Building a business with employees involves culture. Good or bad, every organisation has one. Healthy cultures with engaged employees have more effective teams and better business performance. This podcast looks at how to keep culture from turning sour.

Tristan White founded The Physio Co in 2004. 5 years later he had 20 employees and what he calls a great big mess. After addressing his organisation’s culture, Tristan has grown from 20 to 150 happy, engaged and enthusiastic employees in less than a decade.

Lisa Spiden is the Founder and Managing Director of fibreHR and Roster Right. Working in HR in London and Australia, across banking, fast-moving consumer goods, IT, and communication, Lisa has seen the best and worst of cultures. With a great culture comes discretionary effort from employees, which Lisa says is the best way for your business to set itself apart from the competition.

Disclaimer: Transcripts may contain a few typos. Similar sounding words can lead to them being deciphered wrongly and hence transcribed likewise.

Ed Guy: When it comes to HR, what do you think is the best way to get the most out of your employees?

Interviewing Public: Engage them. I think the best way is focusing on leadership development, managing and leading from the top modeling of the behaviors, modeling the culture, modeling the values, the vision of the company and having that built into the way that you manage your staff.

Interviewing Public: I don’t know, I suppose to keep them engaged and happy. Foster a culture in your organization where people can be happy in their roles and learn and progress.

Interviewing Public: Trying to create a culture of involvement inclusiveness where everyone feels, they can speak up and be part of what’s going on and opinion is valued, no matter what level they’re up.

Serpil Senelmis: For WeTeachMe this is the Masters Series where industry professionals share their secrets to business success. I’m Serpil Senelmis from Written and Recorded. In every episode of the Masters Series we hear from entrepreneurs and founders who have built successful businesses. Almost all of them say that their greatest challenge in business is employees. Finding, hiring and keeping employees that support your business goals and vision is easier said than done even when you’re a specialist in HR. Lisa Spiden is the founder and managing director of fibreHR and knows from experience that culture flows from the top down.

Lisa Spiden: One particular business logic work with the leader themselves and the execs work that engaged in the particular vision you just saw. Filter through the rest of the business, people taking sick ways they had high staff turnover. The actual environment just felt really flush.

Serpil Senelmis: We’ll hear from Lisa soon. First up, Tristan White is the founder of The Physio Co, the weather network of 157 staff across the country. Five years into the business, when he only had 20 employees, Tristan realized that he had created a big mess. Of the past decade, Tristan says he’s cleaned up that mess and created a culture that supports the team and celebrates collaborative wins.

Tristan White: So my story goes something like this. I was not a born entrepreneur. I grew up in a small town called Foster and in the bush 1000 friendly people within Foster and I moved to Melbourne to study physiotherapy. And physiotherapy is important part of my story. I am a physiotherapist. And when I finished uni, I felt that I had a real conflict with my head and my heart. My head told me I need to go in my career direction. My heart told me I didn’t stomach the idea of working in a public hospital system, it just didn’t feel right to me. I moved back home to Gippsland and I worked in a group of private practices, where I got to see sportspeople work in an elite AFL footy club in the evenings and on weekends, a little bit of hospital and aged care work. And that first job was such a blessing and such a challenge because I loved it. And then I sort of hated it. And after one year, in the job that I thought was going to take me 10 odd years to get to. I fell in love with my career. That was a really, really, really tough time. But what I did, I reflected hard, I thought about what I enjoyed doing as a physiotherapist. I didn’t tell a soul because I was embarrassed about what I discovered. But I discovered that I liked working with older people. I started working in a small old nursing home in the northern suburbs of Melbourne. And I met George. George out of work needed some help to get around was bent at the knees that the lane to the left and really hard work for George to get around. But I started working with him as his physiotherapist helping him to improve his strength. He’s balanced his endurance and his happiness. And I loved working with George. And so the next year, I work with George, his roommate, Liz, and some other residents at this nursing home. And then I got busier going to other nursing homes and other nursing homes. After the first year. I needed to ask for help. I couldn’t help all the georgia’s and lasers and matrices that I need to help. And was that point that the physio code that is today with close to 150 team members, helping people like George to stay mobile safe and happy was born from me swallowing my pride reflecting on what was important to me, and being humble enough to dive in to what made my heart sing. And so, as the Physio Co started, this was flying by the seat of your pants adventure of growing a team. I had no idea what culture was. I learned about culture about five years in. All I was doing serving my clients as best I could saying yes to opportunity, encouraging people to join our team and moving forward in the fastest, most effective way I could. I created something that from the outside looked growing. Impressive, helpful, useful. From the inside, I’d created a beach mess. Started Physio Co 2004, five years in, got about 20 team members, no idea what culture is. didn’t really know what this business stuff was. I got to a point I felt completely trapped and stuck inside a business. I’m a bit of a tackle a problem and get stuck into it sort of work. And so I did something, which was one of the biggest risks I’ve ever taken in my business career. That was our left. I didn’t leave forever. But I left the three weeks. I went from Melbourne to North America. I visited some seniors healthcare businesses in America and in Canada. A wonderful, wonderful business called Nifty After Fifty. Kind of gyms for older people in Orange County, California. I came back and I had my solution. I had the idea. I was going to create a purpose-driven values-based business, which would be the foundation of how we would then scale grow and tidy up this big fat mess that I’ve created. If there’s one learning from my career from a business perspective, is choose a model choose an ID and choose something to follow along. I don’t have all the answers that other people have done it, if someone’s done it before, learn from them grow from them, tailor it to what you can do, but really, really do learn from others. What I’ve just described is what I called the fifth year struggle. And it’s nice to give names to challenges in your life once you’ve moved through them. At the time, it’s like hell that like we all know when you’re going through hell keep on going. But one thing I want describe that having a strong culture, purpose-driven values to guide the behaviors in every business, but so very important that we have a really clear vision as to where the business is headed. Because how the hell can any team members follow, grow, challenge themselves and move the business in the direction they want it to go? If they don’t know what the vision is and where they’re going? So as the founder, that’s our job to clarify, communicate, and over-communicate and over-communicate and our over-communicate, and then do it again as to where we’re headed, I reckon that we need a pretty long term goal. Now, Jim Collins in his famous book, Good to Great talks about a big, hairy, audacious goal and be have should be between 10 and 25 years or thereabouts. I’m now a risk-taker, but not that of the risk-taker. So I have on the 10-year end, and so a 10-year obsession as our north star where we’re headed. So if a challenge comes up, are we going to work through what is our core purpose to help seniors stay mobile safe and happy? Great. Let’s continue with our purpose behaviors, core values, we know exactly how we should be acting and the vision where are we headed? And so a 10-year obsession is what we created in 2009. The 10-year obsession for The Physio Co was from our little team of 20 people to grow at 35% per year, per year, per year., per year for 10 consecutive years, so that the end of 2018 we will have delivered 2 million consultations to help Australian seniors stay mobile safe and happy.

Tristan White: That’s a big goal when tracking for 10 years and making good progress. We have had years where we have smashed the yearly goal, and we’ve had years where it’s really sucked. And we’ve really struggled. But where we are right now, almost at the 10-year obsession is we are close to 1.5 million consultations delivered since 2009. With that goal of 2 million consults by the end of this year. It is likely that will land at 1.6 million consultations delivered to Australian seniors in aged care homes, retirement villages and their own homes between 2009 and 2018 which is partly disappointing and partly completely fine because we will likely hit 2 million consults the 31st of December 2019. And it may just take us 11 years to hit our 10-year goal. And I for one, think that is a okay. Our business has grown from 20 people to about 150. We’re going to deliver over 2 million consults in 11 years with one wonderful awards for being great place to work. But all that means nothing if we’re not serving our community and helping seniors stay mobile, safe and happy. It’s been a wonderful experience for 10 years to be one of Australia’s best places to work. For me two weeks ago, to have our group at Amy Park and have over 100 people in a room. A full day of learning, flying in from all around the country was a wonderful, wonderful, proud experience. But this is not about celebrating this is about sharing experience. And so from my perspective, there’s been so many things I’ve had to learn as a person, as a physiotherapist as a team leader, as a CEO, as an entrepreneur, as a husband, as a father, as a volunteer. But the one thing that I think I’d love to share as the most significant thing that I’ve had to figure out and this is an idea of mine, and that is that in any team or any relationship, this is never-ending continuum between caring for and focusing on the people in your team at one end. And the very other end is outcome or business performance. And in my experience, I spend more of my time caring for and spending too much time I naturally gravitate towards the people end of the spectrum, which is probably why I’m a physiotherapist in the first place, and probably part of the strong business we’ve achieved, but in some really tough times and crap time for cash is getting tight, difficult moments with clients, retention of the team, might be having dips because we’ve had all those challenges. Sometimes I find myself focusing more and more and more on the numbers and the business performance. And when I focus on that end, we lose momentum on the culture. But when I focus too much time on caring for and engaging with our individual team members, we don’t always get the performance we’re looking for, be really clear that there is this continuum of people and, and business outcome and, and if you spend too much time focusing on one of the other, then you don’t have that balance, right. I learned that from a business perspective, but it applies to nearly everything in my life. I’ve got three little kids at home. And if I don’t engage with them in a way, which is both caring, and making sure I’m leading them and helping them in the right direction, that relationship doesn’t work out. It’s hard, but it can be done. If someone else has done it, you can do it too. And I’ve had an interview with a wonderful, wonderful mentor of mine just a couple of weeks ago, her name is Emma Isaacs from Business Chicks. And I said to Em, what is the one piece of advice you wish she’d known a long time ago? And she said, to believe in myself. And as I reflect on that conversation with Emma Isaacs, and I think about my own journey, that’s one thing that I haven’t done enough of that is believe in myself, care for myself, who got myself learn, grow, challenge, stretch, rest, and do it all again. Because that’s the job that we’ve got as individuals as humans and as business owners. Thanks for your time.

Serpil Senelmis: So when it comes to building a team, flying by the seat of your pants, is not the way to go. Thanks, Tristan. We’ll take a closer look at building a healthy culture in your business with Lisa Spiden of fibreHR right after this.

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Serpil Senelmis: Thanks, Ad Guy. Lisa Spiden is the Founder and Managing Director of FibreHR and she’s passionate about working with brands to create high performing teams. In this fireside chat with WeTeachMe’s Wayne Lewis. Lisa says the leader of a business is always on show. So it’s important to model the values of the business and remember the impact that your mood can have on the rest of your team.

Lisa Spiden: I fell into HR doing some work over in London in the Human Resources area. My first proper HR gig I would say would be at Barclays Capital in London doing Human Resources generalist type of work. At Foster’s, I had many different HR gigs, including international liability. So looking after all the people who went overseas and looking at how we equalize their tax in different countries and all different elements of human resources, which was relatively complex at the time, but a fun role. Went to Just Group, probably about 12 or so years ago. And it was probably my first real commercial HR gig and it’s because of the person that I actually worked for and the fact that it was in retail. I’d worked in human resources for many years and thought I was pretty good at it got some pretty good feedback, but it wasn’t till I got to the Just Group that I actually worked out that everything I did in human resources had to lead to an actual benefit to the organization. Retail as people would know, is really fast-paced, really low margin, you’re doing everything on a shoestring and really impact-driven, you’re looking at things that you’re doing one day and how it actually is affecting store and sales the next day. So Just Group is just James Portmans, Peter Alexander, Smiggle, seven retail brands. And so it was the first role that I actually I felt such a huge sense of achievement working in that particular business. Because the things that you were doing, you could literally go into store the next day and see how it was actually affecting the people, if it was actually working and people were enjoying what you’re doing. And you could actually tell if it was making a difference to the business. And from that I worked on a particular project, which I won’t bore you with but but a particular project around retention and how do we make sure that we had the right people in stores and what have you. And I had a number of people come to me other retailers and asked me to do the same thing in their business. And so I went out and thought I’ll just do some consulting until I run out of work and then I’ll go and get a real job again and 9 years later, I’m still looking, waiting to go and get that real job but I’m really lucky in that time I’ve started my own HR consulting business fibreHR that I’ve had for nine years. I’ve worked with some amazing brands. I learned so much from these incredible entrepreneurs and businesses that I work with. I’ve worked with Carolyn Crystal from Carmen’s. I’ve worked with them the day when they had three people, Kikki K., I absolutely love working these brands and seeing what they’re actually doing. And I’m learning about the culture, people business, what’s actually working in these particular businesses. And I find that really inspiring. About four years ago, I started a second business. And that business is called Roster Right. And that’s looking at mathematically constructing rosters in the retail, hospitality, aged care, healthcare, spaces. And so I’ve got two businesses that run from my offices, and they’re completely different businesses, different cultures, different type of work, and the nine years of consulting and the work I did with Just Group previously, just gives me a huge amount of different experience and insight into culture and what actually leads to I guess, great culture. But right now, I run Roster Right on a day to day basis, I’ve got someone else running fibreHR, but I’m still really cross that business. So I’ve only got about not like Tristan, who’s got a beautiful empire over there. I’ve only got about 15 staff, it’s quite little. But as I said, the team, little things can make a big impact mosquitoes are a nightmare, they can make a big impact on the barbecue with a little bit hopefully making a big impact.

Wayne Lewis: And how does the culture look in both of your businesses?

Lisa Spiden: So it varies over time. And I think culture isn’t stagnant. And it’s not something that can be fabricated. One business is highly technical. So in the Roster Right business, I’ve got two individuals who are optimization mathematicians. And there’s only 20 of the people in Australia who’ve got the skills to do the math that they’re doing. That business along with the other team that I’ve got around them is very in to tasked focused very clear on what they’re actually doing. It’s a really tight culture in that particular business on the basis that the vision is very clear and you’ve got people who don’t need a lot of leadership. could not do the math they’re doing, I’d add absolutely zero value getting up in front of them and trying to tell them how to do their job. What I can do is point them in the right direction of what we’re trying to do commercially. And they can solve the problem themselves. So that is very interesting. Compared to my other business. The other business has got amazing people, lovely culture, it’s a little bit more reliant on the leader in that business, because that leader is really setting the vision and the passion. So depending on what stage of the business is, that depends on you know how that business is feeling from a cultural perspective. So it’s actually interesting sitting in literally one room with 15 people and you can actually see two different cultures going on in the businesses. All the people are awesome, but the cultures are definitely very different. For me, culture isn’t about one certain element. I’ve worked with businesses that have got basketball courts in their offices, or foosball tables, or they have drinks every Friday night. And for me, what I’ve seen over my journey is it’s not one element that actually creates culture. You can’t fabricate it. If you don’t have the right people, the right leadership, clear vision. It doesn’t matter how cool the whiz bang thing you got around the business, the culture is a made up of a whole lot of different elements, starting from leadership and vision and having the right people in the business. The other cool things, are little cherries on top, as opposed to what creates culture.

Wayne Lewis: And how do you know if culture is working?

Lisa Spiden: When cultures working, you’ve just got a really unified team who are working all together on one particular vision. The discretionary effort is insane. We were doing a piece of work for clients, and we needed to hit a deadline of Friday what have you, the entire team without me asking without even knowing, literally worked 24/7, literally overnight, all of them were working to get this piece of work actually done. I’m devastated because I’ve never ever expected or asked or would want my team to actually be working 24/7, they had so much pride in the work that they were doing, they refuse to actually let it not hit that particular deadline. And so the discretionary effort of a culture when you’ve got people aligned is just inside and around what they’ll go over and beyond to actually help the business achieve a certain goal. It’s easy to recruit when you’ve got a great culture, clients can feel it, you know, the actual quality of work, the fact that they’re actually really proud of where they work. There’s so many elements that just stand out when cultures working really well. And you can feel it if you walk into a business, you can feel straight away whether it’s actually got a vibe of people actually wanting to be there, as opposed to everyone taking off at four o’clock and you know, taking as many sick days as they can and not actually wanting to be around. On the flip side, when cultures not great, and I’ve seen this before, even some of the large FMCG businesses that pay their staff really well, they’ve got all the whiz-bang benefits, they will be have to pay salaries that were significantly higher than their competitors, because to attract talent, the only way they could get them was $3. Yo people didn’t want to work there. So they actually had to pay to get talent to come to them. When it’s not working well, you’ve got huge amounts of sick leave, you’re dealing with a whole lot of politics and people issues that you don’t really have to you don’t have to resolve when it’s all really working well.

