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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wayne Lewis: It’s money, right?

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

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

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

Wayne Lewis: That was gonna be my next question.

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

Wayne Lewis: I can sense that.

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

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

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

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

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

About Masters Series by WeTeachMe

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

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Question of the day

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

Dreaming big for your business is a good exercise to prepare for that moment your startup takes off. What will be the biggest challenges?

Andrew Hardwick founded strategic creative agency Hard Edge in his home 12 years ago. Today the award-winning business works with Mercedes Benz, Telstra and the National Road Safety Partnership. Andrew explains how he overcame the challenges in those early days.

Joe Woodham is the founder of Torii Recruitment, specialising in finding the right team members for the IT sector. Joe describes the benefits of working alongside his competitors and how he consults them for advice.

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

Serpil Senelmis: Just imagine that your startup went ballistic, what do you think the greatest challenge would be?

Interviewing Public: Keeping up. If we just like putting out fires in every single area of the business, being able to cope with it, probably.

Interviewing Public: Trying to not get ahead of myself. I’ve basically got the next 20 years planned out in my head and the vision that I want to get to. So if it went nuts, it would be still trying to always do the next important step, which I’m still trying to learn and execute today.

Interviewing Public: The greatest challenge I believe, would be having to find the right team, hunting over-responsible interesting actuators, trusting other people to put as much commitment and care into something that is yours essentially.

Serpil Senelmis: For WeTeachMe, this is the Masters Series where industry professionals share their secrets to be Success. I’m Serpil Senelmis from Written and Recorded and in this episode of Masters Series our startup is about to take off. We’ve put in the hard work to build our business. The customers are happy, the investors are excited, and we’re scaling up. It’s time to find some employees, fast. Joe Woodham is the founder at Torii’s, specializing in IT recruitment. Joe has helped build the teams of some of Australia’s best-known startup.

Joe Woodham: So when I started out as weird as it sounds, I went straight to one of my competitors. And I got their advice and fell open with him right now more than happy to sort of go this is how we started. This is people you should speak to. And I’ve always gone and spoke with my competitors.

Serpil Senelmis: We’ll hear from Joe shortly but first a founder who’s strapped themselves to the rocket as this startup took off. Andrew Hardwick founded this strategic creative agency Hard Edge in his home. And 12 years later, the award-winning agency counts Mercedes Benz, Telstra, and Mercer among their clients. In this fireside chat with WeTeachMe’s Wayne Lewis, Andrew reveals that even though things went well, in the early days of Hard Edge, he struggled with the isolation of working alone at home. So he got an office and before long, his startup was taking off.

Andrew Hardwick: I’m a trained graphic designer and that’s where I used to follow my passion do my thing. So I used to in high school, I was doing logos for companies and stuff wherever I could and earning $1. So I was always sort of wanting to do my own thing. And looking back now I can say that I guess people change as a you know, move through life, but I also would say it wasn’t that clear and formulators you’d probably like it to be. So I just knew I wanted to try and get out and do my own thing. And the fact that it changed into something different quite quickly probably shows that I was finding my faith. Yeah, about what that will be.

Wayne Lewis: So was there a strategic plan around that in the early stages? Or was it kind of just get up and go out and do it and see what happens?

Andrew Hardwick: I don’t think I knew what strategy was when I started to be honest, well I had a plan as far as I did what I like to think is a smart way so I had a certain amount of money I was earning each year and I went out and that wasn’t affected at all so at least I was earning the same income and I’ll starting something from scratch but as far as a plan goes that you know it’s just get out and then try and grow the business and I, you know, I had some leads and people to talk to all that sort of stuff but it was certainly a risk but I risk from point of view is the worst that can happen is I have to go and find a job again. So…

Wayne Lewis: Yeah, so after launching then was it everything you expected it to be kind of did you have a picture built up in your mind before then and?

Andrew Hardwick: Well, I started working from home in a small one-bedroom apartment. So I had a definite picture on you every wall but it was funny, like two months in. I was sitting there one day at my desk, and doors open. It was a beautiful sunny day outside here I was living my dream. You know, I was seeing it goes very happy about I had a car that always wanted to buy in the garage. And this is a good life and actually felt this sort of wave of depression come over. He was like, What’s wrong with me? And I just realized it was the isolation of doing that, that there was struggle, so I didn’t say that one coming. So it wasn’t initially what I probably imagined. So I then went out and got an office and started to try and make sure I got more contact with people.

Wayne Lewis: So talking about changing behaviors yourself. Did you feel as though that was probably one of the most important things in your entrepreneurial journey? Would you say you’ve been able to evolve and adapt and understand your needs a little bit more?

Andrew Hardwick: Yeah, I think well, you think you know something about business and went out and I didn’t really know anything. You know, I had no experience really and if you’re not exposing yourself to outside influences, and you’re not growing and you’re not learning. And so I think that was my big learning early on that I had to expose myself to be able to, to grow and move the business.

Wayne Lewis: So when you decided to grow the bit or when you were able to grow the business and when you got your head above the water, kind of what were your main focuses, then what was your attention drawn to?

Andrew Hardwick: That’s a hard one to answer. I think I was literally just focused on trying to find the next gig, if that makes sense. So I was trying to make people and trying to find avenues of getting new work and, and probably not focusing on the right things. You know, I was the sole trader at the end of the day, so I didn’t have to sort of put a lot of systems in place and that kind of thing, but I wasn’t strategically thinking about it. If that makes sense?

Wayne Lewis: Yeah. So whereas now you’re probably able to pick and choose some of the people that you work with and be a bit more selective, would you say?

Andrew Hardwick: Doing my best as an agency, and it’s been important for myself, the agency but also the staff with had to sack a few clients along the way. And I make no apologies for that. There’s certain way to treat people or talk to people and as good business and is bad business as well. And so life’s too short to waste your time spending with those that don’t want to move forward or work in a collaborative way.

Wayne Lewis: Yeah, sure. Your business, obviously, it works a lot around telling stories for other brands, what would be your advice to the people out there about telling a story about their brand and getting their message out there?

Andrew Hardwick: It’s a very big question, Wayne. I think at the end of the day, quite simply, there has to be some sort of plan there that’s founded with a truth about the business about yourselves there is actually something that you have proof points against. So, to have a brand value proposition that has meaning and substance behind it is key to move forward and it constantly changes I mean, as a business we are constantly evaluating our brand via proposition as well. So and further to that, you know, having a story you know, like knowing your why and, and all that kind of thing is also very important. Not just from external point of view, but from an internal point of view, if you don’t personally engage and relate to what you’re doing and how you’re doing it, you’re probably not going to do very well. So, yeah.

Wayne Lewis: Sure. So what does the future hold for Hard Edge? What are the kind of things that you work on this moment in time? And yeah, it’s the future.

Andrew Hardwick: We’ve probably tied our proposition in the last three months. So we’re currently moving the type of work that we’ve been doing to something new. And funnily enough, those conversations that we’re having now are so much easier and fluid, because we’re even more sure about who we are, where we’re going and what we want to do. So the current projects we still work with those brands mentioned at the start. And that’s sort of day in and day out kind of work, which we will stay with, but it’s probably more trying to tap into those bigger projects to change behavior and, you know, getting onto those pitch panels and what have you and government scenario that we haven’t had a lot of work in previously and that’s a whole new minefield that I’m probably starting to try and get an understanding of.

Wayne Lewis: Yeah. And then just touching a little bit on the future of work then. So within your organization, are you kind of utilizing the gig economy? Do you have people that are working maybe sometimes on shorter contracts and things like that? Or how do you see the future?

Andrew Hardwick: Yeah, well, growth is a bit of a struggle, a juggling act of having enough work for the people that are there. And you know, it’s a service-based industry, so we charge by the hour. So to make sure that we have sustained growth is a challenge. And so you do have to look at those other options. We’ve always used freelancers, and, you know, we’ve got freelancers we work with on a daily basis, but we can’t justify obviously having them there permanently. So it’s, um, as far as the future goes, we do a program with women University around road safety, and it’s now a mandatory program with a design communication students. We’ve been running that for three years now and we’re taking it to Sydney next year. This is something that we’re very passionate about, but it’s actually become quite a proof point around the type of work that we’re capable of doing and wanting to do. So it’s probably moving. You know, just as I said, that type of work that we’re doing in the future.

Wayne Lewis: And touching a little bit on the passion, though, obviously doing quite a lot of work around the road safety elements. What was it that led you to that initially?

Andrew Hardwick: I guess? Well, I’ve always been interested in cars. And so I ended up working on car magazines and so forth when I was younger. And, and I guess, you know, I had a network from there. And I also had an interest there. And I got involved, probably five years ago at the inception of the National Road Safety Partnership Program, of which Hard Edge is now a partner of but I also sit on committees and so forth from time to time. And it’s just, you know, there’s so many dumb little things that we do that you just become passionate about trying to make, make change in that area, so.

Wayne Lewis: And do any of your current staff members share their passions with you and talk about maybe going their own way and do you, are you open to those types of conversations with your staff members?

Andrew Hardwick: Yeah, of course. I mean, everyone is their own individual and whether they want to be in my business or they want to be somewhere else, that’s where they should be. So always try and support people in their own interests. I’m lucky to have a couple of guys that work very closely with me, the strategy director and creative director are both very passionate about the business and the direction we’re going. So there’s no way I’d be able to take the business in that direction without their support. And some staff probably would rather work on sort of different things that are probably more tangible to themselves and so forth. But you can’t sort of do that. But the work is I think the variety of work creates the interest there for those people.

Wayne Lewis: Yeah. Can we have a round of applause please, for Andrew?

