TRANSCRIPT - 152 - 7 Things I've Learned from Being in Business.

Mel: [00:00:00] sometimes, particularly as women, we get drawn in multiple different directions. We can get distracted by all of the priorities that we've got to get done. And we feel like we need to excel in all of them. And the problem with that is that when we're trying to excel in every aspect of our life, we really end up succeeding in none And so I want to invite you to think about the season of life that you're in, what it needs from you now, Acknowledging that every season that we are trying to live in is going to be different because trying to live in all of them is absolutely exhausting. and it is a recipe for failure.   

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Work Life by Design. Now, how [00:01:00] often do you stop to reflect on how far you have come? Because I think that without sitting down and taking the time to reflect on where you're at. what you've been through, what you've experienced. We're not really taking the time to see just how far we've come or more importantly, the lessons that we have learned. 

So today I want to step you through seven of the lessons that I learned from running my business last year in 2024. Now my business community, I've been in business coming up 12 years this year. And last year was a pretty intense year for me. It's one I described as being a year of paradoxes because there was some really incredible highs, but there was some pretty ordinary lows too. 

So as I shared in my earlier episode, I'd been on a pretty significant health journey and that health journey, those times where things were really tough and really difficult for me physically and emotionally and mentally, [00:02:00] but. The light times and the most amazing bright times were when I started to come out of that fog and I could see things far more clearly. 

So it was a pretty transformative year and I'm reminded of that saying that there cannot be light without the darkness. We need the contrast. We need to see what's happening in the negative to learn from that and to really then appreciate positive and the lightness. Now that was my own personal journey and there was a lot of ups and downs that went through that, but I think what's really important for us to take away, particularly as business owners, is that a huge part of what it takes for you to steward your business. Is in turn how you steward yourself. 

And this is the vision that I have had for my own life. It's how then I want to turn up in my business. And I think these two are really inextricably linked. We really need to understand what it is we want from our own personal life so that we can then design a business around it. Because what I know from running my business for almost [00:03:00] 12 years is that when you are constantly chasing something, you're pursuing success. 

That you think that you need, or you think that you want, or you believe that's the way that it should be. You are moving further and further away from the life that you desire for yourself. And in a big part, that is what's in contributing to your bitterness, your resentment, And in my case, end up being adrenal fatigue and burnout because I had been pursuing this idea of what my business should look like, how it should be structured and. None of that was really serving me to live the life that I wanted to live. And so I needed to make some changes and that all happened as a result of me understanding firstly, that I had ended up in that situation and that my health was suffering as a result to then make these changes. 

And sometimes we need a pretty good push and the pain has to get so great that we actually then start to focus on it and take the time to. address it, but until we do, then we're not really actually living the life that we want and creating the business [00:04:00] that's supporting us. Because if we honest about it, the reason that most of us go and get into business on our own, and we start these amazing businesses because we want freedom. 

We want flexibility. We want to have control over our own time, but sometimes over time that wanes and we get distracted with our real goal and our real purpose. And we need to remind ourselves what it is that we're actually trying to do here. So I initially shared this as a end of year wrap up in my newsletter, but I wanted to expand on it here because I think it's something that's relevant for all of us. 

And there's so much more I could say than I could actually put into words in a newsletter. So I want to share this with you now. I typically do my end of year reflections in January. So as part of my planning process for the year ahead, I sit myself down. I've got a series of questions that I run through. 

I look back over the year that was, and I look for what the highlights were in the low lights. I look for the lessons and I look for the things that I want to take forward. Now, this download happened [00:05:00] for me actually in early December, I was. was actually getting my hair done and I was sitting at the basin, waiting for the treatment to do its thing in my hair. 

And I literally had this inspired moment. So I grabbed out my phone, opened the notes section and I've jotted these seven things down that I think really encapsulated what I had learnt in business in that particular year. I still did my planning session in January and I've got a couple of extra bits I want to share with you on that, but I'm going to start by sharing with you those seven things that I learned about being in business. 

