Dr. Anthony Orsini, Founder of The Orsini Way, dedicated his career to helping people have difficult, compassionate conversations after an incident during his medical training. His senior, whom he knew to be a very compassionate doctor, completely botched delivery of the news to a father that his baby had just died.
Dr. Orsini reasoned that, if someone this humane could still fail to deliver difficult news effectively, then there must be a need out there. He spent the next 10 years researching the best ways to deliver bad news, and experimenting with how to teach others. Since then, he has become increasingly known for The Orsini Way, which helps people — both healthcare providers and business leaders — to have difficult yet compassionate conversations.
He joins The Savvy Entrepreneur to share his story and research. He also offers tips to help everyone have better conversations. Below is a transcript of the show. You can also listen to an on-demand version of the show here.
Doris Nagel 0:42
Welcome to The Savvy Entrepreneurs show! We’re broadcasting here from the Greater Chicago Milwaukee area.
If you’re an entrepreneur or a small businessperson, or thinking about becoming one, this show is for you.
I’m Doris Nagel, your host for the next hour. I’m a serial entrepreneur, and I’ve also counseled lots of startups and small businesses over the past 30 years.
The show really has two goals to share helpful information and resources and to to inspire you with stories from other entrepreneurs. I feature guests every week on the show who are willing to share their stories and advice.
This week’s guest is Dr. Anthony Orsini. He’s the founder and CEO of a company he calls The Orsini Way. Dr. Orsini, or Tony as he says I can call him, is a practicing physician. He’s also an author and a frequent speaker on the topic of compassionate communication in medicine. He’s the level two Medical Director at one of the largest neonatal intensive care units in the world. And he also serves as chief of patient experience and palliative care, more his neonatal practice.
He’s appeared in local and national news of all sorts, including Forbes magazine. He also has an upcoming TEDx presentation. He’s recently published a book called, “It’s All in the Delivery: Improving Healthcare Starting with a Single Conversation.” In addition, he has a podcast called “Difficult Conversations: Lessons I learned as an ICU Physician.” He ever seen a way he says was founded because he realized that the same communication skills necessary to deliver tragic news to patients were also useful in the boardroom.
Tony, welcome to The Savvy Entrepreneur Show. Thanks so much for joining me this week.
Dr. Anthony Orsini 2:47
Thanks for having me, Doris. I’m really honored that you asked me to be on the show. I’m very excited to talk with you today.
Doris Nagel 2:53
I’m honored that you joined us. Talk a little bit about what the Orsini Way is, and who is it designed to help.
Dr. Anthony Orsini 3:02
The Orsini Way is a company that provides communication training to healthcare professionals and to business leaders, to help them learn how to be good leaders, how to build relationships with their patients or their team members, and just how to succeed in their professional and their private lives.
Doris Nagel 3:24
What made you decide to focus on this, as opposed to just the practice of medicine? Were you always good at having difficult conversations and communicating compassionately?
Dr. Anthony Orsini 3:38
That’s the most common question that I get when I do my workshops around the country: How did you get into communication? How did that become your passion?
And if you don’t mind, I’ll just tell you a story about what happened to me what I was very late in my medical training. I had wanted to be a physician my whole life, since I was six years old. That’s all I ever wanted to do. I graduated from medical school, went on to do a residency in pediatrics and then decided that I would further my training to become a neonatologist, which means that I would be qualified to take care of the sickest of premature babies.
Right before I finished my training, there was something that happened to me. In the middle of the night, I was asked to go pick up a baby from a from another hospital who was extremely sick and that only could benefit from some of the treatments that we had in our hospital in Philadelphia. This was not uncommon — it had happened dozens of times before. This particular baby when I arrived was very, very sick. We brought him back to the hospital over the Ben Franklin bridge from New Jersey back into Philadelphia.
What I didn’t know is that the father was following us in the ambulance. The baby started to have worsening breathing and its heart rate started to drop. Along the way, we started full resuscitation. When I got back to the to the hospital, my senior — I call him Dr. Cunningham in my book, although that’s not his real name — took over. He and I tried desperately to save the baby’s life.
I was very fortunate that day, I thought, and I still think so, that Dr. Cunningham was my senior. He was to me a mentor, a very compassionate person, and the kind of doctor that I wanted to be when I when I grew up. And at the time, even though I had been doing neonatology for three years, I lived a very sheltered life. I had both my parents and I had my grandparents, and the thought of telling someone that their baby died frankly scared me to death.