Serpil Senelmis: So sometimes you have to sack a few clients along the way to work with people that align with your values. That’s an interesting perspective from Andrew. We’ll hear from team builder and IT recruitment specialist Joe Woodham right after this.

Ad Guy: Masters Series is presented by WeTeachMe. In addition to offering a wide range of classes, WeTeachMe is a booking system that helps teachers and schools reach their students. If you have a skill to share, you can find your pupils with weteachme.com. This podcast is produced by Written and Recorded. Did you hear the one about the journalists that started a podcast company to capture and release the stories of businesses? Head to writtenandrecorded.com to get your story out there? No joke. And now back to the podcast.

Serpil Senelmis: Thanks Ad Guy. Joe Woodham is the founder of Torii who specialized in IT recruitment like Andrew, he got started in business at home. Joe’s talking to WeechMe’s Wayne Lewis in this fireside chat. He says initially The fear of other people’s judgment. And the fear of returning to a nine to five job was his most powerful drivers.

Joe Woodham: I come from a sales background, I got offered a job in recruitment. I had absolutely no idea what recruitment was at design, and less about IT, so I’ve sort of jumped in. The next couple of years, I had my journey from sort of a small recruitment company to a global, learn quite a lot along the way. And towards the end, I started to really specialize in what I did. And in doing so I started to build a personal brand, and really started to build some really good relationships with the businesses that I was working with at the time. And in doing so, I started to notice that there was quite a large gap in the market in terms of the way the recruitment company that I was working for at the time was asking me to deliver my services, and then the way that my clients wanted me to deliver what I was doing. So, in 2012, or 2011, I kind of decided well, I’ve always wanted to run my own business. Probably now or never, saved up a bit of money so I could sort of blow myself for a couple of months and go, well, let’s give it a crack and see what we can do. So, in 2012, I started working from home, which back then, I guess it wasn’t as common, but it was quite enjoyable. And after a couple of weeks, I made my first deal with my first client, which was a small tech company in a town called Red Bubble. And I think closing my first deal, it kind of gave me that realization, well, I can actually do this, there’s a future and probably can make this work. So I was quite lucky. My first client being a red bubble, that at the time, they were pretty small, but they grew quite rapidly. So I kind of tacked my business onto the back of their growth, I suppose. And I learned a lot from that journey. I was working pretty closely with the CTO there at the time, and they kind of gave me a lot of guidance in what they wanted me to do. And I was able to shape what I was doing with them and offer that service to other clients and sort of grow around that, in that. I was really focusing on trying to build personal brand and leverage my niche that I’ve found and cut into that. So I was trying to do things differently to what other recruiters were. And I think that’s, that’s where I really sort of made my strides and I’ve had a lot of growth.

Wayne Lewis: And were there any moments a little bit like Andrew, where you’re working from home and you thought to yourself, you know, maybe this is a bit of a depression phase or any hurdles in those early days for you?

Joe Woodham: Not a depression phase. I think the fear of failure was my biggest issue of the star. Like you have a few wins of the star but then you have a few things that don’t go away and I’ve always put a lot of pressure on myself to try and move forward as quick as possible and having people kind of looking at you going, alright, you’ve given up a good job to go out on your own and sort of judge you I suppose more than anything, so I put my pressure back to make sure that I am doing things right and succeeding and I think that was my biggest issue was I was always worried that I’d have to go back and get another job and that that scared the shit out of me and still it did for a long time.

Wayne Lewis: And going back to relationship building and understanding the needs of your clients, what were some of the key things you were learning early on about the relationship building process?

Joe Woodham: Recruitments pretty standard, what our job is, is to go out and find the best talent and deliver that for your client. But I think trying to forget what other people were telling you to do from a recruitment perspective, and just listening to each client, each client is very, very different. And they want recruitment done in individual style. So really just working with them as a business and trying to deliver what they need, rather than what I think they need. So for me, I guess building the relationship was really just trying to work closely with my clients understand who they were, what they wanted, and just deliver that.

Wayne Lewis: Obviously, you weren’t a lot of hats at this stage. Can you share some insights as kind of all the different roles you were taken on board when starting out?

Joe Woodham: Alright, so shit got real when I closed my first deal. I had no idea what an invoice was. So I’ve closed my first deal. I was like, Okay, how do I get paid? That’s kind of things. Then I sat down to the center, right. There’s a lot more to the back end of this business side of things, I really need to actually get into gear and start learning a few things. So I think the entire journey, every stage, I’ve been learning a ton, and that’s probably where the passion comes in. I absolutely love every time is a challenge during my way to try and work out. Okay, how do I overcome this? What’s next? But every step like hiring a person, oh, crap, I have no contract to be able to offer an employee. What do we do here? Our character needs to see legal to work out what we actually need to make this work. Pretty interesting.

Wayne Lewis: What would be some of the key things that you would probably look to tap into if you’re maybe in the audience this evening.

Joe Woodham: So when I started out, as weird as it sounds, I went straight to one of my competitors, and I got their advice. And so how did you start? What did you do? And strange, as weird as that might seem to people that were open with the information that we’re more than happy to sort of go this is how we started this is people you should speak to. And I’ve always gone and spoken with my competitors because as much as they’re my competitors, they’re my biggest allies as well. Like we still share clients we get paid on the same work, but we’re in the same industry we should get along.

Wayne Lewis: Yeah. And are you willing to share any of your learnings as well with somebody that’s the new kid on the block, for example?

Joe Woodham: Hundred percent. I catch up with a lot of people who come to me for advice. I think it swings and roundabouts. So the more I give, the more people get back to me. And every time I have an issue or need some work, I just ask people, and they usually more than happy to give it to me. So, probably our biggest piece of advice is don’t be afraid to ask for what you want. People always willing to help. Well, most of the time.

Wayne Lewis: And if you could go back to your earlier days, is there anything that you would do differently?

Joe Woodham: Or there’s there’s a ton of things I do differently, but I’m pretty stubborn. So I probably still do it the same way. Make all the dumb mistakes, spend as much money doing stupid shit. But I think it’s all a part of the process. Like you come out the other side there are four but no, I’ve enjoyed my journey.

Wayne Lewis: And you actively setting goals. Can you give us some insights into how you may be set them up if you do?

Joe Woodham: I’m a bit of a dreamer. So everything I’ve always done like all of my clients, six months to a year before I actually start working with them, I’ll realize, okay, why do I want to work with these people? What benefit for them? What’s the benefit for me? I will, okay, in a year’s time, what would it look like if I was actually working with them? And that’s probably one of the biggest success I’ve had is every client that I’ve ever wanted to work with, I’ve worked with.

Wayne Lewis: So given some insights to the sales process. So some people in the audience may not think they’ve got a strong sales background. Is there anything that you feel as though they maybe could focus on to try and get their first sale?

Joe Woodham: Interesting. I feel like people think sales is a dirty word. But I really think what sales is it’s information aggregating, we’re giving people advice or information that they need to make a decision. If I was going to buy a house, it doesn’t matter what you say, if I like the house, I’m gonna buy the house. If you don’t like the house, I’m not going to buy the house. what your job is, is to give me the information and the facts about it. That’s What sales is? So I don’t think you should be afraid of asking people for stuff or I guess selling your services, because people if they’re not buying from you they’re buying from someone else. So just give them the information that they need to make the right decision.

Wayne Lewis: If you’re thinking like where you are now, what does the future hold for you and your company?

Joe Woodham: Well, our business has done a massive pivot in the last six months. So I’ve built Torii Recruitment off the back of working for small to medium-sized businesses. So we’ve been pretty lucky to work with some pretty cool startups. But in the last six months, we’ve made a bit of a transition to doing pure contract work, which startups can’t really afford to do pure contract work. So we’re working mainly with sort of large corporates now. So the pivot for us it’s really focusing on the large end of town and getting contractors out rather than worrying about permanent revenue.

Wayne Lewis: You talked about things when it was things were taken off for you when obviously you launched your business and things are going well were you quite sensible in decision making, or were you getting carried away with the journey?

Joe Woodham: I think I got caught up in the ego side of growing a business. So I actually started to try and grow through growing my staff numbers rather than growing the revenue. And that was more, I thought, at the time, probably a bit more of a building a brand and how I looked at the industry, whereas it probably wasn’t the smartest decision and it was a waste of money and probably didn’t manage my staff as well as I should have. So I think in hindsight, I probably should have done that very differently, grown a lot slower and not hired as many people to try and I guess, boost numbers and…

Wayne Lewis: How long did it take you to realize this?

Joe Woodham: Probably a year, it’s probably been two years of growing and shrinking and then growing and shrinking, and then sort of now have realized that okay, maybe that’s not the best option and the markets reacting very different. And that’s not the model that I think is congruent with what we want to be doing the matter at all.

Wayne Lewis: Can we have another round of applause for Joe Woodham, please? Thank you very much, Joe.

Serpil Senelmis: Wow, I never would have thought to build a relationship with my competitors, let alone ask for their help. But that’s some great advice there from Joe. Don’t be afraid to ask for what you want. That’s the key takeaway. Next time on Masters Series how I built my business. As every founder knows, there’s more to building a business than a business plan on the back of a napkin and a great idea. We’ll meet two founders with skills and influencing others to join your mission and all the nitty-gritty that goes along with starting a business. 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.

Why work hard for somebody else, when you can work hard for yourself… and enjoy the rewards that come with that. It’s the motivation that’s launched many businesses, but the first step to leave the 9-5 takes a lot of courage.

