Female Founder Feature: Linda Johannesson

Female Founder Name: Linda Johannesson

Business Name: The Growth Garden

Website: https://www.growthgarden.au/

Tell us about your business. What products or services do you offer?: The Growth Garden is a strategic branding, marketing, and growth agency that focuses on giving agency to female founders! We help service businesses and their creators to grow into their full potential so they can realise their big dreams!

By defining and translating clients’ aspirational visions into actionable goals, we then create the custom branding, growth strategies, marketing, messaging, plans and priorities that are required to actually make them happen.

As many leaders are embracing book writing as a viable growth strategy, we have developed a proprietary growth service that helps ensure they bring successful books to market while also strategically growing their businesses.

Our specific service suite includes:
Business vision creation and clarification
Marketing planning
Branding - external and internal brand development, communication and refinement
Ideal client profiling
Strategy development and implementation - both Foundational and Growth strategies
Growth audits
Mentoring
Copywriting and content creation
Book marketing services and consulting

What inspired you to start your business?: I was done with life as a corporate executive or working in an agency for someone else. I’d had enough with supporting others’ dreams, enough of having to go against my own intuition. Enough of not honouring my own dreams.
I could no longer be beholden to someone else’s vision, agenda, needs and wants. I craved the independence and freedom to do the work I loved, to make the difference I wanted to make in the world, to work with interesting, innovative, ambitious people who have found their calling. I wanted to create my dream, the business I wanted to work in that aligned with my vision and my values.
Some may see this as being selfish. Possibly. But I see it more as being self-fulfilling, being the change I wanted to see.
That change was to apply everything I learned about growth from my time in the BIG corporates and in working with other agencies and apply it to the SME landscape so that SME companies could grow smarter, faster and more strategically.
This is why I created The Growth Garden. We exist to help ambitious service businesses to not only grow, but to sustainably thrive!

How long have you been running your business?: I am a 3 X founder. The Growth Garden is my third consulting business and it was formed in February of 2022, so we’re soon to be three!

What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced as a woman in business, and how did you overcome it?:

What has been your proudest moment as a business owner?:

What strategies have helped you grow your business?: The two strategies that have helped me the most in growing my business are:
Do damn good work in the first place! Creating happy satisfied clients who get the results you promised and maybe learned a little something during the process is one of the best ways to create a lasting legacy and develop some very vocal ambassadors who will help you to grow.
Networking, the formation of strategic alliances and offering a generous referral program. Almost all of my work comes from referrals. I actively reach out and connect with those people who are my ideal clients and to the networks like SPARK where they gather. But, I also connect with other entrepreneurs who offer non-competing services to those same target clients and I form alliances with them and offer generous referral bonuses to encourage introductions.

What tools or resources have been game-changers for your business?:

Can you share one key lesson you’ve learned about managing finances as a business owner?:

How do you balance the demands of your business with your personal life?:

What leadership qualities do you believe are essential for running a successful business?: In no particular order: grit, perseverance, optimism, flexibility, hard work, honesty with your customers, your partners and yourself, confidence, humility, decisiveness, problem solving, creativity, curiosity, accountability, empathy, innovation and patience.

How do you motivate and manage your team?:

What role does mentorship or networking play in your business journey?: Providing mentorship is an honour. I think that we should all seek out opportunities to give back. I embrace the role of mentor, coach, consultant and provider of inspiration for those who are keen to accelerate their own journey and learn from those who have gone before them. I seek out opportunities to share my knowledge with networks like SPARK and feel it’s an imperative for those of us who are a few decades into our professional careers. And, the curious, social, serendipity loving me will never get enough networking, it’s often where the unplanned magic happens!

What trends do you think will shape your industry in the coming years?:

How do you stay ahead of the competition in your industry?:

Who or what inspires you in your business journey?: I constantly get inspired by others. There is inspiration all around us… IF we care to observe it. I have been blessed in my career to not only have held many different roles, but have had exposure in many different industries and the inspiration that comes from different approaches, processes, and people has truly been all around me. Sometimes by just observing how someone or some other company approaches the thing you’re grappling with that provides you with a viable solution.
I’m a big believer in the cross pollination of ideas so I actively try to seek out variety and through it, inspiration. When you are being truly curious and asking great questions the flow of inspiration is never-ending.

What books, podcasts, or resources have had the biggest impact on your professional growth?:

What’s a fun fact about you that most people wouldn’t know?: Here are a few… I’m a published fiction author. I’m obsessed with the question why, Golden Retrievers, airplanes, Ryan Reynolds, and the Ted Lasso series!

What’s one thing you wish more people knew about your business?: How deeply passionate we are about what we do and how deeply vested we get in creating success for clients. I do this because I am passionate about helping others grow into their full potential. I want my clients to succeed. There is nothing more rewarding than seeing a vision and a goal come to light especially when clients may have doubted that it could. Being that beacon of possibility for them is where the real payoff is for me.

Reflecting on your time in business, what is one piece of advice you would give to another woman to help her on her business journey?: To quote Ted Lasso, “Be curious, not judgemental.” And by being curious I mean actively exposing yourself to new and different people, roles, processes, tools, technologies, industries, geographies, cultures, values…. You get the idea.
By exposing yourself to diversity you gain perspective. Your landscape on what’s possible changes and expands. And, here’s the gold, your goals for yourself and your business then expand along with it!

How can people connect with you or learn more about your business? (e.g., website, social media, etc.): Growth Garden Website https://www.growthgarden.au/
Growth Garden Email: Linda@growthgarden.au
Linda’s LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindajohannesson/
Growth Garden Instagram https://www.instagram.com/thegrowthgardenau/
Growth Garden Facebook https://www.facebook.com/TheGrowthGalAtTheGrowthGarden