So when the baby passed away and we pronounced, the charge nurse came and told us that the father was waiting in the waiting room. And I thought, “This is a perfect time for me to learn how to give bad news to a patient and a family in the most compassionate manner.” Because who else would be better at it than Dr. Cunningham, who I knew to be one of the kindest human beings in the world.
So I asked him if I could observe him speaking with the parent. We walked down the hallway, knocked on the door into the waiting room. And then, frankly Doris, what happened next still baffles me, 30 year later. Dr. Cunningham knocked on the door. He opened the door, introduced himself, and he said, “My name is Dr. Cunningham. Your baby’s dead.”
The father went crazy. He punched the wall. I remember he knocked down the table lamp and Dr. Cunningham just froze. He wasn’t doing anything. The father was screaming. I went to go say something to the father, and Dr. Cunningham just said, “No, let him be.” Finally the father sat down and Dr. Cunningham spoke with him. At that moment, I heard the compassion in Dr. Cunningham’s voice. And that was the Dr. Cunningham that I knew.
But of course, all the damage had been done. After a while we took the father to see his dead son. And I spent a few minutes with him, and then let him have some time alone.
When I walked out into the hallway, Dr. Cunningham was waiting for me. He grabbed me by the lapel of my white jacket, and he pulled me really closely, about a few inches from his nose. I could see looking into his eyes that he was crying. And he said to me very firmly, he said, “Do you see what I just did? Don’t ever do that.”
And then he walked down to the fire escape, and he cried for about 20 minutes.
That day changed me. Because I knew that this man was the kindest, gentlest, compassionate person that I knew. But the skill of telling somebody that their baby died even eluded him. The actual skill of giving someone bad news seem to escape him.
That day, Doris, I decided that I was going to spend my career trying to understand if there is a right and a wrong way of having difficult conversations with patients and their families. And if there is a right way, whether it’s possible to teach the skill.
So I spent 10 years of my career, interviewing dozens of patients and families about the times that they lost the loved one, interviewing dozens of nurses and doctors who I’d give given bad news.
And I found out that yes, there is a correct way to have these difficult conversations, that you can help somebody in the immediate future and even decades later. And that too it was teachable.
So I started a program in 2010 called Breaking Bad News, and I’ve have been training doctors on how to getgive bad news ever since.
But as you said in the intro, in the process of teaching all these doctors, I realized that the same skills that were necessary to tell someone that their child died were also applicable during other difficult conversations, during conflict resolution. Such as in business when you’re having that difficult conversation with a team member. Maybe separating employment. And so that’s how I got into the business. And with COVID, I’ve been working with businesses more than ever.
Doris Nagel 9:53
I definitely want to touch on how your business has evolved and why.
But first, I’m curious. I’m sure a lot of healthcare providers, being you’re in the business of delivering new sense of great joy to a lot of people occasionally, but oftentimes a lot of things that people would really rather not hear. And I have no doubt that certainly I’ve seen this at a personal level, I’m sure many of our listeners have to where the news perhaps wasn’t delivered as, as gently or as compassionately as it could have been. So I’m sure people struggle in healthcare with having those difficult conversations. But what do you think it is about you personally, that you decided to make this a personal mission for you?
Dr. Anthony Orsini 10:56
For me personally, the story I just shared changed me.
But I’ve always been a student of how people communicate, how people build rapport, I’m fascinated with nonverbal language, fascinated with different words that we use and tone and inflection of voice. It’s really something that’s interested me for a long time. And that day, I realized that communication in medicine is not something taught to physicians or nurses. You would think as a layperson that this is something that we cover in medical school. And it’s not. We’re starting to do that a little bit, and I’m very involved in the training — I’ve trained over 10,000 doctors now. But it’s just been an interest of mine. And I read books constantly, and I’m constantly learning.
Doris Nagel 11:49
I’m glad you’re out there doing that, because it’s obviously needed. At what point did you decide this was more than just something you were doing as a doctor, and realized you could actually have a business around this?
Dr. Anthony Orsini 12:06
Well, I was first approached by one or two fortune 500, companies maybe five or six years ago, to give some lectures at their meetings about how to discuss bad news, and specifically the communication skills I use and how that could help their human resource people when they have those difficult conversations. But it was very just a small part of the business. It was something that I just did for lectures and some workshops.
But then COVID hit. And I got a phone call from a major international company that said, “Please help us. Our human resources people now are having this discussion with their employees about loved ones and team members who have died.” This was an international company that had hundreds and hundreds of employees die of COVID. And you can’t have memorial services, and you can’t be together. And it’s really fallen on the HR people to call Doris or call Tony and tell them that Johnny, who was in the cubicle next to you for the last 10 years, has died. And this company was smart enough to know that they needed some help and some training.
