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What tips would you have for entrepreneurs?

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For entrepreneurs in what sense?

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In a broad sense of business growth, setting your vision.

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Whatever you like to share, you can share about business

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or what you think has the most impact on them today.

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I think one of the things that as an entrepreneur

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you have to have is resilience.

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So I have had and I have made many mistakes and many failures.

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I can list more failures than successes,

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but it's the power to keep going and using the mistakes to learn.

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Because every mistake you make, you learn something much more

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than if you do a first time success, because more often than not,

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you have a first time success, you try it again, it doesn't work.

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That's what happens because you haven't had the information

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of what doesn't work.

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So that gives us knowledge, with knowledge we have power.

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So it's about learning from your mistakes.

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Being a business owner, being an entrepreneur is a learning curve.

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I'm going to use the example of when I owned the cafe, bar and bakery.

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I like baking, I'm not professional, I am nowhere near professional.

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When I opened the bakery, I knew sourdough was something

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I was going to have to sell because I understood who my audience were,

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my customers were and sourdough was just the trend at the time

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because it was in the middle of the pandemic and everyone was trying

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to make sourdough and in my case failing, failing miserably.

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I hated sourdough, I did not like it, it was not my friend,

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but I knew it's what my customers want.

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It took me three months of practice every single day.

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And if you're not a sourdough baker, it takes about three to four days

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to make a good loaf of sourdough, that's the long the process is.

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So I was doing that every single day, making different loaves

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every single day, making slight tweaks so I could then get it right.

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It was that resilience that helped me to win Britain's Best Loaf Award

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just three months after opening my cafe, bar and bakery.

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And that's what we need today is just to be able to learn,

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learn from our mistakes, learn from our failures because

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that is what is going to make you successful for sure.

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Then goes to the same question in something you shared,

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then how do we learn from our mistakes? We look at what works.

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So if I take the case of my sourdough, the problem I was having with it

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was it was flat as a pancake. Put it in the oven, it would come out

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like literally like a pancake. There is no other way to describe it.

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Sourdough is supposed to be beautifully risen, have this beautiful ear.

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So I am then looking at this flat pancake and thinking,

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how do I get it to be this ear that these mysterious bakers can create?

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And pretend that I know what I am doing. That is ultimately what I have got to do.

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I then go back and look at my process. So I have written down my process.

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So I have looked at every stage of what I have done.

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And then I start to, I had to change my mind from being

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like cooking with passion to cooking with science.

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I had to become the scientist in my business.

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I had to understand if I was the scientist, how would I approach this?

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I would make slight adjustments. I would refine it.

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In the end, the result, and I had, I managed to get one type of flour to work beautifully,

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the other type was still coming out like pancakes.

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The difference was 25 millilitres of water. That was it.

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It was that small tweak that made the difference from it being a flat pancake

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to the most amazing loaf of bread that I could create.

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So that is how we learn. We actually look at what we are doing.

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We actually take time going back a bit to the order.

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It is like we see what is it that we are doing? Is it working?

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Look at the data, look at the information, and then we will be able to refine it moving forward.

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That is a great analogy Naomi. Thank you for sharing that.

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No worries.

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Yeah. What about the people who can't be the scientists of their businesses?

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Who can't figure it out?

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Well, there is always a solution.

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When I started my cafe bar and I was working nine to five in an office,

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I used to oversee digital brand marketing teams.

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I was working very much in a large scale organisation managing massive campaigns

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to opening a cafe bar, which I had never done before.

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I had no experience.

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I named my cafe and bar after my grandmother who is called Elsie May

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because she loved to bake and wanted her own tea room.

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But actually that wasn't the reason I opened it.

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That was a story I told very much often.

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But she always said she lived until she was 95.

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She looked after the elderly until she was 87.

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The only reason she stopped was because she lost her sight.

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But she still loved to bake. So she carried on baking.

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She got scales that talked to her. She found a way through.

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So there is always a solution.

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That was the ethos she had. There's always a solution.

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There's always a choice.

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And that was the ethos I wanted to bring to my business.

