How Bambi Staveley Built a Global Brand from a Personal Problem | Boost N Blend(Eps15)(Audio)

How do you turn a personal problem into a successful global product business? In this episode of Small Business Sorted, Kay and Crystal interview Bambi Staveley, founder of Boost N Blend, about entrepreneurship, e-commerce, product development and spotting a profitable gap in the market.

Bambi’s fascinating career has taken her from nursing and early internet innovation to global marketing and corporate leadership at Oracle. She shares how her interest in technology led her to help build one of Australia’s first government websites, establish a successful digital agency and eventually launch an international women’s hair-loss brand.

The idea for Boost N Blend began with Bambi’s personal experience of thinning hair. After researching the global female hair-loss industry, she recognised that women needed a product created specifically for them. She went on to develop female hair fibres designed to conceal visible hair loss and help women feel more confident.

In this episode, we discuss:

• How to turn a personal challenge into a business opportunity
• Identifying and researching a gap in the market
• Testing demand before investing in a new product
• The realities of product development and manufacturing
• Building an e-commerce business and selling internationally
• Using digital marketing to grow a product-based business
• Female hair loss and its effect on confidence
• The resilience required to build and grow a global brand

Whether you’re developing a product, starting an online business or looking for your next business opportunity, Bambi’s story is filled with honest insights and practical lessons.

Discover Boost N Blend:

Website: https://www.boostnblend.com.au/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/boostnblend
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/boostnblend/

If Bambi’s story inspires you, share this episode with a business owner or aspiring entrepreneur—and follow Small Business Sorted for more practical Australian small business advice.

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Kay Godfrey - https://upupandaway.net.au/

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:19

All right, good afternoon, everybody. This is Crystal NK from Small Business Sorted, and we have a wonderful guest today, Bambi Stavley. She's I've known Bambi for a few years, and we're really, really happy and excited to have her in here talking about her business Boost and Blend, which is she'll go into what it's all about.

SPEAKER_00 0:37

Yes, Bambi is founder and owner of Boost and Blend, a global online business aimed at helping women deal with and disguise thinning hair. She started her working life in the medical field, but a love of marketing led her away from there and into a life of entrepreneurship. A love of technology led Bambi into the internet in 1995 when almost no one she knew had ever heard of it. She won the first Australian government contract to build their website and never looked back. From nursing to technology and from the global corporate world to business owner, Bambi has had an interesting and never boring career. So welcome, Bambi. Can you tell us the story of how you got started?

SPEAKER_02 1:23

Well, okay, so from my humble beginnings as a nurse, I think the thing about being a nurse is that you're always looking to serve others. It's a profession that women go into, men and women go into, because they want to do something for other people. And that's always been in my DNA. I've always wanted to do things for other people. And so how did I get from nursing to where I am today? Well, that's kind of an interesting story. So when I was a nurse, I used to drive through the city on my way to the hospital and look at all the people going in and out of the out of the businesses and the high-rise buildings. And I always thought, I want to be there. I I would rather be there than driving to a hospital and put on a blue and white uniform. And taking people's temperatures and whatever yes. And so I started to, so I finished my nursing degree and you know, I got my qualifications and I worked postgrad for a while. But all along I was thinking I need to find my way into the business world. I just had to figure out how to do that. And the only way I could figure out to do that was to sell medical products. That seemed to be the way nurses got out of nursing in those days. And so and so I did that. And I I had a great job working for a global medical devices company. And I loved it. And but I was a sales rep, which is what they did with nurses in those days. They hired us as sales reps, and and I had my own company car, and it was a it was a far cry from being a nurse, and I loved it, but I had a fascination for marketing and advertising, and I really wanted to go down that path. And so I was working quite closely with the marketing communications manager of this global company, and he was leaving. And I thought, okay, here's my chance. I want his job. And so I walked into the managing director's office, made an appointment with his secretary, like he did in those days, walked into his office, sat down, and said, So he's leaving. This guy's leaving. I would like his job. And he had a biscuit in his hand and it just dropped out of his hand.

SPEAKER_00 3:45

I was gonna say that was very ballsy of you.

SPEAKER_02 3:48

What was this 20-something-year-old nurse doing sitting here telling me she wants the job of a probably university educated marketing person man with three kids? And so that was a that was a really yeah, I agree, it was a very ballsy move. But that was me in those days, probably still is. I could see that. Did you get the job? I didn't get the job, yeah. I got the job, and so I ended up as marketing communications manager for this company for Asia Pacific. How did all the other staff take it that you got that role? I think it was kind of assumed that some of the nurses would stay as reps and some of the nurses would progress through the bus through the organization. And another nurse had progressed to a product manager. So it wasn't completely out of the ordinary for me to do that. Yeah. But yeah, I mean that was that was my bliss job. I loved that job. Marketing communications is my your thing. Yeah. And how long did you do that for? Well, I did that until for about three or four years, and then I got pregnant with my first child, and I resigned because there was no maternity leave in those days. This is mid-80s.

SPEAKER_01 5:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 5:05

So I resigned and I was at home with my little baby, and they rang me and said, We just can't fill your we can't find anyone to do your role. And I think that was because I'd taken it and made it much bigger than it had been. Yeah. And it was using a lot of my skills. And I'm a multi-skilled person, so I could do a whole load of things that hadn't been done in that role before. And so they said, Would I be willing to do some of my job working from home? Now remember, this is the mid-80s. That wasn't even a thing then. It wasn't a thing at all. No. It wasn't a thing. And so I did. How did you do it? Like that was faxes in those days, was there? There wasn't even the internet, right? Nothing. I had a fax machine, a typewriter, and my baby in a bouncer net. And I used to boing her in the bouncer net with my foot while I was on the phone to my boss. So that would have been a landline too.

SPEAKER_01 6:01

It was a landline, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 6:02

Oh my god. Yep.

SPEAKER_01 6:04

Was fax machines around then? Yeah. You might have got a few minutes. No, I had a fax machine.

SPEAKER_02 6:08

Yeah. And then I so I worked for them for the next from home for the next sort of five years. And while I was doing that, I was sort of starting a business as a marketing communications consultant. And so they were my first client, you could say. Yeah. And then I got other clients and moved on from there.

SPEAKER_01 6:27

Wow. And your daughter, is she a marketing consultant? Person too.

SPEAKER_02 6:32

She does teach you a lot as a baby. She learnt a lot.

SPEAKER_01 6:35

She does work with it. Subconsciously, she would have learnt it awful. Yeah. Oh, that's amazing. Wow. That would have been quite that was very progressive and modern of that company to actually do that and to find a solution for their business, which a lot of people don't do. And I th I I think that's quite progressive for those days, especially for women being pregnant and everything. It wasn't really a thing, was it? You know, you just sort of went.

