Six critical steps to a 7 figure business with Cat Goodwin from Getting Lost
Cat has taken her travel card game Getting Lost from blog to big business- picking up many accolades along the way including Excellence in Marketing award at the 2degrees Auckland Business Awards. This year they've been featured on Seven Sharp, 1 News, The Spinoff and even on the back of buses!
In this interview Cat shares about:
✅ The early stages of growth with Getting Lost and how they knew it was a product to back
✅ The strategies they used to bust through the growing pains and scale Getting Lost
✅ Her 6 tips to strategically building a 7 figure business
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welcome everyone I am so excited today because I have on the call with me cat Mcnaughton from Getting Lost cat has been
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a She Owns Member for a we while and I have to say sitting on the sidelines of
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watching the growth of this business has been quite exciting and really
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inspirational and just having a chat with cat before we jumped on this before we pressed go on the on the call-
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talking about Christmas coming up we've I've already had a couple of kind of Mic drop on the floor moments where
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I'm like oh my gosh our members are going to get so much from this call today and I'm really really grateful to
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you Cat for coming on the call with us and um sharing some of your knowledge and your journey with us um for those of
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you who don't know cat and getting lost um this year Well really this this year
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or the last year I mean it's you have seen consistent growth over the years haven't you but I think this year it's
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been recognized acknowledged um really noted um not just in New Zealand but
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internationally as well um so maybe you're starting to feel like okay it's all worth it and the hard work is worth
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it um but anyway I can't wait to dive into all of it with you and um and just
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hear some of your insights about business growth um welcome to the call ladies if you are new on the call we're
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just sort of getting started and um welcoming cat to the call apologies for the tech issues um and Cat just wanted
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to say huge welcome again and thank you so much for joining us well thank you for having me it's
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exciting yeah yeah so can I thought it would be really nice for for you for me
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to ask you to take us back to the beginning um of when you went because I
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know originally you were a blogger and then you um had the idea for getting
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lost um and you know a lot of our members are in those really early stages of business business and I just wanted
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to hear some of your insights around that those early stages and including how long ago was that now five years or
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longer or yeah it's longer than longer than five years um so five and a half years um and the blog actually started
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in 2014 um so if you take it right back to the Inception of getting lost we're
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almost 10 years old um which I think people forget you know we we kind of get treated like an overnight success and
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it's like no this is it's a long time coming and typically that's what you hear from most businesses that get that
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term overnight success is that they they're kind of anything back um so my
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background I am a strategist um and I spent 20 years working in ad agencies um
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on big Brands like the warehouse guy um various car brands liquor Brands all
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sorts of things um so and a a strategist is is probably the least useful person in an agency and that they don't
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actually produce anything they just kind of set the strategy um so and I had a couple of side hustles I had a
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photography uh business taking photos of babies which is was quite a departure but a a creative outlet and I'd had a
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series of of very insignificant blogs prior to that and um I reconnected with
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my um High School boyfriend um after divorcing from my husband I had two
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small children he had a daughter and um it kind of just seemed like there was a lot to write about so in 2014 it was the
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age of Facebook was huge people were making money out of blogging and so I thought right I'm I'm going to create a
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blog that kind of talks about the challenges of we had a five six and seven year old of raising small children
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and a blended family and kind of doing adventurous stuff so getting was was born out of that
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um four years later um we had an audience of 20,000 people um and the
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idea for the getting lost game came from our audience so um people always say oh you know we came up with the idea we
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didn't we never claim ownership of the getting lost game um the concept in itself is not unique people have been
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playing a Left Right game for forever you've all probably played it when you were kids um so people asked us how we
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found cool places like we were finding you know water holes that was kind of the the thing of getting lost was
