Grow A Small Business Podcast

In this episode, I interview Daph Crowhurst, the Managing Director at Crowies Paints, a fast-expanding retailer of paints. In 2019, Daph was named Telstra's SA Business Woman of the Year. She got into the industry by buying three paint stores in 1996 with her husband and they grew that to six stores until their divorce in 2011. Aged 52, she decided to keep the business and grow it. She started off by changing the business model and they now have 24 stores in four Australian states, with half of those being franchises. Crowies buys paint from manufacturers and sells it in both trade and retail. In 2011, most of their sales were coming from trade, but she focused their marketing and customer service on the retail channel, and now that forms the majority of sales. The business has grown from eight full-time employees in 1996 to the current sixty-five, including the twelve franchise stores. Sales have also swelled from $7 Million in 2011 to the current $27 Million a year. Daph has consistently funded the business entirely from profits and says the hardest thing about growing a small business is the hours required. The one thing she says she would tell herself on day one of starting out in business is, "Be brave" Stay tuned as Daph shares her awesome and successful small business ownership journey. This Cast Covers: Buying paint from manufacturers and retailing it to trade customers, painters, and retail customers. Why they have had an increase in business in most of their stores during the pandemic. How they started out with 5 stores and later on changed the business model to grow the business. Differentiating themselves from competitors by doing all the admin work, marketing/advertising, product research, and training for their franchisees. Implementing the no-asshole policy in their franchisee vetting process. Growing from 20 full-time employees to 65, and from $7 Million in sales to $27 Million. Thriving in the capital intensive paint business by bootstrapping purely from profits. Their success in marketing themselves as painting specialists. Growing their retail sales while also sustaining a stable growth in trade accounts. The importance of learning to be brave as a small business owner. Getting a great return on investment from traditional marketing. Appreciating her staff by always giving them the opportunity to step up to the next level and improve. Hiring for the personality without necessarily focusing on the skill too much. The value of building a culture founded on openness and honesty. Finding mentorship from some of her senior staff and suppliers. Additional Resources: Crowies Paints Music from https://filmmusic.io "Cold Funk" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com). License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

In this episode, I interview Emily Gowor, an inspirational writer, author, and speaker. Aged 19 in 2007, Emily launched her writing business, traveling around the world in her early 20s, writing an award-winning blog, staying with friends, and living on $22,000 a year in earnings. In her mid-20s, she settled back in Australia and doubled her revenue three years in a row to hit over $100,000 per annum, peaking at $249,000 when she was aged 27. At only 23, she was asked to write her first book and is now a writer, author, speaker, trainer, coach, and consultant. Emily's writings, projects, and speaking presentations have touched and moved thousands globally as she inspires people to reach for more. Her purpose-finding tool, the Inspiration Formula, is licensed to consultants around the world who are dedicated to showing clients a lasting glimpse of their destiny on Earth. As a winner of the 2012 and 2014 Anthill 30under30 Young Entrepreneur Award, Emily has been featured in a range of media sharing her inspirational messages. 70 to 80% of her sales are from training courses and coaching, and the rest are from speaking, and the eleven books she has published. She has launched over 25 online courses on writing and publishing books and building a business from zero to $100,000 a year as a coach. She has clients all over the world and has grown from one full-time employee to two (Spread across several contractors). Emily felt she had succeeded when a couple of moments she realized she didn't work for anyone. She highlights that the hardest thing about growing a small business is making sure the business is taking you in the direction of your purpose and your legacy. The one thing she says she would tell herself on day one of starting out in business is, "Don't you dare give up. Great things are coming" Please help me welcome, the very inspirational, Emily Gowor. This Cast Covers: Discovering that she wanted to do what she loved as a business. Getting the opportunity to edit a book for Dr. John DeMartini. Coaching people to have a life that they want and grow a six-figure career around their calling and their purpose. How her training in NLP at a young age shaped her writing and speaking career. Doubling her revenues three years in a row to get to a six-figure mark which she has sustained every year since. Her experience with publishing, promoting, and selling books. Starting out as one full-time employee and growing her team to include five to six different contractors. Doing different inspirational speaking engagements to empower people. Offering a diverse range of online training programs to serve clients worldwide. Succeeding at changing lives, loving it, and celebrating the various wins. How being in business empowers people to be the best versions of themselves. Identifying your target customers and basing your marketing on resonating with them. Starting solo and funding her business with hustle. Getting poor accounting advice, paying herself poorly, experiencing burnout, and how she dealt with it all by learning how to manage her money better. Working on herself and how it helped her take her business to where it is today. The importance of being authentic and the power of time blocking. The ease with which her team members understand her mission and vision. Maintaining work-life balance while making sure that the business you're growing is actually taking you in the direction of your purpose and legacy. Additional Resources: Emily's Website Profit First By Mike Michalowicz The Pumpkin Plan By Mike Michalowicz Clockwork By Mike Michalowicz Deep Work By Cal Newport The One Thing By Gary W. Keller and Jay Papasan Music from https://filmmusic.io "Cold Funk" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com). License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

