When things go wrong in business, it can feel like the whole year has taken a turn for the worse. Will things ever get better? These founders say yes! And while it may not appear that way at the time, every challenge in business is an opportunity to learn.

Mia Klitsas & Jeff Gore are co-founders of feminine hygiene brand Moxie. While they have solved the problems of tampons getting lost in handbags, they have created a few challenges for themselves that have been difficult to overcome. Mia and Jeff point out the importance of profit over revenue and focussing on what’s important.

Tom Harley is the co-founder of Harley & Sons Roofing. After rounding up his plumbing brothers to work with his dad, Tom has led the way in developing a business that is doubling in size each year. Tom says if you don’t know something you have to get out there and learn it.

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

Serpil Senelmis: WeTeachMe this is the Masters Series where industry professionals share their secrets to business success. I’m Serpil Senelmis from Written and Recorded. Life has a way of testing a person’s will either by having nothing happened at all, or by having everything happen at once. Some wise words from one of my favorite writers Paulo Coelho. These words hold true in business as well, for an entire year can appear to be filled with disasters.

Tom Harley: There was a lot of hard calls a lot of hard times, as a tradesman, you don’t know anything about online marketing, we don’t know anything about web sites. I did reach out to a company that year, who build us a website and I think we burned 90 grand in that year nearly sent the business bankrupt. Since then, you know, the hard calls I have to make is, if you don’t know much about something, you have to go out and learn it. So I’m a plumber and I know more about digital marketing now than most people do is I actually have an in-house digital marketing team.

Serpil Senelmis: That’s Tom Harley managing director with roofing specialists, Harley & Sons. We’ll hear from Tom shortly. But first, Jeff Gore and Mia Klitsas, their co-founders of Moxie. Together they set out to redefine the feminine hygiene market with quality, attractive products that didn’t make unrealistic promises about running on the beach wearing white pants. Jeff and Mia say revenue sounds great, but being profitable is more important. Cash is king.

Mia Klitsas: So tonight, we’re going to do a bit of myth-busting. So we’re going to talk through some of the pitfalls that we faced over the 13 years and honestly, we could probably talk about the pitfalls for days. There have been so many we’ve made a lot of mistakes, but we’ve done some good stuff too. So we’ll share some good things as well.

Jeff Gore: Mia and I used to work in another business to get I was actually her boss and she was a student from RMIT, who came to do her 12-month placement. And we used to go out and have lunch. And one day we had lunch at Nando’s and we just hated our job. And we decided what could we do where we did the same thing that we’re doing now, but we did for ourselves, and Mia had this particular need. And this little thing that we talked about, which is all these tampons falling out in a handbag, and we thought about packaging options that could maybe fix that issue. That was probably in 2003. And we launched the brand Moxie in 2005. It’s been a wild ride 13 years so far, and we’re not finished yet. So we thought we’d let you know about a few of the times where things haven’t actually gone according to plan. We found a few difficulties, as mentioned before, has a feminine hygiene brand. We’ve got all the feminine hygiene products in distribution in Coles and Woolworths, and all the places that you’d expect to find brands like ours. But then we had this brilliant idea that potentially people would like to have a subscription box where they could buy Moxie online and be delivered every month, a little bit of an expansion. But that proved to be a very, very difficult thing to do. It’s actually a lot different from our original business, our businesses, brand development, fmcg, distribution, those sorts of things. Doing something online like the Moxie box club was a lot more of a different business than we expected. And even to this day, we’ve done three different versions of this thing, different websites, and we’ve learned so much about what it takes to get something online and to market something online. But I think the big takeaway from that experience is that we underestimated how different a business it was. It’s not what we were doing before just a little bit different. It’s a lot different and it’s being a retailer which we weren’t before.

Mia Klitsas: People think that with online if you build it they will come and it just so doesn’t work that way I wish it did. Unlike bricks and mortar, which is what our traditional businesses relied on, people are already going into store you know, people expect to find our products on the shelf. Whereas with online where literally having to drive people to that space. And that can be quite challenging. And I think particularly for a product like ours, which is a grudge purchase, it’s not something people buy, because they really want to or because it’s the latest thing, they buy it because they have to. So it’s a bit of a barrier in itself. And then just on the web development front, oh my gosh, seriously, like building websites. And we’re not techies by any means. So like Jeff said, we’re currently in the third iteration of our website. I can’t even I actually just shut a little bit when I think about how much money we’ve spent on it.

Jeff Gore: Sooner do you finish one website, then somebody tells you that that’s all wrong. And then you have to do another one. Yeah. Different website. Yes, that’s all out of date.

Mia Klitsas: Yeah, it’s a bit of a minefield and not something that we anticipated at all.

Jeff Gore: Another area where we’ve probably encountered issues is on the financial side of things that’s not naturally where our skills were based at the start, but a lot of people think revenue or turnover is what it’s all about. And you just have to drive for turnover. The rest of it looks after itself, but no, revenue sounds great but being profitable is a lot more difficult. And you’ve really got to understand the detail of it. We could talk about this for hours. But the reality is, it’s just an area where if you were in a business or starting a business, you really need to understand the back end of things. It can’t be just about turning over a lot and thinking that that’s great. I turn over $4 million and that means I’m great. But no, I don’t like that at all.

Mia Klitsas: We see it now with some of the other brands that we’re working with through the brand makers, people will have a fantastic product or a brand idea, but not a lot of commercial thinking has gone into it. And I think that’s why people sort of get caught out because you’re in that fun phase of launching a brand and seeing it come to life. But then very quickly, you have to really think about cash flow and that can get the better of you very quickly, which I put my hands up like we’re the first to admit that we fell into that trap as well. We got so excited by the launching part.

Jeff Gore: The fun stuff, but he wants to do all of that. But within six months, you’ll find that you coming up again The financial issues.

Mia Klitsas: So yeah, you’ve really got to know your dollars and really look at your margins from day one.

Jeff Gore: It wasn’t long into the business about 2007, where we heard the UK calling. And we started getting contacts from people over there people telling us that it was a big opportunity for us, we need to go over there, this brand would do so well over there. If we didn’t go over there, somebody else would do something like our brand over there. So we’re thinking, Oh, well, we better get moving, we better start exporting and getting our act together. But we went from a small business that did only a few different SKU’s to a really big business really fast and all the retailers in the UK wanted a full suite of products, we would have gone from three SKU’s to probably 12 to do this launch and the structure we put together to service the UK because it’s such a long way away was a very difficult structure and something we’d never done before. And we didn’t know about how the retailers would react over there. They’re quite different from the ones over here. We did all of that and we launched over there. Within six months, we encountered the GFC. All of our margins and everything that we planned on, were cut in half. We had a lot of difficulties, and it was all so far away, and it was all in a different time zone. It was very, very difficult time for us and took us years to recover from it. Eventually, we pulled out of the UK, we did it for a couple of years. The point was, we weren’t ready. We sort of listen to other people. We didn’t get the right advice. We didn’t take the time to do that. We just went for it as fast as hard as we could. We took the risk and it didn’t work out for us.

Mia Klitsas: Yeah, I also shut out still about that one. And he is on. I think one of the greatest things about our business, all that we’ve been able to achieve with that business and through our business is using it as a platform to drive change for the things that we’re passionate about, and particularly as a women’s business. Obviously, women’s rights are incredibly important to us. I think a lot of the greatest things that have come out of our business have just been from off the cuff crazy ideas and the idea for our pads for pads initiative actually sparked from an article that I’d read online that talked about the high rates of school absenteeism amongst girls in particularly developing countries that basically missing school up to 20% of the school year and ultimately dropping out simply because they couldn’t manage their periods. That’s kind of the light version. There’s some pretty horrific stories out there. Once I dove deeper into it, we learned a lot more about it, we realized that what was happening was horrific. And it shouldn’t be happening, you know, no woman anywhere in the world should have to suffer that way. So we wanted to do something about it. And I think this is a great lesson of just really showing people that you don’t have to be a massive organization, you don’t have to have enormous budgets to make a change. So basically, what we did with pads for pads was we went over to Uganda on a whim, as we do with a lot of things. And we found an organization over there that was employing local women to make reusable pads. So we were very sympathetic to the local environment and the economy. These women were being employed to make product we weren’t shipping Moxie product over there. And basically what we did is we used profit from the sale of our products in Australia to fund these women making pads in Uganda. And then we gave them away to school girls for free. So we went into schools with our partners, every pads, and we taught the girls about menstrual hygiene management, we did AIDS awareness, planned pregnancy, and we showed the girls how to care for their kids. And each girl got a year supply of product. And we’ve supported about 15,000 girls just off the back of that, which is pretty amazing. And we’re really, really proud of that. Thinking about how you can use your business to drive change. You know, I think if everyone did that a little bit in some way we could actually make massive impact.

Jeff Gore: Yeah, that was a truly life changing experience and nothing we ever expected when we first started, but so grateful that we we actually had that and did that. So just to wrap up just a few sort of points of things that we’ve learned. This is a lot harder than it looks. And I think I’ve had that discussion with just about everybody who runs a business. It’s great, but it’s a real challenge. That’s definitely a common experience. We’ve learned to take risks, and probably a lot more risk than I ever thought that I’d ever take. Because obviously, when I started this business a lot older than Mia, I’d been in corporate jobs for my whole life basically till I was 42. So for me to take this kind of risk at that stage of my life was a big deal. But I’ve learned to take a lot of risks and rely on my gut a lot. But then there’s a line as well, you sort of got to know where that is.

Mia Klitsas: We play the what if game a lot. We’re sort of not what if people like we’d rather try something and make the mistake, even if it fails, and then at least say, well, we gave it a go. And now at least we know, and we know not to make that mistake again, as I said, we’ve made a lot of mistakes, but will often look at each other and say, okay, well, if we do X, what’s the worst that can happen? And we’ve gotten to the point where we’re saying, well, we might lose our houses and whatever else which you know, can be pretty dark, but then we still look at each other and go, all right, well, we might lose everything, but we’ll still be alive. All right, all right, let’s do it. Okay.

Jeff Gore: And we stayed alive this long. The next one is that to find the right people, and this one is really important in terms of, it’s pretty obvious that if you’ve got a company, and you’ve got people working in it, that you need the right people in the right jobs. It’s probably more important than I ever thought it was working in a corporate environment, it seems like it’s okay. You can have people that aren’t quite there that are okay at a job. But when you’ve got your own business, they have to be right on it. And if you’ve got the wrong person in a row, it just upsets everything, and nothing works right. But the other aspect to that also is that you need to talk to the right people. You need to understand the things you’re not good at and that you don’t know. And don’t try and do those things. Go and find people who do know that they do that stuff, and talk to them, or even hire them if you can, because it took us a long time to figure out that there’s certain things that we weren’t good at. We were trying to do them because we were the boss and we tried to do everything. But it wasn’t our skills and it’s better to pay someone to do it, if you can. Focus, focus is a big one. This word keeps coming up, for us. It’s like when you decide to do something where you’re trying to go down a track, then you’ve got to really stay on that track and go there and deliver it. You can’t be drawn off into other areas and not doing what you said you were gonna do. But also, it’s with you thinking as well, you need to think about certain things. And it always comes from a focus from focusing on a point, or something that you have to do, or some goal that you’re trying to achieve.

Mia Klitsas: I think even when we started the business, it was all about focus. So if you’re thinking about starting a business, or you’ve got an idea for something, focus. So we focused on a pain point on a category and thought, how can we improve it? How can we make it better? And I think that really helped us and obviously, we got to the idea of the tampons in the little teens, but your focus I think is pretty cool.

Jeff Gore: Yeah, makes it easy to think things have their time and they should have in a certain time. The GFC was a good example of something that was wrong timing. Something like the Moxie Box Club is an example of something that is in its time that’s when it needs to happen. It’s probably taken us too long to do, but these sorts of things have their time that comes and goes and it’s not always it’s time. So that’s something to really think about. And the last one, open and honest communication. We heard horror stories of partnerships. And we didn’t want to fall into that trap. We didn’t want to be the people that had massive issues with one another and never told one another. So we always communicate, sometimes it’s hard. But you’ve got to make sure that you tell the other person what the issues are. We have a rule that you either have to say it straight away, or you can’t say it at all. So it can’t last more than 24 hours. So if we’ve got an issue, you’ve got to be out with it. If you bring it up in a week and say, well, I’ve had this issue for a week and I haven’t told you then it’s not right. It’s not valid. You shouldn’t have done that.

Mia Klitsas: Sometimes issues that are perhaps nonissues become issues because you’ve sat on it and it’s stood in your head, and you’ve convinced yourself that it’s bigger than it is. And it affects the culture, it affects your productivity. We’ve definitely you know, had those times but I think we’ve actually gotten quite good at just being upfront and…

Jeff Gore: We’ve never had a time where we’re brought something up and it can be quite a confronting, it hasn’t ended up with us coming out the other side thinking I’m glad we spoke about that because now it’s fine. So, yeah, thanks.

Serpil Senelmis: Key takeaways from Jeff and Mia you have to look at your margins from day one. And communication is the key to running a successful business. Thanks, Team Moxie. In just a moment we’ll meet Tom Harley managing director with roofing specialists Harley and Sons.

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Serpil Senelmis: Thanks Ad Guy. Tom Harley is managing director with roofing specialists Harley and Sons. Tom is one of five sons to join their dad Bruce in a family business that is over 40 years in the making. In this fireside chat with WeTeachMe’s Wayne Lewis. He says business is about delivering on a promise above and beyond.

Tom Harley: My dad’s been a plumber for 48 years and I kind of grew up it’s kind of in my blood. Being a roof plumber might sound a little bit funny, but when we left high school, my dad always said don’t become a plumber, go to university and we all became plumbers. Yeah. So there’s five of us were a year apart, we all become plumbers. We all kind of split off and did our own thing. And you know, I was working for somebody else. You work for somebody else, and you’re always wanting more. My old boss would say, I’ll just go and hide up there for the next two weeks. We don’t have much work on or be sitting under a platform, just thinking to myself, what else is out there? So I quit that job. Dad was working on his own then it was just a sole trader, and then my other little brother came across and I said to dad like, I want to start my own business. He said, well come across with me and we’ll go from there. So I was working with them for probably two years. It was just my dad and another brother and one of my other brothers. He had a company on the other side of town. And again, I got into that mindset of this is crazy. 12 hour days, you know, I was working for myself. But that had to be something else that was out there for us. It wasn’t till I started to reach out to other people I knew I didn’t even have their own businesses, accountants, you know, friends I went to school with and that’s kind of when the doors started to open. That’s kind of where we are.

