The Happy Startup School

This episode of the podcast is another recording from our live Friday Fireside webinar. On this week’s show, we were joined by Eleanor Tweddell. Eleanor is the founder of Another Door, a community that supports people through redundancy, and author of the book “Why losing your job could be the best thing that ever happened to you”. During our conversation, we hear about Eleanor’s journey from a corporate employee to entrepreneur and the hurdles she’s had to overcome along the way. She shares her thoughts on the importance of pushing yourself out of your comfort zone, playing with ideas and surrounding yourself with inspiring down-to-earth people.

Working for yourself for the first time can seem like a scary step. You go from the safety of a regular pay check to the uncertainty of not knowing where the next job might come from. But some us aren’t built for the 9 to 5 and we crave the autonomy and freedom of being our own boss and so we accept the uncertainty and take control of how we work. In this conversation with freelance copywriter William Lyth I hear about his journey from employee to self-employed. He shares that while switching profession and learning a whole new skillset was a risk it was a bigger risk to stay where he was. Originally a developer Will changed direction and found work that gave him flow. He followed the path of becoming a copywriter and along the journey has learned as much about himself as he has about how his new profession. Some of the things he’s learned he put into blog post called “10 pitfalls to avoid as a first time freelancer”. That’s when I reached out to him and asked if he’d join me on the podcast so that we could share his 10 bits of wisdom with you.

When setting out on the journey of building a totally new business it’s important to focus on making progress rather than seeking perfection. You’re a pioneer doing something that hasn’t been done before and so there’s no set template for success. You’re on a voyage of discovery that can take you down many dead ends. Luckily we have tools to help us explore what works such as design thinking, customer development and the Lean Startup. These tools help us discover the problems worth solving and iterate towards the best solutions. However, while it’s important to find problem/solution fit and then product/market fit we also need to keep an eye on product/founder fit. As our business ideas evolve we, as founders, also evolve along the way. As we discover what the market wants we also discover what we want (and don’t want) which is also foundational to the success and sustainability of the businesses we create. If we don’t be build a business that aligns with our own personal needs we can end up following a path based on other people’s definitions of success. We then run risk of building a successful business that makes us feel tired, trapped and tense. The opposite of being a Happy Entrepreneur. In this episode of the podcast I talk to Veronica Fossa, founder of WeFactory. She shares the story of her 6 year journey of building her business and why closing it this year made perfect sense for her. If you’re a business owner struggling with meeting the expectations of what a successful business should be then I hope this story will give you the courage and inspiration to rethink the direction you’re going in.

Recently I caught up with Beccie d’Cunha, founder of Courage Lab, a consultancy that helps founders and organisations build more resilient and higher performing teams. She shared with me a tool that she uses a lot in her work called Lumina Spark. It’s a psychometric profiling tool that measures the level to which we exhibit different personality traits. I’m always curious about new tools that help us unpick the spaghetti of thoughts and emotions that make up who we are. Knowing more about ourselves can help us design the right businesses for us. It’s hard to define what success means for you if you don’t know who you are. Building a Happy Startup isn’t just about making money while creating a positive impact in the world. It’s also about going on a journey of self-discovery. Discovering our limiting beliefs and being aware of our unconscious biases can help us become more intentional and powerful in business. It allows us to act despite our fears and make big decisions even though we don’t have all the information. During this episode Beccie tells me more about Lumina Spark and how it works. We also discuss our own individual Lumina Portraits (these are the psychometric reports created by the tool) and what we learned from them. If you’d like to learn a little bit more about Lumina and how it could help you then listen on. To find out more about Beccie's work and how she could help you develop your own Lumina Portrait check out here website - https://www.couragelab.co/

This episode of the podcast is another window into the worlds of the people who join our Happy Startup tribe. This time I'm in conversation with Lyndsay Lucero, founder of Baxley Goods. She tells the story of how she started her business and why. Unlike other startup stories Baxley didn't begin because Lyndsay wanted to make money but because she wanted to make something for herself and her children. Baxley Goods currently creates beautifully designed and hard wearing bags that have little environmental impact and provide workers a living wage. Through the business Lyndsay is satisfying her need for creativity while also trying to preserve the planet for her children. At the moment she's designing bags but has ambitions to make other products too. During our conversation we touch on the power vulnerability, authentic storytelling for business and why it's so important to be able to admit that you don't know and ask for help. Lyndsay ends with some questions for anyone who's looking to work on something more meaningful: What's your vision? What lights you up? What are you NOT good at? What assets are available to you? How does all this align? What's the bigger picture?