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finding places that weren't talked about um and so we said well you just you kind of follow your nose and people like yeah
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but can you give us directions and we're like yeah this is the world that we're in is that everyone's conditioned to
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following Google to following bloggers like us um and being told where to go me
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so people want to be told but at the same time they want that sense of of Adventure and spontaneity so that's
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where the game came from um I had the idea for the game for probably about six
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months um before we launched it and it was kind of just percolating around um I
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like when I looked back it's like when you go you're so lucky I sat at a desk next to the CIO uh the head of strategy
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and who else was at my desk there was like all these like amazingly talented
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people and I'd sit there and rabbit on about I've got this idea like what do you guys reckon so I like I had a
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Powerhouse of insanely talented people that I was kind of unknowingly bouncing
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ideas off um and then two things happened my ex-husband stopped paying child support and um my boss didn't give
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me a pay rise and so I rage launched the game um I was really really angry at at
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having men kind of dictate how far I could get ahead and I'm like right I I feel like collectively you owe me
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$110,000 and so I set that as my sales Target figured out how to make it and
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launch the game um and yeah the the rest is kind of History so we um we literally
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sold out overnight um we made our Sal Target in six weeks um the the original
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and it's just it's been insane growth ever since wow can you take me back to
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that moment then with the L like what did you do to get that launch
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result well I mean I always say it's anything you do has to be audience lead
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so um and that comes from frustration of of working with big Brands where you have a established products that are
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launched for a variety of reasons and trying to retrofit to an audience um and feeling that frustration of if you just
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made a product that fitted your audience that would be so easy to sell um so we
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never really had huge problems selling um so it's always kind of like sold
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itself because we've had our audience involved and theyve kind of been the
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they were literally the Catalyst they were our feedback groups as we developed it um so when it came out they told all
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their friends and it's just it's always had that Viral kind of feel to it um in
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everything that we've done um so yeah so it did take us by surprise we kind of
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went well will anyone even like this want to play this who nice so um and you
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know little things that I obviously never run a business before um and so we didn't put stock controls on anything so
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when we woke up that next morning I didn't even check it um and went in around lunchtime and we said shut we've
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sold stuff and we don't have it what do we do and we were 3D printing um our cases
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back then and so I'm ringing my brother going sh I've sold all these cases how fast can you print these and he's like
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it's what we were printing like one every two hours or something ridiculous so he's like well stop for start a stop
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selling because it's going to take me a couple of days to actually even get what you've already sold so yeah yeah so
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crazy that is it's so crazy but also I think like really what you've done as
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well when you talk about it being audience Centric is that it's also a community it's a community connected
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through Travel and Adventure it kind of reminds me of mov at Mama they're a community connected through exercise she
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owns it a community connected through growth um or business um business growth
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one of those things both of those things those things um when you have a community doing the um doing the kind
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of um sorry just muting someone
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there when you have the community doing the work for you and telling other people about it and sharing about it it
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does just make things go kind of exponential quite quickly for you um but in saying that not everybody has that
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and but what would you say along that front like what about if someone is just they've got their product and they're
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out there and they know they've made some sales with it um so they know that some people want it but they're really
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feeling like they're feeling far between um what would your advice be given a
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sort of community building type angle yeah I think always go back to your audience so firstly that I would like
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knowing what I know now never launch a product without having audience involvement first and yeah we were