So to kick us off, the first one is bigger is not better. So this is one that I have fallen into the trap of many, many times. As I have gone through the process of growing my business, I thought that I needed a bigger team in order to secure the bigger clients, to be able to prove that we were capable of taking on that bigger project. 

And the reality is that that is just not [00:06:00] true. it hasn't necessarily needed to happen at all, but that was my belief. I believed that in order to be taken seriously, to win those big projects that I needed to have this incredibly big team around me to show them that we had the resources, we had the capability. 

And in some cases that had been proven to me, I had been told that our team wasn't big enough to be able to take on those clients that they were concerned about redundancy within the team. But in hindsight. That was once or twice. So over a course of almost 12 years, I've only had that really happened to me twice. 

And they're probably not the clients that I wanted to be working with anyway. So this was something that really rang true for me in the last 12 months was because we've completely restructured our team and we have won some incredible projects. We have worked with some absolutely amazing clients and we've done it all with our intimate crew of what I call our A players. 

So the way that I have my business structured now is that there's myself and Michaela, my incredible business manager. She [00:07:00] takes care of all of the things that happen, behind the scenes in the business. And then we have a very select team of A players that support us in delivering our projects. So we have designers, we have draftspeople, two lovely ladies, and we also have change managers and communication specialists that support us in delivering our projects. We are a very small but mighty team that deliver incredible work for some really big organizations. So we have proven that we don't need to have a huge team to be able to do amazing work, that we can really do it. 

And do you know what the benefit of this has been for me personally? It has created absolutely so much more spaciousness in my life. And that is something that I've really been drawn to. I am not the person that enjoys showing up at the office every Monday to Friday, nine to five to be seen, to be present, to be available because it just doesn't suit my particular energy style. 

It doesn't suit [00:08:00] the way that I want to get my work done. It doesn't support my productivity or my performance. And therefore it's not great for the rest of the team either. In this model, I get to work when I need to work, in the way that I need to work, in deep, concentrated work, and then we get really cool time together as a team. 

So we get to celebrate and come together in a different way, and it's a different flow, it's a different structure, but it works for us. And the other great thing is that in having this really nice, tight knit team of A players, we have not compromised on our performance. or our profitability. If anything, our business has become more profitable as a result. 

So that's just one for you to ponder. If you think that you need to have a huge team to do the things that you need to do, I just invite you to think that one again. Now, number two, this is one of my favorites. Walk to the beat of your own drum. And this is all about the fact that success really does look different for [00:09:00] everyone. 

And as I just said, I thought I had to have this big team, but the reality is I didn't need that. And my success looks very different to other people's, but I was. Spending so much time meerkatting what everyone else was doing, looking at what was going on, on my industry, thinking about how other people were doing things, looking at what other things look like for success for other people, and I just wasn't owning my own version of success. 

What does success actually look like for me in my life at this point in time. Now, I have a young blended family, which I needed to create space for. I need to be present with them. They had some big moments last year. My little one started grade one. My other little ones are daycare. 

My other big one, she's doing great at high school, but It takes time, it takes energy, it takes focus and what I was trying to do was burn the candle at 10 different ends rather than actually focusing on what was going to be truly important and therefore make me feel like I was being successful [00:10:00] in my life holistically and therefore in my business. 

And so I think sometimes, particularly as women, we get drawn in multiple different directions. We can get distracted by all of the priorities that we've got to get done. And we feel like we need to excel in all of them. And the problem with that is that when we're trying to excel in every aspect of our life, we really end up succeeding in none and we beat ourselves up and we feel really crappy about it and we end up absolutely exhausted. 

And so I want to invite you to think about the season of life that you're in, what it needs from you now, Acknowledging that every season that we are trying to live in is going to be different because trying to live in all of them is absolutely exhausting. I can tell you from firsthand experience, and it is a recipe for failure. 

