Michael Trkolta

Cleaned & Rewritten Transcript

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability. Filler words and false starts have been removed and sentence structure improved, but the substance and voice of the conversation remain unchanged.

Henry Harrison: Welcome to the Henry Harrison Podcast — entrepreneurs, business, and finance. Today we're fortunate to have Michael Trkolta on the podcast with us. He is an entrepreneur extraordinaire, I'll call him. Three businesses right now, and lots of good things to share about AI and marketing and the future, and you name it. But I'm going to let Michael talk about what he's doing. Hello, Michael.

Michael Trkolta: How you doing, Henry? Good to be with you and your audience. Thank you very much for having me.

Henry Harrison: I don't know where to start. Why don't you just tell us what you're doing right now, how you divide your time, what your businesses do, who your clients are. You seem very positive, like you enjoy them — I'm sure not every moment, but yeah.

Michael Trkolta: Well, business is — as long as you're enjoying 80% of the time, Henry, you're doing good. If you start edging out toward 40/60, it starts to become a bit of a concern.

I've been fortunate enough to enjoy it most of my life. It hasn't always been roses coming up out of the ground and smelling them on a regular basis. But I tell you what, if you can push through those parts and those difficult moments, it certainly builds that armor and strengthens you up along the way.

I'll give you a bit of background on me — who I am and where I came from. I came from a sporting background. I played sport for most of my life, and I think that was the foundational component of where I learned how to become very focused. Very winning-oriented. I don't know whether that's allowed, whether you can say that these days, but winning was very important, especially if you're being paid for it in a professional capacity.

Toward the end of my career in tennis, and working with other athletes, I thought, I really want a change. I'd studied at university as well — architecture and marketing. And I thought, you know what, I don't want to do any architecture, because my dad was in architecture. I'll just jump straight into marketing. Then I got through it, almost finished it, and decided, I think I can do this. So I started up a publishing company.

I kicked off with this publishing company, and it was just an idea. I had no business acumen at that point in my life, which was really tough. And I tell you what, that was the school of hard knocks. You learned pretty quickly that your idea wasn't always as great as you might think it is. A lot of people said no, and you had people that said yes. But the beauty about it was you learned a lot from the ones that said no. So I asked a lot of questions. Questions were important. That really honed my skills, and obviously the product.

So we built a product in publishing. I owned the entire east coast of Australia with a local directory-based advertising component for local businesses only. In townships that really don't have a voice and don't have the money to go out and spend tens of thousands of dollars on advertising — but they could do it in this book. This one little book, called My Yearly Directory, was a beautifully bound book, presented very well. Not one editorial in it. We had the Yellow Pages study it, using it in their study courses on how to fill up a book without any editorials whatsoever and get people to use it. I had 1.5 million readers at the height of it before I sold it.

And the reason I sold it — it was a really difficult decision. It was based around where the internet was going. The internet was starting to come up. I had dial-up. You remember the days of dial-up? It took twenty minutes to render one image, before broadband kicked in. And I started getting requests from people asking, "Can you do something for us? We want a thing called a website."

And it was like, okay, I've got this. Now it's starting to come together. All these pieces started to come together, and it was mostly the clients that we already had. We had about 3,000 clients along the east coast, and overnight we were building one-page websites. It was all coming together, and I thought, I'm going to take a bit of a leap of faith here and jump into digital.

So I planned it out very carefully. It was a huge risk, because I was watching people fall over left, right, and center trying to get into this space without planning. But I planned it out very carefully. Everyone in the organization thought I was nuts, but I read the writing on the wall, and we had people literally calling up left, right, and center. This was the time — one-pagers, 30 websites in a month. We were pumping out one a day. Moved away from that and got straight into digital, and the rest is history. That's where I've been for the last twenty-plus years now.

Henry Harrison: I was just looking at the population of Australia on my phone — 28 million people — and you're on the east coast, which is where most of the population is. Obviously Australia is huge. How does it compare to the US? It's surprisingly big, even compared to the US.

Michael Trkolta: You guys have three hundred and — what is it — sixty million people. We have just over 25 now. Back then it would have been around 20 million people. So to have achieved that, I was pretty happy with it. I didn't expect it. I was quite happy just doing my thing in Victoria, but it took off right along the east coast, which was fantastic. So considerably smaller in population, around the same land mass as the US.

