What tips would you have for entrepreneurs?
For entrepreneurs in what sense?
In a broad sense of business growth, setting your vision.
Whatever you like to share, you can share about business
or what you think has the most impact on them today.
I think one of the things that as an entrepreneur
you have to have is resilience.
So I have had and I have made many mistakes and many failures.
I can list more failures than successes,
but it's the power to keep going and using the mistakes to learn.
Because every mistake you make, you learn something much more
than if you do a first time success, because more often than not,
you have a first time success, you try it again, it doesn't work.
That's what happens because you haven't had the information
of what doesn't work.
So that gives us knowledge, with knowledge we have power.
So it's about learning from your mistakes.
Being a business owner, being an entrepreneur is a learning curve.
I'm going to use the example of when I owned the cafe, bar and bakery.
I like baking, I'm not professional, I am nowhere near professional.
When I opened the bakery, I knew sourdough was something
I was going to have to sell because I understood who my audience were,
my customers were and sourdough was just the trend at the time
because it was in the middle of the pandemic and everyone was trying
to make sourdough and in my case failing, failing miserably.
I hated sourdough, I did not like it, it was not my friend,
but I knew it's what my customers want.
It took me three months of practice every single day.
And if you're not a sourdough baker, it takes about three to four days
to make a good loaf of sourdough, that's the long the process is.
So I was doing that every single day, making different loaves
every single day, making slight tweaks so I could then get it right.
It was that resilience that helped me to win Britain's Best Loaf Award
just three months after opening my cafe, bar and bakery.
And that's what we need today is just to be able to learn,
learn from our mistakes, learn from our failures because
that is what is going to make you successful for sure.
Then goes to the same question in something you shared,
then how do we learn from our mistakes? We look at what works.
So if I take the case of my sourdough, the problem I was having with it
was it was flat as a pancake. Put it in the oven, it would come out
like literally like a pancake. There is no other way to describe it.
Sourdough is supposed to be beautifully risen, have this beautiful ear.
So I am then looking at this flat pancake and thinking,
how do I get it to be this ear that these mysterious bakers can create?
And pretend that I know what I am doing. That is ultimately what I have got to do.
I then go back and look at my process. So I have written down my process.
So I have looked at every stage of what I have done.
And then I start to, I had to change my mind from being
like cooking with passion to cooking with science.
I had to become the scientist in my business.
I had to understand if I was the scientist, how would I approach this?
I would make slight adjustments. I would refine it.
In the end, the result, and I had, I managed to get one type of flour to work beautifully,
the other type was still coming out like pancakes.
The difference was 25 millilitres of water. That was it.
It was that small tweak that made the difference from it being a flat pancake
to the most amazing loaf of bread that I could create.
So that is how we learn. We actually look at what we are doing.
We actually take time going back a bit to the order.
It is like we see what is it that we are doing? Is it working?
Look at the data, look at the information, and then we will be able to refine it moving forward.
That is a great analogy Naomi. Thank you for sharing that.
No worries.
Yeah. What about the people who can't be the scientists of their businesses?
Who can't figure it out?
Well, there is always a solution.
When I started my cafe bar and I was working nine to five in an office,
I used to oversee digital brand marketing teams.
I was working very much in a large scale organisation managing massive campaigns
to opening a cafe bar, which I had never done before.
I had no experience.
I named my cafe and bar after my grandmother who is called Elsie May
because she loved to bake and wanted her own tea room.
But actually that wasn't the reason I opened it.
That was a story I told very much often.
But she always said she lived until she was 95.
She looked after the elderly until she was 87.
The only reason she stopped was because she lost her sight.
But she still loved to bake. So she carried on baking.
She got scales that talked to her. She found a way through.
So there is always a solution.
That was the ethos she had. There's always a solution.
There's always a choice.
And that was the ethos I wanted to bring to my business.
That there is always something. There is always a way to solve a problem.
We've just got to think of it differently about how we do it sometimes.
Take a step back, ask for help, get a second opinion.
But there is often there is always a choice to be made.
I closed the cafe and bar and bakery because financially it wasn't going to be viable longer term
because of the cost of living crisis.
The impact that had was not going to make it sustainable.
Unfortunately, it was just a sign of the times.
And sometimes things don't work.
But that was a choice I made.
It was a solution. It was a decision I had to take.
But what it's taught me about what I know about business and how I can help people
has had so much more impact moving forward.
So sometimes we don't always see there's a solution, but there always is.
So you've always got a choice. You've always got options.
Just if you're at that point where you're feeling overwhelmed
and you can't see the vision for the wood or the trees, take a step back.
I've done it. I've closed businesses.
I've walked like I've actually physically closed and then reopen them.
I did that with the cafe because I needed to step back and actually look at it from above.
I needed to not be in it. I needed to be away from it to see it.
So that's what I did.
And like I say, if that's what you're struggling with and you can't walk away with it at the moment,
there is plenty of people to help out there. There is someone to help you.
So just reach out and ask for help because it can be quite a lonely place being an entrepreneur,
but you're not alone.
There are plenty of people that will happily help you and find solutions for what's going on.
Thank you for sharing that.
Naomi, what would you say is your most significant learning experience in life?
A lot of times we as leaders and entrepreneurs learn from our own mistakes.
But for other people out there, if they can learn from your mistakes or my mistakes,
that can maybe save them years or months of their life, that would be very helpful.
I mean, like I said, I've made lots of mistakes.
So there was I could talk for hours on this one, but probably the two I'm going to share too,
because I think these are really helpful.
The first one is know your numbers and I'm talking the financial numbers.
So I went in with a product based business.
I've also been a service based business,
but being able to forecast and work out your cash flow, that is really important
because the most important thing is you.
So you need to put your oxygen mask on.
You need to make sure you know how much you need to live.
So you have to prioritize how you are going to pay yourself, what you're going to do.
And that is thinking about the cash flow in your business.
So what bills have you got coming up?
Suppliers don't all people that's, you know, if you're a service based business, maybe you're,
you know, you go out and do work for people, people don't always pay on time.
Don't assume they're going to.
So make sure you have enough money to pay your bills in your account, including yourself.
So think about what your forecasting is.
And again, if numbers aren't your forte and they are not mine by far,
I had a really great accountant.
I had a really bad accountant and then I had a really great accountant,
someone that could actually give me really sound financial advice.
And I worked with them to get really clear picture of what I needed to do in my business
and my cash flow.
So that is one number one is understand your numbers, what you need to earn,
how much you need to earn in advance as well.
The second most significant learning is thinking about your role in your business.
So I, I now pretty much work by myself.
I do have a couple of contracted people, but I have my eyes, just me.
I have employed over seven, 17.
I haven't employed over 40 people.
I had at the most 17.
And my mistake was not really one understanding what my role was and being clear on what their roles were.
So thinking about the, what you need operationally from people to deliver what you need to deliver in your business.
I probably had too many staff.
I probably had staff in the wrong place and I probably didn't manage some of them in the best way.
So when you think about your business and where you want it to go, think about the skill sets you need,
the personalities you need, and what is it that you need to do to make sure that they are brought into your business
so that they can really deliver the growth you need.
That is definitely one of the things.
If you are a solo entrepreneur or you've got a small medium business and you're not quite sure,
employing people scares you a little bit.
It shouldn't, but we need, we often worry about being responsible for other people.
What it's there to do is help you grow.
And it's about finding the right people for your business.
I think that's really essential.
So, but you have to know your role in the business and ultimately you are the leader, you are your CEO.
So you need to think like a leader.
And you have to think like that in your business.