In this episode, I interview Michelle Gallaher, a Melbourne-based award-winning entrepreneur, speaker, and advocate for the Australian health technology sector and for women in science, technology, engineering maths, and medicine (STEMM). As CEO of Opyl Ltd (ASX:OPL), a company working at the intersection of social media, clinical trials, health data, and artificial intelligence, Michelle is a sought-after mentor, collaborator, media commentator, and influencer particularly on the pace of advancement of emerging digital health technologies. After 25 years in Biotech, aged 48 in 2014 with a massive mortgage, she bootstrapped a business focusing on social media and healthcare. Three and a half years later in 2018, she sold to a listed company that did marketing in AI for $1 Million. She really wanted to get into the AI space and so after the sale, she stayed on as general manager and in early 2019, there was a significant strategic shift and the CEO left. She took over, rewrote the business plan within two weeks, and pivoted the business within seven months. The business started with two full-time employees and currently has six. Their first-year sales were $311,000 with a profit of $80,000 and the two founders paid themselves $26,000 each after leaving a $220,000 a year corporate salary. A year before selling, her business partner got sick and never returned. Michelle's father came in once a week for six weeks to help her with the restructuring and they grew their annual sales from $500,000 to $700,000 with a profit of just under $200,000. She put up her office across the road from her kids' school. Michelle recommends growing a business through collaboration and feels that she has not yet succeeded in business, but is killing it as a parent. She believes the hardest thing about growing a small business is cash management and says that the one thing she would tell herself on day one of starting out is, "Go hard" Stay tuned to gain from Michelle's wealth of small business growth wisdom. This Cast Covers: Solving the problem of recruiting people into clinical trials and the mining of social media for data that help inform healthcare strategy and forward development of new products and services for healthcare organizations. Enabling an environment where patients' voices are brought into the development of new healthcare technologies and clinical interventions. Monetizing their work by offering consultancy services and selling enterprise solutions. How she started the business, sold it three years later, and stayed on to manage it to date. The intricacies of how artificial intelligence technology works and how they use it. Pivoting from a social media consultancy to an AI-Based company that facilitates healthcare design, development, and delivery. Leaving a cushy corporate job to bootstrap with no capital injection at all. Why she feels she could have taken on an investor if she had to do it all over again. Being left to run the business solo after her business partner got very sick and couldn't help manage the business anymore. Selling the business at a million-dollar valuation. Shifting from a revenue-based business and pivoting into building out an intellectual property portfolio. Scaling the business by collaborating with a company in a similar space. Building a diverse team and implementing flexible workplace policies that ensure people enjoy coming to work. Not there yet with success in business but killing it as a parent. Success in seeing an idea coming to fruition and not getting too hung up on the idea of social proof. Why articulating what your value proposition is is key to succeeding in marketing. Leveraging R&D tax incentives and looking at government grants to raise gainful financing. The wonderful validation that comes from being listed at the ASX and the challenges that come with it. Spending a lot of money to generate revenue and then selling intellectual property to get investor funding that can be immediately allocated to more research and development. The level of expensiveness in terms of both time and money of being a listed company. Working on improving her skills in talent management by having more difficult conversations with her team members. Learning not to be affected by people not believing in her and to think fast to be able to evaluate where the business is at any one time. Meeting Ariane Huffington and learning the value of sleep and sleep hygiene. Being able to make all her decisions herself and fail without anybody watching. Shifting from a growth mindset to a transformational mindset. Consciously building on their culture on a daily basis and struggling to find some work-life balance. Trying not to tie her identity to the success of her business. Spending $100k on her professional development and how it has improved her strategic and core functional skills. The advantages of having a diverse board of directors. Additional Resources: Opyl Limited Value Proposition Design By Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Gregory Bernarda, and Alan Smith Manager Tools Podcast Difficult Conversation By Bruce Patton, Douglas Stone, and Sheila Heen The Goal By Eliyahu M. Goldratt Music from https://filmmusic.io "Cold Funk" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com). License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

