“When our team realised how these hyper-growth companies operate, they wanted to change. It was much more powerful than us telling them why data is important or why agile is important.”
“We were tired of the same old sport stars and inspirational speakers for our internal events. Zambesi helped us to engage entrepreneurs and leaders at high-growth companies who could share great stories and cutting-edge tactics that were relevant to our team.”
Zambesi can work with you and your team to design in-house training, consulting or talks for your business. Zambesi experts are all pioneers at high-growth technology firms.
We have more than fifty experts on our public platform and access to many other company founders or industry specialists who aren’t listed on the site. We regularly supply speakers for major conferences and large corporate clients as well as small lunch and learn talks or two-hour consulting sessions for startups.
2X half-day in-house
marketing workshops
“We don't usually 'do' external training however we felt the opportunity to learn from other successful leaders of high growth marketing teams through a customised workshop was compelling.”
Blake eLearning creates high quality literacy products for schools and educators throughout the world including ABC Reading Eggs. They already have a highly experienced and successful digital marketing team.
because they appreciate the benefit of exposing their team to cutting edge marketing strategies and tactics from other industries. We created two create two half-day workshops led by Mark Baartse, CMO Showpo and Tim Doyle, CMO and Head of Strategy Koala Mattress who customised their programs to address the objectives of the Blake Learning team.
Team feedback
“We were able to learn highly relevant and customised content from leaders in other high growth companies who 'do this every day like us' rather than from consultants or agencies.”
“We were able to interact with the experts face-to-face and get feedback on what we’re doing and get some excellent new ideas.”
“We shared information on different technology platforms and services and discussed what’s working in other companies (including CRM, data analytics, email marketing etc).
The team walked away having developed
- A prioritised list of actions that they developed with the experts during the workshops
- Deep insights into some of the key drivers of their marketing performance including a new content strategy and an understanding and plan to make better use of data to power growth.
Keynote and workshop on digital disruptive leadership with Stephen Scheeler, Former CEO Facebook
“This was the best guest speaker we’ve ever had!” Scott Ryan, Head of Business Transformation, Business & Private Banking, NAB.
The NAB Business Transformation team is responsible for a large-scale three-year transformation of the NAB business. They approached Zambesi to secure a relevant, compelling speaker for their team conference who could share learnings, insights and stories from a high growth global disruptive technology company.
Zambesi worked with NAB to understand the overall purpose of the team conference, the format and flow of the agenda and what the team was looking to achieve. We worked with the team to identify a number of options and selected Stephen Scheeler ex Managing Director Facebook AUS/NZ for a KeyNote presentation and Q&A session on digital disruptive leadership. This was followed by an interactive workshop with the top senior leaders of the transformation team which allowed them to dive into more detail in a challenging and thoughtful senior executive masterclass.
“I was very impressed with how easy it was to deal with Zambesi and secure the perfect expert I was looking for. Not only was Kim great in helping me clarify what I really needed and how to consider different options, she also then helped lead the briefing discussion with Stephen to ensure we ended up with an approach and topics that really hit the mark with our audience. Feedback from the Business has included this was the best guest speaker ever!” -Scott Ryan, Head of Business Transformation, Business & Private Banking, NAB.
Full-day
leadership training
“We were using some standard leadership training however the opportunity to be coached in leadership from someone who understood our high growth industry and sector and was currently coaching others at Google, Pinterest and Twitter was really interesting to us.”
Finder.com is one of Australia's most successful digital companies and was looking to source the best leadership training available to support the growth of the company in 2019. The COO of Finder approached Zambesi to access bespoke training for people leaders in their organisation. We worked with Finder to understand their development needs, cultural objectives and funding constraints.
We shortlisted three experts and Finder selected Claire Hatton who is a former senior executive at Google who currently leads training at high-growth companies including Pinterest and Twitter in San Francisco. Zambesi worked with Claire and Finder to develop a bespoke training program for the day’s training which was attended by 40 of Finder’s people leaders.
The program included
- Skill development in negotiating and managing conflict. This work included situational leadership tactics and lots of role-play and practise.
- The development of a coaching and feedback approach to implement across the organisation including a common framework and language.
- The team were highly motivated to action their learnings from the day and Claire facilitated the development of a team-led program to hold each other to account and continue to develop each other’s leadership capability.
Feedback was the content was highly relevant and the trainer was highly relatable to the culture and needs of the company. The day made a major impact on the team and created sustained change across the organisation.