Wayne Lewis: You asked your dad a lot of questions. Was it a case of right? He’s giving you the skills from the technical perspective, but you’re learning business-wise off him as well.

Tom Harley: Yeah. So 100% No, I definitely learned the skills off him, he is regarded as one of the most knowledgeable men in the industry. But when I went across to him, I didn’t know what business was. I thought business was working as hard as you can to invoice as much as you can to put the money in the bank. It’s actually when I started to reach out to people is when the doors just opened and at the time, there was three of us my dad, my brother, myself, you know, after my first business coaching class, I went home and I sat in front of the computer for three hours and typed all this stuff up, and I thought, Oh, my God, what’s all this information? 12 months down the track, we’d gone from three to 15 staff, and then we’re doubling year on year. So yeah, it’s pretty good.

Wayne Lewis: Obviously, you’re the one that’s taking the reigns business-wise, but was it a case of anybody else wanting to kind of take those reigns as well at the same time.

Tom Harley: So I’m very lucky that I did have trustworthy people in the business like my brothers, but all the ideas and the thirst for knowledge was for me. But having them people you can trust in the business allowed me to kind of step back and say, hold on, I will take the hit financially. Because if I’m not on the tools, obviously the business starts to slow down. So I stepped back. I started to work on the business and that’s when it started to open up but when I started to kind of really hone in, they looked at me like you are the boss. And then you know, later down the track, it became the CEO.

Wayne Lewis: So becoming the boss and taking that responsibility. What was some of the hard calls that you want to make in those early days?

Tom Harley: There was a lot of hard calls a lot of hard times in year two, you know, as a tradesman, you don’t know anything about online marketing. You don’t know anything about websites. I did reach out to a company that year, who build us a website and I think we burned 90 grand in that year nearly sent the business bankrupt. Since then, you know, the hard calls I have to make is and I always stick by this is that if you don’t know much about something, you have to go out and learn it. So I’m a plumber. And I know more about digital marketing now than most people do. So I actually have an inhouse digital marketing team and some staff in the Philippines to help us out with it. Next year, we’re looking at saving to the last financial year like 250 grand on marketing, because we do it ourselves now.

Wayne Lewis: What are the calls coming back from your brothers and your dad? What’s their reaction at this stage?

Tom Harley: Well, they just come along for the ride. I kind of come to the table at ladyship meeting or directors alignment sessions with new ideas, and I decide, wow, that’s awesome, let’s do it. It’s really making the goals but having the family in the business. My mum works in the office too. Good family, friends work in the office, everybody believes in the values of the business and that’s kind of what’s driving us forward.

Wayne Lewis: Does that make communication easier then would you say is the relationship still there on a family level or is it all professional?

Tom Harley: Yeah, the relationship is still there. People always say don’t work with family, don’t work with friends. It is very very hard. We do have our moments and it does put strain on the personal level you know you have a big argument in the office and then that night you’ve got family dinner on and that does cause some strain but we don’t hold grudges we move on we talk through talk about the issues and you move forward you know, you can’t hold grudges,

Wayne Lewis: You’re quite innovative in the space as well and you have a lot of competitors that want a slice of that pie. How do you find those offers started in your marketing agency as well what are the some of the steps you try and stay ahead of the curve?

Tom Harley: Well, it was pretty easy being a tradee. I mean, I guess that most of you have had a tradesman anti house, you know they brought up light or don’t rock up at all. They leave shit everywhere. That might sound like small things, but in a trade based business, it means everything. So what we deliver is an amazing customer journey from start to finish. So from the sales, we educate the customer, and we’ve got an awesome sales process to follow them up and keep them updated about when their jobs coming in. You know, all the technology that goes with that and then right down to automatic systems collecting Google reviews and stuff like that, and customers, you know, they turned on site, it was like, this is amazing, we’ve never had anything like this. And then they refer us to a friend. And, you know the amount of referrals we get each week just proves that.

Wayne Lewis: Just going back to that, burning that 90 grand, I want to kind of feel like a little bit about what you were feeling at that time. What were your emotions when you’re feeling that responsible? And you’ve got all these staff members?

Tom Harley: Yeah, well, you feel very responsible. Back then we didn’t have as many staff members. And back then I was pretty naive, you get into business and somebody kind of gives you their sales pitch and you kind of believe it, and you go with it. You don’t find out till a few months later that they don’t deliver on the promise like business is about. If you promise a customer something, you deliver it and you go over and above their expectations and that’s not what happened and caused a huge strain was nearly a lawsuit but might end up getting a little bit of the money back. But that’s in the past now so, thank God. Yeah.

Wayne Lewis: And how do you mitigate against any of those decisions now? So do you have a sounding board where you can bounce these ideas?

Tom Harley: Yeah definitely, kind of the staff and the group we’ve built around. This is just amazing. So we’ve got 10 in the leadership team in the office. And we weekly made up for our weekly leadership meetings, we got our directors alignment. That’s purely because me and my brothers argue a lot and we need that weekly session to kind of yell and scream at each other, get it all out on the table, then move forward.

Wayne Lewis: So open communication, what kind of some of the other values that you guys hold true to the business?

Tom Harley: There are two values I will talk about is one of them is we’re different. We’re different to all other trade based businesses, we do rock up on time we do the perfect job, our customers, absolutely our number one priority at all times. And then number two is you know, don’t be dickhead. So it is what it says it just don’t be dickhead. When you’re bringing values into the business, your staff has to relate to them. You know, we come up with these ourselves. So don’t be a dickhead just means that, don’t do something that you wouldn’t do it your own house. You know, so it’s pretty self explanatory. Yeah.

Wayne Lewis: I like that one. You threw me off a little bit.

Tom Harley: Yeah. Hahaha

Wayne Lewis: So in terms of the future and what that holds for you guys, where do you see the business going? Can you talk a little bit about the marketing and bringing that in house. What else do you have on the horizon?

Tom Harley: So we’ve got currently about 40 staff. We’re thinking this time next year, we’ll have about 70. So we’re growing at about 40% rate, but that’s in Melbourne, and in Victoria, that’s before we break into other states. We are gonna to break into all the other states over the next probably three years, once we get the model that we’re running at the moment, correct. We’re just tweaking it and tweaking it now, whether that’s a franchise model, or we do it ourselves, but we will be nationwide. You know, starting out when my business coaches say you might get to a $5 million turnover is the thing. That’s not possible. You know, we’re turning over 400,000 you know, two and a half, three years later, we’re well over the $5 million mark. Trending towards $10 million, you know, hopefully, there’s a couple of million left in it for me.

Wayne Lewis: If you’re going back to your earlier days, and when you’re first starting out, what are these key bits of advice you would give yourself now?

Tom Harley: Networking and meeting people is what will progress you in your journey. Another thing, which is very, very important, and it’s only really come to me probably 6, 12 months ago is I had my values wrong or my values were out of whack. I would work 12 hours a day not say my family and friends, and I’ll burn myself out. So I’ve switched all that around now. So at the top, it’s got to be personal health. You have to eat right, you have to exercise whatever that is for you. It has to be number one, because if it’s not, you can’t give the best you have to your business and your family. So for me, in order is its personal health, family and friends and then business and if it’s not in that order, it throws everything out of whack. And that’s been a huge turning point for me to concentrate on myself and get in here right.

Wayne Lewis: When your feelings are going out of sync. What do you do to realign yourself?

Tom Harley: Look what I used to do was when I wasn’t working I’d go out drinking and doing all that stuff for stressful life but now I exercise you know eat right, you hang out with friends you know friends and family that’s going to lifts the spirits it means so much for your mental state. Your mental state is probably the most important thing when you’re trying to grow a business because if it’s not you just can’t get to where you’re going to go to.

Wayne Lewis: Do you ever take some time as well to maybe fully step back but use that as a reflection time to think about where you can take the business?

Tom Harley: Yeah, now definitely. So I call it the hour of power. So once a week I’ll spend one hour and I’ll think big. I’ll sit back and say what is an idea I can bring to the table to triple the size of the business in the next 12 months. You know, my directors and my partners, my brothers, Rob and Annie to do the same. So you sit back and you say what can we do that’s just going to absolutely blow this out of the water. You know, most of it we don’t actually bring to the table because it’s crazy, but you know the hour of power. It works for us, so.

Wayne Lewis: Do the hour power together or separately, and then bring it to the table if it’s worth looking at?

Tom Harley: Yeah, we definitely do it separately. Yeah.

Wayne Lewis: Awesome. Cool. Can we have a round of applause for Tom Harley of Harley and Sons.

Serpil Senelmis: So can you to business consider yourself warned, recognize a sales page, and don’t get taken in for a ride. Thanks, Tom. And thanks Jeff and Mia as well. Next time on Masters Series, if you’re a first-time founder here’s what you need to know. Well, that will be a short episode. All you need is a misspelled name and an Instagram account. Right? No, really, we’ll have a couple of founders here to share their story and isolate the key ducks that you’ll need to have in a row before your launch party gets underway. 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.

Sometimes it takes a bit more than a spark to jumpstart a business. Putting your idea in action takes time, effort, and money – but there’s a few more tools at your disposal to get your startup started.

Ben Cohn in a Co-Founder of TAXIBOX, the mobile self-storage solution that brings yellow cubes of joy to your front door. Ben did a lot of on-the-ground research to jumpstart his business. He explains his approach to making sure TAXIBOX customers always have a remarkable experience.

Ben Stickland is the Founder of Alliance Software and has spent a lot of time and money in the startup space. Ben says the first three years of business are like walking up a see-saw, then things start to level out and become a bit easier. He says he loves running experiments to see what’s going to work in his business.

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

Serpil Senelmis: Hi guys, I’m from the podcast network Written and Recorded. We do the master series podcast. Can I ask you a few questions? What was the spark that got your business started?

Interviewing Public: I was sick for living in the matrix. I like freedom.

Serpil Senelmis: And how’s it going?

Interviewing Public: I’m not making any money, but I just started three weeks ago, so I’m fine.

Interviewing Public: Okay, the spark was maybe about four or five years ago, I had my own business idea, man. And I joined silicon beach to find the app developers, but I really couldn’t get it started. Even though I joined this big community, there was no support, there was no way to find the right people. So I thought this organization needs help. And I stepped up to help the organizer. And four years later here I am the lead organizer, and we have 10,200 members in Melbourne, the largest silicon beach community in Australia.

Serpil Senelmis: Now what is the one thing that you’re waiting for to start your business?

Interviewing Public: I haven’t finished my studies yet. I’m just waiting for my studies to finish and just have more experience in those who like I’m studying accounting at the Romans. So I would love to just stay home and just work

Serpil Senelmis: And why do you want to work at home?

Interviewing Public: It’s easier like you’re just wasting a lot of time just by traveling rather than spending much time with my family.

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. You know, I can remember the exact moment that I decided to become an entrepreneur, and all it took was one spark to jumpstart my business. If you’re still waiting for ignition, we’ve got two jumper leads ready to rev up your startup. Ben Cohn is co-founder of Taxibox the mobile self-storage company responsible for yellow boxes up and down the East Coast.

Ben Cohn: I love shopping the customer’s experience. So people think storage, they’re like, man, that storage because it’s so boring. But when you book a Taxibox along the way, you get jolted by these random things that just come out of the blue. For example, the Taxibox starts talking to you on emails and starts having an affair with you. You’ve got to find an edge. Use your brain to think of doing things in creative ways that people are just not thinking about.

Serpil Senelmis: We’ll hear more from Ben Cohn from Taxibox soon, but first, let me introduce you to another Ben, Ben Stickland, founder of Alliance Software. In 1999. Ben topped his graduating year of uni and was inundated with enticing offers, but he decided to jumpstart his own business instead. Ben says sell your idea before you build it to test the market and make sure it wants what you’re offering.

Ben Stickland: So the question that I want to challenge you with is how much time would you invest to dramatically increase the odds of your business success? I think that a lot of people, if they would do one week of good research, they would move their odds of success from 20%, which is, in general business about the success rate of new businesses, which is about 20%. In tech startups. It’s between five and 10%. So it’s like, most people fail, that in one week of work that could move it from 20 to 40%. If they did a month of research that can move at 50%. If I did three months, they could move it to 70%. It’s not just doing the research, it’s having the humility to listen to your market and actually hear what they have to say. We had a product in the aged care space that was a unique platform for publishing content onto the TVs of aged care residence. We had a large number of customers and our attrition rate was almost zero. Once clients got it in they loved it, but because it was weird, it was really hard to sell because it wasn’t locked. We were replacing x with y, we actually invented a thing. I just remember the frustration of going, it ticks me off that I have to actually get in front of somebody and educate them to what the hell this thing actually does before I can get them to consider whether or not to buy it. And that was our greatest constraint. It’s nice to be able to compete against the market and go we are this and customers get it and then you just go well, where this but our reason for buying is why. Every business in fact, I think is hardest at the start. My observation and I have a lot of good friends who run businesses is typically three years, I used this analogy of walking up a seesaw, it’s been three years walking out the seesaw. And then one day you’re doing the same thing. You’re actually just still walking. But it just feels like it just gets easier because all the background work you’ve done of building contacts and building systems and building this and building that they all still exist and all of a sudden one day the momentum ships over and you keep walking, you’re going crap and making money for the first time and it’s not hard to find employees. It’s not hard to find this and that kind of walking down the other side. Have the seesaw and so all the business owners that I know. And I know a lot of them would generally tell the story of it being hard for the first two to three years. In my experience, I came from a very academic family, and I performed academically very well, I was the top of my university class both in my two undergraduate degrees and my postgraduate degree. And it sucked being in a position where the people that you went through university with were racing up the corporate careers of the big consulting firms, and you’re making 25 grand a year and living off your wife’s income, trying to get this damn business to work and feeling like a loser. So, in every business, I would say to you brace yourself for the first little while because it can be tough to sell. So how to be smart and I reckon you can do this in about a month. One is keep your overheads low. So we rent in a space above a barbecues galore store. After a little while, when we got some money, we spent a bunch of money to deck it out and it’s really cool and funky inside but the rent is actually low and I love the low rent because it’s allowed me to experiment. It’s allowed me to try things and actually lose some money. And because my overheads didn’t eat me, I didn’t go and rent an expensive office upfront. Every business owner should be how to answer this question. If you can’t answer this question, you’d count play? Who is my customer? How will they discover me? And why will they buy from me? Why would I switch if you haven’t got those three answers, you’re not in the game. In a standard business, there are three skills you’ve got to have, you got to be able to sell. And I made a lot of professionals who are actually afraid of selling or don’t know any successful business people who can’t sell. You’ve got to understand operations, and you got to understand finance. They’re the three things you gotta be able to do. And I’m gonna give you one book on each of those topics that I think is the best book to read on each of those topics. So ready fire aim is a great book on business in general, but it’s got a lot of really good marketing smarts in it. It’s probably one of the best business books I’ve read. Traction is an operations book. traction is a book that I read, coming out three years ago now whilst I was spending a couple of months in the US. We’ve almost followed it religiously. We’ve just said to our group, we’re going to do everything in this book and simple numbers straight talk big profits is the best finance book for nonaccountants that I can recommend.

