Career Coaching Secrets

Your Career Superpower: Discovering Achievements with Tom O'Neil

• Davis Nguyen

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Host Rexhen interviews Tom O'Neil, an award-winning international speaker, best-selling author ("The 1% Principle"), and career development expert. Tom's work has been featured in Harvard Business Review and The Economist, and he leads cv.co.nz.

Tom's journey to coaching began at Deloitte New Zealand, where he observed successful professionals often lacked life balance. This inspired him to help clients achieve a holistic approach to career and well-being. He highlights his "Achievements Questionnaire" as a powerful tool, even published in "What Color Is Your Parachute?", that helps clients understand their true value, sharing a compelling story of an 18-year-old realizing her significant accomplishments.

He coaches a broad range of clients, from students to CEOs, including mothers returning to the workforce. Tom's client acquisition relies on organic search (via owning key domain names like cv.co.nz), strong referrals, and Google Ads. He also maintains an active LinkedIn presence with value-driven content.

Looking ahead, Tom aims to continue his impactful work and address the challenge of effectively "marketing himself." He advises coaches to be bold, network actively, and clearly articulate their value.

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Tom O'Neil:

I developed a tool called the Achievements Questionnaire. What that does is people go through it and they start to just understand their achievements. I always find it quite interesting when I say to people, you know, so what are your achievements? People look at me like, you know, like I'm crazy, you know. And ironically, the people who are probably the most impressive in terms of their career tend to be the people that don't understand their achievements the most. They kind of just see it as just doing their job. And so this achievement questions.

Davis Nguyen:

Welcome to Career Coaching Secrets, the podcast where we talk with successful career coaches on how they built their success and the hard lessons they learned along the way. My name is Davis Nguyen, and I'm the founder of Purple Circle, where we help career coaches scale their business to $100,000 years, $100,000 months, and even $100,000 weeks. Before Purple Circle, I've grown several seven and eight figure career coaching business myself, and have been a consultant at two career coaching businesses that are doing over a hundred million dollars each. Whether you're an established coach or building your practice for the first time, you'll discover the secrets to elevating your coaching business. business.

Rexhen Doda:

Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Career Coaching Secrets Podcast. I'm your host, Regine, and today's guest is Tom O'Neill. He is an award international speaker, best-selling author, and career development powerhouse. Tom's work has been featured in Harvard Business Review, The Economist, and over 300 other global publications. He's the author of multiple career and personal branding books, including the Amazon bestseller, The 1% Principle, which has helped thousands of professionals make consistent, sustainable changes in their lives. As the managing director of cv.co.mz and regular national columnist, Tom has supported over 10,000 clients across 50 countries, guiding them to land their dream roles, build standout personal brands, and lead with purpose. And it's a pleasure for me to have him on the podcast today. Welcome to the show, Tom.

Tom O'Neil:

Kia ora, my friend, as we say here in the beautiful New Zealand.

Rexhen Doda:

Well, it's a pleasure to have you on And first of all, I want to learn a little bit more about what inspired you to become a coach and then start your own coaching business.

Tom O'Neil:

Yeah, it's interesting. I have a degree, started my career with a degree in psychology and just fascinated in people and thought, oh, that's, you know, let's find out more. From there, got into recruitment and really interesting things. Doing recruitment was a recruiter for Deloitte, an HR management consultant. I was the head of the great of being the youngest management consultant in the whole of New Zealand at 26 years of age for Deloitte. And it was really, really weird because the previous five years, And when I was at Deloitte's, you're interviewing, looking to recruit chief financial officers, you know, senior level roles, CEOs. And all of these people, I just found, not all of them, but many of these people were really great with their career, really fantastic. But when you dig a little deeper, you know, they were having personal relationship issues with their family. Their health was really poor. You know, they were just stressed out the whole time. They weren't really working on anything outside in terms of hobbies or interests or anything like that. And it was just a common thing, people thinking for another 10, 20 grand, my life will be so much better. When in actual fact, for an extra 10, 20 grand, you're just going to get more responsibility, be away from your wife more, you know, your husband, you know, whatever it is, your kids. And so for me, I thought, actually, you know, I'm at 26 years of age, I'm trying to find out who I am and what I'm doing on this planet. And so for me, it was a real interesting journey around focusing, you know, primarily on the career, helping people in their careers, but having having an understanding of actually it's been more holistic and really transitioning my thinking and as such the thinking of my clients away from not just your career I mean we all need more successful careers but then also balancing that with health with family with friends with fun with faith all these other things and so yeah so for me it was that was the transition from just really seeing people focus only on one area of their life doing it well but to the neglect of everything else so that made me want to sort of provide a bit more insight across the whole the whole area of life if that makes sense