And then second company came, and a third company. I realized then that this is extremely applicable to what I do. And then I started working with companies just about how to separate people from employment. After that, I started the podcast. The whole concept of the podcast is that the communication skills in medicine and the communication skills in business are really the same. And if you can master them, you’re really way ahead of the game.
Doris Nagel 13:58
You know, I think a lot of us are not very good at having difficult conversations. Do you think doctors or healthcare providers are bad at this? Or is it that we’re all just pretty bad at it?
Dr. Anthony Orsini 14:16
I think almost everyone’s bad at it. But everyone can be taught. I mean, after all the 1000s of people that I’ve lectured to and put through improvisation or role playing, there’s very few people that I find that cannot be taught. It’s a skill that can be taught.
But Doris, just like anyone else, human beings are not comfortable in situations that they feel unprepared and not trained for. And so when you’re asking whether it’s a physician, a nurse, or a new leader, a new manager, to separate someone from employment, and you haven’t given that person any guidance on how to do it correctly, then we get nervous because I don’t really believe anybody is not compassionate. No one wants to give bad news, no one wants to do it poorly. So just like any other task, you want to get it over with.
And that’s where things really break down. Once you’re taught how to do this, you will stop thinking of this as a task that needs to be just completed. And think of it more as a skill that you can be proud of, whether that’s in business or in healthcare.
Doris Nagel 15:30
What do you think it is about us as human beings? I mean, why do we avoid some of these difficult conversations? And I’m thinking about, you know, parents having difficult conversations with their teenagers or even with their spouses or their family members. Why is it so difficult?
Dr. Anthony Orsini 15:53
I believe almost all human beings are good people. None of us want to make someone else sad. And none of us want to be in situations where we make someone angry. And in difficult conversations, usually, that’s the fear. Is the person across the table from me or that I’m speaking to, is that person going to either be sad at the end of this conversation, or angry at the end of the conversation?
Now, when it’s bad news, such as a cancer diagnosis, or separating someone from employment, of course, they’re going to be sad. But if you use proper communication techniques, you can soften that blow and help them deal with the tragedy that’s coming. You know, if I’m telling someone that their child died, nothing’s going to change that. But if I do it correctly, I can soften that blow. But I think all of us are good people. You know, we don’t want controversy. We don’t want those difficult conversations. So it just makes us nervous. And then we don’t come up with a plan. And it just it snowballs out of control.
Doris Nagel 16:54
Some of the consequences that you’ve seen when people avoid difficult conversations, or have them but it doesn’t go well?
Dr. Anthony Orsini 17:06
We know in medicine,that when you have when you give tragic news to a patient, and a friend or a family, that not only if you do it incorrectly, that not only could that affect them immediately, like the father in the story that I told you, where he punched a wall and broke a chair and knocked over the lamp. But we know from data that if you tell somebody tragic news, it can affect them up to 30 years later. There’s many people out in your audience that may have been fired or let go, lost their jobs. And you can think back and ask yourself if you still have hard feelings for the person who told you? Or did I understand when I left that room.
I had Dr. Larry Barton as one of the earliest guests on my podcast. He’s a world expert on workplace violence. And his new book talks about how the manner in which you’re separated from employment can really affect whether that person comes back and shoots the place up, or ends up being a stalker. So these communication skills are not just a soft skill that’s needed for doctors – it’s a skill that everyone can have and benefit from.
Doris Nagel 18:27
There’s no doubt difficult conversations can happen every day. Do you think what constitutes a difficult conversation varies from person to person?
Dr. Anthony Orsini 18:39
Absolutely. I mean, I’m not trying to equate a conversation about a loved one who dies in a motor vehicle accident with a conversation with your teenager. There’s various degrees of difficult conversations.
But the concepts are the same: how you approach that conversation, how you lead up to the difficult news, those concepts are all the same. And if you understand communication — as I mentioned, I’m a real big student of nonverbal language — you can use your nonverbal language to send a consistent message. I’m not going to tell you that it’s always going to help with your teenagers, because I find those to be some of the most difficult conversations. But it does certainly help if you have some training.
Doris Nagel 19:32
It occurs to me that one of the things that makes conversations difficult is that if we’re the bearer of the bad news, there are often stories we tell ourselves — things to justify our actions. Either we tell ourselves a story that is’s not really that bad or not that big a deal. So we avoid the conversation or we tell ourselves, “I need to hurry up and get this over with.” And we try to numb ourselves to the human side of things.
Dr. Anthony Orsini 20:17
Absolutely. And again, we think of it as a task. If I can give any advice to your audience that wants to learn how to navigate through these conversations, it is, number one: have a plan. It’s always baffled me how many people will go into a difficult conversation without a plan.
