[00:00:00] We've made a lot of progress as a society in many of the areas that we needed to in the last few hundred years. But one thing that has not changed enough is money. If we want to be able to tip the scales towards the favor of marginalized people, we need to understand the secrets to making money in small business.
The more we talk about money and the secret. That usually stay at the golf club, the more likely we are to be able to make money. My mission is to get more money into the hands of good people, specifically good business people like you. This is Money Secrets, the place to learn about the money secrets of successful small business owners.
Because I believe small business can change the world, and in order to do that, we need to be making lots of money. Let's go.
This podcast episode was recorded on the lands of the Wie people of the KO nation, and I'd like to acknowledge them as the traditional owners and [00:01:00] custodians of this land and water that I live. Work and play on. I'd like to pay respects to elders both past and present. And note that sovereignty has never been seeded.
This always was and always will be. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land.
Hello, listener. It's Fi Dunston here, the host of the Money Secrets Podcast. Hello. I've got something exciting to share with you today, and that is that my business, peach Business Management, has just turned 15. This is a pretty huge milestone.
I mean, I think a lot of people talk about the amount of businesses that fail in the first three years. I don't even know where they get those stats from, to be honest. But a lot of businesses fail and I don't know what the percentage of businesses that get to 15 years are, but I, I reckon it's probably fairly low and I'm really proud.
That I'm still here 15 years later. I also wanna celebrate with you that Money Secrets Now has a podcast [00:02:00] sponsor in news that I was not expecting, but is very exciting. The Incredible People at Rounded, which is a beautiful invoicing and accounting app. They love what we are doing here at Money Secrets, so much that they wanted to get behind us.
And if you know me at all, you know that I am really driven by my ethics and my values, and. The reason I decided to say yes to this sponsorship from rounded is because I really believe in what they're doing. They are Australian made. They are really niched. The amount of value for their members is huge because they've really focused on what are the features that sole traders need in their bookkeeping app to actually help them to stay on top of their money.
So, yeah, you'll be hearing quite a bit more from rounded over the next few months, which I'm really excited about. But yeah, back to my first news, which is that peach is now 15. So I thought what I would do today is actually take you back on a [00:03:00] journey I wanna take you before Peach started. Because not all of you know the context of where I'm coming from.
You may have just met me recently or maybe you've been following along with my journey for the last five years. But yeah, I've got a pretty long history. Some of it starting before peach. Uh, don't worry, I'm not going back to my childhood. I'm just gonna start with when I graduated from uni. So essentially I grew up at the Gold Coast.
I did a bachelor of business with a major in accounting and hr, human resources. I went and worked in a really small tax practice for six years in Burleigh Heads at the Gold Coast, which is one of my favorite places on Earth. And I learned so much in that environment because all of my clients were small business owners, which of course I loved, and I'm a really fast learner, so I was like a sponge in that office just soaking up all of this new education and all of these new skills that I was building.
[00:04:00] I also had a really entrepreneurial boss. Brian Hickey was my first real boss when I was a real accountant, as I put in inverted commas. He was just such a great mentor and boss for me because he could see that I had a lot of talent and skills, and he really fostered that by allowing me to really just take control of my own career, I suppose.
He used to have this way of mentoring me where I would come to him and let him know I'd made an error, which is very normal. I'm a human being. And rather than getting angry with me, which he never ever did, he would calmly let me know what the error that I'd made was. And he would say, you are the one who needs to call the client to let them know.
So if you can imagine, I was a 21-year-old because I grew up in Queensland. I finished uni a bit young. I was a 21-year-old on the phone to these small business owners calling to let them know. Hey, I accidentally made an error on your bass and now you owe $20,000. They were [00:05:00] those kind of errors. Anybody who's worked in a tax environment knows how fast paced it is and how easy it can be to miscalculate something.
Of course these things always get picked up because there's a lot of stages of review that happen there. But yeah, my first six years were in this very small tax practice in Bur Heads James Street for anyone who knows the area, and Brian Hickey was my first boss and he, he really was amazing. We're still friends.
