#awinewith Carly Wieland
MEET Carly
Carly is the Founder of Lime Intelligence.
Find Carly here:
Lime Intelligence website and Instagram @lime.intelligence.
Transcript
Danielle Lewis (00:08):
Oh my God, we made it. Carly, thank you so much for being here on Spark tv. Cheers. Yes. Just the thing, we should just set a warning to everyone that we've both have a long
Carly Wieland (00:23):
Day. Must have one to enter this process. Yeah,
Danielle Lewis (00:26):
That's right. You have to get on our level today. So let's start out by sharing how you got here. So I love to give people a bit of context in terms of have you always run businesses? Did you have a career first, how did you actually get to Lyme intelligence?
Carly Wieland (00:47):
Okay. Look, thank you so much for inviting me to be here, Danny. I really appreciate it and I admire you and everything you do as well. So it feels like an honor to get to have a warm, the fabulous, Danny, I'm so happy.
Danielle Lewis (00:58):
Thank you.
Carly Wieland (01:00):
Yeah, look, I always wanted to be an entrepreneur, so I won't do the war and peace version, but I started my first business when I was seven.
Danielle Lewis (01:11):
What really,
Carly Wieland (01:12):
I dunno why, just had this thing and I made cards and I was an avid sewer. My mum enrolled me in a course called A Knit Wit. So I was an official knit wit for a while.
Danielle Lewis (01:23):
Oh, oh my God, love you so much.
Carly Wieland (01:26):
So the business was called Hot Radical Designs. And so yeah, I just made I think at least 30 or $40 from my family. It was a big push. And then after that, yeah, went put that on hold for a while and went and did the uni and corporate thing. And yeah, I think that was a really good experience actually, just to get those foundations. And I worked out what is good about corporate and things that I didn't like as well. What did
Danielle Lewis (01:55):
You study?
Carly Wieland (01:57):
I studied at Q ut I wanted to be the next Steven Spielberg when I was at school, but didn't get the right grades. So I went on to do marketing. I thought, well that sounds fun and creative. And then I went on to work at Tourism Queensland and it was weird that everything I wanted and planned to do went completely out the window and I started in market research and in aviation. So I became an asexual.
Danielle Lewis (02:27):
I need to put a rating on this episode.
Carly Wieland (02:31):
I'll keep the pg. It's alright.
(02:34):
But I started working there in aviation doing commercial airline development for the state government and I really loved that. I had an excellent mentor at the time who was super passionate about the industry and it just sucked me straight in. And then after doing that for a while, I went for my first corporate job down at Gold Coast Airport as their manager of business development and marketing. And I ended up being there for eight years and going through the ranks. Ended up being on the executive committee there, which was an amazing experience. Lots of travel. I think my record was, I was away for three months out of the year when I added all the nights. I'd go away, come back, and it all seemed very glamorous, but it was quite exhausting. And then decided what different
Danielle Lewis (03:18):
Times we live in.
Carly Wieland (03:20):
I know. And then decided to get married and have babies and that didn't really go with traveling. And then I got divorced and then I got remarried. So anyway, that was fun. Midlife crisis at 30.
Danielle Lewis (03:32):
Oh my gosh. I can imagine that in and of itself going through that was interesting.
Carly Wieland (03:38):
Oh yeah, it was. And I think the good thing about it was that it made me go, okay, it is time to get on the entrepreneurial journey again. I did, there was a lot of frustrations in corporate while I loved learning from the people around me. It was kind of like, well, I'd go to do something. And then it was like, no, no, we're not quite ready for that yet. Or Hey, why don't we do this idea? And it's like, no, I think you're a bit ahead of yourself there. I think you just need to calm down and this is what we need to do. Can
Danielle Lewis (04:07):
You not dream big, please?
Carly Wieland (04:09):
Yeah, just calm down. And that was quite frustrating and just wanted to be able to experiment a bit more. So I started doing consulting work, doing a similar kind of thing, which was a good bridge. And yeah, I think that's where Lyme intelligence was born because working with airports and having those airport customers, I'd made a lot of contacts in that time at Queensland Airports, which was great for personal brand exposure. And so a lot of people were like, oh, cool, now you're working for yourself. Can you come and do my route development? We've been really successful at Gold Coast getting in the first ever long haul flights from Asia and launching Jetstar and things like that. So all of those things were great to get my business going. You could have pass wins to give you that case study to go, Hey, you can trust me.
