Energise Wealth

Hey guys! Welcome to this week’s episode of the Wealth Unplugged podcast!

Here are the key tips I took from interviewing the amazing Robyn Foyster, Founder of The Carousel, on Feminine Wealth TV this week.

Robyn has been a powerhouse in the magazine industry for many years. She started her career as a journalist before moving on to magazine editor and then publisher of 8 of Australia’s most well known women’s mags. At the height of her career she decided to throw it all in and take on the entire industry by launching her own next gen multi media platform called The Carousel.

This woman can tell us a think or two about success for sure !

Takeaway #1 – Watch where the future is going

Just because something has been successful in the past doesn’t mean it’s going to be successful in the future. You have to keep your eye on where things are going and how the markets wants and needs are changing.
Robyn saw the shift towards online, bite sized video and mobile content happening and realised the magazine industry was about to be heavily challenged.
The diamonds can often be found when you stay one step ahead of this kind of change.

Takeaway #2 – The ‘5 ingredient’ recipe for success in business

Robyn shared with us the ‘5 key ingredients’ she has learned are key to success in business.
A great idea; Money; Timing; Balls of Steel and of course ….. LUCK!

It’s really important to be passionate about what you do, but there is a lot more to it than just passion. The people who just go on passion alone and expect all the rest to fall into place can get seriously burnt in business !

Takeaway #3 – Money really matters!

When getting a business off the ground successfully money is super important! Usually things will take twice as long as you anticipated to get going and will cost 3 times as much. When you don’t budget for this it’s easy to see how people fail in business.
The numbers never lie so don’t leave yourself wide open tot his stressful situation. Do your numbers and then double them !

Transcriptions

Speaker 1: Want to know what successful people are doing with their money to create wealth and to use it consciously for the greater good? Welcome back to Wealth Unplugged, the weekly podcast that gives you diamond tips on creating conscious wealth from change makers, world shakers, and wealth creators. Now here’s your host, Barbara Turley.

Barbara Turley: Hi there and thanks for joining me again for another episode of Wealth Unplugged. This is the podcast where I give you the key takeouts that I pick up from the guests I’ve been interviewing on my feminine wealth TV show. I’ve had everyone from amazing entrepreneurs to investors, right through to philanthropists and people doing great things to change this world, all women of course, being the feminine wealth TV show, and you can catch those shows over on my website at energisewealth.com. There’s a whole host of shows over there to watch.

Getting onto this week’s show, I had one of the loveliest women I think I’ve met in long time on the show this week. Robin Foyster, she is the founder and publisher of a multimedia platform called The Carousel, and you can catch that at thecarousel.com. Robin has been the editor of some of Australia’s largest magazines, she was also the former publisher of eight of the largest magazines in Australia, think Harper’s Bazaar, Cleo Magazine, Australian Woman’s Weekly. She was the publisher of all of those magazines, all at the same time, managing all the major editors there.

She’s had a keen eye on the magazine and media industry for very long time, having come up through the ranks of journalist through to editor, then onto that publisher role. I wanted to interview her because she recently launched this new concept called The Carousel. She’d left that security of a high paying corporate role to get out like the rest of us and launch her own business. What I loved about her, and it brings me onto my first key takeout from Robin, she talked about the fact that you’ve gotta watch where the future is going when you want to launch something. Just because something’s been done successfully one way in the past doesn’t necessarily mean that if you launch that that you’re gonna be successful, you probably want to keep your eye on where things are moving and where things are going.

In hockey, the big thing is to say don’t go where the puck is, go where the puck is going, where it’s going to be, so you need to know where everything is going. In the case of Robin and the Carousel, she had worked in the magazine industry for a long time and she could see that things were really changing. Although people are still buying print magazines, she was very aware that there was a lot of change going on out there and people are moving online in droves. Not only that, people are now looking for online digital but bite sized content, everybody wants video. They want video and content that’s optimized for mobile. That was number one, she could see that change happening and she wanted to stay ahead of the curve and do her own thing in this space.