In this episode, I interview Carissa Reiniger, the Founder, and CEO of Small Business Silver Lining, a company that helps more small business owners make money doing what they love by building more profitable and sustainable businesses. They believe strongly in the power of small business to generate sustainable economic development and to create economic justice. Their work has been featured in many publications and media outlets including the New York Times, Forbes, TechCrunch, National Post, Globe and Mail, Inc, Entrepreneur, CNN, and more. Carissa is also the Creator of the Thank You Small Business movement and regularly writes, speaks, and advises on small business. She started out in 2005, aged 22, and after accidentally firing herself from corporate. She initially did consulting in anything with the simple drive to help small businesses and soon after, she pivoted to an online training offering called Silver Lining Action Plan (SLAP). SLAP has now helped over 10,000 small businesses around the world. They later reduced their fees from $2,000 a month to $300, and their success rate has been 70 to 80%, which is measured on the goals the business owners set for themselves before starting their 13-Month program. From one full-time employee to now forty, her team is in 14 countries and went remote eight years ago before it was cool for Covid. Their next move is to offer small business lending lines based on SLAP behavior. For culture, they focus on team wellness, extra holidays, and an unlimited time away policy. When it comes to success, Carissa feels she has had moments of success but hasn't gotten there yet. She says that the hardest thing about growing a small business is juggling the complexity or volume of things to do. The one she says she would tell herself on day one of starting out in business is, "It's going to be okay. Pace yourself and don't do it alone" It's going to be a super resourceful episode if you're looking to grow your small business, so don't forget to tune in. This Cast Covers: Working with small businesses to help them grow by helping individual small business owners become more profitable and sustainable. Facilitating the creation of opportunities for families, jobs, communities, and the economy. Moving from a subscription model charging $300 a month to a pay-what-you-can model during the pandemic. How their current business model is helping them grow their customer base and help more businesses. The advantage of having a scalable software-as-a-service model. Saving the business by cutting some of their costs and from SLAP experts donating their time. The backstory of how she came up with the SLAP methodology. Working with 10,000 small businesses in over 20 countries and the metrics they track to keep growing the business and its impact. Starting out as the only full-time employee to the current eighteen full-time staff and some freelancers and contractors. Why tracking against top-level revenue and team count may not be the best way to measure business growth. The value of decreasing their overheads to get their price point down. How their profit margin grows with the growth in customer base while their overheads don't grow that much. Enjoying moments of reminders that her hard work has been paying off. Doing marketing that is helpful, valuable, authentic, and not spinny Making a decision not to take VC money to maintain their focus on making an impact. Encouraging small business owners to raise funding from selling products and services and taking equity financing as an option of last resort. Giving unsecured loans at fair interest rates based purely on business owners' SLAP behavioral data. Learning to be vulnerable and asking for help in difficult times. Working hard rounding herself and learning to be a better manager. Seeing that something she created out of nothing is now a huge machine that employs people and helps lots of small businesses. Going remote years before Covid hit and how that has helped her find great team members. Building a culture that focuses more on team wellness. Spending tens of thousands of dollars on personal development and continuous learning. How she has benefitted from being intentional about building a network of incredible mentors and coaches. Juggling the complexities of the many hats a small business owner has to wear. Learning from other people who have valuable expertise to share. Additional Resources: Carissa's Website Small Business Silver Lining Integrity by Dr. Henry Cloud The Modern Manager Podcast with Mamie Kanfer Stewart MasterClass Music from https://filmmusic.io "Cold Funk" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com). License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