Henry Harrison: I've been to the east coast. I haven't been to the center, or the west coast, because there's so much traveling just on the east coast. And I always get a kick out of it — you know, time zones around the US, but weather, and the fact that it's Friday morning there when it's Thursday here. It's one thing to say six hours, eight hours, but somehow when it's the whole next day, it's sort of a neat thing about how big the world is.

And of course, down there you're in winter, and we're in Dallas, Texas, so I think it's 100 degrees today according to my weather.

Michael Trkolta: Wow.

Henry Harrison: It was 99 degrees, and my wife and I went to Wyoming — a famous park, Yellowstone National Park — to see the wildlife and get away, but also to cool off, because in the mornings it's in the 50s. So down there, what's the weather right now? It doesn't snow too much or ice, does it, in Melbourne?

Michael Trkolta: It's about 35 at the moment. It's considered a warm day today, so we have two extremes. Anything along the east coast, you can go from 30, 40 degrees right down to, depending on where you are in Australia, minus two or three overnight. So it can get very, very cold over winter. Even in some of the warmer parts, even in the desert — the desert cools down over winter.

Henry Harrison: I didn't recognize the schools, because you probably wouldn't recognize all the schools in America — I don't even recognize all of them, and I think there are five thousand or so. But you mentioned architecture, RMIT University, and also Institute of Management, and decided not architecture. Went off to the directory, had an exit, sold that. Went into websites before anybody knew what they were, and was dominating the east coast for that. And that's where I interrupted you, about the fun of just talking about Australia. If I summarized that right — correct me if I messed it up.

Michael Trkolta: It's really funny that you mention RMIT. I studied at RMIT, which is one of the major universities here in Australia. That was my architectural component, and marketing, weirdly enough. And then they turned into a client, nearly 30 years later.

Henry Harrison: Wow. That's pretty cool. Something to be proud of.

Michael Trkolta: Yeah, something to be very proud of. It's nice to know that the university you went to became a client down the track — although none of the teachers and the lecturers are there anymore, unfortunately. But it's a nice little badge of honor to have.

Henry Harrison: That might be a good thing. If you got in trouble, they might not have taken you on as a client. I don't know what your drinking habits were back then.

Michael Trkolta: Well, I wasn't too bad. I'd like to think that I was okay at school.

Henry Harrison: I'm sure you were. I'm just trying to make a joke. Not everybody's proud of every moment they had in college.

Michael Trkolta: No, absolutely not. So that was a great experience. And then the business grew into a company called Network Media. Now we have three mastheads.

What I mean by that is, we have WebOracle, which is a 360-degree digital agency that specializes in mid-tier to enterprise-type businesses. Mid-tier in Australia — even though we work with US companies, mid-tier here in Australia is considered 50 to 200 million dollars, and it's usually privately owned. We also work with listed companies, but that's obviously the higher end of the enterprise spectrum.

Then we have Amped Brand, which is an FMCG branding company that looks at anything to do with print. Again, a little bit of print involved, for mid to enterprise-type companies, right across the board.

And then we have a company called Premium Links, which does PR and advertising online. Coming up with PR snippets that really come together, that are carefully thought out and crafted in a way that you can literally drop them into a journalist's hands on a Friday night just before they need to go down to the bar, and they need to get something out really quickly — and then you hope that it explodes for your client.

So they're the three different companies that we have. But the great thing about them, Henry, is that they all pull different resources from each other, and I've learned to understand that resources are really important. They're hard to come by. And to really build up resources in a company, A, you've got to have good turnover in that company. Two, you've got to have stable turnover and that recurring revenue model.

So I've always focused around a recurring revenue model. And that's been a challenge. That's a huge challenge. I remember one time, through the inaugural stages of WebOracle, building it up and moving it along, all of a sudden we landed our biggest client. And I thought, this is great. We've got a client.

But that client took up 60% of our revenue, and we were really top-heavy. And one day that client decided to leave, when we had a bunch of people sitting around in the office. And I was like, okay, this doesn't look good at the moment.

We had the accounts people, everyone literally grouped together and said, well, we need to cut costs here, unless you can pull a rabbit out of the hat. And of course you can't just pull a rabbit out of the hat if you've got a major client that's dropping seven figures on an annual basis into your coffers. You're not going to pull that out overnight. It's a long lead time with a big runway before you can actually land that one. So it's a difficult one to have filled.