Once you’re trained, that plan will become easier, but also use your imagination. You may not think of this as a difficult conversation, you may think of this just as a conversation that you’re having with an employee to tell him or her that they’re being passed up from a promotion. But take a second before you have that conversation. Take a deep breath, and imagine what it’s like to be the other person. Body language experts such as Amy Cuddy and other experts, have shown us that just by taking that deep breath and imagining yourself in the other person’s shoes, much of your body language will fall into place.
Now, if you’re a real student of this are, you could also use your nonverbal communication to emphasize and even do a better job. But take a second. Don’t rush through it. Take a deep breath, come up with a plan and imagine. and you’ll be halfway there.
Doris Nagel 21:32
What are some of the most common mistakes you’ve seen healthcare providers in particular do when they know they need to have a difficult conversation?
Dr. Anthony Orsini 21:43
100% of the time, even though they don’t think they’re doing it, subconsciously they’re rushing through it. They think of it as a task, they’ve never been trained, they’re human beings, they’re a compassionate person. Physicians and nurses in particular have dedicated their lives to caring for people, so that when something tragic happens, deep down in their subconscious, they think of this as a failure. So one of the biggest mistakes that they make is they rush through it, they don’t have a plan.
And you’ll see how many doctors — even on TV — will have really hard conversations standing up. To me, if you do that, you’ve already lost the game. You can’t tell somebody tragic news standing up, whether that’s on the board room or the hospital. Yet you see it on TV shows all the time — you know, someone runs out and says Dr, how is my wife; Oh, I’m sorry, she died. That should never ever happen. You must sit down.
Doris Nagel 22:49
It occurs to me there is potentially long-term damage to the teller of the bad news, as well. If you constantly try to numb yourself, I wonder if there isn’t potential psychological damage to the person who’s consistently bringing the bad news? Is that something that you see as well?
Dr. Anthony Orsini 23:20
Here’s the interesting thing about that, Doris. There is something called second victim syndrome. Once you are trained on how to do this, and you can change in your mindset, to stop thinking of this conversation as a task, and start thinking of it as a skill that you’ll be proud of, you’ll actually protect yourself.
Because the added trauma to the person giving the news is multiplied when that person is uncomfortable doing it. And they know, just like Dr. Cunningham in my story, he knew that he did it wrong. He was upset about it. And he cried on the fire escape for 20 minutes. Now, you were horrified expression when I told you what he did. But it wasn’t that he wasn’t compassionate. He knew that he had messed up.
So my advice would be that you can limit not only the damage that you’re doing to the person receiving the news, but you will also protect yourself by knowing that, in a terrible situation, you did the best you could when you gave that news to the patient, or when you had to furlough or lay off that employee. You’ll know that you did it in the in the manner that was best for her or him and that even though they’re still being terminated, you know that you did a did a good job. And you’ll go home with less trauma on yourself. Of course, you’re going to be sad. But that’s how you protect yourself.
Doris Nagel 25:03
I think people assume oncologists, for example, and maybe people in in burn units and those kind of positions are delivering bad news especially often. But do you think COVID has amplified some of the challenges for healthcare providers?
Dr. Anthony Orsini 25:22
COVID has certainly amplified the need for this kind of training. Because now the bad news is coming so fast — like rapid fire when we’re finding ourselves in the middle of it.
I would like to dispel the myth that people that do it all the time, get good at it. As I say in many of my workshops, if I teach you how to swing a bat incorrectly, and you do it 1000 times a day, you’ll just get really good at swinging a baseball bat incorrectly. And I play a lot of golf, and I’m not good at it. Many would think that just because I’m doing something a lot, I’m getting better at it.
But that’s only if you’re doing it the right way.
Doris Nagel 26:06
I know you alluded to the fact that a lot of businesses increasingly have seen the value of being able to facilitate those difficult conversations. What do you see as some of the similarities and some of the differences between difficult conversations in a healthcare setting versus in a business setting?
Dr. Anthony Orsini 27:14
It’s all about communication. And there is a big movement now to improve culture with within an organization, within a business. Many companies are trying to get away from the old days where we promoted people who were the smartest people in the group, and then wondered why our employee engagement is down, wondered why our turnover is high.
More companies are realizing that being a good business leader, being a good leader of men and women, is all about the ability to form relationships, and to communicate well — not only during the hard conversations, but during the everyday conversations. And I talk about that a lot in the podcast. And I talk about in some of my lectures, if you understand how to communicate every day, you will be a good leader.