Ben Stickland: We’re going to talk about tech businesses in a second. Just to give you a little bit of background, we built a product called Market Samurai. And it had incredible success. We had launched it and we had 10s of thousands of customers. And we were convinced we were technical gods who could do anything. And we had this big list of email providers, and we hated all the email software because I kept doing all this nasty stuff to us. And we knew our thoughts were built in WordPress and everyone else’s walls and integration with WordPress was a mongrel. And we knew that if we just build something great in that space that did really good, intelligent, integrated marketing inside WordPress and handled big lists and didn’t find me for everything stupid, and it was going to be great. And so we just said, we’re gonna eat our own dog food, we’re gonna build this product, it’s gonna be amazing. And we did, and we took it to one customer, and another, and another. And after we took a 12th and I owe you on datas and said, We don’t have a big list, that integration into WordPress, that’s what we pay web design, they’re cheap, why do we care, and it’s not just a big problem, and bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla, and we threw the product in the beam, it was a very painful experience to come home to your wife and say, you know, that thing that was gonna be awesome. We spent all that money on, it didn’t work out. What we did find was that when we started doing those customer interviews, there was a couple of things in there that people really liked. We had this tool that helps people write copy, and I said that it’s pretty cool. And so we came across a book. The book is called running lean. And running lean is a script that basically is like the idiot’s guide to starting a tech business. And it’s literally just here is a set of interviews, go and ring your customers and ask them these questions now ring them and ask them these questions. And we started following through this thing. And we’ve done like, at least 100 interviews Now when we started out in the business, we went through this process, and the second business did a lot better, to the point where I didn’t want to spend that kind of money again and so We did always interviews to confirm people would like it. And they look really good. But I was still nervous. And I learned to be humble. And so what we did is we said, okay, we’re going to sell it before we build it. And so we put up pages, and we made these videos that pretended that the product existed. And we sent traffic to these things. And we asked people to buy a thing that didn’t exist. And then when they got to the page that said, Do you want to actually buy it, we said, it doesn’t exist. But thanks for getting here. And when it comes, we’ll give it to you for free. And we got no blowback. But we discovered that people were going to buy it. I knew that I interviewed individual humans who liked it and gave us feedback on features and whatever else. But it also sold it at a good conversion rate to the market. I kind of knew I could sell it on you individuals liked it, and it gave me the courage of my convictions to go after it. So starting a startup, you can have incredible potential to scale. So our product it’s now called click video our online content video platform, it turns written content into videos almost instantly. People spend between 30 and $50 us a month to access it, it probably costs me five cents a month to add a new customer to that. Like if a customer comes in buys the actual infrastructure costs, maybe slightly above that, but just trivial. You’ve got this huge capacity of overheads that actually have to exist before you can sell to one customer. And then beyond that, it’s very scalable. Rech startups have really high failure rates, they are often trying to change the world in some way. And the failure rate in tech startups is depending on what stat to read 90 or 95%. And generally, you’re going to require capital and or technical skill to get going. My observation has been in the tech startup space people have done well with Goldilocks sized businesses. So you want to solve a problem that’s big enough to make some real money from. But there are some businesses when somebody comes to me and says, I’m going to set up an event platform that anyone in the world can use to set up their own events until it friends about it, and I can all share it. It’s like a case that’s a global business and you’re competing directly with Facebook, and that’s okay. That’s not so that it can’t be done, but you’re trying to change the behavior of the whole world. I’ve got other clients who work in a niche, like aged care in Australia, I can tell you because I know that niche is only, I think three and a half thousand facilities and 7000 retirement villages. It’s big enough to make money from that’s a serious enterprise. But if you have a killer offering in that space, it’s a Goldilocks sized business. It’s small enough that Microsoft is not building a specialist product. But it’s big enough that you can make millions of dollars. Just think about that. I’ve seen good success in Goldilocks-sized niches two harder in lessons and I’ll wrap it up. Lesson One, just get out of the building run problem and solution interviews, getting out of the building. That’s a common tech startup phrase. It means go and talk to people. Don’t just say I’ve got a great idea. I know my market and I’m going to be determined.

Ben Stickland: That little phrase is highly correlated to losing lots of money. I’ve seen it just from my experience. It’s my observation. I’ve got a great idea. I’m going to work really hard and be determined. Just get out of the building. Literally going and talking to five customers with problem solution interviews, will in most cases, change your idea. Run low-cost experiments. I love running experiments, I will try anything if I can try it for under five grand. If I can try a marketing idea I can try any endeavor. Let’s try paid spots in Instagram. Okay, under five grand, great, let’s try it out. So this is how I see a lot of people spend their money in a tech startup environment. They consciously spend their money over time, and they get to a moment of truth, and they get one opportunity to be right or to be wrong. I think most people are wrong most of the time. The way you want to spend money is to get lots of moments of truth I spent some money on didn’t really look like it. I’ll spend a little bit more I’ll try something, spent a bit more. It didn’t quite work. It’s been a little bit more. Actually. I hit a moment of truth. I’ve got enough market validation that it is now worth spending the money and I’ll pile the money on. I will spin that speed because I’ve done the background work to get the validation. So smart spending, just some ideas for low-cost experiments, demonstrate mock-ups, and prototypes. I can think of two sisters we’ve worked with in our software firm who have a great business tech startup in the childcare space. whoever sent them to me, had pumped up our tires. They had really crappy experience with their previous developers. And that would just desperate to give me the check. It was like all the ethics in the world for me to say to them, could we just test this market first because they’re like, oh, this is going to be great. Let me just give you the money. And it’s someone who likes taking money for services. That’s okay. I was so tempted, it was insane. I said, can we please just spend a few thousand bucks, draw some pictures, do some interviews. I came back. The idea is complete crap. Two weeks later all we figured out a new way. We’re going to do this. We’re just going to go for can we please spend a little bit of time and by the second time now we’ll happy to do it. The second idea was crap. The third idea turned out to have a lot of traction. They’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars now and they are just at the point now where they’re about to become cashflow positive, so they’re just starting to nicely get traction in the market. I suspect that their business, they should sell it for at least 5 million bucks. Like it’s got good traction in the market. It solves a genuine problem. But I had to go through a few rounds to kind of get there. Secondly, test marketing. That’s what we did before selling it before you built it. There’s nothing like asking someone for money to stop people being nice to you. I think it’s a killer because people feel sorry for people starting businesses because I know will the pain you’re going to go through. And so they want to say that your idea is great. And so you just say to them great, would you love to be a foundation investor? You know, it’s gonna be $20,000 a year to use his product for only $1,000 a year, I’ll give you the first three years of membership. I just want to know that you’re serious. People who loved your idea will not part with one 20th of the value to actually buy it. You can get them all to part with the money. That’s a really strong indicator and build minimum viable products, build small things build half-assed products that you’re not proud of. Do the small thing get it to the market have high customer churn, get real market feedback. I know in our video product the things that I thought were critical when they are years down the track. Our retentions going from crap to really good. And the things that I thought were critical that I’d be embarrassed not to launch with still haven’t been built. But we got something really basic into the market and our customer feedback. And every time someone left us, we got to figure out what they didn’t like, and what really drove their decision making. But for a long time, I wouldn’t give accounts to family and friends because it was like we built this thing and it serves this niche market, but you’re gonna look at it and think it looks a bit crap and whatever else but we’re in the market, we’re getting real feedback, not pretend feedback. A concierge service is a concept I’d encourage you to think about. So the classic concierge services, you’re going to build a platform to help people order food from the supermarket in line with their dietary requirements and what they’ve got in the cupboard. All they have to do is take a photo of their cupboard once a week and artificial intelligence is going to suck at all the things they’ve got. And your plan is to have these huge logistics warehouse with machines moving stuff around and doing all this stuff so that you can be really slick on the food delivery side. The concierge service And if it would be put up a website, send me a photograph a human’s going to figure out what you want. A human is going to walk into Kohl’s and buy it for you. And we’re going to lose 100 bucks on every order, we ship out the door. And we’re going to do that for the first 500 orders. But we’re going to figure out what people actually want and how this whole thing works before we invest in the warehouse and we invest in the artificial intelligence, we invest in the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That’s it. And I think we’re done. Thank you very much for listening. I appreciate the time.

Serpil Senelmis: So what stuck with me is the idea of getting out of the building. Run problem and solution interviews. And while you’re at it, run some low-cost experiments. Thanks all those ideas Ben. Next up, we’ll meet the man behind those yellow cubes in Ben Cohn of Taxibox.

Ad Guy: Masters Series is presented by WeTeachMe. Jumpstart your creative side and learn to make, bake or partake at a face to face class near you. Rev your creative engine at weteachme.com. This podcast is produced by Written and Recorded as journalists per hire, written and recorded or chase down your story. One that you might not even realize is there. Don’t bury your headline find your story at writtenandrecorded.com. And now back to the podcast.

Serpil Senelmis: Thanks Ad Guy, Ben Cohn is co-founder of Taxibox which got a jumpstart when he was traveling in the United States and saw a similar business. In this fireside chat with WeTeachMe’s Wayne Lewis, Ben says he shocks and surprises his customers. So they have a remarkable experience to be a successful business, Ben’s advice is to find your edge and think of doing things in creative ways.

Ben Cohn: I ended up quitting my job to go buy property. And I renovated property for about a year and I did really well from that. And I just decided to sell that. And then I had a fair bit of cash. I’ve got a business partner in the business who I met in consulting, and we decided to sell the business together. So I mean, the hurdles were, realistically, I really wanted to make this business fairly unique from the start. And I knew that one of the biggest issues in the business was the capital costs because for us, capital costs are a big thing. We had to basically buy all of our taxiboxes, which are the storage units. And so the biggest hurdle was finding creative way to buy them at a really good price. And so we spent months in China, finding factories and basically manufacturing these box services. So capital was a constraint at the start. I had some money saved up, borrowed from family. Yeah, the rest was just actually I hate to say it because it’s just actually a lot of fun. The experience was great traveling around China meeting factories being 25 years old, kind of acting like we knew we were doing, working out of backpackers. The taxibox cover that you see driving around today was designed to the backpackers by myself. But when I was 25, on illustrator, it just kind of oldest work. I don’t know, it was just a good experience.

Wayne Lewis: And after what Ben said in that first talk, how much research did you do?

Ben Cohn: I didn’t know anything about trucks of forklifts or warehouses. I had to get my forklift license. So there’s a bunch of researching of the industry of things that we just didn’t know. Probably spent three, four or five months realistically researching the United States market. The industry is massive over there. Yeah, and then just baby steps along the way. Nothing in the last seven years we’ve been running has been one major step. Everything’s been tiny, tiny steps. For some of you that are sort of in your mid-20s. I was there six, seven years ago in the exact same position. That’s amazing. I just suddenly wake up and I look in I’m running a business and everything has just been incremental steps along the way. It hasn’t been this monumentous shift this epiphany that happened to me.

Wayne Lewis: Ben’s analogy of the seesaw as well and that tipping point of becoming cashflow positive. Do you remember that moment for yourself as well?

Ben Cohn: Yeah, we became cashflow positive, probably within a break-even probably six months to a year into the business. We didn’t take out a salary for the first year and a half. It was just myself, my business partner for the first year and a half doing all the work. And then from there, it just gradually grew. I would say, though, that I don’t necessarily feel like it gets easier and easier with time. The first year and a half or two years was actually quite easy for me because I just knew how to work really hard and it was just dependent on myself and my business partner. But as the business grows, we’ve got staff, we operate in three cities. We’ve got 49 full-time team members. With that there you’ve got, as humans, people have things that happen in their lives, you kind of carry a lot of that load. So the interpersonal stuff that happens with dealing with people and dynamics at work, I actually find really challenging. It’s a complex decision, you know, trucks breaking down, we’ve got a fleet of trucks that have accidents, or they break down and they need servicing. It’s just stuff they never thought about. So, for me, as time goes on, the odds and the stakes are much much higher than they were, I still find ways to really challenge myself and enjoy things, but I don’t to be frank, I don’t find that it gets easier with time, we probably make more money. That’s true. But the emotional drain is pretty heavy in running a business.

Wayne Lewis: From a leadership perspective, how do you nurture your own leadership skills?

Ben Cohn: It sounds are really, really a bit odd. But I think that a lot of the best stuff that comes to me creatively in my mind, or my views in the business is when I’m really on my own. I sometimes I’ve been known to go and hire a cabin over in Hillsville. And I just go there on my own for two days. And I just literally spend time reading and just thinking And that gives me some great ideas for the business.

Wayne Lewis: In terms of the relationships in your life, is there any been any times where it’s affected your marriage and things like that, as you’ve got too much fears have been any points where you thought, this is enough for me, I want to give up and walk away?