(05:00):
I've done this before, but now I'm just doing it for myself. And yeah, I think what we noticed is that everywhere they want to know, well, how do I talk to an airline? How do I get started? The whole point of those roles is to get more flights in. So how do I go about that? And it all just comes back to data. And so a lot of people that work for the airports, they didn't have access to the information. They had Excel spreadsheets everywhere. They didn't know where they were going to get that information from. And so that was a challenge for them. And so that's where we're like, well, there's got to be a better way. We really can do business intelligence better. Airports are so focused on operations and on safety, which is good, and security and that sort
Danielle Lewis (05:43):
Of thing. We want that. Yes, we
Carly Wieland (05:45):
Want that, yes. But when it comes to commercial, particularly 10 years ago, they were like, oh, okay, that's an afterthought. We don't want to spend money on marketing and budget on data. So we built some Excel spreadsheets and then we're like, okay, God, this is crap. We really can come up with a better way. And so Lyme was born and my now husband who used to work at the airport and then worked at an airline, I slowly dragged him out of corporate summer, me and he went, which was great. And so now I started the business together and it's been an amazing journey. But it all started in that I guess airport space and Lime was an airport business up until recently.
Danielle Lewis (06:28):
Wow, that's incredible. And I love how you used your skillset that you had going through corporate and use that to drive the business. I mean, I think it's interesting. People are like, what do I do? I want to start a business, what do I do? And then they're kind of trying to think of something that they have no experience in, but it's like you already innately have so many skills that you've built up over time. Absolutely.
Carly Wieland (06:51):
Yeah. And I think too, when you've got a network, it's like that concept of a bridge.
Danielle Lewis (06:58):
Yes. I love that. You said you went into consulting first. That's cool.
Carly Wieland (07:02):
Yeah, yeah, because it gave me, it was like a soft start just to test things out too and find out, well, when you're not working for one particular organization, what was amazing is it kind of opened the floodgates for, oh, hi, what have you been doing there? Now I can talk to you. You're not sort of bound by confidentiality where you are. Can you apply some of those skills and help me do that? I know I couldn't ask you before you had a job, but now can I pay you to help me do this? So it was actually really great to get that start and just all the frustrations that our customers had just came to the surface. And that sort of born, it was where the idea was born for line because it was just so obvious when similar pain points just kept coming up and coming up and I wanted to make my life easier. I'm like, I need to put this data into some sort of centralized warehouse so that it doesn't take me days and days just to find the information before I even get to work out the So what part of the business case. So I would recommend that as a way of starting, if you are unsure, your core skills get set that you've grown up with generally there's so many applications for it.
Danielle Lewis (08:18):
Yeah, no, that's awesome. And I love the talking to people and listening to their problems and creating a solution that solves it. It sounds so basic, but I feel like people miss talking to their potential customers first sometimes.
Carly Wieland (08:36):
Yeah. And look, what I have learned, I, and I know that it's sort of building up where we've been, but one big takeaway I have learned when we started business was I used to think that you had to be a particular type. And this comes back to sometimes as women we're like, oh, we always doubt ourselves. Whereas guys just go, ah, fuck it. I dunno if I'm allowed to swear. Sorry. Oh
Danielle Lewis (09:01):
Yeah, we have wine. Of course you're allowed to swear.
Carly Wieland (09:04):
Okay, that's my favorite word. It's cheaper than therapy. I think I soon realize, even when I was in corporate life that originally when you leave uni, think, oh, you have to have this secret recipe and you have to have done, get so many runs on the board, you have to have 10 years badge on your shoulder before you can go and start your own business. But absolutely not. It's just, honestly, I think the biggest difference is just the will and that sort of stomach for just taking a leap. You got to have the stomach for it. And I think it's just about trying something and then an action, that constant action. That's the difference I think between people that have great ideas and those that actually have a business.
Danielle Lewis (09:50):
Yeah. Oh my God, I could not agree with you more. I just chatted with someone. And even applying that to a marketing lens, some people think that there's just going to be this one thing that they do that's going to change the world. But I love that you said that because exactly it. It's just the consistent action act. Take action, take action, take action over and over again. There's not one tiny breakthrough moment that
Carly Wieland (10:12):
No, no, it was like there's no bird that lands on a post next to you and gives you a wink, and you go, oh, right, this is the right time.
Danielle Lewis (10:21):
I wish there was,
Carly Wieland (10:23):
I'm looking for a sign. Yeah, I just think it's just getting on with it. And we started slowly and we build momentum and you experiment. I think that you don't have to get it right from the get go. And I remember going to a few really good presentations for other business women and they were like, well, just don't let perfection get in the way of getting started. All the ducks don't have to be lined up in a row. Someone said to me, when all the ducks are lined up, what happens? They get shot. Okay,
Danielle Lewis (10:55):
Wow.