Of course, during that time I went to the UK for a year and came back, but I walked straight back into my job there, which was awesome. And about six years later, I decided I was going to move to Melbourne for various reasons. So I'd been working there for six years and I just needed a change. I thought I was probably going to be moving to Melbourne for about a year.
Uh, 18 years later, I'm still here. Um, but yeah, I moved to Melbourne. I didn't really know what I was going to do when I got here. I literally got into my car. My best [00:06:00] friend jumped in in the passenger seat and came with me for a very long road trip. We took about two or three weeks, I think, to drive down here, and I was somehow lucky enough to end up with a job interview at Mountain Goat Brewery, which was the best job that I've ever had, not including working for myself.
That job was absolutely amazing. I didn't even know what a craft brewery was, so this job at Mountain Goat Brewery was just such a, it was a total revelation for me. I got to work in a place where the people there were just as passionate about music as me, so I went on this incredible music adventure there.
But the core of that business was about sustainability, community, small business being grassroots, being independent, and being really focused on quality. So that business was doing things all the way back in 2006 and before, like you know, of course, recycled [00:07:00] packaging, a really considered approach to no waste.
Solar panels on the roof, recycled water. Being used in the bathrooms, there was just this approach to being thrifty and reusing everything that we could. So the whole brewery bar was decked out in all this incredible kind of repurposed thrifted, um, furniture and the like. Everything that they did had this undertone of community.
Ingenuity, thriftiness and just being so passionate about the quality of what they were creating, as well as really considering the people that they were serving. They even had this really cool policy in place where the staff received a bonus of a dollar 50 per day. For every day that they didn't drive their car to work.
So what that meant is that most of us, including me, rode our bikes or caught public transport to work every day. So that's the kind of ingenuity that was happening [00:08:00] back in 2006, and it just blew my mind. I just couldn't believe that I got paid to work in this environment of creativity and innovation and.
It was just so fun. I got to be part of so many different things there. I was part of the finances, obviously, but I was also recruiting. I was doing some hr, I was even helping the sales team. I was getting involved in marketing, business strategy and planning, and yeah, it was an incredible three years at that business.
The next place that I went on to was a small venture capital firm actually, and that was really different and really fascinating. Uh, so the people that I was working for were a family, a family business that had, um, investments in various other businesses and tech startups. They had a tech company themselves.
They had their own brands that they were building and growing as well. Probably the one that you're most likely to [00:09:00] know of is Bellroy, which is a beautiful wallets label. They do more than wallets, but that's what they're known for. So yeah, again, I just ended up working in this environment where I got to learn so much.
So I was working alongside Ruby on Rails developers and hearing about all of this kind of tech, you know, standup meetings and. What the startup world looked like. I was seeing what it looks like to grow a brand. Of course, I was responsible for the finances, but I was really lucky. Uh, in fact, I've been lucky in all of my jobs.
Those are my three main jobs before I, uh, started Peach. Six years in an accounting firm where I got to just take my career by the horns, and absolutely loved working with the small business clients that I got to work with there. Then the next place that I worked was Mountain Goat Brewery, which was just so much fun, but also I was just such a sponge.
I was soaking up all of this new, these new skills, these [00:10:00] new areas of business that I didn't get to play in when I was in the accounting firm, and I just absolutely loved it. Then I moved to the venture capital firm and it was a shorter length of time. I think I worked there for about two years. But again, they allowed me to take so much responsibility and to basically map out my own, you know, how things were gonna work.
I was the first person into the finance team just like I was at Mountain Goat. So yeah, I feel like I've been so lucky that all of my kind of real jobs that I've had since uni have all been really great. I'm really grateful that I've had nothing but really great experiences in the workplace. I don't say that to gloat.
I know that lots of people have had really bad experiences for a variety of reasons, but I've always been in the small business space and I dunno if that's why I've always had such great experiences. But yeah, when I finished uni I could have got a, an accounting job really [00:11:00] anywhere that I wanted to. I was just obsessed with this idea of starting in a really small tax practice rather than going for the Big KPMG or, or those sorts of firms.
I just never thought that I would fit in or thrive in those environments. So I never tried.