And we know people that have been — me personally, I’ve had bosses who I recognize were extremely smart doctors, but couldn’t lead. And I’ve had bosses who were great doctors that I would walk through fire for them. And when you look at what makes a good leader in business, it’s the same skills that make a good physician. And that’s the ability to communicate.
And so communication is really, whether it’s your professional life, your personal life, if you can learn to communicate, your life will be better. And it can be taught, Doris — and that’s why I get so excited when I talk about this. And that’s why even though I’m still a practicing physician, this is my passion. Because if you can learn to communicate, I can teach you how to get your team members to want to work for you.
My favorite saying is, “People don’t follow because they’re forced to, people follow because they want to.” So the skills that I teach have so many parallels between medicine and healthcare and business. We have many, many physicians, who are the best in their fields, and their practices are failing. And they’re not well liked. And we have mediocre doctors, just competent, but their practices are thriving. What’s the difference? The difference is, one is liked and the other is not liked.
I can take one of those physicians and say, “Let me just teach you how to communicate a little better. Let me teach you how to build rapport. And your practice will thrive.” And it’s the same thing in business. If I can take a leader who’s super smart and work on their communication skills, all of a sudden their turnover is going to go down, and people are going to want to work for them.
Doris Nagel 30:05
I’m curious whether you are selective about your clients. It occurs to me that some are probably much better suited to be able to hear these messages and be able to process and change their behavior than others.
How do you know whether a client is actually going to be receptive to what you have to say?
Dr. Anthony Orsini 30:35
Most of our clients are there because they want to be there. Some of them are there because they were told they had to be there. Those are the most difficult clients. So when you have a CEO of a hospital, or someone who has a particular team member who’s having difficulty with their conversations, and they’re told you have to go through The Orsini Way.
I have several different instructors that we work with. And many of these people we put through improvisational role playing – I use professional actors. But the ones that are forced to come to me are the challenge. But I love that challenge, because that is a skill in itself.
If you were told by your boss, Doris, “Listen, you need to see Dr. Orsini about this,” the challenge that I would have would be to make sure that you’re relaxed, to make sure that you’re open to this before we do the exercises. I might use some humor, but I don’t want to come over there and hit you over the head. I’m going to tell you that I know you have some skills, and I know you have compassion and leadership abilities. And all this is doing is just bringing them out, and is going to help you bring it out. And those are the most satisfying cases, I think.
Doris Nagel 32:06
What does a typical engagement for you look like? Or is there a typical one?
Dr. Anthony Orsini 32:15
Well, it depends on the program that that the person is looking at. We have learning modules, one of them is the bare necessity. But typically, most of our clients are still in healthcare — about 80% of our clients although the business part is growing. But typically, we are asked to work with a group of doctors at a time.
The gold standard in the Orsini way method of teaching is improvisational roleplay, with professional actors. And I use actors that are been on television, on Netflix and Broadway — we use the best of the best. And typically, that doctor or that leader will be put through an improvisational scene in a difficult situation, while that’s being videotaped. And my staff and I will observe, and then we would bring the person in. For instance, if I was doing a role playing session with you, we would watch your video together and comment on everything from your verbal nonverbal language, your tone, your inflection, your cadence, the plan that you had, until you understood exactly, not only what why the conversation might not have gone optimally, but how you can fix it. And usually after a coaching session and one of the improvisational roleplay sessions, we see results just within that short period of time.
Doris Nagel 33:46
How long does an Orsini Way engagement usually last? I’m envisioning that people have “aha” moments and things improve. But as you say, it’s like hitting the bat incorrectly 1000 times. Adults have a lot of ingrained behaviors. And so how do you deal with that? Is there a follow up usually, because I’m sure, it takes time to really change people’s behaviors and approaches.
Dr. Anthony Orsini 34:20
It does. However, I wish your audience can could see how this happens. But it is very much an aha. And we have had doctors and other people that we’ve trained that, after we do a lecture or two and then put them through one or two improvisation or role playing, it’s like a light bulb went on – they never thought about this. In some ways, it’s like a child who just discovered ice cream – “Wow, I never thought about this!”
I’ll tell you a quick story about a particular surgeon who was sent to me by a CEO of a hospital. The CEO said, “I told this guy he’s a great surgeon, but we’re getting a lot of complaints about his bedside manner.”
So I spoke with the surgeon. He clearly didn’t want to come through the program, but he had no choice. We did a little coaching session. And the coaching session was a little bit of education, but mostly it was to break down the barriers, loosen him up a little bit, let him understand that he’s not being judged. And then I put him through an improvisational role playing with a horrific scene. I really made it tough on him — he had to disclose a medical error. And we videotaped it. And he was so bad, Doris, that my instructors said. “Dr. Orsini this one’s yours. I don’t even know what to say.”