SPEAKER_00 7:02

Did they keep you on the same pay? No, they paid they offered me an hourly rate, okay.

SPEAKER_02 7:08

To to work from home because I'd already resigned. And so I cre you know, I created a company. Yeah, bought a shelf company.

SPEAKER_00 7:17

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 7:18

And that would have been unusual a bit those days too, Bambi. It was. And I called it Bambi Advertising.

SPEAKER_00 7:25

It was very original.

SPEAKER_02 7:27

Yeah, actually, I think my husband bought it for me as a present.

SPEAKER_00 7:31

Really?

SPEAKER_03 7:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:33

How cute. I wonder how many other people have their husbands buying them a shelf company for a present. 128 or 29? Oh my gosh. That was I like that. What do shelf companies cost?

SPEAKER_02 7:46

Oh, it wasn't much a couple of hundred dollars.

SPEAKER_00 7:48

Okay. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:50

Yeah. But it wasn't a thing. No. Do you know what I mean? And those shelf companies were that it's not like you go on the internet now and put your name in and grab one. It's like they had to be on the well, you create them, but it was it's like literally you pulled it off the shelf almost, you know, and got that. Wow. That's really interesting. And then what happened?

SPEAKER_02 8:07

So that's sort of how I got from nursing. Yeah. That's how I that's how a nurse became a marketing person. So the the company I was working for sponsored me to do a marketing course, yeah, which was good because you know I had a few gaps. But then I then had that marketing communications company for 10 years.

SPEAKER_01 8:27

Right.

SPEAKER_02 8:28

And while I had that company was when I realized that there was such a thing as the internet. And no one was talking about it. And I thought it was really weird because when I read about it, I thought this is something amazing. Yeah. This is going to change the world. And I remember speaking at a couple of ad club lunches, telling people about the internet. And afterwards, people would come up to me and and they would either say, You are so full of bleep, this is never gonna nothing, nothing like you're describing is ever gonna happen. Or they'd come up to me at the end and say, Wow, thank you so much. We just had no idea what was coming.

SPEAKER_01 9:06

And so what were you helping them? Were you buying domain names, or what were you buying to help them in those days? Because that was early internet, wasn't it?

SPEAKER_02 9:14

Very early, yeah. Well, we were making websites. So once I won I won the contract to do the Australian government website, then I didn't look back because I'd move taken marketing communications agency and put in an internet kind of area. So we I had a production manager and our designers had to learn how to design for the internet. So we then You must have been one of the early website companies, then were you? I think we were, if not the first, certainly one of the first in Australia.

SPEAKER_01 9:45

And what was the name of that company?

SPEAKER_02 9:47

Well, funnily enough, it was still Bambi Advertising Propriety Limited. And so we changed it to Yell, which was Bambi Advertising Property Limited, and then Balance Group. So we changed and we became Balance Design. So why balance? Ah, because I wanted something that started with B, because Bambi starts with B. Yes. And I like to be at the beginning of the alphabet. Yes, yes. Oh, that was important because we had the yellow pages then. Had the yellow pages, that's right. So I needed to and it needed to be BA, so it was at the top of the Bs. Yes. Wow. So that's how we came up with balance. And also at the time I was a young with two small kids, and I was literally balancing my life, trying to balance work, running the business. I had 15 staff. We had an office that I, you know, had to pay rent on, and so I had kids, a business. It was it was they were tough years. So balance was a very big thing. Sounds like fun years as well, right? You obviously enjoyed what you were doing in those days. Yeah, and what I was really good at was explaining the was being the person between the web developers and the client. So the client would want a website, but they didn't know how to even ask for what they wanted. And I knew how to brief the developers, having sort of built a site myself. And so I was good at getting clients in the door. So so just going back, you built a site yourself.

SPEAKER_01 11:11

Who trained you to how to build websites? Oh, a book. No way. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 11:18

Yeah, well, self-taught coder all those years ago. Can I tell you a funny story? So I wanted to, I knew that I needed to get onto the internet before I could build a website. Man, and that internet was hard to get on. It was. It's not easy. Yeah, and I had heard that there was a business in St. Leonard's in Sydney that had something to do with the internet, wasn't quite sure what. And so I was driving down the highway and I saw their building and I thought, I'm just gonna go in and ask. So I walked walked in the door and I said to the girl in reception, I believe somebody in this business knows something about the internet. Would you know who that would be? And she said, Oh, no. But so there's a guy on the second floor he might know. And so she got on her reception phone, she called him up, yeah, and she said, There's a lady in reception who wants to talk to you about the internet. And he said, Oh yeah, put her on. So she gave me the phone at the reception on the reception desk. And he said, There's a guy in just down the road from here who would be able to get you on the internet. And he said, I don't know the address, but he's in it behind a bookshop. And he said, if you go down here, turn left, then turn right, then turn left, and if you third building on the left, there's a bookshop. It's a bookshop. Go in there. Off I went St. Lennon's. Oh, St. Lennon's. Wow. Off I went, followed his instructions, pulled up outside this bookshop, went in, and said to the guy, I'm looking for some way of getting onto the internet. He said, Oh, you've come to the right place. So he took me out the back of his bookshop. Bookshop. And he sold me a book on HTML. And he got me signed up to the internet. I bought a modem from him. I went home. I plugged it all in. And I, you know, had the bing bong bing bong. You know, I got into the internet.

SPEAKER_01 13:09

And I started there. And I just started And those were the days when you used to have to put a code in at the front of the computer to even get it to load up. Do you remember that? You used to have to put in like, hmm, was that right? Or am I getting it?

SPEAKER_02 13:22

I don't remember that, but um, I'm not recalling that. But but I did, I was able to get in. I I bought some software to build with, which came on a floppy disk. Yeah. The floppy disk in my computer, and I opened up the program and I had my little HTML book. Wow. Yeah. So that that's and then from there we just we just build websites.

SPEAKER_01 13:46

But you must have had a brain that that kind of picked up things like that quite quickly. Like you're obviously quite tech savvy, and you you could work that out. So you must have a bit of a mathematical brain.

SPEAKER_02 13:58

Did you know you had that? I'm one of those people that whenever you do those left brain, right brain tests, yeah, I am bang in the middle. So, you know, I'm creative because as you know, I'm an artist. Yeah. And then I'm a very good artist too, by the way. Oh, thank you. And then I'm able to do coding and things like that as well. So yeah, somehow my left and right brain are I don't know, they merge. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:20

Somewhere in the middle is where I am. Because I know Bambi, just a side story, Bambi would come to the office and she would bring these paintings that she'd done at home. And I think one of my favourites ones was that the candle that that had that shadow on like a dark wall or something. It was just McNeil. It looked like something that was painted in the 1700s or 1600s, whatever, but beautifully done. And then we had a framing shop at the bottom, right? And then you would like to take it down to the framing shop and then pick it up the next week or week. Yeah, they're really good, aren't they? I feel like they're gonna retire soon. And they they try to sell that shop. So uh, but yeah, but yeah, please continue. So so you then became Bambi Advertising, which then became Balance Design. Yep. So then how did you get into the hair thing? So you ran that advertising company for what, 10 years?

