Why Curiosity is Your Secret Superpower

Automatic transcript provided by Captivate. It may contain small errors.

Welcome to the Pet Grooming Business Podcast with me, Bill Betts, where we give practical business advice to help you grow your pet grooming business. This podcast is sponsored by Low Pay, the low rate payment app that gives you more. So without further ado, let's get going.

Hi, everyone, and welcome back to this episode of the podcast, Just Me today. And I thought I'd come in and talk to you about a topic that I was quite interested in and I think has certainly helped me and Al on me and Emma in our grooming business. So we're going to dive into the topic of being cur. Curious, if I can say it correctly, being curious. And I think this is actually an underrated superpower of the entrepreneur or business owner. Now there's a question. Do you actually see yourself as an entrepreneur?

That'd be quite an interesting one to ask yourself. But anyway, let's dive into this topic of being curious. Now, I know from running my group, the dog groomer business, help and support, that pet groomers are naturally quite a curious number of business owners. And, and I see like every day lots of questions coming into the group asking about, you know, what should I do in this situation? What blades, what shampoos do you recommend? You know, how can we do this? How can we do that when it comes to the actual, the practical side of pet grooming?

And I know, you know, it's a fantastic industry to be in because you love getting out to seminars and watching others, like doing haircuts on particular breeds and stuff. So you're a naturally curious type, bunch of people, people when it comes to the practical side of pet grooming. But are you as curious when it comes to running your business?

You know, are you asking the questions all the time? So many groomers do stop being curious when it comes to running the business side of things. They sometimes I find they settle into habits, routines. You know, you're very busy doing the. Doing the actual job and get into routines. And then we just get into this habit of saying, well, this is just the way it's done. This is how it always happens. And this can really stop us from growing our business. So as many of you know, I do like, I do enjoy a nice business book and I recently got a copy of Arnold Schwarzenegger's book Be Useful.

That's a really good book recommendation. And I always like actually listening to the books on Audible and I really enjoy it when the actual author is reading the book themselves. I find I get more out of the expressions and the tone and the language so Arnold reads his book and Be Useful on Audible. So I've listened to it quite a few times, actually. And in it, and this is what has inspired the podcast, because in it he talks about the tools we all need to make ourselves valuable to our businesses and to our customers to get ahead and to thrive.

And one of those tools, maybe one of the most important ones, is curiosity. So let's have a little dive into curiosity. So it certainly has helped us with our pet grooming business.

I often say, you know, my wife Emma, who runs our business, A to Z Animal Care, she's never really been one for hanging out in Facebook groups or networking with pet groomers, to be fair. She's always kind of run her own race and done her own thing. And I think this is where curiosity has always benefited our business. You know, she's always trying new products, she's always looking out for innovation within the industry. And this has certainly helped when it's come to the teeth cleaning side of things with me Pet and also looking at products from people like nexmune.

If you want to learn more about nexmune, go and go back probably for the day, a couple of months on the podcasts, and there's a couple of podcasts there talking about Next immune and their products. But Emma, being a veterinary nurse, was always a little bit skeptical of me pet and teeth cleaning and whether we should, shouldn't, etc. You know, all the questions because we see it every day. But she didn't turn to Facebook groups to get answers to the questions. She listened to the suppliers of the product and then was curious about how the products work, what the product did, what the benefits, what the results, etc.

And invested in me pet kit and actually decided to find out for herself what the benefits of me pit was. And so this was around 2020. Well, no, maybe a bit earlier actually, because we were doing it before we went into lockdown. And, you know, we started off with a bit of trepidation, but a lot of curiosity and started delivering me pet to. To our customers dogs. And that's when she started seeing the amazing results that we were getting and fantastic feedback from, from our customers as well about how better the dog was eat.

Some dogs were eating, obviously, how much nicer their teeth were, how much nicer the breath was. And when Emma was seeing the dogs back in, she was obviously seeing that gingivitis was starting to recede and all sorts of stuff like that. So being curious stopped her from just sort of listening to the noise that's out there listening to the opinions and listening to what other people were saying about Amy Pet. Obviously pros and cons and positive opinions and negative opinions. And she went out there and she was curious about the product and made her own mind up about it.

And that helped us obviously believe in the product and go on and sell it. And obviously today we, we're still pro, we're still promoting and using Mu Pet within our business. So curiosity was a real benefit and superpower, I believe, for, for that particular example, this podcast is sponsored by Low Pay. Low pay is half the price of sum up and zettle. So you keep more of the money that you earn. Rate start at 0.79%. Another one that I sort of think about and I talk to my clients quite a lot about this is now, I think this obviously comes naturally from being a police officer for 18 years, is being curious when it comes to business.

And it's asking those questions and talking to people and seeing if, you know, do they know better than me? Do they know? Do they, do they have, like, something that I need to learn and something that I can then take forward to use to bring to my clients. So it's always interesting. Like the grooming business program that I'm the leader of, I'm a head of isn't all about. It's not the Bill Betts show. You know, I'm, I, I, I bring lots of different people into the, into the program to help my clients because everyone's got something different to bring to the party.

I sort of went off on a time on a tangent there. But the curiosity, I suppose that I sticks out for me is when I first signed up, when me and Emma first signed up for mentorship in 2020, I then started to do some digging around our mentors and understand their background. I wanted to know how they were all linked. I wanted to know how they got on in business. I wanted to know their secrets. I wanted to understand why they were so successful. I wanted to know what habits they had to make them successful.