Carly Wieland (10:55):
Okay. That
Danielle Lewis (10:56):
Turned very quickly.
Carly Wieland (10:57):
I'm from Queensland,
(11:01):
I'm a farm girl, but I think you don't have to wait for perfection just to get started and get the wheels moving and not everything works. And everyone always says, don't be afraid of failure, which is true. And I was like, well, I don't want to fail, and I don't think our business has failed, but we've had failures within the business on certain projects, and you learn from that. So when someone said to me, oh, don't be afraid of failure. I'm thinking, oh my God, do I have to completely fall in a gutter? And then I go, okay, I've had my failure and now I can work on. It's like, no, there's different levels. You can fail at a few things. Learn from those and still keep pushing forward. You don't have to wait for this big aha moment where things go to absolute crap and then you start again. Because I think some people always think, oh, I haven't had my failure and you're just waiting. There's this demon that's coming, but I just think that's complete crap. And that you might just have little failures and you learn from them.
Danielle Lewis (11:57):
And I mean, even the word fail is so aggressive. It's like you're going to try a lot of shit that doesn't work. And if you do fall in a, he go, oh my God, well that email didn't work. That was a failure. It was an email. Get over yourself. Just learn from it and try again. But I think we
Carly Wieland (12:20):
Glamorized it. It's self doubt. Yeah. Yeah. I think you coming back to the earlier point, there's not really any moment where you just know, okay, now's the right time. I think you just have to get started and not be afraid that little things might go wrong here and there and you just keep pushing forward. And we've had that in our business big time in the last couple of years. Covid was a shocker for a lot of businesses, but we were an aviation business.
Danielle Lewis (12:46):
Oh my God, that's insane. We just
Carly Wieland (12:49):
Got some momentum. We were like at year five going, oh, this is great. We've got 18 airports. We're doing a lot of consulting work. Our revenue had doubled. And we're like, okay, this is great. Now we can employ someone. We got an office, we fitted out the office and we're like, oh, we've made it. Now I have a pot plant. This is very exciting.
(13:10):
Love that. And then Covid came, and then we started getting the calls from airports. We're a subscription based model. Airports pay a license fee to access the product. And then we set them up and then they go an ongoing subscription and they're like, oh, we're going to have to cancel our subscription. We've been told to cut all spending. And I'm like, but you're going to need to track your recovery. And they're like, oh yes, but we've been told to cut everything. So 70% of our revenue was looking at going overnight, and we absolutely freaked out. And there was a lot of tears, a lot of wine,
Danielle Lewis (13:47):
Lot of wine. It's helpful. So many levels.
Carly Wieland (13:51):
And we just had that moment. We were like, okay, so we need to put our big girl pants on here and work out what are we actually going to do? And we're not going to take this line down. And I think if you're born with that inner fight, that helps a lot. You're passionate about what you do. And I think for us, we're like, okay, let's just tell everyone that. Don't cancel your subscription. Just don't pay us for four months. We'll keep doing the work for free. And that way it's way harder to win a new customer than it is to keep an existing customer, as we all know.
Danielle Lewis (14:24):
Yes, I love
Carly Wieland (14:25):
This. And so let's just keep them by looking after them. We'll step up our service, but we won't charge. And that will end up being the best strategy that we did. We only lost one airport in that whole entire time. And we really leaned in and we did blogs, we did video interviews that we could share because everyone was feeling pretty depressed. Everyone was scared about losing their jobs. It was a pretty rough time. And now we've got really loyal customers to the point where they send us gifts for Christmas. They really appreciate it. And I'm like,
Danielle Lewis (15:01):
That is so amazing. Fucking feelings. Yes. Oh my god. And I love that so much as well, because it is so true. You've hit the nail on the head there with retaining customers. So there's some stat, I think it costs you five times more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain an existing one. And I feel like a lot of people get obsessed with the got to get new people, got to get new money in the door, got to get new revenue. They kind of forget about their existing customers to pop them on whatever they need to go on and then just let them sit until there is a problem. So consciously focusing in on your existing customers I think is a frigging great lesson.
Carly Wieland (15:46):
We call it lime love. We send out lime love packages and to the point where we felt like psychologists for a while,
Danielle Lewis (15:55):
But you have to be, sometimes some
Carly Wieland (15:57):
People were really struggling, but it was a nice feeling to have that purpose too, because in a time of crisis, you can get the wobbles and go into paralysis. And I could see that we could have gone down that path and plenty of other people around us did where they're like, okay, I'm just going to go into the trenches and I'm just going to wait and it's going to get better. But I think if you are an entrepreneur, you like action and you want to be doing things and feel like you're waking up every day with purpose. So we were like, okay, right. This is our new purpose. This is what we're going to do. We're going to make everyone know that there's a silver lining. We're going to be that positive ray of sunshine.