Wayne Lewis: How do you monitor that and make sure you’re on top of it?

Lisa Spiden: Actually just talking to you staff and actually asking the question, I talk to a lot of managers who are doing performance reviews and they’re too scared to ask this staff if they’re happy. And they’re too scared to ask if they’re actually going to stay around in the business because they don’t want to hear the answer if they’re not. And for me, I would way rather ask the question of what’s keeping you here, and what would make you leave, because at least I’ve got the opportunity to address it, if they’re going to leave and see if I can actually turn it around, rather than sort of putting my head in the sand and waiting for a resignation. So for me, finding out how culture is going is asking the question, how’s it going, you know, if you know it’s not going well, and you don’t want to hear it, obviously, you’re not going to ask the question. But then you’re obviously okay with having potentially a poor culture in business.

Wayne Lewis: At what point did you think okay, I need to actively install the culture. Obviously, you work in an HR space that give you some insights, can you advise, when to introduce that and how?

Lisa Spiden: Well cultures pretty much mean at one when you’ve got staff so, so for me it’s not a formal introduction of culture by the fact that you actually are running a business and the fact that you have any staff at all if you do, you’ve got a culture, whether it’s a good, bad or indifferent culture, there’s a culture that exists. When to address it, obviously, you’re constantly monitoring it and making sure that it’s where you want it to be. But in terms of setting the culture right from the start, the core things that really influence culture is leadership. So having strong leadership, having clarity of vision, and a really inspiring vision, you know, where people actually want to be a part of it and buy into it. Having the right team, I’ve seen small businesses that have got one person that’s not the right fit that can completely affect the culture of the entire business. So dealing with poor performance or managing people who are not the right fit for your business is really important. But I do know of businesses that have had people who haven’t been the right fit for their businesses but have needed them technically. And they’ve sort of come to us previously and looked at ways to actually keep that people in the business but not affect the culture. And one scenario, I’m not suggesting that this is the way to go but I’ve seen one particular business where they actually ended hired to that person to work from home, which sounds a little bit crazy but it worked from the actual office perspective, people actually enjoy coming to work. They weren’t actually influenced by this person, this person thought it was great, because the reason they weren’t a great fit is they knew they weren’t a great fit. And they were happy to do the work and do it from home. And I guess what I’m saying is really addressing what is the issue with the culture and then working out if there’s a way to, you know, address that whether it’s out up around, whether it’s even just having an honest conversation with someone around fit?

Wayne Lewis: Can you give us an example of the worst-case scenario, something that you’ve seen that stands out to you?

Lisa Spiden: So one particular business that I did work with the leader themselves and the execs were that engaged in the particular vision for whatever reason, and you just sort of filter through the rest of the business. People were taking sick leaves, they had high staff turnover, people would come to work late leave late, really didn’t put any discretionary effort. They kind of did the minimum effort that was required in their job and you could just feel the quality of the work. The actual environment just felt really flush. Not long after some new executives were actually bought in and you can just feel the vibrancy people actually challenging things that are happening in the business question because they actually care. You know, it’s coming from a good spot and just feels very different. So, culture can be affected by many different elements. I think it’s just about being able to work out what culture you want to create new business.

Wayne Lewis: And what does the future hold for fibreHR? Do you have the long term 10-year plan, and maybe what Tristan talked about before the 25 years?

Lisa Spiden: I’ve got more of a 25-year plan for Roster Right in there. I know what that business is going to look like. And that’s hitting overseas markets. We’ve got a revenue target and sort of domination in that market. We’re lucky because no one else in the world is doing what we’re doing. So that’s a really cool business. In terms of fiber. My vision has been the same year on year, you know, a win for me as if it is the same in 10 and 15 years’ time and that is to work with some inspirational entrepreneurial businesses and provide HR support to help them be the best businesses they can. So our describe our services refers to their businesses. We don’t want to take the glory. We’ve navigated many HR obstacles and challenges along the way. And we want to use our learnings to help other amazing businesses reach the area for us. So that in itself is an amazing goal because over that 10 years, it might be another thousand incredible entrepreneurial businesses we get to work with. And that’s amazing inspiring. So it’s not really about world domination for that particular business or tripling the size of that business. It’s just around continuing to do amazing work with amazing people and adding value.

Wayne Lewis: Excellent, great answers. Guys. Can you join me in a round of applause for Lisa Spiden of fibreHR?

Serpil Senelmis: Even though I love the idea of a business with a cherry on top, it sounds like no amount of perks will make up for bad corporate culture. Thanks, Lisa. And thank you Tristan as well. Next time on Masters Series how to turn your passion into your business. Wait, I can, I can have a business based around watching Netflix? No. Okay I guess not every passion can be a business or maybe it can. I can’t wait to find out in your next it. Until then I’m Serpil Senelmis from Written and Recorded and for WeTeachMe, this is the Masters Series.

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Question of the day

What was your favourite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

In Masters Series, we regularly bring you real-life stories from entrepreneurs and start-up founders. In this episode, we turn the reality up a notch to bring you tales from the edge, with two people who had very different experiences during the GFC.

Jamie Langham is the CEO of Absolute Immigration who help businesses and individuals migrate successfully. Jamie’s business in Melbourne was going well in 2008, so he decided to put on a General Manager, and expand into Brisbane with an office and three staff. The GFC peaked a week later, but that wasn’t the only challenge the universe had in store for him.

Graham Van Damme is the Managing Director of Jag Capital. As a mining engineer, he bought into the business he was working for and began growing profits immediately. In 2008 he sold the business to private equity with the promise of even more ongoing profits. When the GFC hit a few months later, he realised his promise could be a little challenging to deliver!

Disclaimer: Transcripts may contain a few typos. Similar sounding words can lead to them being deciphered wrongly and hence transcribed likewise.

Serpil Senelmis: What’s the most challenging experience you’ve had in business or at work? e

Interviewing Public: Probably the biggest challenge is communicating at cross purposes with people

Interviewing Public: Working with other people like collaborating. Sometimes that’s gonna be really difficult. Different backgrounds, different cultures, so you have to kind of like, adjust everyone to the same working style, do everything for them.

Interviewing Public: It was dealing with a half-million dollars worth of debt.

Serpil Senelmis: Wow. Okay, that’s a challenge. And how did you tackle that challenge?

Interviewing Public: With difficulty. Haha. Yeah, there’s a number of different strategies. We try to sell our way out of it. We try to negotiate our way out of it, and we try to legally getaway out of it. So yeah, it was uhm, it was really tricky.

Serpil Senelmis: For WeTeachMe this is the Masters Series, where industry professionals share their secrets to business success. I’m Serpil Senelmis from Written and Recorded. One of the most popular reasons for listening to this podcast is to hear business tales from living examples of startups’ success, and sometimes tales of failure. In this episode, we’re putting the usual tips and tricks aside together around our founders and simply listen to their stories, business tales from the edge. In addition to working in his own business Jag Capital, Graham Van Damme has worked with other businesses on merger and acquisition and inboard roles.

Graham Van Damme: So we started trying to acquire the companies and the private equity companies or firms will just wind these things on massive model to bagger also. So we did so we ended up selling that thing for an eight-figure number. Build talk more money off the table at that transaction than he had in the previous 20 years.

Serpil Senelmis: We’ll hear from Graham soon. First up, Jamie Lingham will share his experience as CEO of Absolute Immigration in a fireside chat with WeTeachMe’s Wayne Lewis. Jamie has been working passionately in immigration for over 15 years contributing to immigration policy compliance and strategies. Working in a highly complex field. Jamie says integrity is key. As a founder, you have to own every decision you make.

Jamie Lingham: I actually was in marketing, and I was working for a company that did computer and internet packages. So I had great budgets. I was on a good salary. And I was just bored of just flying around going, I don’t love what I do. I’m not passionate about what I do. And my dad was doing immigration and he dealt with the sort of savior end of town. He was dealing with getting people out of detention. And he kept saying to me, you’ve got to get into immigration, you’ll love it. And I looked at the people he was dealing with, and I was like, forget it. These people are criminals. I don’t want to deal with it. And anyway, so I finally said, okay, I’ll give it a go. And I think I was in debt and I had no real plan, I went and did an immigration course. And then just decided I’m gonna just start. So I started in the bedroom of my house and just gave it a go.

Wayne Lewis: Your dad, been a huge catalyst for that. Was he something that you learn a lot of in that time? Or was he kind of did you kind of have to educate yourself in the process and push on from there?

Jamie Lingham: Yeah, the type of immigration that I worked on was significantly different to what he worked on. So I focused more on corporates, on attraction retention strategies on doing the compliance pieces for government departments. And so he was good on a number of things that help navigate the immigration system. But I also had a lot of mentors around and that to me was the big thing. So I sort of faked it till I made it in a way you go out and you’ve got the confidence and then I people would ask me are how do you do this? Or is this possible? I’d be like, yep, you know, let me double-check. And I will quickly be back on the phone or on their computer and I’d be checking in there like it’s fine. But I think it’s just sort of keeping that level of confidence as well, but also not taking people down the garden path and having a really honest approach with everything that I did.

Wayne Lewis: From the early days of some of those mentors still the same people or did you have to access a different type of mentor in the early days to what you do now?

Jamie Lingham: One of my mentors, is a Jesuit priest by the name of Father Michael Kelly. And he started a business that turns over $160 million a year, using the church as a buying group. And he’s the most honest guy I’ve ever met. His moral compass is unbelievable. So he was great through the startup time, and then about maybe five years ago, I sort of said, well, Mick, you know, my business is growing. And he was actually living overseas. And I said I need a new person. And so he put me on to another gentleman who basically he grew a finance business from, I think, was about 15 staff to 1500 staff globally. And so he’s an accomplished lawyer. He’s on the boards of a number of companies. And so I catch up with him on a monthly basis. I buy him lunch, we sit down, we go through some things. And I’ll say, look, Phil, you know, having problems with this or I need hands with that.

Wayne Lewis: Has there ever been any times where your moral compass has maybe led you astray in the decision making process and how you maybe come back from any of those moments?

Jamie Lingham: Look, I think that the answer is yes, I think sometimes you might sort of get a bit compromised when you know, you need some money, you got to pay your bills. I’m not saying you’re stealing or anything like that. But the advice you might give could be compromised. So what I learned very early on is you’ve got to give great advice. And just because you think you can make a sale doesn’t mean you have to make the sale and that hurts. But I think what’s really served me well is always being honest to people. And if you don’t need a visa today, I’ll tell you, I’ll say, look, you don’t need it. We had one of our clients who said, we want to bring over a couple hundred people from overseas for an engineering project. I said, Give me a technical person will fly overseas, I’ll meet with the companies who are recruiting for you. And basically, we saw three companies and the company that they’d signed up with, it was just terrible. They didn’t have any pastoral care. They had no idea how they’re going to deliver it. The other two, we found the project was going to be worth about $3.8 million, including recruitment fees, our fees probably would have been three or 400,000. I got back and I said, Look, the mining booms actually coming off, you can find local people and train them up using government subsidies and we saved the company about 3.6 million. And I missed down the fees. So the moral of the story that is, you know, yes, it hurt because I thought, well, this is great, there’s a huge wind I’m gonna make a lot of money. But money’s not the game. I mean, I always look at money is like oxygen. You know, you can’t take all the oxygen in the room, no matter how hard you try, it comes and it goes, you know. So it’s the quality of the air you’re breathing.

Wayne Lewis: Yeah. And talking a little bit about the drivers and some your drivers had a little chat with you before we kicked off. And you’re also talking about competition as well. So can you give the audience some insights into the competition and how that motivates you?

Jamie Lingham: Absolutely. I mean, I love business itself. I like looking at business and how different business operates. And one thing I’ve really learned is, when you go to big companies, you actually realize that the people in there working at high levels actually don’t know a lot. You expect you’re going to get to the huge listed companies and the person in HR is going to be less amazing, well rounded the day actually, a lot of them are still stumbling around. And so that interests me a lot. I think that, you know, to get to those levels think well, how can this big organization possibly operate with these people in the roles? And so as far as competition is going, I’ve had a number of competitors approached me to buy me out. And they say, we like your business, you know we want to buy. And I just think, look, I prefer to compete with you. Why am I going to sell to you? And I believe in what you do, I believe in where I’m going, and what I’m doing and our capabilities and our capacity. And you know, if I was 65, or 70, or 80, maybe look at selling, but I think that that’s really what gets me out of bed. I think, you know, just the fact that you’re running your own show that it is the decisions you make as long as your own every decision. You can’t sit there and blame are the markets turned down or often you just go okay, that’s on me.

Wayne Lewis: What about the difficult moments where maybe self-belief isn’t always there? How do you overcome those moments?

Jamie Lingham: You always get your days you question yourself and hear the cliche about all these stories about business people got told they can’t do it, can’t do it. I sort of got tired I could do it. You know, everyone’s out. You’d be great at it, this would be great. And it was actually more demotivating than someone telling me I couldn’t do it. Because then it, you know, just didn’t, I don’t know, have the same sort of feel. But there’s moments that you doubt yourself. There’s no doubt about it. But I think that really coming back to yourself, and one thing my dad did actually tell me because we’re dealing with people that are very emotional level, you know, moving people to a new country and getting their visa and enabling the state, it’s a highly emotional business I can’t think of I mean, I suppose you know, medicine, and to a lesser extent, real estate would be a similar level, but you know, you’re dealing with people’s lives. And so what he said to me, so just make sure you keep something for yourself like so I’ll go for a surf and then you know, get in the ocean or do whatever and just make sure I can really recalibrate. I have a highly supportive wife. I’ve got some good mentors around. So it’s just making sure that I think you have that level of support on the journey. And as I said, being honest in the way you act and the way you treat people and not ripping people off, that puts you in good stead.

Wayne Lewis: Can you give us some examples of one moment in your business haven’t been going the way you wanted them to?

Jamie Lingham: Yeah, absolutely. Back in 2006, I was in Melbourne and my business was just pumping it was, you know, we were going great guns. I looked around the office had 10 staff and I thought I’m bored. You know, I want to go do something different. So I said, I’m going to open up in Brisbane and there was 1% vacancy rate in Brisbane at the time. And so just before the GFC hit that very peak, that pin of the spike is the second I signed a lease on an office and I’m telling you like the world fell apart. And life doesn’t give you one thing at a time, it actually gives you everything so I had a downturn in the market. I’d employed three staff up there. I had 10 staff in Melbourne. I put a general manager on who was just a nightmare. She just put all my staff offside so five staff quit. My AI was stealing money, she stole about 70 grand off me. And then because of that actually got taken to court for fraud because of a document that she’d put into the department of immigration. So you can imagine it was bloody stressful. Anyway, so I had five staff in Melbourne resigned and went up with a sack of cash and I came back with zero. But anyway, so I packed up the office overnight, literally overnight. And I had a call from the building manager, they said, Are you doing a runner on us? And I said, No, no. I’ve just got to save my business in Melbourne. So I turned up to Melbourne, basically five agents down. So the people who did the work, and two agents in Brisbane who were now gone, and I walked in the general manager said are what are you doing here? And I said I’ve come to save my business. And she said, okay, I resigned. I said, perfect, that’s fine. And then my now wife, who was my girlfriend at the time, she said, look, if you have to work 12 hours a day, seven days a week to get this back on track, that’s what you got to do. And so I did six months was 12 to 16 hours a day, I took on all the caseload of everyone else, and I basically just put my head down and just battered on. And it was tough and so my girlfriend now wife would come in and we’d have dinner, and then I’ve sort of stumbled back to work. And it was tough. It was really tough, but I tell you, every single one of those things that happened, it’s the old cliche, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. It’s so true. I mean, I’m thankful for every single aspect of all the things that happened because it just taught me so much. It’s like that massive kick up the ass and I needed to pay attention to my finances. You know, I had a bookkeeper I trusted my bookkeeper, I trusted this person, you trust people. And I’m not saying you can’t trust people, but I’m saying putting systems and processes in place. So you can check those things. Because, you know, we’ll hear about bookkeepers taking money. And one thing I find is people who are going into business, don’t want to face up to certain aspects. I don’t want to be the accountant. I don’t want to be the salesperson. I don’t want to be whatever I want to be the technician but the reality is that you actually have to go I come into business, I need to grow myself in that area. I need to develop it. I need to get good people and robust systems that have redundancies in place, that if something goes wrong, that I’m alerted pretty quickly.