In our community of purpose-driven entrepreneurs, we have many founders who want to create a positive impact with their valuable products and services but are hampered by how they price. This affects both their financial and energetic sustainability. Do you feel unconfident and apologetic in the way you price your products and services? Are you struggling to grow your business because you’re always scrabbling for new customers? If so, this episode is for you. Laurence and I are joined by Ben Johnson - founder, investor, mentor and pricing coach. He shares with us five principles to help you price well. We discuss what they mean and share stories from our agency days to illustrate each point. This is an incredibly valuable conversation no matter where you are in your entrepreneurial journey. You'll find some useful tips and stories that will unlock your pricing challenges and help you become more confident and therefore more profitable. The principles we cover are: 1. Get out of your own way 2. Price the person and not the job 3. Give different price options 4. Provide a pricing anchor point 5. Always deliver value

It's perfectly possible to be shy, quiet, or introverted and get on in the world. However, on social media all we seem to see are the loud-mouthed extroverts who are smashing it and trying to sell us another transformational program that will help us make six-figures in sales. Unfortunately, those voices have dominated the world of entrepreneurship making the less assuming ones of us feel inadequate and not knowing how to market ourselves authentically. In this fun and informative conversation with Pete Mosley, author of The Art of Shouting Quietly, we hear an alternative story of success. What if getting known and marketing yourself wasn’t about shouting loudly, but shouting quietly. In his book, he asks “What if it is as simple as employing your best listening skills and learning the art of well-crafted questions?” During this conversation, we talk about different models of success and being aligned to our true values. We discuss the importance of sharing our ideas with others who show ruthless compassion rather than well-meaning criticism. And we also cover the idea of getting help from others to market what we do so that we don’t feel like we’re always having to talk about ourselves. The invitation to introverted entrepreneurs is to find a way to get your message out into the world that aligns with your nature and rises above the noise. In this episode, Pete shares how you can do this.

If you’ve written down 7 top priorities you’ve got no priorities which means you’re going to find it hard to be productive. According to Graham Allcott, founder of Think Productive and author of Productivity Ninja, productivity is ultimately about making space for what matters. This means creating clear intentions and focussing your attention on what you need to do. During this episode Graham shares the different things that can affect our productivity and what we can do about it. This conversation is also within the context of a global pandemic and only just starting to come out of lockdown in the UK. Whilst we may have had all the best intentions of using our lockdown time more productively Graham also reminds us that we’re only human. The challenging emotions caused by the uncertainty we’re facing means we can’t be as productive as we’d like. And that it’s ok. There are some wonderful nuggets of wisdom in this episode as well as pointers to some really useful materials to help you with your productivity such as Graham’s weekly checklist and Think Productive’s working from home pack of resources. The weekly review - https://thinkproductive.co.uk/the-weekly-checklist-the-key-to-ninja-productivity/ Working from home resources - https://thinkproductive.com/wfh/

When Laurence and I closed our digital agency it seemed like the natural thing to do. At the time we had a beautiful studio, a talented team and clients with ongoing projects but we’d lost the creative energy to keep it going. We weren’t clear about its future and we were being drawn to grow the Happy Startup School. While it wasn't plain sailing closing Spook Studio was a lot less traumatic experience than what many other founders have had to go through. In this episode of the podcast, we’re joined for our Friday Fireside by Tom Nixon, author, coach and founder of Maptio (a tool to help develop self-managing organisations). He's on a mission to support founders and research what it takes to create (and close) impactful companies. Tom shares his story of entrepreneurship, how he closed his company and why some businesses have a natural shelf-life, and that’s fine. We talk about the taboo connected with closing a company and how we’ve lost sight of the creativity and humanity at the core of business. Businesses may be legal entities in themselves but in reality they’re just a collection of people brought together by the creative energy of the founder. When we forget this we can easily become imprisoned by the structures we’ve created. If you’re a founder thinking about closing your company or at the beginning of a startup journey we hope that this conversation will give you a new and more energising perspective on what it means to be an entrepreneur.

