You're listening to a Mother with Me podcast.
Hello, and welcome to biz your work life Sorted. I'm m Vernon, and today we're tackling the question that's probably popped into your head during every terrible meeting you've sat through. Should I just quit and start my own thing? Look, whether you're dreaming of launching the next big tech startup, I'm good for you, or if you're perfectly happy building your career in a company, and honestly both are completely valid,
then this episode is for you. There's so much pressure these days to be entrepreneurial, and sometimes we forget to ask ourselves if that is actually what we want today. Our career coaches, Michelle Battersby and Soph Hurst break down the real talk about both parts and when I say real, I actually mean real. Michelle is an entrepreneur who launched Bumble in Australia and now runs her own startup, and soph took the lead from Google to launch a coaching
program for people in their earthly career era. So they both worked in some of the biggest companies in the world and now they run their own businesses. So they've literally lived both sides of this story. Plus As a little extra bonus for you, Michelle is going to share three practical steps to avoid accidentally burning through your life savings guilty. Here are your big questions and concerns.
Have this amazing business idea, but everyone keeps telling me I need more corporate experience first. How much experience is enough before you can actually back yourself.
Everyone talks about finding the right co founder, but how do you actually know if someone's right?
Like?
Do you go of your gut or is there some kind of friendship to business partner formula?
I see all these perfect startup stories on TikTok, but no one talks about the missing middle part. How do you actually go from thinking of an idea to starting the actual business without losing your mind?
The whole cost of living thing actually terrifies me. I want to start my own business, but I can barely afford rent to be people actually make that leap without family money backing them.
It's something a lot of us dream about, you know, quitting our job and starting a business, And there's so much social pressure online to be entrepreneurial and breakaway from the nine to five. But is working for yourself for you? Michelle and I both currently own our own businesses, but before that we worked at companies. So Google PwC City Bumble.
In today's episode, we're going to break down the hard truth of both situations so you can make smarta decisions for your career, and Michelle's going to give you three practical steps that are going to stop you wasting your life savings. Michelle, you've worked for some pretty awesome companies and now you work for yourself, So which is better.
I think working at a company is better, particularly at the start of your career. So I think if you've landed a job at an organization where you believe in the mission, you love the product, and you feel like you have autonomy in your role that is just chef's kiss, that can feel really amazing, and it can also set you up with some really incredible skills that you can then transition into entrepreneurship if you do choose to go
down that route later. But I also think it's worth noting that entrepreneurship isn't for everyone, and you don't have to go and start a business, and working at a company can serve you amazingly throughout your whole career. But I do think there is a definite value there if you work for a company first.
There's so many different factors at play here, and I think what this episode's going to do today is help people answer that question. Is working for yourself for you? And then if it is, how do you go into it? Michelle,
I'm actually pretty surprised that you said that. You said it is better to work for a company at the start of your career, and I feel like it's a bit of a business hot take, because you know, it's counter to the narrative that you see online right now, which is all this stuff around like being a baby CEO, all these inspressional career stories of entrepreneurs, and it feels like everyone has a Shopify's store.
There's also a lot.
Of anti corporate, anti company talk. Sometimes it feels like, am I lame to work at a company?
Explain yourself. Yeah.
I see those same narratives online and I don't agree with them.
In my experience.
There are three epic reasons to work for a company first, and I think the first one is really about flipping that narrative on its head, like you are not a slave because you work for the man. You know, all this stuff you see online that you know, it's almost less than it's not as fulfilling if you work for someone else.
I don't agree with that.
There are so many incredible benefits to working for someone else, and flip that narrative and take from your employer. You're working in these big companies.
With processors, policies.
In place, and money to help you develop your skills. Do the course, seek exec coaching, travel shadow people. Take as much knowledge as you can from that environment and build yourself on paper and you can then take that to the next company and propel yourself forward, or you can take it into entrepreneurship. So that's I think the first benefit for working for an organization is just how much you can acquire new skills and gain exposure to
certain things. The second benefit is it's stable. It's financially stable employment. It also helps you build a network. Your network will pay dividends if you do go on to start your own business. It'll also help you if you want to progress in a corporate environment. But an example of how my network benefited me once I started my own company was my app was about to launch and three days from launch, it was rejected by Apple in
the app Store for a way. We'd applied a certain piece of technology and all of our creators were on it, ready to use it. All of our media, we'd done, all our interviews, all of our press was about to
go live and we were panicking. But we had someone on our cap table, so someone who'd invested in us that had an app that made a hell of a lot of money for Apple, and we tapped that person on the shoulder, someone from our network, and they were able to contact Apple, which is very hard to do if you've got a baby app, and they were able.