And I learned a very valuable lesson. I spread the risk completely across the board moving forward from then. I never allowed, from that day on, any one client to be bigger than 10% of our total revenue within the company.

Henry Harrison: Very smart. And then you have, I guess, dozens of people it looks like, between the different companies. Do you have different office spaces, or are you all in the same space? Do you go back and forth? It seems like they're overlapping skills from your standpoint, but also distinct clients and markets.

Michael Trkolta: Good question. We have them in groups. We work out of one building — we have an entire floor in central Melbourne, and we work in groups. Premium Links sits in one section of the office, then you have WebOracle in another section, then you have Amped Brand and the creative sitting in another section. And then centrally we have the office manager, digital marketing director, and the various other stakeholders within the business who are grouping everything together to make sure everything runs well.

That really is the key — making sure that everyone is talking to each other. We have whips on a regular basis. We never, ever let anything slip through the cracks. One of the quickest things to happen in a business is to land a great client that has great potential in terms of recurring revenue, and then the left hand's not talking to the right hand, and you become irrelevant in their eyes — for the reason that you haven't picked up the brief properly, or it hasn't been explained very carefully internally.

So communication is critical in what we do. We have a communications person who literally sits in the middle of everything, and everything goes through a flow. One of the things we always look at is channel before strategy. We look at each client, we break them down in a whip, and we make sure that we sit each client in a silo of their own.

I don't know whether I'm getting ahead of myself, but we use AI. We lean on that quite a bit. And I know a lot of companies don't. They use it for different things, and I've even heard people in our industry just complain about it. But I feel there's a lot of downward force on people at the moment. You're either in or you're out.

I've seen businesses in the last six months here that historically — especially the creative ones — have literally gone to the wall, because companies like ours, companies that are really focused on improving systems and understanding what their client needs are and strategizing a lot quicker, and creating a system where everyone knows what's going on at any one time, that's critical. A lot of people use AI in different ways.

Henry Harrison: So when you say "go to the wall," that's an Australian expression. That means they're getting in trouble.

Michael Trkolta: They're going under. They're getting in trouble.

Henry Harrison: Give a few examples, because it's all in the news. Whether it's a graphic designer or whatever, AI, boom, boom. But you can leverage it too, so that hopefully you can continue to grow and service your clients better.

Michael Trkolta: Absolutely. So there are two trains of thought. If you're not picking up on it — I'll give you one example. There's an agency that recently went to the wall, in the next large city over, in Geelong. And we hired half their people. They just didn't pick up on AI. They were still doing things through spreadsheets, emails, and talking to each other. They had about 20 to 30 people that they employed.

As we employed some of the people that they had — the talent they had was fantastic at what they did, but they needed to be upskilled. Every time we asked them a question about AI, they had no idea about AI. They had no idea about how much it can improve your workflow and get things done a lot quicker. To not know that in this day and age, I think it can really work adversely and very much against you. And they literally went to the wall.

Henry Harrison: When we say that, they had financial problems. They had to lay people off. They may have gone out of business. That's what we're talking about.

Michael Trkolta: They did. They had financial problems. Well, they didn't go out of business entirely — they're only down to the owner and his wife. So from a business that's been around for 50 years, to do that, because they haven't picked up on AI.

Where a lot of young people — even some of the young people that we're employing at the moment — the talent that's coming out of universities at the moment is unbelievable. We're just picking them up everywhere, because they're just like sponges. They absorb everything. And I feel that a lot of historical legacy businesses that are in our field are really dropping off, because they're not picking up technology.

Technology's your friend. You've got to lean into it. If you don't like it, lean into it at least and try it, and if you don't like it, then don't buy it. If you've got a better way of doing something, and you have, then do that. No one's stopping you. But at least have a look at it.

Henry Harrison: You're leaning in. You've been leaning in since the beginning of the internet, really, so congrats to you for that. Let me divert us a little bit. So that was a tough day, week — you lose the big, huge client with over a million dollars in revenue, back then, where you may not have had as many people and as much revenue to start with. Did you have to lay some people off? You probably did.

Michael Trkolta: Oh, yeah. We had to lay off nearly 40% of our staffing.

Henry Harrison: Horrible.

Michael Trkolta: That was probably one of the worst days of my life. I felt like I failed. And I came home to my wife and said, "This has got to be the worst day of your life." She said, "No, it's not the worst day of your life. It's the best day of your life."