It is failure in the fact that your body is going to shut down on you. You are never going to please everybody. So think about what does success really truly mean to you right now in the [00:11:00] season of life that you are in and what. Changes can you possibly make to start to shift that needle back into alignment with what is possible and what's important to you right now.   

Now, number three was about embracing your own rhythm. So this is one of the things that I think since the pandemic, we've all had a very different opportunity to look at the way that we work because people work differently. We all have a different biological rhythm. If you want to learn more about chronotypes because we all have different waking cycles. 

different performance periods within our day and different sleep cycles. And all of these things are contributing to how we can actually be of our highest performance and our highest productivity throughout the day. And I think because of the pandemic, we've had the opportunity to start to look at well, what does flexibility really look like with me and my business and my work? 

And how can I [00:12:00] think about that in a little bit more of a different perspective? So, as I shared with you. I'm not the Monday to Friday, nine to five kind of person coming to the office and doing that in a really rigid and structured way, I found really constraining and I found it quite smothering. So the fact that I now have this ability to work from home some days, I can go and meet my team in a cafe. 

We can, do workshops. We go and we meet clients. This level of creativity and flow has absolutely made my soul sing because I'm not bound by this idea of a commute or a place or a schedule, but I'm free to really ebb and flow with the needs of my business and my life. So things change for us. We know we've got kids drop off. 

It's called pickups. We've got, uh, sports days or there's an event that's happening. We've got the flexibility to move and ebb and flow with that. And it has meant for me that I have been able to really restructure and reconsider what's important for me in each and every. Part of my [00:13:00] day. So getting to get up and do my morning yoga. 

I can do my meditation. I can go for a book walk after I do the school drop off without feeling that pressure of I have to be in the office and at my desk by nine. So all of these things are incredible ways for me to be able to create flexibility in my day, which is also enhancing my. Productivity and my performance. 

So things are getting done quicker because my brain is relaxed and my body is at ease and my nervous system is calm. It also means that I can slide other things in there. Like if I need to go to a midday physio appointment, or maybe I just want to go and get a massage. Or as I said, when I started this episode, this all came to me as a download while I was getting my Friday hair appointment done. 

So thinking about how we can blend all of the different aspects of our life. into our days and still get done what we need to do. But thinking about it in terms of what is your own rhythm, what's going to make your heart sing? How are you going to be [00:14:00] able to weave together all the different aspects of what It's going to take to create a good life for you and your version of success.  [00:15:00][00:16:00] 

Now, number four was if it's not a hell yes, then it is a hell no. And this one came about because [00:17:00] life is too short to do work that does not light your soul on fire. So in the past 12 months, we as a team got really super clear on the type of work that we want to do and the clients we want to work with. 

And the result of that is it has been incredible because work is really joyful when you're doing it with other amazing humans. And we're all reaching for the same goals. Now, what this has meant is that it's about being really clear on who you want to work with. It's about being really clear on the work that you actually want to do. 

And for the longest time, I was really resistant to this because I had this. perception, this belief that the only way that I could do the work that I wanted to do was if I also delivered these other suite of services, or that this piece of the puzzle I couldn't do because I had to do this piece of the puzzle, but I really didn't enjoy doing that other thing. 

So being really clear on what lights your fire, where you're passionate, what's actually going to be the. Best possible business that you could [00:18:00] design and you could create for yourself. And just doing that is incredibly liberating because it means that you are putting the most effort into the work that you do and it's natural and it's easeful. 

And that is one of my big focuses for this year ahead is how can I make my work feel more easeful because when it feels hard, it's exhausting and I'm tired of being exhausted and I don't want to do that anymore. The other thing that's made me bet really clear on is when opportunities have come our way being really discerning about whether they are the right opportunity for us or not. 

Now, I made this mistake a couple of times last year, to be honest, and it was exhausting because there was a couple of opportunities that came our way. They were extremely excited about the possibility of working with us, but I just didn't feel like they were going to be the right fit for us. They weren't in a space where they were ready to make the decisions that needed to be made. 

