Understanding customers. Getting them into houses. with Chris Schutrups
Digital marketing was not really a thing. It started by just going out and networking, listening to people, asking them what worked, what didn't work, you know, ringing up estate agents saying, look, I'd love to do your mortgages and walking up and down the high street with my briefcase, really. I just recently went with my cousin who works for Virgin Atlantic on a trip to Austin, and I ended up doing both of the pilots mortgages!
Like all businesses, it's about understanding the customer's needs, their pain points, and trying to work out where we can stand out and make a difference and have an incredible customer experience and good customer outcomes where others can't.
Funding runway for African creators, with Chinedu Enekwe
And I happened to be in a room where there was, I guess, $3 billionaires. And I said to myself, 'why am I a room full of Nigerian billionaires celebrating Nigeria, and the only thing I have to offer them is other people's businesses to invest in, right? Like, why don't I have a business for them to invest in? Why don't I have more equity in the things I'm doing?
I was very young. I was very hungry. So, knowing that, I wanted to have a deeper and richer relationship, I then presented an opportunity to the firm I was working with and to other investors, and I said, hey, I want to do this thing, this is a business.
Opening a beer faster, with Oli Thomson
There's over 700 craft breweries in Australia, 700 craft breweries for a population of around 23.5 million. It's massive. We've just had the top 100 independent craft beer votes at the weekend - this is a nationwide competition - and of the top 10, I have two of them on tap at the moment.
So Larry pale ale is one of my favourites and BentSpoke's Crankshaft IPA, but some of them are just becoming crazy. I mean, we've got biscuit ales on, I've got mango sours, I've got raspberry salsas- what you can do with a beer now is just crazy. One of our best sellers which goes very well with the climate here, using all natural produce, is a local brewery, Catchment Brewery up on the mountain. They do it a hot brewed ginger beer, which is a gluten-free, sugar-free and there's a sensational, refreshing bit of lime in there perfect for our balmy, humid summer days.
This weekend, we've got we've got live DJs, Friday and Saturday night. In fact, I take to the next Friday night, I'm a bedroom DJ with a few few beers in my hand - although since I started the bar, I've put about 10 kilos on, we get about five reps a week dropping off samples that they is for us to try, they want us to put on tap, someone's got to drink them...
Closing a mortgage faster, with Eilon Shalev
Entrepreneurship is a profession, a profession that requires close attention to details, and discipline on multiple facets of the business. And if it is justifiable for a person to get an MBA and transition from finance to product management, or transition from product management, to consulting or transition from sales and marketing to something else, then it absolutely is justifiable to get an MBA to mass not to master maybe, but to be a jack of all trades of all of those aspects.
The likelihood of starting a company and being successful is very low already. So arming yourself with education that is tailored specifically for that purpose, that sounds to me like a very good investment.
And I have to say it was it was an immense investment in myself.