And I thought about it, and she put it into perspective. It was a great learning experience. It's a lesson that I learned, and I learned from it. And the good thing about it is I got to re-employ quite a few of those people back.

Henry Harrison: That is a good thing.

Michael Trkolta: It was a good story. It was a happy ending story, so I was really happy about that. But they understood. That was a business learning lesson. And business lessons are lessons that you need to look at very carefully and say, what are the moving parts that cause issues? Things like AI, you've got to lean into. Anything that comes up that you think you need to look at, that could disrupt the environment, you need to look at it immediately.

Henry Harrison: Is there a story, or a sample of a particular company — maybe you don't want to say it publicly — and some things you've done for them, to take it down to a more granular level of, hey, a company comes in the door and we did this, boom, boom, boom, and therefore their revenue was up, or their retention of customers was up, those kinds of things?

Michael Trkolta: Sure. I'll give you one. I'm happy to say, the Hilton Hotel — I'm sure you guys know the Hilton Hotel Group.

Henry Harrison: Oh, yeah.

Michael Trkolta: The Hilton disappeared out of Melbourne. They used to have a great footprint here in Melbourne, all the way up until, I think, around 1985, and then they moved out. They had one of the biggest hotels in the country at that point, and then decided to move out. But they had a really bad, stale look about them. Things were changing around in the '80s, we were moving into the '90s, and it just looked like a hotel for businessmen jumping off planes all the time in wrinkled suits and leaving in the morning.

They basically shut that hotel down, and then they came back and said, "We're going to try this again, but we're going to do it a little bit differently." And I worked with a chap called Kenneth Chen, who represented the organization.

He came to me and said, "Look, we're opening up a hotel in the middle of Melbourne. It's going to be boutique. It's going to be this, that, and the other." And I got really excited, because it was completely out of the box of what they normally do. I'd looked at the model, I'd stayed at their hotels, and they've always been very cookie cutter. This was completely out of the box.

They wanted to attract locals. And we thought, okay, how are you going to do that? The only way you're going to be able to do that — we looked at a couple of offerings that they had. They had a restaurant, they had a great bar that was being put together, and we thought, this is your segue into getting people in through the door.

We built a campaign around it, because they were in the financial and legal district of Melbourne, which is quite large, in Collins Street and just on William Street. That's the legal section and the financial section.

Henry Harrison: That part's still the biggest business city in Australia, ahead of Sydney?

Michael Trkolta: Well, I think it's neck and neck.

Henry Harrison: Comparable? Neck and neck? Okay.

Michael Trkolta: Neck and neck. But Melbourne's pretty influential. All the big four banks are here. You've got a lot of business here. Even BHP, one of the biggest mining companies in the world, sits here. So you've got all of those people sitting in the area.

So we thought, we're going to come up with a concept, and we're going to talk to all the stockbrokers. We're going to talk to everyone that's nine-to-five in the area, and we're going to fill up the bar, which was called The Douglas Club, and Lucci, which was the restaurant. This beautiful, sprawling art deco space, high ceilings — they would have been at least 60 feet high — in a beautiful location. And it was big.

So we created a campaign. We understood the audience. We created a marketing strategy around that. We picked all of our instruments very carefully, like a song sheet. We just created a song sheet and wrote a score for each channel — your Meta, Google Ads, and so on. So we looked at it like that. We wanted to make sure that everything was in tune before we hit the go button.

And within three months — I'm not going to dive into the weeds, but within three months we literally had that place, the bar, packed at five o'clock every single night. From the bar, they'd go to the restaurant, then the next group would come through, and it was full five days a week, Monday through Friday, and even on Saturdays and Sundays.

And I'll tell you how that came about. A lot of the people who were working in the area would tell their friends, "This is the place to be, and if you're going to stay anywhere, you should stay upstairs, because it's a boutique hotel." So they not only got international travelers through their own marketing channels, they also got locals staying there, through the right marketing activity, to come in and make a bit of an event of it.

And then what we did — we decided to create a bit of a story around the building, because the building had so much heritage. It was such a beautiful building that we created an app for it. Anyone that walked in hit the QR code, and they'd be taken back through history, through this wonderful story about the building. A lot of the old bits and pieces were still remaining in the building that they could look at and go, "Oh wow, that's been there for 200 years, and this is what it used to do."

So that really was an attraction point. We created a point of difference, so it looked completely different to any other hotel. Melbourne has hundreds of hotels, but that place is humming, due to that activity.