Danielle Lewis (16:36):
Yes. Oh my God, that's awesome.
Carly Wieland (16:39):
So it worked out really well. And at that time too, we're like, okay, so we can love the airports up, but it's not going to pay the bills, so that's great. What are we going to do next? And we decided to diversify, do the pivot. Everyone's like, I hate that word, but I'm like, but it's a good word. It
Danielle Lewis (16:58):
Really describes what you're doing. Come
Carly Wieland (17:02):
On, let's not get hung up on a word. And that worked out to be really great. And again, we went out to our contacts first and said to them, Hey, we are looking at, we've got this BI platform, we've got this whole framework we think for work for other industries outside of aviation. Would you be willing to experiment with us first? We'll do it for this price and you'd be able to crash test dummy. And when we did that, we realized there was actually more appetite from non-aviation businesses for the bi side of things and dashboards and having access to your, your numbers. And there are so many SMEs out there that are like, well, I can't afford a tech person. I can't afford a bi developer. They're expensive, but if I could outsource it to you, could you help me? I'm like, yeah, let's give you total visibility over your business. And they're like, it could work. And so that's just taken off and that's just so exciting for us. We were goaling here and now we're goaling up here. We could be bigger than what we thought we could and let's give it a go. Why not? Let's fuck it. Let's do it.
Danielle Lewis (18:15):
Oh my God, that is awesome. Because you know what? It was really interesting. I kind of felt the same about Covid. Like you would look around and there were people who were just hibernating, who were just totally like, Nope, we're going to close up shop, we're just going to ride it out. And the unfortunate thing about that was some of them did that for too long and then there were others that were just like, what are we going to do? Let's just come up with crazy ideas. I'm pretty sure I remember in Brisbane, I drove through and got a drive through lasagna from someone. I'm like, what the hell? It was so cool though. And at that time too, when you were like, this is the best thing that's happened to me all week. I
Carly Wieland (19:00):
Remember boots and I'm getting lasagna.
Danielle Lewis (19:02):
Yeah, exactly. Can this be a regular thing? Does this just happen to be through covid? But it was like those ideas, it really separated people. I think people either went into their shell or went into crazy creative mode and I think it really paid off for people as well, which is so good.
Carly Wieland (19:20):
Definitely. Well, we've gone from a team of three to a team of 12 in two years over Covid when we should be dead. We were in aviation, we kept all of our airport customers, we've created new revenue streams for them, worked out well, what do you guys need? Because we did all those lean in sessions, we just got all these ideas and we just made sure we wrote all those ideas down and now we're giving back to them the things that they want. And we talked to the airlines and they're like, well, I wish the airports were doing this. Now things have changed. It was like, okay, well we can help with that. Cool. Which has been really cool. So it's covid is the best thing to have happened to us, which sounds ridiculous, but no, it's in the end. It just gave us that kick up the ass to go, I know we're thinking about other industries, but now we have to do it out of survival. And I'm so glad we did. We've tripled our revenue, we've tripled our costs as well, invested in people, but I think we've set ourselves up now for scale. So have, like I said before, our vision is much greater now. We just want to disrupt the way SMEs do business intelligence all around the world.
Danielle Lewis (20:34):
Yeah, that is so cool. So talk to me about the team. So it's no easy feat going from three to 12, lots of stuff that come with that. How have you found going from employee to employer?
Carly Wieland (20:51):
Oh, that's probably our biggest challenge is, and when we're in a tech company essentially, and it's hard to keep people, we've had a few turnover of staff, which we weren't expecting, we never do. And we now, I think we have a really good core base. What we did realize is that you need to pay people well, and this is a great tip that my mentor gave me. And that's the other key thing. We wouldn't have got through Covid if we didn't have a mentor business coaching group. I was part of the Spark group. All of that continuous content, people who are like-minded. It is very true that you become the sum of the people around you that you hang out with. So put yourself in the pool that you want to be in, not necessarily the one you don't want to be in. And my coach said to me, you know what we were looking at employing someone who's like $170,000. I'm like, holy shit, more than we pay ourselves. Oh my God. And he's like, well, you're renting that person. If you have the pipeline of stuff coming in, you're not giving them $170,000 here in a bucket. You are renting that person for an amount every month. The first month might be tough, but every month after that you should be creating billables that can pay for that person. I was like, oh, is this complete mind shift for me? Then I was like, oh, well let's get a town. Let's go and get five. Yeah,
Danielle Lewis (22:16):
Totally. Get an army working for
Carly Wieland (22:19):
Us. Come on.