Wayne Lewis: At that time, then how did you build up the trust and obviously you talked about the processes but was it easy? I don’t know. Maybe after few months to draw back from?

Jamie Lingham: You know what, when I got back and getting things back on track, and as I said I was sort of going through this court process as well. And the funny thing is, we lost at the magistrate court. And so to be mentioned, you are guilty for fraud and go hold on a second, I didn’t do it. So and so a wonderful barrister in town and he said, oh, well, what was going on, and he sort of found the accounts, and he found this girl was stealing. And it was just bizarre how it all unfolded. And then I went to the county court, and, you know, obviously was then often got cost and all that sort of stuff. So you can imagine I’m going through the 12 hour days trying to sort of get things back on track. I’ve got five staff instead of 10. And it was tough, but it was, it was great. It just really, I suppose redefine who I was as a person and just, you know, reinforced my values.

Wayne Lewis: What about the hiring process now, if you do need to make any new hires? Do you instill that from the off? How do you?

Jamie Lingham: I have a few barriers that I hold very highly, obviously, when is integrity I know it’s a bit of a throwaway one that everyone wants to put on their company values, but just making sure people honest, would they give back money if they found it on the street? Would they go back into a shop and pay something that they forgot about? To me, that’s where you know you need to be I think fun. Fun is got to be in my top three values. If I’m not having fun what I’m doing, then forget it. I had one client who was so rude to one of my staff, he’d ring up an abuser, and I was like, okay, your next fee is an extra $500. And he said, What are you doing? And I said, Well, you know, this is our annual sort of fee rates. And then the next month, he said, okay, we’ll do it again. They increased it by 500 again, and he said, I’m going elsewhere. I said, Great. Life’s too short to put up with people like that. You shouldn’t be trade like that in business. And I always say that when you go into business, you like a dog chasing everything, you know, you will chase a kid on a scooter, you will chase an old lady and a pusher, you will chase someone in a wheelchair. It doesn’t matter because you’re out there. But as you get along, and as you get older, you sort of sit on the porch, and at the moment, I’ll only get up if there’s a double-decker bus full of fat Germans going past and then I’ll get off my porch, chase the business but what I’m saying is the amount of energy that you expend on doing those sort of things is really high but Back to your question on the employment of staff. So in my business, obviously having the technical knowledge is important. It’s another lesson I learned, I employed a guy who’d been doing it for, you know, 10 or 15 years the immigration game. And he gave such poor advice, I realized he didn’t know much. And I thought, well, how is he giving that advice to all the other clients? So now, all of my potential agents have seven case studies. And I give them complex case studies to see how they go, how they answer questions, how they think, how they research, and that’s great. It’s not just a personality-based thing.

Wayne Lewis: And what does the future hold maybe in the next five years for you?

Jamie Lingham: The immigration, as you know, is changing, you know, so rapidly, particularly Australia, I think that it’s misrepresented. I think that the government’s treated the migration space very poorly, and it’s like a cash cow. And so where the Australian government’s going is more automation work on algorithms. And you say, okay, you come from a certain country a certain age episode qualification, you’ve got more chance of getting a visa But if there’s any discrepancies in relation, what you do is probably chance you won’t get it. But our view is more outward. As far as not just doing just Australia centric we’re in New Zealand, you know, we go to png to China, we do visas for all these other countries. And so we think that it’s just about the global movement of people and helping, you know, particularly organizations do that and Well, yeah.

Wayne Lewis: Okay. Can we have a round of applause for Jamie Lingham of Absolute Immigration?

Serpil Senelmis: I loved how Jamie said money is like oxygen it comes and goes, What a great analogy. So if you can’t take all the oxygen in the room, it makes sense that you can’t take all the money in the world either. Next up, we’ll hear from the managing director of Jag Capital, Graham Van Damme.

Ad Guy: Masters Series is presented by WeTeachMe, whether you want to improve your photography taste whiskey or painted teapot. WeTeachMe has a class to build your soft skills and have fun. Learn what makes your heartbeat at weteachme.com. This podcast is produced by Written and Recorded. A podcast is an intimate medium where you can share your business story without anyone knowing that you’re blushing. Listen to more tales at writtenandrecorded.com. And now, back to the podcast.

Serpil Senelmis: Hey, thanks Ad Guy, Graham Van Damme has led businesses in aviation resources, mining, manufacturing and construction. One of those businesses he grew from $4 million in annual sales to 32 million in just six years. In this fireside chat with WeTeachMe’s Wayne Lewis, Graham says you’re only as good as your last project and you have to perform.

Graham Van Damme: Originally, I was a mining engineer. I’d worked in Australia, Indonesia, in the UK and then moved back to Australia in 2004. At the time, I was offered a role with this drilling company that was based in Melbourne, basically on half the salary that I had been receiving working in the mining industry out in the back of Queensland and Indonesia, or going back and working for bhp as a dragline engineer, and when I went for the interview, the owner at the time Bill Side said to me, and he was in his 60s basically said, look, within a couple of years ago, he running this joint. And I was a 26-year-old, I thought, oh, this sounds pretty cool. So I started with him and then you know, it was a business that very much first-second third generation so at one point, it was the largest privately owned drilling company in the southern hemisphere. But unfortunately, through Bill’s ownership, the market have changed to become a lot more compliant. There was a lot more competition. And they basically it struggled like sold off the piling division was very competitive. In Melbourne, and when I started with him, we only had about 15 employees. We had an operations manager yet a part-time bookkeeper and about 15 staff. So we’re turning about 4 million in turnover a year making no money. We basically are the next two years, we had the amazing opportunity to partner with Woodside. So they were looking for a local company to take the local content box on their tenders, did all the initial geotechnical drilling. So part of the drilling services that we did was all the site investigations that were close to coastal areas, but off jack-up barges. But to do that for Woodside yet to actually have an Australian standard level type or h&s system, which is what was there might have developed. And that was a lot of my background with the mining companies and with these, and we just grew from that. So once we became a T1 contractor to Woodside, we basically brought our ticket because you know all of the Chevron’s and Woodside and Fortescue metals and bhp’s and all these other companies then had a local supplier that take the local content wherever deliver this thing. So rolls on, you know, mid-2005 2006. And we’re gone 4 million, 6 million, 8 million in sales, a standard makes money. Bill tried to put the business on the market. I think in the 12 months he had for sale, I think they had one person come through the door. And I just flippantly said to one or the other, the operations were so why the hell we buy it. And he sort of said, nah he’s kidding the world. We want to buy these things that will ship for the amount of money that’s coming down the pipeline, why the hell not? So I started talking to all these PA firms and of corporate advisors, and they’re all talking about these 20 grand retainers each month, and yada yada yada. So there’s no hope and how long I can afford it. And I went to my subsequent business partner, I said all he said, No, don’t be silly said he’ll give it to us. That’s what he told me. So we’ll just buy it on vendor terms. And the promise was that we’d make him more money as our partner then he has in the previous 20 years. And so we basically bought it for nothing, bought 80% of it. And then we rode the mining boom. So we did the deisel project. We did the channel deepening. We did all of the Fortescue metals, expansions, all the brows, pluto blacktip. PNG, LNG, all the LNG projects. So we just rode this thing. And in those days, you know, one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is, you know, pick an industry with tailwind because people trying to relearn that one. But the thing is, even when we screwed up, we made money. So we bought the business in 2006 2007 all my business partners were 20 plus years older than me. And I’m looking at the market gun, I’ve got massive, key main risky, so I’ve got to work out and get some other production drilling into it. So we started trying to acquire the companies and the private equity companies, firms were just buying these things on massive multiples. So boger will sell it. So we did so we ended up selling that thing for six and eight-figure number. Bill took more money off the table at that transaction than he had in the previous 20 years. We sold 80%. So we basically rolled up within this amalgamation of three drilling companies with a private equity firm. So we close that deal in 30th of June 2008. And Lehman Brothers went fast in September of that year. So we’re on a trajectory and they went like this. And I learned from the PA guys that they just doubled down and they went, bought more companies. And then away we went. So we ended up exiting to Transfield for 575 million in 2010. And I lost the three months.

Wayne Lewis: We have a little chat before as well about the after-effects of that buyout. And when you sold out and everything else, can you give some insights as to the barriers that you came up against after that?

Graham Van Damme: You know, you go from running your own show. And basically in complete control, I knew I had business partners, but our board meetings per se was basically sitting around having a glass of scotch on a Friday afternoon going what are we gonna do next week? what’s ahead of us, what are we going to beat for and that was the extent of it, whereas when we moved into the PA with the PA Guys, they without a doubt, put a massive level of oversight and compliance, which wasn’t a bad thing. But we absolutely have to step up and professionalize all of our systems and processes. Because from day one, we knew we’re going to least or we’re going to sell to a listed company. And that was a phenomenal learning curve. It was a case of, alright, Jim, I need to buy an engine oryou need to buy an engine, yep, go down to or I got to get approvals. And during those days of the private equity guys, as long as you’re within a budget, not a problem, but as soon as you miss your budget, they’re all over you. So there’s a lot of those freedom to operate. And then when we rolled off into the a six company, very, very different culture, much, much bigger organization, and just the levels of compliance and bureaucracy stepped down, which was, you know, in my view, beyond what I was happy to operate in. So I ended up leaving pretty quickly.

Wayne Lewis: Throughout of all these processes. And obviously, you’re at the top of the scale there. How do you handle the stresses?

Graham Van Damme: At the time when we’re selling, I still remember the phone calls with a corporate advisor, at 1 am in the morning, we were doing the deal. The reason we sold for the business so well was we had no depth in the organization. There’s literally myself, my business partner who ran the operational side, or in the commercial finance side. And we had an admin manager and that was that was the management team. You know, you’re pulling 60 70 hour weeks, and then you do a transaction on top of that, which has got, you know, all the hours and managing DD and we had good corporate advisory guys, but at the end of the day, were the ones that got to answer this stuff. So the end of that journey, I ended up spending a week in hospital burnt out and at the age of 31 and I’ve never, ever worked those sort of hours again, I chose not to, you know, to how do I manage stress nowadays, it’s you know, I work I mean office, generally from hub at state, I’ll get home generally at five o’clock, Monday to Friday. My business is a product business, not a service business, the business I have at the moment. I’m heavily involved with scouts with my kids. We do a lot of travel I I’ve got a very good general manager that runs the day to day of the business. So, I have zero client-facing and faithfully zero supply facing role in my business now. And that comes with a cost. But at the same time, it gives me the freedom to be able to do what I choose to do. So my view of business and for me, the businesses are they’re a vehicle to fund the lifestyle that I want to create for myself and my kids. Unfortunately, I’ve ticked the box, I’ve got the T shirt for growing the big business, and I’ve had the bit in the massive staff in the restaurant, I just don’t want to play in that space anymore.

Wayne Lewis: What are some of the things that maybe some of the hurdles that you came across the big blockers for yourself that made things really difficult?

Graham Van Damme: Oh, it’s not so much blockers, it’s just workload. You know, at the end of the day, with service businesses, I mean, we’re all contractors, so it’s highly competitive. We’re working on massive projects. I mean, they’re multi-billion dollar projects. So you know, the likes of Woodside and ISO companies, their tolerance for delays, and all the rest of it is just zero. So you have to perform otherwise, you’re only as good as your last deal or your last project, otherwise, you’re not going to get the next one. And then you overlay that where myself and you know, I had four business partners that were relying on me to get the deal done. And sure there was elements with that were contributing, but I sort of made my bed I had to sleep in it. So I sort of laid it down this path that we thought was a good idea. Let’s have a crack and see what happens. Will you look around and business of that size, you sort of try to turn around and say, who’s going to take up the slack and there’s no one behind you, it’s left to you. So it’s just the nature of the game working in the businesses that we work in.

Wayne Lewis: And if we look to where you are today, you’ve got a new business, which is the engines you’re in the engines game. So can you give us a little bit of an insight to that and how your decisions and the way in which you want to manage that business is different to how you used to do things?

Graham Van Damme: Yeah, so I got out of the drilling company thinking I knew everything and started playing in the venture capital and seed investment stuff and lost a lot of money in IT, wastes all sorts of other silly crap. I should have gone anywhere near. I bought this business five years ago, because at that stage, I was involved in it. Other companies which have subsequently gotten out of or shut down, you know, it was a solid business have been around for 30 years, it was a product not a service that had a good solid team run under management. It was in the automotive space, which I thought was a cottage industry, which is like similar to the drilling where I’ll be able to, you know, consolidate and do what I did with a drilling company. And then you get in there and you get a 20% hit on the top line and all sudden you’re in turnaround phase pretty quick. So whilst yes it ticks all the boxes, the drilling company, I was had a business at tower wins. And now I’m facing headwinds, you know, and then you overlay the thematic of electric vehicles and autonomous vehicles and an aging workforce, an industry that people don’t want to be employed in, Chinese imports. I don’t know many other competitive games. Essentially, I go through my decision logics, I think the decision would have still been the same because I don’t fault the decision process, its just in hindsight, I should never have actually taken the original I am okay. That’s just the nature of that.

Wayne Lewis: So, do you talk about resilience and the hard work ethic there? Is there any other values that you hold close to your heart?

Graham Van Damme: Yeah, I mean, we do we, you know, my philosophy is that as far as r&d goes, it’s ripoff and duplicate. So we continuously improve, we’ve ripped off at licensing, so we don’t screw our clients. So we run through these are things you know, open and honest. And, you know, the integrity type thing is sort of so, you know, we want to have your own word, you know, you’ll be open, honest conversations. So one of the questions I always ask is, you know, when is it okay to lie? If you’re a parent, you say, well, you know, so it’s it’s an interesting way of seeing where people’s views are. That is, no, I don’t have them plastered all over the walls, but we are continuously talking about it. The businesses which are bought you had situations where the sales team didn’t actually know what promotions were actually in the marketplace at the time. Whereas I’ve walked in there and very candidly, and we had to because we had to deal restructure pretty quickly was, here’s the revenue numbers. Here’s the profit numbers, this is what it costs to actually produce a product. And that’s why it’s no longer competitive, continuously communicating it. And it gets the point where now, you know, I know, I’ve got a workforce on the factory floor that are knocking down my door telling me they want me to get back in front of them, talk to them, because I’m done for a few weeks. Next week. We’ll get there next week,

Wayne Lewis: Keeping them on the same path, right?

Graham Van Damme: Yeah, it is. They want to know where they’re going. They’re not silly. They know they can see the industry wins as well.

Wayne Lewis: Guys, can we have a round of applause for Graham Van Damme, please? Thank you very much.

Serpil Senelmis: So at the age of just 31 Graham found himself burnt out and hospitalized. The lesson there is your business should be the vehicle for the lifestyle that you want. Thanks, Graham, and thank you, Jamie, as well. Next time on Masters Series, business and people, culture and HR from forming and storming to norming and performing. Building a great team is vital to your startup. We’ll hear from two experts on how to hire well. Until then, I’m sorry Serpil Senelmis from Written and Recorded and for WeTeachMe, this is the Masters Series.

About Masters Series by WeTeachMe

Masters Series is a show about inspiring entrepreneurs, creative thinkers, and visionary dreamers, and the stories behind how they built their companies.

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Question of the day

What was your favourite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

Data is the key to modern business and there’s so much of it about that the challenge is less about how to get it and more about how to process it all.

Gary Tramer is the Co-Founder of LeadChat who are responsible for those little pop-up boxes on websites that ask if you need any help. Gary explains that he’s now taking his experience with data in e-commerce and applying it to bricks and mortar retail – to provide more information about physical shoppers when they walk into a store.

Simon Mathonnet is Head of Digital Strategy at Splashbox. He’s obsessed with data and digital marketing. Simon shares how he uses data to help startups and long-running businesses to achieve their goals.

Disclaimer: Transcripts may contain a few typos. Similar sounding words can lead to them being deciphered wrongly and hence transcribed likewise.

Serpil Senelmis: What do you think is the most useful data for a startup?