I'm really thankful that they acknowledged it, that they stepped away from it and gave us the power to be able to do it. Kenneth — we'd worked with him before in another capacity, but in this capacity he really said, "Look, take it over. Come up with a strategy." He liked it. We pitched it to them, and away we went. We just spoke a different language.

And I think preparation is critical in everything that you do as a brand. When people say luck, there's no such thing as luck. It's preparation meeting opportunity. I'm sure you've heard that before. And it goes a long way. And then it's just rinse and repeat, and they've been doing that ever since. They've been a client of ours for, oh, I don't know, over 10, 12 years now.

Henry Harrison: And you say recurring revenue. How exactly do you get that? That's recurring revenue because you've had a client for 10 or 12 years, but that's probably not a contract. Maybe it's a contract. Talk a little bit about recurring revenue, because that gives your company a lot of solid financial stability, in addition to lots of big clients. So your people that work there know they're going to be in good shape, and on and on. Your customers know you're going to be there for many years to come.

Michael Trkolta: So recurring revenue for us is a critical component. If it's not recurring, and someone comes to you and says, "Okay, all I need is a really quick design and a couple of business cards" — that's not recurring revenue.

Recurring revenue is when someone comes to you and says, "Look, I really need help with my marketing on an ongoing basis. I need you to come up with the narrative, the story. And I don't want them getting any fatigue — I don't want any new potential or existing clients getting fatigue. I want a rotating marketing campaign that comes up with something new and fresh every month to two to three months, so it keeps them engaged and ongoing. And I want you to look after a bunch of assets for us as well."

So our whole business model revolves around that component. We work with companies that generally don't necessarily have a marketing department, or if they do, they have a very small one, and they're always stretched for time. They don't ever have enough time in the day.

Marketing people just won't call you if everything's running well. It's when things aren't running well that they have problems. So they tend to pass things over in a capacity where it's a service level agreement, and that is our recurring revenue model.

Now, in some cases, if it's a larger enterprise company, we might need to scale up. So we might lock them in for a two or three-year contract, and then that contract will come up after two to three years, and we'd have to re-pitch for it again based on their brief and their requirements.

So we work on a recurring revenue model, and as I said, 10% is no more than what we want to make from any one client in terms of income, for that risk component. And that keeps everything very stable, as stable as possible.

But it also builds an attraction for your business. If you ever one day decided that you wanted to sell your business and move on and do something else — and a lot of people don't really have an exit strategy with businesses. They either pass them on, or they just keep working them into the ground. Some, not all. But they don't know what to do then. So if you've got that exit strategy, that recurring revenue model is a critical component to being able to sell it very quickly. It's a very attractive business model.

Henry Harrison: Just an aside. I was just making sure he was still CEO and president — Chris Nassetta. We grew up in the same town in Arlington, Virginia, went to the same high school. He's the CEO of Hilton Worldwide.

Michael Trkolta: Oh, nice.

Henry Harrison: I still see him once in a while when I go back. My siblings knew his siblings, parents knew his parents. Small world.

Michael Trkolta: We'd love to work with the ones in the US as well. Actually, we did. I think there's a head office in Texas as well — their IT department sits there.

Henry Harrison: Oh, okay. I was going to ask you that — about working in the US. These days, most things are remote. A hotel, you probably need to have someone go in and walk around and look at things. But a lot of things you don't necessarily have to be on the ground for. So you can work with companies in the US, companies anywhere, I suppose.

Michael Trkolta: Oh, we do. Premium Links, that I mentioned earlier, is our B2B offering. We have companies like Keypath. We have various companies that come to us directly that are aggregators for universities. So we work with a bunch of universities in the US that require ongoing marketing for their services, their offerings, their courses, their MBAs.

Premium Links is the platform that most of them come to. Premium Links is all about PR strategies, and coming up with links on specific types of platforms and journals that really connect with an audience to build authority, and obviously give them some exposure throughout the spaces they really want to be recognized in.

So generally we have SEO experts, marketing experts, and it's a transactional platform. We've been working with a bunch of US universities, and even businesses now are coming on board, because of the media connections we have — not only in the US, we have them globally. And a lot throughout Australia, from News Limited, who I'm sure you guys know, right through to Fairfax, ACM, a bunch of them.