Danielle Lewis (22:21):
So
Carly Wieland (22:22):
That was quite a good mind and everything's mindset with business ownership. Let's base it. You just got to keep working on this, otherwise you won't have the stomach for it. But I think that the resourcing side is definitely a challenge. And even just recently we changed the way we think about this because tech people are so hard to get. We're like, okay, we're going to do a mix of contracting. We're going to do a mix of graduates coming up through and just kind of have, look at our team almost like our customers where we have a pipeline look at how do we build people through, how do we limey them by getting them in early, have that mix of gray hair up and comers and that's kind of worked really well. So we've got a few really good loyal team members now and treat them bloody well.
(23:15):
I love Richard Branson's. Treat your team the same way you treat your customers. And we do that when we onboard someone, we send them a lime love pack, we send them collateral, we send them a gift, we find out we do an onboarding. So what favorite drink do you like? What music do you like? If you had a day off, what would you do? So we we've got that insight into who they are as a person and we call it the Lyme family. And it seems to be working because I get that feedback from our team. They're like, what's your favorite thing about working at Lyme? Oh, well, we just love the culture. We like the atmosphere of feeling like we're all part of the bigger vision. And I know a lot of people talk about that, but I think we are trying to walk the talk as much as possible, and it's just treating your team you would your customers, I think.
Danielle Lewis (24:02):
Yeah, but it's also, I think being intentional about that. I think it's really, you think about an employee as a person that's supposed to do a job sometimes and you kind of forget about the human side. And I think someone once said to me that culture's never done. It's never fixed.
Carly Wieland (24:22):
No. It's always
Danielle Lewis (24:23):
Something that you continuously have to invest in and it is all of those little things. I love the survey. That is so cool. It's those little things where you go and as a business owner, you need the data as well. You actually need the spreadsheet that says, these are all the things these people like. This is when their birthday is. This is when, because it's never going to stay in your head. I don't care how intelligent you are, empathic you are whatever you need it in a spreadsheet. But unless you
Carly Wieland (24:53):
Grow a team, how are you going to remember? And
Danielle Lewis (24:57):
I can't remember what I ate for breakfast.
Carly Wieland (25:01):
Well, I've got a great person who's worked with me now, our marketing person and her role is to help support me and I don't want to be, and I'm not sorry about getting her to assist me in the things that I can do better. Actually going down, I remember you saying to me once you have a list of these are my empire things and these are my things I could give away. And I was like, oh, that's a great idea. So I took that and I used that and I'm like, oh, I'm so glad. These are my things I can pass on to the next person because what do I want to be paid per hour? And is that coffee with that person or is going to get the coffee for the office? Is that worth what I would pay myself per hour or should I get that to someone else to do?
(25:43):
And that concept of I guess outsourcing or delegating as much as possible where you're not really refining your time and thinking about what your hourly rate is makes you kind of question. I don't know if it's a coffee with someone that you're not sure if it's going to, it's someone that's just going to kick tires or whatever. You're like, oh, actually let's just do a 15 minute teams call. And it sounds brutal, but time is so precious and the only thing you can't really muck around with. So why don't you try and think about everything like that and delegate where you can.
Danielle Lewis (26:23):
And that's such a good lesson from almost going from founder of the business to CEO of the business. As the founder, you have to do everything. You're the one man show
Carly Wieland (26:35):
Hand dirty.
Danielle Lewis (26:36):
Exactly. But as you move more into that CEO role, you really do have to be of your time and understand where you add value because you also need a life. You've got a family, you've got outside interests. There's a little bit of self-care that has to happen at some point. Hell, you have to if you don't learn to delegate and outsource and the right things to do as well, so you're not sacrificing quality or whatever. I think you can get in a little bit of trouble if you're not thinking that way.
Carly Wieland (27:12):
And I do think as we've grown our team, the importance of that onboarding phase has become more a, I've become a lot more aware of that, making sure that you have your processes and how do you onboard people? So what we started doing more recently is we do a 15 minute chat with someone who's just started the business with every other team member. And that team member gets to say what they do and share because everyone loves talking about them themselves. So clearly I'm just talking about myself all the time right now.
Danielle Lewis (27:47):
I love it. Do it. I'm literally got a post at night at a pen and I'm taking notes and
Carly Wieland (27:55):
That works really well. Everyone gets a little buzz out of it and they get to form a little bit of a rapport as well while they're going through that process. And then it's a way of not me having to sit there for two days talking to someone in our team and telling them everything about the business. They get the perspective of everybody else. So we might do some longer sessions with people if they're relevant, they're part of the digital team or the marketing team for example. But I think that getting to meet everybody and just having that little one-on-one time, even if it's like 15, 20 minutes, we have a rule. We try not to make any meeting more than 30 minutes. If we can't get shit done in 30 minutes, then we're wasting people's time efficient people.