Programmed speakers
for team offsite
“People can’t stop talking about the panel this afternoon. What a treat and so powerful. It was on brief and on point.” Sarah Gallon, Global Manager Media and Partnerships, Tourism Australia
Tourism Australia approached Zambesi to curate some inspiring and informative speakers for their internal team offsite.
Objectives
- To inspire the team through learning how entrepreneurs bring the ‘purpose’ of their organisations to life and how they use ‘purpose’ as a driver of internal and external strategy, team culture and customer growth.
- To expose their team to cutting edge tactics and ideas - particularly on content and growth strategy.
- To learn how high-growth Australian businesses are launching and acquiring customers in overseas markets. Zambesi presented a range of different speaker options including key-notes, panels and training workshops. Tourism Australia selected a range of formats including a panel of some of Australia’s most successful technology entrepreneurs and a keynote from one of Australia’s smartest young marketers which anchored the strategy session on day 2.
Feedback
- It was inspiring to hear from disruptive entrepreneurs and how a bigger purpose will inspire teams and customers.
- The team reported that they developed an understanding of how entrepreneurs take calculated risks and an appreciation for the need for risk in marketing today.
- The marketing keynote had a considerable impact on how the team reimagined their content strategy and customer journey. The team took away lots of tactical ideas on how fast-growing companies create content, engage customers and use sophisticated analytics to build marketing engines.
Lunch & learn series
We developed a series of informal speakers for the Fairfax technology, product and community media teams. Fairfax is traditionally a content business and wanted to learn from businesses with business models based on digital customer acquisition, retention and subscription revenue.
The first session was with Andrianes Pinantoan, Head of Growth at Canva (now Airtasker). Andrianes shared how he designed the growth engine for Canva including how they use content and SEO to drive acquisition, different strategies to drive referrals and ultimately revenue. He shared insights into how his team uses data and analytics to measure different cohorts, different buying paths and his approach to team design so that everyone is focussed on growth.
We’ve since run a second session with a User Experience Design expert who shared stories about how their company designs product by working closely with customers.Feedback so far is that the sessions have been hugely informative and have given the teams lots of ideas for how to improve their product and processes. Even more powerful is how learning how high-growth companies operate is transforming the internal culture. The team recognises how they need to change and then drive change internally.
“We have been using Zambesi to help us with a new innovation program as part of our Agile transformation here at Fairfax. Zambesi curated two amazing experts Andre Pinantoan from Airtasker and Keith O'Brien from BlackPurl to give our DevOps and Engineering teams two mini masterclass sessions on Scaling for Growth and Great product design. Our team loved the sessions - they were fresh, innovative, informative and inspiring. The value that we got out of this sessions was exceptional . Thanks to Kim and the Zambesi team for making this happen. We'll definitely be using Zambesi in the future and would highly recommend.” Bruce Levine, Program & Operations Manager, Fairfax Media
Internal TEDx competition with Fleur Brown, Cofounder TEDx Sydney
Sydney University’s MBA program came to Zambesi to create a series of practical workshops led by current leaders at high-growth firms. We launched our partnership in November 2018 with a four-week TEDx public speaking program led by Fleur Brown, Founding Member TEDxSydney. The sessions included workshops on how to structure a TED talk, public speaking technique, coaching and feedback and finally a TEDx style competition voted on by peers.
Feedback from staff and students was sensational. Participates transformed their ability to tell stories, engage an audience and communicate with confidence.
Zambesi is currently developing a number of other programs to bring real-world, cutting edge thinking to the MBA curriculum.
“The University of Sydney ‘Talk like TED’ program ran across four sessions allowing us to see a profound transformation in the MBA students. Many started out unsure of their keynote topic and extremely nervous about speaking. Over the course of a few weeks they went from identifying a unique topic and building compelling content around it, to delivering a near flawless, deeply moving keynote on a large stage in front of a very inspired audience. The alumni of this program are well equipped to inspire almost any room with their content.” Fleur Brown, Founding Member TEDxSydney
Sunrise Conference Workshop Series for Blackbird VC
Zambesi created 44 bespoke workshops for Blackbird’s Sunrise Conference on Cockatoo Island. Workshops included topics such as technical leadership, agile, successful business partnerships, building online marketplaces, pitching masterclass, advanced sales training, resilience and mindfulness, cybersecurity and more.
Our workshops were a key part of the conference and were attended by more than 1000 people. Feedback was that participants loved breaking into smaller groups where they could interact directly with an expert and peers on a topic that is relevant to them and that the combination of large keynote sessions and intimate focussed workshops made the conference special.
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