Emma Welsh was restructured out of a job when old friend Tom got in touch to suggest they start a business. Emma and Tom’s is one of the most recognised juice brands in Australia, but their first batch almost didn’t make it into the bottle. Emma describes the experience of leaving the 9-5 and how the role of the entrepreneur is basically about problem-solving.

Bill McCorkell experienced life as a builder and an architect before striking out on his own to combine both skills with Archiblox. Less than a decade later the business has been recognised for innovation by Fast Company in the US. Bill admits to making mistakes but says the secret is to learn from them to do better next time.

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

Serpil Senelmis: What do you think the best thing is about starting your own business?

Interviewing Public: I think it’s about having a bit of control over your life and where you want it to go. I think rather than working for somebody else and putting money in their pocket, yeah,

Interviewing Public: I’m a registered nurse, so it’s my hours are all over the place. But you know why work for somebody else when you can work for yourself and be successful? Yeah.

Interviewing Public: If you’re doing hard work for a company, they’re making a profit, why not work for yourself and do the hard work and make profit for yourself? And the more you can scale, the more you can earn that kind of thing.

Serpil Senelmis: I’m getting a common theme here tonight.

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 this is the first episode of the new season of Masters Series. Over the next few weeks, you’ll hear from entrepreneurs on how they built and grow their businesses. But right now, the task at hand is how to leave the nine to five. If you’re anything like me, you’ll have thought about it long and hard before making the leap, it’s a big decision with many unknown. Builder, an architect, Bill McCorkell made the leap back in 2011 and hasn’t looked back.

Bill McCorkell: It was such a chaotic time of architecture that I was experiencing that at one side, I was working on the delivery team. So we’re doing the construction documentation and I processed for the 15 thousands variation on the job, which is extraordinary for any commercial project. But it gave me an insight into the creativity behind architecture, which I really had a passion towards.

Serpil Senelmis: We’ll hear from Bill shortly, but our first brave entrepreneur is Emma Welsh, co founder of Emma and Toms foods, I love her juices, and I’m so glad Emma decided to leave the nine to five back in 2014, if only for my taste buds. In this fireside chat with WeTeachMe’s Wayne Lewis, Emma reveals as the CEO, she now spends most of her time problem solving and working out solutions. And she’s got some sage advice if you’re planning to take the plunge, you can have the right idea but with the wrong capital structure, you won’t succeed.

Emma Welsh: So the first thing everyone wants to know about me and my business is Tom, is Tom, my husband, my partner? And the answer is no, he’s a friend. We met doing swimming lessons when we were 12 years old. And amazingly we’re still friends. Now many, many, many years later, would never have imagined that I would have gone into business with him, but strange things happen. So I guess my story is I really am someone who decided I wanted to have my own business, probably on leaving university. I thought it was clever and I thought I’ll learn on someone else’s time and money. And I think it’s a good idea to get experience in different facets of business in marketing, commerce, sales. And so I started off working for a commodity trading company. And I guess I’d always had a great belief in the value of brands and so I when I was thinking about my CV, and when I was busily developing myself as a person, I was looking for good brands. So I put Cargill which was a big multinational trading company, and then I worked for a Mass Corporation. And then I went to business school in Europe. So it’s all sort of brands brands trying to get into building my own personal CV and my experience, so trying to learn in different areas.

Wayne Lewis: And what age was that?

Emma Welsh: So this was straight after university. So I went to did science at Melbourne Uni which is a very general course. And then I did a little bit of strategy consulting. And then I got to a point where I was working as a strategy consultant in London and a friend of mine who had in business school came and asked me if I wanted to start a business. And this was my first time to go into business. So this thing of leaving the nine to five, I actually was invited out of the nine to five. And I accepted the invitation and I went and worked with this friend of mine. So, you know, I didn’t really take the plunge then. So that business, we built it up, we raised a lot of money. But we ran out of the money very quickly and we had, I think, the right business idea, but the totally wrong capital structure. So we basically, were trying to make it a big business very quickly. And the business which some of you may be familiar with in Australia, called A Connects was basically the same business we were trying to set up in London, that business is now worth a billion dollars, we sold out of our business for I think about 100,000 pounds or something like that. It just shows you can have the right idea but the wrong structure and you don’t succeed. Anyway, after that experience, which was a fine experience, who I’m still friends with the four people that I was in business with in the UK, which I’m very proud of, and the investors, we had we’re still friends with them, I still stay in touch with some of them. And I think that’s all worked out well, because we communicated well all the way through.

Wayne Lewis: So obviously moving on from there and talking a little bit more about Emma and Tom then. You’ve left the nine to five, you’ve experienced a lot of things to do within the business world, how is that equipped you then and kind of what were the first hurdles going into permanent that you had to overcome and making that a success?

Emma Welsh: So, I mean, the first one is actually starting, and that’s, in my view that the most difficult thing to do is to start, and the second break time I left my job I was actually booted out of my job. So I was working at the NAB and my whole team was restructured out so I was sort of out on the street. And actually, again, the second time Tom actually appeared from where he’d been in Europe and he actually again, he asked me if I wanted to start this business and he had the idea of a juice business. So again, it wasn’t really me starting and leaving the nine to five. So I think I’ve never had probably the courage to do it, but I at the time, sort of fell into it. But I mean, starting from scratch I think it’s really hard but it’s, you know, we went to the market, we bought our fruit juices, we made up our different blends and tested things out. And then we, it was a matter of working out, well, what do we need next? We need bottles, and we need caps, and we need labels, and we need a design of our labels. And each time we’d think about it, and we’d think, well, we need to what do we do? Who do we speak to? And we’d, we’d work it out. And I think that’s in business some a lot about problem solving. And as we go along now, I mean, still I feel my most of my time is problem solving and working solutions to things and always things are changing. I mean, I think, for someone thinking about going into their own business, some, to me, it’s good to be very comfortable with change, because change is always going to happen. And things are never going to go according to plan and, and I think this thing of I’ve got to have the right idea but to have the perfect idea. You know, I mean, our idea was to have a juice business. we’ve now moved into a healthy drinks and snacks business. My idea was to never be in distribution, we’ve now got 40 vans on the road, so…

Wayne Lewis: Talking about that skill set and obviously adapting, you guys have ventured overseas as well. And is that exploring those foreign markets? Is that something that you work on today?

Emma Welsh: Yeah. So I mean, we have a business model, which is very much based on relationships. I mean, maybe it’s just the people we are, but we want to do business with people we like. And we really choose people that we like. And so we’ve sort of fallen into our export markets really, just because we’ve happened to meet people we like. And so we’ve got a guy in the Middle East. And we’ve got a whole team in China, is it’s turned out those businesses are all people who are wanting to set up their own new distribution business, which I think works really well because a new distribution business they need to have product to sell, and they need to go and get customers. Most distributors, in my experience really don’t do anything. But the other thing is, is that they need to be very well funded. And actually a guy in the Middle East is just giving me some grief because I think he’s not well funded enough.

Wayne Lewis: When you are choosing those people, how much time do you spend on that? Those relationships that you’re forming so behind the scenes?

Emma Welsh: You know, we get approached by a lot of different people and I think the thing is to, for us to be very clear on what we’re trying to do and what’s important to us at the moment. For example, the other day, we’ve had this Charity Water, which we’ve done as a collaboration with Cotton On and we sell it to cafes, and we donate basically the profit from that so it’s about 25 cents a bottle, anyway Cotton On decided that we were all too small for them, and they didn’t want to do it anymore. So we thought, well, we actually like this, we’ve got customers that want to buy this product. So we’ll do our own and we then needed to find someone who is a charity to support. So I came across Street, which is I think, is a fantastic organization. I went and had a chat to Bec, who’s the co-founder of that, and she said, I have a great idea, you know, very good. Just one problem. We really don’t want to have any plastic, you know, in our shop, so we looked at cartons and other ways of doing it. Anyway, we eventually realized we could do 100% recycled PT bottle and she was happy with that because it’s saving 82% of the resources that would have been used in a virgin bottle. It’s an example of someone we liked, it’s a good relationship and it’s helping us do what we wanted to do but it’s also helping her and what she wants to do and her beliefs.

Wayne Lewis: And it comes back to the problem solving as well. So your husband actually works for the company as well. So everybody asks whether Tom is your husband, but you, your husband worked there. How do you manage those relationships internally? Does that have an effect?

Emma Welsh: For me, working with a partner is pretty difficult. It’s hard to leave business at home. The biggest thing that I’ve learned in terms of trying to make our relationship at work happy, because here’s the sales guy, and I’m the CEO, and typically that is quite a stressful fraught relationship. So the biggest thing I’ve learned to do is to moderate my tone of voice, so to be really careful what tone of voice I use when I’m speaking to him. And that certainly is help but it’s definitely not easy. And I find you know, one of us might want to talk about work and the other one doesn’t and just leaving it at work is for me important. And business is stressful. So there’s always ups and downs. And I mean, his skills are really valuable to our business so we really need to have him in the business. Yeah, he’s been a key driver in the business. So the good thing is we managed to stay together as well.

Wayne Lewis: Yeah. Do you have people that have left the nine to five wants some flexible working? Or do you have conversations with maybe current staff members about leaving that working environment, if they come to you and ask for advice?

Emma Welsh: Yeah, more we recruit people that want part-time jobs, and I found it quite an effective way to bring in really better levels of skill experience than I could otherwise afford. And there’s actually quite a lot of people, often women looking for part-time work that’s actually meaningful and enjoyable. So I basically breaking roles into smaller roles. And then as the business grows, usually they are quite happy to take on more work. So you know, maybe the child’s got a bit older or whatever their circumstances often change.