The other thing she talked a lot about was this idea of branded content. I loved this because branded content, or I think it’s called native content as well, is where you’re bringing people who are advertisers, advertisers are looking to get away from the tile ads and more into articles that have been specifically written about something that they’re trying to advertise by a writer. What you’re really doing is creating a platform, where readers can get the content that they really like in the format that they like, and advertisers can get access to readers in a format that suits them but also suits the reader and you’re not bombarding them with ad content. I just loved that Robin has brought this whole concept together and built the next gen of magazine publishing, which is The Carousel.

She was really inspired, I asked her about Arianna Huffington because of course Arianna Huffington did a similar thing in the US, and now globally she’s become a household name and she’s developed such a persona out of what she did. Arianna Huffington was originally the editor of the Washington Post, she was an editor there, then she launched her own blog and put it online. Lo and behold, within a few years the Huffington Post exploded and became almost arguably as big as the Washington Post and technically probably a bit more influential that the Washington Post ever was. She could really get her voice out there and the voices of multiple different people in the Huffington Post that maybe the Washington Post may have been a bit limited in.

I just loved this whole thing of Robin really looking at where the future is going and then thinking very strategically about if I’m gonna launch my own business, rather than me doing a me too thing, let’s think about where things are going, where the future’s gonna be and be a maverick, get out there and create the future the way you think it’s going in your industry. You could do the same thing in whatever industry you’re in as long as you keep your ear close to the ground and you’re not afraid, it’s not necessarily taking on risk, it’s not afraid to step out and be a leader, be ahead of the curve. As I say Robin has done this really well over at The Carousel.

I guess me and Energise Wealth, when I think about what I’m trying to do at Energise Wealth, it’s a similar sort of concept. I realist that in the financial industry where I was the gap was there’s the financial advice industry desperate to have people pay them to give advice, but they lament this whole problem where how do you turn the need for advice into demand for advice, there’s a big gap in the market around educating people around money so that they then can go and feel confident to seek the right advice. I felt that was a gaping hole in the market, so I came in with Energise Wealth and decided that’s exactly what I would build and get the conversation of money into the mainstream, get people really thinking more strategically about business, money, and investing.

That brings me onto my second key takeout from Robin. She made a really good point, she has some really good mentors and one of them is an investor in The Carousel. One of her mentors had told her that the ingredients for a successful business are five key things you need.

First of all of course you need a great idea, and you need to be passionate about that idea, but you need a great idea. Number two, you need money. I know that sounds so obvious but how many people are launching businesses without the money, the right money to back them, that they need. Number three, you need good timing. Sometimes you can have a great idea, you can have the financial backing, but the timing just might be wrong, you might either be too early with an idea, or you might not be looking at the fact that there’s industry flux going on, there is change in the economy. This is a seriously key one that people don’t watch. The economy might be slowly tipping over, and you just might be launching an idea at a time when things are becoming tight and it better to wait a year or two for things to turn.

Number four, you need balls of steel, I call this your hustle, [“hustle-ometer” 00:07:20], how hot is your hustle? You really need to be able to hustle hard, because even having a great idea, financial backing, the right timing, but an inability to go out and hustle for deals and do deals, with will limit your ability to be successful. Number five, you need luck. This is the thing, a lot of people when they fail at a business or things don’t go that way they start blaming themselves, particularly us women, we beat ourselves up about it and we blame ourselves when sometimes you just got unlucky, the right ingredients weren’t there in the right proportions or maybe you had all the other four but they weren’t there in the right proportions. A failure is only a failure when you quit, so if luck wasn’t on your side then you need to look at the other four ingredients and think about the ratio of one to the other and think about maybe how you can rejig them to get them more strategically placed for you.

