The Latest from Kristy-Lee

Most Australian small business owners already know the honest answer if asked to walk away from their business for a month with no phone, no email, and no checking in. For most, it is messy, or simply not possible, even after years spent hiring a team, building an org chart, and writing role descriptions. The real test is not whether you have built a team, it is whether that team can actually run the business without you making the calls. Here is a simple way to find out exactly how far you are from a business that runs without you, and what is actually behind the gap once you see it.

Why doesn't having a team automatically mean you can step away?

Having a team does not automatically buy you freedom from the business, because most teams are still trained to bring every meaningful decision back to the business owner. A business can have an org chart, position descriptions, and a full staff list and still be completely reliant on one person making the calls. The real measure of freedom...

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 344 of The People Powered Business Podcast.

If you walked away from your business tomorrow for a whole month, with no phone, no email and no checking in, what would you come back to? For a lot of business owners with a solid team, the honest answer is "a mess", or "I'd never even try". You've hired good people, you've got roles and an org chart, and yet the business still leans on you for almost everything.

Here's the thing: hiring a team doesn't automatically give you freedom from your business. Freedom is one of my own values, and it's what I want for every business owner I work with. But so often we build teams and structures that still depend on us completely. Most of us have had the week-long break where we work flat out beforehand to get ready, the team hangs on until we're back, and we return to a pile of questions, decisions and unfinished work. The business didn't run without us that week. It just waited. That's why a month is the real test. It's...

Most Australian small business owners already know who on their team needs to go long before they do anything about it. The decision has been on their mind for weeks, sometimes months, while the excuses pile up and the performance never actually improves. By the time the call finally gets made, what should have been a straightforward exit has usually turned into a far harder legal process, and the rest of the team has already worked out exactly what you're prepared to tolerate. Here is why business owners drag their feet on firing decisions, what the delay is actually costing the business in the meantime, and the legal groundwork worth checking before you make the call.

What actually happens when you sit on a firing decision too long?

The longer a firing decision stays unmade, the more it costs you on every front. Waiting past the probationary period without documented warnings makes an exit far harder to execute cleanly, and it does nothing to protect the business from an unfair dis...

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...

The earliest signs are rarely dramatic. A slightly later start time. Lunch eaten alone instead of with the team. A question that used to come automatically that now doesn't get asked. None of these look like a problem on their own, which is exactly why disengagement is so easy to miss until it's already cost you something, a resignation, a performance issue, or a team member who's technically still there but has stopped contributing anything beyond the bare minimum.

Is this actually disengagement, or are they just having a bad week?

The difference is duration and pattern, not any single incident. Everyone has an off day, a distracted afternoon, a short lunch alone because they needed the headspace. Disengagement is what you're looking at when several of these shifts show up together and stick around for weeks rather than days, with no obvious explanation like a personal event or a genuinely heavy workload.

If you've ever caught yourself thinking "they've seemed a bit off lately" and...

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...

From the first full pay period on or after 1 October 2026, the pay and classification structure for health professionals under the Health Professionals and Support Services Award 2020 changes completely.

If you employ health professionals including occupational therapists, physiotherapists, psychologists, dietitians, podiatrists, medical imaging technologists or other allied health professionals, this is not a straight forward wage adjustment. It is a full reclassification exercise, and it is built on qualifications and years of experience rather than the old flat pay points.

Practices that have never paid much attention to award compliance, because salaries have traditionally sat well above the minimum, are the ones most exposed right now.

What Actually Changes Under the New Structure

Every health professional employee covered by the Health Professionals and Support Services (HPSS) Award needs to be reassessed against the new structure before 1 October 2026. That reassessment i...

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...