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really lucky that we we had 20,000 people we've now got 70,000 people so I like I have a a built-in panel that I
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can get instant feedback from and I use them all the time so um we I can't
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remember the number off the top of my head but we we put in one of our award entries I think was 30,000 comments that I read last year that is the biggest
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like social listening poll that you can have of instant feedback of your product of what's good what's bad what people
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like don't like like and you've got to be reading it all you can't have a moderator in there um but the other
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thing that we do is we research we run focus groups so we do Quantum Quil research um so do that if you don't have
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your own social media audience and you've got to be careful as well that your own audience you are operating
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slightly in a a bubble or a vacuum that you're you're talking to yourself um but
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yeah you you can recruit an audience um so you can use recruitment companies you pay about $300 per person get them in a
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room and talk to them um so because if if you're making
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decisions without talking to your audience who are you making the product for so that that is the like that's the
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really really big thing and and used to bug the hell out of me when I was in agency of of how many people would work
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on a product that they hadn't even touched themselves they hadn't talked to the people that were using it and you
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know it just happens all the time but yeah just get really super intimate with your audience yeah and I was actually
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listening list in to a podcast the other day um I can't remember who it was now it might have been I can't remember um
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and she was talking about how people when people talk about know your ideal customer um and she was saying the tri
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the not the trick but the link that a lot of people Miss is that they'll know their ideal customer they'll understand
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their pain points but what they don't look at is what compells them to
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purchase um and so what is it they're doing that is making them think oh yeah I want to get this and I want to get it
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now and you know from our conversation before um we started the call it's obviously for you it's like those big
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things that coming up Christmas time gift time all of those kind of things those things compel your ideal customer
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to purchase so you know um that those are the times you have to ramp up for and and just for everybody listening now
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can you share with the woman on the call what you were saying earlier about
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Christmas time and times of the year and income and all that kind of stuff yeah
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yes so um we and I last week we went into profit for the first time for the
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year um I think we're probably back out of profit now because we we just paid a whole bunch of stuff at the end of the
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week but that's really normal for us so we've been in business five years now so I I know this um and we are an
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incredibly seasonal business so we do 70% of our sales in six weeks um so from
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the first week of November to the middle of December um that's where it all happens and if it doesn't happen we fail
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like we're literally we fail we don't make enough money we can't order stock next year we can't pay staff next year
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we we literally that's it uh so for us we're looking at bringing in over a million dollars in the next four
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weeks so because we're already two weeks into it so it is crazy numbers so um and
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everything we have done all year is building up to this point so all of our new product development is done that's
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all done in the first six months of the year because we also have a a really busy time at father Mother's Day um all
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of our trade shows are done all of our relationships are built we figured out um how much hopefully how much stock we
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need um we've done all of the development stuff so basically by the time we hit first well by the time we
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hit 23rd of October is our go date there is everything has to be locked in place
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because we are like we're too busy getting orders out so down down the road so our office is just around the corner
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there's seven people right now packing orders and and getting everything out so um we're currently tracking about 400
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orders a day um and that'll just keep growing so it's just my role now as as
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operational as troubleshooting as just getting things done I am no we're not
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planning we're not doing anything so if you haven't got it done by now it's not going to but it took us a long time to
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to know that about our business um because you you need Trends and you need data so yeah my background obviously
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strategy and also insights um so data is key like for everything just collect as