In this episode, I interview Craig West, the Founder, and CEO of Succession Plus, author, keynote speaker, strategic adviser, and leading authority on Succession and Employee Share Ownership Plans (ESOP). Craig is a strategic accountant who has over 25 years' experience advising business owners. His background as a CPA in public practice has provided invaluable experience in the key issues of concern to business owners. Following 6 yrs of study to gain two master's degrees, Craig focused on Capital Gains Tax (CGT) for business sales advising on strategic management of taxation issues in exit planning. This experience formed a very strong view that the majority of business owners (and often their advisers) were unprepared and unaware of the steps required to prepare for exit. Craig then designed and documented a unique process to assist owners and their advisers prepare for exit. He now acts as a strategic business and financial mentor for mid-market business owners. He has written four critically acclaimed books educating business owners on employee incentives, succession planning, asset protection, and exit strategies. Craig has conducted numerous seminars and keynote presentations throughout Australia and internationally. In March 2014, Craig was appointed Chairman of the SME Association of Australia, an organization focused on improving the success of SMEs in Australia, and in October of the same year, he was awarded the Exit Planner of the Year by the Exit Planning Institute in Texas, USA. The award was as a result of his innovative development of a 21 step exit planning process to help business owners maximize business value and achieve a successful exit. His proprietary structure - a Peak Performance Trust - has won the Australia-wide award for the ESOP of the Year twice in four years. Don't miss this episode as Craig comes on to share highly valuable expertise with you. Enjoy! This Cast Covers: Becoming an exit planning expert because he hated being an accountant. The importance of small business owners learning how to extract the value of their businesses. Giving people a better understanding of ESOPs (Employee Share Ownership Plans) How ESOPs contribute to a 7% to 23% improvement in business performance. Developing a simple way to explain, design, and implement an ESOP in a business. The great return a small business owner can get from investing in the implementation of an employee share ownership plan. Getting small incremental amounts of money out of your business each year by selling part of the business to your employees. The popular business exit method where employees can end up owning the business they work for. The reward of equity in a business versus a cash reward. Implementing a succession strategy sooner rather than later to allow for a proper exit over time. Avoiding the "Us and Them" way of doing things to ensure the growth of your business and how ESOPs can help. How an employee share plan in a professional service firm can work to lock in employees and incentivize them to perform better. The Win-Win-Win model he focuses on when designing an ESOP for a business. Committing to getting your ESOP to keep your employees, improve their performance, and get a great return in both the short and long term. The value of getting clear on what your exit strategy is before you start and build your business. How to cash in at the end to fund your retirement or your next venture. Additional Resources: Succession Plus Build It By Craig West The E-Myth Revisited By Michael E. Gerber Incentivising Employees By Ann O'Connell, Ian Ramsay, and Ingrid Landau Ownership Thinking By Brad Hams Music from https://filmmusic.io "Cold Funk" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com). License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

In this episode, I interview Mellissa Larkin, the Founder, and CEO of Peripheral Blue, a company that has been disrupting the way companies receive legal and consulting services by giving clients access to top tier, responsive legal and advisory services in a flexible and affordable way. Peripheral Blue provides legal advice and business advisory services to clients of all sizes including SMEs and ASX 200 companies across a broad range of industries including health, energy, IT, construction, rail, hospitality, food, and manufacturing. Mellissa is responsible for recruiting and managing PB Lawyers, Law Clerks, PB Consultants, and support staff. As well as developing and refining the strategic growth plans for the business. She was the 2020 Telstra Business Women's Awards Winner, a 2019 Telstra Business Awards Finalist, and a finalist in the Women in Law Awards in two categories: Innovator of the Year (Individual) and Wellness Advocate of the Year. After 20 years in corporate law in 2016 aged 38 and with three young kids, she started a new type of law firm to disrupt the market. Questioning what value juniors gave to clients when they were being charged to clients to effectively learn on the job, the company only has highly efficient and experienced lawyers with 20+ years in the game. Mellissa started as the one full-time employee and they're now up to nine, and sales have grown 267% year on year over the four years. The business has been funded entirely from profits. They are obsessive about culture and changed theirs to a collaborative one, not competitive amongst colleagues for billable work, putting value for clients front and center. Mellissa felt they had succeeded when they won their first big piece of work then won a large old client. She feels the hardest thing about growing a small business is accepting the risks and making it happen. The one thing she says she would tell herself on day one of starting out in business is, "You can do this" Please join me in welcoming Mellissa Larkin from Peripheral Blue in beautiful Adelaide, Australia. This Cast Covers: Disrupting the legal and consulting service industries in Australia by doing things differently to deliver great value to clients. Fostering more collaboration and changing their culture to achieve more efficiency. Creating a business model that invests heavily in building solid and long-term relationships. The challenge they had explaining their new way of doing things in a way that clients could connect with. Their genuine and authentic attitude towards helping their clients and how it worked in their favor in terms of customer attention and conversion. How taking the first six months of the law firm to build on the new concept helps in ensuring the firm's success. Transitioning to business ownership and the