Wayne Lewis: And going back to the moment of realizing that Emma and Tom’s was obviously doing well, and it was getting some traction. Did you still have that style of mindset where you’re quite frugal with the things that you’re maybe investing in, the stuff that you’re taking on and things like that? Or were there any moments where you thought, you know, this is great, we’re getting carried away? Or did you maybe keep a rein on things when things were going well?

Emma Welsh: I mean, I think that’s one of the many mistakes that we’ve made is, and I do think it’s a bit of coming out of big corporate. So Tom and I both had worked for large companies, we’re both used to having colleagues, we were both used to having plenty of money to spend. And I think we weren’t nearly thrifty enough. I mean, we thought we were being thrifty, but we hired people too quickly. You hear so often you should be working on your business, not in the business. I believe at the start it’s so hard to get money coming in the door. It’s so hard to be profitable, that we would have been a lot better off if we hadn’t had some of those people. If we’ve done more ourselves. We’re still getting better at it but it’s hard to make that final profit that ends up in your pocket.

Wayne Lewis: Yeah. And what some of the things you do on a daily basis to maybe develop yourself and to keep on learning?

Emma Welsh: I mean I think reading a lot has been really valuable. The other thing, probably just talking to people, I mean, every person I speak to will give me a little bit of information that helps me make better decisions. So it’s very easy to sit at my desk and be busy. But actually making the effort to get out and talk to people is much more important, I think.

Wayne Lewis: Yeah, definitely. Can we have a round of applause for Emma, please?

Serpil Senelmis: Doing business with people you like sounds like one of the great advantages of leaving the nine to five to start your own business. Thanks for that advice, Emma. We’ll hear from builder architect and entrepreneur Bill McCorkell right after this.

Ad Guy: Masters Series is presented by WeTeachMe. Before you leave the nine to five why not try out a few classes to discover what makes your heart beat. WeTeachMe connects you with face to face classes in your neighborhood right across Australia. Explore the possibilities of your mind at weteachme.com. This podcast is produced by Written and Recorded with a passion for telling great stories, Written and Recorded podcasts, give brands a real voice with personality. Find out how to talk to your customers more effectively at writtenandrecorded.com. And now back to the podcast.

Serpil Senelmis: Thanks, Ad Guy, don’t give up your nine to five. Well, at least not until you’ve heard from Bill McCorkell. As a fourth-generation builder and second-generation architect, Bill didn’t think twice about leaving the nine to five and hanging out his shingle. Since jumping into the world of business, he’s designed a carbon positive home and he says it was his brother’s encouragement to go into partnership and the challenges that followed that led to the building blocks of his own business, Archiblox.

Bill McCorkell: So I studied architecture at Melbourne University. My old man was an architect. I’ve always wanted to be an architect. I had heaps of passion towards architecture design and just finding better ways for good details. Finishing up University of Melbourne, I was lucky enough to be employed by a firm in Kuala Lumpur. Coming into this firm, I always had this perception that architects all we did was design amazing buildings. Unfortunately, this firm I worked with, they were extraordinarily efficient in the way that I ran a Business of Architecture. I was lucky, I designed 10/20, 30/50 storey towers that were never built. I designed a variety of different sort of houses that would never build. I designed as exhibition buildings that were never built. I left at the result of the economic crisis, that here in the late 1990s and came back to Melbourne working on federal squared. So I’ve gone from a amazingly efficiently run architectural business into a chaotic, creative studio that was designing Federation Square part of the lab architectural studios. It was such a chaotic time of architecture that I was experiencing that at one side, I was working on the delivery team. So we’re doing the construction documentation. And I processed the 15,000 variation on the job, which is extraordinary for any commercial project. But it gave me an insight into the creativity behind architecture, which I really had a passion towards. A couple of years later, I jumped forward and I was playing cricket in India with my brother, another massive passion of mine, India and cricket. And over there, my brother had joined the family building company called McCorkell Constructions. In a night out over there, we decided that the brothers should join together after a successful day on the middle of the pitch where we probably hit 5 or 10 runs together. We then decided that I should join the McCorkell constructions on my return back to Australia, which I did left Federation Square, jumped into a commercial building company, which had been established for 70 years at the time, an architect and a builder working with an older brothers business that had been entrenched within for 10 years, worked really well for quite a while, as an architect, I had a turbocharged learning experience on how to actually build, how to manage building how to estimate how to procure basically the ins and outs of the building trade. So from an architectural perspective, I was extraordinarily lucky to actually get those learnings and also work in a very well established business as a director, and having lots of learnings along the way of how to actually run and manage a business from a director’s point of view. That five years on an architect and the builder a younger brother and an older brother, decided there’s only so many arguments that could have been potentially lose. So having a chat to a friend who was leaving his business quarter, a tech guy to head overseas, I joined up with his business partner. And then for the next four years, I ran a business core tech IArchitects absolutely loved architecture. So for me, this is one of my biggest passions was getting back into architecture and running what became and has become a very successful architectural business. In the first two years, we took the business from one and a half staff members to over 20. We had a diversification of products ranging from single residences through to multi-res and a lot of commercial and a lot of hospitality. But it was something I really loved doing the architecture, but I really disliked being on the other side of the fence from the builder. And the amount of times I’ll sit down with builders knowing exactly what process I’d gone through to get to a price, knowing exactly what the price should be, and then having the arguments over how did you arrive at this type of figure really, really annoyed me. So after two or three years working with technae I started up a second business whilst technae called Archiblox. Because this is where my passion really has been and was, you know, I had the opportunity of not only being an architect, but also being a builder at the same time. I really enjoyed the opportunity of taking ownership of a project from the initial contact with client through the handing over the keys and completion. So that’s a really good way from an architectural experience of looking into a business and finding a way that we could manage and be part of the whole client journey. We looked at prefabrication as being a methodology that would work really well for us, being an architect have been exposed to the volume housing and the vanilla nature of the housing market. We really believe that we could make a difference in creating a product that we could take to market and sell to clients. And in a way that we could do that was through prefabrication. Really early on in Australia prefabrication became quite a staple back in the gold rush to areas of the 1850s. But right through to modern days prefabrication has been used in Australia, but in a really small percentage. And so when you wake up overseas and other countries and the take up of prefabrication, Australia had a really, really low percentage to take.

Bill McCorkell: One of our biggest barriers as prefabrication was the perception of the prefabricated buildings than the general public. A lot of the clients had to take a lot of convincing as to why they should buy an architecturally designed prefabricated house when the general market population looked at the donner type of scenario that was prevalent throughout the mining industry. So we thought what was a really good way of then creating a good product that people would take some traction to, and then create really good stories? I think the society with done really well. Archiblox is create stories around our products delivered, they stories and building up with a way of then building our brand. And so what we’ve looked at as the business, what other stories we can use in our business, to help build our brand. Being a kid growing up in Melbourne, we used to do lots of camping, and one of the things as a kid growing up in Melbourne, I’ve really loved the bush and one thing I’ve always loved about the bush is the first nation people’s relationship with that bush. So random things we’ve done recently setting up our Reconciliation Action Plan, which to me is a no brainer for any Australian business that you can really then start giving back to the first nation people. From our key boxes perspective, it starts giving us really good insights into the different nations around Victoria, New South Wales, so that when we give stories to our clients, we can pass on the stories from the first nation people and start really layering up information for clients and their knowledge and their appreciation of the land that they then become caretakers on as an architect of sustainability. Looking at different schemes, like carbon-neutral schemes that we can then start putting back into the environment of gains and really good story that we have in the business. And then also different associations that you become members on. For example, I currently sit on the prefab balls, board directors as the national organization, also sort of how the Father Bob Foundation, and so again, those are just really good avenues that we use as a business to start promoting the different ideologies we have in the beliefs we have. So what these things give us is good PR and what these PR gives us is good access to clients. As a business, we’ve really thought about the stories that we do, we’ve really thought about the products that we’ve developed, we’ve really thought about the organizations that were associated with. And what that leads to is lots of opportunities to then promote and cross-promote, and really use our key blocks of social media platform to then build our client base. So as a business, who sells houses and sells commercial buildings, we would generate 80% of our leads come through some sites that I’m really proud of at the moment. We’re the most followed architectural business in Australia on Instagram, and social media pages, and a site that we do really push heavily. And that gets me to my wife who works with me and runs all of our social media. And so collaboratively, we do really run our key blocks. The other thing we use as part of building our brand is the testimonial page with clients. We’ve made lots of mistakes as a business along our journey. And if it’s something that we don’t learn about every time, then it’s something we can’t grow as a business. But one thing that we really appreciate and we really gain a lot of traction, who for future classes for our testimonials, and the way that we can then promote and cross-promote through our brands?