In this episode of the podcast Laurence and I were given a masterclass in empathy. As part of our Friday Fireside series of webinars we were joined by Christine Raine, empathic coach, entrepreneur and founder of Conversable, a transformational movement on a mission to share how empathy can transform human relationships, and therefore the world. It was a very timely conversation given how the world seems to have turned upside down over the past few weeks. Fear, division and blame are driving behaviours more and more. And so we explored how can use empathy in our lives and work to be able to address the challenges we face and the inequality that exists. According to Christine empathy starts by being fully present with people; serving as a mirror to what they’re saying and feeling; and reflecting what their feelings and needs may be to help then connect with their own inner wisdom. It’s about helping people move from a head-centred approach to communicating to a more heart-centred one. At the centre of Christine’s work is teaching Non-Violent Communication and she teaches us what it’s about and where it comes from. I found this an incredibly empowering conversation that touched on empathy and privilege and how we can use our deeper understanding of both to contribute to the changes that need to be made in society to make it more equitable for all.

This episode is a departure from our normal format and is an experiment suggested by one of our longest-standing members and a big advocate of our work, Peter Krishnan. Peter has been to every Summercamp and is also the leader of our Happy Startup London group. During this episode, Peter shares his story of a startup along with 3 music tracks that have been important to his journey.

In this episode of the podcast we’re in conversation with John Parkin the author of F**k It: The Ultimate Spiritual Way. We hear about his journey of self healing and how saying f**k it was core to it. It’s about not holding on so tightly to ideas and concepts and being more aware of the unfair expectations we place on ourselves, situations or events. When it comes to saying f**k it to fear John talks about accepting the feelings rather than pushing them away. He says “we’re scared of sadness, pain, vulnerability and grief… in normal times we’re all too busy and we don’t experience significant pain or joy and so the nervous system is almost frozen. But when you allow people to be more vulnerable and relaxed the ice starts to melt and they get to feel that pain and joy again.” There are so many gems in this episode and so if you struggle with dealing with the high and lows of the entrepreneurial journey then listen on and learn how the f**k it way can show you the path forward.

When faced with a crisis how do you respond? When your mind is filled with anxious thoughts and worries it’s impossible to find the right answer. But if you let your mind settle and be at peace then that’s when insight arrives. In this episode of the podcast we’re joined by Elizabeth Lovius, entrepreneur, leadership coach and wisdom teacher. She shares her own insight about where inspired action comes from and how we can find it within us. We relate this to our own experience of handling a crisis when we discovered just 3 weeks before our annual signature event that we didn’t have a venue. According to Elizabeth, no matter what we might be experiencing on the outside, inside we are safe and we can claim the peace we need at any time. This is our spiritual side, the side of us that we need to be using more in business, particularly now.

"The whole world is suddenly in a state of total improvisation, and no-one has any idea what will come next" In this episode of the podcast Laurence and I talk to our good friend Laurence Shorter. He’s a coach, comedian and author of The Lazy Guru’s Guide to Life. We be explore the idea of not having any idea. For Laurence, this is the essence of true creativity and from where clarity emerges. When we settle into a space of doing nothing we give an opportunity for our inner voices to quieten and stop. We stop thinking and we start feeling into what's needed next. For many of us this is a scary place to be. We’re so used to going somewhere, achieving something and doing work. We believe that we can think and do our way out of any problem. But what if the situation becomes so complex that you truly can't think of what to do next? At that point maybe "doing" is the last thing you should do. If you’ve been looking for an excuse to do nothing then make sure you listen to this episode.

In this episode of the podcast I talk to the lovely and super positive Gayle Berry, business mentor and founder of Blossom and Berry. Gayle has been running her own business for over 18 years now. When she first started Blossom and Berry, her baby massage school, she was sending out binders and CDs to people via the post. She's now transitioned everything online and has clients across the world. We talk about what it takes to run a sustainable business and the importance of authenticity and love. She believes that by being intentional about what you want and making sure you align your actions accordingly you'll build a business that you'll love.