difficulty she had in breaking the mindsets and habits of working in corporate. Starting from zero to sustaining a 267% growth year on year while maintaining a great culture From one full-time employee to nine within just four years. The big moment when she realized that her firm could go for the big commission corporate work. The importance of being clear on who your client avatar is and what your messaging is. Hiring top-tier trained lawyers who have worked in-house or for the government. Funding the business from her own funds and growing it purely from cash flow. Pushing herself out of her comfort zone to learn about marketing and selling. The stress of making the necessary decisions and risks to facilitate growth. Learning how to say no, prioritize her time, and value herself and her team. Putting systems in place, being disciplined, and setting goals. How bringing in two of her law school mates eased the hiring process. Understanding what drives and motivates people as part of their focus on wellbeing and culture. How she goes about seeking her own form of work-life balance. Investing in learning about marketing, social media, selling, brand development, and public speaking. How powerful LinkedIn is for a professional services company. Additional Resources: Peripheral Blue Deep Work By Cal Newport Secrets of Closing the Sale By Zig Ziglar Sell Like Crazy By Sabri Suby Music from https://filmmusic.io "Cold Funk" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com). License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

In this episode, I interview Michelle Dale, the Founder, and CEO of Virtual Miss Friday and 1nSourcing™, the alternative virtual assistant service for digital entrepreneurs. Virtual Miss Friday is an online business consultancy and academy with built-in virtual assistant services while 1nSourcing is a service that specializes in serving 6 and 7 figure business owners. Originally from the UK, Michelle traveled a bit then settled in Cairo, Egypt. Aged 24 in 2005 and sick of selling Eqyptian rugs on eBay, she pivoted to become a virtual assistant. 5 years later, earning $500,000 a year as a virtual assistant, she pivoted again to online courses and now teaches people to create their own online businesses, and build and leverage remote teams for 1nSourcing social media, website building and maintenance, customer service, and content creation. By the end of 2010, 10% of revenue came from training courses which is now 60% with 30% coming from services, 10% from affiliate revenue, and the rest from her team. With her team having once peaked at 25 full-time employees, she now has 10 and has grown the business purely from profits. Michelle says she felt she has succeeded when people were asking her for help and advice. Trying not to give up at the toughest times is what she finds to be the hardest thing about growing a small business. The one thing she says she would tell herself on day one of starting out in business is, "Don't give up" Ladies and gentlemen, please help me welcome Michelle Dale. This Cast Covers: From providing virtual assistant services to teaching people how to create online businesses or take their existing businesses online. Selling her services through a role-based system that ensures business owners get all the support they need to succeed. Training people to become virtual assistants, build their own team, go into consulting, and sell digital products and services. Transitioning from getting all her revenue from services to create new income streams from training, affiliates, and her team. Booking a one-way ticket from the UK and settling in Egypt where she built an online business and eventually got into virtual assistant services. Starting from $0 to hitting 6 figures, scaling fast, and hiring full-time team members. Focusing more on digital products to get more flexibility and streamline operations. Earning $20,000 a month as a virtual assistant while traveling all around the world and how that inspired people to become virtual assistants. Achieving happiness and fulfillment as a small business owner. The importance of personal one-on-one interaction in marketing. How using Bonjoro to send customized video messages to her customers has helped her grow her business. Plowing back profits to build the business without external funding. Growing during the recession by maintaining a positive mindset. Navigating the tough business environment brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic and thriving through it all. Working on herself, her mindset, and her confidence to add the greatest value to the business. Overcoming stress from making mistakes and learning from those mistakes. Learning that sometimes one can't control everything. Advising every small business owner to maintain a good self-development ritual. Hiring and training different types of people from different countries. Putting pride aside and asking for help from more experienced people. Traveling, running the business, raising a family, and still achieving work-life balance. Going from $0 to $20,000 right after completing Yaro Starak's Blog Mastermind Course. Additional Resources: Virtual Miss Friday 1nSourcing™ Crush It By Gary Vaynerchuk Music from https://filmmusic.io "Cold Funk" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com). License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