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So [00:12:00] this is a long-winded way of telling you about the roughly 10 or so years of experience that I had post university before I started my business. Peach. So I wanna tell you about the origin story of Peach and how it happened.
One of my friends, Janine Rouge, actually from Red Mullet Creative, amazing graphic designer, she could see that I was feeling a little bit stuck in my life. I wasn't really sure where I was going. I knew that I was up for something new, but I wasn't sure what it was. And she took me away for the weekend with some of her friends that were going, basically, they were going for a bit of hiking.
The Grampians, which is about three and a half hours away from Melbourne. It's an absolutely beautiful mountainy kind of, um, picture like rock faces and just absolutely beautiful scenery everywhere. So we went away for this weekend and. She and her friends called it hiking. [00:13:00] I would've called it literally climbing up the face of a mountain in pouring rain and wind.
It was kind of terrifying, but we went on this big hike one day after the hike, somebody said, oh, we should go to the Mount Zero Cafe and see if it's open. I had no idea what the Mount Zero Cafe was. Of course. So we head off to the Mount Zero Cafe. It is open, and here is where I get to meet Jane Seymour, who is one of the co-founders of Mount Zero Olives.
So picture this, we're all freezing where saturated from our hike and Jane's shop, which is on the Mount Zero Olive Grove, is open and she makes us all a cup of tea. And we're basically just having a really great time chatting with her in her lovely warm shop, which is right in the, at the base of Mount Zero in the Grampians.
We get chatting, we're getting on like a house on fire, and I tell Jane who I am and what I've done in my career, and she says to me, well, how could I work with you? And of course, I [00:14:00] fumbled and said, oh, well, um, here's my number. So I gave Jane my number. By the time she called me a few days later, I'd already decided that I was going to work for myself, that I was going to be a consultant, and Mount Zero Olives was exactly the kind of client that I wanted to work with.
I also had a little brainwave in the middle of the night when I was trying to work out what do I wanna call myself? I knew that I wanted the name of my business to be something real. I didn't want it to be a made up name and I wanted it to be something that sort of spoke of either being wholesome or organic or natural.
I wanted those thoughts of like growing and you know, the double entendres of business growing and I could see trees. I love trees. And peach just came to me in the middle of the night and I thought, yep, that's it. Peach is the perfect word. Who doesn't love peaches? And yeah, so by the time Jane called me a few days later, I had already decided that yes, I was [00:15:00] gonna be quitting my job with a venture capital firm.
They were amazing by the way, and let me continue working with them for a little while. While I've. Phased down from there and phased up into my business. So grateful for people like that. And thank you to the crew from investing. If you just happen to be listening to this podcast, that actually made it so much easier for me to start my consulting business 'cause I had a couple of months of leeway where I could build into being a proper business owner.
So Peach Business, peach Business Management actually was what I decided I was gonna call my business. And I knew that what I wanted to do was to use my business and finance skills to help businesses like Mountain Goat and like Mount Zero Olive. To make more money while also doing amazing things for the world.
I told Jane all about this and I ended up helping consult with her on another project that she was getting off the ground. We consulted quite casually, but we did some work together over the next [00:16:00] couple of years and quite soon after she introduced me to her other company, which was Mount Zero Olives, she asked me if I was interested in joining the board, which of course I was.
She introduced me to her son, Richard Seymour, who was the general manager of the company at the time, and still is, and we absolutely hit it off. And I joined the board of Mount Zero, I think it was probably in about 2011 or 2012 that I joined the board. And uh, I've never left. So I have been working with Mount Zero Olives for something close to 15 years.
I just love that company. The reasons why I love that company is because it's all about healthy Australian local food. It's olives, olive oil, pulses, and grain salt, and some other products as well. There's a huge focus on environmental sustainability, organic [00:17:00] produce. There's a really big focus on being local, so low food miles, and really high quality products with really minimal intervention.
That company is all about putting incredible Australian produce onto the menus of some of the best restaurants in Melbourne and all over Australia and into the kitchens of, um, home chefs everywhere and beautiful, uh, sort of boutique or bougie supermarkets. There's just so much that I could tell you about Mount Zero because I've worked there for so long, or worked with them for so long.