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That there is always something. There is always a way to solve a problem.

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We've just got to think of it differently about how we do it sometimes.

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Take a step back, ask for help, get a second opinion.

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But there is often there is always a choice to be made.

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I closed the cafe and bar and bakery because financially it wasn't going to be viable longer term

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because of the cost of living crisis.

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The impact that had was not going to make it sustainable.

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Unfortunately, it was just a sign of the times.

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And sometimes things don't work.

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But that was a choice I made.

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It was a solution. It was a decision I had to take.

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But what it's taught me about what I know about business and how I can help people

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has had so much more impact moving forward.

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So sometimes we don't always see there's a solution, but there always is.

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So you've always got a choice. You've always got options.

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Just if you're at that point where you're feeling overwhelmed

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and you can't see the vision for the wood or the trees, take a step back.

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I've done it. I've closed businesses.

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I've walked like I've actually physically closed and then reopen them.

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I did that with the cafe because I needed to step back and actually look at it from above.

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I needed to not be in it. I needed to be away from it to see it.

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So that's what I did.

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And like I say, if that's what you're struggling with and you can't walk away with it at the moment,

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there is plenty of people to help out there. There is someone to help you.

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So just reach out and ask for help because it can be quite a lonely place being an entrepreneur,

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but you're not alone.

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There are plenty of people that will happily help you and find solutions for what's going on.

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Thank you for sharing that.

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Naomi, what would you say is your most significant learning experience in life?

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A lot of times we as leaders and entrepreneurs learn from our own mistakes.

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But for other people out there, if they can learn from your mistakes or my mistakes,

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that can maybe save them years or months of their life, that would be very helpful.

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I mean, like I said, I've made lots of mistakes.

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So there was I could talk for hours on this one, but probably the two I'm going to share too,

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because I think these are really helpful.

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The first one is know your numbers and I'm talking the financial numbers.

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So I went in with a product based business.

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I've also been a service based business,

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but being able to forecast and work out your cash flow, that is really important

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because the most important thing is you.

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So you need to put your oxygen mask on.

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You need to make sure you know how much you need to live.

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So you have to prioritize how you are going to pay yourself, what you're going to do.

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And that is thinking about the cash flow in your business.

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So what bills have you got coming up?

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Suppliers don't all people that's, you know, if you're a service based business, maybe you're,

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you know, you go out and do work for people, people don't always pay on time.

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Don't assume they're going to.

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So make sure you have enough money to pay your bills in your account, including yourself.

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So think about what your forecasting is.

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And again, if numbers aren't your forte and they are not mine by far,

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I had a really great accountant.

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I had a really bad accountant and then I had a really great accountant,

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someone that could actually give me really sound financial advice.

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And I worked with them to get really clear picture of what I needed to do in my business

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and my cash flow.

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So that is one number one is understand your numbers, what you need to earn,

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how much you need to earn in advance as well.

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The second most significant learning is thinking about your role in your business.

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So I, I now pretty much work by myself.

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I do have a couple of contracted people, but I have my eyes, just me.

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I have employed over seven, 17.

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I haven't employed over 40 people.

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I had at the most 17.

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And my mistake was not really one understanding what my role was and being clear on what their roles were.

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So thinking about the, what you need operationally from people to deliver what you need to deliver in your business.

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I probably had too many staff.

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I probably had staff in the wrong place and I probably didn't manage some of them in the best way.

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So when you think about your business and where you want it to go, think about the skill sets you need,

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the personalities you need, and what is it that you need to do to make sure that they are brought into your business

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so that they can really deliver the growth you need.

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That is definitely one of the things.

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If you are a solo entrepreneur or you've got a small medium business and you're not quite sure,

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employing people scares you a little bit.

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It shouldn't, but we need, we often worry about being responsible for other people.

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What it's there to do is help you grow.

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And it's about finding the right people for your business.

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I think that's really essential.

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So, but you have to know your role in the business and ultimately you are the leader, you are your CEO.

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So you need to think like a leader.

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And you have to think like that in your business.