To get that up approved for us.
So building a network will help you loads if you do go on to start your own company.
So you feel like if you were straight out of UNI trying to do this, you wouldn't have had that same connection.
Definitely not.
And your network will help you in so many other ways, like raising capital, hiring people.
I think something people don't.
Realize is it's very hard to hire people when you start company because they don't know that your idea is going to work. They don't know that your money's not going to run out. They might not be willing to take a smaller salary and sacrifice where they're at for your dream. So most of your first hires are people that already trust and know you, people that you have to pull from your network. You can't just post a job at and get all these people applying to this
unknown company. So it also can help you and in that regard as well actually build a team. The third thing that I think is really beneficial is if you start your own company, you also automatically become a leader.
And not everyone has natural leadership capabilities. So being in an organization, you're exposed to managers, to leaders, to execs, to people with decades and decades more experienced than you, and you will be exposed to good leaders and bad leaders, and you'll know how it feels to be an employee, and that is very very important because if you've had a bad manager, you know how shit that feels, and
you never want to make someone feel that. So it helps you grow into the kind of leader that you want to be, to have experienced both good and bad. I actually thought of another thing that doesn't fit into my three. But you also get to make mistakes and it's not at your expense, it's on someone else's dime, and that is a freedom that you do not feel when you have your own company.
So those are all my pros.
As someone who now owns a business, and I'm just bleeding money from software mistakes that I didn't need to buy. Make mistakes on someone else's money.
Use it as a crash course if you are really entrepreneurial, see how many projects you can get your hands on and use them as a crash course to starting your own company, Like what projects can you build from the ground up?
Michaele. Those are some pretty good reasons to be an employee, But most Australians still have some kind of desire to start their own business. So I think the numbers around seventy percent, and it's actually higher for gen Z. It's like eighty four percent of gen Z say they want to start their own business. On the Way next, Michelle breaks down exactly what you need to know before you start your own business. We're talking about the transition from
being an employee to owning a business. What do you want our listeners to know and what is the scary shit that no one really talks about.
I think the first thing for anyone to be aware of who's starting to work on a side project is what is in your current employment contract. This may or may not seem obvious, but a lot of employment contracts actually don't allow secondary employment. Or if you come up with an idea whilst you're working at the company, they own that ip and they own that idea. So simple things like using your personal laptop, using your personal email.
If you are starting to dabble in certain things, it's a good idea to make sure you're not pursuing something that's a conflict of interest. If something is a conflict of interest, then that could end up in a pretty big legal kerfuffle for you and potentially lost time and money. I was mentoring someone who had spent a considerable amount of money developing an app, and they'd then gone and told their employer about that app and it was deemed a conflict of interest and they've not been able to
continue to pursue that side hustle. So thinking about where you're at in your career, what your idea is, and being aware of what's in your employment contract is a
good thing to look out for. Secondary to that is the main thing that a founder is going to have to sacrifice, a financial sacrifices and time, So you really want to make sure that you're pursuing something that has legs, and ultimately you want to figure out if it has legs in the fastest, cheapest way possible before you start to sacrifice too much time and money.
I think that is actually where a lot of people get really stuck. So the person who's sitting there thinking like, I have this amazing idea that's going to change the world, or you know, you might have someone who's like, I want to start a business, but I don't even know where to start. How can you actually validate a business idea?
Yeah, I think this is what I want to make super clear, because I'm sure you've seen this as well. So where someone comes to you for mentoring and they've already spent their whole life savings developing an app or some kind of product that they've never actually asked anyone if they want, or maybe they've asked their parents or their friends. That is a good start, but they're not necessarily going to tell you the truth. So three ways you can validate your idea without spending too much money
is surveying. So I recommend using a site called type form generates really easy to use and interpret. It surveys generates a link and you can send it out to anyone. You could start with your friends. You could ask your friends to pass it on to friends of them. You could share it on LinkedIn and ask your immediate network to get around it, and then it kind of spreads from there. You could share it on social media. That is a really good way to test you've actually identified
a problem people have. You want to be asking open ended questions where possible. You want to be asking questions that aren't just going to give you the answers that you want really broad industry insights. You need to just start researching the space. So surveying is a really big one. The second one in that vein is you could actually start to generate content. And again you could keep this really broad. Like you're at the very start right now.