Interviewing Public: It will be starting from customer intelligence. So identify which customers are interested in their business or the products. So this way we need to refine how we get and engage their attention.

Interviewing Public: Potential customers, somehow being able to identify who they are, and their details. Probably definitely some data on the type of consumer you want to target. Who would be interested in your products and some innovate sort of that way?

Serpil Senelmis: For WeTeachMe this is the Masters Series where industry professionals share their secrets to business success. I’m Serpil Senelmis from Written and Recorded. Data is more than just numbers and details, it’s our new currency. All those free apps you’re using are all paid for with data and it’s worth much more than you might think. for startups, data provides valuable insights to understand clients, competitors, and ultimately to hack growth. In this episode of Masters Series, we’ll meet two data nerds sorry, experts who will help us empower our data and get our startups growing faster. Simon Mathonnet is head of digital strategy at Splashbox. He specializes in harnessing online marketing channels for startups to drive growth.

Simon Mathonnet: If you identify that a button on your website is critical to user conversion. Just really design a test that’s going to be maximum impact. Don’t slightly change the color like one gradient or something like don’t change it from blue to light blue, by changing from blue to red. Go from maximum impact with your tests, with your results with everything just make everything count.

Serpil Senelmis: We’ll hear more from Simon soon. Now if you’ve ever had a good chat with a website, chances are you can thank Gary Tramer and his team at LeadChat. There’s little pop up windows that ask you if they can help you. That’s LeadChat. Gary studied neuroscience before popping up in Windows, which might account for the success of the system. That and a lot of data. In this fireside chat with WeTeachMe’s Kym Huynh, Gary says he’s learned over several startup experiences that it’s important to sell first and build your product second.

Gary Tramer: If we sort of go back, I started University, about 2000. I decided to do a degree in behavioral neuroscience, which is really a fancy psychology degree. It sounds far more impressive on the resume. So I did it did his degree for three years and it’s you know that weird awkward time in your life. When you entrust into university, and you really have no idea what you want to do with yourself. And you’re trying to come up with the answers. And your parents are like be a doctor, be a lawyer, and you say, I didn’t get the grades. You know, it’s not as simple as that. It was this period where I was trying to find what I was good at. And sometimes you don’t find that out until much later, I finished behavioral neuroscience. And I got involved in sales. And the sort of sales that I got involved in was probably the dirtiest most frowned upon type of selling, door to door sales. When you go home and you tell your parents that you’re going to do door to door sales. What do you think they’ll say?

Kym Huynh: Well, I can only imagine.

Gary Tramer: So I never said that I was going to do door to door.

Kym Huynh: What did you say?

Gary Tramer: Well, I said I’m going to be a residential sales consultant. Which is like glass for door to door add-in like workbook, and I actually found it really quite awesome. You know, You get the door slammed in your face, you get the dog chasing you down the street. And we were trying to sign people up for energy companies and telecommunications companies. And I actually really enjoyed this idea. Completely commission-based, by the way, no base wage, if you didn’t do a sale, you didn’t make money. We were working 14 hour days. And I sort of knew then if I could do that, and if I can sell in that environment, this is sort of for me. And so I built a company 2004 through 2010, which is actually one of Australia’s largest direct sales companies. So if you would have walked through Melbourne airport or Sydney Airport, between those years, and somebody tried to sell you a Citibank or American Express credit card would have been our guys. And we wrote huge amounts of volumes of sales for these companies. And I decided after doing that for five or six years, if I’m doing so well for these companies, what if I put the sales resource to something that I owned and added some value to myself. And so my business partner, Michael, he’s actually a friend of mine. We’ve known each other since we were three, living the same street, went to school together, best mates, we went on different paths and came back. And in 2011, we decided to do this cool thing called a startup, which back then wasn’t really like a word like this. It was to start a small business, actually, we had this idea. So this is not going to sound exciting at all now, but back then, we thought, How awesome would it be if you could have the entertainment book on your phone? Now I know it sounds really boring. But back then iPhones have been out for like two or three years. It was like really cool. And we asked our accountant to help raise some money because that’s what you do. And we managed to raise about a quarter of a million dollars, which is, I think, quite an amazing thing. We spend I reckon like seven or eight days locked in my house, doing a business plan, using Business Plan Pro software. It’s like a wizard that tells you like what to write, amazing. Because we thought that’s what you do. Right? You have a business, the accountants are like he has a business plan. Yeah, have a business plan. All this thought into how it’s going to work. And we’re paying for these Ibis reports on like industry sizes and things we had now, that’s what we did raise the money. And we spent the money on developing the product. And I say that with a smile because I would never ever do that again. But we spent about $200,000 on the line item in the budget was turned $1,000 on building the app and the website, about $30,000 on the sales guys, and 10,000 on this, and then 10,000 on marketing. And we’re like, it’s going to be huge. The movie, The Social Network, just come out. We were all inspired like, we will be the next Facebook.

Kym Huynh: Did that in two hours.

Gary Tramer: Exactly. And we’re like this will be yes. And needless to say, we built this unbelievable product. Like literally, it was amazing that no one ever used. We got no users,

Kym Huynh: Okay. Why?

Gary Tramer: Because we didn’t spend any money on marketing. We learned this lesson. And I say that now. But we learned this lesson. That was the most painful lesson to go back to investors and say, we lost your money. It takes a big hit on your pride to say that. And it was that gut-wrenching moment that we said, Never again, are we going to build something before we actually sell something. Because to try and market the product, you really only needed a brochure. You didn’t need all this stuff that we build. So we didn’t even know if it worked. And I know nowadays with the lean startup and these sorts of teachings, that’s sort of the way of doing things. And so we’ve applied that ever since, and so I’m going to find For a few businesses to today, as that business was failing, we thought that selling SEO would be cool because Google just released Google Places and we figured, small businesses are probably going to want to rank well. So we took my door to door team. And we went, printed some brochures, and we call the company Search Words. And we decided to go and sell local SEO door to door. We had no SEO team. I don’t think we were even registered as a company or a business yet. And we said we’re going to do it for 12 weeks. And if we get customers we’ll find an SEO team somewhere in the world. But if we don’t get customers or enough, we’ll just refund on the money and say, sorry, couldn’t get your results, which is sort of common in SEO land. 12 weeks went by, and we had 600 paying customers that paid up front for the year about 1000 1500 dollars

Kym Huynh: 600 paying customers in 12 weeks.

Gary Tramer: So we actually have them on printed, like it wasn’t iPads. It was like literally a piece of paper, like a contract, or like tiny writing. So I really went rating it, but put the name, the details, the credit card, they wrote at the bottom, they signed it. We had all the ideas of doing this as a really great business. 12 weeks later, we hadn’t touched any of their websites, Google nothing. And we looked at each other. And we said I think we need to find an SEO team now. And so we did we put one together. And we build that business to about 6000 customers over three years. And then we had this mass realization that building a business that competes against Google’s best interest is probably not the best business model. Because like every three weeks or every six months, they’ll change the game. And you have to redo it all over again, which is very frustrating. And customers saying to us, why am I getting results. I was ranked one, now ranked like nothing And we’re trying to explain to them that’s because you don’t see it anymore. But the person on their phone sees it now, or whatever it was. Search Words actually still runs with one person running the entire customer base. We don’t sell anymore. We just manage the customers. They’re all ranking pretty well. And having so we sort of said, let’s just keep that going. Search Words then morphed into a company, which we started called LeadChat, which we talked about, we had this thing where we were getting traffic to people’s website in SEO land. And the problem was, when you looked at their website, a very small percentage, we actually convert into an inquiry, like 1%, maybe 2%. So we said, how do we fix this? I had a Filipino virtual assistant at the time. She’s amazing, literally amazing. And I was. I said, What if you sit on live chat, like all day for me, I wonder how many people will chat with you on our website and it worked instantly. It worked. We got 10 times the leads. And we said, if it worked for us, and we would pay for this, then we should definitely make this product. Same thing. Let’s find 100 customers. And then we’ll decide whether we’re going to build out a team. We got 100 customers, we built out a team. And later it still runs now and operates in about 10 countries, 15 countries, which is pretty crazy. But the lesson was to sell first and build at second and we sort of apply that model every day. And then it comes to power local. So LeadChat got to the point where it was running quite well. I get bored very easily. I don’t have ADD. I don’t think. But I think entrepreneurs you know, we like the shiny new thing. And then once it’s running, it’s like not that exciting anymore. So this LeadChat business that we had that was doing live chat. We had a customer that was in e-commerce that was like an online store and said can you do chat for us, and we said, of course, we can. Because when you’re in sales, you just say yes to everybody. You know, like, course we can do it. We did a terrible job and their website conversions went down. So they actually lost money. And we couldn’t figure out what had happened. And then we have another customer in e-commerce say, Can you do it for us? Of course, we can. We screwed it up again. So my business partner said, there’s only one way to solve this. Let’s start an e-commerce company. And let’s put chat on and figure out how to do it ourselves.

Kym Huynh: Makes sense.

Gary Tramer: Okay. So the chat didn’t work for this e-commerce company. We couldn’t make it work. But this e-commerce company worked. And within 18 months, we were showing Gamma apparel like hoodies, manufacturing in China. We’re selling them globally, marketing through Facebook. And within 18 months, we had a $20 million annualized run rate. So do we have $1.8 million dollars a month, we were spending about $750,000 on Facebook ads a month and we’re still enjoying all the frequent flyer points, still. And we sold that business to a US big internet company in 2016. And that was a really great lesson on how to sell without salespeople and had to have a business that had really, me and Michael, Andre, who was the advertising guru, and some Filipino customer service reps who were amazing. A team of like five and that was it.

Kym Huynh: A team of five?

Gary Tramer: Yeah, I mean, if manufacturing was outsourced, it’s when we sold that it was a real wake up. It was. This is actually like, This is crazy. We couldn’t make chat work, but we made e-commerce work. And people asked us, what was the secret to making eCommerce work? Like how did you do it so far?

Kym Huynh: Tell me.

Gary Tramer: And the secret was that Facebook allowed us to target people quite uniquely with specific interests. So we had a custom audience. We had an email database that we were growing through these people who had purchased that we could re basically remark it to we knew everyone visiting the website via what’s called a cookie, you know, you see the ads after you visit a website over and over again, so we could get people back. And after that purchase, we could get more money out of them by upselling like a second item for half the price. And so Mike and I said, This is unbelievable. Cogan does it all the big brands do it the iconic, that’s how they get so much out of their website. But the Brick and Mortar stores like the JB Hi-Fi or the restaurants or your fitness brands that don’t know who you are when you walk in? Could we solve that for them? So we decided to build a company called Power Local, which is our focus today. And that business is about identifying people that walk into venues through Wi-Fi. And then helping those brands market back to those individuals as a way of building a database of their foot traffic. And now we have this view of what business should look like for us. And that is we should always have customers before we invest anything. We never raise money for any of our businesses besides the one that we lost the money. And by the way, those investors from the first business, we actually gave them equity in every other business since, as a side of good faith, that’s code for guilt. They had a leap of faith with us, and businesses where we don’t have to sell every time. So we like subscription businesses where you do a sale, the customer will keep paying for the service. And every sales effort or cost to acquire somebody is for a new customer to throw into the bucket. Because our e-commerce company, you had to keep spending with Facebook to get the customer to come in. And we didn’t like the idea that we have to keep spending for the same customers. And the models have worked quite well for us. And so that brings us to today where LeadChat and Power Local still run. And now we spend our time just trying to optimize those businesses and bring people in that can help us run them because we’re terrible managers. We’re not very good at doing the day to day team, they hire us. I mean, they’re like, every day we’re changing the CRM. It’s like I found this new CRM, we have to use that one. They’re like, we just spent the last four months learning that one. I’m like, Yeah, but this is way better. You know, it drives them nuts. But it keeps us fresh, so.

Kym Huynh: I understand that I bring back books to my team all the time, and they started using it as doorstops. Now you’re very heavy on the sales front. What is that one piece of advice that you can give people in terms of growing their own businesses or startups with sales?

Gary Tramer: The one piece of advice, I would say, is to use Google Keyword Planner to determine if there is a need for what you are thinking about offering or a tool called SEMrush.com, which is a paid version of that. To find out if there is a need, there is nobody looking for what you want offering. Maybe it’s not a good place to start. If you’re really ballsy like me and trying to products that aren’t in the market, then I would spend about $100 on some Facebook ads to get out to the audience that you think might be interested and see with anybody even looks or clicks on that ad. That will be my number one piece of advice.

Kym Huynh: Amazing. Thank you. If everyone could join me in thanking Gary?

Serpil Senelmis: It’s impressive to hear how those old school face to face and door to door sales techniques are still important in this digital world and so much passion for data and new CRM system. Thanks, Gary. In just a moment Simon Mathonnet from SplashBox revealed data’s valuable role in digital marketing.

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Serpil Senelmis: Thanks Ad Guy. Simon Mathonnet is head of digital strategy at SplashBox. He earned a master’s degree in digital marketing from universities in Paris in San Francisco. Simon’s worked extensively with startups in the US, Europe, and Australia, assisting them with the deployment of online marketing channels to drive big growth. Simon says it’s important to remember that correlation is not causation. And you need to have clear goals in mind for your data.

Simon Mathonnet: I first encountered the startup ecosystem when I was finishing my master’s degree in digital marketing in San Francisco, but four and five years ago, and really quickly, I got really passionate about what we represented. I got really interested in founders’ passion for their products in the different constraints and the challenges that it created. And despite that, now, I work on all types of clients. We work with a couple of startups here at SplashBox, and it’s still my favorite type of project. There’s no doubt about it. I’m obsessed with digital marketing and data analytics. And I think it presents a huge opportunity for startups to grow. And I’ve seen startups of all types basically leveraging data to design their marketing strategies and really grow from small eCommerce stores to hundreds of thousands of dollars and millions of dollars per month just by analyzing the data that they collect, leveraging that to designing their strategy online and basically designing a growth plan. So what is lean analytics? Well, lean analytics. It’s a methodology to basically leverage certain specific pieces of data to basically impact directly your business results. And it basically all relies on working on certain key data points that you can work on to reach your goal. Well, we call this causation relationship, which is if I reach more people with my product, I will sell more and you want to look for that causation effect. For instance for Buffer. They basically found direct causation between the number of posts in the first week and their retention rate. Basically, what they’ve identified is if a user posts through Buffer more than 15 times a day, they’re more likely to remain inactive user three, free six, nine times later. So what now they can do is they can basically develop strategies to make people post more for their tools, and therefore that will directly impact their retention rate. From a practical perspective, looking at any types of business, how do you actually do it? The first thing you want to do is you pick a KPI, then what you’re going to do is you’re going to draw a line, you’re going to say this is my average revenue per month. Currently, this is my average revenue, and then you’re going to find a potential improvement. So usually, it’s like a very educated guess where you’re going to think, all right. On my websites, on average, if people look at three or more products, I feel like they’re more likely to buy because they’re more engaged, right? So what I’m going to do is I’m going to try to work on that number of pages per user, right? If I’m able to increase that, or if I’m able to increase the number of users who view three pages or more on my website, then maybe that’s going to impact my revenue. You don’t know yet. But it could, right. It’s all about those educated guess, you know, your product. And if you followed Gary’s advice, you know, your customer as well. So you have that hypothesis, which is if I do this, and if I increase that number, then it’s going to increase that number, and it’s going to help me reach my goals. So you either design a test, or you can just make changes that you think are going to improve, and then you’re going to measure the results. By doing this, did we get closer to a regional goal? And if you did, that’s great design another test and try again. etc, etc. And if you didn’t, well, maybe it’s time to design another test and try something else. Or maybe it’s time to look at different elements or another strategy. So you can use a variety of tools at any step of this process to basically collect data. This depends heavily on your business model, I’m not going to give you like a three-step framework on how to run all these tests because no two businesses are the same. For instance, let’s say my goal is to grow my sheer number of customer base, you’re not going to use a Optimizely, which is a split test and a conversion rate optimization website because that affects the conversion rate of people who have already come to your website, for instance, or you’re going to do for instance, is if your hypothesis is alright, I think that my target markets is 25 to 35, making this amount of money per month being in that target market having those interests? Well, I can use Facebook. And I can advertise to that type of demographic. I can create an ad I can push my product.