Ben Cohn: It is an absolute lie if a business owner tells you that they haven’t thought of it, because every business owner goes through this and has these days where they’re like, Oh, my God, this is just horrific. It happens. I definitely thought of that. I never really got close to really acting on it, to be honest, like, as much as I’ve thought of it. If someone said to me, Hey, I’m going to buy your business. I probably wouldn’t do it because I really love what I’m doing at the moment. But I’ve definitely you know, there’s tough times, and then the impact on relationships. If my wife was sitting here, she would tell you that it’s had a massive impact on things. I come home and I share things with her that she doesn’t want to hear about. She can’t stand the word taxibox anymore, but c’est a la vie, she married me so she stuck with it to be honest. Yeah. One thing is, as a personality, I like to be fairly relaxed. I do find, though, that in running a business and having staff that report to you, I’ve almost become a bit like in my conversations are very much really focusing on everything they’re saying. And I’m just very engaged. And I find that happening in my social life as well. And people like to feel like I’m being interviewed. Yeah, man, honestly, the information, just tell me and we can act on it. You know?

Wayne Lewis: Do you have an exit plan? Does every founder have an exit plan, do you think?

Ben Cohn: When we started our business, we did not think of an exit plan at all. And that really shaped the way we’ve grown our business. I think actually starting the business with a view as to who will eventually buy that business or what industry is going to buy that business is a really important point, because it actually shapes the way you’re going to develop that business to eventually have a buyer. We didn’t do that. And we’ve created an incredibly unique business that whilst it is very saleable to paypal at the moment, it’s not built by us to sell so I actually don’t have any desires to sell the business for the long term. I can see the view of how big the market can be. I’m doing things that creatively really challenge me in the business. I’m not necessarily driven by money, as much as challenging myself creatively, or doing things that are really different or challenging the status quo. So in this business, I’ve got plenty of scope to be able to do that.

Wayne Lewis: And what does drive you then?

Ben Cohn: I love shocking the customer’s experience. So people think storage, they’re like, Man, it’s storage because it’s so boring. But when you book a taxibox along the way, you get jolted by these random things that just come out of the blue. For example, the taxibox starts talking to your emails and starts having an affair with you. If you get a quote on our website, and you actually get the quote, email to yourself, you can click a random button that goes into this Tetris look-alike game where you play. And depending on your score, you actually get discounts off your taxibox so it lures you back into the process and our business is absolutely littered with surprises along the way. That’s the stuff that just absolutely I love and people book a taxibox and like, man, I was getting storage and holy crap I’m never going to any other storage company again, because the experience was completely, radically different. I can talk about the stuff for hours, or businesses just fill with these things.

Wayne Lewis: They’re the kind of ideas that you pick up when you’re in this cabin in Hillsville is not the more operational strategic side, but more of these creative Mario type things?

Ben Cohn: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s true. It actually happens over weird dinners with friends when they’re like, Man, you should do something. And I’m like, we doing it. We’re just gonna do these ideas come out of really random places, the team around me, I feel like they kind of feel the culture. And they’ve started suggesting things that normally most feels weird saying bosses, but most bosses would be like, there’s no chance we’re doing that. We’re kind of like, let’s just try. Let’s just see. So it’s kind of similar to Ben’s concept of, because less than $5,000 Why not do it? From my perspective, if you do something like everyone else, you’ve got to find an edge. Either got to be really good at it. You’ve got to have a hell of a lot of money. That for me far easier is to actually use your brain to think of doing things in creative ways that people are just not thinking about that corporates that are focused on money and necessarily engage in their minds. And, you know, that gives you a unique edge.

Wayne Lewis: Thank you very much, Ben, can we have a round of applause for Ben Cohn of Taxibox?

Serpil Senelmis: How funny that Ben’s wife is sick of hearing the word taxi box. Good thing he’s got a strong belief in himself and his business. Thanks, Ben. That’s officially the first time we’ve had two founders with the same first name on this podcast. Next time on Masters Series, family business primer. If you thought starting a business was hard, try doing it with your family. But in all seriousness, right now, I’m talking into a recorder being operated by my husband and I wouldn’t have it any other way. We’ll meet two family-based founders and find out the benefits and disadvantages of working with your loved ones. 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.

There comes a moment in every startup when the brand develops its own personality and characteristics, separate from those of the founder. The next challenge is to build it into a powerhouse brand. In this podcast, you’ll hear from a brand builder and a brand whisperer.

Nathan Chan is the Founder of Foundr, the magazine that profiles entrepreneurs. Nathan started Foundr at the top by interviewing Sir Richard Branson – he then gave away that copy of the magazine to supercharge the Foundr brand. Since then he’s interviewed Arianna Huffington, Mark Cuban, Seth Godin, Tim Ferriss and he shares their insights and his own in this brand-building masterclass.

Stephen Esketzis is the marketing funnel mastermind and Founder of Digital Marketers Australia. He launched his first business straight out of high school with the Meggle App which hooked people up with their nearest bar or nightclub. Building a 10,000 strong network for the app took Stephen deep into the world of digital marketing. Today he builds marketing funnels for businesses of all shapes and sizes.

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

Serpil Senelmis: How does your brand convey your business’s personality?

Interviewing Public: For me as a running a social venture, my brand is represented through authenticity, caring for the people that I’m interacting with and dealing with on a daily basis. The service that I’m putting together helps to empower students and helps to reengage elderly experienced persons. And I hope to represent that through the way I deal with all the people I speak with. And, and that to come through in that.

Interviewing Public: Well my brand and business I guess, is essentially in one. And they both convey my personality because I’m quite creative and enjoy helping other people and seeing them succeed. So as a personal development and business coach, that’s sort of what I do. I help others succeed, help them grow. And that’s a reflection of myself because I love helping others that just really makes me feel fulfilled.

Interviewing Public: The business that I work with is a tech startup, we’re pretty young. We’ve only been around for a couple Using we’re really building out our team at the moment. And it’s something that’s very front of mind for us and that we’re very conscious of and working on at the moment. I think it all starts with culture and people. And that’s definitely been our priority to start with at least yeah.

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. Somebody asked me recently if my business was made or if it was a brand of its own that could continue without me. It’s a tough question, and I’m looking forward to getting some good advice from our two experts. As we look at building a powerhouse brand. Nathan Chan is the founder of Foundr magazine, and digital resource to self-made entrepreneurs. They got his big break after winning an interview with Sir Richard Branson.

Nathan Chan: And I knew forget it was like late at night I trackback, the head of Richard Branson’s PR. And you know, I remember telling my friend that I was living with at the time, like be quiet, because I’m gonna go pitch Richard Branson, so I run to my room. Like I just called her up. I just was like, stumbling, you know, so nervous. I gave her my pitch. And she said, right, look, please understand when we get these requests, at least 10 times a day, shoot me an email. I promise. I’ll at least get back to you. So I showed her a really good email. And then yeah, he ended up saying yes, and we did that interview.

Serpil Senelmis: We’ll hear more from Nathan soon. But first, Stephen Esketzis, founder of stevenesketsis.com. Naturally, in this fireside chat with WeTeachMe’s Wayne Lewis. Stephen says you really need to get inside the head of your customers if you want them to take action.

Stephen Esketzis: So my background is digital marketing. I’ve got a few different companies and one of them, we run monthly digital marketing events. So everything is all about learning how to build a sales funnel and acquire customers online. You know, lead generation, taking them through that whole process of a cold audience, someone you’ve never met before warming that lead up, turning them into a customer and sending them through your services to make as much money as you can offer them in your business. straight out of high school, I built this app to help people get into nightclubs. And that was kind of my first business idea. Believe it or not, it actually pretty well, surprisingly, but I went out one out, I was like, only get into this nightclub. I don’t know a guest list, it’d be cool if there was an app or I could just find one. So we built this app. And it worked. We’ve got like 10,000 downloads from all these different nightclub owners and patrons and things like that. And after a while, we kind of hit a glass ceiling. And then once we hit that glass ceiling, I was like, well, what do we do now this is like digital marketing when I want I don’t know anything about it. So I went into the world of Facebook advertising and Google advertising and sales funnels and boosting posts and all this kind of crazy stuff. And that’s how I ended up in digital marketing world and I ended up blocking that a lot more than the app world. So I stayed in it and became head of content marketing for a company called Click Funnels for a few years while doing a lot of consulting at the same time, and now building a lot of our marketing funnels and helping lead generation for businesses around Australia as well, so.

Wayne Lewis: With the app, can you give us a bit of an insight as to some of those hurdles that you came across? In those early days?

Stephen Esketzis: So with the mobile app, especially like I had no idea what I was doing. So if anyone’s going into marketing or starting a business, it’s pretty overwhelming. You don’t understand how to spend your money effectively. You put your money into like a Facebook ad or something like that. You just see the ad spend go up and you don’t see any results you don’t see people actually buying. So for me, the biggest hurdle was actually understanding how do I get someone to become a paying customer on my platform or for my service, before interacting with them? How do I get someone who I’ve never met before to actually give them my money? Give them me money? Have them give me money? Third time lucky. I know it’s tongue twister, but yeah, so that was the biggest hurdle And I guess to figure that out, I realized that you know, there’s two things there. So it’s sales and marketing. And I think a lot of people confuse the two because sales is face to face, closing a sale. So actually taking someone through the process of your qualified customer. Now, let me tell you something, whereas marketing is the process of warming someone all the way up to your offer. And then they’re actually already sold because they’ve seen all the messaging that leads them to your offer before you even got there. So I thought that was really fascinating because it’s a lot of a less pushy approach. Most people think sales is a lot more pushy. And I thought, you know, if I can do this at scale, then there’s a huge opportunity here for any business I want to build. It doesn’t have to be an app, it can be a website, it could be, you know, service-based company, like a removals company could be anything you want. If you understand the mechanics behind marketing, then you can go into a business and blow it up at will. So for me, that was kind of the biggest hurdle and that’s how I went about solving it is just looking around what is marketing diving deeper and deeper in and then I realized that to get that actual understanding The process is called a sales funnel. So it’s actually putting someone through the top of this funnel, teaching them about your product, warming them up, and then eventually they become a customer and then breaking that down. So that’s what I ended up going in and learning.

Wayne Lewis: So some of the clients that you’re working with today, is it your main role to understand those customers’ needs before you start working with them, or how does it work?

Stephen Esketzis: So I mean, different clients we work with have different data available to them. So some of them like of selling brand new, some of them have email lists and Instagram followings, and all that kind of thing. So if you’ve already got some sort of data available to let’s say, you’ve been in operation for a little while, or you’ve got some customers and some leads, but you don’t have a ton. You leverage what you’ve got to make the next step easier. So you can start targeting new customers. So for example, if you’ve got like an email list of past clients or past customers, send them an offer, you know, give him a free voucher or attempts and off code and say, Look, we’d love you to answer these questions. Just keep it very low barrier. Now what’s the number one challenge you’re facing right now in your Or in your swimming lessons or in whatever the product is. And actually go through those answers and structure and see where you know what people are replying one of those answers that has coming up over and over again that you can start tackling when you start targeting new customers. So they’re actually giving you all the fears and frustrations or issues. And you’re just reusing that in the content when you start advertising to them. So that’s what we’ll do with a client, we’ll find out what they’ve got available. And then we’ll go and take it away and start leveraging that when we want to start finding new clients. If you’re starting from scratch, and you don’t have anything, it’s always good to go out and either partner with someone who has a following in that space, or start running some test traffic and going face to face asking questions. You’ve got to kind of get that face to face response sometimes to really get the insight into, you know, what they’re thinking and what they’re going through.

Wayne Lewis: And what tools are you using for the capture?

Stephen Esketzis: We use a few different things. So for our email list in our CRM, we use a tool called Active Campaign that does all our email management and CRM. For surveys type forms pretty good where you can do quizzes and surveys. If you’re starting something mass market from scratch, a little hack of mine is using a tool called Google consumer surveys, you can actually go through and ask some questions. And Google will put this as an ad over pieces of content on websites. And for people to access the content, they got to answer this quiz. If you’re starting like a beauty eCommerce store, you can say, Are you female and interested in beauty? And then yes or no. So anyone that hits yes will go through another five more questions. Anyone who hits no is disqualified, and then they don’t answer the questions. So you only pay for the responses that are qualified. And you can start getting some data like that. So that’s a really easy way to do data collection. And again, if you don’t have resources or an email list, Facebook groups is a really easy one. We’ll start doing that recently for ourselves. One of our brands we’re launching in the pet space. So we wanted a logo and we’re like, well, what logo do we want? What’s going to resonate with people, someone who owns a dog so we had four or five different logos, we went out we posted it to all these different groups and the one that I thought was never gonna win one. It came up again. Again, again, again, it’s a stupid little dog like lying on his back. And I was like, it looks like a dead dog. Like, there’s no way, like this thing is gonna win. And it just crushed it like they loved it. So I was like, all right, that’s what we’re gonna go with. Like, it looks ridiculous. But you don’t know sometimes like your target customer isn’t you. So it’s just about picking up that piece of information. But at the end of the day, like digital marketing, it comes down to three things. So it’s talking about having the right offer, you’ve got to have a high converting offer and offer which resonates with your audience and the irresistible offer. So that’s probably the most important part. The next is your target customer, you’ve got to make sure you’re crystal clear about who your target customer is and how you’re gonna reach them. And where they are. If you don’t know who they are, you might have the best offer. But if you’re targeting the wrong people, they’re not gonna respond. And then the third thing is the messaging your copy. So if you’re actually targeting the perfect person with the perfect offer, but your copy sucks, then they’re not going to take action. So it’s gonna be just like a dead campaign that had, you know, had legs on it, but at the end of the day, it’s not capturing it’s not gripping enough to convert. So make sure you’ve got really tight copy, hell of a really good offer. And your targeting is on point. If you get those three things, it’s a home run every time

Wayne Lewis: And how do you see the future for Australia for not just digital marketing, but businesses as a whole?

Stephen Esketzis: I think it’s thriving. Honestly, every single time I speak to someone who’s in business online, offline, brick and mortar, whatever it might be. Right now, it’s easier and cheaper than ever to start a business with contractors like upwork.com, where you can go hire anyone from any country for dollars an hour. I think the the wealth of knowledge out there on the internet is so vast that everything’s at your fingertips, there really is no excuse not to be able to start a business and just keep plugging away and grinding through it. Because there’s so many free events and so much free content. There’s so many blog articles and so many different pieces of information out there that you can go and learn from. I just think it’s gonna get bigger and bigger and more and more competitive as well. So I think you have to have your hand you know, your hand on the pulse or finger on the trigger. I can’t remember what the thing is. But basically, you’ve got to be paying attention. Because at the end of the day, if the guy next to you is running the same company or something similar, and they’re doing that, then it’s just gonna crush you. So I think we’re thriving, but you’ve also got to be an active business owner, you can’t be passive. If you’re in a startup and you want to just do the minimal work, you’re going to very quickly find out there’s a lot more to it if you’re really want to scale something quite large.