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many data points as you can because it knowledge is power so I have a little
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book um and I'll go back to my last year so what I do at the end of each year is
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I do like a post analysis of what worked and what didn't work and then and I
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write notes write notes to myself for the next year so if you guys can see that so that's my learnings for 2023
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um so I go through analyze all the data takes me about a week um and then I just
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check back on that constantly to go okay am I doing those things like making sure that I'm waiting Australia and New
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Zealand properly um I'd put my read myself a note here don't freak out when
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June and July are down and don't over invest it's all about brand awareness and building preference at this time so
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I'm literally like telling myself the next year okay you this up this year don't do it next year so yeah I
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love that so when you say it took about a week to do that that's obviously around all the other stuff that you're
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doing in your business but I thought or or or do you literally you have a week and you just go this is my thinking week
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my planning week my creative week am I getting my head in the game for the next year week what's the sort of approach
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with that yeah so I've got into a little bit of a a habit so um my husband's
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parents have a batch um at YT Bay the kids are off doing stuff my kids to teenagers now so they're off doing stuff
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so I just bring my laptop up and I sit at the beach for a week and um reflect
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on what happens and set my targets for the next year so that's literally the first week of January um and that's what
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I do so um we have in the past sh getting lost um over those two weeks I
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we're not this year um because one of the things that we learned is that we're actually our own handbreak um which is a
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really interesting thing um but yeah all yeah um so yeah so I I sit there and and
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I do that because it's really important because it's top of mind right then you can look back at the data and the trends
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we analyze all of our promotional windows we you know we look at Trends and what customers are doing what um
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lifetime value is doing where people are coming from we have a a propensity model that we've built to um which is a
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worldwide propensity model which tracks um across 17 different variables things
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like car ownership safety scores um proximity to Coastline a whole bunch of
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things that predicate How likely they are to buy one of our games so that we can map where we go in the future um so
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our business is incredibly driven by data and that requires quiet time to be able to map that and yeah get it thought
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it yeah and I think for the people who've got small businesses and they're just starting out that can feel really
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really hard carving out that time for planning um in the early stages when it
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was just you and you didn't have so many kind of um resources to tap into I guess
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um what did it look like for you then in terms of making stuff happen and
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continually getting the results like I know you say people just you know they
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they did they were attracted to the product you built the community the sales just naturally happen but if you
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never posted on social media if you never put it out there at all then it's
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not automatically going to happen like you do have to be sharing the invitation
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to buy the product with the world in order to get the result um and I know a
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lot of people something that holds them back is that they're actually just too scared to tell people about what they're selling and they're going to feel pushy
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and um and so just thinking back to those early stages again and when you
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are getting all of those systems and and consistency of sales and planning and
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everything done what did your how did you approach it uh chaotic and and like
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completely without any plan or strategy um so this was it it was never intended
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to be this we weren't intending to have an export we weren't intending to have more than one game we weren't intending
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any of it I was intending to make $10,000 to Reco the the money that I
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thought that my ex-husband and or boss should have paid me um so we we had no plan and the only thing that saved me is
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that I am a strategist by trade I know a lot of this stuff instinctively um so
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all the planning that I should have done on paper um I kind of knew by by gut
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feeli so that saved me a little bit um but literally for the first three years
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um we we winged it 100% it is a miracle that we grew the way that we grow um and