SPEAKER_02 15:10

So I sold it, it was basically an internet company by the time I sold it. So I sold it in 2000, December of 2000. Oh yeah. And I then went I then spent the next 10 years working for Oracle. What made you sell? Why did you sell? Actually, I didn't want to sell. My my 2IC, a guy I'd worked with for m many years, had been a great support to me. He wanted to buy it. And I said, No, no, you know, I don't think you should. And uh he'd been at me for a long time to sell it to him. And eventually he rang my accountant and my best friend and asked them both to ring me and talk me into it. Oh my goodness. He really wanted it. He really did, and they did. They rang me and said, just do it, just let him. And I was I thought, okay. What do I do now? And you had no idea what you were going to do next. I had no idea. But I thought, well, everyone said to me, somebody wants to buy your business something you should you should say yes, you should sell and do something else. And I had done it for a year.

SPEAKER_01 16:12

And it must have been a fairly good price then, was it? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean the price would have to be f fairly attractive for you to. But that is actually really good advice because how many people get those opportunities and they turn it down? Yeah. And then they try and sell it like a few years later. So you didn't plan to sell, so that opportunity just came past your door. Yeah. When you were in nursing, just interestingly, how many years were you in nursing for?

SPEAKER_02 16:37

Five or six.

SPEAKER_01 16:38

And then how many years were you in the other one for? Your marketing agency? Bambi advertising. Ten. And then you were in this one for 10. Then I went to Oracle. Then you went to Oracle. Yep. I was there about ten years. So you have a 10-year cycle. I do. Yeah. I've noticed that too. Some people have eight years, some people have seven, but ten can be you're a different ten, aren't you? Interesting.

SPEAKER_00 17:03

Where are you at the moment in the 13?

SPEAKER_01 17:05

She's over. I'm overdue. She needs to sell. Any buyers out there? So, Oracle, what were you doing at Oracle? That's interesting. Oh, I was they were a big company then, right? Oh, they are.

SPEAKER_02 17:17

Huge, huge. Massive global company. Yeah. Well, I managed Oracle's user groups across the Asia Pacific, which was a fabulous job, and I loved it. And it was it was just it was just my I I look back with such fondness on those years. I managed so big software companies like Oracle have user groups in every little far-flung corner of the world. And so that they all could work together, you need one person, so one person in each region. So I was the Asia Pacific person and I managed all of the um the chairman of the boards of all the user groups, which was a huge job. There were you know a hundred or so of them, and we we had meetings all over Asia Pacific, and it was sort of my job to organise the meetings and get the speakers and were you flying over there as well? I was flying everywhere. So how old were your kids then? They were early teenagers.

SPEAKER_01 18:15

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 18:16

And I found that hard, all the travel. In fact, by the end of it, I hated the travel. And to this day, I don't like travel. So did Dad have to look after the kids while you were away? I did. He did, and I used to have to say to the girls, I have two girls, and I used to say to them, remember dad's not a mum. He's a dad. Give give the guy a break. He he's never gonna be a mum, he's only gonna ever be a dad. And you know that's really good advice. Be kind to him. Because you know, he's probably mothered him while you were away. Oh, I don't know. He he put chili in everything he cooked for them, so they were hungry by the time I got home.

SPEAKER_01 18:51

So you said you remembered that time with fondness. What what was so nice about that? What what what makes you 'cause fondness is a is a really nice word.

SPEAKER_02 19:01

Yeah, I think it was the people.

SPEAKER_01 19:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 19:03

You know, the the chairman of each user group and I became really good work buddies. You know, I worked so hard with them and so that we just did so much together.

SPEAKER_03 19:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 19:17

You know, we traveled together, we went everywhere together, and and yeah, that they were just really lovely people. And the people in Oracle were lovely. I loved that company.

SPEAKER_01 19:26

Yeah. They were just a lovely company to work for. Yeah, that's great. So talk to me about how you went from Oracle and Fondness to Balance Group to Boost and Blair.

SPEAKER_02 19:37

Or is there another is there another little thing in here? No, no. I I left I left Oracle because things were changing, and Oracle went through a lot of changes when I was there. I think they had 72 acquisitions while I was there. Oh my goodness. Um and so the company changed a lot, and they didn't really, you know, people at the top didn't want user groups to have such a big place in the organization, and so they didn't really need as many of my people as there were. And so I moved from there to renovating a house, which I thought would be a nice thing to do with it. With teenagers. Yeah. Although by then they were older, but yes, so then I I actually helped out a friend who had an advertising agency. So I went and did that for a while, just helped them out with a they had a massive contract to do a huge website, and they didn't have anyone there who knew how websites how to pr how to project manage a website. So I did that for about a year or two, and I really liked that too. But then my hair started to fall out. So that was I was in my late 40s, and we were actually in Cyprus, and I could feel my hair, I could pull my hair out of my head, and I had no idea why. And you hadn't been on like chemo or you hadn't been sick or anything like that. No. I hadn't. Wow. But as it turned out, I had changed some medication and that I found out later was the cause. But so when I came back home, I started to I sort of tried to ignore it for a while, and any woman with hair loss would tell you the same thing. You just try to ignore it and you move your hair around and you try to do different things with your hair so nobody can notice. And and so I sort of got on the internet and went, What what do people do? What do women do when their hair falls out? Like what what's going on here? And it was hard to find answers because everything on the internet about hair loss was for men.

SPEAKER_03 21:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:38

And there was a lot. There is a lot, and there was a lot then about hair loss for men. And I was really self-conscious of my scalp showing through my hair. And somebody said to me at a dinner party, Did you know that your hair's falling? Oh dear. How awful. It was a very pivotal moment for me. Because until that point, I thought I was hiding it and nobody could tell.