Wayne Lewis: So what are you thinking down the line?

Stephen Esketzis: For online? Yeah, I mean, I’m involved in a bunch of projects. But for me, personally, we’re working in a lot of lead generation spaces. So online lead generation for different service-based businesses. And I’ve got another company where we build media properties, so big content, websites, thinking like, you know, health.com or a lot of those were just content, content, content. So I run a couple of those websites. And we just see the potential. There’s really big a lot of companies who are, for example, the dog one that we’re starting at the moment talking about targeting pet owners and giving them information about how to be a better dog owner, and we’re bringing experts in to help them with that. We’re saying companies who like all these pet food companies and all these dog walking companies and all these supplemental products that linking to that industry are really looking to partner with these authorities. And you know, people who are providing value first rather than just the product. So I think if you can provide value in your business, no matter what it is just content in whatever form it is, whether it’s video, blog, content, podcast, whatever that medium is for your audience, that’s going to really capture their attention. And that’s how you’re going to, again, build the brand, I think providing all that content upfront. And that way, by the time they hear about you and work with you, they’re already pre-sold in their head. So I think content is just going to get more and more important.

Wayne Lewis: Content is king.

Stephen Esketzis: Content is king.

Wayne Lewis: Guys, can we have a round of applause for Stephen Esketzis.

Serpil Senelmis: So the key to successful digital marketing is a three-step process. Number one, have an irresistible offer, two, be clear on your target customer. And finally, make sure that the copy in your message is exceptional. After all, it will decide whether your customers take action or not. Thanks for all that Stephen. Next, we’ll meet a man who went from struggling to get a job to having tremendous influence and learning to think big.

Ad Guy: Masters Series is presented by WeTeachMe. Is it too early to think about Christmas? Why not learn to make gifts such as soap, robots, or Christmas wreaths? Get the jump on the festive season at weteachme.com. This podcast is produced by Written and Recorded. You can give your brand a voice and personality with a podcast that really speaks to your customers. Let your brand talk with writtenandrecorded.com. And now back to the podcast.

Serpil Senelmis: Thanks Ad Guy, Nathan Chan. didn’t have much of a work history behind it before he took a leap of faith and started Foundr magazine, in this fireside chat with WeTeachMe’s Wayne Lewis. Nathan says the growth of your company is a reflection of you as a founder, and how much time you’re investing in learning and networking.

Wayne Lewis: I’m an avid listener of your podcast.

Nathan Chan: Right, thanks mate.

Wayne Lewis: The first line that you always open up with is how did you get your job? So that same question, if you don’t mind, how did you get your job?

Nathan Chan: So I just kind of fell into it. It’s funny. I’ve been doing this for five years now. And I look at all these people that want to start a business and they have all these crazy wild dreams of raising capital and building the big businesses. And for me, I started Foundr because no one would give me a job. My first professional job was in IT support at an accounting firm, and then I moved across and started working at a travel company called intrepid travel. And I did a master’s in marketing. And still no one would hire me to do marketing. So I saw there was an opportunity to disrupt the publishing space creating a digital magazine. And at the time, I was interested and curious around entrepreneurship and business. And I thought, what better way than to create this magazine around business and everything that I wanted to learn and read because I saw there was a gap in the marketplace to produce content around entrepreneurship and business for more kind of early stage founders and aspiring founders. And I just started on the side. I remember actually taking that magazine, like the first edition on the iPad, taking it to job interviews, and still no one would hire me. After a couple of months, it was pretty clear to me what I wanted to do and how it’s gonna grow this thing. And yeah, the rest is kind of history.

Wayne Lewis: How did you get some of the early wins on the board?

Nathan Chan: You know, starting a magazine is a blessing and a curse. The blessing was that I didn’t know it at the time. But a magazine has a tremendous amount of authority when you talk about like building up media properties. Having a magazine is tremendous for influence. And I just kind of stumbled across that. And if you want to start a magazine today, like you know, a lot of people would say, you were stupid, saying back then a lot of people told me I was stupid, but I was really naive, right? And you know, I didn’t have any money either, so I kind of had to be super resourceful. So to answer your question, I worked out very quickly that having a magazine is amazing for getting cut through and actually getting in the door and getting in front of people. And the first early wind was I got an interview with Sir Richard Branson, and that was for issue number eight, but I pitched him for issue number four but when I was four months in. I’ll never forget I was you know, Still at my day job, and I was at a share house with one of my mates in McLeod. And I never forget it was like late at night I trackback, the head of Richard Branson’s PR and you know, I remember telling my friend that I was living with at the time, like be quiet, because I’m going to go pitch Richard Branson, so I run to my room. Like I just called her up. I just was like stumbling and I was so nervous. I gave her my pitch. And she said, like, Look, please understand, we get these requests at least 10 times a day, shoot me an email, I promise I’ll at least get back to you. So I showed her a really good email. And then yeah, he ended up saying yes, and we did that interview and that that was a really big win because I took that interview. And I gave it away for free. I gave that particular magazine edition away for free. And that was something that I learned that you when you’re building any kind of brand or building an audience. If you want to build that audience, you want to lead with something that’s really good that you could easily charge for. But if you give it away for free and put it out there, you can do a few things. One, you can provide value up front and you can build your audience but two, with that magazine, having Richard Branson on the front cover of a brand that nobody’s ever heard of. It’s tremendously powerful for building influence. That was definitely a big win. Another big win was, I just was lucky that I stumbled across the business model of selling recurring subscriptions. And that just kept building and it was just building, building, building, building. You know, a lot of people, when they start a business, they don’t think, okay, I’m just gonna sell subscription that was really powerful, and still is today. I’m very, very passionate about recurring revenue

Wayne Lewis: From the podcast, I’ve noticed that you’re looking for that advice from some of those founders about how to scale and how to build teams?

Nathan Chan: Yeah, yeah, yes. So you build a very, very big company, or something of true worth and value and significance through having a great team. There’s no other way about it, you can’t do it off your own bat, I think you can build a business maybe to a million bucks or a couple of million by pushing it, max by yourself. But once you want to get past that, you really need to develop a keen eye and skillset for identifying talent, recruiting talent, fostering talent, and really allowing people to do their best work at your company and really fostering that team. So that’s definitely something that is a common thing that a lot of people don’t think about the accomplishments. Now founder is not a reflection of just my work. It’s a reflection of our team’s work. And we have an incredible team, which is, that’s how you can scale is through hiring tremendously talented people. And it’s really tough. When it comes to hiring great people. You want people that I think super hungry, you want to create an organization, an environment where they can do their best work. Getting paid is one thing, but being able to fall in love with the work is another thing, one thing that I’ve found really powerful to attract great talent to want to join founders of vision. I say this not sparingly, but I truly believe that the work that we’re doing at Foundr, our content, everything we put out, we have the potential to create the next Elon Musk to like shape the future of our generation. Because all these young kids, when they go to learn, they want to learn about entrepreneurship. And they, you know, type in Google, they’re finding an article from Foundr, they’re listening to a podcast, they’re watching one of our videos or doing one of our courses. And you know, to be a part of that, that’s pretty exciting. That’s all you need focus on when you scaling and building your team.

Wayne Lewis: Nathan, you’re super passionate about building a powerhouse brand. And can you just share a little bit about how you went about turning your brand into a powerhouse brand?

Nathan Chan: Yeah, I am particularly passionate about building brands from scratch, especially if you got no money. You know, there’s three key components that I believe are the key elements and ingredients for building any brand, especially online. The first one is having a great product, you look at all the companies that are winning, and that have great brands, they tend to be the ones with the most superior products. Like if you want to win in business, you have to work towards having the most superior product in the marketplace. And that kind of goes without saying, but for some people, they try and cut corners there, so that’s number one. So for us at Foundr, it’s our content, anything that you see us put out, whether it’s a podcast, whether it’s a video, whether it’s a blog post, whether it’s one of our courses, whether it’s one of our magazines, a book you name, it, anything we put out, is a very, very strong product and it’s good. The second key component is and this is a form of unique selling proposition in of itself to differentiate yourself is great design. So I’m very, very passionate about, about having great design in whatever you put out there. So if you look at all the top startups one thing that is very, very common, they all have tremendous design. Like it just goes without saying. And the cool thing is with design, because of technology nowadays, you can actually get incredible design at extremely low cost. Like you don’t have to go to these ridiculously expensive agencies locally. You can go to a website like behance.com or dribble.com, you can find an amazing designer from Eastern Europe. Obviously, you can take advantage of the economy and pay somebody a really cost affordable right here in Australia or US or whatever, and find somebody in Eastern Europe and you can get incredible design work. And I think that is so important. So if you look at anything we put out there from Foundr, the design is impeccable, it’s really, really strong. And when it comes to great design, the things that I think about is it has to be cool, it has to be funky, it has to be fresh, and anything that we put out there, we want people to to see it, if they’re glancing and they’ll take a second look, it’s got to be really cool. And that’s something that can be achieved when you starting from scratch with not much money, obviously a great product, you’ve got to build a great product. And then the third one is having ambassadors for your brand. Now, it doesn’t actually have to be kind of, you know, you’ve got a deal with them, but you need to be able to align yourself with them in some way, shape or form. So we don’t have any official ambassadors per se for Foundr, but we treat the people that are the rock stars of our industry in the entrepreneurship and business space. We get them on the front covers of our magazine, and some of them we have testimonials from and we put everywhere all over our website. Like if you go to the homepage of foundr.com, you’ll see a testimonial from Gary Vaynerchuk, Daymond John, Marie Forleo are all very well-known people in the industry in the space that people were just like, wow, these guys must be legit. You see the Foundr covers, we use those to show these people was almost ambassadors for the brand. So if you can really elevate your credibility and authority, that’s how you start to really cultivate and develop an amazing brand. That’s really all it is in those three simple key steps. And this all can be achieved even when you’re just starting out. The thing you just have to remember is you have to be prepared to spend that little bit extra in investing the time in creating a great brand at the start. So I’ll never forget when I was trying to design the first edition of the magazine, and it was ridiculous. I found the first designer and I got him to design up the whole magazine edition. And it costs 200 bucks. And I was just like, oh, that’s a bit of money and I dropped the 200 bucks. You know how much money and then I found these other designer who was just 100 times better then the first designer we worked with, and I was just about to launch the magazine. And I found the second designer, incredible guy, and I spoke to him and and I showed him what we had. And I said, yeah, how much is it gonna cost for you to design our magazine every month and, and he’s like, it’s gonna cost you about 600 bucks and I was just like man, there is no way in hell, I can afford to pay that or pay that. And I’ll never forget, this is like one of the best lessons that I learned about branding. He said to me, Nathan, I know it might seem like a lot of money to you is probably out of your budget. But if you can invest in design, early on when you’re starting your business or building your startup, at the early stages or at the very start, you might not see it and you might not feel it right now. But it pays its weight in gold over time. And you really see those benefits in In the long run.

Wayne Lewis: Did you go with that guy, with the second?

Nathan Chan: Of course man, I went to his wedding. He’s our art director now, like he still does every single magazine edition. He’s done like most of the stuff we put out there. So, yeah, it’s a, it’s a good one.

Wayne Lewis: You talked a lot about learning for the people that have been there and done that before. And that’s helped you also grow the brand. Can you shed a little bit light on that for us, please?

Nathan Chan: One thing that I’m pretty obsessed about is obviously growing Foundr. And we have a tremendously large vision for what I believe Foundr can be. And to get there that requires taking things to the next level and scaling. So one thing that I found from my experience that helps me get there is just by the quality of advice that comes to me and that I get and that I soak up. I’ve been very, very lucky along the way to get really, really good advice from where I am now. All the way up back when I started. I’ve always been very passionate person, if I get obsessed with something, so if I meet somebody that I can help them and they can help me, I somehow tend to get a lot from that, that interaction. So where I’m going with this is, I think one of the biggest hacks there is when it comes to and I don’t like to say this, like, you know, building a successful business is finding somebody that’s done what you want to do. And just finding out all the things that are ahead from them and just learning from them. Everything that you want to do right now is probably been done by somebody else before. Now you can get that advice from really three different ways. One, you can pay for it, which is something that I’m more than happy to do and I continually double down on paying for advice, whether that’s paying for your mentors paying for coaching, jumping on something like a service like clarity.fm. And if you want to find a lead generation expert, you can find so many on there, and you can pay them $10 a minute, you speak to them for half an hour $300. And you can know, the best stuff for that person knows from generating millions of leads in the past couple of years for their company. So that’s the first thing you have to be prepared to respect that person’s time if they are going to give it to you. And if they want to be paid, pay them. Make that investment in yourself. The more that you level up and invest in your knowledge and mindset and spend that time the faster you can grow your company. The growth of your company is a reflection of you as a founder and how much you know and how much you’re learning. I know that sounds kind of basic and obvious, but if you really step outside of that, if you just keep investing in double downing on investing in yourself, then, of course, you’re stacking the deck in your favor to be able to grow your company. The second thing is really to network and meet people, I always try and serve first and ask later, I think that’s really incredible when you’re looking to meet people, and you perhaps want to connect with somebody, put yourself out there. And then the third thing that you want to be doing around getting great advice is joining groups. And there’s plenty of them out there and just having that accountability from really smart people or people at the same level, the journey that you’re at, or maybe even a little, you know, it just, it’s really, really powerful. And just that accountability when you’ve got that cadence of catching up with that group once a month and being able to say, Hey, this is what’s happening now. Imagine being able to go to that group and say, yeah, I’ve done have done nothing, you know, like having that and just being inspired by others and having that cadence of catching up with that group is tremendously powerful. So they’re the three things when I think that I’m always focused on when it comes to having quality advice and always being fed that quality advice and getting people to always test my assumptions. In my strategies and looking forward on tweaking the business model, adding this line of product or turning this cost center into a profit center or whatever it is.

Wayne Lewis: I’d love to hear this passion. You’re very passionate about social as well. And Gary V was somebody who you looked up to for the advice on obviously growing through social?