Rexhen Doda:

and throughout these years it's been almost like 15 years and a half or something that you have been started started your coaching business maybe it's been more that you've been coaching but throughout these years and feel free to correct me if i'm wrong throughout these years which

Tom O'Neil:

part of it it's quite funny i used to say that i've got over 20 years experience in recruitment in hr and then one day i was saying that and realized i've actually got over 30 years experience in recruitment at hr it's quite so depressing really but you know

Rexhen Doda:

it's uh you mean so 15 years would be like the actual coaching business and then there's about 20

Tom O'Neil:

yeah

Rexhen Doda:

25 extra that has been coaching in hr

Tom O'Neil:

oh probably another 15 extra yeah yeah yeah so

Rexhen Doda:

okay Amazing. And so which part of the coaching journey would you say is the one that you find the most rewarding since you started your coaching business?

Tom O'Neil:

Really interesting question. I developed a tool called the achievements questionnaire. What that does is people go through it and they start to just understand their achievements. I always find it quite interesting when I say to people, you know, so what are your achievements? People look at me like, you know, like I'm crazy, you know. And ironically, the people who are probably the most impressive in terms of their career tend to be the people that don't understand their achievements the most. They kind of just see it as just doing their job. And so this achievements questionnaire I developed, it actually got published in the world's largest career guide called What Colour Is Your Parachute? So it was published in that, I think, for about 15 years, which was cool. My work got translated into, I think, 13 languages around the world, something like that, which is crazy. But the interesting thing with this is it helps people understand get tangible aspects or tangible examples of their achievements. For example, I had a young woman phone me. I was probably 18 and 19 and in tears. I'm like, this is weird. People don't normally phone me crying. And I said, well, what's wrong? And she said, I've just handed in my notice to my boss. He screwed it up and screwed it up and threw it in the bin and laughed at me. And I want a CV, please. I want to leave the job. My heart just went out to her. Just I could just feel her heartbreak. And I said, okay, well, let's just unpack some of this. And this is over the phone. She's just outside on a mobile phone crying. And I said, so what's your background? And she said, I work as an office administrator at a gas station. And we go, okay, cool. And all right, have you started to go through some of these achievements? Have you done this? No. Have you done that? No. Then I said, have you set up any systems? And she goes, only MYOB, MYOB. is a accounting finance system. We have this part of the world. And I said, what? You set up MYOB? This girl's, this young woman's 18, but maybe even 17. And I said, you set up MYOB? in the company, in the service station. She goes, no, all his service stations. And I went, what? And he's got something like six service stations. So she set up this accounting and finance package and networked it across five, six petrol stations. I said, that's amazing. She goes, oh yeah. And then I said, do you know any cash handling? And she says, oh, not much. And I said, how much? She says, I take $60,000 to the bank every two days. I'm like, I've been in HR for 20 years at the time. No one's given me $500. It was so funny because you could hear the cogs in her brain just literally go gung gung. She started to now understand her value and she said, right, I'll phone you straight back. Hung up on me, went back and printed off the letter, went over to the boss, slammed it on his table, told him I'm out of here, phoned me back about 10 minutes later and helped her with the CV, got a wonderful new job and away she went. But that for me, I'll never forget that because it was just one one of those moments where as a coach you have this incredible honor of having speaking into someone's life and that was such a blessing it was such an incredible blessing to help this woman go from and literally eight minutes from a blubbering mess who had believed she had no value to a powerful young woman who was actually doing really cool stuff yeah so for me that was a really probably that my favorite bit of what i do helping people understand their value and it's a relatively simple process

Rexhen Doda:

that is an amazing story especially given that like like you said seven minutes a phone call you can make a difference you can make an impact in someone's life like that it was crazy so typically we talked a little bit about this in the intro as well uh when it comes to the people that you work with uh the target audience or who you generally end up working with, how would you describe them? Is there a specific industry or specific niche or maybe a specific demographic that you typically find yourself working with or is it broad?

