Starting a startup ep 1 Final FINAL

Gemma and Donna are starting a podcast to document their journey from the corporate world to starting their own business. They don't have a set plan for the podcast and it will develop in real time. They hope to inspire others to start their own businesses and share their learnings. Gemma and Donna have different backgrounds and complement each other well. They discuss the importance of knowing yourself, your motivations, and the sacrifices you're willing to make when starting a business. They also emphasize the need for open and honest communication, especially in a partnership. I'm Gemma and I'm with my co-host Donna, who is also my business partner. This is our brand new podcast. We are here to take you on a very exciting journey, because Donna and I are embarking on something a little bit different. This isn't going to be your regular podcast. This is going to be a real-time journey as we move from the corporate world into founders of our own run business, which is really exciting and scary at the same time. And if I were to sit here and tell you that we had it all figured out and a plan, I would be absolutely lying. I also can't tell you what is going to be in every episode of this podcast, because we don't know, because essentially it is going to be, as Gemma said, in real time. So it will develop and grow and change. And maybe even one day there will be an element where you guys can interact with us and let us know what you want to hear more of and stuff like that. But at the moment, you're just going to come with us as we do a whole heap of learning, which is going to be interesting. Yes, it is. We're starting five months in. So what we're going to do for the first few episodes is we're going to take you through where we've got to, to this point. We're going to recap on some of our learning. We're going to tell you about some of the highs and the lows, because there have already been many. And then what we'll do is get to a point where we will be completely real time and you'll follow this journey with us. And essentially, the aim of this is to hopefully inspire some of you to embark on starting your own business and take the learnings from us. So you don't necessarily make the same mistakes that we have. It is supposed to be kind of like helpful and learning. And actually, as we started researching how to do this, there wasn't anything that we could necessarily follow as a guide or, or let someone else take the lead on and go, ah, that's how you do it. So that's essentially the aim of this podcast. And for any of you budding entrepreneurs out there, or people who are just fed up with doing the same old thing day in day out, this could be for you. What we're not going to be is a specific guide on the ins and outs and exactly how to do it. Because what we've found is you really do learn on the fly. But what we'll hopefully do is give you some of our learnings so you can learn from our mistakes and make your journey a little bit easier. So come on our journey with us. Enjoy and watch as we embark on this crazy mad journey. I think it's probably fair that we should be a little bit of a background into who we are, and how we've ended up here. So Donna, tell us a little bit about you. Okay, so a bit about me. I am someone who grew up working class family, with a mum who had always instilled in me that I could do whatever I wanted to as long as I work my ass off. And that has definitely stuck with me. I am a jack of all trades, master of none. I have fingers in many pies. I am always up for trying something new. And I love a project. I love to see whether I can just do stuff. I have, I would say my head screwed on. So Gemma alluded to the fact that we're both ex-corporate backgrounds. So I've always maintained a solid nine to five job. So pay my bills, pay my mortgage. But on top of that, that's where I then work every hour that God sends, have other businesses, other hobbies, other side projects. So when Gemma and I got together, and it was like, ah, we need to do something else. I was like, yeah, yeah. I also have a crazy level of risk taking. So I'm always up for most things, to be fair, as long as it won't kill me. Typically. Catch you in the right mood. She's a yes. Yeah. I'm a yes. Definitely. But what about you Gemma? Because although we complement each other beautifully, we've got a lot of similarities, but some differences as well. Yeah, we do. We do. I mean, I kind of alluded to it earlier. We have known each other for 10 years. We have worked together in the same business and had similar sorts of backgrounds in terms of our corporate life. I come from the Northwest, if you can't already tell by my accent. I'm a Northern girl living in the South. I'm a mum of two. I love to learn. I love to try new things. I'm incredibly creative. And my career to date has been half marketing, half sales and sort of all blended together in the middle to amalgamate my most recent position as running a startup, which I loved so much. Me as a person, I am not as much of a risk taker as Donna, but I will happily go into something with Tufi if I can see the end result. And I know that me and you make a really strong team, like from our friendship from the day we first met, we have always been on a similar wavelength. And I think we, to your point, we complement each other really nicely, because I maybe tone your risk down a touch, because I'll ask a few more questions, and I'll get a bit more balanced about the whole situation. Yep, not a bad thing. And it's kind of exciting. I'm at a point in my life where it's now or never, I was made redundant, all on really good terms. But I knew going into this was that I had the ability to give this 100% of my time, because financially, I have the backing of my redundancy that is allowing me to do this full time. Like, I've always had this really stable job, to your point, nine to five. I think I just got to a point in my career where, you know, when I was reflecting on things, I just thought, the only way to get more is to take on more responsibility. But it's the same type of responsibility, it's just in a bigger pool. And I am all about learning. And I want