Slideshow with Dave Hayward

Alex M.H. Smith, Basic Arts: Why your moat is crumbling Alex Smith wrote a bestselling book telling businesses their strategy is bullshit. His follow-up is worse: the passive moats protecting most businesses are gone, and the people coming for your market share aren't going to be polite about it.Produced by Europa Creative Partners (europa.nz).In this episode of Slideshow, host Dave Hayward speaks with Alex M.H. Smith, founder of Basic Arts and author of No Bullshit Strategy, about why competition is intensifying across every industry and what that means for businesses still coasting on advantages that aren't really advantages anymore. As Alex puts it: "Their moat is that other people could not be bothered to do what they're doing." That moat is gone.Alex breaks down the K-shaped economy (exploding supply meeting flat or declining demand), explains why boring, sexy, and lucrative businesses face different timelines of disruption, and makes the case that the lifestyle business is finished. The conversation also covers the three most common types of bullshit strategy, why Elon Musk's 2006 Tesla blog post is still the best example of strategy done right, and why Alex believes "we've gotta stop answering needs and start creating needs," pointing to brands like Liquid Death and Trader Joe's as proof.Links:Alex M.H. Smith, LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-m-h-smith/Basic Arts: https://basicarts.org/Dave Hayward, LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/haywarddave/Chapters00:00 Cold open00:21 Meet Dave and Alex01:30 K-shaped economy explained03:46 Why business got harder06:30 Sexy, boring, lucrative09:57 Winner-take-all reality12:54 Lifestyle business is dead16:56 Three bullshit strategies18:16 Goals aren't strategy19:20 Generic plans, no edge21:21 Fluff, purpose, confusion22:24 Why bad strategy persists24:21 When hustle stops working25:44 Uniqueness versus demand27:46 The magical sentence trap31:06 Write strategy in prose35:25 Three paths to unique value38:57 Creating needs, not solving40:12 Liquid Death and Trader Joe's43:51 Making strategy exciting45:29 Narrative and weather making46:44 Final wrap and goodbye

Dante St James owns six cafes, three menswear stores, three barber shops, and three training businesses. He bought his first cafe during a pandemic for $18,000: the cost of three plane tickets for a family trying to get home to Brazil.Produced by Europa Creative Partners (europa.nz).In this episode of Slideshow, host Dave Hayward speaks with Dante St James, serial entrepreneur and digital skills trainer based in Australia's Northern Territory, about why income diversification is the only real insurance policy for modern business owners, and why the traditional full-time job might be the riskiest bet you can make in 2026.The conversation covers how Dante built a portfolio of 17 businesses from a single COVID-era cafe purchase, the systems thinking that lets him run them without working in them, and his approach to failure as a repeatable, low-cost experiment. Dante also shares his LinkedIn content framework (two topics, three values, five questions), why he stopped his podcast after 400 episodes, and what AI is already doing to specialist workers across Asia and beyond.Links:Dante St James, LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dantestjames/Dave Hayward, LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/haywarddave/Chapters0:00 Introduction2:15 Radio days in Darwin3:43 Community radio lessons5:34 From medicine to bartending6:53 First freelance hustles8:23 Buying cafes in COVID13:09 Systems and delegation15:52 Menswear and barbershop hub20:43 Risk tolerance and failure26:48 Diversifying income streams31:59 Marketing as a system34:32 Forced into entrepreneurship35:14 Cringe before they binge35:56 Early social network roots37:51 Going all in on LinkedIn40:04 Values and content framework43:31 Small talk builds trust45:04 Newsletters and attention48:45 Why he quit podcasting51:43 AI tools and quality56:04 AI job disruption fears59:41 Innovation hub networking1:02:19 Productivity and exporting ideas1:04:03 Wrap up and future plans
Keywordsserial entrepreneurship, income diversification, small business, cafe business, COVID business stories, LinkedIn personal brand, content strategy, AI disruption, digital skills, failure in business, multiple income streams, business systems, delegation, Australian business, entrepreneurship

Somewhere out there is a $10 skill pack that thousands of people have cheerfully downloaded without reading. A couple of hidden lines in one of those, and it could be raising invoices through your connected Xero before anyone notices. Nyssa Waters would like a word before you hit download.

Produced by Europa Creative Partners (europa.nz).

In this episode of Slideshow, host Dave Hayward sits down with Nyssa Waters, CEO and co-founder of Possibl AI and RCRT (Right Context Right Time), and one of the most brilliant minds working in AI right now. She led AI adoption at Google Cloud before building her own company to over $4M in revenue in under two years, and she moves from security architecture to the future of the working week in the same breath. The conversation covers serious ground. What an AI agent actually is, for a start (most of what people call agents is automation with better PR). Then the risks that come with wiring AI into everything your business owns: skill poisoning, tool drift, downloaded skill packs nobody reads. Every connection is a point of vulnerability, and most businesses have no idea what they've granted access to.