Nathan Chan: Yeah, so I’ve learned a lot from Gary, from chatting with him and catching up with him. And when you want to build a brand, one thing he taught me is you need to conquer all the channels. You can’t just conquer one. If you’re starting from scratch, you need to just focus on one channel. There’s too many channels you can only focus on one at a time. So for Foundr, we started with Instagram, we absolutely destroyed that channel. How did I work out how to master that channel. It’s a simple simple concept. This is how I master every single social channel you guys watch what we’re going to do with our YouTube channel will get that to 100,000 subscribers in six months or less. So the concept of growth hacking any social channel is a concept of modeling, which comes from Tony Robbins like success leaves clues. So you look at all the channels in your space. Let’s say we want to master Instagram and let’s say we run a physical product. We have a physical product-based business. You want to study the top 10 to 20 Instagram channels that are absolutely killing it on Instagram that sell physical products and they have a tremendous brand. You want to study them really intently? Like what kind of content are they posting? How often are they posting, how often they posting on their stories, how often they doing their calls to action, who the influences they are working with all these different things, that’s the first thing you want to do. The second thing you want to do, is you want to buy every single course out there from people that are legit practitioners. These are people that have done it with their own business, they don’t say they’re an expert, and they’re a guru because they say they are, they’ve actually built legitimate businesses themselves. mastering that particular channel, that’s the second thing you want to do, and you want to soak up as much as you can. And then the last thing you want to do is just be super consistent, high-quality content times consistency equals influence. So if you just do it relentlessly, like you pump out like we have for the past three years, if we just pumped out great content on our Instagram channel and said, like almost 1.5 million followers in three years, if we just did that, we might not be 1.5, we’d least be in the hundreds of thousands. So that’s what you really need to do those top three things. And then you move on to the next one. You just go one at a time and just be really, really relentless on just mastering that one channel. And that’s all I’ve really done when it comes to social. We did it first with Instagram, then we did it with podcasts. Then we did it with Facebook. Now we’re going to do it with YouTube. And we’re focusing on blogging. We haven’t mastered that yet, but that’s exactly what we’re doing with YouTube. No short-cuts.

Wayne Lewis: Awesome answer. So thank you very much guys. Can we have a round of applause for Nathan Chan of Foundr magazine?

Serpil Senelmis: So one of the key takeaways from Nathan was a high-quality content times consistency equals influence. There are no shortcuts. Thanks, Nathan. And thank you, Stephen, as well. Next time on Masters Series, women run the world. It’s a shame that women face more challenges than men in almost every aspect of life. But it’s a reality. We’ve already heard from some sensational female founders in this series of massive series, and we’ll celebrate two more next time. 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.

Women face more challenges than men when it comes to starting a business, but that doesn’t stop them following their passions.

Mini Latif is the Founder of Ottoman3. In this podcast, she reveals that as a 7-year-old she thought everybody grew up to run a business. At that age, she also came up with the original concept for Ottoman3.

Kara Breadmore is the Founder of Ka’llure Jewellery. It was Jewellery that found Kara and became her passion. Kara explains how her business is not about making shiny things, but telling the stories of her clients.

Masters Series puts industry professionals in front of a room full of startups and entrepreneurs to share their experience and secrets to success.

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

Serpil Senelmis: Who’s your businesswoman role model?

Interviewing Public: I don’t know if you would say this is I think she’s a businesswoman. I would say Beyonce. Okay. I think what she stands for, for women as well. And also, I’m Emma Watson as well. Just really strong people.

Interviewing Public: I love Oprah Winfrey. I know she’s a TV personality, but she’s still a business person and she’s coming from next to nothing, and build herself up and become this empire.

Interviewing Public: Yes, would definitely be my boss. And she does everything like not afraid to mop the floors. You know, like spent her weekends in the store. She’s still hustling.

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 and I’m a woman running a business. While there are more of us in entrepreneurial leadership and board roles, I’ve noticed that it’s far more common for mediocre men to come in to shout their successes than it is for really successful women to feel comfortable talking about theirs. But we’ve got two female founders ready to step into the limelight for you, Kara Breadmore started Ka’llure Jewellery in 2005 to create custom jewelry that fulfills dreams.

Kara Breadmore: We were exceptionally lucky that we had a father who really encouraged my sister and I, as women to be anything that we wanted to be. And it didn’t matter if you were a man or a woman. And it meant that I actually became one of the first Victorian scouts, Boy Scouts, and Girl Scouts. And that was an amazing experience and I didn’t even really realize it at the time that it was so forward-thinking of my father.

Serpil Senelmis: We’ll hear more from Kara soon. First up Mini Latif, founder of Ottoman3 Brow Bar who wanted to bring beauty rituals of ancient times into modern practice. With three locations across Melbourne. Mini has successfully brought threading back and saved many eyebrows. In this fireside chat with WeTeachMe’s Wayne Lewis, Mini says there’s nothing more powerful than a single woman without a kid.

Mini Latif: I grew up with parents that always have their own small business. So they were making coffee before it was cool. And they weren’t called baristas back then. So we were just working really hard and the takeaway shops, and I honestly grew up, really believing that everyone grew up to start their own business. I had no idea that you didn’t own your own business when you became an adult.

Wayne Lewis: That’s quite powerful isn’t it?

Mini Latif: Yeah. I just thought that’s just the way we do it. So watching my parents struggle somewhat in takeaway shops and cafes and stuff, making a healthy living for us. I knew that it could have been done better and more sophisticated. So my goal was not to get into the food industry but certainly I was going to run my own business, maybe in an industry that I enjoyed, which at that time, I love fashion. And I love beauty because I’m a typical girly girl. This is I’m talking 10 years old thinking now. And so when I grow up, I’ll go and probably work for those big corporate companies, learn all the policies and procedures, and then go and start my own business. I need this as a kid.

Wayne Lewis: 10 years old, where your parents are encouraging that as well. We are expressing some of these views with the parents of that.

Mini Latif: Yeah. And they said you are going to be a lawyer, that’s what’s gonna happen with you. So you’re going to go to Monash very specific. We actually spoke to my Mum about it last night. So I have an E-book and my ebook is called How to be a dirty entrepreneur. And my Mum was a bit taken aback and “you’re not dirty!”. And I said no entrepreneur used to be a dirty word. So when I was 10, if I said to you, Mum, I want to open my own business, you would have said no, you need to be a Lawyer, Doctor, or engineer. Those were the three really respectable career paths that migrants of that period. My parents are from Cyprus. So they had come to Australia to escape the war and to try and have a better life for themselves. So when they ended up having a family themselves, they did very thankless jobs, but they did them so their three children could have an opportunity and in their mind that opportunities again, Lawyer, Doctor, Engineer,

Wayne Lewis: And then you made that trip over to London and you’re working in the agency space what happened there?

Mini Latif: So I work for British Telecom and Lloyds TSB British Telecom itself is one of the biggest telecommunications companies in the world. So the agencies that we were using one were world-class, but also the budgets were just crazy, and you’re talking about 12, 13 years ago now. So we were launching a website about 14 years ago called BT vision and my budget was a million dollars, then I still don’t have million-dollar budgets. So I got exposed to some great things. But I knew that that was an area that I needed to immerse myself in. There was so much the corporate world is not something that I desired strongly, but I knew I had to go through it to gain the insights. Yeah.

Wayne Lewis: And what were some of the difficult lessons that you faced in that environment?

Mini Latif: I think knowing that policies and procedures as boring and as dull as they are, quality control measures, all of those things that really don’t excite me unnecessary to keep, I guess the word is control. I mean, you could speak to any of my team, they might say to you, Mini one day makes a decision to go left and the next day to go right. I don’t call it being indecisive. I’m just forever evolving in my ideas and my processes, but that can be detrimental for a company of I have just over 30 women working with me so I could literally change the course of the entire brand in one sentence, and that’s not healthy. You know, it’s fun to watch the chaos. We’re not gonna do brows today. No, it’s not like not that bad. But it taught me how to be a lot more controlled in the way that I thought how to deliver the lessons I learned there is how I actually managed to open my very first Brow Bar in Myer. I don’t think I would be able to pull that off in 2018. But in 2008, when I contacted Myer, I had no contacts by the way. So I literally know nobody, I always say on the most unnetworked, unconnected businesswoman, I know, I just hustled my way through. So it just is what it is. But I moved back from London and I was like, Alright, how am I going to do this? Now, I know that I need to be in the department stores. I know that that was where the opportunity was. The biggest player is Myers available today. But anyway, I said all right. I don’t know anyone at Myer, so I went on their website and I found this email address. It’s called info@myer.com.au. So I emailed them. And I said, I have a very important proposition for you, but you need to sign this NDA before I release any information. So that tone of voice that legal than NDA, it was just don’t tell anyone but a report from British Telecom just changed a few names on there. You know, they’ve got a really good legal team.

Wayne Lewis: Did this go in the e-book? Is this in the…

Mini Latif: Not that bit, but my blog always goes a little into the stories so I got a response I’d say within 48 hours, and my store was opened up eight months later.

Wayne Lewis: In-person. Were you always thinking on the grand vision of going national or was it a case of okay right head down, see how this bar goes? Oh, was it always…

Mini Latif: All the way, day one all the way I just an all or nothing person. So it was the vision I had it like 10. So it wasn’t a brow bar back then by the way, so when I was seven, my parents took us to our first international trip overseas. We did the UK, we did Cyprus, and we also did Turkey. We had family living in Istanbul. So I was seven years old walked into one of the palaces in Istanbul and I just looked up at this opulent, insanely overdone place and just said to myself, when I grow up, I am going to work in a place that looks like this. Not live, work. So this work ethic is in being embedded in me from birth because I literally was raised in a milk bar for the first seven years of my life. We lived upstairs and the milk bar was on the bottom. So for me, everything was work, work, work, work, work. Back at seven, I just wanted to work in a palace essentially, you know who doesn’t right? So as I got into the corporate world, I knew that I was definitely into beauty. That was something I was just passionate I just personally loved all things beauty, and I realized that there was no hamams in Australia which is a Turkish bars, right there is an opportunity in the Australian market, I am going to design the country’s finest Day Spa with a Hammam look and feel to it an ottoman bath look and feel to it. So I was a marketing manager for ISelect so the I select logo that you guys see and the terracotta orange, you know, I pick that I was in a taxi in Sydney and saw an orange building and said, that’s the ISelect logo color. So that’s how those things happen, guys. And then Damien Wella, who was the he’s the founder, but the CEO at the time, I put my resignation and said, Alright, I’m ready now to move to London, and go really write my business plan for this Ottoman Day Spa that I thought was what it was going to be. So when I went to London, I wasn’t there just to get some corporate experience. I was also there to spend a bit of time in Turkey, my Turkish is terrible but I wing it all the time and spend some time there and really kind of get an understanding of what this bar was going to eventuate into. And I did that. So that’s with aesthetics. So of course, all of you are going to follow me on Instagram at the end of this to really get an understanding of what the look and feel of my brand is and all that kind of stuff. But the aesthetic side was locked in at that point, the service what it really is, that came about on my lunch breaks when I was working at British Telecom and jumping on the tube and running to John Lewis at my lunch break to get my nails done, and then go and crap. Whilst I’m here, I’ll just run to the other side of the department store and get my eyebrows threaded. So these things already existed. I am the very first brow bar to open up in Australia in threading 10 years ago, but I did not invent threading. It’s been around for thousands of years and I didn’t invent it as a concept in a department store. Most of the ideas that most of us have something that’s already kind of been thought about but we re-invent them and we make them contemporary for the audience that we are today. So as I would see in this tight lunch break period of trying to get And I’m running across and getting my brows done and I realized why if we had them combined because every three weeks, I’m coming to get my nails and my eyebrows done and I just would have saved a little bit more time as they were together. And that’s basically how Ottoman3 came to life. That’s the three every three weeks of coming in and having the service done. We did nails for five years, it really wasn’t profitable, fantastic for marketing, fantastic for PR, could get any story in the Herald Sun about stuff like that. And no one really cared about brows back then. But at five years, I had to make a call where is the direction of this business now? So I decided, yeah, we’re gonna grow the brow side because I’m going to start manufacturing brow products

Wayne Lewis: And as a woman in business then have you had any challenges as being a female in business or is it play to your advantage?

Mini Latif: I just gonna disappoint everyone and say, no.

Wayne Lewis: That’s good, though.

Mini Latif: I just haven’t not even in my corporate world. I just have not experienced it. We talk about all the time in the office as well. We do have a full female team. It just personally I’ve not experienced it. We do have challenges of having a full female team though, in our office now for different reasons. Would you like me to expand on that?

Wayne Lewis: I’d like you to expand on that? Yeah.

Mini Latif: All right, this is very cultural. Okay. As for threading our brow artists typically come from India for the most part purely because that’s where most of the people have their skill set from some from the Middle East, but predominantly from India. So I have about 25 to 28 brow artists at the moment. Many of them really like being in Australia for less than five years, majority of them, okay. They come from a culture where the man runs the household. So men, ahead of a woman as far as Korea, so if the child is sick, guess what the husband does. He’s an Uber driver. All right. So he has more flexibility to go pick up the kid from school, if he’s called in sick, she doesn’t have that flexibility. She’s got to catch two trains and a tram to get to the store. But this cultural aspect for us is something that we’re constantly battling. It’s a really difficult one because often she actually is the breadwinner, or should I say making more money in the household? We know this because we talk to them very intimately about it and trying to empower them to try and give them a voice in their own home to say, look, if the teacher calls and the kids sick, he has to make a call who goes to pick up that kid? And that kind of, to me goes back 20, 30 years where you would never expect the husband to leave his corporate job to pick up the kids sick from school. Of course, the mum would do it. That’s a bit backward.

Wayne Lewis: Yeah. And it’s good that you’ve got that open relationship with the staff.

Mini Latif: Yeah, many husbands dislike me. Yeah. That’s alright. The beginning because of this culture. This is going back to 10 years, I’d say for the first six months, husbands would call me to tell me stuff about their wives, whether it’s like she’s calling in sick or something to do with her pay or some administration question, I’d be like, I’m sorry, I can’t speak to you. I don’t employ you. You can put the phone on to the person that I’ve employed. I can have the conversation with her as politely and respectfully as I could. That doesn’t happen anymore. But yeah, those are the challenges, I guess from a female perspective.

Wayne Lewis: Okay, if you could go back and you could tell yourself one or two things now what would that be?