So we brought him back. I asked him, “How did you think you did?” And he said he thought it was fine, you know, still with a chip on his shoulder. So I said, “Let’s watch.” And he watched himself for less than a minute, maybe two minutes. And I know this is radio, but he looked at me and he said, “I am such an A hole. I can’t believe I’m such a jerk. I never knew that I was that much of a jerk.” And I said, “It’s not that you’re a jerk. It’s just that you never saw yourself communicating, you never been put through this kind of strain.” We watched the whole video. He was writing frantically during the review process. He asked to stay for the rest of the day, because we were doing other positions. And now, he’s an instructor for us. How dramatic a change was that?
Doris Nagel 36:52
That’s amazing. So truly, anyone can learn to become a better communicator, and have better difficult conversations. Are there resources that you can recommend? Obviously, your book might be a good place to start.
Dr. Anthony Orsini 37:10
My book was released in May 2020. As you mentioned, it’s called “It’s All in the Delivery: Improving Healthcare Starting with a Single Conversation.” The book has some personal stories about why I went into medicine. But the story of Dr. Cunningham is there. And I give very practical advice. Now the book is healthcare-oriented. So there’s several chapters on the special skills that are required to delivering tragic news — Breaking Bad News, as I call it. And then the whole second half of the book is about improving the patient experience, which is really the hottest topic in medicine right now.
So my book is a great resource, as is my podcast. I mean, Doris, I learn something every week from my guests. They are just amazing people. We’ve had people like Quint Studer who are leaders not only in business, but in health care. People like Claude Silver, who’s the chief heart officer at Vayner Media. We’re into our 35th or 36 episode now. And I’ve learned amazing stuff from each and every one of them. And every single week just solidifies my belief that the parallels in medicine and in business are just endless. It’s amazing.
Doris Nagel 38:36
What do you see as some of the biggest similarities, but also some of the biggest differences?
Dr. Anthony Orsini 38:43
Well, when we’re talking about being a leader, I see very few differences. You know, a being a leader — whether you’re a leader in healthcare administration, or you’re a leader in business — being able to be a good leader is being a good leader. Of course, there are some subtle differences when you’re speaking to a patient about a life changing diagnosis like cancer or that your husband or your child died. There’s nothing that is that tragic in business.
But as I learned many years ago, giving bad news is redefining someone. I’m redefining you as someone who has cancer. I’m redefining you as a widow. I’m redefining you as someone who didn’t get the promotion. I’m redefining you as someone who’s been fired. I’m redefining you as someone who’s now divorced.
And the process that that person goes through when they’re being redefined is very similar — the anger and the denial, we all know those five steps. So yes, the difference is that I’m dealing with life or death. But as I say, on my podcast and on my website, you know if you can learn to tell somebody that a child died, terminating someone from the business should be easy. At least life goes on for them.
Doris Nagel 40:10
I certainly can see some of the parallels.
Are there resources that you found that might be great places for people to start? At the end, we’ll have you tell people how they can get in contact with you if they’re interested. But obviously, not everybody, at this moment at least, can be part of The Orsini Way. And in some cases, it sounds like it might be useful for people to start doing some pre work and thinking about this, which might make them a better candidate for The Orsini Way. Are there things that you’d recommend to people that they take a look at or read?
Dr. Anthony Orsini 40:56
Absolutely. If you want to really get excited about the way the human brain acts during conversations, if you want to get excited about communication, there are certain books that are been bestsellers. And when you read them, you’ll be hooked. You’ll learn about how your brain is analyzing someone 350 million times per second on someone’s body language, cool stuff like that.
I’d recommend the latest book by Malcolm Gladwell, “Blink,” is a famous book that’s all about communication and little slices. Amy Cuddy’s book,”Presence,” is great. You know, Amy Cuddy did a study where she studied people who were interviewing for a job. She made half of them stand in front of a mirror with their arms out and kind of like an eye one pose. And the other half just sat in the waiting room. She proved that the ones who stood in front of the mirror did better on their job interviews, but also, when she drew blood on them found out that they their stress was way down.
Cool stuff like this is what gets me excited. If someone really wants to learn about communication, there are many of these books out there. I’m drawing a blank on one about how your brain is rewired. There are also great resources for people on our website. We do have some videos there, and we have a YouTube channel.
But the first thing I would do, Doris, is let’s make ourselves aware that communication skills are a real thing. It’s not some soft thing that we don’t need as a leader. And then start reading books like mine. And the other that I mentioned, and you’ll be so excited. You will just keep reading and you’ll become a student of it.