Tom O'Neil:

Yeah, I like to say actually it's quite broad. I work with students all the way through to CEOs. Yeah, which is great because it's a lot of nice variety. You're working with some person who, you know, is an amazing global leader. I mean, some of the people I've worked with, I'm thinking, it's insane. But the funny thing, they're still terrible at knowing what their achievements are. Just useless. And then, you know, you've got a 20-year-old student who's just graduated with a degree in marketing and they're out to make a mark in their world. It's awesome. Ones I really enjoy working with, you know, mums who are returning to the workforce. Again, that's a whole demographic itself that are people, successful women who then take a break for their career. But then they suddenly think, you know, my whole career, everything's changed. You know, I've been out of the market for three years and I'll step down to get back into it. Well, why do you need to step down? It's not like the law field's changed that much. that much in three years or the marketing industry's changed that much in three years or whatever it is. And so again, just helping women like this really understand their value and that there's no need just because you've taken time out of your career, which shouldn't be. And a lot of them come to me very sort of, oh, you know, I've taken time out of my career. You took your time out of your career to do the most important job a human possibly can, and it's to raise a family, you know. You should be thrilled. You should be stoked telling our potential employer that, I took three years out to focus on my family. And for some reason, we've got this whole, oh, it's a, you know, you've taken time out, something's wrong. So for me, it's very wide, which is wonderful. And again, it just gives a lot of variety. As I say, one day I'm dealing with a global chief operations officer. A few hours later, I'm dealing with a student who has just graduated. It's really great honor.

Rexhen Doda:

And how do you find people or how do people find you in order to work with you? in terms of like marketing channels?

Tom O'Neil:

Yeah, so our business is cv.co.nz. I also own outplacement.co.nz, learning and development.co.nz, interviews.co.nz, you know, all this sort of stuff. So I certainly worked very hard at the start 20 years ago trying to buy, you know, all the sort of relative domain names, CV service, LinkedIn profiles, you know, you name it, probably got it. Just to try and capture that market in terms of that brand of course that helps with google and so um a lot of it's organic search which is incredible blessing right place right time sort of thing i won't say it was due to any smarts uh it was just due to you know um being there some things are funny like interviews.co.nz was just sitting there free crazy it cost me 30 bucks cv.co Dot NZ, I had to get a loan to buy. It was $5,000. It was 20 something years ago. And the guy that owned it said, I want five grand. And at the time, it was all the money in the world. You know, you're starting your business, you're spending $5,000 on literally nothing except some digital device. placeholder, you know. But again, obviously that turned into the best investment in my life. My wife was very supportive and it was really, really great to have her behind me there. And, you know, going to the bank to say to the bank, we need to want to buy this digital asset. It's kind of like buying an NFT these days. It's a respect to the bank. But, you know, thankfully that went ahead. And so, yes, buying those domain names is really important. Obviously, 20 odd years are going now. So we've been going, cb.co.nz as such has been going 20, just over 20 years now. Effectively, we get a lot of organic business come in. Just, you know, friends of friends, people returning. It's quite funny. It's kind of, as a coaching business, we have people come to us, help them out, which is a great, great blessing. And then, you know, two or three years later, they come back. But of course, over 20 years of working, that's quite a nice consistent sort of income. Of course, referrals are very, very good. I'm always getting referrals. I got three referrals yesterday, something like that. It's just amazing. And then on top of that, Google Ads is our main advertiser. So we've always historically found Google Ads very, very good. I tried LinkedIn, found it was too expensive. Facebook got a very limited response for the investment. I always found Google Ads the best way to get that word out. I'm always trying different things and trying different staff. Unfortunately, I haven't found a magic bullet per se, but through pretty much Google Ads and the organic search where it comes up and referrals on the whole, I have a pretty solid pipeline.

Rexhen Doda:

I really like it. You already have a pretty diverse set of marketing channels. Most of the coaches that I interview happen to only have referrals or rely on referrals, but you've worked out some other channels and extra to that, which is amazing, especially thinking about these domains. They probably are worth a lot more today.

Tom O'Neil:

Honestly, seriously, every single one of them was sitting there except for cb.co.nz. It's ridiculous. So wherever you are in your own country, Just jump online and find out if interview, interviews, LinkedIn profile, LinkedIn profiles, you know, all that stuff is sitting there. And it's just crazy. And of course, you buy LinkedIn profiles, co.nz or co.ab or wherever you are. Suddenly, obviously set up a quality web page to have something that Google likes. And then now you become a lot further up the chain because you've got that brand.