SPEAKER_01 22:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 22:06

And once she said that, I thought, I'm gonna have to really take this seriously and see what I can do about it. So I so I found out that there were products that Men had that they could shake into their hair to cover it up. So I bought a men's product. So what's that? A shake in Yeah, it's a shake in hair fibre. Oh a hair fibre. Okay. So I bought the men's product and it was like salt, like like if yeah, you shake it on. Shake it on, yeah. Yeah. And that worked. And so I thought, oh, okay. Now I need a woman's one. I don't want to use the men's one because it's very heartbreaking to open your bathroom cabinet every morning and pull out a men's hair loss product. Well maybe it was like black or what it was brown and ugly, and oh, I was like, oh, I don't, I don't want to use this. And so I thought, I wonder if there's a gap in the market for a women's one. And just enough. Yeah, and just sort of. But just cycling back for a second, when I sold Balanced Design, one of the things that somebody had said to me at the time was, you'll never get anywhere selling your own time. You need to sell products, you need to buy A, buy for A, add on a markup and sell for B. And I thought, oh, okay, never really thought of it that way. But you're right about selling time. Time is finite. My time was finite. And so that had always been bumbling around the back of my head that I might want to have a product one day. And so when I was looking for whether there was a market for a female product, I was thinking, well, that would be good because that's kind of what I'm thinking would be my next move into a product, online product, maybe even e-commerce, was my thinking at the time. And so that is where that all began. I did a lot of market research. I probably spent six months just solely researching hair loss products, looking at the market, looking at the global market, looking at the Australian market, looking at what was out there, looking at potential growth, looking at how many women had hair loss, how many men, how big, how big the market was, what was the opportunity. I spent a lot of time. My marketing brain was not going to let me just build a product for the sake of it.

SPEAKER_03 24:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:21

So that's where that all began. Wow. So that woman at that particular dinner party, do you still see her?

SPEAKER_00 24:31

That's a terrible thing to say to somebody, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 24:33

Oh, but you know, she probably she probably you know, some people could just be very brutally honest. Some people or they just weren't aware how sensitive maybe Bambi was about it. And probably, you know, like if you've got something on your face you want someone to tell you, don't you? Yeah, but you so sometimes people think you haven't noticed, but you know, I don't know. I'm just saying, just defending her, I guess. But it's but but what a pivotal time because that person says something and it was just it hits the spot, doesn't it? And then you die that actions you into this whole next chapter, right?

SPEAKER_02 25:06

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:07

It's almost like you could thank her in a way because you may have sort of plodded around it a lot and not actually gone down there.

SPEAKER_00 25:13

I'd also never heard the comment about your time is finite and that you should start look at a product to sell. Nobody's ever said that to me before. So it's something I'm going to remember from our conversation today. Oh, right. Maybe I'll start selling a product.

SPEAKER_02 25:28

Yeah, it was actually so true. It was actually something that really rang true for me. And I was thinking he said, You'll never be able to make a lot of money if you're only selling your time.

SPEAKER_01 25:40

I was like, Unless you're like a a lawyer at some sort of prosecutor or something, you know, like where you where you can't sell your time at a very high rate, but you've got to be really, really good at it. So e-commerce. So you how did how did that all come about now?

SPEAKER_02 25:55

So Yep, so I I thought I did the research. Yes, there seemed to be a a market for a women's product. And so I bought all the men's products from everywhere around the world that I could find. And I the fibre products, right? Yep, the hair fibers, yeah. So I tried them all, decided which were the best ingredients, looked, got a hair colouring specialist here in Sydney to work with me, and we worked for a long time on perfecting the colours for women. So men's hair tends not to be dyed, tends to be more natural colours, whereas women, most women of a certain age, dye their hair.

SPEAKER_03 26:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 26:37

So we needed to have hair colours for women that reflected ashy tones, warm tones, cool tones, light tones. Yeah. Yeah. So we needed to develop a product that was specifically for women.

SPEAKER_00 26:53

So that's what I did. So how did you did the people who sold the men's product tell you what the ingredients were?

SPEAKER_02 27:00

No, no, it was a lot of work to get to the point where I could find somebody who would help me build the product and manufacture it. And so yeah, that's what I did. And then yeah, so then I brought the product to the market. And actually, one of the things I did before I committed 100% was I created a web page that talked about a hair fiber product for women. One page. And I ran it for a couple of weeks to see whether women would click on it or not. And that was my way of just checking what I what the marketing, what the market sort of the It's a good idea. It's a great idea. Yeah. So the market was telling me there was a product. Yeah. But I just wanted to be sure that if I did do this, that women would click on an ad. And they did. And they went to the page, and the page just said, Oh, you know, coming soon.

unknown 28:15

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 28:16

But but I was able to see like who was coming to the web page. And they were coming, they were clicking. And I was like, okay, there's definitely an opportunity here.

SPEAKER_00 28:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 28:26

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 28:26

So how long did it take you to get the product made?

SPEAKER_02 28:31

Um, it was probably a year or something.

SPEAKER_00 28:37

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 28:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:38

Product development. Yeah. Quite a lot of investment, I would think. Uh, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 28:44

Yeah. Bit of a problem that you have to buy the product before you sell it. Do you have a patent on the product? No, because it is it isn't an unusual product. Our colours are, and nobody else has our colours, but the actual idea of making a fibre from cotton is not unique. Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_01 29:06

Interesting story, isn't it? I was just mentioning that that her whole career, basically for this new business of studying an e-commerce store, designing, manufacturing, researching all these hair fibers for hair loss, was, you know, like all her skills that she'd gained over the prior prior 30 odd years, had perfect for where she is now and to be able to run this business. How long have you been doing Boost and Blend for? 13, 30. Oh, yeah. So we're over that 10-year pick. But also, you were talking about what you're doing now a little bit on the sideline, other than running this business. So do you want to tell us what you're doing? Oh, well, I've just started vibe coding.

SPEAKER_02 29:47

Yeah, what is that? Yeah, so vibe coding is basically using AI to code. And it's not as simple as ask AI to do it for you, because you still need to have a whole load of different pieces of software to work with to make it come to fruition. But my husband had always wanted an app that he could put all the bottles of wine in his cellar into an app. And then he could, every time he took a bottle out, he could say that he'd taken a bottle out and it would have all the inventory of his entire cellar, which is about a thousand bottles. Wow.

SPEAKER_00 30:23

The coming round.

SPEAKER_02 30:27

And so and he's talked about this app for years, and I thought, look, I've always wanted to try vibe coding, so I'll give it a go. And sure enough, on one Saturday, it took me a whole day basically to make this app for him. Not the whole day, really, you know, five or six hours, I guess. And I made this app, which is on his phone, my phone, and he just scans the bottle, the label on the bottle, and it sucks in the information off the label. So it says who the maker is, what the wine is, what the grape it is. And then it just he puts it in a location in his cellar. He's named his location, so he can put the location, and then he can go find it. He can look for it on the app. He can drink a bottle and take it off on the app. I can take a bottle out of the cellar and make sure that I go and say that I've taken that bottle out. You could put the empty bottle back. Why is it called vibe coding? I don't know that answer. I have no idea what vibe coding means. I'll have to look it up. You'll have to look it up.

SPEAKER_01 31:30

You don't have to do that on a Saturday cave when in between your podcasts.

SPEAKER_00 31:33

Well, I won't be creating any app, sorry.