Bill McCorkell: Diversification is like we massive fans of Rocky blocks as well. I really like diversification, what we do not in product offerings, but also in innovation because it keeps a lot of interesting staff and fellow colleagues within the business. And it’s also making us always think about better ways of doing it. But we’ve had calamities along the way I think, as every business has had. And again, looking at the calamities and looking at the opportunities to get better is one of those big things. We had a manufacturing plant down in one fagin Gippsland up until 2016. As the complexity of the projects increased, also the skill level within the business increased. In 2016 I had an opportunity of taking over some land, a facility down at Laverton and I looked at that as an opportunity being a Melbourne-based business head office in Melbourne that I could take my manufacturing facility from one baggie and bring it down to Melbourne. It was proved to be an extraordinarily difficult time in the business because all of my manufacturing side of the business out of 60 people, I had one person follow the business. And so we had to retool throughout the whole business. And at the same time, our project became more complex, the geography of the landing of these projects became more complex. So it became it was an extraordinary difficult 18 months 16 months. And to add to those calamities, we also then entered into a commercial market. So this is our first large commercial project we did was part of the level crossing removal. So this is the signal control center that we did for LendLease and CPD so to tier one contractors, we went into a little bit naively onto this project. We did in such a way that we didn’t realize we’d signed up to a project that if it wasn’t delivered on the day of final completion that were exposed to $6 million a day in third-party damages. So business like ours or any business, that’s just an extraordinary process to go through. During the process of manufacturing, one of our contractors turned to us and said, the concrete floor that we had built for these 25-tonne buildings that were six, five and a half meters high, but five and a half meters wide by eighteen meters long, the deflection through the building would be more than the 25 mils allowed through the manufacturer’s warranties on the concrete flooring. In fact, the spaghetti-like structure that would be putting these buildings onto had no structural integrity at all. So we had to go through this mad rush of trying to redesign through transport-specific engineers. This whole steel cage that we had to then find the fabricators during specific timeframe who ended up being is marked down in Launceston and the rigmarole about bringing this thing back up on ferries back into Melbourne, then to complete the project in the facility yet at Laverton to take out the dating on to then install on time and complete with all of these things that lined up was one of the most stressful times I’ve ever had as a business owner but also is one of the most rewarding. So in about two months into this process, I realized we need a hand. And so I basically spoke to one of the commercial manager directors LendLease basically went in hand in hand and gave them four demands that I needed and if I didn’t breach these four things, they wouldn’t have a railway infrastructure project that was worth $1.7 billion. That would not come online because we’re a $4 million part of that process. And so really, thankfully, they saw the dilemma that we were in, they took our payment terms from 45 days into the month, down to 15 days. Like I was all this assistance that we needed, and we basically left the project completed on time. We didn’t lose any money, and it was such an amazing effort from a business like Archiblox are basically worked in domestic prefabrication to deliver a basic 600 square meters. computer. So my lesson there is be really well aware of what you’re trying to do, and don’t chase dollars. But we can’t achieve all these things without the right structure and the right team behind us. I’m a massive fan of learning and I think any business owner, you have to be aware of learning. And we’re only as good as the staff that we have on the ground and part of our colleagues and part of what we work with and the community that we create is all about who we’re the type of person we work with. And part of that is the creation of the values that we all work towards. Part of the colleagues we have, the clients we work through, and the suppliers that we work alongside Archiblox has had some amazing stories as an architect, I’m probably really proud of one of the awards we got given in 2016 was voted the third most innovative architectural firm by Fast Company over in the States. As a builder, I’m most proud of the construction award that we won early this year for the senior control center that we built for the city cofferdam online and I like to think just those two awards there alone have really signified at our key blocks that we really managed to find relevance in both the architectural field and the construction field.

Serpil Senelmis: So despite Bill’s phenomenal success, he’s had calamities along the way and opportunities to get better as well. That’s comforting to know. Thanks, Bill. And thank you to you, Emma well, next time on Masters Series, that moment my startup took off. After leaving the nine to five, the dream for our startup is for the website to be inundated the phone to ring off the hook, and our business to hum like a well-oiled machine. How to make that happen is the challenge. We’ll have two entrepreneurs to put that into context for us 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.

Software as a Service or SaaS tools can improve your time management and productivity. More importantly, they can be low cost or free and scaled to support your business as it grows.

Former Google employee Soumya Rao Indurti founded Connect Labs to improve lives by empowering people to use the right technology better. Soumya says there’s no point using a SaaS tool if it doesn’t give you more time to focus on real relationships with people.

Over the last 3 years, Soumya’s worked with almost all of the productivity SaaS tools on the market and in this episode, she reveals which ones will fast track your happiness!

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

Interviewing Public: I work in a basketball organization and we manage 250 people using sightly as a CRM management program that we use across, not so much for customer use, but more so for a management tool.

Interviewing Public: I think we’ve moved over to Office 365 and the integration of the different platforms has been quite useful for us.

Serpil Senelmis: And I reckon there’s something to be said for old school pen and paper, right?

Interviewing Public: Yes, definitely.

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 in the final Masters Series for this season, we’re putting on the SAS or maybe that’s pronounced SaaS Software as a Service is a business model way computer applications available to you online for low monthly subscription, for free. Best of all, you can save time and increase your productivity.

Soumya Rao Indurti: I’ll actually be my happiest self when everything is just smooth like technology does what it’s supposed to do, my calendars all sync up the emails, go into the white folders, and like life seems great again. But if that doesn’t happen, these small stupid things, these little moments that we have every day, just like changes how your day is gonna go, how the day for the people around you is gonna go and generally, generically, everything is gonna go.

Serpil Senelmis: Soumya Indurti works with Connect labs who specialize in putting SaaS in place for businesses. Soumya is passionate about people and believes technology is only as good as the positive impact it can have on people, their work, career and lives. When it comes to spending time and increasing productivity. Soumya says work shouldn’t be A battle, the right SaaS tools can make us happier at work.

Soumya Rao Indurti: So I think I started like my early career at Google, we sort of like we’re all into like paid search advertising and ads and stuff like that. And then I decided to sort of work at a startup after that, so I could start my own eventually. So while I was at the startup, we used a lot of sales, marketing, automation, lots of productivity tools to sort of do things better, sometimes cheaper, you know, why not? And basically try to get ahead with whatever we could and I think it was such a change from like a place like Google that had everything like if you sneeze and you say, Oh my god, I’m really cold. People would come with like a thermometer to check like the temperature around you and stuff. So I think it goes from like being really appealing to like finding resources that you need not want I think. So it completely changed my journey, gave me a lot of like legs to start my own. And now I think we’re proudly three years old, one of hub spots, platinum partners in Australia, which is amazing because we were the APAC partner day last week in Sydney. And there were like 30 partners once upon a time and like now there’s 247 in Australia alone. And I was like what? So it’s quite a journey and I think there’s a lot of learning that I’ve had because of all the stuff I put myself through voluntarily. So it’s kind of like a crazy story. If you start at Google and choose to pick the hard yards like it’s mad, like everyone thought I was crazy. My mom was like, why? But anyway, I think like, it’s great that I did. And now I’m like, super happy. Like, it’s the hardest life has ever been in the last three years, but it’s been the best time that I’ve ever had. So generally, I think there’s something really amazing about creating connections. So I think we sort of went after that and created this brand around like how we can connect people better how we can make people happier at work and what we can do to support that so it’s not just about telling you that some sort of software is really great or use this. So use that. But it’s more about figuring out people and how we can sort of really, really support the happiness quotient in everyone’s lives. Okay, so there’s a few things that I’m going to go through today. And I hope that it will sort of put some sort of insight into all the little bits and bobs that I’ve sort of picked up along the way. How many of you have ever had these moments like at work? Oh, no, I forgot damn this laptop. How do I do that? Not sure what I gonna do. I just can’t seem to make this work. Or can I find this damn thing? Like, there’s always been somebody saying something somewhere that has really annoyed them that has made them less efficient or happy at work, basically. So everything’s fallen apart and nothing makes sense. And, you know, they take that stuff with them home, right? Like I’ve done it so many times. I’ll actually be my happiest self when everything is just smooth like technology does what it’s supposed to do. My calendars all sync up the emails go into the right folders, and like life seems great again. But if that doesn’t happen, these small stupid things, these little moments that we have every day, just like changes how your day is gonna go, how the day for the people around you is gonna go and generally generically everything is gonna go. So I think what we kind of very recently because we’re such a big work in progress is sort of figured out that our vision is to make like millions of people work happy and have these work happy moments. Because it’s not like the big stuff. It’s not how do you get like more leads? How do you get like more website visitors? Or how do you get like, how do you basically be successful every day because you just had a smile on your face instead of you know, hating the next person, your laptop, whatever? Quite frankly, life is hard. So there will be moments that you hate things around you but if we could create those little moments, we’re not trying to change things radically. We’re not trying to like, I think override things. But if we were to sort of look at things differently, because we change something we used all day, every day, I think the time and productivity and the effectiveness factor are just like flows into your lives. And so Oh, no, I forgot can then change to something like, Oh my god, I love this task list. Things you couldn’t find before you can now because it’s in that sneaky folder that you actually, you know, have created because you are better organized at work.