In this episode, I interview Emily Osmond, an international marketing coach, speaker, and podcast host. She is the founder and editor of Australian interiors blog GetinMyHome. Her podcast, The Emily Osmond Show, shares practical strategies and candid real stories of entrepreneurs to help other entrepreneurs make marketing, mindset, and money their superpowers. Aged 27, she left the marketing world in corporate five and half years ago to start a consulting business focusing on branding, strategy, and website design. She had the idea to try providing online courses and hasn't looked back. She launched her first course within a few weeks of having the idea back in mid-2018. She now has 500+ students in more than 10 countries and banked $40,000 in the first year of selling the courses. In 2019, she grew that to $200,000 compared to the $100,000 she made in her first year of providing consultancy services. The courses have grown 214% in the last six months since April 2020. She has one and half full-time employees, has funded the business purely from savings, and spent $60,000 on professional development in the last five years. Emily has worked hard on pricing and her mindset to be able to shift to then succeed with online courses. She felt she had succeeded when early in 2020 she checked the Stripe bank account and was able to reduce her work hours. Emily believes the hardest thing about growing a small business is, "Mindset, backing yourself, knowing there is no manual, and trusting yourself" The one thing she says she would tell herself on day one of starting out in business is, "You can if you think you can" Stay tuned and enjoy! This Cast Covers: Starting out a service-based business and later shifting the business model to run on her online programs. Building a business out of her passion for running workshops and teaching business owners how they can do their own marketing. From $100,000 a year in revenue to $200,000 a year solely from the online programs with four additional income streams. Working with a team of skilled professionals on a part-time basis to boost the profits of the business. The lessons she learned from the challenges she went through with pricing. Working predominantly with women who run home-based businesses that are in their first 3 years of operation. Using a combination of content marketing, Facebook ads, and podcasting to market her business and build her audience. What the Emily Osmond Show is all about and where it's currently at. Maintaining a 6 to 10% churn rate for her online programs by studying exactly what causes people to exit and coming up with ways to solve the highlighted issues. Currently having 400 students paying every month with over 600 students having gone through her programs. The immense benefits of using Kajabi to sell her online programs. How to upload your customers' email addresses into Facebook and use that to figure out your target audience. Starting the business with her own cash and growing it from profits. Being trapped in the mindset of what other people were doing successfully and how she got out of it to just do her own thing. The power of mindset and boundaries when running an online business. Having to make decisions in the business and the pressures that come with it. Overcoming the belief that she was not good at numbers to figure out all the numbers related aspects of her business. Hiring people who free up her time so she can focus on her core business activities. Achieving work-life balance by specifically building her business to allow her to have a low number of working hours. Uplevelling her skills and building lots of great relationships from spending $60,000+ on her personal development. Working less in the business by setting up systems and trusting others to run things. Additional Resources: Emily Osmond The 4-Hour Work Week By Tim Ferris Online Marketing Made Easy Podcast Goal Digger Podcast Music from https://filmmusic.io "Cold Funk" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com). License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

In this episode, I interview Bob Moesta, the Founder, President, and CEO of the Re-Wired Group. The Re-Wired Group specializes in Demand-Side Innovation and they help companies and individuals grow by enabling innovation from the Demand-Side; Changing buying and consumption behavior. They identify, design, and execute marketing, selling, and buying systems for growth and focus on fast, high-impact actions that lead to immediate results, growth, and insight. Their approaches, methods, frameworks, and software have helped companies grow more than 20% when their current market was down more than 50%. Bob is a founder, maker, innovator, speaker, and now a professor, and he enjoys making innovation more predictable and successful for entrepreneurs and enterprise leaders. Among the principal architects of the Jobs to be Done theory in the mid-90s along with Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen, Bob has continued to develop, advance, and apply the innovation framework to everyday business challenges. He is a fellow at the Christensen Institute and has worked on and helped launch more than 3,500 new products, services, and businesses across nearly every industry, including defense, automotive, software, financial services, and education, among many others. The Jobs to be Done theory is just one of 25 different methods and tools he uses to speed up and cut costs of successful development projects. He is a guest lecturer at The Harvard Business School, MIT Sloan School of Entrepreneurship, and Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. He is an entrepreneur at heart and engineer and designer by training. He has started, built, and sold several startups. Bob started out as an intern for Dr. W. Edwards Deming, father of the quality revolution, and worked with Dr. Genichi Taguchi extensively. He traveled to Japan and learned first-hand many of the lean product development methods for which so many Japanese businesses, including Toyota, are known. A lifetime learner, he holds degrees from Michigan State University and Harvard Business School. He has studied extensively at Boston University's School of Management, MIT School of Engineering, and Stanford