I'm now their CFO and still on the board. Yeah, I just love their approach to sustainability. I love their approach to supporting Australian produce, their approach to supporting Australian restaurants and cafes, Australian, uh, independent supermarkets and grocers. Their team comes from all over the world.
They're obsessed with quality. They have such an incredible culture, which [00:18:00] has not come about by accident. It's something that we've put a lot of time and effort into defining the culture that we want. Really defining the value set and the, you know how a lot of companies talk about their values, but they're just words that are on a page.
At Mount Zero, we've taken those values and we've operationalized them. So we actually talk about the value set of the business every single month at our staff lunch. So yeah, absolutely love Mount Zero, and I plan to interview Richard Seymour from Mount Zero very soon on the podcast. So listen out for that episode.
But yeah, Mount Zero was essentially the reason why I started my business Peach. Another cool little thing about the name of my business is that when I told my friend Janine Rouge, who had taken me to the Grampians that weekend, I told her that I'd made the decision I was working for myself, which she was thrilled about because she was also, she is also [00:19:00] self-employed.
Then when I told her that it was going to be called Peach, she said, do you know that I grew up on a peach and cherry orchard? I had no idea. But yeah, it just felt so serendipitous. So that's how the, that's the origin story of Peach. I met Jane Seymour at Mount Zero in the Grampians. She asked me if I'd be interested in consulting, uh, with her on a new project.
And that gave me the courage to start Peach. So that was in 2010, and since then I have gone on to do lots of different things, but you probably don't know what a lot of them are. So I'm gonna try to give you the short version of what I've been doing at Peach for the last 15 years. So for the first couple of years I was, uh, floating in the breeze, getting pulled in all sorts of directions.
But essentially what I was trying to do was find small and medium businesses who were looking for financial and business advice, [00:20:00] and they were businesses who were using their businesses as a force for good within the first couple of years. Uh, of starting Peach. Some of my favorite clients that I worked with were of course, Mount Zero Olives.
Another client I worked with who I just love with every fiber in my being is Project Rocket. So Rosie and Lucy Thomas are siblings. I met them in our local bar, the shout out to the Elwood Lounge, and we met there, developed a friendship, and I can't remember exactly how we started working together, but I think Rosie called me one day to ask for some advice about a big partnership deal that they were negotiating.
I think eventually after a few kind of coffee dates and that sort of thing, we decided we were going to work together. So I worked with Project Rocket. For about 10 years, they are Australia's youth driven movement against online bullying and hate. Absolutely amazing organization Run by Lucy and Rosie [00:21:00] Thomas.
And essentially they have developed their own framework and their own sort of theory of change that they take into high schools and primary schools to teach kids about how to stand up for their mates, who are being bullied and how to be a good online citizen of the world and a lot more. They've developed this incredible methodology and they've also trained and employed, I don't know how many employees, more than a hundred, maybe 200 over the last 20 years.
Uh, their team now I think is probably around 50, although I'm just guessing. But they have delivered these workshops in Australian schools to I believe, over a million school students. They have now developed into having corporate partnerships with companies like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Telstra Foundation, et cetera.
They also have a not-for-profit arm called the Project Rocket Foundation, and they also have workshops that are funded by [00:22:00] individuals. Schools, of course. I absolutely loved being part of the kind of finance and business advisory team there at Project Rocket. Worked really closely with Rosie and Lucy for, as I said, about 10 years.
And look, I might be oversharing here, but I think it's something that I don't hear a lot of people talking about. I actually at one stage encourage Rosie and Lucy to go and work with another finance consultant, not because I didn't love working with them. I adored them. I still kind of feel like they're my little siblings or something.
Um, but. Yeah, I just feel like sometimes the right thing to do for our clients is to actually encourage them to work with somebody else who might have different or better or just, you know, specializing in a different area that might be able to help them more. So that's what I did with Rosie and Lucy and it was very hard for me to let them go, but I think, um, I was just driven by them making sure that [00:23:00] they had what they really needed to keep driving their business forward.
I'm not talking about all of my clients, but another business that I worked with really closely, probably around 2012 or 2013. Job site recyclers. I had no idea what a site recycler was, but I can now tell you that they are a service that exists within the building industry. Their clients are big builders like Metricon, Porter, Davis, those sorts of companies, or the ones that still exist now, and they basically go on at, um, various times during.