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we shouldn't have so um I remember being interviewed by Jesse migan and he's like it's like you're getting lost in
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business and I'm like yeah it it actually is um and not in a good way um
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it was like it is was not a way to run a business we were um I can't remember if
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I said it to you before or on this call so we've never gone into debt with getting lost um the only well sorry when
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we started we did we invested $3,000 of Our Own money uh but we've always said that we're going to be cash flow
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positive and we're not even going to put ourselves in a position where we may lose our house money because of this um
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so that's meant that our decisions are relatively safe even though they're really freaking spur of the moment um so
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I kind of like and so last year was was our really pivotal year it was the year
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where we went okay we'd grow to a we were a $300,000 business when we
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launched literally accidentally overnight into the states off the back of a viral post and I called PWC because
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they were the biggest accounting firm I knew and I thought well they'll have officers internationally and met up with
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this guy Mike and he was like look see if you can grow it to a million dollar business and I'm like right I'm going to
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need a little bit of rger around this so that was the the first time that we put a plan in place and we put that plan in
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place we went from a $300,000 business to a million dollar business in less than 18 months um so wow the plan was
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right the plan was good we needed to do that but I liken it to like when we
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launched you know people say you know um make the product while flying we did that we made tweaks and stuff that's the
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if you follow that analogy through what I I kind of like in this to is we were
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cruising at 20,000 ft it was clear blue skies um he happy passengers and we
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decided to dismantle the plane so there was nothing imminently wrong we were
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making money um everything was good except that it wasn't um so we had
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inconsistently we gone from one product to 20 products um and we hadn't thought about how that locked across a range it
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was really disconnected and messy from a consumer perspective our pricing was inconsistent um our marketing was
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inconsistent I was still doing a lot of it myself which a strategist should not be doing it it themselves um so we we
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basically had to pull every single part of our business apart while trading as a
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million dollar export business um which is is petrifying but something that I
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would recommend that people actually do um because if you grow as fast as we did
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the likelihood is that that what that million-dollar business looks like is not the business you would have created
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if you had have known that it was going to be a million-dollar business selling around the world what do you mean when you say that
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that you mean it yeah can you expand on that yeah so I mean like I'll give you a
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really a good example so when we launched we had one game um and it was
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Direction game and we sold it in a suitcase and we sold her in a cardboard box and the suitcase was our Deluxe
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version and the cou box was our Standard Version um then we started adding in
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other things we added in a summer edition a winter Edition a Walkers Edition a a whatever else um we kept the
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what is now known as the adventurers Edition called The Standard Edition uh because it had always been the standard
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edition and we just had never actually stepped back and thought someone coming in cold to our business what the hell is
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the standard edition there was no more deluxe edition it was just something that we called it from day dot and and
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it's funny some of our retailers still call it standard edition and some of our original customers but it means nothing
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but it meant at the time it meant something but you've got to regularly sit back and and take yourself out of
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your view of it and look at it from a customer View and go does this make
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sense is this it might have it might have even made more sense if it was like the original or something like that
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exactly exactly the standard is just like minimum viable product kind of
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maybe that's right yeah but small changes like that make a massive difference but you've actually got to to
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step back I mean we changed everything we changed the materials that we um made our our um boxes out of we went from um
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3D printing to injection molding and and then we changed the material that we use with our injection molding because they were're melting in cars which is not
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ideal for a car-based game um so you know we we've had to do a whole bunch of