University's "D" School. Stay tuned to gain from Bob's wealth of expertise on matters demand-side sales and it will definitely help you change the growth trajectory of your small business upwards. This Cast Covers: Starting seven companies and letting other people run them once they top $50 Million. Moving away from managing more people and selling to focus more on doing work. From engineer to helping people in the defense and food industries build products, to becoming a highly successful serial entrepreneur. Continuous learning to gain horizontal skills that helped him communicate with the right people. His guest lecturing work and how his books are helping educate future innovators. Starting the entire sales process by understanding why people buy in the first place. Demystifying what Demand-Side sales is all about and why it's important when growing a small business. The value of understanding the forces of progress. Translating the three motivations of progress into the dimension of product. A great example of how powerful Demand-Side sales can be for a business. Innovating by learning enough fast enough and focusing on the things you struggle with by either eliminating them or figuring out new ways to them. The importance of realizing that sales is much about timing and listening that it is about you as the business owner. Learning to understand demand instead of getting obsessed with pushing a product. Additional Resources: The Re-Wired Group Dark Horse By Todd Rose The End of Average By Todd Rose How to Fly a Horse By Kevin Ashton Little Red Book of Selling By Jeffrey Gitomer Music from https://filmmusic.io "Cold Funk" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com). License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

In this episode, I interview Kym Power, the Founder of Rejuvenators Health Massage, Australia's largest professional mobile massage company. Kym passionately believes in holistic wellness, self-care, and taking personal responsibility for one's health and life success. In 1993, aged 21, she quit hairdressing for the love of providing massages. Now 27 years later, her mobile massage business is in all states and territories except Tasmania. They provide massage and beauty services in rooms mainly in 800 4 or 5 star hotels such as the Stamford, Pullman, Novotel, Mecure, Meriton, Rydges, Adina, Mantra, Pan Pacific and Park Royal Hotels to name just a few. They also help celebrities on tour such as Lady Gaga, Richard Branson, Matthew McConaughey, and Russell Brand. Kym started the business as the one full-time employee earning $20,000 in the first year, which was more than she was earning as a hairdresser. She now has nine full-time employees at her head office with around 100 independent contractors providing their services. Their pre-covid annual sales was around $2 Million. Kym recommends putting in good systems, procedures and training because that allows her to take three months a year off and travel overseas. Her only external business funding was a $5,000 car loan when she was starting out, and from there she funded the business purely from profits. She really struggled to find work-life balance earlier on but now feels she has it at the right place. She felt she had succeeded when she found things doing better and she was actually helping people. To her, the hardest about growing a small business is self-sabotage. She says that the one thing she would tell herself on day one of starting her business is, "It's harder than what I think, but it's worth it" Stay tuned and be inspired. This Cast Covers: Running a mobile massage company that operates all across Australia. Starting from very humble beginnings 27 years ago to build a successful business. From being clueless on pricing when she started out to growing the annual revenues up to $1 Million. Building a strong team of 80 to 100 independent contractors and up to 8 contract employees. Getting success from refining things all the time and finding ways to do them better and smarter while consistently helping more people. Being able to step away from the business and having it run well by itself. Marketing the business by forming strong and lasting business partnerships. Self-funding the business from the get-go and how that has worked out for her. How being creative and big-picture minded affected her ability to work on the numbers/financials. Having to fire sale her house to save the business from failure. Challenging herself and her beliefs so she could change her business mindset. The satisfaction of experiencing the positive impact that her business makes in people's lives. Going from being a sole therapist to bringing on other therapists to join her service delivery team. The importance of small business owners focusing on their overall health and wellness. The mistake she used to make by hiring people she liked and how she dealt with it. Successful Hiring 101: Hiring people who are really good in doing what you're hiring them for. Constantly changing things up in their culture to meet the demands and needs of employees. How she succeeded in finding work-life balance despite the challenges she was facing initially. Investing in tons of professional development and how it has impacted her life over the years. Self Sabotage: The one way that small business owners hinder themselves from growing their businesses. Using NLP techniques to clear her mindset of negativity and improve her productivity. The power of automation and outsourcing in growing a small business. Additional Resources: Kym's Website Rejuvenators Health Massage The E-Myth By Michael E. Gerber The Barefoot Investor By Scott Pape Music from https://filmmusic.io "Cold Funk" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com). License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/