I don't [00:19:00] think they were ready to make the investment that they needed to make in order to take the process that they needed to take. And the reality was that I put a lot of time and effort into developing proposals, attending meetings, workshopping this with them. Only for them to go in a different direction. 

And the reality of that was I knew in my gut that that was not going to be an aligned fit. I just didn't make the call soon enough. So I'm encouraging you to trust your instincts. And if it's not a hell yes, then it is a no. And that brings me to number five. Number five is I already have the answers to all of my questions. 

Now this one is a lot about the fact that. I believe, and this is again, in myself, I had started to really. Outsource a lot of my decision making, my thought processes and my intuition. I had just handed it all over and felt that I was not capable of making [00:20:00] decisions. I had lost a huge amount of trust in myself and my ability to lead my business and my team as a result of a number of things that had happened. 

And I had just completely lost all of that self confidence. And so I just ended up outsourcing it. I would ask my friends, I would ask business coaches, I would ask other people what their opinion was, and I would take that route, but the reality is that that wasn't serving me. It wasn't serving my business because they weren't things that were aligned with how I wanted to run my business and how I could then honestly show up and continue to support and grow my business. 

And so. This last 12 months, I have taken all of that back. I have leaned in hard to who I am, what I believe, and what I know will make my business soar. And I can tell you, it has never been better. So if you are struggling with your trusting your gut, trusting yourself, trusting your intuition, [00:21:00]owning yourself and who you are, and being proud of who you are and what you bring to the table, then. 

I highly recommend spending some time to find yourself again and really connecting back in with who you are because there is no one else like you and you are incredible and you are doing things out there in the world that nobody else can do because they are not you. And you are going to bring so much value and perspective to any conversation. 

And the way that you are going to do it is going to be different to everybody else, but you already have all of the answers that you need inside. You just need to tap into it and to connect to them. Now, number six work is what I do, not who I am. Oh my God. This was a really hard one for me to learn because. 

For the longest time, my identity has been so tied up with what I do. Now, I've been unravelling this one for a really long time, [00:22:00] and whilst I'm really starting to feel like the ties are dissolving, there's still strands that are still connected. They're still attached in other ways, but At the same time, it has also been so incredibly liberating to be able to extricate myself from this one, to start to loosen those shackles of the fact that I am an individual, I am a mom, I am a creative, passionate woman. 

I love to go out and I love to go hiking. I love to be in the bush. I love to paint. I love to have dinner with my friends. I love to go on holidays. There is all of these other aspects of me that are not. What I do and to try and find my value and my worth in other things outside of work. That has been, as I said, one of the most difficult things because I have really attached my identity to what I do for so long that untangling [00:23:00] this has been a lot of work. 

And as I said, that's still not completely unraveled, but it's a really big step in the right direction. And one of the things that my husband likes to remind me of is that don't get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life. And I shared this particular quote with the ladies who attended my planning day in January. 

And it seems to be one that's resonated because I think as busy, ambitious women, we can often get so invested in trying to build these amazing businesses. Attaching our own identity and our self worth to the success of our business, its visibility, its growth, its performance, that we'd get distracted from what it is that actually would be making a life for us. 

And as I said earlier, thinking about what does success look like for you? Because success isn't the same for everybody. And the other thing is success isn't all about money and creating a great business and building this empire. [00:24:00] Sometimes it's about having really great work life balance, being able to show up at the kids school events, because that's what you want to do. 

Maybe it's about the fact that you want to work four days a week, figuring out what success looks like for you and what work needs to look like for you, and then wrapping everything else around that. And trying to detangle your identity from that. Now, the final one that I want to share with you is number seven.   

And it's safe to blaze your own trail. Now I've referred to this a a couple of times already throughout this conversation, but there really are no hard and fast rules on how business should be. And this is one that I see in a lot of the women that I get to speak to and I interact with through my coaching and the planning days and my clients is that we have this idea of what we should. 