SPEAKER_02 31:37

But but it's been great because I have three Boost and Blend stores. I have one in the UK, one in the US, one in Australia. So it's a global business now. I have an Amazon store in the US, an Amazon store in the UK. So I have five Boost and Blend stores, and they're all accessed through five different portal places. So I vibe coded a dashboard for myself. No way. Yep. So all of my five businesses. Somebody's been wanting forever. Yep. All of my five businesses come into one screen, one app, which is on my also on my phone. So you see sales?

SPEAKER_01 32:14

What do you see on that dashboard?

SPEAKER_02 32:16

I see sales, I've only set it up to show me sales, sales to budget. Oh yes. Where we were this time last month and where we were this time last year.

SPEAKER_01 32:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 32:29

And then I've set it up to report everything to me in Australian dollars. So I put it brings in the sales from the US and the UK and from Amazon, US and UK in US dollars and in pounds, and then it converts it all to Australian dollars, and my budget is in Australian dollars. So I can just see any day and it and it fetches that data every four hours. Wow.

SPEAKER_01 32:54

Because I can remember us talking about it was really hard. Like you had to like get all the sales, put it in a spreadsheet, have a look at it. And then normally, like if you were on the ball, you'd do it every day. But I mean, normally, you know, if you were busy or had other sort of fires to put out, you know, things would get left, and then you would go, oh, the sales were bright. So you're always looking back, whereas now it's like in in real time, right? Absolutely in real time. Yep.

SPEAKER_00 33:17

Wow, that's amazing. Where do you sell the most product? Which country? Australia.

unknown 33:23

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 33:23

But the US is not far behind. In fact, it may over it does overtake Australia. It does. It has actually overtaken Australia a few times.

SPEAKER_01 33:32

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we've seen that a few times, haven't we? A couple of times. Wow, that's pretty well done. Yeah. We're pretty impressed. I am really impressed.

SPEAKER_02 33:41

But but you know, I'm also I love sewing. And I make I made just made a sling for my grandson who broke his collarbone. So I love doing things like that. Not the one who always hurts himself.

unknown 33:53

No.

SPEAKER_02 33:54

And I always and I paint. So I have all these things. I've got lots of hobbies, things that I want to be doing. I don't want to be working you know 80 hours a week. Or I don't work 80 hours ago. We understand.

SPEAKER_00 34:06

We under I understand. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 34:10

But you're not working 80 hours as much anymore, no. No, no. Those days aren't there.

SPEAKER_00 34:15

Yeah. So so Bambi, looking back, what was the hardest part of the journey that people didn't see?

SPEAKER_02 34:23

I would say bootstrapping a business is the hardest thing. I I I don't think people realise how hard it is to grow when you're bootstrapping. I don't know what bootstrapping means. Oh, so it's when you use your own money.

SPEAKER_00 34:41

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 34:41

No, I do know what Yes. So I mean I've heard that before. Yeah, I've heard it. Yeah. If I had had an investor who put money in, I could have grown a lot faster and with a lot more comfort, and I would have had a lot less sleepless nights. But when you're growing using your own money, it's just so difficult because every time I grew I needed to manufacture more product and manufacturing costs money and pay up front. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, the number of times over the years as I've been growing, I have not been able to sleep or I've had worries about whether I'm going to be able to pay the bills. Where the next, you know, I mean the the product, I should say another thing about this product is that it's a consumable. And whatever I did, if I was going to go into a product, I was going to go into a what what people call a compounding business. So a business where people consume it and buy it more and consume it and buy it more. They replace it all the time, repeat business. Yeah. And so that gives you natural growth. Right. Because a certain percentage of people will always keep buying it. But if you're doing that and you're getting new customers in at the bottom of the funnel, and then everybody's moving on and buying it again and again, and you're growing too fast, then you need to get more product, you need to spend more on marketing, you need more people to run the business. You know, I can't run it all by myself with seven or with all these stores all over the world and and you know, warehouses, three PLs. I've got a 3PL in in England and another one in Texas. Yeah. And one here in Sydney.

SPEAKER_01 36:23

So it's a lot to just for people who have e-commerce stores out there and stuff, and running three and having to get stock to all three, and having to advertise, and you all your stuff's done through what marketing platform? What what so you're basically Facebooking and Instagramming adverts to everybody, like and then your website as well has it. Yep. But people find you predominantly on Facebook. Yeah, so it's not it's not through Google's search, it's not SEO or anything. Yeah, SEO is well for the website, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 36:55

Absolutely SEO and Google.

SPEAKER_00 36:57

How have you found Amazon?

SPEAKER_02 37:00

Hmm, well, I they're they're not easy to deal with. They don't have to be easy to deal with because they don't have a lot of competition. They're um behemoth. Yeah, there's a reason I'm asking. Yeah, okay. Yeah. Well, uh they take a third, so that's tough because you know I sell a lot on Amazon in the US and I lose a third to Amazon. I don't advertise on Amazon really. I advertise on Meta, send people to my website. I think what generally happens is they see that they see the product on Facebook, they go and buy it from us, or they go, Oh, I wonder if that you can get that on Amazon. And then they go to Amazon.

SPEAKER_03 37:40

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 37:40

And then if they can get it on Amazon, they'll buy it there, which is why I have to be on Amazon. There's no choice in the US. Yeah. But, you know, look at it is what it is. It's not that easy to deal with. But then again, I do have a bit of a sit and forget attitude towards Amazon. I just make sure there's plenty of stock. Yeah, you need to just flies off the shelves there.

SPEAKER_00 38:00

Do you have the same pricing on every website, every in other words? Is it cheaper on Amazon or no?

SPEAKER_02 38:08

It's actually more expensive on Amazon. Only by $2. But I that's deliberate.

SPEAKER_01 38:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 38:15

Because if you're really penny pinching, come and buy it from my website. Yeah.

unknown 38:19

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 38:19

So how do you manage all that marketing? So there's a lot of marketing going through in different funnels and all of that. So what what what products have you used, or how do you manage that? I'm sure a lot of people would be interested to hear.

SPEAKER_02 38:30

I just I use Facebook itself, Facebook Ad Manager. Okay. For so I have three separate Facebook ad manager accounts, one for the US, one for the UK, and one for Australia.

SPEAKER_03 38:41

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 38:42

And I manage it through Facebook. These days you can actually well, there's more and more tools now than there have ever been. I tend not to really use the tools that much because I've been doing it for so long, I can see what's going on. At the moment, I'm use I've I've hired someone in the Philippines to I teach them how I want them to do it, and then they manage the day-to-day of it because I can't manage that day-to-day. I have managed it day-to-day for many years, but I can't do it all.

SPEAKER_00 39:11

Do you change the ads a lot or do you sort of just cycle the same thing?