The warnings are only half the story. Nyssa has a hefty bet running with a US venture capitalist that he'll stop opening his email within two years, and she's building the case for why she'll win: her company is replacing 90% of its 42 SaaS subscriptions with a system her own team built. Their first mission was, in her words, destroying Jira. From there it ranges wide: purpose-led teams, why nobody should write a three-year AI strategy, and her belief that AI can restore us to being human again. If you want to know where all this is heading, an hour with Nyssa Waters is a very good place to start.

Links:
Nyssa Waters, LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nyssawaters/
Possibl AI: https://www.possibl.ai/
RCRT: https://www.possibl.ai/rcrt/
Possibl AI, LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/possiblai/
Dave Hayward, LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/haywarddave/

Chapters
Introduction (~0:00)
AI Agents Defined (~1:42)
The Problem with SaaS (~5:26)
AI Security Risks (~7:56)
Future of Work & Purpose-Led Teams (~35:10)
Backend as a Service & RCRT (~47:37)
AI Restoring Humanity (~1:02:28)

Dave Hayward has changed industry and discipline more times than most people change jobs. This is what all that jumping taught him, and what it cost.
In his first solo episode of Slideshow, recorded from a talk at Revved's Write-Offs event, Dave works through four lessons from a career spent jumping off the deep end: sinking before you swim, treating optimism as a tactic rather than a default, surviving bad bosses and impossible targets, and the dream job that fell apart and led him to revive Europa Creative Partners.
Along the way, he gets into forgetting the coffee for a coffee tasting and closing the deal anyway, a sales target that was doubled and then tripled with no extra resource, and the dream job that fell apart and pushed him to quit with a fresh mortgage and no plan, the write-off that became Europa Creative Partners.
He also lands on why 2026 might be the best time in years to be a generalist, and why the self-doubt never really goes away. Worth a watch if you have ever taken on a job you had no business taking, and made it work anyway.
Links:
Dave Hayward, LinkedIn
Europa Creative Partners
This episode was recorded from content that was part of Dave's talk at Revved's Write-Offs event.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction
00:50 A first solo edition: the Write-Offs talk
01:40 Imposter syndrome and the 84 percent
02:50 Breadth, depth, and optimism as a tactic
04:00 The welding job he wasn't ready for
05:20 Birmingham: a coffee tasting with no coffee
06:10 Bad bosses and a target that doubled then tripled
08:10 The dream job and the scandal that followed
09:20 Quitting with no plan, and how Europa came back
11:50 Why 2026 is a good time to be a generalist
12:40 Still jumping, just picking better watersFind full show notes, links, and transcript at europa.nz/podcasts.Produced by Europa Creative Partners.

A funnel is just the journey a customer takes from not knowing you exist to paying you money. That's it. Today’s Slideshow with Dave Hayward, we’re going to explain it clearly. Most small business owners want a viral reel. Stu Lees wants to know if they've mapped what their customers are actually afraid of. One of those will grow a business. The other is just noise.Produced by Europa Creative Partners (europa.nz).In this episode of Slideshow, host Dave Hayward speaks with Stu Lees, a marketing advisor, strategist, and founder of the Shoestring Marketer, about the three fundamentals that keep disappearing from the marketing of businesses (large and small).The conversation covers Stu's customer persona framework — built around fears, frustrations, and motivations rather than two paragraphs of demographics — and why marketing works on emotion first, with logic arriving only to validate a decision already made. Stu also shares the email nurture strategy behind $ 2 million in sales in 18 months with no cold calling, and why he believes personal brand has never mattered more for both businesses and the people who work inside them.Links:Stu Lees, LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stuartlees/The Shoestring Marketer: https://shoestringmarketer.co/Dave Hayward, LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/haywarddave/Chapters 00:00 Introduction01:00 Stu's background: the SF startup and the marketing academy05:00 Learning by osmosis: how Stu learns anything new07:30 Public speaking as a superpower09:00 The Shoestring Marketer and what it's for14:00 Setting up the three neglected things15:00 Neglected thing 1: deep customer personas17:00 Emotion first, logic second19:30 The persona framework: fears, frustrations, aspirations, context22:00 Frustrations as a cheat code for writing content24:00 Case study: "not on my watch" and a backup software campaign26:00 System 1 and system 2 in marketing27:30 Neglected thing 2: the full funnel and email nurture30:00 People don't buy from ads. They buy from relationships.32:00 The $2M case study: 40,000 emails a week, no cold calling35:00 Neglected thing 3: personal brand in the age of AI36:00 It's never been more unsafe to be an employee38:00 The daily LinkedIn connection habit (started 2014, 28,000 connections)40:30 Get out from behind your desk43:30 Being unapologetically human45:00 Public speaking and community as brand builders51:00 Real rooms beat digital channels for trust55:00 Why a monthly newsletter proves you're a reliable business58:00 Wrap up