On hand we probably have about 250-odd journalists that support what we do. But they're also very industry-specific, because each type of business, especially if it's legal or finance, requires a certain type of language. There's governance around the way you can write about a particular business in certain countries, especially in Australia. And even in the US to some degree, with certain things.

I mean, you can't advertise legal services here as frequently or as easily as you can in the US. I remember driving over to Palm Springs, where my wife and I go on occasion, and just seeing all these great legal boards, and thinking, wow, that's pretty cool — because we can't do that in Australia.

Henry Harrison: It's true. A lot of advertising for lawyers in this country. I think everybody pretty much knows that. Especially our plaintiffs' attorneys, injury lawyers — a lot of signs, on the billboards, for some reason.

Michael Trkolta: That was an eye-opener for me. The first time, I would have been about 20 years old, landing there, and it's just all these signs everywhere. But legal, in a way that I'd never seen legal before. It was so compartmentalized, that they specialized in each area, and I just thought, wow, that's impressive.

So that's our platform, and that's the one that's getting us into the US.

We're coming up with a new platform at the moment — talking about AI. We've literally built a platform that we've been working on for the last 18 months, which is about to be launched toward the end of this month. It goes through all your various touchpoints of your online platform and looks at every single moving part.

We've put in close to 2,000 data points that it analyzes. It compares you with other people within your industry, within your geolocation, and tells you where the issues are, using AI. We've programmed it in a way that it spits out the right data. So we're going through the testing phase at the moment for WebOracle, and that's something we're pretty proud of. It's taken a little while.

So talking about leaning in — we just went right in there on that one. And I think that's where a lot of things are going at the moment, and you're going to see a lot more of it over the next three to five years.

You look at some of the big platforms — they do get a lot of backlash on letting people go. But AI does drop a lot of that grunt work. Let's face it, anyone that's using AI, the amount of grunt work that you don't now have to do is just remarkable, in my view.

Henry Harrison: And change is always difficult. But in the US, there are articles now, at least in the Wall Street Journal, that there's actually more hiring going on than there are layoffs from AI. So I think there's a lot of opportunity for people. And the young people too — they grow up with the phone. And everybody should be using it, regardless. But you were talking about the young people — they're catching on.

So there's a lot of good opportunity. It's just, change can be hard if you're in the wrong spot at the wrong time. And I always feel for those people. But there are a lot of other people that are benefiting. And hopefully those people will find their right seat as well, if they get laid off from one spot. Like the people that didn't make it in the other company — a lot of them are working for you.

Michael Trkolta: Yeah, absolutely. But it's really interesting that you say that. AI's not really for everyone, right? So if you were to give, let's say, Anthropic to a 15-year-old, would they know what to do with it?

Henry Harrison: That's a good question. Probably not.

Michael Trkolta: No. And do you know why?

Henry Harrison: I want to hear your answer. I'm not sure how far ahead of me you are.

Michael Trkolta: It's kind of rhetorical, really, because there's no life experience as yet. Very minimal life experience, and no business structure or understanding of what it can do, or how things work out in the real world.

You've got to come to it with a plan, right? And you've got to know what you're doing. If you've got some business acumen, you can probably work your way around it. It doesn't come with a manual. Everyone does it in their own different way, and I've seen people do it in different ways.

The ones that can't use it generally don't have as much business experience, and they're usually a lot younger. And I'm not knocking anyone, I'm just saying that you've got to have a plan. So it kind of talks to a particular type of audience. And I feel the ones that don't get it now are starting to pick up on it and play around with it. I like the fact that there's a freemium version of everything out there, so you can play around with it, learn it, understand it, and then get into it.

Henry Harrison: And it's still shocking, too. I heard — and maybe this has changed in a few months — but a speaker on AI, I went to a seminar, and he said they did a survey and only 1% of the people in the US were using AI. And the definition of using it was searching using AI, which now you can do on Google, at least twice a week — which I think most people would say is not really using AI. So again, that's surveys, probably, because I don't think Google had released that yet. But that was two or three months ago.

Still, the change that's coming is going to be profound, and already is. But it's still a normal world in many parts of business, where it's not drastically changing that much.

Michael Trkolta: No. Look, two years ago I was using Google like there was no tomorrow. You jump on Google and you do all your research there. And then you've got to wade through all of the information and collate it and do what you need to do.

I feel with Anthropic, or Claude, if you like — and we use different ones for different things. There's not one that does everything.

