actually sometimes that's really hard to find in a situation where the reality is somebody needs to be standing behind a desk for a period of time somebody needs to be on the other end of the phone to speak to a customer for a period of time a shift or whatever that looks like so how does that work and coming from the hospitality space you know
Like you said, I mean, that industry works incredibly hard, sometimes some very long shifts, sometimes a very antisocial hours, as a lot of other sort of jobs, careers and industries do. How do you find that sweet spot in an environment like that?
I think this is a really important conversation, though, isn't it, around that culture?
And actually, just picking up on that point that you and the term or the word polarity, and I think it's being able to see both those sides, as you said, and Johnny, you just said there, being able to identify what's going on in each of those different worlds and using basic tools such as to-do lists just to keep ourselves honest, because it's really... really hard.
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