SPEAKER_02 39:14

Well, in the old days with Facebook, you would be able to find your audience by using Facebook's audience sort of definitions. So I could say find me women who are perhaps of menopause age, or find me women postpartum, which that's another time you lose hair. And I could specify the audience and then Meta would go find the people. They don't do that anymore. There's no it's all it's much harder now, isn't it? It's too broad, I reckon. Well, they've made it really broad, and that means that the only one way you can find your own customer is with your creative. So it looks into the creative, sees what it is, if it's a before and after. So a woman with her scalp showing through her widening part area, and then the next image is it's all covered up. And so Meta looks at that and decides, oh, I see what that is. That's a hair loss product for women, and then they go and find the people. So it's really important that you have good creative and you have to keep turning it over. Interesting. What about television? I have I've toyed with the idea, but I haven't done TV, no.

SPEAKER_00 40:26

I know I see some ads for men's hair loss on TV early in the morning.

SPEAKER_01 40:31

Is it expensive TV now?

SPEAKER_02 40:33

No, it's not. No. I mean I have I have looked into it and no, it it's actually quite budget friendly these days. Yeah. Doing TV. Yeah. I've done radio, quite a lot of radio.

SPEAKER_01 40:44

Yeah, radios, radio can be still very very lucrative in in getting to a lot of ears, you know, like people listening to that and all that. Yeah, so and then for your and then obviously once they join, you've got a a mailing, obviously you've got the client's name and everything, so you've got a database and that. So what do you use for your your mail out? So obviously you've got you you'd have lots of funnels, right? I would imagine, that are running in the background. So what do you think? I do. So I use Clavio. Clavio.

SPEAKER_02 41:13

Yep. We used MailChimp for many years and then they had a falling out with Shopify. So my my sites are built on Shopify.

SPEAKER_01 41:19

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 41:20

And so we use Clavio, which is brilliant. I think Clavio is amazing.

SPEAKER_01 41:23

Yeah, it's it's it's it seems like it's the perfect product for bigger, like like for what you want, and when you've got different funnels, and then they you have all those different, what do you call those when they flows. Flows, that's it. Yeah. Because you can have thousands of those, right? And making sure that they're all good and everything. And do you do that or do you have someone else doing that for you now? I have done it, but no, someone else is doing it for me now. Yeah. And what do you think about all the AI generated stuff for creative? Because I know you used to have to use graphic designers and different designers and stuff.

SPEAKER_02 41:56

I'm I'm happy to use a little bit of AI here and there. Yeah. I think it's great. I really do. I think you've got to be careful. It would be, you know, better to use real people, but it's hard with hair loss because not a lot of women want to show their face and their hair loss problems to the world. And, you know, one of our biggest challenges is that not necessarily women don't necessarily tell each other that they're using a camouflage product for their hair loss. And in fact, one woman said to me one day she had coffee with a friend, and a friend said, How is it that your hair looks better now than it ever did? And mine's getting worse as I get older, and she said, Oh, well, I'm just lucky, I guess. And I said, Why didn't you say you were using Boost and Blend? And she said, Oh, I'd I'd never say that. And of course, there is a generation of women who are like that, but the younger women are quite happy to tell each other. Like I don't think I'd say anything. No.

SPEAKER_01 42:54

No. I I would. I wouldn't, I wouldn't be too self-conscious, I don't think. But I know that for women the the hair loss thing is uh is much more common, isn't it, Bambi, than people think. Than people think than this. Absolutely. Because we can use wigs as well, right? So which some women would would use as well.

SPEAKER_02 43:15

But it's well, but we're not talk we're talking about we're talking about thinning, I think. Yes. You know, when we talk about hair loss in women that that we can fix with my products, we're talking about thinning. So it's thinning out, your part is is getting wider, you can see your scalp through your hair at the front. Women are feeling pretty sad about it, and they f often feel like they don't want to be in bright lights because people can see through their hair. Yeah. They don't want to stand in the sun because then you can see through their hair. Women tell me that they don't go out much because they feel so self-conscious about their hair. So what Boost and Blend does is it just shakes in over a thinning area, the little fibers cling to the hair, and instantly the hair looks ten times thicker. Each strand of hair is ten times thicker. So when you wash your hair, does it wash out or just washes straight out? So you have to so you put it into clean, dry hair. And you don't need to reapply it. If you're not going to wash your hair every day, you can just leave it in for a couple of days and then Then wash it out and do it again.

SPEAKER_01 44:16

Okay. All right. That's it's uh I've I've bought some because I've got like when I had that BCC's cut off the top of my head, and I've got a little bit of a like a little round hole like this. So I often will just put some on. Yeah. I don't see it, so I don't mind it so much, but I I am aware that it's there. But yeah, it's so easy to do, isn't it? It's like you just you just shake, you don't have to like pull the hair part or anything, you just shake it on the top and it kind of just settles in, doesn't it? It does. Yeah. And how does it stick on the hair? Is it like it's slightly electrostatic? Ah, yes.

SPEAKER_02 44:47

So it just clings to clean, dry hair. Yeah, such a clever idea, isn't it? I know it's brilliant. It's such a clever idea. And you know, one of the nurse in me wants to help women feel good about themselves. I want if I'm a solution finder. If if you're upset about something and I can find a solution for you, then I will.

SPEAKER_01 45:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 45:09

And I will, you know, pick up somebody and help them. And that's sort of my that's in my DNA. That's who I am. Are there any men buying your product that you know of?

SPEAKER_00 45:20

There are.

SPEAKER_02 45:21

I do see the odd male name coming, but you know, there are other products that men can use. And the problem is the hair loss market is so male focused. It's becoming more female focused, actually. I think I started something when I brought this into the public sort of conversation 13 years ago.

SPEAKER_00 45:39

Do you have any competitors now?

SPEAKER_02 45:42

In the women's world, well, many of the men's products are now calling themselves unisex products and are now marketing themselves to women, which I find very hilarious because they're not, they're just selling men's hair colored products to women, whereas mine are women's hair colours.

SPEAKER_01 46:00

Yeah, big difference, right? Yeah, really big difference. I wonder where women back in the day, would they be dying, would they dyed their hair more of the natural men's colour to in order to use those shakers back then? They must have used them a bit, no. So they just didn't even use them.

SPEAKER_02 46:15

Yeah, I guess they just um I guess they just suffered through a bad colour match.

SPEAKER_01 46:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 46:23

Whereas we would never have a woman with a bad colour match.

SPEAKER_01 46:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 46:26

And you've got a big range. How big's your range? Well, we have nine colours, but you can also use two at a time.

SPEAKER_01 46:33

Ah, so you could shake them.

SPEAKER_02 46:34

But like UK, you'd need two at a time.

SPEAKER_00 46:36

Yeah, I need two. So, Bambi, what taught what mistake taught you the most about the business? About business in general? I think Did you make any mistakes? Yes, of course I did.