Doris Nagel 42:47
You know, it’s interesting that COVID has changed how businesses view the need for this. Do you think that that’s a permanent change? Or will people just kind of go back to the way things were once everyone gets the vaccine?
Dr. Anthony Orsini 43:07
I really hope that one day, we’ll be able to go back to normal. They keep moving the goalposts for us, so we don’t know when that will be. But I think that the impact that COVID has had on us has changed us, and in some ways for the better. I truly believe that people now appreciate what they have more. Maybe we took our jobs for granted. We took our health for granted.
And maybe, I’m hoping, that we will start to appreciate the little things in life. One of my New Year’s resolutions is to live more in the present. That’s something I’ve always had trouble with, I’m always looking on to the next best thing. And I think COVID has helped me to be happy in the present. Just last night, I was watching a movie with my wife and I reminded myself of that. And I think that COVID is going to help us do that.
Doris Nagel 44:11
Great insights. Where do you see your business headed in the next say, three years to five years? What would you like it to look like?
Dr. Anthony Orsini 44:23
In the next three to five years, I still think that majority of our business going to be healthcare. I’m a physician, and that’s where the biggest need is. And with patient experience being the hottest topic in medicine right now, this is something where I think are our skills are going to be needed even more to train doctors and nurses — not when they’re giving bad news, but how to make that hospital stay more pleasant by being into communication.
I love working with businesses and I love teaching and working with leaders to help them with their communication. skills. In three to five years, I see this growing because I think the need for communication training is now really front and center. And we’re doing things now with better communication over zoom. How does body language affect communication there? We just did a program and I wrote a contributing art article for Entrepreneur Magazine just last week about how to communicate non verbally through a zoom call or through the internet. And this is all going to needed in the future. And so I’m hoping that The Orsini Way will grow exponentially over the next three to five years.
Doris Nagel 45:44
I people are interested in learning more about the Orsini Way, or maybe finding your book or catching your podcast, what’s the best way for them to connect and learn more?
Dr. Anthony Orsini 46:02
I can be reached at drorsini@theorsiniway.com The website is theorsiniway.com, and we have a lot of information on there about what we do and how we do it. We’re constantly adding different products and learning modules, especially now that we’re doing everything remotely. People can always contact me through theorsiniway.com. And my podcast is called “Difficult Conversations: Lessons I Learned as an ICU Physician.” You can get it through my website, but it’s also available on Apple, Spotify, Google, AmazonPlay, you name it. And then the book is available either through my website or on Amazon. The book is called “It’s All in the Delivery: Improving Healthcare Starting with a Single Conversation.”
Doris Nagel 46:58
Sounds like a great book. I’m looking forward to picking up a copy. Tony, thanks so much for being with us this week. It was really great having you on the show — very interesting and meaningful work you’re doing. Thank you again, for being my guest.
Dr. Anthony Orsini 47:13
I had a lot of fun. Thank you.
Doris Nagel 47:16
We have just a few minutes left. I thought today we might talk about some startup statistics that I saw recently, and how it relates to the story of one of my startup failures in the hopes that it will save some of you out there from becoming a statistic, like I was. CBInsights looked at the reasons why startups fail. They analyzed more than 100 failed startups in detail. And while the reasons that these businesses failed – and others like them — are probably interrelated, they concluded a whopping 42% of startups failed because there was no market need.
That was by far the largest reason. 29% said they ran out of cash. Now, I would have thought that was the main reason that most businesses fail, but it actually was less than a third of the root cause. 23% said they fail because they didn’t have the right team.
So almost half of the businesses failed because there’s no market need for their idea, their services or their product, that’s a pretty discouraging statistic, especially because it means we the entrepreneurs were blindsided. We got too excited by our own idea and we didn’t validate it. Market need is usually a pretty fixable thing because market research and market testing can often be done pretty inexpensively, even if you need to be a little creative about it. But you have to have the will to do it, and be disciplined and objective about it.
But many of us are blind anyway. And that was me. Several years ago, I decided to pivot my offerings at Globaloacity, my little consulting business. I had previously focused on international expansion assistance, especially helping companies finding and managing foreign distributors. But business at times was slow, and I was having trouble competing with all the free government programs for companies for small companies and the big consulting firms for big companies.
Meanwhile I had connected with someone who has spent his entire career on indirect channels to market, both foreign and direct channels, and all different types. And he was at an inflection point in his business — and footnote here — in hindsight, I should have asked a lot more questions about that inflection point — more later on that. But we struck up a friendship and he suggested we collaborate together go to market with a comprehensive indirect channels-to-market consulting offering. It sounded like the perfect pivot. We knew we had the right expertise with our combined experience.