Be doing, and we've picked that up through things from as young as when we were a [00:25:00] child to the way that we see business done. Now we go in and we attend business networking or coaching programs or mentoring or education training. And we're told this is the way that things should be done. But the reality is there is no hard and fast rule. 

You can design the business that you want, however you want. It's about you being deliberate. and discerning and making the right choices that are going to support you to create the business that you want to create. So this year just gone. I completely reimagined my business to follow my passions, my interests, my skills, and what I also knew. 

My clients need it as well. So when I was talking earlier about the fact that I didn't want to do those parts anymore, and I only wanted to do these bits, all of that was about me trying to unravel what I thought my business should look like because nobody else has built a business in the model. That we are currently [00:26:00] operating. 

So at community, we do the workplace strategy. So coming in and helping organizations really understand what it is they're trying to achieve and how their place, their environment is going to support those strategic goals and objectives to create great employee engagement with their team. We then have elevated and sit at design advisory role. 

Now at that design advisory level, we are supporting the client by sitting on the same side of the table as them, helping them make sense of the decisions that are being placed in front of them whilst maintaining the integrity of the strategy that we have created across the process. So we help those clients find the right team members and their designers, their project managers to actually execute and create. 

That particular project, but we sit in the advisory role to maintain that continuity along that process and support them in that decision making with my 20 plus years of experience. I have seen so many things that need intricate little decision making. And so I'm bringing that [00:27:00] experience to the table in each of those particular conversations. 

And then on the other end, because work has shifted so dramatically and the environments that we are creating for our people now look nothing like the environment they're usually leaving, we are sitting in that change in communications role. So change leadership, helping the organization. Upskill, develop and build the in house capability that they need to transform their business. 

On the other end, it's about onboarding people into the new space, helping them understand the etiquettes, what their personal work performances look like. It's about upskilling their changing communications team on how to manage a change program and giving them templates and resources and coaching support through that entire process. 

It's about upgrading and upskilling their leadership team so that they can help successfully navigate this change transition period. It's also about upskilling and enabling and activating their next generation of leaders as well. So this process is not just about the change of the [00:28:00] project. It's creating incredible transformation and upskilling of their organizations employees through the process of using the workplace as a catalyst. 

And so that was so cool to be able to finally build this business that was what I want to do. It's what I want to deliver to my clients because this is where I'm most passionate. This is where I'm most excited and inside all of that, this is exactly what my clients need to be able to take their businesses forward. 

And so I really had to embrace the unknown to do this because there's not a roadmap. No one else has done this. This is something that. I'm interested in, I have a skillset there. I have an amazing team with an incredible skillset around this, and we can bring all of that to the table to support these clients, to create these incredible transformation. 

And what I've learned is that you don't always need to have it all figured out. You just have to know how to take the next right step and. That has completely enabled me to change our market [00:29:00]offering, but that next right step can often feel really, really scary. So there was a quote that I read recently, and it was about the fact that you need to trust where your two feet are right now and just put the next one in front, take that one more step just in front of the last one. 

And it's that simple. Just keep working and keep taking those steps in each and every direction because it is safe to blaze your own trail. You don't need a well worn path. You don't need to see someone else doing it. You just need to have the idea and the vision inside you and just continue to take those next right steps. 

So they were the seven things that I learned from being in business last year. And as I said, they came to me in this very intuitive, spontaneous download and I popped them down all on paper. And I revisited those when I sat down to prepare for my planning day in January, where I hosted this incredible group of ambitious women, 12 women at the Khalil Hotel, in [00:30:00] James Street in Brisbane for a full day intimate session of. 

Preparing their businesses for the next 12 months ahead. And in doing that, I gave them some pre work and the pre work that I shared with them as some questions that helped me to take stock of the year that's been before. It helps me look at what went up, what went down, where my biggest lessons were and what some of the highlights were. 

