The Biz Dojo Inc. - Customer Service Training Team of the Year
Company: The Biz Dojo Inc, Calgary, Alberta
Company Description: The Biz Dojo Inc. is a multi-award winning podcast turned coaching, leadership and wellness business. We provide coaching and consulting services to businesses and directly to individuals as well, including life, business, entrepreneur and mindset coaching and classroom training, as well as media and podcast consulting to a multitude of clients worldwide.
Nomination Category: Customer Service & Call Center Awards Team Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Customer Service Training Team of the Year - External - Business Services Industries
Nomination Title: The Biz Dojo Inc. - Enabling growth mindsets in large-scale corporate service environments
The Biz Dojo training team started out as a couple of friends who wanted to start an inspirational podcast in late 2020. With multiple certifications in coaching, training and development and leadership, both Seth Anderson and J.P. Gaston wanted to share their love for personal growth with the world. The goal: talk to some amazing people, learn some cool new skills and frameworks, hopefully inspire just 1 listener (probably a friend or family member).
The podcast was not only inspirational to the thousands of listeners it would engage around the world, but just 6 months after launching the team would win multiple awards for creativity and leadership in the training and development podcasting space. Shortly after, they would acquire national and internaional sponsors, be highlighted in renowned publications (Forbes), and would incorporate as a full-service coaching, training and consultancy business by the start of Q2 2021.
Today, the team offers training and development of future skills to all levels of organization across all industries. This includes wellness and mindset training, bias coaching and personal branding. In addition, The Biz Dojo also expanded to offer other services that includes digital media and podcasting, marketing services and more.
Though the team has only been around for just over a year, the success they have realized as a training and development consultant is unprecedented. The Biz Dojo offered a unique blend of access to their deep and insightful conversations with thought-leaders from around the world, and over 40 years of experience as business leaders, coaches and trainers. The newly formed The Biz Dojo Inc. would quickly amass a number of local, national and international brands looking for support in helping to develop their business - and specifically the mindset and capabilities of customer service and leadership teams.
One such client, an international telecommunications corporation with over 30,000 employees worldwide, would engage the team to develop training for their teams to teach future skills. The work the team had already done on a podcast with a TED presenter would inspire that company to work with TBD Inc. to develop training for their service and leadership teams. This training would be available to all employees , and would build on their skillsets to prepare the team for the future, and to help them better understand mindset and personal wellness.
Not a bad transition from "two guys with a podcast"...
With less than 20% of podcasts making it beyond 8 episodes, to have a podcast that makes it past 50, wins multiple awards, incorporates as a business, and lands a significant contract with an international corporation to provide them with training for future skills... that's pretty darn rare. In fact, for the podcast awards alone, The Biz Dojo Inc. is the only Canadian podcast to win both an AVA Digital Gold Award and a Hermes Creative Gold award - and just 1 of 10 around the world.
Our entry into the space of training and development as a business (not just a podcast) wasn't planned, but has been highly successful. We have been engaged in multiple personal coaching contracts as a result of our success in those trainings, and have been sought for further training development in future -- both by the company we worked with, and others who had heard about the work we have been doing.
In addition to these major contracts, the team has also been engaged by other training and development businesses to assist with strategy development. Many of these are our competitors, and it speaks volumes about our achievements when your competition requests your expertise.
Attachments:
WINGS- the one-pager shared with team members as they entered our conversation on future skills
MP3 - a copy of the episode that inspired our client to engage us in developing training for 30,000 team members on skills of the future
Podcast Charts - providing context for our reach and success as a podcast
The Brain & Mindset Presentation- an example of the presentationthat inspired team members to better understand their own mindset, and how they could leverage that to build on personal branding through a better understanding of self
Award Letters- two separate uploads to highlight and confirm our Gold AVA Digital and Gold Hermes Creative awards.
URLs:
https://thebizdojo.com The Biz Dojo Website - our home page where clients engage with our variety of services
https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/s2e8-spreading-your-wings-w-walter-vandervelde/id1534432504?i=1000512318111 Podcast: Spreading your WINGS w/Walter Vandervelde - the podcast with TED presenter Walter Vandervelde where we explore the foundational framework of his WINGS theory (this is what launched the training program)
https://www.ted.com/talks/walter_vandervelde_wings_the_5_primary_skills_for_the_future_of_work Vandervelde on Skills of the Future - this is the original TED talk that inspired the podcast that inspired the training that inspired so many fronline and leadership team members (whew! that's a lot of inspiring!)