Danielle Lewis (28:39):
That is so good. I love that. Connecting people with other people in the business though, I remember that was actually the best thing that we ever did at Scrunch for our engineering. So we made our engineers sit with the campaign managers to actually run a campaign and they would say, why are you doing that? And the campaign managers would be like, because what you built, that's how you built it. And they were like, oh, we can do that so much better. But it's because they didn't understand intimately what the job was that they were building then they just built it whatever they thought. But once they actually viscerally felt the problem, things got so much more efficient. It was so cool.
Carly Wieland (29:21):
Yeah, absolutely. It comes down to why you're doing what you're doing if you don't share that. And we had Joe Burgess actually who we got her to come out for a day. Yeah, she's great. And she's a SaaS founder, and we got her to come out and we had a day with our team and we focused a whole day on our why do we do what we do? Why do we get out of bed in the morning and do this? And it was so funny, some of our tech guys were like, why are we doing this? Let's get on with the shit. We've got to. How are we going to make the product better? What about the code and what about this? And we're like, no, we're all doing this together, even the digital team, and we're going to sit back and look at what is our why.
(30:04):
And we watched the Simon Sinek video. We did the whole works, and it was so good because now even some of our bi developers are like, and data engineers like, oh yeah, so this could be really beneficial for the customer. Just flipped their perspective. And I agree. I reckon it increases efficiencies and it makes them understand, well, what's the end game and why do we have customers and why is this important and why should I get this done straight away and how does this impact on the business? And I wonder about what that's going to be like when we're bigger. Our vision is to triple our team. So how do we nurture that nice intimacy and collaboration that we've got right now when we get bigger, but I'm sure we'll be right. We'll just keep on our toes, which is the only way to do it. Keep experimenting.
Danielle Lewis (30:57):
Yeah, totally. Keep experimenting. And I think making it a priority. I think that's the biggest thing is if you don't keep it a priority, you don't focus on it. It just doesn't happen. So many things are on the to-do list. If there's not a couple of your top priorities always there, then it's so easy for a week to pass, a month to pass and oh, I didn't do that. I didn't do that.
Carly Wieland (31:19):
And that's why having that group of people around you, and I do recommend being part of a business coaching group or having other people that you keep accountable with because one of the things that we have been taught in this group is that you can have a five year plan or a one year plan, but keep it really high level. Don't go write a 50 page business plan that never ever gets looked at again. And you'll spend so much time on it.
Danielle Lewis (31:46):
It's like a 30 minute meeting. If you can't put it on a single page, it's irrelevant. Exactly.
Carly Wieland (31:52):
People scroll through football fields of shit in a few hours. No one's going to sit there and read a 50 page document. So have a few key points and play a game of quarters. That's what we talk about a lot. What's our next quarter going to look like? Yes, we have a longer term vision, but what's the quarter going to look like and what's the next month look like? And we kind of keep that rotating and we don't get hung up on, oh crap, we didn't tick everything off our list because that's bloody debilitating and it just affects your attitude so much. So if we've got most of the things done well, that's great. Well, let's look at what's the next quarter and what's the next quarter. And I think having the long-term vision, but the game of quarters just has kind of helped keep us agile and flexible and I don't feel like I'm locked in any chains and I don't get depressed if I don't achieve everything that we were going to do because there's always a reason why, because a new opportunity came up and we were like, well, let's grab that.
(32:48):
I don't feel like I need to tick everything off my spreadsheet. So okay. So I think that's been a really valuable lesson for us as well and helped us adapt and change over this last two years.
Danielle Lewis (33:00):
That's awesome. I absolutely love that. It's so easy to wake up in the morning and be like, I have no idea how I'm going to make a million dollars. But if you get up and go, the only thing I have to do today is sell one thing, then you're on your way to making the million dollars. Well, whatever it is, your big grand vision is when you break it down. And I love that the game of quarters. That's so good. Because also I also think too, even if you focus to micro, it gets and you don't achieve the micro, it's easy to go, oh, I didn't do it. I didn't do it. I didn't do it, versus I got a quarter, I can really implement a new strategy. I can see if that's working, I can optimize it, I can test it and align to the vision. It's a good amount of time to actually achieve something.
Carly Wieland (33:45):
Yeah, no, absolutely. And then celebrate the wins too. The other thing we've done is implemented a monthly morning tea where I love food. So we have our favorite little bakery and we get all these goodies. It's just an excuse for the business to buy me morning tea. Really?