Mini Latif: Do more, actually, because I kind of I’m not slowing down now. If anything, we’re like quadrupling everything we’re doing, but I didn’t have a kid at the start. I’ve got to keep out so that slows you down. I wasn’t married at the start. You know, being single. There’s nothing more powerful than being a single woman without a kid. You are the most powerful person in the room because that is someone that has a lot of energy. That is not having to be split by partners, children. That stuff all comes if you choose to if you want it, and it’s so interesting now that I look back and go, why didn’t I do more of that before I had to worry about family and stuff like that?

Wayne Lewis: Yeah, cool. Great way to learn. So guys, can we have a round of applause, Mini Latif of Ottoman3.

Serpil Senelmis: I so love how Mini wanted to work in a palace when she was a little girl and she made that dream come true. Thanks, Mini. We’ll hear from Kara Breadmore right after these messages.

Ad Guy: Masters Series is presented by WeTeachMe. Women run the world of WeTeachMe with creative and practical classes in locations across Australia. Learn more what makes your heart sing at weteachme.com. This podcast is produced by Written and Recorded. It’s time for females to start speaking up and disrupt the male-dominated podcasting world. Find out how to make your voice heard, and writtenandrecorded.com. And now back to the podcast.

Serpil Senelmis: Thanks Ad Guy, Kara Breadmore was planning on a life in fashion until a transformative adventure revealed to her the wonders of jewelry. In 2005 she founded Ka’llure Jewellery. And in this fireside chat with WeTeachMe’s Wayne Lewis, Kara says if you don’t look after number one, you won’t be able to run a business. You need to invest in yourself to give back to your business.

Kara Breadmore: We were really lucky growing up we lived in a house where we were really encouraged to be thought leaders and to think outside the box. And, I think in particular, even though it shouldn’t have been this way, in the sense of gender equality, we were exceptionally lucky that we had a father who really encouraged my sister and I, as women to be anything that we wanted to be. And it didn’t matter if you were a man or a woman. And it meant that I actually became one of the first Victorian scouts, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. And that was an amazing experience. And I didn’t even really realize it at the time that it was so forward-thinking of my father to let me as a young girl be a boy scout or the first girl scouts. And that experience definitely shaped my resilience and so many skills that I’ve taken into my business life. I’m exceptionally grateful to both of my parents for the upbringing that they gave us, but particularly reflecting on the opportunities that having a dad who was open-minded as a woman in business, which is a very hot topic now the gender equality space, so I went to high school and I was always very into fashion design. And from there I actually got into RMIT and did fashion design degree. But after about two years I, I don’t know I was not 100% happy and unfortunately, my parents were going through a very messy divorce. And I felt like I just needed to take a year maybe like a gap year but the wrong year. I was made to be going into my final year to graduate and I just needed a break needed to go and discover who I was and really find more out about myself as a young woman. So my, my friends and I bought a car for $800 and drove around Australia for a year and it was the most remarkable year of my life. I always loved making little beaded necklaces. I had no idea how to do it. I just taught myself and I took my box of beads and my wire and my plies…

Wayne Lewis: Reselling them on the road?

Kara Breadmore: I was selling them on the road. Yeah. I left Melbourne with $800 in my pocket for the year. I had no idea how beyond that $800 dollars I was going to survive. Yeah, it was a mind-blowing experience. But, by the way, we broke down 70k’s out of Melbourne for the year which was quite funny. These two blonde bombshells rocking to the petrol station and remember saying to this guy in the mechanic shop, and we’ve broken down and I think he just did everything he how if you travel around Australia. And anyway, I tend to my girlfriend because the end of the trip was starting to grew near and the questions around what am I going to do? Am I going to go back to uni? They all started creeping in. I just remember saying to her, I was like, I wonder if you can study jewelry. And it just seemed like a really strange question that I’d never actually explored before. Anyway, to my parents dismay, they were quite upset and had always been very supportive in everything that I’ve done, but they were like, what are you doing? You’ve got one year of your course left and and RMIT fashion and design course it’s exceptionally hard to get into very sought-after course, so they were like you’re mad, and I didn’t feel like I had a full support, which was really hard. And even my brother and sister also thought it was crazy. So I felt quite alone in the decision to go into jewelry. But that now has been an instrumental learning for me and my business that I’ve looked back and always back to myself, and I think now I give my, my family the big like, you know, I backed to myself and I made it because I listened to myself. And even though you didn’t think I was making a good decision, I’m really, really so pleased that I did, but it meant moving to Perth, on my own without my family and any friends, because I’d missed the intake into the jewelry course at RMIT, which I really wanted to get into. And at the time, I remember sitting in my first week of soaring metal and I literally was sitting at my desk crying because I was like what have I done. This is the worst thing in the world trying to hack into these metal with these tiny little so frame that week by week, everything went by and I just fell in love with the process of making jewelry. And next thing I know, I’m back in Melbourne and I’m applying for the RMIT course. Actually, when I got off the plane, I thought I better get a job. And I looked in the newspaper. Yes, the newspaper who gets a job in the newspaper and it was a job advertised that said CBD jeweler requires an assistant. I’ll never forget, it sounds like a great big long description of stuff at all. Just fax my resume in. And I did and apparently, 500 people applied for this job. And I ended up managing this business for 14 years while I would run my own business. And it was a hugely instrumental in my experience and my knowledge and working underneath Ronnie Bower who’s exceptionally highly regarded in the jewelry industry. He definitely helped map and shape who I am today and I’m exceptionally grateful for that. It’s probably only been in the last three years that I’ve really dug into my business to understand. Why do you literally wake up in the middle of the night and draw jewelry for people? Sometimes I literally do wake up until the night my husband like you drawing again. And I’m like, Yes, I just have to draw because I am so worried that I would forget it in the morning. It’s because I love it so much, but I never really questioned why I love it so much. So I’ve done a lot of exploring in the last three years because in a way jewelry is quite materialistic. And I don’t think of myself as a materialistic person. So I wanted to understand what my relationship was with my business and why I was so driven by this thing that is technically a luxury and materialistic. The words like brand identity and tone of voice and all these things didn’t like even four years ago, of course, I knew they existed but they didn’t really mean anything to me. I had essentially just been loving doing what I was doing and just doing it. So it was really pleasurable experience for me to really unpack why I’m doing what I’m doing. And what I discovered was the beautiful sparkly things that women love is definitely the reason I do what I do. But it’s not what drives me. It’s not what gets me out of bed every morning. It’s the connection, I get to follow my customer and my client and the long term relationship. I get to go through so many experiences in my clients because it’s not a transaction. For me, it’s a lifetime relationship, it might start with an engagement ring, then go on to a wedding ring, and then it might go on to a push present or eternity ring. And then it’s Oh, it’s my wife’s birthday. And then all she’s telling. It’s not just these one moment and it’s one transaction it’s so much deeper, and whether people will consciously recognize it or not, to release. It’s very empowering for people to process what they’re going through, through a piece of jewelry. So it could be a divorce or it could be their grandma’s passed away, and they want to redesign their piece into something else. There’s so many reasons that people embark on the journey to design a piece of jewelry. And for me, that’s where the goodness lies. And the part that really empowers me to want to empower them to heal or to grow or to love or to learn or to forgive or to say thank you or to say, sorry, there’s so many reasons that jewelry comes into play. So it’s been a really magical three or four years for me, really discovering why I’m doing what I’m actually doing. So yeah, and it’s…

Wayne Lewis: You’re making my job very easy here actually.

Kara Breadmore: I’m sorry, did I just not stop talking?

Wayne Lewis: You can carry on. Actually this is fascinating stuff. You’re doing a great job. This is absolutely great to listen to. So you talk about doing a little bit of soul searching and digging into the why of why you’re in business and everything else. So now that you’ve put that in place, what is in front of you now, what are your main goals?

Kara Breadmore: A lot of people assume that because I’m a jeweler that I have a jewelry store. Never say never. But I don’t see me ever transitioning into opening a shop because what I try to encapsulate in every step of my business is an experience that people can’t help but want to talk about. And I think retail and the shop fronts now really struggle with being able to execute that for people. So my space that I’ve recently launched and opened to the interactive workshops studio, it’s an environment where people can come and visit me but also have experiences while they’re there, quite unique ones. And I’m just in the process of designing a whole series of round the table, dining and jewelry, interactive experiences, that people actually come to the studio and it’s more than just I’ve come to talk to you about a piece of jewelry. I’m actually throwing them into saying here’s a pool of gems. You’ve got the freedom to play with them and turn it into anything that you like, but into an interactive evening. And I’ve got a lot of ideas around, wanting to create a blog that’s focusing on my clients who are women. I’m very passionate about empowerment of women. And I want to call it the maverick women’s blog. And it’s because so many of my clients that come to me are really impressive, powerful, amazing women who’ve got an incredible story to tell. And I want to tell that for them, especially because they’ve come via the channel of them being a client to me. So that’s another thing. And I’m also about to roll out a ready to wear collection, which is very exciting, but also very nerve-wracking. Because up until this point, everything that I’ve ever done has been around creating something for someone. And even though I’m still designing it for them, it’s about them. Whereas this is me putting my aesthetic and my design out there to the world with no reason for it. And so there’s a little part of me that’s like, oh, but if they don’t like it, but I just can’t know that I haven’t tried in my life to achieve this thing that I really want to do, which is to have a online store where people can purchase and take a precious piece of it and own it, but they don’t have to necessarily go through the whole process of the custom design experience. So yeah, that’s a few things that are in the pipeline.

Wayne Lewis: Exactly. So was that always a grand vision?

Kara Breadmore: No, I think this is what my vision of businesses, I don’t have a vision of becoming a multimillionaire, of course, you need money. And because money is important, but it’s not what drives me. It’s what drives my business. For me, it’s about looking back and saying my business to do something that was bigger than the sparkly materialistic things. It’s about the journey. It’s about the opportunity that everyday meeting people, it’s so much more than that. And I just want to look back and know that I’ve injected that into my business, essentially.

Wayne Lewis: How do you look after yourself? Are there any moments where things get on top, what do you do to invest in yourself emotionally?

Kara Breadmore: I had such an awakening to this in the last few years. Unfortunately, my mother went through a very difficult time and it really made me look into myself in terms of my mental health and my well being and I honestly believe everything starts at the top with you in business. If you are not looking after you, number one, then you will never be able to operate business the best that you possibly can if you’re not. So I make a really conscious effort now to always make time for myself every day. I don’t nail it every day. There are some times when my husband will definitely attest to that. But I am so much better than what I used to be and realizing that going for a walk and taking 15 minutes to myself and all the whole time I used to be like oh my god, I don’t got time for this. I don’t have time, I got to go to work. I’m like to stop. Just take the time because you’re actually investing back into your business by looking after yourself. I started doing yoga, which I don’t really do regularly anymore. But I definitely, when I turned to yoga, it had such a, an awakening experience for me to really connect with myself and to what matters and your well-being is so important in business. And yeah, I go to the gym and do all those things that are really important. My husband, I recently moved near the beach. And it was a really concentrated decision because even though we could have got a bigger house out further, I wanted to be by the ocean so we could get up in the morning and have that lifestyle and just make sure we take time to go for a walk and look after yourselves because bigger picture we all can wake up one day when we’ve just worked way too hard and way too fast. And what was it all for? You work hard, and then you become sick? Yeah. So I’m actually about to go on a wellness retreat, which I’m really excited about, to Fiji. It is for entrepreneurs. So it is about work skills.

Wayne Lewis: Guys, can we have a round of applause, Kara Breadmore of Ka’llure Jewellery.

Serpil Senelmis: So Kara’s vision isn’t to be a multimillionaire. I really love that she wants to look back and know that her business stood for more than just the shiny things. Thanks, Kara. And thank you Mini as well. Next time on Masters Series, how to jumpstart your business. If you’ve been sitting on your idea for a startup, you won’t want to miss this. We’ll hear from two successful founders about the steps they took to get their business up and running. 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.

Marketing your brand online is not as simple as setting up a profile in cyberspace – it requires strategic social impact activities that highlight your competitive advantages.

Simon Mathonnet says forget about your logo, strapline, and team colours. While those things are important, your brand is how your customers perceive your business.

As head of digital strategy with digital marketers Splashbox, Simon works with hundreds of businesses to build powerhouse brands.

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

Interviewing Public: How do I think is the best way to get my brand out there? It depends on who my client is. So at the moment, a lot of social media, yeah, that’s where they hang out.

Interviewing Public: I think it would be. Initially, it’ll be word of mouth. And then after that, it would just be, I would say social media.

Serpil Senelmis: For WeTeachMe this is the Masters Series where industry professionals share their secrets to success. I’m Serpil Senelmis from Written and Recorded. What’s in a name, that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet? Shakespeare understood the challenges of building a powerhouse brand years before the internet became the crowded place that it is today. Your brand separates you from all the other roses out there. The challenge is getting consumers to recognize and remember that. Today’s master has an insatiable appetite for SEO and some useful advice to help your brand be heard above the noise.

Simon Mathonnet: A brand is not a product. It’s not about your logo and your story and your slogan. A brand is how people perceive what you do well, what you do not well perceive your values your story, but it’s consumer-generated.

Serpil Senelmis: Simon Mathonnet is head of digital strategy at Splashbox where he helps brands climb the search results ladder. He says it’s great to be innovative. But if your business idea is so new, people won’t be searching for it. So you’ll have to communicate outside of search. His advice, let your brand hang out where your customers hang out.