Simon Mathonnet: Did I get new customers by spending a 50 or 100 dollars on Facebook ads? Yes, or No, that’s a really easy, lean analytics cycle. So just a few of the tools we have here. You need to have Google Analytics on your website like you want to capture all that data. It just gives you so much insights into customer behavior and how people interact with your website and your products. This data is really good when it’s actually aggregated, like when you get like a significant amount of users to your website, especially when you’re starting out at the beginning you’re not going to have a lot of people coming to your website. And that’s one of the pitfalls, having too much data versus having too small data how do you then interpret it? So in that case, instead of using a tool like Google Analytics, which basically gives you all the stats regarding browsing behavior on your website, you would want to use something like Hotjar. What Hotjar does is it’s a heat mapping and session recording software on your website. For instance, it will record a sample of sessions of user browsing your website. So you can actually see your website and you see people moving the mouse around clicking stuff, reading things, which actually gives you insane insights into how someone who’s never been in contact with what you do, actually reacts to the way that you promote your content the way that you have your messaging, etc. And you don’t need a lot of those to actually make some critical assumptions. With Google Analytics. You need a lot of data to actually see patterns, where as with Hotjar, you can see a couple of sessions with people getting confused about a button that you’re not because you navigate on your website every day to make an educated guess that this could improve your conversion rate, for instance. Optimizely, if you want to design split tests on your website, AV tests to basically improve your conversion rate is what you want to use. Segments is maybe a bit more advanced, but it’s basically when you have a lot of different tools, collecting a lot of data. And you want to feed that data through to customer support, or things like that. So maybe, for instance, your goal is to improve retention. So what you’re going to do is you’re going to design a test around customer support. If you improve your customer support and personalize your customer support more then your user are going to stay with you longer. So in that case, you can use segments to actually feed that data through your customer support to be a bit more personalized. I have LeadChat here, what a coincidence, why do I have LeadChat here? If you design a test around customer satisfaction in customer profiling, that kind of live chat on the website is brilliant. Because you get direct input from your customers, you can actually look at like, what types of questions do they ask? Do they ask questions about price? Do they ask questions about features? Can I actually use that and improve my website based on this feedback, like you get really, really good customer insights using the live chat features, which is really cool. And Google Ads is really strong to actually test search behavior with your custom audience. You may think my product answers a problem and people would search for my solution a certain way. I’m gonna take the example of Splashbox. We offer digital marketing services, but it’s not very cheap. It’s more like we designed complete custom strategies. So we’re wondering, someone who’s looking for that more of that high-end product high-end strategy. Would they type in Google SEO Services, digital marketing services, digital marketing agency enterprise? What kind of words would they use? What kind of words would they use to define what we do and search for what we do? In that case, what we can do, target all those keywords on Google ads, put a bunch of Google Ads see who clicks on whats, what kind of keywords brings us the most clicks? What kind of keywords do we get the best click-through rates, what kind of keywords so we get the best traffic from is really good. And then we can use like things like Hotjar, etc. So we can also design tests around that. Like it can be as simple as that don’t overcomplicate it. Two years ago, we had a big retention problem at Splashbox. We had a lot of customers, leaving us and going to over SEO agencies, over SEO agencies, digital marketing agencies was so aggressive in targeting customers really hard for us to keep up and the problem is, we have no sales team. Everything was organic growth. Everything was word of mouth, everything was a referral. And therefore, having a retention problem for us was big. So we looked at or like core group of clients, we looked at clients that we’ve asked for two, three years or more. And we look at what do these clients have in common? And we looked at everything we looked at the profile of the people that we were dealing with, were their expectations really high, their expectations really low. How are they treating us all like we looked at the size of the business, we looked at the different fields. And we looked at all the elements and we try to identify a pattern. And the pattern that we found is actually in results. And we found that our most loyal customers are the customers that had the best results within the first three months. Right? So you want to look at patterns and find things like that. What that means is that we can design a test around that finding around that pattern around that insight to validate it and make our business better. So what we did, the next month, we’re launching about 10 campaigns for 10 clients. And what we did is five of them, we actually reprioritize a lot of the elements of the campaigns to actually have like maximum impact in the first three months. Usually what we try to do is we try to design a strategy that has incremental growth over time, so that basically, it’s more of like an ongoing value that you get each month for what you pay as a retainer. But what we did for those five is we reprioritized it to make sure that the first three months they were getting like six months results, and we put more efforts in and we put more hours. So usually what we do is a client pays us on a monthly basis. we allocate them a number of hours and we worked a number of hours. What we did is we doubled the hours for those five clients in the first three months. And what we noticed is that those fives actually stay the other fives left after 12 months, right. So then validated, we knew that this is how we had to retain clients, we had to focus on those three months that were critical for us. So a few pitfalls and a few things to just consider and be careful when you’re following that kind of methodology. The first thing is you need to define everything and every single metric. Once a user to your website, someone comes and just straight bounce, they consider the user. No, really no business considerations. Sometimes in companies, you would look, for instance, to hire a data scientist because data analytics is really good for you. And then that data scientists will just go on their own. And they would go through all the data that you’ve collected, and they would come back with what I call fun facts. They would say like, hey, I found that, oh, most engaged users, they watch that particular picture on the website five times on average, and yeah, what do I do with that? That’s great, but it’s really really not actionable, right? That’s that doesn’t have that business consideration. So if, for instance, you have a co-founder or you have an employee, that’s a data scientist, I strongly, strongly encourage to basically integrate that rule as much as possible, even though most of the time they operate as a silo, really, really make them understand business considerations, get their buy-in with the product that they’re buy-in with the business, just going to make their output way better. Too much, or too little data, be careful. It’s very easy to get lost in all the different data points, especially with all the software now, that just gives you a whole bunch of data like even Google Analytics, the amount of data you get through it is massive. Really think about your career objective. Really think about that. And really think about the meaningfulness of the metrics that you’re looking at. Not going for maximum impact. You have limited time to hit your goal. You really want to hit your goal. If you identify that button in your website is critical to your user conversion, just really design a test that’s going to be maximum impact. Don’t slightly change the color like one gradient is something like don’t change it from blue to light blue, right? changing from blue to red, go from maximum impact with your tests, with your results with everything, just make everything count is my last advice. Those are all key concepts that we use in designing digital strategies for upcoming businesses. And I hope that some of them you can actually use go ahead and apply and action. And thanks a lot for coming here today.

Serpil Senelmis: Well, sounds like the learning never ends when it comes to collecting and analyzing data. And I love that example from Splashbox collecting data from individual clients, rather than masses of details and numbers. Thanks, Simon, and thank you Gary as well. Next time on Masters Series business tales from the edge. We’ve heard some great stories of the highs and lows of starting a business over the past few episodes. And next time we’ll double down on those tales from the age. Until then, I’m Serpil Senelmis from Written and Recorded. And for WeTeachMe, this is the Masters Series.

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Masters Series is a show about inspiring entrepreneurs, creative thinkers, and visionary dreamers, and the stories behind how they built their companies.

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Question of the day

What was your favourite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

While profit fuels a business, it’s growth that is the real reward.

Steve McLeod established his first company, Fire & Safety Australia in 2007. Today the business has revenues in excess of $10M and employs 150 people across Australia. Steve delivers a masterclass in how to grow your business.

Rory Boyle founded Hampers With Bite with his brother Nick in 2004. It’s actually one of a group of companies that the pair are Directors and Owners of, including Wholesale Promotions, Tastebuds, and of course Hampers with Bite. Throughout their growth, the Boyle brothers have held onto the family business feel of their companies and put the customer at the centre of all they do.

Disclaimer: Transcripts may contain a few typos. Similar sounding words can lead to them being deciphered wrongly and hence transcribed likewise.

Serpil Senelmis: Now what would you do to increase your revenues in your business?

Interviewing Public: I would focus on getting more customers.

Interviewing Public: I guess, think outside the square and offer something a different service compared to your competitors.

Interviewing Public: I’ll probably try give more products, more innovative products. Yeah, because I’m an engineer by profession so that’s what I would go for.

Interviewing Public: At the end of the day, business is really all about sales. But you can only sell something if your customers really find it that valuable.

Serpil Senelmis: For WeTeachMe, this is the Masters Series where industry professionals share their secrets to business success. I’m Serpil Senelmis from Written and Recorded. I think it’s fair to say that all businesses start with a revenue of zero, but not all businesses will go on to reach revenue of 10s of millions of dollars. In this episode of the Masters Series, you’ll meet two founders who have the pleasure of counting their revenues in 10s of millions. Rory Boyle established Hampers With Bite as part of a group of companies with his brother.

Rory Boyle: I run a business and my brother and I were rolled around punching in the office before literally, but Dad had to break us up with a broom. All sorts of crazy stuff happened over the years. I don’t know what all but every year I’ve learned, every year I’ve grown, every year I realize what it takes to be better and are constantly trying to improve I guess.

Serpil Senelmis: We’ll hear more from Rory soon. But first, I’d like to introduce you to Steve McLeod. Steve started his first company Fire & Safety Australia in 2007 and literally took it from revenue zero to an excess of 10 million dollars. Today Steve shares his business-building tactics through the business growth service, courage for profit. The former firefighter says not every decision he made in his business has been popular. It takes a bold leader to follow through make the right decision. Steve gives quite an exceptional masterclass in how to grow your business.

Steve McLeod: Alright, so I started out in the fire brigade, I joined the airport fire service in Sydney, in the age of 19. And join the Metropolitan fire brigade in Melbourne at the age of 21. And, you know, my journey to become a firefighter in the fire brigade was around my passion for helping save lives and for making a difference in the world. You know, during this time, I spent eight years in the fire brigade involved in high angle rescue and technical rescue. And during that time, you know, I went to a lot of great things I had the privilege of being able to be involved in saving people’s lives. But I also went to a lot of really nasty things and a lot of tragic accidents and incidents that occurred. During my days off and working two days, two nights, and four days off. I started doing work which is what I really enjoyed, which was teaching people about emergency response and safety training, everything from doing first aid and CPR training through to fire and emergency response training. Through doing this during my days off, I discovered what my passion was. And I started a business called Fire & Safety Australia. So starting that sort of as a side hustle to start with, over the next three years between working day shifts, and night shifts, and my days off, that business became a 13 staff member, million dollar a year business in about three years time. I then decided that my passion the opportunity was to grow this business into something bigger. So I started this really from a position of wanting to help people, wanting to make sure that people went home from work safe, and that people understood how to work safely, and they knew what to do if there was an emergency in their workplace. Today, Fire and Safety Australia employs 150 people nationally, and we work with businesses like HP, Chevron, Santos, Large Australian, and international oil and gas and mining companies. And our team is put into two areas. About half of our staff about 80 people are on shift as paramedics and emergency services officers at very large oil and gas mining and defense installations across the country 24 seven. So it’s a business that never sleeps. The other side of the business, we train about 50,000 people a year in emergency response and safety training from clients like the MCG and Crown Casino or Bunnings through to remote oil and gas in mind sites in defense. A lot of this work is remote and it’s a 24 seven type of environment. You know, I build this business from really wanting to improve emergency response and safety in the world. I don’t work in the business anymore. I still the owner, my wife, Kelly and I. I have a CEO and a leadership team that runs the businesses today. The way that I like to think about leadership and about running and growing a business is I love this Steve Jobs quote, my job isn’t to be easy on people, my job is to make people better. So the reason that I love that is not every decision that I made in growing, my business has been popular. Not everything that I have said and wanted to achieve, everyone’s gone along with and everyone said, that’s a great idea. Sometimes it takes a bold leader to have the courage to follow through on the decision they know is right, even when everyone else doesn’t think that it’s the right decision.

Steve McLeod: So in building my business out, we went from zero to $1 million in three and a half years and then one to 10 in the next four years, and then tend to the mid-20s. In the three and a half years since one of the things that’s always worked for me is to have a strong and compelling vision of the future. So ever since starting from the early days, it’s always been about where are we growing to? What does success look like for us in the future? And so one of the things that I’ve always wanted to make sure is that my team knew why we do what we do. The difference that we make in the world, and what the future success looks like, you know, as the CEO or leader of the business, I think your job is to be able to go and show people, Where are we today? And what does success look like in three or five years’ time. And so the goals that I originally said in 2007, 2010, 2012, 2015, having the team that’s able to see that success, and to see that come off, is what really drives people forward. I think that high performing team members want to understand where the opportunities are in the future, within a business and what the direction is in the future. The other key point is that we have to have a strong culture. You can’t have a high performing business and a high growth business unless you’ve got an engaged team of people that leave the common core values. So we have four core values that we built our business on. Passion for safety, be memorable, commitment to our team and clients and thirst for improvement. These are the behaviors the value set, about the people that we bring into the business, and how we’re able to grow the best team of people to have a successful team. So every single person when I was running my business as the CEO, every person on first day, I would take them through the vision as the first thing that we did. I wanted to see the light in their eye about is this something that excites them? Or is this something they think is hard work? I would say that every people decision in the business is based on our core values. And that my job was to get the right people into the business and the wrong people out. Because we wanted to create a strong culture and engage culture, not a negative culture. So highly recommend building a great culture through the use of core values. The next thing is we’ve got to have an effective strategy. So the way that I like to think about strategy is how are we going to achieve success one year three or five years out, so I like to think it like you are the captain of an aircraft. If you took off from Melbourne to fly to New York, And the captain came on and said, I’m not really sure where we’re going, if we’re going to make it, or what time we’re going to get there. We’re just going to fly west and see what happens. Everyone’s gonna freak out. So instead articulating a clear and well-defined strategy. Talking to the team about this is where we’re going, this is the way we’re going to get there. Here’s our roadmap to success is what’s going to get that team aligned and engaged with the journey ahead. I love this George Patton quote, which goes along the lines of a good plan violently executed today is better than the perfect plan each week. And I see so many businesses that are the strategy work with that are planning and planning and planning and planning. Or sometimes they’d be better off just to start, break a few things and fix it along the way. So don’t spend so much time planning sits and big goals and then just start taking action towards it. Also, we have to look at along the journey Are we on track or off track? So one of the things that I find with businesses is they put together this killer strategy or killer plan. And they look at it in a year’s time to go here, all the things we found that we need to make sure that we’re checking the gauges along the way to see whether or not we’re flying on track or off track, just like a pilot would. I got my pilot’s license when I was 16 years old. And one of the key things to learn when you’re flying around visual flight rules, is every six minutes looking at the map, looking outside? Are we on track or off track? You know, if you sit down and read the paper for an hour, and you look up and you go, there’s water all around me, there’s probably some problems. So this allows you as a business to go well what am I key numbers that are going to determine if we’re on track or off track without goals each and every single week?