Rexhen Doda:

Yeah. Absolutely. And not only do you rank organically on Google, you also are doing Google ads on top of that. So you kind of like have some real estate within the Google search area that belongs to you. Yeah,

Tom O'Neil:

yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, I mean, obviously if you're, you're, you're searching in a different channel, I mean, we do social media advertising on Facebook. Um, and when I say advertising social media posts that don't pay for advertising on Facebook or LinkedIn, but do, um, I've got five, 6,000 connections on linkedin so twice a week put up a post um you know smiling person and just like a tip so not necessarily come to cb.co.nz we'll solve your problems or you know there's only one time in your life sorry there's only one time in society we're allowed to talk about how good we are that is the job hunt you know that's one of my sort of my go-to go-to sayings you know we as humans you know you don't go to a barbecue as we have in new zealand i'm sure around the world. You don't go to a barbecue and start talking about how good you are. You know, you sound like an idiot. However, people take that barbecue mentality to the job interview. They don't talk about how good they are at the interview and just very humble and very quiet. Well, this is the one time someone's wanting to hear how good you are. You know, they're wanting you to talk about how you met and exceeded KPIs, how you set up that new system, how you were awarded for the responsibility, how you're involved in coaching and mentoring, training new people. as a recruiter former recruiter that's gold to me because it helps me define your value against someone else's and that's again what my achievements questionnaire does help people pull that stuff out but the problem is people go to the interview and go I do these five things and I suppose one of my other things I would say is imagine if the world's greatest tennis player and say Rafael Nadal imagine if he wrote his CV and put occupation tennis player responsibilities hit ball you know it's crazy because absolutely mad but it is what he does for his job this is the thing yeah he does for his job yet he's won wimbledon he's won us open blah blah blah blah that shows the quality of him hitting that ball and the problem is you know you'll say i'm a sales rep i do do these six things i'm a ceo i do these 12 things well it's like saying rafael hit a ball you know and you want that in your cv but what are the outcomes of what are the outcomes of hitting the ball effectively

Rexhen Doda:

yeah absolutely and great analogies by the way how do you how when it comes to you mentioned a book at the beginning what color is your parachute and so what color is your parachute what what is that about

Tom O'Neil:

specifically so that's that's the world's leading the world's best-selling career guide so it's been published i think every year since 1980 or something and that's that's very much in the career space i think sold over 10 million copies worldwide but um yeah it's it's Written by a guy called Dick Bowles, who sadly passed away now. But it's really primarily focused on the career space. And yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So really, really great book.

Rexhen Doda:

I wanted to ask you also about when it comes to looking into the future from now, what are some goals you're working towards with your coaching business? Is there something coming up?

Tom O'Neil:

Yeah, it's interesting. In terms of particular goals, I also have another business, Learning. and development, which is free. Just sitting there on the internet. I

Rexhen Doda:

get the pattern or not? Pattern.

Tom O'Neil:

Learningdevelopment.co.nz. When I saw it, I just couldn't believe it. My balls almost fell out of my head. But I do a lot of coaching. Sorry, a lot of training programs on professional business writing and critical thinking and problem solving and so on for our national defense.

Rexhen Doda:

And

Tom O'Neil:

you mentioned that you also

Rexhen Doda:

have a team structure. How does that look like? But how is the structure look like? So what are the roles you've hired? Wow. Antarctica. That is impressive. Yeah. Yeah. What would you say is like the biggest challenge that you're trying to solve for now? Is there any challenges that you're facing? with your coaching business. Yeah. Yeah. You got to market yourself. Yeah. We have about like four more, like five more minutes. I wanted to get you like, is there any final advice you'd like to give to other coaches who are looking to scale their impact? Thank you. Thank you so much, Tom. For anyone who wants to find you or connect with you, they can go into LinkedIn, search Tom O'Neill, or they can go into Google. Again, search your name on it. Your website will come out. And you also mentioned your websites as well throughout the podcast. We'll make sure to link it as well in the description so people can come and find you. Thank you. Thank you so much, Tom. And yeah, it's been a lovely episode overall. Thank you so much for coming. That's it

Davis Nguyen:

for this episode of Career Coaching Secrets. If you enjoyed this conversation, you can subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to this episode to catch future episodes. This podcast was brought to you by Purple Circle, where we help career coaches scale their business to $100,000 years, $100,000 months, or even $100,000 weeks, all without burning out and making sure that you're making the impact and having the life that you want. To learn more about our community and how we can help you, visit joinpurplecircle.com.