Simon Mathonnet: Hi, everyone. Before we get started just a little bit about me. I have a master’s degree in digital marketing from Paris and San Francisco. I lived in the US for a bit especially in the startup space. And I worked within startups to help them develop their brand through online marketing. I’ve been working at Splashbox since about 2015. And I’m heading the digital marketing strategy across 100 clients. I’ve been teaching at General Assembly for over two years in SEO, SEM, and data analytics. And I have been speaking a few industry events here. I have absolutely no creative or design credential and backgrounds. And you’re all wondering, why is this guy going to talk to us about branding, right? Well, it’s all because brands not really a logo. A brand is not a product. It’s not about the way it looks. It’s not about your logo and your story and your slogan. It plays a part in what it is but it doesn’t define the brand. The brand is defined by your consumers, by your target. A brand is how people perceive what you do, perceive your business perceive what you you do well, what do you do not well perceive your values your story, but it’s consumer-generated. Now, a few stats that I think are really interesting and actually really, really relevant to branding your business, especially online. Well, 81% of consumers they search online before making a purchase. So building your brand online is extremely important if you want to reach the majority of your audience. Not only that, but they probably is an average of free websites. And most of them look for online reviews. And now you start to see how people perceive your brand, how people perceive your business, how people perceive your online presence, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today. And there’s really two aspects of it. Yes, there’s the creative aspect of it. There’s the way your logo looks, your color scheme, your slogan, your story, but is also a very, very strategic aspect to branding and building a brand online. If you want people to perceive what you want to convey in terms of messaging, brand, values, etc. The issue is that usually strategy and creativity are separated within a business. So it’s very hard to have a consistent and integrated approach across strategy and creativity. So the way I look at it is very different. The way I look at branding, usually when we are approached by prospects when a client comes on board and say, I want to develop my brand online, the way we look at it is through three different layers. And the first one is your creative assets is your name, your logo and your colors. Those all play a part into how people perceive your brand because that’s what they see. However, I am not getting to tell you that your logo should be yellow, red, blue or green, that you should keep your slogan to free phrases, two phrases have tagline, straplines, etc. because it’s so business and user-dependent. All you have to do is just think about the different layers. It’s all about the mindsets. It’s about the logic. It’s about the rationale that’s behind it. It’s not about following specific guidelines. It’s more about the methodology. So the three layers of online branding that you look at the first one is named logo and colors, creative assets, basic creative assets. The second one is the vision, the story, the values, the characteristics of your product, or the services that you’re selling, that you’re promoting, that you’re pushing. It’s basically the meat of your business. And the third layer is the strategic layer. So it’s the channels to creative the targeting. So layer number one is extremely creative. Layer number two, it’s creative, and strategic, how do I differentiate my product and my service? But also, what’s my story, what’s my vision? And the third layer is extremely strategic. It’s all about the approach. So it’s all about leveraging your brand assets, number one, through the right channels. Number three, by conveying the right value and the right message to the right people. So it’s really that integrated approach from creative assets to targeting messaging and channels.

Simon Mathonnet: Now let’s talk about a branding campaign, right? So let’s say that you want to build your brand online, right? So the first thing you’ve got to do is pick your channels. Where are you going to push your brands based on your audience behavior? Now, some audience they’re really social media savvy, for instance. Some people would use Google some people would use Bing, what do they do online? Where do they hang out? Where do they chat? Where do they engage? Where do they engage with brands? All the questions that you need to ask yourself, then once you figure that out, is your audience on Instagram on Pinterest? What kind of message I’m going to deliver to this audience? And basically, you’re gonna base this messaging around the stage of your user journey. Is it the first time they get into contact with your brand? Is that the first time they see it? Or is it the second time or third time? Are they ready to buy? Or are they really early stage where they haven’t even considered your solution? You need to consider that in your messaging. The channels’ capabilities, of course, there are some channels who are really visual heavy like social media, you’re going to have to craft your messaging around imagery, creatives, design banners and stuff like that. If you find that your audience, for instance, is searching a lot of on Google’s in very specific terms. And you want to advertise on Google and do an AdWords campaign, all you’re going to have is text. So consider that in the way that you craft your messaging. And of course, your tone of voice and values. And the third element is, this is all great. But if you don’t measure the efficiency of what you do, it may all be for nothing. And this is extremely important. This is something that is usually not considered when thinking about building your brand, building your exposure, building your business online is how do you really measure what you’re doing. So you can find opportunities to improve. And you can also find areas that are not performing as well. So you can cut spend or just stop wasting your time on areas that won’t work. So measures in place to measure the efforts and the efficiency of the efforts that you’re doing is really, really important. Alright, let’s start with the first element of a branding campaign, which is how do you pick your channel? Right? Well, the first thing you can look at if you have an existing website, and if you have existing an existing audience that comes to your website, you can use really cool free tools like Google Analytics, to basically determine what are the channels that currently work really well for you and where you can build on that, right. So the number of sales is going to be an indication of how qualified my audiences and I’m going to look at what channels people that bought when free so here social media with 6500 people is a really, really important channel. It’s also bringing a significant amount of revenue. Alright, social is a platform where my audience is engaged and is willing to go to my website is engaging with my brand. How do I get more of that social this gives you an indication of the channel that you need to focus on. Organic search is organic search on Google, right? People search a lot online. Maybe I should do some kind of like optimize my website. I should teach myself a few SEO principles. paid search is AdWords display or banners here I have all the data. If you have existing users, you have already some data that you can leverage in order to pick your channels. I don’t think that you can look at is you’ve got plenty of really, really cool marketing studies online on to what kind of demographics use what kind of different channels online, for instance, no one in this room probably uses Bing, right? I’m guessing but it is actually a very, very good channel. If you are targeting people that are older, they say older than 35. I would say older than 60, older than 65. You can target that demographic for being because it usually an audience that’s not really tech-savvy, they buy a computer, they open Internet Explorer, and Bing is here and they type in Bing, right? So think about that kind of channel. What do they do? What do they use? Where has Google is more tech-savvy, younger demographic, etc. But one other thing to consider when thinking about search engines and how you can leverage search engines is.

Simon Mathonnet: If you, as a startup have a really, really innovative idea that you really, really want to push into, but that no one really knows about, it’s really unlikely that someone’s directly looking for in online. So I’ve picked a few, a few products off of product hunt, for instance, like a messenger bots, that converts files, right, this seems like a really, really good idea, but no one searches for that in the internet. So you can’t use search engine to really push your product is just no one’s searching for it. So you get a turn to our channels. So it’s all about looking at what data is available in your field, what’s working, what could potentially work and what’s not. That way you have a right plan from the start and you don’t waste your efforts, just doing something that’s not going to get a result straight away. Social is extremely important, but just the social platform that your audience uses is extremely important. So for instance, millennials, Instagram and Snapchat are really, really popular. So if you’re targeting a millennial audience, then you need to look at that over even just over Facebook now. Whereas Facebook, if you’re targeting Gen X and baby boomers is a great social media platform. And just by starting to think about where you audience actually hangs out, you can start having a plan to build your brand online. For instance, someone could initially find you through a search and then hang out on social come across one of your good posts, and then decide to convert, maybe that’s the behavior that works in your field in your market with your target audience. But it’s always different. That’s why you need to collect a lot of data like this. I strongly encourage you, if you have a website and online presence, please set up Google Analytics. It’s a fantastic tool, you get plenty of data like this that you can use to build your brand. Let’s talk about messaging and branding. messaging through online marketing is extremely important. I see a lot of businesses engaging in online activity online advertising, and just pushing their product, pushing their price, pushing their discounts, pushing their offers, but it’s not really about that you want brand recognition. Remember, brand is about how consumers perceive your brand. And you need to influence that perception. And you can influence that perception through more channels that you may think at the beginning. For instance, the way your website appears on Google and Bing is an amazing way to actually shape that brand perception. So if you google the iconic, this is what you see on Google, right? You see clothes online shows online the iconic. What they do here is yes, they have keywords and they optimized so that they rank better for shoes online and clothes online, but it’s also associating the products and the things that they sell to their brand. Someone is going to see consciously or subconsciously the iconics next to shoes, the iconics next to clothes right, it’s starting to build my perception of the brand if I didn’t know what the iconic does, I would think the iconic they’ll say shoes and clothes online. This is my brand perception of the iconic so you can already start shaping it with that kind of like page titles on your website, which you can edit through WordPress etc is very important for instance. You’ll also get additional space, Google gives you the ability to add a description to your page so that it can display this description on search engine. You can write in that description, your values, your story, your product vision, your USP’s. This also affects how people perceive your brand, because they will read that. And you’ve got a, if you google the iconic, what you see is you see that they have a lot of cell pages. So what I’m thinking my brand perception is the iconic is often on sale. So they do discount prices. It affects the way that I perceived the brand if I base it off this for instance, so you can use that as a tool. Now talking about social media, and talking about social media, different point of view user journey. So let’s say that I have noticed that my target audience hangs out on Facebook a lot.

Simon Mathonnet: So what I’m going to do is I am going to pay some Facebook ads to push my brand and push my products. Let’s say that I’m targeting an audience who’s never heard about me. I’m not going to say book today and get 10% off it makes no sense. They don’t even know what I do. What I’m going to do is I’m going to say well, my brand they offer eco-friendly cleaning, with 100% happiness guarantee, etc. I know straight away what the brand is, what they do and what their values are. Those guys are eco friendly. They are hustling company I know straightaway what they do, I know straightaway what they stand for. Not only that, but the call to action is way softer. Learn more is way softer and then get offer, get offer it’s really “salesy”. If I haven’t heard about those guys before, probably not going to click it. Get an offer is really good when the audience is already familiar with you. So what you can do is you can do fancy retargeting or remarketing from people who’ve already been to the websites, and you can target them with an ad like this and they’ll remember you because they’ve been on your website, you don’t need to repeat what you do, unless you think that they haven’t converted to your website in the first place, because they haven’t really understood what you stand for. So always think about the user journey, and what should you tell them at each point in time, which is really, really, really different. The third element is measuring and optimizing. So this is all great, right? But how do you do all this? First of all, how do you know what to do? And second of all, how do you know if it works or not? It’s very, very important, so many different businesses and brands, who just dump money into Facebook ads into Instagram ads into Instagram content, Facebook content, they have no way of actually measuring if it works or not, their only indicator is by business doing okay. Well, I guess I’ll just keep spending that happens a lot. The problem with that kind of approach is that you can’t really build on what you’re doing and the money you’re investing and the time that you spend, you’re not really getting maximum value from it. So if you actually have measures around it, first of all, you can limit your risk of investing time or resources into an area that has high chances of failing. Furthermore, anything that you do in work, you have really, really strong ideas about what to do next, in order to get even better value for your brand. So the first thing you got to do is create an hypothesis about your branding, right? And it could be all my assets compelling enough, is my targeting tree too narrow, to wide? Should I focus on top of funnel bottom of funnel activity? Could be as simple as should I advertise on Facebook or not? Should I invest any kind of money in SEO or not? Should I do some AdWords or not? What should I use? Should I write content or not? And then design a test and set up metrics to measure your processes. So for instance, if I’m wondering If I should write blog content or not for my website, right, I’m going to design a test. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to write five articles and I’m going to post them, right? I’m going to post them. And I’m going to measure what kind of traction they get, what kind of visits now have my metrics, number of visits to those blogs? And I’m going to see if just writing is enough, and then I’m going to iterate on that. All right, it didn’t work. What do I do next? Maybe my hypothesis is maybe I didn’t advertise my blogs enough in my content. And all those hypotheses come from your initial research, your persona, your research about what the market is doing your research about your demographics, right? The better you research Initially, the more likely you are to come up with a hypothesis that’s going to be successful. And iterate and optimize. So you’ve got plenty of free and paid analytic software that you can plug onto your website in order to measure any kind of metric that you want any kind of data point that you want to get, you can get through Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, Google AdWords Segment, Hotjar. I love Hotjar. Just a disclaimer, I’m not paid by Hotjar in any way, shape, or form, but I just love the software so much it is unbelievable. What hotjar allows you to do is up on your website, you have heat maps, so if you use crazy eggs before like it tells you why people clicked, which is great, but it’s not the best feature. The best feature is it records a sample of sessions of users, right? So if you play those sessions, you will see their little mouse going around and clicking on things and moving around, etc. If you have a website, I am telling you you’re probably on your website. Every day, almost, you know it’s back to front. You know how to navigate it. You know where to click if you want to get a specific piece of information, but most people do not. They have no idea having seeing it through the eyes of someone who just lands on the website, you learn just so much. And then you also get really pissed because you think, why would they click on this? Why would they click on that? Come on, man, just click on the contact button, give me a call. It’s extremely interesting. It gives you a lot of insights into what people care about where they get confused. And also you can use that with the way that you push your branding because you can see them lingering on certain words, on certain paragraphs, you can see what they read why they care about, do they go straightaway to the pricing page? Or do they read about you first, like those kinds of things is super, super, super important? I think it’s free or really cheap so give it a try. It is fantastic. Also, this is very theoretical. But it’s a great way to approach measuring and optimizing. So it’s called the lean analytics circle and it’s basic those three steps, but a bit more developed. And if you’re interested in that kind of stuff in data analytics in how to really optimize your website, I strongly encourage I think it’s a book called lean analytics, which is brilliant. Also the whole methodology around how to actually find meaningful test meaningful KPIs, to prove the hypothesis, and especially when it comes to branding is super cool. And that’s one of the forgotten aspects of branding campaigns. Because usually, again, creative and strategic, or completely separate in segment in business, and I am an extremely strategic person in case you didn’t see. So what I do is I each step up the process, I get input from creative people, and I give them insight into strategic direction as well. And having that collaboration between creativity and strategy is invaluable to build the brand. You can use all that to get buy-in from your stakeholders. You can get buy-in from the people that are working with you. You can get buy-in from your investors, you can get buy-in from your board. If you start involving them in your branding activities, ask them questions and say, hey, I’m really looking for some feedback in order to grow the brand. What are your clients’ challenges like if your sales reps are going around asking people a question, just ask them about what’s the most frequently asked question, and then maybe that gives you an idea for a content piece. Maybe that gives you an idea of what your brand is not conveying online and what people are unsure of gives you plenty of insights, supply them with branding assets, like give them I don’t know, USB keys, little fancy stuff like that stuff is actually really, really good to get that brand awareness. And you want to make people proud of what they’re involved in and I felt like branding assets really good way to do so and given And branding projects, of course, like helping you with that whole thing. depending if they’re more of a strategic person or a creative person, you can get them involved at any step of your branding campaign. And they should be like people think about the sales funnel, right? From awareness to loyalty and advocacy. But your first advocates should be the people that are working with you on your brand. That’s why it’s so important.

Serpil Senelmis: So your brand is not your logo, it’s how customers perceive your business. Thanks, Simon. That makes a lot of sense. And I can see how that fades into the way brands talk through content and communications. And there were some great tips for building a powerhouse brand. I’ll let you know what’s coming up next time right after this.

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Serpil Senelmis: Next time we’ll get all the latest developments in AI from machine learning to conversational digital interfaces, somebody better bring in a robot that’s all I’m saying. 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.