And the reason I'd like to do this, and I think is so important for us to look backwards and reflect is so that we can work out, well, where are we going to go forward? So for me, if I looked back and I looked at what some of my biggest lessons were, it was really about not trusting my gut, not listening to my own intuition. 

So as I said, I went down the path of sharing, those proposals and going and investing in all that time and effort and energy into those clients that I knew weren't aligned. Whereas I could have just said, Oh, look, I'm sorry. That's not going to be a great fit for us. I think this is a better avenue for you and directed them in the direction of somebody else that it was going to [00:31:00] be a better support to them. 

It was about investing more time and energy into projects and opportunities that were not eventuating in the direction that they needed to go. It was. A lot of concern about how others were going to perceive me in terms of what I thought, my business needed to look like. I was concerned what others were going to be saying. 

And let me tell you, nobody is looking at what you're doing cause they're too concerned about what they're doing. So there was some really good lessons that I learned from looking back at my business last year and that I wanted to go, okay. Well, they need to be some of the ground rules that I'm going to take forward into this next year, into 2025. 

But the other thing that I really, really like doing is looking at what are my highlights. Because when you know what your highlights are, that's what you want to go and create more of in your business. That's what you want to do more of because that stuff is lighting your soul on fire. It's bringing the joy to your business and to your life. 

And so there was some really Clear things for me that came out [00:32:00] of last year that I'm going to be taking forward. And that's spending really good quality time with my team. We do some really fun things and they were absolutely some of the best highlights of my year last year. So Michaela and I went on a couple of business trips together. 

We did our end of financial year day spa day. We had a. Brilliant Christmas lunch together. And those things are those moments that we get to celebrate and come together as a team, and they are incredible time because we get to bond, we get to have conversation that's deep and meaningful outside of work, but it's still work, which is even cooler. 

The other thing was doing that same level of travel and business associated work. But with my business mates, because when we get to go to conferences together, we get to go to dinner. We get to stay in nice hotels. We get to go and learn together. And fortunately, my friends love learning as well and are very business orientated as well. 

So that was another [00:33:00] one of my highlights. So thinking about, well, how am I going to do more of that this year is going and booking another conference and getting my girls together and we're going together. So. Pre planning that stuff and getting it in the diary is how it's going to happen. And the third thing that really resonated for me as a highlight from last year was just some of the soul aligned magical dream clients that we bought into the business. 

And I absolutely want more of those. They were clients where we got to deliver our full suite of services. They were great human beings to work with. Outcomes that we were able to deliver for their businesses were just Next level transformational. And it was just incredible experiences. So again, coming back to that, trusting my instinct and trusting my gut, knowing which way to lean. 

That's what I need to do more of in this next year. So that is an insight into seven of my biggest lessons from the year that has [00:34:00] been some of my other bigger lessons that I learned. And then what are my highlights that I'm going to be taking forward and really baking into my business as we lean into 2025. 

So I would really encourage you to sit down and take a moment to think back about what lessons you might've learnt. From being in business last year, I'd love you to take any of these lessons that I've learned and apply them to your own business, because this is where we are going to see more growth and more women creating incredible businesses that are so soul aligned and that are conscious of the season of life that you're in. 

And what is important to you because that really, really matters. So I really just want to invite you to take a moment to think about what worked for you in the last 12 months, what lessons you've learned and what you want more of in the coming year and make it happen. And if you need my support, I'm here, hit me up, send me [00:35:00] Instagram or an email, reach out. 

I'd love to hear from you. I'd love to support you. It's going to be an incredible year this year, and I can't wait. So thank you so much for joining me here today. And if we haven't already connected, come over and connect with me on LinkedIn, Melissa Marsden, we can find me on Instagram at Melmar. I'd love to chat, But until next week, I hope you have a beautiful day. Go and do that reflection and I'll see you next week.