Soumya Rao Indurti: So I have this theory about work and life. Everyone talks about work-life balance, and I actually quite frankly, don’t think it’s a balance at all. And I think life just is he’s got a lot of elements in it. And work just happens to be for some people, all of it. Some people are part of it. And some people Maybe you’ll make different kinds of choices with their lives. Take for example, Joe. Joe works 40 hours a week from the age of 20 to 65 and gets two weeks of vacation every year. In that time, he will have worked like something around 90,000 hours in his lifetime, right? So the concept of work where you work from has like, you know, it’s changed over time. We’ve had like, okay, we work from the office, you can work from home now you can work from anywhere. I have this like thought that if we change the tools we use every day, that we’d be happier at work and there’s something to do with like, knowing that things are just going to work. It’s like I don’t know how many girls in the room have to like use a straight now to get their hair looking straight. Like there’s so many things you have to go get a blow-dry then you have to like go get it straight and it’s like quite a lot of work involved to do it. You just want to wake up one day and feel like oh, you know, you just want straight hair and vice versa for people who want curly hair, nothing against that, but we use a lot of tools at work, mostly SaaS tools. But like lots of these tools at work, there’s a whole bunch of great tools out there. And the thing that actually I think pulls me towards a lot of these brands is because they’re great founders behind them are their great teams working there are these people who are actually providing value or doing things that you know, really align with yours. So I think what I’m gonna do, you know, tell you a little bit about how we sort of run our customer success teams, how we run our own lives to be happier. And I think when I look at the whole picture, there’s like literally few things that I think we can go back and like, change or think about. So the first thing to do is to color-code your calendars. It’s amazing, like life-changing. I was on this call with like somebody who started a business and it’s kind of become really big in Sydney and stuff like that. And he was like “Soumya, the first thing you need to kind of think about is how you’re going to change how your life is structured”. And I was like, how am I gonna do that? That sounds so complicated. I was like, I don’t even know where to start, like, and this was like, Yes, I worked at a startup. Yes, I worked at Google. But I was still learning about like tax and a whole lot of other stuff. I was really busy doing other things. So it was like, I don’t even know what to do, man. And then he said, it’s quite simple really, why don’t you look at your calendar every day? And I was like, what does that mean? I don’t even want to look at it. Like it’s packed. Like it’s crazy. It’s miserable. It makes me like cry. And then he was like, you know, just like figure out what part of it is like social stuff, what part of it are meetings, what part of it are workshops? What part of it are you like, actually creating time for yourself? And quite frankly, when I started my business, I thought, you know, headspace and all these apps, like really silly. I was like Who’s gonna listen to all that stuff like as if I have time? I thought meditations like really lame as well. And I was like who’s gonna tell you like which person tell you stop thinking like my heads full of like stuff all the time. So I was like this is really bizarre that they’re going down that path so I think though when you start a business like you just figure out okay, this is it. Life is you know better when you think about your health and well being so you start to go back and figure out all the little bits that you can add in that calendar in a certain color. I chose green because I think the well-being part is like super vital so I actually have like quiet moments. Like I live across the Albert Park Lake so I’m like, Okay, I’ll go there and and like pretend that’s my green moments or like color code that into my calendar and leave it there for every Friday night. Yes, I don’t do much on Friday nights, it’s very fun. I sit in front of the lake and like I have a quiet moment. So color coding, it’s actually bizarrely like life changing. If you have have like this beautiful vision of like how you can use each color on your calendar to change you know how you look at your life so you go back and look at the month or the week if you have a lot of reds and red some meetings just pulling out the I don’t know sucking the life out of you because you go in there you talk about a bunch of things and nothing ever happens. I quite frankly think a little conversation over the desk or like over a coffee just to like actually say what you mean without being distracted with things on a slide or a sheet in front of you, whatever says a lot and you can go do something with the information that’s being shared. So we will create a giant that’s the beauty of I think being, you know, startup to scale up kind of, I think because you don’t really have a lot of time to go and chill somewhere. When we do we really chill but it’s very rare. But when we do that, like we’re actually completely there because we’re present, we put like, okay, I did get an Apple Watch. So I like ignore this stuff that I don’t have to see. But nobody knows that I would like quickly glance at things and like make sure that I, you know, I don’t have any files to put off and stuff like that. But there are things about like having a color-coded calendar to sort out your life.

Serpil Senelmis: So the takeaway so far from Soumya, color-code your calendar, red for meeting, green for time by the lake just to chill. In just a moment, Soumya will reveal how a CRM that’s a customer relationship management tool can change your life.

Soumya Rao Indurti: Over the next few weeks, the Masters Series team will be finalizing preparations for the next season of inspiring business champions. Meanwhile, the classes at WeTeachMe continue to grow and expand mines all over Australia. WeTeachMe connects you with the classes that you want in your neighborhood. Learn what makes your heartbeat at weteachme.com. The Masters Series podcast is produced by Written and Recorded. With a journalistic approach to sound and words written and recorded can help you tell your story effectively. To find out more about sound as a service, head to writtenandrecorded.com. And now, back to the podcast.

Serpil Senelmis: Thanks, Ed Guy, why don’t you just take a break for the next few weeks. Soumya Indurti is the founder and CEO of Connect Labs where they help businesses create, connect, and convert for marketing and sales success. And she’s about to share her favorite software as a service to help you save time and increase productivity.

Soumya Rao Indurti: The other thing is to create lists and I had a lovely picture of the list that I created. It’s literally called like have to have to do and I divide these list in before I used to think nothing of them because I still have like five lists that I haven’t gone through like which weren’t like tomorrow or the next week or whatever. So I think the shorter the term, like the quicker it is for you to action it so don’t put stuff for like 20 days away like nobody cares, you’ll forget it. You know, we are aging every day like every second actually. So there’s no point leaving, you know, list in list to follow up just put like tangible things for tomorrow, or this week, but nothing more because the weekly stuff your calendar will deal for you. But the lists for everyday stuff to like check off is great. And this is going back to the life and work thing as well. It’s a mix of everything. You can create lists for work, you can create lists for your life. The other thing that I really find amazing about these tools that you can sort of change you know, every day is to have a lovely way to like communicate like we have some bots as well that just add a little bit of happiness every day. Do they make you bit more productive? It’s bizarre but like, I think communicating you know, even with inanimate objects when you’re really bogged with the day is hilarious. Like I asked growth bot HubSpot has this slack one for free if anyone want to get it, we have this growth bot, for example. I said, tell me a joke just for the purpose of this presentation, by the way. So growth bot was like, really lame. And give me that duplicate content. Why does search engineers not like twins? Because it’s duplicate content. It’s, it’s, you know, it’s what growth what can throw at you I suppose I didn’t know what’s gonna come of it. But you know, why not? Right, like, I think so. We’ve got clients that are really big, and we’ve got clients that are really small. But when we get really large projects, like everyone just gets down to like, getting stuff done, and I swear some of them don’t blink when I’m watching them and it’s scary. Me, so I like to look at them and I’m like, dude, I’m gonna like really die if you don’t blink right now or get up and walk. So some of them hate me for getting them to move. So, you know, there’s small things like this, it can just stare. No, it’s dumb, but it puts a smile on your face, you’ve had a bit of a break, they go back. And when they whatever tasks that tackling, which could be quite mundane at work, it’s sort of like just breaks it up, you can, you know, yell at a bot without like, taking out your angst about a project on a person next to you that potentially most likely doesn’t deserve it. But well, you know, we use a lot of Trello. Trello for life, Trello for work, Trello for a lot of things. We have inspiration boards on it, it’s only because it’s very visually like, appealing to a lot of us, but I think the other reason we’ve used it is we found different ways to make it scale as we’ve grown. We do our social media scheduling and stuff from HubSpot, but we do all the planning on Trello. So it’s like a really cool place to see everything visually and like. So we use it like large scale and we’re a massively growing agency. Lots of people tell us it’s a shit idea. But we kind of are doing really well with it. I feel like the more agial you are and the quicker you can get things done, it’s actually good for you, I think there will come a time when all this profitability stuff to the tee is going to matter. But I think systems and you know, tools and whatever you get only give you what you put in. So, you know, if you excuse my, you know, great use of language, it’s always shit in, shit out like. So, if you kind of think about what you put into systems or things every day, you’re only gonna get back what you put into it. It’s not magic, it’s not going to do everything for you. You’ve got to do a lot of hard work just like color-coding your calendar, but once you’ve done it, life squared. So we find that a CRM can like really organize everything for your revenue, tasks, your everyday life, like all the little pain points, you know. And I think you can get a free CRM. I highly recommend checking out the HubSpot one. Obviously, disclaimer, again, we are partners. But there is a lot to do with that phrase here. I mean, imagine not paying for it too, that’s really good to use and like organizing pipelines revenue, seeing the structure of like your business in and out. There’s a lot of value in it. But more than anything, I think the ability like we put stuff into a Slack channel that comes straight into our HubSpot CRM, like it’s like a native integration, right. So I think when you put all the tools in one place, it just makes sense. And you can map like every small piece of like your life like quicker and easier, and hate systems tools and smash your keyboard lesser.

Soumya Rao Indurti: So use a free CRM, or you can pay for all its features. We’ve tried everything in my little short span of, you know, three years in like this space. We’ve thought about how we can do stuff quickly every day, how we can annoy each other and our clients a lot lesser every day. And also, I think, like, how can we just put a little bit of happiness back in our life every day. So one of the big things that I really want to share is that the tools you use every day can like, keep you happy, or like really destroy it. So I think don’t settle for less. And don’t settle for something that does not work for you. Because it’s most likely something that just doesn’t simply work. Because none of us you know, want to make things work and fix things that keep breaking all the time. And that’s where, like, you can make small adjustments and change things like so many people who work with us, they’re like, Oh, my God, like it’s not about the tool, is it? I was like, no, it’s actually about what makes you successful at work and how can we sort of use tools to help you get there and it becomes easier because the person sees value in it and we emphasize the fact that we just want you to work happy, really. So how can we sort of help in that space and the tools once you get rid of like the pain that the tools are causing you, you can actually spend more time actually connecting with other people around you. Because I think nobody really loves the iPad generation and the mobile generation and, you know, lack of connection. Like I think every time I go to a restaurant, it’s so funny, everyone’s taking pictures of their food for Instagram, and I’m like, I really, it’s so weird that I’m in the digital space. And I still like, want to eat my food and not take a picture of it. But sometimes it’s like, pretty beautiful. And I think now, you kind of like just think about the person making this food and stuff and that little blip like when I put stuff up and I actually take a picture of a lovely granola bowl like my friends will be like, Oh my god, where do you have it and a little bit of, you know, happiness is sent to the person who actually made it somewhere behind and like a really hot environment. And I don’t know it’s kind of like lovely that we share but everything in moderation and everything only to bring someone joy, I think. But we do need to like spend more time connecting with people. And that’s why what we do we really love because we focus a lot on the people, whether it’s in businesses around us, whether we connect with, you know, random on a website, anything is about the person. And we do like this person-centric or human-centric like view of sales, marketing and customer relationship management. So it’s like something for you to just take away that, you know, tools can increase productivity, but it’s increasing productivity so you can spend time with others around you. Thank you.