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like continual change and and I think that's the thing you've got to be listening to your customers and not
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afraid to go okay so we did it this way but this way is we thought it was optimal but it's not and we're going to
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change so you you've just got to be really unafraid of changing things yes
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and so what would you say to someone who's got a product that they're not selling enough of um what would
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you what would your recommendation be talk to your customers yeah um so yeah
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figure out what they doing don't like like we so um I I know what my net
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promoter score is um I know what my customer satisfaction scores are you know um research all those things like
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don't be afraid of of negative feedback and if it's not right don't be afraid to
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make like drastic changes we like we really killed some of our Darlings we um
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launched a board game back in relatively early days of getting lost someone um
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complained about that the G that they got they thought that it was something that they would be able to play at home
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and we're like well no it's it's a real world game and we had a mentor at the time they're like well why don't you make it that' be really cool turning a
25:08
customer complaint into a product and I'm like oh I don't really know if it fits with our brand and they were like I
25:14
will give it a try and I'm like yeah okay and we researched it and it it had good feedback and we made 10,000 of them
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and it was an absolute dog it was like it's the only game that we've ever lost
25:25
money on um and I I still have whole bunch of I'm sitting in in my wardrobe
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but the learnings that we got out of it and the reasons why um people didn't like it it was really valuable in
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helping set what our brand actually is so people got instantly confused they're like well what so now are they all at
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home games or are they like you know we had a real niche of it's a game you play in the real world and suddenly we bought
25:50
in a a home Edition and it just really mecked with what people thought of our
25:55
like thought our brand was um so the actual brand rub that that product was having on the rest of our products was
26:02
so detrimental that it was like for the few people that would like it it's just like no and again trust your gut my gut
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was that is not our brand and I should have stuck with that but
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yeah that's really interesting and just I love that reflection on you have to be
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prepared to change I always like to say the path might change but the dream Remains the Same and and the dream might
26:30
just be that you want a successful business because I always say to people like i' i' give selling shoes a go or
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you know lamps or hes or to me the passion behind business is learning how
26:45
to grow the business it's not that I'm so stuck on one certain product that if
26:51
I'm not able to sell it I I'm like um freeze and can't continue to move
26:58
forward with growth like you have to be able to be agile with what you're offering so that you can respond to what
27:06
um customers want but also as you said stay in your lane might become known for something that's really clear and simple
27:13
and easy I really love that insight as well um and so and and I also just
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wanted to reflect for those of you who are listening are thinking gosh you know it's a big business and they're super
27:25
successful and um I'm not there yet um if that's you just
27:32
a reflection as well on that you know I've had a seven figure business and it was probably the most miserable ever
27:39
been in my life like the stress of the team and the um just just the level and
27:48
then also the level of failure as well like if it went wrong and it it feels very public and um I don't know there
27:56
was just it was most mostly though the stress of the team and actually of course as the founder I was paying
28:01
myself the least so everybody else it was almost like everybody else thought
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it was a business that had unlimited resources to spend on marketing and
28:13
ideas and staff bonuses and all of these things and I was still like
28:19
bootstrapping it and being like you guys it actually takes a heck of all of hard
28:24
work and risk and commitment to get to this point and when when other people haven't had
28:31
the um what's the word skin in the game they they they're much more kind of
28:37
loose with spending I think that's what it was so I used to find that really really stressful and just the emotional
28:43
um commitment of leading a team and I mean you don't have um investors but I
28:50
can't imagine what it must be like certainly I've heard from a lot of well-known very successful New Zealand
28:57
entrepreneurs have taken investors on and actually suffered pretty serious depression and mental health issues
29:04
because of the stress that comes from everybody else and the lack of support for the founder um so it's not an easy
29:12
thing to do you know the business might grow but the challenges just change don't they like it it nothing suddenly
29:20
changes when you get to that level of success and all of a sudden you're
29:25
sitting in the pool on a Flo sipping bubbles in Fiji or something like that
29:31
like it's just it's not realistic to believe that that's how the growth joury is it's just a different stage of growth
29:38
and a different experience at that level yeah I think it's surrounding yourself with good people um so I work with my
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sister um so she so probably not a lot of people know
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this but I only um joined getting lost fulltime um four months ago um um so and
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we were already well past being a million dollar business so we'll be a $2 million business this year and we have