Steve McLeod: So I coined the phrase relentless discipline. After training about 400 entrepreneurs and various business sizes, the main reason that I see people fail is that they do not have the discipline required to do what needs to be done, day in day out, week in week out, quarter in-quarter out. They like squirrels that will go and chase the next shiny object that they see in front of them, or change the business’s direction because of something that they overheard, rather than have the relentless discipline to do what needs to be done day in day out. So when I talk about relentless discipline, what I mean is, if you have to make 10 cold calls a day, to go and speak to 10 prospective clients, then you do the tenant a day, every day, for as long as it takes. You don’t do five, you don’t do nine, you do 10 forever until you achieve what that goal is. And so relentless discipline is the only thing that I’ve been able to use to make sure that we stay on track. What are the key numbers in the business? How do we make sure that we’re continuing to grow, see our ideal customers with relentless discipline? So even today, there’s a couple of numbers that I still care about was revenue and profits and that is great. One of the numbers that I’m obsessed about in my business is how many current clients or prospective clients did my team go and see each week. The reason that I put that as significantly as I do our profit or our revenue, is that I know if we’ve got a team of 12, and they’re in front of 120, existing or prospective clients each week, I know the business will grow. But when I see there’s an off week or an off month where that comes down to 30%, they haven’t got the discipline. They’re not following through on the core activities that will drive the business forward. So relentless discipline, what do we have to do over the year? How do we break that down into a quarterly goal? How do we break that down into a weekly activity? Is what I’ve seen working my business to grow us from zero to where we are today. It’s about aligning everyone onto one page. So I’m only interested in our business plan which is based on one page, what are the key things that we need to deliver? So on the left hand side of the plan Is what are the annual goals that each head of each division needs to deliver to have a successful year over the year ahead. So starting a strategy session by saying, what does success look like 30th of June 2019? What do each of us have to deliver to have a successful year? The problem with most plans is that people do all of this work planning, and none of the work doing. So the right-hand side of the page is, what do we have to do each and every week with relentless discipline to guarantee by the end of the year, we’re on track and we achieve our desired outcome. So if I want to see whether or not a business or my business is on track, it’s not about what their goals are for the future. It’s about what are the activities they’re doing this week. They’re going to drive us towards our quarterly targets. They’re going to drive us towards their annual targets. Mostly businesses and most leaders have their head in the sand when it comes to thinking about, do I have the right people on my team? And so I’ve lost count of the number of people that I’ve fired along the journey that I’ve made, but it’s certainly in the dozens. And the reason is, I learned this question about six years ago. And this question is probably the most powerful question, when it comes to determining, do I have the right team? Because unless we have a superstar team, it’s pretty hard to get superstar results. So the question then any time a leader in my business would come to me and say, I have this problem with this team member, this team member is showing up like, this person is a cancer in terms of the culture of the business, they’re not fitting in with our values and our attitudes. The best question to ask is, knowing what we know now, would we enthusiastically rehire this person? When I’ve done a lot of Business Growth Training quite often teach between 30 and 70 people at a 30 and 70 business owners between a quarter of a million dollars a year in revenue and $50 million a year in revenue that would come to some of the courses that I would teach at a 70 people, I might get eight people put their hand up and say, yes, I would enthusiastically rehire all of my employees. So there are so many people that run businesses that have the wrong team members, they have the wrong culture. They’re not hitting the performance requirements, yet they’ve got their head in the sand because they’re going, they’re not that bad.

Steve McLeod: So I don’t really want to not that bad team. I want a great team to achieve great results. So ask yourself this question about your team. And think about knowing what I know now. Would I enthusiastically rehire all of my team? And if the answer is no, and you do nothing about it? You’re the bottleneck holding the business back. You’re the person that has to have the courage to make the difficult decisions, to get the best possible team in place to achieve best success. Saying that we can’t grow a piece Without marketing and sales, without actually going, connecting what we do, why what we do is unique and different compared to our competitors, and connecting that with our ideal clients. So there’s a couple of things that I’ve learned around marketing and sales that I thought I would share with you. The first one is about hiring a sales team. So I want you to look at if you’re a solo entrepreneur at the moment, or if you have a sales team of 50. The two biggest things that I’ve seen that determine the potential success of a sales team or a salesperson are attitude and activity. Attitude being out there every day wanting to win. Are we taking the nose and the rejection and moving our way forward? Do I have the attitude which is I need to go out, see prospective clients see existing clients and just get it done? Or do I have an attitude which is, gee, that’s a lot of time out on the road, that’s really difficult, the markets really tough, my competitors are undercutting. So we have to have the attitude being that we want to win. Second of all, is activity. So by activity, what are the activity drivers in your business that are going to grow it? So in my business in selling professional services, it’s face to face meetings with current or prospective clients. So I would set a number, let’s say that was 12 meetings a week a person. And I would say my job is to help you coach you mentor you, if you hit your 12. I guarantee that you’ll hit your targets. But what I found most of the time is most people were soft. They didn’t put the activity in, and they do six or seven a week. After doing this for about five or six years in churning most of the sales team, I just said if they’re not doing their 12 a week, by six months, they’re just going to leave the business. So I spent a lot of time working with sales team now and different businesses. What’s the activity level? I mentored a young woman a few years ago and she had a chocolate business. And she said, You know, I want to sell my business in a few years time so that I can go and have kids and take a bit of a break. First question I said is how many hours a week are you spending meeting with prospective clients? And it was two. And I said, well, two is not going to get you to the growth that you want to get this about a quarter of a million-dollar business. I said, I’ll mentor you or help you. If it’s at least 15 hours every single week. No, one way can you be less 15 hours a week, every single week, in two years, it was a $750,000 a year business, three times the revenue because we worked out what was the activity that we needed to drive, had the relentless discipline to do it week after week after week, and triple the business. So what could you do within your business? What’s the activity that you need to do because businesses are built off from behind the desk, but they built from talking to clients, emailing clients, speaking to prospective clients, what do you need to do to push that activity forward? Because most businesses that I see that that’s the area they’re lacking. They’ve got a reasonable product, but they’re just not doing enough activity. They’re not out on the road enough seeing enough people, you can do quotes and proposals and emails at night. My business was not built in an eight-hour workday. It was built in going and seeing prospective clients spending time with the team. And then that night doing what needs to be done. The next thing around marketing is what do you do that’s unique and different compared to your competitors. Because if you do the same thing as everybody else, you probably get the same results or less, or it will only be about price. So in my Fire & Safety Australia business, I came up with the five reasons to use Fire & Safety Australia Australia, the first of which no one did in our industry was 100% money-back guarantee, which if anyone isn’t happy, even when they were happy, but they wanted to go and get their money back anyway, we still wanted it. It was a way to basically say if we did that all the time, we would go under, we wouldn’t exist. So this is something which is different. So how can you clearly articulate why you do that is unique and different that your customers need instead of your competitors? If you look at the businesses that have grown really quickly around the world, I caught the Uber here 20 minutes ago, Uber was unique and different compared to everyone else, which is why they rapidly scaled. So what do you do that’s unique and different that your customers need? That is going to make a difference and being able to articulate to them talk about in your website, and everything you do.

Steve McLeod: There are lots of people out there that have this huge vision. And they have great ideas and a great strategy. But most of them just never bloody do it. They don’t have the relentless discipline, week after week, month after month, to do the activity and do what needs to be done. And they don’t have the courage to get through the adversity to be able to move the business forward. So after doing this and reflecting on my own business journey, I authored a book called carrier profit. And the reason I call it carriage for profit is business. leaders need to have the courage required to get through the difficult times. Leading a business in successful times is easy. It’s not that hard. But leading a business when going through cash flow dramas, people, dramas, client dramas, and having the courage to push through. Even though the inner voice might say this isn’t going to work, that’s what get businesses through. So if I see businesses and entrepreneurs that continue to grow, continue to be successful, it’s because they have the courage required to push through, even when things might be falling down around them. I write my book, I came up with a formula, which is every business has a different definition of business success. Some people want to make $50,000 a year. Some people want to be able to sell their business so they can have a family somewhere to make a billion-dollar business. That business success only comes from having a strong and compelling vision, showing and aligning the team. What does success look like three or five years from now, having the courage to go and push through when things are difficult. You know, most of the time, courage is only associated with people like firefighters or in the military, that business leaders need courage to make the decision, which is the right decision, even if it’s not the popular decision. They need to relentless discipline to execute on those core activities, week after week after week. So even when they’re tired, even when they’re sick, even when things aren’t going well, they need to push through and continue executing. And the last one is thirst for improvement. businesses and entrepreneurs that grow great businesses do so because they keep learning. They keep growing, and they keep looking to improve themselves. So that’s what’s worked for me. And that’s what I saw after teaching 3 4 5 hundred different businesses. A lot of them had a great idea, a great product. They even had a great strategy, but it just didn’t go and get it done. And so getting it done, even if not perfect is going to lead to success. So from this, I’ve developed what I think is a good strategic growth framework in terms of how to grow a business. What’s a strong and compelling vision for the future three to five years from now? What’s our strategy breaking down to three or so top goals for each area of the business? What’s the KPI dashboard that we’re going to measure each and every week with relentless discipline? To determine if we’re on track or off track? Do we understand and measure our team performance regularly? Have we got the right team? Would we enthusiastically rehire our team? Do we have established core values that define the culture for the business? Do we understand who our ideal client is? And what we do that’s unique and different? And do we have a clear profit and cash plan for the future? The last thing I want to talk about was this definition of courage, because it’s not always easy to get through the difficult times. So I thought what I would do is share with you some things that happened to me in 2015. So in my business, I had a team at that time of 100, so it was not a small team, and I’ll see all the business. And I had four things that you know what if they happen to you, I’m yet to meet someone that had all four happening their entire business career, let alone a year. This was basically the year of hell, which is some horrible, horrible things happen. So the first one was an employer resign, who was a bit of a psycho, who became a stalker, and did a whole lot of horrible things. I just landed the biggest day of a contract in excess of $10 million, and decided to call the client to say that our business was bankrupt. Email all of the staff to say that the business was going under and a whole lot of really nasty things. So my view on that now is if you’re going to have 100 people, there’s going to be 1% of psychos out there, so you can work your way through dealing with that.

Steve McLeod: The second one is I had a call on a Friday night from one of my employees and a lot of our work is at remote oil and gas and mine sites saying the rope broke. He attempted to hang himself and we helped that person he said to me multiple times You saved my life. We put him up for the next three months in a hotel. His family wouldn’t look after him. So I went flew up to the site to take him, got him to a point where he was cared for. And then three months later, there was alcohol and drug problems and he decided to put in a WorkCover claim, saying that the reason that he attempted suicide because he was overworked in the business, he lost the case. But this just gives you an example of you can do the best buy people commit to people, but not everything works. The third thing is I had one of our senior managers who’ve been with the business for two years. We employ a lot of ex-military personnel, he’s in the special force in the military and unfortunately, he had a parachuting accident the day before. He’s meant to come back to work and he passed away. So one of the toughest things that I’ve had to do is call up his 15 staff, and to talk to them about, unfortunately, this is what’s happened as a result. And the last thing which actually piles In comparison, even though it was huge financially, is I made a terrible critical business mistake that year, the cost is half a million dollars. So the reason I talk about the word courage is because courage isn’t when things are good, courage comes from when you are tested. There is not one business owner that I know who has not gone through significant problems and challenges and had to push through. So that’s why I like the word courage. So what are the decisions in your business that you’re not making? Or that you’re putting off? You know that you need to make it you know, it’s the right decision, but you don’t have the courage to get it done. So that’s why I like to talk about the word courage. Last thing for me is just because a business is bigger, doesn’t mean that it gets easier. I used to think when we’ve got a million dollar a year business, it’ll get easier. We got a $10 million a year business get easy when we make a million dollars in property that’ll get easier. It’s all crap. Okay, it just is different. Which means you can still have cash flow problems at a $20 million business just like in Canada, $200,000 a year business. So don’t think that it will get easier tomorrow because it doesn’t. You will just get better if you keep learning and improving yourself. And secondly, if you keep using that thirst for improvement, to grow yourself and grow your team, you’re going to be able to work through it. What I do now is work with different business by 15 business I work with generally mid-market businesses between one and 100 million dollars and help them with strategy and help them to grow. And the way that I finish any strategy session that I ever do, or any training session is with a quote, and the quote is by this famous person that I think is terrific, and they have a great metaphor that we can adapt when it comes to business. Even to the point I was at a client meeting today after running a strategy session for them a month ago, and they actually made this into a glass plaque. And they gave it to me, and that’s a Yoda quote, which is, “Do or do not there is no try”. So when it comes to growing a business, when it comes to doing the things that need to be done, don’t try and do it, don’t talk about doing it next week, just go out there and do it and know that your business will be better off as a result of it. Thank you for having me.

Serpil Senelmis: So don’t spend so much time planning, set some big goals and start taking action. Most importantly, have a strong and compelling vision. Thanks for that, Steve. We’ll have a tasty treat after the break with Rory Boyle from Hampers With Bite.

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Serpil Senelmis: Thanks that Ad Guy. Rory Boyle went into business with his brother Nick to create Hampers With Bite in 2004. Customers come first at Hampers With Bite. They can custom build their own hampers, and the Boyle brothers will deliver anywhere from Cooroibah to Wagga Wagga. In this fireside chat with WeTeachMe’s Wayne Lewis. Rory says to generate a profit and not just have a turnover, you need to reinvest into your business.

Rory Boyle: In terms of formal education, I didn’t do very good at school. I think I got 39 130 I had no interest in I was going to watch movies and lying on the hill and the sun when I should have been at school. I know aspirations do anything too crazy until I got to sort of 23 24 I was over in the UK working., I was actually selling mobile phones telemarketing and my brother mentioned maybe we should come back and start a business up together. So I come back with not a dollar to my name. I was always a good talker. I was always a good salesperson. And I think I had business smarts so I came back and set up a business with him. That was Hampers With Bite, it was a first company in 2004. Or we didn’t have a customer and naturally it was in our first day I just got the yellow pages out and started calling businesses and find out if they’re interested in gifts or hampers at Christmas time. But just use the skills that are required through telemarketing, showed a bit of balls, gotten a phone just made the calls and you know, in the first year we did a decent amount, which was something to kind of get us going. From there I went to work that was in Christmas because the seasonal business. Went back to work or selling Yellow Pages advertising and White Pages advertising to make sure that all the money that we made over Christmas in the first year we could bank and buy more stock and buy more catalogs and do more and advertise in the second year. Instead of sort of saying I might have been a money at Christmas so take it easy during the year and pay the rent and enjoy it and feel like a business owner. I didn’t do that that was one of the best decisions I made. I banked the money and come back and spent it on trying to get more growth the following year. And that was what I did the next year and then once we had enough to pay a wage all year, we just become more and more efficient with our marketing dollars and advertising and we kind of just grew and took off from there. And…

Wayne Lewis: And obviously, you need to surround yourself with great people as well. So how do you pick people with the skill sets that you need for growth?

Rory Boyle: So we didn’t do that till later. So we, I we’re in business for a while now. I started when I was 24, I’m 38 now. We had some good years in the first six-seven years no doubt about it. We had some good growth introduced promotions warehouse introduced taste buds, but I was in a period of my life where I was still in sort of my late 20s and still locked have a good time and it was making money and but also spending it a little bit and probably not as focused on the strategic direction of the business that I should have been. Probably got to my early 30s and realized okay, I really need to capitalize on this because really, we’re just turning over money. So then I actually got on the phone and found who the best hamper company was in the UK and I found out who the best hamper company was in the US and I flew over and met them and spent a week with them and learn everything I could from them. And I just started learning that was contagious started surrounding myself with business people that took me to the next level and not only for Hampers With Bite but for my other company Taste Buds, which is a chocolate bouquet company that’s grown exponentially over the years and Promotions Warehouse which is a promotional products company that complements the seasonal nature of our business. It’s quite consistently busy during the year and as taste buds wherein Hampers With Bite is very seasonal. So we had to look at in sockeye. We’re very busy at Christmas time with Hampers With Bite, how can we complement that we’ve got a factory that’s empty half the year. Let’s sell promotional products or sell chocolate bouquets. And they’ve been good earners for us.

Wayne Lewis: So you talked about learning off the best, would you attribute that as one of the most important things for growth and if it wasn’t for that, where would you be?

Rory Boyle: Yes, to be quite honest with you for me in my journey, and I don’t disregard somebody else’s learning from the best has been their major driver for growth. For me, the major driver of the growth and success in business was. Was looking at your competitors and seeing what they’re doing and reading articles about them and smart company and saying she’s making this much money, this making this much money I can do that I can, that motivation and just hunger was what really drove us. I think lateral thinking, really looking at what the markets not doing and what you can do to make a difference. I mean, that’s okay. You can spend a million dollars on marketing. But if you don’t have a point of difference, you’d have a hole you don’t have something that makes you stand out, then you going nowhere. So for me, they were the real reasons why we grew. I would say in later years learning from really good business people helps complements and structure the business and the way in which we’ve been able to take it from a small business to a medium business, you know, with more employees and take it to that next level.

Wayne Lewis: Yeah, to talking about the skill sets needed to get it off the ground, and everything else and you’re heavily focused on sales. How important is lead generation for you, obviously, you just picked up that phone book?

