You Never Get a Second Chance to Make a First Impression

I'm writing this from the Virgin Australia lounge in Sydney, reviewing my notes over a McLaren Vale red and a genuinely excellent sandwich. It's how I decompress after a conference, and Brisbane gave me plenty to decompress about, in both directions.

The Inspire and Succeed Conference promised a lot. Sir Richard Branson as keynote. A bill built around succeeding through adversity, raising capital, building community, and going global. I jumped on a plane. So did a lot of people.

Here's the honest review: three speakers were absolutely outstanding. The rest ranged from forgettable to actively annoying. I'll cover both, because the contrast is actually the lesson.

The Pitch-Fest Problem

A pattern has emerged at events run by this promoter, and Brisbane confirmed it. The drawcard speaker (Branson this time, Gary Vee last time) fills the seats, and then a rotation of pitch-artists uses the captive room to sell coaching packages, trading systems, and business courses to people who came to learn something real.

Some walked out after twenty minutes. One man near us muttered "rancid" about a speaker who spent his set calling himself a "chubby little bastard" in what appeared to be a calculated rapport-building technique. It wasn't working. The MC was, charitably, not suited to Australian audiences. The finance guy declared himself "Numero Uno" without much evidence.

I'll leave it there on the negatives, because the good parts were genuinely good.

Michael Crossland

I knew nothing about Michael going in. After the MC's extended warm-up, my expectations were somewhere near zero. Michael walked on stage and immediately said: "Ignore everything the MC said and lower your expectations. I'm a simple Aussie bloke, not an American celebrity." Then he proceeded to exceed every expectation I'd quietly abandoned.

I'm not going to give the full story here because Michael deserves to tell it himself, and if you ever get the chance to see him speak, you should. What I will say is that the question of "how is this man still alive, let alone thriving" hit me about five minutes in and didn't leave.

He didn't pitch anything. He didn't sell anything. He just told the truth about his life and what it taught him, with a disarming combination of humility and genuine joy. The room was completely still.

Key takeaways I still think about:

• Adversity doesn't define you. How you respond to it does.
• Don't wait until it's too late to say what you feel.
• The life we complain about is someone else's dream.
• Give without remembering. Receive without forgetting.

If you ever get an opportunity to see Michael Crossland, take it without hesitation.

Lisa Messenger

Lisa came on stage in a cape. She looked like a million dollars and somehow also completely approachable. That combination is rarer than it sounds.

Her thirty minutes generated more ideas for me than anyone else on the bill. The central argument: move away from transaction-based business toward community-driven business. Start small. Start where you are. Create a genuine value exchange and move fast.

"The big don't devour the small. The fast devour the slow."

She talked about finding brand partners, not just non-competing ones but genuinely aligned ones, and building collaborative networks rather than competitive silos. The idea that there is more than enough work for everyone if you build the table bigger rather than guard what's already on it. These ideas align directly with how PlainBlack operates.

The moment that stuck with me most was her pitch to Branson. While every other business in the room asked "what's in it for me?" Lisa stepped up and said: "Can I send you a box of magazines each month?" In a room full of people asking for things, she offered something. That's the whole lesson in one move.

She closed with a question worth sitting with: "Are you a founder or a CEO?" Every business needs both. The founder sees the world. The CEO sees the sum of its parts. Know which one you are, and find the other.

"People want to do business with people. So in a world of automation and remote communication, let's re-humanise our relationships."

Sir Richard Branson

Three words: humble, happy, hopeful.

Richard was brought out by Lisa Messenger for an interview format that ran close to ninety minutes. He stayed longer than scheduled, answered every question with genuine engagement, and at no point gave the impression that he was the most important person in the room, even though he objectively was.

I've read Branson's books. I had a picture of who he'd be in person. One of the rare pleasures of attending events like this is finding out whether your impression of someone holds up when they're actually standing in front of you. Richard's did, completely. The humility isn't a brand. The optimism isn't performed. He's genuinely the person his writing suggests he is, which is its own kind of lesson about consistency and character.

He told stories about the Virgin brand, the famous publicity stunts, the failures and the pivots, always framing them as "we" rather than "I." He spoke about his relationship with people as the thing he's most proud of, not the business empire. For someone with his resources and reach, the absence of arrogance was striking.

The Real Lesson from Brisbane

The contrast between the pitch-fest speakers and Crossland, Messenger, and Branson was unusually clear at this event. The people who tried hardest to sell something earned the least trust. The people who offered something genuine, without an immediate ask attached, held the room completely.

That's not a conference observation. That's how marketing works, how business works, how relationships work. You get one first impression. Make it about what you can offer, not what you can extract, and you're already ahead of most of the competition.

Worth every dollar. Would go again. (Someone please tell the promoter to fix the MC.)