I go into meetings now, and I'm not sure whether you've heard of a platform called Granola. It's an app that sits on your phone, and you know what it does? It's great. It talks to everything. You just hit the record button, so to speak. It records the entire conversation and takes all the notes, condenses them down into point form, into who said what.

And then what I do is I load it straight up into my silo of that particular client in Claude, and it sits there as my history notes, and I know what's going on at any one time.

So the way we operate a lot of our AI platforms is, we create a silo. We attach all the other AI platforms into it. And everyone has an opportunity to jump in on that shared client silo, and we know what's going on at any one time. So if it's the marketing department, if it's the design department, the management, the finance, whoever it is, they've got a record of everything.

It's a great way of keeping records as well. But more importantly, you can also version control, and go back and see what's going on. So creating these silos creates efficiencies internally for us, and that's one big thing that we've overcome, because communication is a big thing in organizations.

The minute you get past 30 or 40 people, it's an issue — or it can be an issue, in some cases where not everything has been spoken about properly. But if it's sitting in this one silo, it certainly does help.

Henry Harrison: Well, the things you're doing for the clients — listening to you, maybe some are more specific, but you're the whole breadth of marketing. From brand and concept to execution on a daily basis, of the ads and all the different channels, and SEO and graphic design. And I'm not even thinking of all of them, because I'm not in your company. But there's more. And so to keep track of all that, with a big organization, you have to have good systems. That sounds like a great system.

Michael Trkolta: It's a great system. We've gone even as far as — one of the big things that you always need. Everyone's looking for clients, right? Everyone is always looking for clients. You want the right clients. You want to work with the right clients.

One of the most important things we've always found — and this is another school of hard knocks kind of story — when I started off in business, we'd just say yes to everyone.

Henry Harrison: Ah, got it.

Michael Trkolta: It was so hard, Henry. We just got to a point where, "Yeah, we can do that. Of course we can do that. Of course we can do that." Then we found ourselves spinning our wheels, working on work that's already there, but not bringing in additional clients. And that's a very easy trap to get into when clients are asking you for different things on a regular basis, and you're not really itemizing what you're actually doing throughout the day.

So understanding your swimming lane has been an important one for us, and picking who your right clients are is critical. It's the ones you say no to that actually give you the success at the end of the day, because the right one will come along. And for us, it's always been about the right client. It's got to be the right fit, because you really don't want to be fighting the work internally, and worrying about creeping work from the client.

So defining and understanding what that right client looks like is an internal process as well — creating a structure internally, understanding what you're providing that client, itemizing everything. But bringing them in as well, that's a big one. That sales component is critical.

So, again, talking back to my platform — sorry to do that to you and everyone else that's listening.

Henry Harrison: We want to hear about it. It's exciting.

Michael Trkolta: Oh, okay. All right. Well, I'm happy to talk about it then. We've created a system, an AI system, that basically breaks down your entire platform from your brand component right through to every touchpoint that you're using. So if your brand is off point —

Henry Harrison: This is the one you spent 18 months working on, and you're launching at the end of this month? What's the name?

Michael Trkolta: It's at weboracle.com.au. W-E-B-O-R-A-C-L-E dot com dot AU. It hasn't been launched yet, but it will be launched —

Henry Harrison: Sure. I know it hasn't, but we'll get the name right so people can look it up.

Michael Trkolta: Thank you. And what it does — it allows you to, once you land on the site, it basically explains what it does. But we always start off — and no one's been doing this, this is a first. We've created a first in terms of your brand assessment, literally online, and that is the most critical component.

If you've got a website and it's not working for you, and it's not making money or generating leads — what are you doing? Why is it there? Why are you spending money on it? Generally the first port of call is the branding, and understanding it.

Now, this is an easy fix for anyone, and you don't need to come to our website to know this. But if you can't get someone to look at your website and understand what it is you actually do in under five seconds, it's over. They're out. They're out so quickly. And if the branding doesn't relate and doesn't speak the language that they've connected with, that is an issue immediately. Everyone leaves straight away.

So look at your homepage immediately. Check it, and make sure that it stacks up really well. The brand component is the most critical component, because that's the one that connects.

It's like having a dish out in front of you. You go out to a restaurant. You're going to spend, let's say, a couple of hundred dollars, and the dish appears and it's not quite right. It can smell okay, but it doesn't look that good. Is it connecting right away? So first impressions are really important. But then you taste it, and it tastes all good.