SPEAKER_02 46:52

I think I grew internationally, perhaps with a little bit of with a few blinkers on. I knew that women were losing their hair everywhere, so I figured, well, I need to sell it here, I need to sell it there. And maybe I maybe I went overseas a little too soon, and then I spread myself too thin. Okay. I spread my money too thin. I think that's one mistake I made. And the other one is hiring slow and firing fast. I know people talk about this all the time. It's a big topic. But I'm so I I've had people working for me who who I got to know, and I felt so terrible for them that I didn't want to tell them that they weren't doing a great job, and I didn't want them to lose their job. But obviously I've had to let people go over the years, but I I've waited way too long to let them go. I mean, I've had to let them go in the end, but I waited too long. I I watched them doing things I couldn't turn them around, and and I should have just fired faster. You're too nice.

SPEAKER_01 47:54

Yeah, I'm too nice. You're too nice. It's funny, isn't it, how that that that saying fire hire slow, fire fast, and how many of us business owners make that mistake a few times, don't it? And then we learn down the track, right? But it just it just we all want to be nice and we all want to be treat our staff well. And I don't know, we make that mistake. And sometimes we like people for who they are, but not for what the work they can do, and we make that mistake as well, don't we?

SPEAKER_00 48:23

You know, like I don't think it pays to be nice. Well, in business. No, I'm being said in business in that sense when you're talking about staff.

SPEAKER_02 48:33

I think you have to be a bit more ruthless than I am. Yeah. But actually, you better be realistic, don't you?

SPEAKER_01 48:37

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 48:38

Yeah. There was another mistake that I made, which I learned a lot from, and that is for a couple of years I had a kitchen shop. Which?

SPEAKER_01 48:46

You never told us that. No, I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 48:47

Where's the kitchen shop fit in? Was that between Bambi advertising and Yeah, it was it was it was between being a marketing communications consultant and going full on into internet. There was a two-year gap in there where I had a kitchen shop. But what I learnt through that time a retail shop. Yeah, a retail shop. Oh my goodness. Brickford More. There was a mistake there for one. Right. Um, but no, the mistake I learnt was that I had a lot of staff working for me because you do in a shop. Yeah. I didn't put aside the tax. And I didn't it was the first time that I had ever had that many employees.

SPEAKER_01 49:30

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 49:31

And I really got stuffed by not by not putting the tax aside. Yeah. It adds up, doesn't it? Especially if you're doing it quarterly as well. Yep. So ever since then, I have always had an account where my tax money goes every month. Some tax money goes aside. The GST now and all the super and whatever else, whatever other tax I'm gonna need, it goes aside every month. And I learned that the hard way.

SPEAKER_00 50:01

You can come and be one of my bookkeeping clients.

SPEAKER_02 50:05

Really?

SPEAKER_01 50:06

So many. It's so interesting that how we all do that. I remember at the service stations we did that. I think GSD came in or something like that, and it was such a hard thing to budget for. And I think even that idea of having two bank accounts, and you sort of think it's your money somehow, because it feels like you'd you're taking that money, but then when you get that quarterly thing and it's like sixty thousand dollars or whatever it is, man. Yeah. I learned that the hard way. I was gonna ask you one more question. It's like cash flow is like the thinning hair problem.

SPEAKER_00 50:38

Is it we need a fiber for cash flow?

SPEAKER_02 50:40

Oh, I wish there was.

SPEAKER_00 50:41

What's the best piece of advice you've ever received?

SPEAKER_02 50:46

Um, I look back upon the man who said to me, You should you shouldn't sell your time. Okay. That that has resonated with me for forever since he said it. It was probably 28, nearly 30 years ago that he said that. And I've never forgotten that he said it.

SPEAKER_01 51:07

It's an interesting piece of advice. It's like very profound, wasn't it? Like we kind of know that, and you do hear it, but we don't hear that enough, do we? No, well, and he was a multimillionaire and he had he had he sold products. So that really was profound then.

SPEAKER_02 51:24

Yeah, because it changed it changed the course of that, plus someone telling me I was losing my hair, it changed the course of my life.

SPEAKER_01 51:30

Yeah. So the that question of if you lost everything and you had to start again tomorrow, what would you do? I know, right?

SPEAKER_02 51:41

Whoa, what would I do? Look, I I just want to paint. I just want to paint. I want to paint. I just retired. I want to paint. People are willing to buy my art, and I can't keep I can't paint enough to do that. I I haven't got enough time to paint enough paintings to sell it to make any kind of a living out of it. And I would do that if I had to.

SPEAKER_01 52:06

And I think for painting too, you've got to it's it's like to be creative, you can't have that stress of running e-commerce businesses globally, all of that sort of stuff, because that kind of takes a certain amount of head space sometimes.

SPEAKER_02 52:20

No, I use it as my downtime.

SPEAKER_01 52:22

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_02 52:23

I mean, in my office is where my art studio is, and whatever painting I'm painting is on the easel. And I sit at my desk and I'm working and I go, Oh, I I think I should have, you know, I've just done a painting of my grandchildren. I think, oh, that eye's wrong. And then I'll just get up and pick up a paintbrush and fix something and go back to my desk. So that's not really downtime. But then I do sometimes finish at three o'clock and paint for the rest of the day.

SPEAKER_01 52:48

Yeah. Can I ask you just for for what's your words of wisdom on that thinning when you grow too fast, thinning of money and the cash flow, the cash flow issue is is a is a topic in every business, and every business goes through this. What is your best advice on on cash flow?

SPEAKER_02 53:08

I look at it every week.

SPEAKER_01 53:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 53:11

I I didn't do that for a long time. Yeah. I look at it every week now. And I have for quite a few years. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's all you can do.

SPEAKER_00 53:20

Knowing your numbers. Knowing your numbers, as we keep on saying. Yeah. That's that's exactly what it is.

SPEAKER_01 53:26

So do you look like do you look at a cash flow report or how do you look at the cash, or do you just look at the bank balance?

SPEAKER_02 53:31

Oh no. I've I've got a report. I've got a a number of different I've got a spreadsheet for each store. Oh yeah. And uh well for each country, let's say. And I put the cash in that bank account in the spreadsheet every Wednesday.

SPEAKER_01 53:50

Every Wednesday.

SPEAKER_02 53:51

Without fail. It's the first thing I do on a Wednesday.

SPEAKER_01 53:54

Yeah, right. Okay. So you put in the forecast. Yep.