Rory Boyle: Yeah, I’ve got a lot of tips on lead generation depends on you. Your industry if it’s an industry where there’s a broad appeal for the product, so my company Tastebuds does chocolate bouquets not dissimilar to flowers. So the same people that we’re going to buy flowers for anniversary or a birthday are going to buy chocolate bouquet. It’s a b2c product with an average sale of 65 to $75, but quite popular and it’s consistent through the year. So it’s a broad demand for that product. So for that product, you know, I really invested heavily into SEO and invested heavily into Google AdWords, Facebook, marketing retargeting, marketing automation, somebody visits your site. I think one of the keys for Tastebuds for us if somebody visits the site, we spend money to acquire these customers to visit the site to do everything you can to capitalize on that visitor when they come to the site. So whether it be pop up forms to try and capture an email address, an exit coupon, sort of a marketing automation flow. That’s not just how you abandon your cart, but it’s sort of five compelling offers to try and engage them back into purchasing when they’ve abandoned the cart. So for company like that, with broad appeal, I’d say, that’s how I want generated leads to capitalize on our leads, live chat, you know, making sure that but essentially a philosophy that spilled around, if someone answers your website and you spent what you’ve got to spend to get them to your website, to do everything in your control to make sure that you don’t lose them, and realizing that just because the business is making a million dollars, you’re not rich, you’re not special, it’s easy to turn over money profits, what really matters. So you really need to concentrate on credit situation where you’re putting the money back into business to generate profit, not just turn over and generate growth, which is integral,

Wayne Lewis: The data that comes out of all this you sound like a bit of a data man as well. Is that right? And how important is that to your decision making?

Rory Boyle: Yeah, the data is the key. So may I do a profile on my customer who exactly is my customer? You know, I did a profile a little while ago, I says, okay, here’s 2000 customers, b2b customers, what what are they role? What did I do? They chief executive of a marketing manager, they work in HR, how many times have they changed jobs in the last three years so I can start understanding who my demographic are, and how often they’re changing their jobs, because if they ordered a year ago, I need to know what percentage of people are going to leave the next year. I want to know what industry they’re in. I want to know where what suburb they’re in, I want to know what company size, how many people that are in our organization, whether it be staff or one to 100 hundred to 1000 thousand to 10,000. And then you get that sort of acquisition model, the second this is what my customer is, how can I best market to them doing that through LinkedIn is pretty effective. But there’s lots of other ways to do it, Facebook marketing, following random entrepreneurs depends on your demographic is. That’s what I do, I analyze data, who my customer is very carefully. And I focus very, very carefully on ensuring that if I spend money to get somebody on my site, we’re gonna find compensation. I do everything I can to capitalize them.

Wayne Lewis: And talking about maybe some of the tough moments. Maybe when the day is maybe not given all the answers.

Rory Boyle: These are tough moments. tough moments was thinking I was turning over money, but I wasn’t making any profit. That’s a big one. Yeah, I was in mid 20s. And we turn it over some decent money and thinking of a big shot and When you really sit down with you can I know he did with turnover money and realizing that anybody can turn over money that’s simple, but it’s actually making profitable counts. There was a tough transition for me early in the business that I was naive in regards to that. There was net profit that count. What is it? Net profit is sanity, turn over’s vanity. That’s very, very true. I judge your business on how much profit they’re making, not necessarily the turnover on it. That’s just an arbitrary sort of figure for me in some regards, depending on the stage of the business. I’d have a woman that worked in our accounts department is stole 200,000 off us, you know, we found out and couldn’t do anything about it. That was a knockout punch at one stage is like I could go through a million tough times in a business. I run a business with my brother, you know, may like we’ve rolled around punching in the office before literally rolled around, punching in the office. My dad had to break us up with a broom. It’s just crazy environment, you know, then all sorts of crazy stuff happened over the years. I don’t know what all but every year I’ve learned every year I’ve grown every year, I’ve realized that you know what, what it takes to be better and are constantly trying to improve I guess.

Wayne Lewis: Yeah. And talking about not so much wasted years but maybe your work-life balance. Can you maybe touch upon that and maybe how you’ve shifted towards that these days?

Rory Boyle: Yeah, if I do completely honest with you work-life balance has never been harder for me than it is right now. I have a little baby who’s here, Rosie, who’s four weeks old, around seven weeks old. Okay, good dad. I got Tommy who’s four years old and another little boy Joe who’s two years old. So in the last four years, some pretty big changes to my life. So that’s really challenging that we’ve never turned over more. I’ve never had more employees. I’ve never had as many demands on my time, never too many responsibilities, everybody’s looking to you. And the balance between being a good dad, getting up with the kids at start in the morning and running the business and doing everything you got to do is more challenging now than it ever has been and I’d be lying to you say if I’ve got a complete hold of it. You know, I work all day, come home trying to spend some time with the kids absolutely burn out seven o’clock, two glasses of wine, try and get to sleep. Get up in the morning, play with the kids try and get to work, do your stuff and just go go, go go go all the time. And it is exhausting. So I’m not an expert on work-life balance. I haven’t mastered it if I to be completely honest with you, yeah.

Wayne Lewis: What does the future hold for you?

Rory Boyle: We’ve become very good in acquisition. I’m really strong. And I’ve had a lot of learnings on that in the last two years. I can’t recommend enough immersing yourself around entrepreneurs, I would say if I had joined a group, say like EO, which I’m not a preacher for EO, but I’m just gonna use it as an example as many business networks six, seven years ago when added surrounded myself with peers who were going to hold me accountable for the decisions I made, like we have a business that was 30 to 40% bigger than it is now and certainly more net profit. I didn’t really start to learn til I put myself around other people that were ambitious. So having cracks. And you sit around with four or five business people and say we’re making this much, we’re doing this much, we’re invested in this and all of a sudden think I’m gonna do that when I’m on and I’m not going to be the idiot that doesn’t do that. You rise with the tide. And you say, okay, I’m more hungry, I go back, I’m more determined, I’ve been reading articles, I’ve been exposed to different people, and it just makes you hungrier and makes you realize what other people are doing. You pick ideas from that you don’t always have to reinvent the wheel, you put it together, you think laterally, my staff, it’s a bit of a joke, because I always say the same thing, think laterally think outside the box. And I might be a t-shirt that said that, which is really daggy. But um, but it really is just not just copying what everyone else is doing. And not just looking at a market and saying, look, everybody’s doing this, let’s do this. It’s actually thinking, how can I be different because if you don’t do that, and you go and spend a whole lot of money on Google AdWords, and you’re offering the same product that they’re offering at the same prices with no point of difference, if you’re a new business, you’re not gonna be profitable because they’ve got an existing database. So they’re going to sit in a manner of acquisitions into their business, that they’re not spending advertising money to acquire and you’re a new business. It every customer you bring in you bought, essentially one way or another through advertising. So unless you’ve got an edge on these guys, they’re always gonna have an advantage on you. Think outside the square of how I can do things differently. Don’t do what everybody else is doing. That’s the killer is just from the crowd. You got to look at things differently and find a point of difference. Much like what Steve touched on.

Wayne Lewis: Thanks and thanks very much. Guys, can we have a round of applause for Rory Boyle?

Serpil Senelmis: I really liked how Rory flew to the UK and the US to meet the best hamper companies there to learn from them. But, a little bit concerned about his punch out with his brother. Thanks, Rory. And thank you, Steve, as well. Next time on Masters Series growth hack your startup with data. We’ll find out how to get to $20 million of revenue faster by empowering data to help your startup growth. Until then, I’m Serpil Senelmis from Written and Recorded, and for WeTeachMe, this is the Masters Series.

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Masters Series is a show about inspiring entrepreneurs, creative thinkers, and visionary dreamers, and the stories behind how they built their companies.

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Question of the day

What was your favourite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

Getting your idea out there and into business is one thing, but how you take the next step to build it up can be a challenge.

Hannah Vasicek is the Founder of the designer jewelry label Francesca. When she started selling her handmade designs at Hobart’s Salamanca Market she had an idea that she might like to have her own shop one day. Less than 10 years later Francesca has a shopfront in Hobart and Melbourne with online sales going globally. Hannah explains her bumpy road to building the business and provides a glimpse into what’s next for Francesca.

Tobi Skovron is the Founder of co-working space CreativeCubes.Co. But first, he invented the Pet Loo and built a business that he sold after a decade. Tobi describes the challenges of relocating to the US in the middle of the global financial crisis (GFC) and outlines his plan for enabling more entrepreneurs with CreativeCubes.Co.

Disclaimer: Transcripts may contain a few typos. Similar sounding words can lead to them being deciphered wrongly and hence transcribed likewise.

Serpil Senelmis: What do you think it takes to build a business?

Interviewing Public: A lot of inner strength, a lot of drive and vision. And knowing what your purposes and knowing your why.

Interviewing Public: You need to believe in yourself, you need to believe in the the end goal, what it represents to you, what it represents to the people surrounding you. So, yeah, I think you just need to be really dedicated to it.

Interviewing Public: I think the best businesses don’t just focus on money, they actually a feeling of purpose or a gap in the market or a need that someone has.

Serpil Senelmis: For WeTeachMe this is the Masters Series where industry professionals share their secrets to business success. I’m Serpil Senelimis from Written and Recorded. How do you take a concept that started in your bedroom and build it into a business with its own location employees and investors? You’re about to meet two people who have done just that. Tobi Skovron is the CEO and co-founder of CreativeCubes.Co, a co-working space with culture. Toby converts buildings to co-working spaces for other businesses to call home. And he’s just about to open a second location for Creative Cubes in Melbourne.

Tobi Skovron: It was at that collaborative workspace, by the way, Uber, I’m afraid you’ve heard of them started literally across the corridor. And so I’m surrounding myself with people like that and having lunch with these types of guys that have these wild ideas. It really was exhilarating.

Serpil Senelmis: We’ll hear from Tobi soon. First up Hannah Vasicek, who founded the jewelry store, Francesca while she was 21 and still at uni, Francesca started as a stall at the Salamanca Market in 2011. And today has a global offering online with shopfronts in Hobart and Melbourne. Hannah says there’s no way you will survive business if you don’t absolutely love what you do. Her key to success is passion, perseverance, and conviction.

Hannah Vasicek: I grew up in a rural New South Wales, really small population and there wasn’t much to do there. And I was one of those children who had way too much energy. And my mom like needed to funnel it into something. So she actually took me to a beading store when I was 12. And I started creating things with beads, and I absolutely just fell in love. I guess from an early age, I had an entrepreneurial spirit. I traveled two hours to school each day on a bus and two hours back, so 20 hours a week on a bus. And that was when I had my first business venture started. So I actually went in at 12 bought wholesale lollies and I’d buy a whole box of lollies for $20. I’d separate them all and sell them individually and I’d profit about $120 from each box and I was selling two to three boxes a week. So at an early age, I saw the beauty of finding something at a cheaper price, being able to market it and find my audience and sell it to someone at a higher price. So I kind of got hooked from there and still loved making my jewelry. So I guess that’s where it sort of started as a passion. I never thought that it would be what it is today. So we have 32 staff now. And we have an online store that’s shipping internationally and it’s just amazing. From there what essentially happened was, I was making my jewelry, I started overflowing my bedroom of jewelry, so I started selling it to whoever would basically look at me, I’d take it to the staff room at school and force my goods on them. And then when I was 16, my family moved to Tasmania. And it’s funny, Tasmania everyone used to think that it was such a nice small place and why would you go there, but for me it was the world was my oyster because it was this massive city and there was so much opportunity. So, I started selling my jewelry to a gallery down in Salamanca, and they were selling out and putting three times the price on my goods when I was 16. And I thought there’s no point them getting the profit, I should be getting all of this profit and enrolled in the the markets down there. It’s a amazing market and you meet customers from all over the world. At 16, I rocked up there with my little tent and my bag of goods. And the first time that I went to exhibit there, I didn’t get a stall, and I convinced someone else to let me set up on the side of their store. So from there, the first piece that I sold direct to my customer, I was just absolutely just hooked.

Wayne Lewis: So obviously your mom was quite a catalyst for that in the first instance, did they encouraging the whole process and going forward to do the try and bring you back a few steps?

Hannah Vasicek: Um, I think my parents were always very encouraging. I mean, anything that got me out of the house and out of their hair was good. But it’s funny, they never saw it as a business or anything more than just as my dad would say, selling trinkets. And so I kind of didn’t believe that that would be a business for me. So at 18 I actually enrolled in uni and I did a double degree. So I did science and law majoring in physics and maths. Who does that? And literally, I went to uni and at this stage, it’s amazing. I was working one day a week at the markets and just one day a week of work. I mean, I would make jewelry during the week supported me living out of home since I was 18. And every single uni holidays, I travel overseas, so we had this amazing business but I never saw it as a business. And midway through my degree, the first business was actually called handmade by Hannah which was a bit cutesy and my target market was 60-year-old men, I mean men, no 60-year-old women. And I wanted to sell to my age group. So he rebranded to be Francesca and that’s the name my mum wanted to call me. So from there, it started actually to take off. still didn’t think I could do business. My dad, definitely he’s very traditional. He said that women shouldn’t be in business. So I still felt like it was just a hobby for me. And it wasn’t until my fifth year of law that I opened an email one day and it said that you’re in the top four of a Global Student Entrepreneur Award. And I kind of was like, I don’t even remember applying for it. And the next week, I flew over, presented my idea of this amazing international brand, which wasn’t international and definitely wasn’t out of Tasmania yet. But I had this vision of, of how big Francesca could be, and I presented it at PWC. And literally, just I had five-year projections of how big we were going to be and like all this stuff, and actually one so I rang my dad told him that I was going to New York expenses paid in three weeks to present the business at the World Trade Center. And he just laughed and said, you know, like, I don’t believe you so…

Wayne Lewis: And is it just your dad that you’ve maybe come up against from a male point of view that says, you can’t do that, or we got any other kind of experiences?

Hannah Vasicek: And so many, so obviously, I did five years of law and science and I got headhunted by a top law firm when I graduated, I deliberately didn’t reply to anything. They sent me down there in Tasmania, and they basically grilled me about the business, and at this stage, I did still didn’t know if I could do the business full time and support myself. So when I told them you know, oh, I can sell the business or you know, I can have someone run it and they gave me the job but they gave me a month to to decide whether or not I should give up my business. They didn’t want me working on it at all. When I decided to say no to the law job. I had old teachers that were saying that I was wasting my brain. I had people saying that you know, like what a waste 5 years at uni.

Wayne Lewis: How long did it take to convince yourself?

Hannah Vasicek: It’s it’s an ongoing project, I still. The more you grow, the more stressors that come into the business, the more employees that give you grief, you sit there, like I have that many moments in life where I’m like, what am I doing? Like, I don’t belong here. Like, you know, I shouldn’t have all of these. the staff and things like that. So the inner critique never goes. And it’s one of those things that you just got to be mindful of it. And the biggest thing for me was surrounding yourself with people who believed in the dream when you don’t, because there are those times and you know, I’ll ring my mom or ring my husband and say, you know, I’m giving up this is it like, I can’t do it anymore. And they then take the reigns. And then when your employees start taking the reigns and you know, kicking you up the bum, that’s when you know you’re doing something right.

Wayne Lewis: What about the staffing side of things and knowing when to maybe make the first hire and when you’re obviously got past the moment then stage what was next for you?

Hannah Vasicek: Figuring out how to hire someone, actually. What do you do? Where do you find this information to actually hire someone in the first place? That was the biggest thing. So I like, you know, obviously you can Google. But it’s really hard to find the basic dumb questions. I think there’s a huge gap in the market, which I’d love to fill one day in how to really simplify the big scary steps. So I’m pretty sure I didn’t do the most legal thing at the beginning, even studying law, you’re not really well equipped to live it in daily life. So I just winged it, you know, asked so many questions. I didn’t even know how to pay superannuation, but I knew it was there and it was racking up. But I literally was like, I don’t want to bring my accountant in and say, how do I physically deal with this? So you’ve got to ask the stupid questions. You’ve got to be investigated because no one else is going to find out for you, especially if you’re a one-man show. So that’s the exciting thing and when you start to thrive off and learning, things like that and being happy to fail at you know, making the wrong hiring in things like that, yeah.

Wayne Lewis: I mean you did the rounds you went into to trade shows and fairs and markets and things like that, which helps build the business. What are the kinds of things and tools did you use to kind of take it to the next level? Did you build a personal brand or anything like that?