I’d really focus on those five key things, I’m very passionate about believing that passion is not enough alone to build a successful business. I know there’s gonna be some of you out there listening thinking no, do what you love and the money will come. I’m gonna tell you right here right now that that is what is tripping up so many, particularly women, and heartfelt entrepreneurs our there, the sole entrepreneurs out there. It’s tripping you up in business because it is not true. Do what you love, yes you have to be passionate about what you do, you have to have a great idea that the public actually wants. It’s not just that you have to be passionate about it, the market needs to want it. You also need to remember that money is very, very important, I can’t stress it enough. Everything takes longer than you think to launch, that’s the first thing I’d say, and it will cost you three or four times more than you anticipate.

If you launch a business with a great idea but you don’t have enough money to back you and to keep you going, the business is in danger of failing, whether it’s a brilliant idea or not, and so many startups fail because they’ve run out of money too early, and their whole idea goes to pot because they don’t have enough money. Maybe you need to think about raising capital, and this is something that Robin did, she did raise capital to launch The Carousel, because she knew although she had the model and she had the passion and the right idea, she knew that it was gonna take a lot of money to produce a platform like this properly and to have the right inputs and the right money.

Not only did she put a lot of her own money in, because investors do like to see that you’ve got skin in the game, but she did go out and raise capital and she said herself it’s quite a stressful and arduous process, so you need to be ready for that too if you’re gonna go that route and get educated on it a little bit before you go down that route.

Like I said, my third key takeout is that money matters. I can’t stress this one enough. It’s not just passion, money really, really matters. As I said, things are gonna cost you more than you think so potentially you need to do your numbers. I always so the number never lie, the numbers are unemotional and they never lie. If the numbers don’t work and if they’re not looking like they’re working out for you, you really need to go back to the drawing board and think about how do I raise more money? If it’s a small business you may need to just approach family members, but if you’re gonna approach family members and friends who might be interested in investing in the beginnings of your business you need to have your numbers done, you need to show where the revenue lines are coming in and where the people are gonna get their money back.

Again, a lot of people get very caught up in an idea, and the passion behind an idea and their love of the vision, but without the numbers to back it up you’re getting into very dangerous territory. Although you might be excited by your idea and you might feel like I’m dampening all your excitement and enthusiasm here, I just want you to think more strategically about the money end of things. Every woman I’ve had so far on the feminine wealth TV show will echo the same thing. They have all said the the importance of three main ingredients.

You need passion, you need money, and you need a strong team of people. Now those people might be outsourced offshore staff that are cheap, they might be friends that are just helping you out, or they might be a fully fledged team that you’re paying, but in any case you can’t do everything by yourself, and these are the ingredients that you need for success. I would urge you to think, if you don’t have these things yet, maybe it’s worthwhile spending another year or two getting these things in place and getting structure and strategy in place before you launch, so that you can guarantee your success.

I hope those are like I said, some really key points and thing that are gonna get you on the path to success before your start, or if you’re in the middle of things right now maybe you need to take a step back. Maybe you need to pause things for a month and really think about how you’re gonna get these things in place.

That’s it for this week, next week I have a very interesting lady on the show next week, Cecilia Robinson, who is the Group CEO of a company called My Food Bag, and what I loved about this company is I had actually thought of this idea myself a few years ago, so I was so keen to get her on the show and listen to how she launched it. This woman is only 29, she’s 29 years old and she is already killing it, but like she said herself she wasn’t an overnight success. Tune in next week and I’ll give you some key takeouts into how she actually got My Food Bag going.

Remember also if you love the show and if you’re finding value in it, please let me know in the comments below, wherever you’re looking at it. You can comment over on energisewealth.com, under the wealth unplugged podcast area. You can also leave a rating and a review over on iTunes if you’re listening there and that really helps to build the show and get it out to more people, so I would love and be so grateful if you would do that for me and for the team who put this show together. Until next week, have a great week and I’ll see you then.

Speaker 1: Thanks for tuning in, come join us on energisewealth.com to continue the conversation, get your free video training seven steps to energized wealth, and watch the video interviews that were the inspiration behind this episode.