Serpil Senelmis: So going from the opulence of Google to the frugality of a startup. Soumya has learned that it’s a small things that will change the way that your day goes. So utilize the tools people, and that will make your workday happy. Thanks, Soumya. Next time on Masters Series, we’ll have a bright shiny new season for you. Will kick-off at the end of July with how to leave the nine to five and start your own business. We’ll have some inspiring speakers, and plenty of great tips to help you and your startup no matter where you are in your journey. 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.

Marketing is about building relationships – to retain good customers and reach new ones in a way that encourages them to become repeat customers. This podcast outlines the key steps to building a community.

Sarah Meredith is the Australian Country Director for Global Citizen, the movement that aims to end extreme poverty by 2030. Global Citizen has set itself a goal of building a community of 100 million and with 8 million working with them already, they are well on their way.

Martina Hughes is the founder of Tantric Blossoming, the largest Tantric Community in Australia. Martina says community is all about relationships and it is strengthened by shared risk. She outlines 3 essential elements of community building.

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

Interviewing Public: When you aim at being the best in what you do, you can get some references. And I must say that was very helpful to grow my business. Yeah.

Interviewing Public: Yeah. So when I think of my community, I think of the 1500 people I’ve got on my Meetup group. I’ve had one contact today, from when I put up a discussion topic. On the holiday. My only feedback I get is from those that actually attend my meetups.

Interviewing Public: They like that personalization, not a generic advice up to a point you can do personalization for that tend to just follow templates to make it look the same but the content I just write per person.

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. An old adage in business is that it costs more to attract new customers than it does to keep existing customers. These days engaged customers become communities through social media groups, email newsletters, and customer relationship management software. Martina Hughes is an expert in building communities. She created Tantric Blossoming, Australia’s largest tantric community where she has supported thousands of people with workshops, retreats, and training.

Martina Hughes: Community is all about relationships. Having any satisfying fulfilling meaningful experience in life involves our relationships. And so I have three visions of what I say is necessary for creating community.

Serpil Senelmis: We’ll hear from Martina shortly, but first, we’re going global. Can you imagine how powerful We could be if we all work together. That’s the mission of Global Citizen with a goal to build a community of 100 million and end extreme poverty by 2030. Sarah Meredith is the global citizens Australian country director. She says partnerships are everything when it comes to building a community.

Sarah Meredith: Really want to take you on a journey today about who we are, why we exist, how we operate, how we build a community around our work. And really what’s next, what’s the vision for us over the coming two years, where movement more than 8 million people worldwide founded by three young Australians here in Melbourne, one of those is for Men Young Australian of the Year, Hugh Evans. Our mission is to build a movement of more than 100 million global citizens worldwide. These actions will help achieve this vision of a world without extreme poverty. essentially how we do it is we have a platform where we provide opportunities for global citizens to learn about the world’s biggest challenges. And if you go to globalcitizen.org, you’ll see that we have a policy areas where you can follow various issues that you’re passionate about girls and women, water and sanitation, finance and innovation, education, ending hunger, these are really critical issues. And then we invite global citizens in those areas to take action. And each action ends your award point, and that reward point. If you get five of them, you can use them to redeem rewards tickets. Now many in the world have the lucky opportunity to attend one of our major festivals. But we also offer tickets to concerts thanks to the partnerships with artists and promoters and here in Australia we’re very lucky that at the moment, we have tickets available for Taylor Swift, Shania Twain, Pink, the presets which is had Missy Higgins. And that’s thanks to the generosity of those artists giving us two tickets per show for global citizens to win here in Australia. Right now, we know that we need 260 billion a year to end extreme poverty. At present 150 billion is funded through what we call Overseas Development Assistance. And 100 and 10 billion gap in that financing. We know that the UN General Assembly passed a resolution calling on every nation to commit a point 7% of gross national income. So when you think about that, that’s 70 cents and every hundred dollars of Australia’s budget would go towards helping others overseas. And right now Australia in the commits point 19% of gross national income, about $4 billion, which is an incredible help and we are very happy that that money continues. But over recent years that has dropped. And we’ve been campaigning quite hard to have that increase because we know that the challenge is at the pinnacle of the moment in extreme poverty. Over the last decade, 1 billion people are being lifted out of extreme poverty. And we have 1 billion left that we want to get to in the next decade as we head to 2030.

Sarah Meredith: So we know that if you want to influence governments and you want to influence policy, you need a movement of people, a constituency of people that say to that government, this is a priority, we need to invest in at. So we’ve been working hard to build a movement across the globe have active citizens who will reach out to governments, they’ll reach out to corporates, they’ll reach out to their friends and peers and say, we want to end extreme poverty and the time is now. This is why we’ve created our model of building a community, which is based around four key areas, one, individuals signing up, it’s all free. And we have 8 million at the moment and we’re building to 100 million as is our mission. We also gather an army of the biggest artists and talent on earth. And when we mean by that is that we host music festivals, but we also ask those artists to make commitments through their social media and through the networks. And at the moment, we’re very excited that we have Chris Martin as one of our Global ambassadors, he’s signed on with us to 2030. And he curates our festivals. You may have seen Rihanna as one of our ambassadors, but we also have a number of artists that have appeared over the years at our festivals. We also work very hard behind the scenes to work with governments and policy experts, partnerships are everything for our community, we cannot achieve any of the actions receive any of the commitments without the partnerships we have. They may be with other NGOs, they may be with business, or they may be with governments and some governments really want to champion these issues such as Norway if you’re really passionate about water and sanitation, and they came on board in a partnership with us to make large scale commitments. We also partner with unexpected brands and really try to influence the work they do, but also in trying to get them to leverage their reach to increase the number of global citizens we have. We partnered with Gucci’s time for change around gender equality. We’ve partnered with Johnson and Johnson around health campaigning in vaccines, we partnered with Procter and Gamble about water and sanitation. So I was talking about our audience and that’s really important for us because we need to understand our community to continue to build that community, work with them and ensure that we’re meeting the campaign issues of interest, as we know that our audience is 63% female, which is why we do a lot of gender equality campaign. Girls are very passionate about that and as you will see from recent movements, we’ve been on this issue for a couple of years, but it’s really shine that now is the time to really talk about gender equality, and 50% of millennials, which would be unsurprising to many of you, we use technology as our platform. But we also have some of the coolest artists in the world and people want to get on board that our impact is the most important way that we communicate back to the community because we could have this entire movement, they get a ticket, they get five points and then I move on. But we remind our global citizens well those five actions that you took to get a ticket actually resulted in these wonderful outcomes. 30 million actions have been taken on our platform, which is an incredible number. We track those numbers around the different themes and make sure that we continue to drive them up. those actions resulted in $35 billion in commitments made on our stage, which is pretty incredible. Those commitments will actually affect the lives of more than 1 billion people. We have a partnership with PWC, we independently audit all of our commitments to prove that because of the actions of global citizens, that commitment was made. And we’re also releasing regular reports to say, this government came on stage, got a big announcement and got a little publicity and they made this commitment. We’re actually been tracking their delivery of that. And we do a traffic light system, about the delivery of those commitments, constantly reminding people that the impact of the work we do and the commitments we make are critical in the efforts to end extreme poverty. So how does our community engage with us? We’re pretty clear. We want your voice, we don’t want your money. Your voice is the most powerful thing you have. Many people feel disempowered with the political system. As someone who’s worked in a very long time, I can tell you that your voice is actually pretty powerful if you use it in the right way. And we try to amplify your voice. So say, we asked you to send a tweet to the Prime Minister asked him to increase Australia’s Overseas Development Assistance budget. That’s pretty important because if he says 100,000 tweets about that from constituents, it’s going to impact his view about whether that’s a priority in the budget. We also ask people to sign petitions, we present those petitions and every opportunity we can and we just had an event in Brussels, launching our sheet as equal campaign, where we presented petitions of hundreds of thousands of global citizens to take an action around gender equality.

Sarah Meredith: We also ask everyone to download the app. So you regularly get engagement. And if you haven’t, please download the app. It’s really cool. You get a constant feed of what’s happening in the world around development. But in general, it really talks about a lot of the issues facing the world, not just about the Sustainable Development Goals. And it also gives you lots of actions that you can take quite easily. We also really try and engage with that community by driving really creative, cool content, and really challenging what is quite a complex issue in breaking it down so people can have a bit of fun and share it with their friends. We actually had a video that went viral where our team in New York rewrote the words to Adele’s Hello. And then we sent it out about calling your member of parliament because that’s a perfect example of how we can engage our community and really start to grow it to an even bigger community. I just like to wrap up with what’s next for us this year is the hundredth anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s birth, which is a pretty unique moment, he really had the greatest call to action end extreme poverty. We launched it in London, and we’ll be taking it to our festival in September this year. And there may be announcements about other opportunities throughout the globe about events are doing and it’s the generation to end extreme poverty, and we just have a little inspirational clip to get you excited. Hopefully, you sign up to Global Citizen, you start taking action and you join the movement.

Nelson Mandela (Recording): Not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings..

Sarah Meredith: Thank you very much.