to be stretched and I want to be pushed. And I want to see the fruits of my labour, like literally, I love seeing things that I'm taking part of come to life. And I think that's what really excites me the most about this, but it isn't for everybody. And you really do need to do your due diligence and weigh up, can you take a certain level of risk. And I think Gemma touched on something that is really important, as you start out in kind of your journey, you really need to know what you're made of. And you need to know what motivates you and you need to know what you are willing to do and give up to make this happen. Because typically, what I have found is going out on your own or starting something like this, you have to give so much to it and you have to be willing to compromise. And if you are on your own, you have to reflect on what does that mean for you as an individual? What is your support network? If you are within a family, what is the impact on the family? What are their expectations? What won't you be able to do? What evenings will you be working? What school recitals will you be missing? Because you will be surprised that if you want to move at pace, how much time this will gobble up. If you're happy to plod along and do it as and when you've got time, then that is absolutely a route you can take. It's not necessarily the route that Gemma and I are taking. But one thing I would definitely suggest is write down a list of what your motivations are, what your driving factors are, what you're willing to compromise and what are your areas of life that you will not compromise. And if you are part of a family, you need to share that with your family and you need to get alignment because what you don't want to do is to come in and be divisive because you do need that support. So this isn't necessarily just about starting a business. This is understanding the ramifications of starting that business on you and your family. One thing is really important is that you can always be open and honest to the nth degree, especially if you're going into a partnership. It's kind of less important if you're doing this completely on your own. But of course, you know, Donna and I are in a partnership. We were friends before this. We were colleagues before this. So my advice would always be, if you are going to go into a partnership, find somebody that you can truly have genuine, honest, no holds barred conversations. I think we got swept up in the excitement of let's start a business. How exciting would it be? And you will find if you're anything like us, you automatically jump to all the fun stuff. What should we call it? What should it taste like? What should it be about? Rather than the really hard, nitty gritty stuff that you actually need to focus on. You need to be able to call a spade a spade and have constructive conversations because ultimately, you're building this together. It's not swayed in one favour or not. This is equal and you need to be able to build something that you're both proud of. So the best advice that we could probably give you if you are going into this as a unit, essentially, more than one person, is to sit down and really understand what are people's backstops? What are they willing to do? What aren't they willing to do? The level of honesty, like warts and all, because you need to be able to talk about money. And if you're putting your own money in, you need to be really honest with, you know what, this is what I'm willing to do. This is what I'm not willing to do. And that's great. Because to be honest, Gemma and I can have warts and all conversations because it's not about being embarrassed or anything like that. It's about how do we make this business work? And how do we run? But also, how do we support each other as individuals? And I think just building on that, Gemma and I have worked together. So it's very easy for me to go, no, I don't like that. Move on. Actually, have we thought about this? I have found when giving the same type of feedback to someone who hasn't worked in a corporate environment, aka my husband, that doesn't fly so well. And actually by going, no, no, no, I don't like that. Move on. Let's talk about something else. It doesn't land well at all. And it's actually really, really hard to work with. And I'm sure this will come up in later episodes. But when you have external input, and people that you haven't necessarily worked with from a professional perspective, consider how you land feedback. And we will come on to eggnogate later. Oh, eggnogate. Oh, good Lord. We could probably do a whole episode on marital stats. Yes, we could. But we're also very fortunate that we both have great husbands who are backing us on this, and annoyingly have some good ideas. Yeah, yours particularly. He's a creative mind. He didn't know it, but he's a creative mind. Anyway, we need to tell you a little bit of how we got to where we are today. So you're probably wondering how we with solid corporate careers ended up starting up a run business. Well, essentially, it was what we said earlier, we came to the conclusion that we were just going to keep plodding along doing the same thing unless something radically changed. And that wasn't good enough for us. And we decided we needed to mix things up. And how about we start our own business, we actually started out as a threesome. Now, I had an amazing lecturer, when I was at university, who always would give us a briefing for our next project, and then essentially kick us all out and tell us to go to the pub, because he said the best place to come up with ideas and be creative is in the pub. And so knowing this, I took this very wise man's words, and all three of us went off to the pub. My two other partners in crime at that point were late. And so I was several cocktails into the creative whirlwind of my mind. And we tabled loads and loads and loads of ideas. Each one of us came with, I think, three or four different business ideas or concepts, really far and wide reaching. Yep, there was franchise options in there, there was new products, there was a brainchild of Donna's that was completely brand new. And she invented a thing. And some of them have legs