SPEAKER_02 53:57

And what what the actuals were, so then the figures automatically update from the And then I have a consolidated spreadsheet with all of my store all of my countries in one place in Australian dollars. So I can see exactly how much cash I have in each country. Yeah. Because obviously I have a US bank accounts, I have UK bank accounts, I have bank accounts everything. And it's all consolidated. Yep. Yep. I look at it every week. So nothing ever will surprise me. I know what's coming. I know what I'm about to spend on stock, I know what I'm about to spend on raw materials, I know what I'm about to spend on marketing, and I can see it all. And the bottom line has to just be always positive. Why do you think people don't look at that? Well, why didn't I look at it until I did? Yeah. I just had no idea of how to set it up. It actually was my I hired a virtual accountant, a virtual CFO. Yeah. She is. And she set it up for me. And that just made all the difference. That was about three or four years ago. So it's easy to use, but it's just like Yeah, I just didn't know how to set it up. I didn't know what it should look like. I didn't know what a cash flow spreadsheet would even look like. I tried. I had many iterations of something like that over the years, but I just never had anything that worked.

SPEAKER_00 55:16

And I actually think spreadsheets are probably the best way to go. I know now that you've got zero has a cash flow manager. QuickBooks does too, but they're not. I still think it's a good old spreadsheet.

SPEAKER_01 55:28

Yeah. I feel like if your zero isn't accurate, or you're not, or if you don't trust your zero for accuracy and your your reconciliation isn't done, I feel that that that forecast thing will always never be accurate. And then you don't trust your figures again. And I think it's that that ability to trust your figures and to trust what's actually in the bank is real and where that my other money is to actually know where it's gone. Like, you know, because you can you hear some really sad stories out there about how they just go and but they just don't know where to look or how to look. And then that that balance sheet is sitting there taking some of the money out, and you know, where you're doing drawings, maybe, or you're paying off loans, or you're paying it, or you're or you're just your ATO tax debt, it's all on that. So it's not showing on your PL or and it's not showing on your cash flow. So it's like you've got to pull all of that in and and to track that and what I'm paying off and what I'm paying. Like I've helped a client set that up even with tax debt and everything. But it's tricky, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 56:33

But it takes time too. You actually have to spend some time with it. Even when it's set up, you still have to spend time putting the figures in and making sure they're right.

SPEAKER_02 56:42

And I think one of the problems with e-commerce is that you have to have PayPal, you have to have Afterpay, you have to have all the credit card options, you have to have all of those in all the different currencies. Yes. And I just have currencies and cash in everywhere. And how do I know what's what unless I consolidate it all into one spreadsheet?

SPEAKER_01 57:07

And so you've got to have different bank accounts in different countries, right? That you transfer backwards and forth. And the currency thing, who manages that for you? Is that is that something you leave and then bring in when it goes up or down? Or or is there a management plan around that? No.

SPEAKER_02 57:24

I manage I manage the currency. Well, I I buy and sell in the currency as much as I can. I buy and sell in UK in pounds. I buy and sell in the US in US dollars, and I buy and sell in Australian and Australian dollars. So I don't switch the currencies around all that much. Yeah, good.

SPEAKER_01 57:43

I think that's the secret of because I know I had a friend that had a business that they dealt a lot of their business was done overseas as well, like a consulting excuse me, consulting company. And she used to go out and look at the the the exchange rates and then buy a whole lot in that other currency and then you know, sort of switch it back. And she made a bit of like she made it work t in their favour for the business, because I think they got caught out a few times where they had to switch it, but the currency was in the the wrong way. And so then they lost more money than what they needed to lose out just due to currency changes, you know, which hurts, right? It does. So it is it is important to be aware of that, especially for a smaller business, you know, that does that.

SPEAKER_00 58:26

What's the next question there, Kate? I don't know. I think we're one more and then what systems, habits or routines have had the biggest impact on your success? So what systems, habits or routines have had the biggest impact on your success?

SPEAKER_02 58:43

I think we use currently use sin7 for stock inventory management. Yep. And I don't think we could ever do what we do and have stock moving all over the world without something like that.

SPEAKER_00 58:57

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 58:57

When we're at we're about to move off SYN7 onto a competitor of theirs because it's cheaper, but because SYN7's very expensive. But it it's a really good piece of software and managing inventory is massive.

SPEAKER_01 59:11

It's massive, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 59:12

Yeah. I think we can probably the last question. The very last question now. No, if we've got time. If every small business if every small business owner listening today could do just one thing this week, what would you tell them to do?

SPEAKER_02 59:28

Learn SEO. If you've got an online business. Yeah. Man, you do. So I can't speak for a small business owner that isn't operating in the e-com space. We just have to talk about e-comm. Yeah. And I would say learn SEO. Always. That's what I should have done right. Oh well, I actually I did from the beginning. I think SEO search engine optimization is the most important thing. And now it's AI. Now it's AI optimization. Learn that. Just learn it. And do a little bit every day. A to a small thing. You know, write a blog post that's really got some great keywords in it that you know people are searching for.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:06

Just understanding SEO is going to make a huge difference for a small e-com business.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:12

And it doesn't matter where you are, SEO matters now. Yeah. It's just, and you can lose a lot of money down black holes with people not doing the right thing by you. There's a lot of shunky businesses out there that we all get burnt on with SEO. But there's a lot of good businesses out there as well. But I feel like if you for me, if you know what's happening and you know how to do it, and if you don't know how to do it, it's such a good lesson to try and learn it. It's like that cash flow report. You don't know it until you know it, right? And then you can't unknow it. And I feel like then you're more in control of your business and you're not just leaving it up to the big world to just do the right thing. Like a business isn't going to just do the right thing, right? It's a product of your actions. And so if you do no actions or you don't do the right actions, it's going to respond in that way, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. So and I think that's what people forget. They kind of feel like, I don't know, that somehow is this all gonna work out. Today has been with uh lovely Bambi Staveley from Boost and Blend. And we've had a wonderful chat for about the last hour. And our podcast is called Small Business Sorted with Kay and Crystal. And thank you so much, Bambi, for coming in and and sharing your expertise. We might get you back in the future. I think if we want to dive down more into some of the e-commerce, just twerks and quirks, sometimes people get a bit out of that. There's a lot of e-commerce stores out there, and it's really hard to get them up and running to work and to get that level of sales that you've had and success that you've had. And I feel like it's uh it's a it's a tricky thing to get into. It sounds easy and it sounds that, but to actually get it to work for 13 years, wow, you know, kudos to you and well done and um congratulations really. Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:00

I've learned I've learnt a lot. So I'm sure that the audience has learned a lot too.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:05

What was that thing that you do? That was my key takeout. The Selling Your Time was my Oh Selling Your Time. Yeah, those uh the apps that you're creating, the Yes. The sorry, what the the app that you created for the Wall Street. Oh, Vibe Coding. Vibe Coding, that's my uh that's my key takeout today. But we'll Google it. I'm getting too I've written it down, yeah. And we've loved having you on the show today. And uh please look out for our other shows. They kind of come out once a week. And you can find us on all good podcasts and on YouTube as well.