Danielle Lewis (34:02):
Yeah, I'm in. I'm in.
Carly Wieland (34:05):
And so we get our morning team, we sit around and we do, well, what's been our wins the last month as a team and let's do a shout out to, everyone goes around, has an opportunity to go, or I want to say, well done McKayley for doing this, or Well done Levi for doing this. And it's really nice to get that peer support and people think about it in the lead up and you're like, oh, what have been our wins? And when you sit back and look at, because we are rapidly changing all the time, how much we're actually achieving in a month, let alone a quarter, it's pretty impressive. And so it's good to kind of go, Hey guys, this is awesome. You have this tendency where you're like, okay, did that tick next? Tick next? And you don't stop and go, well, I'm going to give myself a high five for that effort.
Danielle Lewis (34:53):
Totally, totally a pat on the back, a bottle of champagne, anything please. And I think too, it's easy as entrepreneurs to keep up with that level of hustle, but I don't think teams play at that level. I think you've kind of raised something really important when you do have a team is that you need to be cognizant of the fact that they probably don't think how you think they kind of think in their sphere of influence versus your sphere of influence. So actually making sure that they feel successful in their sphere of influence is so
Carly Wieland (35:37):
Yeah, and I think sharing that too just creates those little connection fibers between the team.
Danielle Lewis (35:43):
Yeah, absolutely. So do you have any downtime?
Carly Wieland (35:49):
Yes, we play hard, but we work hard, but we play hard too. So I have to say, we do have a lot of holidays every year. We've got four kids between us being the brand Dutch blended family, so we love our camping and we have our new camper trailer arrives in a week, which is like a weapon. Oh
Danielle Lewis (36:09):
My God, that's so fun.
Carly Wieland (36:11):
Super excited. And we just go off road, no phone reception. I get dirty. There's red dirt everywhere, but this new Canberra trail's going to make it a little bit more luxe, but that's our reward for ourselves for getting this far. But yeah, we do take time off grid and we sort of do some holidays with the kids and we say to them, we kind of involve in the business and say, well, you're a Lyme family member too, so when we're working hard during the week, the benefit for you is that we get to do these holidays and we probably have six to seven weeks holiday a year with kids. We'll just go school holidays and just have that downtime and that's our flexibility, I guess. We work pretty hard during the week. No doubt about it. Sometimes when I was starting, I'm like, am I working hard enough? People say, are you working hard? I'm like, I don't know. It
Danielle Lewis (37:03):
Days working
Carly Wieland (37:05):
Hard. Yeah,
Danielle Lewis (37:07):
It's so true. I know, but it's so easy to say, well, the reason I haven't achieved my goals yet is I'm not working hard enough. It's like, well, no, I don't know if that is the reason.
Carly Wieland (37:17):
No, no, that's not it. I'm delegated enough.
Danielle Lewis (37:21):
Totally. It's usually not how many hours you're putting in. That equates to success
Carly Wieland (37:27):
And I get good at monitoring, I feel in the last, I've spent a lot of time working on personal development in the last, well, particularly two years, part of the whole business coaching thing, and I feel like I know when my bucket's getting full and I'm like, okay, I can sense this now. I'm going to go and have a float at City Cave on the weekend or something.
Danielle Lewis (37:50):
Oh, that's such a good idea. Yeah. Yeah.
Carly Wieland (37:51):
Just things that zone out. And I've even said to my husband, we work together. I'm like, sometimes I just need a bit of time out where I like to pot around the house and do the washing or read a book or have my cup of tea in bed in the, I try and do a mix of regular little things and then we do the big holidays as well. So yeah, that's kind of the balance, but you just kind of know. You get used to feeling, oh, okay, I'm going to freak out if I don't. You can sense yourself snapping and getting cranky and not often. It's one of the kids, are you all right? Are you getting your period or something, mom? I'm like, oh
Danielle Lewis (38:26):
My God, it's so funny. Right at that point, and we're going away in a week and I'm like, you just have to last one more week. You can do this, and then you just chill. My partner's like, is everything okay? And I'm like, no, it's not okay, but it'll be okay in a week when I'm on a plane, so let's just ride this out.