So let's just say you think that all the influencers in the world right now are currently having a huge problem managing their dms. You could literally create a video, post it on TikTok and say to all the creators out there, if you could hire one person in your team to do one thing that would make your life easier, what would it be. That's just going to tell you is dms actually something that's coming up, or have they
got other problems? You know, just little things like that that will start letting you know if you're actually onto something. Then the third one, and I love this is competition is good. Competition indicates that there actually is a need
for the thing you're focusing on. So go and find all the competitors, all the companies that may have come and gone in this realm, and hit up the founders or ex employees or current employees maybe at those companies and talk to them a similar method to the surveying, but you're not going directly to your potential consumers with
this one. You're going to people that have actually worked in it and have lived and breathed it and potentially made mistakes, and you're figuring out, like what are the red flags of this idea, or like is my idea innovative? Or have I iterated enough on what these other people
have done to make this successful? And that last one is actually inspo from my co founder because there's an idea that she had for a platform, which was to build the next gen Facebook events platform, and she found many people had tried to build a product that was going to be the next version of Facebook Events, and she just hit up all these ex founders who had tried and she got on the phone with them, and she very quickly realized that that wasn't an idea that
she wanted to pursue, and she moved on to the next And so this method is tried and tested. The surveying with type form is exactly what I did with my business before I went all in. None of those ideas actually cost a dollar exactly.
It really feels like you're going from this idea is in my head to now I'm actually getting it into the real world and getting real feedback. I think that point around not just your friends, it has to be people you don't know, friends or friends, because I think your friends are probably gonna they're gonna be pretty nice to you about your ideas, so you want to make sure you're validating it with other people.
Another thing that can often come out of this surveying approach as well. Something that happened with me and Sunroom is as I started doing the surveying, consumers were starting to say to me, I'll invest in this, and that for me was the light bulb moment where I thought, oh, okay, I think we might be onto something with this. These people are telling me they'll use it, and they're also telling me they'd give me their own money for me to go and build it.
So, Michelle, you were talking about the survey questions. Do you actually have the survey that you did for Sunroom that you can show people.
I do.
Let's put it in the show notes.
I will share the original Sunroom validation survey. And I also have a TikTok that I posted about another app that we were developing at Sunroom, where I was trying to check the power of parasocial relationship. So I'll show an example of content that I posted to validate if an idea was good or not.
Michelle, I actually wanted to add one more point, which is around this idea of sort of proving or disproving your idea. I went through a similar situation where I was leaving my company job and I wanted to figure out what my business idea was going to be.
I still feel like I.
Just wanted a bit more handholding. I did a really great program, sort of a founder program for women, and I just want to share with you guys. It was called tech Ready Women. It totally fit into my life. I think it was like a six or seven week program, super cost effective. I think it only cost me seven hundred dollars and it's partly subsized by the government. It's run by this amazing woman, Christy Whitehill, so we'll put
that in the show notes as well. I definitely recommend if people just want a bit more support and coaching, that's a program I did. All right, let's close this out with some action points. So Action point number one is you really have to be willing to sacrifice. So what are you going to sacrifice in terms of your pay and in terms of your time. Something that I did was just writing a list down of what those sacrifices would be, so you're going into this with your
eyes fully open. Number two, if you have an idea for a business, you really want to start with validation. So what's the cheapest and fastest way to prove or disprove your idea? And hint, that's probably not building out a full app. Again, Michelle's really helpful steps are going to be in our newsletter. And action point number three. I sort of wanted to end the episode with something that I think summarizes this really well. It's something I heard the other day. So making money is your reward
for putting value into the world. So don't think of it in terms of what do I want to build. Think of it in terms of what people actually need.
So my absolute favorite thing this episode is being assured that it's okay to love your corporate job. I'm sure Mamma Mia is very happy about that. Sometimes we want to go boss, and sometimes we just don't. And for anyone sitting there with the business idea burning a hole in their brain, please please please check out our newsletter. This week, Michelle's broken down exactly how to validate your
idea without spending ascent. I'll chat to you in our buz Inbox episode that drops this Thursday, where we answer all of your career dilemmas and see you next time. Mamma Mia acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast is recorded on