So that's the critical component. Then what we've got — we've got plug-ins. You can plug in your Google AdWords connectors from Google. You can plug in Meta, anything that you have, and we can give you a projection read on exactly where your marketing currently is. We're about 5% off at the moment, but we're looking at improving that to get it to about 98%.

And then we can give you a projection as well of where you can be, based around a whole heap of algorithms that we've created. And we crawl other competitors to see where the gaps are and give you a full report on that. So we're kind of backing what we do, as opposed to just providing you a report and walking away.

It's all under the one roof. And what we've found — a lot of enterprise businesses generally tend to like everything under the one roof, especially if you've got a marketing department that is talking to five or six providers. Henry, I'm sure you've been in business for a very long time, and when you've got a lot of providers that you're dealing with, they're all blaming each other, especially if they're in the same field, if something's going wrong. And enterprise just don't have time for that. So they tend to go with a proven provider where they feel comfortable and they're getting results. That's a critical component.

Henry Harrison: So let's have fun with it for a minute. By the way, on that story — I started my first business when I was 26, a custom home builder. Built a spec home, sold it, and realized no one was going to buy a custom home, their dream home, from a kid.

So I managed to find a business partner that was 20 years older, and the first thing he told me is, "The best thing you can do is send the difficult clients to your competition." So, like you were saying, find the right customer that's the fit for you. Because if you know me, I was like, "Client, client, client. Give me the client. I want to build, client, please." And he said, "No, no, no, we don't want that client."

So anyway, a little different than an enterprise software company, but similar model, similar thinking.

So when you were a kid — obviously you mentioned tennis, at a very high level and competitive. Your dad was in architecture, if I got that right. Did you envision yourself even starting a new company at this time in your life, after all the ones you've started?

Michael Trkolta: No, I had no idea. I knew I was entrepreneurial, and I kind of went against the grain in some capacity, in a positive way. But I never knew.

I was the kind of kid that just came up with an idea and thought, okay, this is a good idea. But I always liked the idea of business. Business was always in the back of my mind, and I liked the idea of getting something off the ground and going through a process and making it happen.

But did I know what? No. Our municipality-based directory, the one down the east coast, our publishing company — that was an overnight thought. And the next day I wrote down the entire plan on how we're going to do it. I went out and got the stock, put it all together, and that's literally where it took off.

I had one other idea back even earlier than that. I would have been about 18. This was around the university years. And I thought maybe doing cakes in a cup would be really good. So I came up with this idea and got a mixer and got a chef to make up a whole heap of different cakes that'd sit in a cup for a while. And then I'd go out and visit a whole heap of people around where I went to school, and the universities and so on. They'd all buy a box each, and they'd fly off the shelf.

But then I realized it was going to take a long time, and the scaling component was a little more difficult than I anticipated, because my pockets weren't deep enough. And I was still a little green at that time in terms of understanding how to get everyone together and scale this thing up to the top. So that was a hard thing to do. And I let that go pretty quickly, because hospitality, as I'm sure you know, is a difficult business. I just didn't have the pockets for it.

But I learned a lesson from that. Okay, do something. I literally sold an entire book. And that led into my publishing. I sold an entire book without having to spend a cent before I went to print. So I learned that recurring revenue's a good thing. I learned that getting people to pay for things up front, before you do them, is a better thing. And it's less risky.

Those are the types of lessons I've learned along the way that have really stuck with me. But I really like your one — send your bad clients off to your competition. I'm stealing that.

Henry Harrison: Well, that's a pretty good wrap-up. But if there's something else you'd like to add — I'm going to say, from Thursday evening in Dallas, have a great Friday, since it's early morning, a great Friday in Melbourne.

Michael Trkolta: Thank you.

Henry Harrison: Is that where you live? Do you actually live in Melbourne?

Michael Trkolta: I do live in Melbourne, yes. Melbourne, Victoria. I'm not far from central Melbourne, in Brighton.

Henry Harrison: Nice.

Michael Trkolta: But look, if anyone wants to connect with me, you can find me on LinkedIn under Michael Trkolta, which I'm sure you'll share on your feed at some point as well, Henry.

Henry Harrison: We will.

Michael Trkolta: Henry, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for having me, and for hearing my story. It's been wonderful. I hope that your listeners got something out of it as well.

Henry Harrison: I know they will.

Michael Trkolta: Thank you very much.