The construction of a brand new home, and they go on with bobcats and heavy equipment to take waste away. The really interesting thing about this organization is that they recycle up to 97% of that waste that they take away. Now, this in the context of 2025 might not seem that kind of groundbreaking, but in 2013, that was [00:24:00] absolutely groundbreaking.
That company has gone on to recycle millions and millions of tons of construction waste. Most people don't realize that 20% of the waste generated in Victoria is generated through the build of brand new homes. It's shocking, right? One fifth of the waste that goes into landfill is from. Construction of brand new homes.
So I loved working with those guys. It was a group of five, uh, families who had started that business. I helped them as their CFO. I helped them to get a really significant grant from the Victorian government. They employed a team of about 120 by the end. Really significant business. So much investment into recycling infrastructure and yeah, I was there alongside them for about 10 or 12 years in the end, absolutely loved working with them.
And again, I encourage them to. Consider replacing [00:25:00] me with somebody in-house. So what ended up happening is over that 12 years, I worked really closely with their financial controller who was self-taught, and essentially I handed over what I was doing to her and she was able to take over from there and run with it.
So I'm not somebody who likes to force my clients to stay with me for a long time. But those three clients in particular, so Mount Zero Olives, project Rocket and Job Site Recyclers, they did stay with me for a really long time and I absolutely loved working with all three of them. Some of the other things that I've done since starting Peach, so I started as a consulting business, delivering business planning and financial planning and sort of, you know, accounting support for small and medium businesses.
Because of my tax background, my clients were all asking me if I could do their tax for them. Eventually I gave in and I started running a tax business, but what happened is it absolutely [00:26:00] took off. I actually had quite a big team. I think there were about 10 of us at one point. I just couldn't keep up because I was still trying to run my consulting business and my tax business, which was called Peach Tax.
By the time I'd been doing both for three years, I was absolutely burned out and I didn't feel like I was doing a good job of either of those things. There's plenty of ways that I could have chosen to resolve that. Yes, I could have built my team further and kept that business going, but the decision that I made was to sell that business.
And, um, I'm so happy that I did because I was able to sell the business to attack. Practice that absolutely loves being a tax practice. It was a really intimate handover. So I introduced every single one of my business clients to the new owner of the business one by one. And as far as I know, almost all of them ended up staying with him and his team.
So yeah, I used to have a tax practice, which I started, and three years later I sold it. [00:27:00] Another thing that happened during that time is that I was working with a lot of new and startup businesses, and I was helping them with business planning, which of course starts to dip into marketing. I was actually being engaged to do people's copywriting quite often, which is quite bizarre because I have no formal training in copywriting.
I just am totally self-taught. I don't do copywriting anymore, by the way. But yeah, I probably wrote copy for about 20 or 30 brands back in the day. So what ended up happening was all of these new businesses were looking for branding and copywriting and websites, and I had an amazing web developer, a great copywriter, and, and I don't mean myself and another copywriter and an amazing designer.
So we decided to start another business, which was called Peach Creative. We ran this creative agency again for about three years, and it was really successful. We had some amazing projects come [00:28:00] through the door, and in the end I realized that I was doing a lot of the work and I was getting nowhere near enough of the fee because I was outsourcing all of the work to these other creatives.
Uh, who were my business partners, but actually they didn't have time to do the work that I was sending them because they were already so busy in their own freelance businesses. So in the end, that business ended up closing, which is a little bit sad because I do think that we could have. Put that on pause and turned it into something really great.
But that's what ended up happening is, yeah, peach Creative was there for two or three years. We did some great projects and then it no longer exists. Another thing that I got involved in, one of my clients pitch me an idea, which was called the FEEL Project. This is gonna sound like it's coming out of left field, but it was essentially a blog and an online business dedicated to sex, [00:29:00] wellness, and relationships.
At the time, there was not really anybody talking about those topics in a really mainstream setting. So we started this blog called The Feel Project. Again, it was absolutely beautiful. I'm really proud of the work that we did. We engaged some really incredible writers and one or two different sexologists to be part of the project, but in the end, my business partner and I both had our existing businesses.