And then I started to realize that all of our mentors that we had, they were mostly linked by a program called Key Person of Influence, which then, then I went and found out who was the head of that program. That's Daniel Priestley. I then started reading his book Key Person of Influence. And here we are with a podcast, with a Facebook group with, you know, all the, all these things started to rub off on me. So by being curious, it kind of got me introduced to my mentor's Worlds.

Another thing that I realized very quickly was my mentors read a lot of books and they took a lot of inspiration from the books that they read and they took a lot of lessons from the books that they read. One mentor that we had, Andrew Priestley, often used to say to us, he would buy a book, and his objective of buying that book was to make 10,000 pounds in sales from that, from an idea from that book, which I thought was. Was amazing. So by me being curious and digging and, you know, trawling through some social media and the Internet and finding out a little bit of background behind our mentors and then sort of observing them and listening to them, I worked out that, you know, reading books and gaining more education and networking and speaking to people and inviting people onto the podcast was a great way to start expanding my.

My knowledge, my inspiration, and being really positive about the business. So that's how being curious has really helped me within my business. So how can it help you in your business? Well, like I mentioned, it's about asking those questions, isn't it? I want your curiosity to start breaking up that status quo. I think one of the most dangerous phrases in business is probably, and be mindful of this and see if you use it, or see if you can find people that say this to you when you're talking about new ideas.

And they say, well, that's how we've always done it. I think that's probably one of the most dangerous phrases we can use in business. Well, that's how we've always done it. Things move on so quickly and we need to be mindful of that. I think in the book I'm writing, I talk about marketing. Don't give too much away, but I talk about marketing and I talk about how, you know, when we started our business, A to Z animal care in 2005, the market was quite simplistic and it was quite easy to find customers.

Whereas the growth since 2005 to 2025, in the last 20 years, the marketing has just become so much more sophisticated. And now customers have become so much more sophisticated when it comes to marketing as well. They're not just sold on a card in the window or an ad in a magazine. There's so much more that we need to do for marketing. So that's where I come from when it means, you know, one of the most dangerous things is that, well, that's how we've always done it. So we need to be curious about that.

What can we do to break up the status quo? Status quo. Even asking why do I do it this way opens doors to new and better solutions. Always asking these questions. Curiosity can also make you more useful. So if you're listening to this podcast and you're an avid listener, being useful to your customers will make you invaluable to them. You know, being useful to your customers might make them like, not go elsewhere and stop looking for someone else, stop looking for another groomer. So again, I pull you back to our Next Moon conversation.

You could go and find out and research more about nexmune and understand more about their products and then start supplying those products to your customers and solving their problems. And that all comes down to you being curious about it. You know, why is Bill inviting this company onto his podcast? Why does Bill and Emma use NextMune products in their business? Why do they recommend NexMune to their products? It's not because, you know, I get some kind of pushback from them, I certainly don't. It's because I, we believe in their products and you can go out there and be useful to your customers.

So by, by being curious and doing some, some investigations and background some knowledge growth, you can actually be, by being curious, you can be more useful to your customers. By introducing products such as NextMune and things like that, it leads to growth. Okay, Curiosity pushes you to learn more about your business. Maybe thinking about your numbers, thinking about your marketing or your clients, and maybe thinking about how to improve your leadership skills if you actually have a team of people underneath you, all these things can help your business to grow and thrive.

So these are some questions that you need to start asking yourself, really, you know, when you start thinking about business, why is it the way it is? You know, why do I earn the money that I do? How much money am I paying out every month? How much does it cost to open my, my business every day? You know, where do my clients come from? Who are my kind of clients? What's the demographic of my clients? Why do I like working my with the clients? Why do I not like working with some of the clients?

What is it about them that stops me from enjoying my diary? What more can I do to market my business? What else is out there? What other tools can I use to make sure that people find me within my business? This curiosity can really help you grow your business.

So hopefully that will start making sense to you and you can start taking some of this away. And I put in the. I had a very good 5 star Google review the other day and it's on my page if you'd like to go and read it. And it's about a pet groomer that was just unhappy with the way that she was. And she had two salons and she wanted to cut down to just one, which was a cat, cat only salon. And, you know, she came in and did a bit of work with me and we had a call and, you know, a lot of the questions was, why, why are you running it?

Why do you do this? Why do you do that? And why is such a powerful, powerful question. So, you know, I want you, I invite you. No, I want you, I invite you to start asking yourself why. So whenever something comes up within your business or within your mindset, start asking yourself why. Be curious if you see some of, some of the results that we get our clients, ask yourself why? Why did I get those results? Why can they charge 75 pounds for Cookapoo but you're struggling to charge 45.50?

Why are they doing so well with upsells? Whereas, you know, you put a post out on social media and don't get anyone asking about it. I want you to, I want you to ask yourself these questions and ask yourself why and get more in touch with your business and the business side of things, not only just the practical grooming side of things. So I hope you enjoyed this little, little ramble of mine. As always, always invite feedback. Let us know what you think. If you are like me and you stopped reading as soon as you left school, which I, which I completely regret now, but if get, go out there and start reading, ask for book recommendations in the, in the big Facebook groups.

Like I said from this episode, one of my book recommendations for you is Be Useful by Arnold Schwarzenegger. And if you can download it on audible, even better because you get to listen to him read it and listen to all his nuances when he comes to reading his own book. All right, take care. And as always, messages. My DMs are open for messages. So if you got a thought on this episode or you're going to take some action from this episode, then please, please let us know.

Take care, everyone. See you all soon. Bye bye. I hope you've enjoyed this podcast. Please make sure you give us a like or a review to help people find it. The podcast is sponsored by Low Pay. Head over to www.lopay.com to find out more about their payment solution.