Carly Wieland (38:48):
Oh, it's so true. And you just got to go and do your little thing. Yeah, totally. And one of our coaches says to us, well, you need to exercise. Just do something every day. It might be 10 minutes of stretching in the morning or a walk or just kind of monitor when you do stuff, what makes you feel good, and then do a little bit more of that. You don't have to do half an hour of exercise every day if you can't. I know I need that to keep my adrenaline down, but I just, yeah, something is better than nothing. So some days I might do five minutes of stretches and I'm like, that's okay. Or I might spend an extra bit of time reading another chapter of book with my son when we're in bed at night, and that makes me feel a woman fuzzy on the inside and I'm still being a good parent and entrepreneur,
Danielle Lewis (39:37):
But it's so interesting. I feel like it goes completely the other way we go, are you looking after yourself enough? And then I feel like I'm failing as an entrepreneur. I'm not getting up at 5:00 AM and doing journaling and exercising and this and that and that, so obviously I'm not doing it right. So I actually love that you're like, no, just if you do a little bit of something every day for yourself that zens you back out. But also, I like that you said figure out what it is for you. Exactly. For me, because I sit all day, I just sit here and talk to people on the internet all day.
(40:16):
It's literally just walking. I can just walk to get groceries for dinner, get back, and by the time I'm back 30 minutes later, 20 minutes later, whatever it is, I just have relaxed. I've moved and my mind is clear and I can do the thing. So I try and actually do it in the middle of the day so that it's kind of my forced break. So it's like sometimes you're like, I don't want to take lunch, or you eat lunch at your desk, and I'm like, no, if I get up and do that, I've zenned myself out for the afternoon so
Carly Wieland (40:49):
You don't need lots of time. I think that's one of the misconceptions, and then we just put more pressure on ourselves. We are not doing yoga on the beach. Seriously, who does that?
Danielle Lewis (41:00):
More wine. That's the real answer.
Carly Wieland (41:02):
More wine. Absolutely. A hundred percent. I have to just walk a little bit further so I can have that extra glass of wine.
Danielle Lewis (41:08):
I know. I'm not going to lie. The old age gets you, doesn't it?
Carly Wieland (41:13):
Oh my gosh. Hell yes. Yes. This old body ain't what she used to be, but that's okay.
Danielle Lewis (41:19):
That's right. We've still got it. We've still got it. Okay, so let's wrap with any last imparting wisdom that you might have. So we have plenty of people that dial in who are corporate esco, who are either just wanting to take the leap and start something for themselves or have just started and are kind of freaking out as to what they've done. Is there any kind of, I guess, advice you might've wished somebody told you or would impart to your previous self?
Carly Wieland (41:56):
I think honestly, I really wish at the beginning, I just wish someone had said to me the key thing that don't worry about perfection. Just get started on something. There's no secret recipe and there's not this secret club of people who are just frigging amazing and that you can't be part of. Everyone can be part of that club if they just do something. Just get active and do something, and if you don't want to start a business, you could buy one and you could buy businesses without going and having a million dollars. You could go and say, oh, well up to the owner, find a motivated seller. This is the ideal time to do it in Covid land. There's so many people who are retiring that just are closing down businesses and go and say, well, what if no money down? What if you vendor finance? There's other ways of you don't have to have cash to start. I used to think, oh, I need to save up lots of money to be able to have that capital to invest. When we first started, we did a deal with our developers at the time that we'd pay them off over time and give them a bonus on top. You don't have, I just wish that someone had said to me, you don't need to have all your ducks lined up.
(43:14):
I'll get shot. I'll get
Danielle Lewis (43:15):
Shot. You're the only person out of a hundred people that I've talked to that has said that. That is so cool because I feel like I've spoken to a lot of people who've said, I don't have enough money. I want to do a tech thing, but I've got to raise capital or I've got to save up. Or developers are too expensive or whatever. That's so smart about find someone, even if it's not the perfect vision that you've got for the business you want, but they've built the foundations to kickstart you. That's so cool. I love that.
Carly Wieland (43:52):
And just be brave enough to go, oh, I'm just going to start with a customer and get their testimonial. The power of testimonials has been incredible for us. Just sort of having that word of mouth and referrals and don't be afraid to give away a bit of cash for the longer term goal to like, oh, well, if you refer us to somebody, we will share in that profit and partnerships. Wow. I never realized how powerful partnerships are until getting going in this gig from a brand leveraging point of view, from introductions to other potential customers point of view from even knowledge like, oh, I'm really good at this particular thing. Well, let's work together. I'm good at this thing. There's not a set mold. It's a really experimental, so just give it a go and you can start slow without thinking, freaking hell, I'm going to lose my house and have to mortgage the house to do this. Just get going.
Danielle Lewis (44:50):
Yeah. Oh, I love that so much. Carly, you are absolutely incredible. Cheers. Oh, thank you. Thank you for coming on Spark TV and spending your time with us. I appreciate you. I you're incredible. Thank you.
Carly Wieland (45:07):
Oh, thank you. Right back at you, babe.