And we just could not put enough time into that business to make it work. So what is the, what's the lesson here that I'm, that I'm trying to tell you with this journey that I've been on as a business owner is that often we actually think that what we should do is start another business. But really what we should do is make sure that we actually have enough time and focus to work on the business that we already have.
So that last business that I was involved in, the field project probably wrapped up. I'm gonna guess that it wrapped up around 2014. That's just a [00:30:00] guess. I then decided that I needed a little period of time where I wasn't actually doing anything for particularly innovative, just working in a really simple, streamlined way with my CFO level clients.
Three of whom I've already told you about. And there were some others too that came and went during that time. But eventually I decided to grow my business into the direction of coaching. So I didn't want all of my clients to be CFO level clients. I wanted some of my clients to come and work with me for a period of time, and then be able to kind of go on without me.
So I developed my signature. Six month program where I would coach people one-on-one through essentially building a business strategy and a financial roadmap to take them through the next three years. But while we were doing that, I was also teaching them everything that I know about making and managing money, and I was also helping them to take action in their business.
So this is one of [00:31:00] the most. Important reasons why coaching is so valuable is accountability. So giving my clients homework, although we hate that word, but giving my clients a to-do list that they were to action after the session with me and then asking them in the next session, how did you go with all of that?
So I have put, I don't know how many clients, at least a hundred clients, small and medium businesses, through my signature program, and I really love it. I absolutely love working one-on-one with. Uh, small and medium business clients and I will continue to run that program. Right now, that program is on pause because this year, or actually, let me take you back a little bit further.
So one of the things that I decided I wanted to do last year was create a documentary. I wanted to create a documentary that basically took people past the surface level of things that we talk about related to money and business, and I wanted to ask. Some really juicy questions of [00:32:00] women who were my clients and were business owners, what their deep thoughts about money and business were.
That documentary is called Lifting the Curtain. Hopefully you've seen it. We'll definitely put the link in the show notes for lifting the curtain. You can watch the whole documentary on my website. So I created lifting the curtain and then that really naturally led into what the main part of my business now, which is Good Money Club.
So I realized that although I love working with clients one-on-one, and I will continue to do that for a very long time. Something really special happens when you are in a group environment. I had been running Get Financially Fit, which was a cohort based. 10 week program for about three or four years, and what I'd found is that 10 weeks just wasn't long enough.
So I created Good Money Club, which was designed to just take people a little bit longer, so take them through the education that I wanted to share with them about making and managing money, whilst also [00:33:00] creating a bigger impact on the world. And I wanted them to be in a container of. Like-minded community led women for six months.
So Good Money Club has now been going for about 18 months, and more than half of my members have been there for longer than six months, and that is the best metric for me. That Good Money Club is actually valuable and working for my members is that they come for the initial six. Months and then they decide to stay even though they don't need to.
So they stay because they're in the community. They're getting access to me and the other members in the group every single week on Zoom. We also do things in real life too, and Good Money Club is now the main part of my consulting business. Peach, I suppose what you'd call it is money and business coaching in a group environment, and I.
Absolutely love it. At one stage in my life, I thought I would be a teacher and I decided to become an accountant instead. So good Money Club is [00:34:00] kind of where I get to be a little bit of a teacher as well. So Good Money Club has existed for about 18 months. I absolutely love it. And now I have actually started another business.
I'm now also the co-founder of Ripple Festival, which I'm sure you've heard me talk about on this. Podcast, ripple Festival is a collaboration between me and my best business friend, Mia FileMan from Campaign Del Mar. The idea behind Ripple was that I think business conferences are boring and music festivals are awesome, and I think we can bring the two concepts together.
So Ripple Festival is a whole new business for me and Mia. It is a two day. Festival for small business owners. That's happening on the 12th and 13th of November in Melbourne. And if you can imagine that there will be business owners, social enterprise founders, purpose-led humans live, um, music, live comedy, art, entertainment, food, amazing [00:35:00] company dancing, all in the one venue.