Serpil Senelmis: How impressive growing a global community from just three young Australians with a vision to active citizens worldwide and 13 million actions. It just shows how powerful a community voice can be. Next up on the Masters Series we’ll explore the tantric way of building community.

Ad Guy: The Masters Series is presented by We Teach Me, Australia’s biggest school. WeTeachMe connects you with face to face classes in your neighborhood. Learn what makes your heartbeat at weteachme.com. The Masters Series podcast is produced by Written and Recorded. Journalists for hire, Written and Recorded, record podcasts, and write blogs that tell your story. Have a read and listen at writtenandrecorded.com. And now, back to community building.

Serpil Senelmis: Thanks Ad Guy. Martina Hughes experienced a deep inner awakening with Tantra and wanted to share that with the world. So she created Tantric Blossoming and it’s become the largest tantric community in Australia. Martina says community is about sharing risks. It’s also about sharing challenges and having a sense of collective achievement.

Martina Hughes: Community is all about relationships. Having any satisfying fulfilling, meaningful experience in life involves our relationships. What led me to start Tantric Blossoming? Actually, there are a few things that led me to start Tantric Blossoming. But one of the key factors was my desire to make a difference in the world. From when I was very young, I had this internal burning desire to make a difference. I didn’t know how I was going to make a difference but there was this coal that was drawing me to stand up in the world to stand up for something and to support people to experience transformation. In actual fact, when I started Tantric Blossoming, I had no idea that I was starting a community, I just wanted to help people feel better. I wanted to help people have better relationships feel more connected to their bodies. And so I started off with some very short events, sacred sexuality for women, and some private sessions, helping people to unravel their conditioning, helping them to get more in touch with their body to be able to have more effective communication. And all of that was going well for a few years. And then I felt a call for something more. And this sense of people had been to my workshops, wanting to come back and experience regular connection with others who’ve been to the workshops. And so for me, I went, okay, they don’t want to keep coming back and doing the same introductory workshops. What can I do that gives them a space for connection, a space that feels like community. And fortunately, I had a dream around that time, and in this dream I saw people coming along to an event with me where they would do tantric practices, simple things like massage and touch and eye gazing and communication practices. And in that dream, I saw how that could be a way for people to come together regularly and grow through using these practices. So I started Tantric Nights in 2008 and for me, that was the beginning of community around the work that I offer, because with Tantric Nights, all of a sudden people who were longing for more connection in their life, people who were longing for the feeling of community had a space that they felt safe, had a space where they could connect to others. So in some ways, my entry into community was a little bit of a happy accident, you could say. And so I have three visions of what I see is necessary for creating community. And so these three keys are to have a shared vision. So for me when I created Tantric Nights, the vision was to create a space for people to connect for people to feel for people to be able to share experiences with others. And it turns out that a lot of other people had a similar vision of wanting to have that experience. I’m used to being somebody who does a lot of things alone and being an entrepreneur. There’s that sense of Oh yeah, I know how to do this, and I’ll do it solo. Tantric Nights grew really quickly, like my very first event, I had 12 people there, and within six months I had 80 people there. And so pretty soon I was going I need Help for this event. It’s no longer a one person event. So very quickly, I realized that I needed a team around me to support me. And that building of a team around the work, gave other people a sense of being able to step in, because people felt what it was that I was offering. And people wanted to be part of that. If your vision is strong, other people will come to you and go, yes, I have a similar vision. And I would love to be part of what you’re creating. Now, I’ve had a lot of people coming towards me over the years with similar visions. Not all of them share my values. So I have values around responsibility, integrity, growth, expansion, being of service, and another of the values we have at Tantric Blossoming is why to be that sense of the joy of life, that joy that comes from serving others. So for me to say yes to collaborating with somebody to say yes to somebody being part of our team, they also need to share our values.

Martina Hughes: And then, of course, we live in this world where technology is changing things really, really fast. Online communities are popping up all the time. Social media is changing the flavor of the world. So it’s very important as an entrepreneur, creating a community to stay tuned in to make sure the vision stays current. Because when I started tantric knights, the vision was very much around creating space for connection. But also I was in a period of growth then, within a few years, people started asking me for retreats, people started asking me for training programs, and so part of having an effective community is listening to the people who are part of your community, listening to what they want, what they need, what they’re expecting. And having that sense of there being dialogue that’s not just from leader to participants and team members, but actually conversations that are between participants, between team members, but also coming back to facilitators and leaders. So the conversation needs to be able to go in all directions. And it’s been really, really effective for me to listen to the participants in our groups to have that sense of what they’re looking for what they need from us. And so then that led to me creating retreats, creating training programs, which have helped me to develop both as a woman as a facilitator and as a person. I remember a business mentor I had a few years ago. questioning me on my vision. And I was going through a period of time where my vision was a little bit wobbly, and kind of going, ah, I’ll go with the flow kind of going through one of those spiritual phases where it’s like, I’m just going with the flow, and I’ll see what happens next. And I remember my business mentor saying to me, would you get in a plane with a pilot who didn’t have a clear vision of where he was going to take you and I went, okay, good point, good point. And so at that stage, I went back and revisited my vision. And in revisiting my vision, getting really clear that I want to empower men and women to live the most authentic life possible. Because for most of us, we’ve been on the receiving end of conditioning. We’ve been on the receiving end of contraction since we were children. And a lot of people are leaving and feeling quiet, shot down quite painful. One of the common things I noticed when I talk to people is that most people live with this sense that something is missing in their lives, but they don’t actually know what is missing. Another big part of having a community that feels connected is shared risk, shared experiences, shared challenge. Our retreats are limited to 20 people. But in that way people have the sense of knowing that they can journey deeply in this retreat container, they can journey deeply with each other. Also on the element of risk with keeping our numbers limited, people feel safe. They’re taking a risk, they open their hearts, they share some of their painful stories. They share some of their joys, breakthroughs. They share about things that affect them deeply. So there’s an element of risk taking in the way people show up in our spaces. There’s certain advanced retreats where we asked people to get naked and dance so people to get naked and gaze into each other’s eyes. Most people say to me beforehand, there’s no way I’ll ever do that. I’m not getting naked in front of a group of people. But when they do it, it changes their world. Because what we’re most afraid of is being emotionally naked. Our clothes are really just the mask for hiding how we feel by hiding our fears, our anxiety, our joy. And so I can see a few interesting faces in the audience go, I would never do that.

Martina Hughes: But what I’ve seen is that after people have been naked together, And recognizing that it’s not actually a sexual experience. It’s not about getting naked, to have sex, to do things to each other but it’s taking a risk, it’s leaning into challenge together. It’s discovering new edges. And generally there’ll be at some point at which every newcomer looks around and goes, wow, this is really beautiful. And so much easier than I thought in my mind beforehand. It takes down a lot of our walls that takes down a lot of our barriers. Not saying that that has to be your recipe for your community to go and get people naked. But what risks and challenges might you build in? Like there’s personal development seminars where people walk across hot coals, and the sense of achievement of walking across hot coals gives people both the risk and the achievement of going somewhere. Also in our space, ritual is really important. I went to a seminar in the us a couple of years ago, which has a really strong community and they have a number of ritualized parts of the conference, where have an opening party and a closing party and certain other regular parts of it. So, ritual gives people that sense of our I come to the space and this is what I feel, this is what happens for me. So, ritual and those shared experiences take people deeper into themselves. And then what I see as the third key is a sense of belonging. The number one cause of depression is people not having a sense of belonging, not having a sense of belonging to family, to tribe, to community. And so the way we live nowadays, with people living individually rather than in extended family or not living in extended community space, it impacts people greatly. And so, at Tantric Blossoming, there’s an element in everything we do of showing people that we care whether it’s a private session, whether it’s a workshop or over trade or an online course, letting people know that we truly care and who they are as a person is valued by us. So that way, I have clients and community members who have been with me for say, 10 or 11 years. I might not see them for two or three years. But then all of a sudden, though, kind of hit a crisis point in their life, and they come back and they come back because they know that Tantric Blossoming provides that space of caring, that space where they can open they can grow. They can experience challenge, and new ways of being. Even in our online interactions though, if I’m running a zoom webinar, I’ll take time to check in with people, take time to see how people are feeling because that’s part of what’s missing in our online world today is people’s feelings are not being included. People’s feelings are not being allowed to take up space. So that element of caring is very much part of what we’re offering and it’s part of what has people feel like Tantric Blossoming is home for them. And it’s something that a lot of my regular clients and community members will say that when they come into the spaces with us, they feel like they’re home again. And on some level, all of us are longing for that feeling of home in our bodies, the feeling of what’s it like to be so comfortable that I feel at home in my own skin that I feel really happy and confident with who I am. And so I encourage all of you, as you’re working on your businesses and developing your community to have a look at what is the shared vision that you’re putting out there? Is that a vision that other people can easily step into and become part of? Are you creating opportunities for others to make a difference with you? Also, what are the experiences you’re creating for people? Do those experiences touch their hearts? Do those experiences challenge them? Do those experiences inspire them? In some way experiences what will make the difference in their life.? And are you cultivating a sense of belonging? Your community so that they know they have a tribe, they have a network, they have a support system behind them. If you work with those three keys, you’ll find a lot of fulfillment for yourself as well as for your community members. Thank you.

Serpil Senelmis: So a key takeaway therefrom Martina for startups and businesses is to know what your shared vision is, and whether you’re cultivating a sense of belonging. Thanks, Martina. Next time on Masters Series, work, life, balance does it really exist? For startups and entrepreneurs, the boundaries around work and life tend to blur. So we’ll explore some different approaches to getting the balance right. Until then, I’m Serpil Senelmis from Written and Recorded and the 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.