30:04
aspirations to well aspirations are interesting we we have a plan to 10 million um I just haven't decided
30:11
whether which road we're going to go whether we want to grow to a $4 million business or a 10 million uh but that's
30:16
the thing with having a goal is that you have that so my sister has been on board
30:22
since probably about three years um so and so she would run things and I would
30:28
go off to my day job because advertising pays really well it's really hard to to
30:33
to quit a a job that is is paying that much um so and then last year we hired
30:39
my cousin as well so um I work with with my family which is amazing um and both
30:45
of them have grown into the roles that they have within the organization um and
30:51
I would 100% recommend doing that hire people that you want to work with and train them into the right roles
30:58
um versus hiring people that are on paper right for the roles but maybe don't have that right fit um because
31:05
I've I've never had that like when like the experience you described that is
31:10
totally alien to me because we are like so tight um if like I win an award we
31:17
win an award if you know we share our I share all the sales um we are like 100%
31:23
in it together um and I wouldn't want to do it without them um likewise we
31:30
employed 20 teenagers um so and another four adult staff um on a casual basis so
31:38
and they are all live in the local area so when I walk to work in the morning I literally walk past their house all the
31:44
kids come after to school so they finished school and 4:00 there's kind of like a mass onslaught of teenagers so I
31:51
think surrounding yourself with great people um that is definitely like like
31:57
yeah kind of and the other thing that I think of is that when I think back to us
32:03
at That level like we started that business when we were 21 and we had nine full-time staff um within a few years
32:12
and we were all young we were all young all living in London all away from home
32:19
um and actually though I think it was because we had this idea of how we were
32:24
supposed to be showing up as business owners and we didn't have any support
32:30
and I mean that was why I ended up starting she owns it because I looked back and I was just like what were we doing we had that team and we did not
32:36
know how to manage them and we we didn't even share with them the real reality of
32:43
what was going on behind the business where you know if they didn't hit their targets for the month the impact that
32:49
that that had on us and and the whole business and we just kind of that was
32:55
their role and that was their responsibility we really segmented it and um that was really detrimental for
33:01
the business like you've got to have transparency within the whole business to get buying from everyone um and
33:08
that's a huge that's just a learning that you have over time I think but um and it's changed a lot since then and
33:14
and even just the way that I mean back then that was when was
33:20
that when did we start that early early 2000s I think people still had or I
33:26
certainly still had theide aide of a business owner in my head is someone who wore a suit and um you know projected a
33:31
certain look and now I'm just kind of like janal and jeans and you know whatever whatever you can sh upen in
33:37
that day things have really loosened up and changed and I think that's a real benefit for business owners as a whole
33:44
um and teams as well and employees because it's way more um it's way more
33:50
tight and you can grow that culture in a much different way um so yeah that's
33:57
just so awesome thank you so much for sharing all of your junic is there anything else that you would love to share I would love to hear from you
34:03
before we close off um I think I messaged about kind of daily routines or
34:10
habits that you feel you have or don't have um that that that people could just
34:16
understand take an insight into your life yeah um so no um I am a very messy
34:24
chaotic person we were talking about this morning in the office we were talking about note taking and um I said
34:32
I don't take notes um so if I'm in a meeting I like I don't take notes I often don't even take a pen um because I
34:39
feel like I can't listen and write at the same time sometimes I'll draw pictures and it used to like you could
34:46
see you'd be sitting in a meeting with clients and they'd be like we paying you
34:51
like $300 an hour and you're drawing pictures I'm like it's helping um so I have a very chaotic mind um if anyone
34:58
else has a chaotic mind I would recommend reading messy um as a book it's a really good book to go okay
35:05
chaotic finds can actually come up with amazing things and it's it's oh you don't have to try to be structured to
35:14
like for that to be okay um so yes I don't I don't have routines like but no
35:21
um when I um so to give you an idea of how chaotic I am sorry um
35:27
when the kids were little someone told me this after my husband and I had divorced I knew that routines were
35:32
important so I gave them a bed time um which was seven and if they were being good um I would wind the clocks forward
35:40
and I go look it's only six o'clock we can play some more and if they were being naughty I would change the clocks and so James would come to my house and
35:46
he'd be like it's like falling down the rabbit hole because every clock in your house sees a different time because I
35:53
the time what I wanted it to be so yeah that is kind of my and and unsurprisingly we have a product that
35:59
gets you lost and and it so it suits it works for me obviously if I was doing something different it might not um but
36:07
yeah so no rets I did write six steps um to grow your business to a multi-million
36:13
dollar business based on what we did so this is the messy way of doing it um so
36:19
step one is to create a great audience Le product step two is to figure out
36:25
your Logistics because if you've done step one right you are going to have a lot of logistics issues so you are going
36:30
to sell out we constantly sold out for the first two years um step three
36:36
operationalize it um get your health and safety sorted your staff sorted have the right people in the right job so don't
36:42
pay someone $30 to go and do career runs get a a student and and pay them 23 um
36:49
higher the skills that you don't have like bookkeepers designers media people people to do your email your it um just
36:57
because you can do it doesn't mean you should do it so I don't book my own media I work 20 years in advertising and
37:03
we have um Amanda from so The Story Goes who I worked with in an agency and she's brilliant and she does a much better job
37:09
than I ever could um stop what you're doing um and re-evaluate everything so