And we were convinced there was plenty of demand. After all, we knew anecdotally that lots of companies were unhappy with their current distributors — there was a lot of research out there showing this as well. Plus, I relied too much in the fact that my partner had consulted with many companies over the years on this very topic.
But what we never established was 1) whether people would actually pay to have someone come in and help them improve their distributor network, or whether it was just a minor irritant to most companies that they just rather than not bother with; and 2) we never validated if they would pay, how that offering needed to be pitched and packaged, and whether they would hire us, and on what terms to do that work.
We never focused precisely on who our ideal clients were: were they startups? big companies? global companies? in what industries? We also didn’t validate how whether our combined expertise would be the go to solution, in the face of competition from big name consulting firms. And finally, we certainly didn’t know how to find these ideal clients, and we didn’t validate that either.
The result? A couple of years where we had lots and lots of leads and discussions. But we could never close on any significant engagements, only a couple little things here and there. But we were bleeding money on marketing. But for whom? So that was the cardinal sin: we never established that there was a market demand for our services as we were pitching them. And so we eventually ran out of money.
And looking back, we also both committed the third cardinal sin: the wrong team. I realized, looking back, that I was counting on my new business partner with his long career working in this area, and having many successful consulting engagements in the past, to be able to help answer all these questions and find clients. But that turned out to be a bad assumption. He had never sold the services directly. And probably more importantly, he had no real interest in selling these services directly. He was hoping I would do that.
His past business model was to align with a very large namebrand consulting firm and do all their training and workshops and distributor management. The big name consulting firm organized all these trainings, and charged a pretty penny for it. And my new partner showed up and delivered the trainings, which were very popular. And then the consulting company was nice enough to let him scoop up any consulting engagements that followed on from the trainees, and there were a few of them every training session. This was a very successful business model for him for most of his career. But the big consulting company found workshops harder and harder to fill as corporate travel and training, budgets dried up. And eventually, they decided it wasn’t a profitable business to be in. They were out of this business, and my business partner was completely out too — hence the inflection point in his career that I should have explored further.
I also was just naïve about how very different that business model was from the one we were trying to launch. For one, he had the cache of this big consulting firm’s name behind him. Second, they invested all the time and resources into organizing these workshops, allow him to show up, collect a nice fee for the training (even if he didn’t land any follow-on projects), and then also scoop up any business that was generated.
And, maybe even more importantly, the attendees had already been pre-primed to want follow-on consulting services – they were willing to pay the high price for their seminar, and they got three days of education not only on why they needed to do this, and why it was a good idea, and he got three days to sell them on why he was just the right guy to do it.
We had none of that infrastructure. We had no name in the marketplace, and no clear process to weed out all the MANY maybes and zero in on people who really wanted the services and had the budget to do something about it.
We tried doing blogs and webinars and podcasts. But it just wasn’t enough to push people over the vine hurdle. It turned out that maybe there was some need for our services, but either we didn’t package it right or didn’t realize how difficult it would be to screen through all the people who were not good fits. So we didn’t we really didn’t have much except great expertise.
I had not realized how different would be to try to mass market our consulting to clients. And I had counted on him to help. But he had no experience or expertise doing this, and frankly, he didn’t really want to do it. And so, you might wonder, “Well, why didn’t you just hook up with another training company?” We did think about it. But frankly, the large workshop industry is a mere shadow of what it used to be. There are a lot fewer seminars, they’re much pickier about the offerings. The pay that you get to do seminars is peanuts, and most of them will not let you scoop up those consulting engagements that follow on. Eventually, we ran out of passion, ideas, and money.
In the end, we fell victim to all three of the top cardinal sins that I mentioned in this study, with the primary one being no market need, at least as our business was conceived. All of this was preventable, if only we done a lot more market testing. And if we both had clearer role clarity. So that is the sad tale of one of my disastrous new business ventures. And I hope you can learn a little from my mistakes.
Thanks again for listening — I hope you enjoyed it. Thanks again to our special guest this week, Dr. Tony Orsini, founder of The Orsini Way.
You can find lots more helpful information on my website, globalocityservices.com, where you’ll find a whole library of different kinds of resources and tools for entrepreneurs.
Feel free to email me — I’d love to hear from you. It’s dnagel@lakesradio.org. I promise you’ll always get a response from me.
Now, be sure to join us next week at 11 Eastern/noon Central.
But until then, I’m Doris Nagel, wishing you happy entrepreneuring!
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