and might be something that we do in the future. And it was really interesting having different people's perspectives. And then having all of these, some quite quirky business ideas, I will caveat to review, and we kick them about a bit, we kind of picked the top three, and then each one of us took one of those. And we went away and essentially had to research it and come back and almost present a bit more of a refined business case to be able to understand what we wanted to move forward with. Yeah, and what the opportunity was. And I think that's a really important thing as well. Like we, we came with these ideas that in our heads initially, had legs, but then also needed work. So we did that due diligence. And we went and looked at market size and competitors and the size of the opportunity. And I think for any of you out there thinking, I want to start a business, I think there's almost two routes. If you're an inventor, or you have a really specific idea that you're wedded to, then that is great. Run with it. If that is not you, then throw lots of ideas out there. See which sticks, see which you're passionate about, see which has more momentum. Don't necessarily get wedded to one, because actually it might not be the best one. Pressure test it. And that's essentially what we did. And we had a short list of three, which we whittled down to two. And we actually started to progress both of them. I did a drawing of an invention, which we then worked with a patent company and did a worldwide patent search to understand was there anything like this on the market. That in itself is super interesting. So if any of you actually want information on that, then feel free to connect with us via our social media channels, because that's a different one. Because we didn't actually go with that one. That's probably on the back burner. The one we did go to was we decided to make a rum brand. We did. We did. And to give you a little bit of context of how we came up with rum as an idea. But we felt that there was a gap in the market to bring either a younger or potentially more females into the rum market, taking some of the cues from the gin market and seeing whether they would transfer across. And that's where we really were quite interested in how versatile is this drink as an alcoholic product? And how far can we pull it and stretch it? And what can we do? And actually, what does it need to look like and taste like and, and almost feel to entice this younger, different demographic into that? Because quite frankly, the alcoholic market is saturated, there is absolutely no point bringing another me to rum product into the market. So we were really clear that we had to have a point of difference. And that had to resonate through the branding, the name, the taste, how we talked to the potential customers. And so when you start thinking about what you're doing, you need to understand what is your point of difference? Because if you're just doing the same, unless you are like half the price, it's just not going to fly. Or you have a cult following or something, you need that USP, you need your unique selling point. And remember, everybody has a bias. And you have to be so careful that your bias doesn't override the logic behind your decision making. And I think there is so much written around your unconscious bias is really worth doing some research into that. So you can understand how that might be driving some of your decision making and your thought process. Because what you don't want to do is make a brand that you love, but nobody else loves. Very true. And a great way to overcome that if you do have that bias, or you're not potentially sure if you do or not, is test things. So again, we'll talk about it in more detail. But we have tested everything from the product, through to the label design, through to bottle design, and whether people like the feel of it, the whole look of it. Utilize people around you. Because again, they will give you different opinions, and you can formulate your overall thoughts from that. My best advice, if it's not something that you're experienced with is look at it from a consumer's lens. So if you're doing something that you know, try and put yourself in the mindset of a new shopper. Or if it's something that you don't know, well then actually you're really well placed to look at it because you don't have experience, you don't have knowledge. So whenever I look at something in market, and I try and evaluate it, I always try and put myself in a new pair of shoes without my experience and glasses on it and what I would do differently, what stands out to me, what speaks to me, what catches my attention. So that's it, folks, with regards to the first episode of Starting a Startup. Hopefully it's piqued your interest, and you want to hear more. We didn't really go into too much detail tonight, but it was really just to tell you a bit about who we are and what we do. And also to give you some pointers of what to consider when you first start out. I think that the key points, if you take anything away from this episode, is around no idea is a bad idea. Have multiple ideas. Don't be overly wedded to any one of them until you start fleshing out that business case. Really, then, as an individual, reflect on who you are, how you work, what your backstops are, what you're willing to compromise on. So you know what you're signing up for, and then have that conversations with anybody who's kind of going to be impacted by this choice. And then if you are working with people, have the really awkward, horrible upfront conversations, because I can tell you now, it's so much easier to have them straight up than further down the line. Yeah, totally. We will get into a lot more over the next coming episodes. We're going to continue to give you a bit of a background into how we got here. But once we get to the in real time shows in just a few episodes time, you really will see the nuts and bolts and the nitty gritty of us learning on the fly as we embark on this mad, rumtastic adventure. Oh, and one final thing. Save all your goddamn receipts. Oh, yeah, definitely do that. I'll explain more on that next time. Catch you later. Bye.