37:16
rebuild that plane um then plan your next course and plan really big like
37:21
that was um Mike from PWC told us to plan to 10 million and it was surprising how easily and how quickly we could get
37:28
there and that empowers you to then go well do do I want to so back to to what you were talking about do I want to be
37:36
owner of a $10 million company I still don't know that I do um and then step
37:42
six go all in make your business 100% your focus so that was my biggest learning so when I left my job in June I
37:49
was working three days away by that point so I I was slowly transitioning out it was super scary for us we have a
37:56
big mortgage I'm the main income earner um but since I did it we've literally
38:02
doubled our sales so back yourself um and yeah make your like make your
38:07
business the focus make everyone else kind of pay attention to your business as well um because yeah you you are the
38:13
secret Source in a small business um you're the one who does it so yeah that's that's my six steps love that if
38:22
you are watching this I will I'm going to pull out go back into the recording pull those out and um download them into
38:28
a little separate segment for you so you can have them there but so many of those just resonated with me as well and and
38:34
even with like people struggle with the think big thing um but what I like to
38:39
say is if you are trying if you're like starting from zero and you think well I
38:44
want to make $20,000 in my business in the first year um then you're going to make certain decisions all based around
38:51
bringing in $20,000 in your business but if you decide in your first year you want to make
38:58
$200,000 then the decisions that you're going to be making for your business are vastly different to the $20,000
39:04
decisions so the the way that you invest is different whether you spend money on branding is different um and the result
39:12
is going to be different because maybe you won't make $200,000 maybe you might make 60 but 60 is a heck of a lot more
39:18
than 20 so um just it's not always about whether you reach that number that goal
39:24
setting it's about shifting your thinking around what you're actually the
39:30
actions that you're taking inside your business to get the result that you want at the end of the day so when you think
39:35
really small you tend to get that small result and when you think bigger um your results are bigger too um so thank you
39:41
for sharing that and the other one that I was wondering about K just before we close off is just if you're on a limited
39:48
budget and you've got those six steps um which are the ones that you would invest
39:54
in first so that's the order that we did it in oh I see yeah so that's and and
40:03
like honestly through No Lack of like no real planning because we did not just is
40:09
what happened yeah we didn't even set a sales Target apart from that first
40:14
$10,000 one we didn't set a sales Target for the first two years we just keep going H wow we we made lots of money
40:21
this is lucky right um so yeah definitely
40:26
recommend um recommend planning but yeah I'm going to go back to audience like always audience always have them first
40:34
so spend money on Research spend money on um so I I worked in advertising and
40:39
media so I'm all about finding the Right audience getting in front of them um so
40:45
yeah that hit Amanda up go and um get her to invest your money wisely and
40:51
reaching the right people um and yeah know who your audience is and know what they want um if you know that and you
40:58
have a product that they want and you've talked to them about it um you can't really go
41:04
wrong yeah and the as well with your product um don't don't be put off by
41:11
things that aren't on the shop so we didn't exist our category didn't exist before we made the getting lost game
41:18
there wasn't a travel adventure games isn't a word it's still not a word um so
41:24
um don't be afraid to make that you know we 3D printed our suitcases um don't be
41:30
stuck by what you can buy because if you can buy it it's not particular a orinal
41:35
so go by what your customers want and then figure out a way you can make it and you can make it really cheaply um
41:42
you know we were were 3D printing for our first year we 3D printed my and we broke my brother's 3D printer within a
41:48
month um so then we got had this guy K who printed them in his parents um
41:54
garage for us um it's stall as a suitcase um and he went from one 3D
41:59
printing machine to Five 3D printing machines um by the time we were finally big enough to move to injection mold and
42:06
when we bought our injection mold it cost us I think $30,000 which was huge
42:12
um and we had to go into the um the molders um and pay on like three or four
42:20
different credit cards so we had all of our cards we're like can we put 10,000 on this one 8,000 on this one or we're
42:26
just transfer you 5,000 and CU we like we were trying to kind of get the money from everywhere and we' worked out how
42:31
many we would need to sell to make it worthwhile um so again back to the
42:38
numbers but um yeah and and but none of that was off the shelf stuff like we
42:43
didn't buy anything that existed so yeah yeah and that is that's huge that that
42:50
it's not Drop Shipping it's you know is it it's like complete creation through to complete business um model all done
42:58
by you guys and your team and that just really incredible and inspirational um
43:05
if anybody on the call has got any questions throw them out there now um
43:10
otherwise Kat thank you so much for joining us today and sharing all of that amazing journey and knowledge with us I
43:18
know that sometimes some of the stuff that people hear from these calls is a
43:24
bit confronting like they might have already launched their product and maybe they haven't talked to their audience
43:29
that much um and now they're thinking okay well what do I you know I feel like
43:35
that might be a big problem um the problem is only as big as you turning
43:41
around and going I'm going to talk to my audience now and I'm going to be open because the path might change but the
43:46
dream Remains the Same um and if your dream is Financial Freedom um Financial
43:53
Independence um impact all of those things things it is worth it is worth figuring it out and um tweaking as C
44:01
says listening to people figuring out what people want staying in the game and figuring out how to make it work for you
44:07
and um you know getting lost in business as cat has as well as as all around the
44:12
country and around the world um thank you so much Kat it's been a real pleasure and I can't wait to share this
44:18
with everyone and I know that it's there's going to be so much useful Stu
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