Hannah Vasicek: My business basically doesn’t wholesale. So wholesale would have been the easy route. And we actually started the first year, I was like, okay, we’re just going to wholesale and that’s going to be the brand. But I went to a trade fair spent $10,000 to get retail stores, which would stock my brand, but then I realized I don’t actually trust that they’re going to do the brand justice. So I didn’t want the brand to be watered down into a little homewares store. And I had this vision that I presented on about us being this massive international brand. So I actually came back. I had all these orders to fill and I canceled them all. So knowing straight away, what you say your brand looking like in the future is essential because that week literally I winged it found a place to open a retail store was $400 a week, that’s peanuts in retail these days. But I thought that was huge. And I just literally opened the doors the following week, put freedom furniture everywhere, and just made do. We opened the door in March 2013 and 18 months on, we had opened our huge flagship store. And it was from hustling, like, so I was working a two-day law job to ensure that I could pay the $400 a week rent, and then working the other five days in the store direct with my customer and just absolutely building this community. And every time I’d meet someone, then they would go and tell someone else and we just have this huge, huge effect. And we went from doing you know, $200 a day, which I thought was like, amazing to doing, you know, like $10,000 and like it just started like catapulting and then, you know, I sold the drain to my bank manager and I said, you know, I want to have this store that’s in line with the vision that I had. And she believed in it, we got knocked back for our $75,000 fit-out loan because we were like a nobody. She believed in me so much that she rang the highest person that she would get to at the Commonwealth Bank, told them about how big we were going to be one day, and they push through the line. So literally, like if you’re so dead set on the vision, and where you’re going to be and you can convince yourself and then convince other people, they work magic for you. The day we opened, we quadrupled our revenue, and I paid off that loan in six weeks. But you had to believe, I had to believe and hold that vision there and convince everyone around me that it was going to happen so that it could happen. So yeah, it’s it’s I kind of remember what the original question. You just gotta hustle.

Wayne Lewis: Keep going. So what are maybe some of the worst moments within your journey so far? So obviously, it can’t all be sunshine and roses.

Hannah Vasicek: Never ever, ever get into business unless you 100% love what you’re doing so I have three essential ingredients for success, which is passion, perseverance, and conviction. The passion is like, there is no way that you’ve survived the struggle of business. If you don’t absolutely love what you do. The qualifiers, you know, you have to do it for peanuts, and still enjoy what you’re doing and be happy. Because it’s years of really hard work and depending on you know, how big you want to grow it, reinvesting before you even you know, make the true success story. That’s a big one for me that you shouldn’t go into business unless you really, really are willing to. I’m that person who I’m like, everything will be fine. You know, I’ve got a flat tonight. I probably missed it, but like, it’ll be fine, we’ll get there. And I remember one day when I’d literally just put all of my money into the store. And I came in on a Sunday morning to get my computer charger and walked into the store and everything was gone. Like everything was gone and I thought I was on a TV show or something like that. I thought someone was pranking me, because all of the jewelry was gone. And then when I saw the till splayed across the floor of the shop, I knew that we’d been burgled, and my heart just absolutely sank. You know, I was going on this like dreamboat of how awesome is everything and that happened, and um, we were severely underinsured. I think we were insured for like, $5,000 because I was trying to save money. And that was a huge, huge impact on myself and you know, the business. That’s one of the big doozies. Six months later, our office was broken into by we think the same person. It’s hard to recover from things like that. But again, if you really love what you’re doing, you just get back up and you keep going. There’s so many hard aspects to business. But if you see it as a challenge and something that you can really, you know, thrive off, I think it’s sometimes worth it.

Wayne Lewis: And what does the future holds for Francesca’s collections?

Hannah Vasicek: Yeah, so the future for us is trying to work out how you can be a sustainable business. And yet one which can really give back to the community, one which can bring meaning. And as well, we’re starting to ask ourselves as a whole, you know, how big do we want to be like, we could scale tomorrow and have 100 stores? No problem. But how big do we want to be without losing the heart and the core of the business? And I would highly recommend doing this at the start of your journey, journaling down what your view of success is in the future. So how much money do you want a year? What material things if you’re that way inclined do you want to be happy and successful? Because it’s often that as an entrepreneur and a business owner, you get there and you’re still not happy? And I see so many entrepreneurs who are they’re making all these wins, and they’re making so much money, but it’s never enough. And I think that the most amazing thing and the true vision of success is actually getting there and realizing that’s enough. So the future for us is actually uncertain at the moment because we’re not quite sure that we want to scale I think that you know you go into business to be time rich and not money rich and I’m definitely not time-rich at the moment and I think that’s probably my, my future goal, yeah.

Wayne Lewis: Perfect. Can we have a round of applause for Hannah Vasicek?

Serpil Senelmis: What a vision, wow. To be time rich and not money rich. She is one inspirational lady. In a moment we’ll meet another business builder in co-working space maker Tobi Skovron.

Ad Guy: Masters Series is presented by WeTeachMe. Build your own dreams with WeTeachMe’s inspirational creative classes. Enjoy face to face learning in your neighborhood with weteachme.com. This podcast is produced by Written and Recorded. Build your business with a podcast that communicates your passion with your community. Listen to the enthusiasm at writtenandrecorded.com. And now back to the podcast.

Serpil Senelmis: Thanks, Ad Guy, Tobi Skovron founded the co-working space CreativeCubes who are just about to double in size with a second location in Melbourne. Before that Tobi built a successful pet supplies business that he sold as a going concern in 2013. This is a man who has been there and done that, and Tobi makes an active choice not to go with the flow. His motto in business is “upstream is the new downstream”.

Tobi Skovron: So born and raised in a very entrepreneurial environment. At the age of 14, I lost my dad who passed away, and while that absolutely hurts and still hurts. The reality is I don’t think I’d be where I am today if I didn’t have to go through that experience. As a young kid, my dad was a raging entrepreneur, dropped out of school when he was young, forced me to go all the way through. But when I used to leave my bedroom, my mum had plaques, literally outside my bedroom. So my bedroom then was sort of like a hallway and then a bathroom. And the hallway between my bedroom and the bathroom was like, littered with awards that my dad had won on a global scale. And so looking back, I really do feel like that was a very impressionable, every time I go the toilet, there was that message reinforced. And one of the things that I really remember was my dad turned 40, he passed when he was 44. There was a cake that my mum had created for him for his 40th birthday, which was actually a photo of him on the icing. And there was a little bubble that said, I did it my way. I look back now like I think about the impression that that made on me. 2003, I met this girl, I lived in a one-bedroom apartment she was living at home, I bought a dog called Subi. Sim basically said Tobs, we just need a patch of backyard on our balcony. And that was like the light bulb moment. I don’t know if it goes on or off but it put rocket fuel inside of me. And I went out and created this thing called the pet loo. And if you’re a pet owner and you go to a pet store, I’d say nine and a half times out of 10 you’d see pet loo exhibited or retailed in shops. And so that kind of fueled a 10-year journey. After six years, we went to Los Angeles because in 2006, we started exporting by the container load to the US market. I remember very clearly on a Sunday afternoon, we’re watching footy and since we going to live overseas. We just started this monster business. I was like yeah, kind of but we can’t. And she’s like, well, let’s put a manager in and let’s try to manage over the next 12 months. And let’s see if we can go abroad. I was like, cool, okay. And so she says, where do you want to go? I said, where do you want to go? She goes, I asked you first. I said, I’m a gentleman I’m trying to ask, you know. So on the count of three, she said, LA. I said, Los Angeles. So we moved to LA 2008 2009. And we live there almost nine years. We actually been back just under two years now. And basically went there trying to export and grow the US business. Talk about being kicked in the hairy beanbag. We went to LA 2008. It was the peak of the global financial crisis. No one was buying anything. I remember converting $300,000 in Aussie dollars to go to the US so at the time We decided to go was like 97 98 cents to one, which was awesome. The day we got there and exchange the money was 58 cents to one. So overnight, hundred and sixty-four thousand dollars just evaporated in exchange rate. Peak of the global financial crisis, I just fired my distributor, who I asked to sell into retail stores and decided I would just sell ecom direct to consumers who is buying a container load pricing, which was great. But then selling at retail and making like, more money than I was, and I was like, sweating. So I dismissed him. I said he could stay on and continue his channel. He was like, I’m out. So I was $300,000 negative on the sales line. I was $164,000 negative on exchange rate, peak of the global financial crisis, and we just landed in LA. And so I basically worked my ass off and over the course of four years, we built the business up. And in 2012, I sold the business for all cash to the largest player in the space. I literally went from negative 460 odd thousand to just shy of 10 mil in rev, and debt-free cash flow positive. Broke as a joke because every dollar that came in had to go into fuel the next container, and I was always container loads behind. But at the end of the day, come 2013 are sold to a company called Pet Safe. I paid all cash for the business, I had no investors and life had begun. And so join them for a couple of years. And then Sim, she kind of pestered me for a little bit, you’re all here so just be angry. Pester me for a period of time to say hey, can we go home? Can we go home? Can we go home? And so in 2016 October, we came home, and now she’s like why did we come home? It’s freezing here.

Wayne Lewis: You talked about that moment on the cake, and it was your dad doing it his way. What is your way? And what are those key traits that made you what you are today?

Tobi Skovron: I think resistance or resilience. I have this motto and had this saying at Pet Loo, upstream is a new downstream, everyone’s going that way. I don’t want to go that way. Pet Loo was an amazing journey. I kind of miss it. But I also where I’m at today is I’m sort of coming down the mountain and don’t look at that as a hierarchy aspect. And I’m trying to get all the people at CreativeCubes, either on my back, or at least help them navigate back up the mountain. I’m trying to now create spaces and environments and communities to support people from having to deal with the shit that I had to deal with. You know, my parents wanted, what they didn’t have for me, and I want what I didn’t have for my kids. And so I also want that from an entrepreneurial standpoint. I want people that have an idea kind of maybe about to jump off the cliff. I’m going to push you. I’m going to teach you how to build the plane. And then I’m going to surround you with other people that are sort of trying to figure it out as well. And then we’re going to take off together. And that’s what inspires me. That’s what makes me move every day.

Wayne Lewis: Yeah. And when you got to that point of where you’re able to sell the business initially, what was the key kind of elements in that whole brokering of that deal that allowed you to sell out there?

Tobi Skovron: Yeah, so I took an idea from Elwood Victoria. I took that to a global market of 150 countries of distribution. I proved the demand, I proved that we were the category laid out. I mean, it’s not a pretty space, but we’re in waste management or pet waste management. Which global crisis no global crisis is…

Wayne Lewis: It’s money, right?

Tobi Skovron: It’s not going to dry up anytime soon, and actually kind of made pee and poo sexy. From a pet ownership perspective. I enabled a lot of people to have dogs, whether they lived in an apartment, on a boat, in a cold climate where their dogs won’t go outside and they’re doing the stuff inside. We enabled all of that. And I think that the data was there. The brand was in stores, people were loving the product, the reviews, so it gave the acquirer every reason to make the purchase. And for me, I was really excited that they could take the business beyond what my means were without me having to go and raise venture to continue to go.

Wayne Lewis: Yeah, you surround yourself with other people with other skill sets at CreativeCubes. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of that and your success as well?

Tobi Skovron: Yeah, so CreativeCubes is a collaborative workspace, and we have aspirations of taking on the world obviously. During my time in Los Angeles, we lived in a three-bedroom apartment. The second bedroom was for guests that were coming. It was a rotating door for everyone that came and the third bedroom was my office. We had logistics in a 3PL Third Party Logistics Center in another state. And so long as I was connected to the web, I was able to process orders. And sometimes I wasn’t actually at the apartment, I might have been on the plane flying to another retail location or a distributor. And so long as I was connected, I was able to distribute product. And so, Sim I got to a point in our relationship where I was so obsessed with the business. And she was so obsessed with or maybe not obsessed, honey, not obsessed with living in Los Angeles and sort of like traveling abroad, we were young, we were newly married, we didn’t have kids, we had two dogs that we kind of imported from Australia to live with us, but we’re pretty free with the exception of money. And so you know, a black ride to Venice Beach, which was you know, a kilometer away from our apartment was a big deal. So she would bust in the door at two o’clock in the afternoon and go hey, you want to do this. I was like, I’m at work. Yeah, I know your weapon like you’re here. But no, no, like, it’s I’m not here. I am here, but I’m not here. And then on the flip side, I say, hey, do you want to watch I think 24? Would that been a irrelevant show back then. Yeah, it was 24 tonight. Yeah, cool. I just go to the toilet. And then I come back to the toilet via the spare bedroom and hear my email. I just checked email. Three hours later come out what’s going on with 24. That was three hours ago. She’s asleep on my couch. And so there was just no break. And so I moved into a collaborative workspace, which actually happened to be the old Google headquarters in Santa Monica, which is really cool. Because Google had moved out to Venice. And this guy had taken over this workspace. This was way before any other collaborative workspace existed, it was called Rock Real Office Centers. It was in Silicon Beach, which is a smaller tech scene to Silicon Valley, although Silicon Beach has now got bigger transactions going through it than Silicon Valley, like Snapchat. And so it was a real scene and sort of wen I immersed myself for the sake of our relationship I am by the way, we weren’t in trouble at least. I don’t think.

Wayne Lewis: That was gonna be my next question.

Tobi Skovron: When I immersed myself in this community, I actually created a boundary between work and play. And it was exciting to go home at night because I’ve kind of locked my work away. My other iMac there. So I wasn’t running on a laptop. And I was able to really compartmentalize life. And so it was at that collaborative workspace that the next part of the journey started to be realized. And I’m a very, very loyal person. But running the pet business, and sort of working in this collaborative workspace, by the way, Uber, I’m not sure if you’ve heard of them started, literally across the corridor. And so surrounding yourself with people like that, like what’s your scuba thing? You’ll hear about us in a few years. And so surrounding myself with people like that, and having lunch with these types of guys that have these wild ideas really turned me on like, it really was exhilarating.

Wayne Lewis: I can sense that.

Tobi Skovron: Yeah. And so I started having this sort of like, I love the pet business, and I love what I’m doing here. But wow, this collaborative workspace is really something special. You not only influencing or being part of and supporting the people, but you’re influencing their markets because those people are actually able to springboard off this platform, which is a desk or private office to deliver their message and their vision. And so I fell in love with community and collaboration. And I’ll tell you, the success that I had at Pet Loo was absolutely because I had an amazing woman behind me. But I was also able to rub shoulders with people that were like changing the world and had that mentality like, just throw yourself off the cliff and see what happens. I don’t think we have that here in Australia. I think we have it, probably within people. But I don’t think we have that as a society. You know, there’s that tall poppy syndrome, we should be lifting people up. And if you have a crazy idea, I want to wrap myself around you. And you can get on my back, and I’ll help carry you to the top of the mountain. And so that is, for me, the inspiration for CreativeCubes, and I hope that I can help push a lot of people off the cliff in a very safe controlled way and inspire them to just have a crack. Admittedly, when I was 23, when we first started Pet Loo, I’m 38 this year, we had nothing. I came to Melbourne with like maybe 1000 or $2,000 in my wallet. So the loss wasn’t that big. Now it’s potentially catastrophic. But I really do hope and I really hope that creative cubes is a big enabler for people that are just like, screw this corporate job. I studied podiatry by the way you studied law doing jewelry, I studied podiatry and started making dog toilets.

Wayne Lewis: And what does the future hold for CreativeCubes? Where are you taking it? And how are you going to do that?

Tobi Skovron: The goal is to sort of scale that across Australia, and maybe a location or two throughout the US to help Aussie companies break into the US or Canadian markets, where, you know, I got relationships and anything I can do to help the people. I’m a serial entrepreneur, but I really genuinely feel like I’m the people’s entrepreneur. And I’m kind of looking out for the people within the community. And hopefully, I become a byproduct of that success or their success, should I say.

Wayne Lewis: Tobi Skovron of CreativeCubes. Can we have a round of applause, everybody? Thank you very much, Tobi.

Serpil Senelmis: Thanks, Tobi. And thank you, Hannah, as well. Next time on Masters Series, how to grow your business from zero to $20 million. We’ll meet the owner of Australia’s leading safety training company, and the founder of the app company that built the trend tracker app. Until then, I’m Serpil Senelmis from Written and Recorded and for WeTeachMe, this is the Masters Series.

About Masters Series by WeTeachMe

Masters Series is a show about inspiring entrepreneurs, creative thinkers, and visionary dreamers, and the stories behind how they built their companies.

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Question of the day

What was your favourite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.