And that is my big swing for 2025 is Ripple Festival. So look, I hope that wasn't too self-indulgent, taking you through such a long backstory of how I got to where I am. You may know me as the host of Money Secrets. You may know me as Fee from Peach. You might call me Miss Peachy, but my name is Fee Johnston.
I'm a chartered accountant. I'm a business and money coach, and I'm absolutely obsessed with getting more money into the hands of good people. Some of the things that I think my journey as a business owner have taught me and might be interesting to you is that managing my energy and my capacity is really, really critical.
So I have overcommitted myself way too many times. I really thought about Ripple Festival for a very long time, trying to make sure that I actually did have the capacity, and I do think that I've made the right decision, but you can't take the decision to have a second [00:36:00] business or even to develop a new income stream or a new product line to your business.
Any level of additional revenue or complication adds complexity to your business. Every new product that you launch requires its own marketing. I have so many business owners tell me that they're thinking about creating a second brand, and my brain wants to explode because a second brand doubles the amount of marketing activity and investment that you need to make.
So yeah, that's a big lesson for me from the last. 15 years is that we need to try to make our businesses as simple as possible. And when I look at how my business runs now, I have the Money Secrets podcast, which you're listening to, which allows me to connect with a bigger audience and share the skills that I've learned about money and business with the listeners.
Hello? So I have money secrets. I have Good Money Club, which is my main revenue stream right now. I still work with some really limited one-on-one [00:37:00] clients, including Mount Zero Olives. They are still absolutely part of the stable of clients in my business, and they always will be as long as they want me.
But yeah, what I have done, even though I have. Added a whole nother business to my repertoire. I have really simplified the way that I do things in my main business to allow me the space and the energy and the time to be able to commit to a whole second business. I think another thing that I've learned over these 15 years is that one of the hardest things about small business is just how long it is.
It just, it never ends. Small business never ends. It's not like a job or an event or a project where there's a natural end point. And that is one of the things that's really hard about small business is that it's in our brain 24 7, and that could be for 15 years like it has been for me. And while I am really proud of what I've created with Peach, with Money Secrets, with Good Money Club and with Ripple Festival, it [00:38:00] has come at some sacrifice to me.
You can't be in business for this. Long without having some scars. And I think for me, one of the things that's taken the biggest hit has always been my health and my mental health, despite me putting a lot of effort and energy into those areas of my life, I think I would be lying to say that my small business has not impacted those things.
So I suppose I wanna say that no matter how long you've been in business for, it's really great to acknowledge that this idea of it never being over is both a comfort. And a stress because the work that you think you have to do today can actually be done tomorrow. We really need to put circuit breakers into our day, our week, our month, our year.
We need to get annual leave into our calendar. If you don't have annual leave booked for the next year, please put it into your calendar right now because if it's not in the calendar, it's not gonna happen. So we need annual leave, we need rest. We need to work with clients that [00:39:00] energize us. And another thing to really maybe take from this episode is that if you are working with a service provider who you've been working with for a long time and you don't feel that you're actually still getting value from working together.
Talk about it. If you are working with a great service provider who really cares about their clients, they will be very open to helping you to move on to a new service provider who might be a better choice for you. Thank you for listening to my very, very long talk about my career so far. I'm really excited to be 15 years strong in business and to be more profitable and making more revenue than I ever have.
I'm so proud of Good Money Club. I'm so proud of Ripple Festival. I'm so stoked that I still work with Mount Zero Olives and can't wait to introduce you to Rich on the podcast soon. And I'm also. Super grateful that I got to meet my best business friend, Mia FileMan from Campaign Delmar, who has not only [00:40:00] helped me to create Ripple Festival, but she's also turned into an incredible confidant friend marketing trainer, and she has actually helped me to become a much better marketer and a much better business owner too.
So here's to best business friends and uh, I'll see you next week. Bye.
Thank you so much for listening right up to the end. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Money Secrets, where we talk about the money secrets of successful small business owners. If you enjoyed the episode, I'd love it if you subscribe to the podcast, but leave us a review or share this episode with one of your friends.
I hope you learned something. I hope you got a new perspective and I really hope you enjoyed the listening experience.
