Creating a Successful Business that Aligns with Your Values with Kellie Wilkie

In terms of how she's built her business, her vision, how she's hung onto her boundaries and her values, and the way in which she's structured her business to both facilitate the life that she lives and the business that she's building is a true example of business and life by design. please enjoy this episode as I chat to understand a little bit more about Kelly, her business, where it started, where it's going, and how she's juggled all the things, enjoy.

Now there are some business women that you meet that blow your way, and my guest today is one of those Kellie Wilkey. I had the pleasure of meeting Kellie for the very first time. Actually towards the end of last year. We were both, uh, speakers at an event we'd been asked to speak at this event.

You know when you go into the room sometime and you gravitate to someone, and then you start chatting and the more you're chatting, you've got more questions, and the more questions you have, the deeper the answers go, and you just, you almost want a notebook to write down those lessons. This was my conversation with Kellie. Any of you that follow my blogs, my newsletters, follow me on LinkedIn. You might as we talk today, go, oh, that's the person she was talking about.

and I reached out to Kellie and I went, please come on. I wanna have a conversation with you about what it means to be a woman in business. I really wanna share with our audience some of the stuff that you've learned. some of the things that you might do differently in hindsight, some of those lessons, et cetera, because as more and more women are entering into entrepreneurial landscapes doing their own thing, which is awesome, at the same time, there is so much that we need to learn.

Now, to give you a little bit of background, Kellie's been running our own business for around 25 years, and it's not little, it's not small fry. We're talking employees of 24, I think 25 people. she's also a mom of twin boys. the conversation that we started on was, understanding her, work that she did with the Australian rowing team.

Apparently, you know, she shared with me offline that this was 10 years of working with the Australian Australian Rowing team, and she still finds time to give back, to show up, to share, to turn up. So thank you, Kellie. Welcome. Thank you for letting me. Just put you on the hot seats. it's such a pleasure to have you here.

And so we've got various different practitioners within the practice. So I'm a sports and exercise physiotherapist and, particularly have a special interest in the athlete, spine. So particularly low back pain. And we've got five sports physiotherapists. We have musculoskeletal physiotherapists, we have hand physiotherapists, and we do, we have a bracing and casting service too. So we're a one stop shop. We have one clinic location.

a lot of, uh, medical practices these days spread themselves around different suburbs, but what we try and be is a, a gold standard service where people will travel to see us and be able to, access all of their needs, you know, under the one roof. And what does make this business really different is that we see people over much longer than average treatment times.

So we'll see a new patient over an hour, and we'll see a reassessment over half an hour, which is fairly unheard of in the medical world, and there's a reason for that. Number one, we can provide gold. Standard, service to our patients when we're servicing them in that way. But also what it means is our physiotherapists and our exercise physiologists have time to do their paperwork, their communication with referrers, everything within work hours so that they're not taking that home.

This practice is very much set up to be able to look after staff health and happiness first and foremost. That's why I set it up for my, myself in the first place. And, if we can all be happy and healthy and functioning as a team that's continually curious and continually trying to help each other be better, then you're in this lovely flourishing environment where you enjoy coming to work.

You are not overworked, you don't work on weekends, and you don't work late at night, and therefore you can provide the best services to patients. So it's quite a unique. Healthcare facility. But um, yeah, it's something that I'm really proud of that's been, yeah, next year in April it will be 25 years of business, which, um, as we know, It's no mean feat to start it in a small business by yourself and get to that point. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Can you tell me a little bit more, if you can remember when you first started and you were really clear about what you wanted and what you didn't want any challenges along the way, like even the, that concept of we do it for an hour, not half an hour. So what I'm hearing is this constant challenging norm and rethinking about it and even going, I don't care. I'm gonna do it in my way. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.

I did really well. I induced the whole university, so loved what I was doing. Spent lots of time studying. Came back to my first job and I got a job in private practice. It's quite hard to get a job in private practice as a new grad, but I had done well and I went into a practice that was very high turnover and I burnt out within about 18 months.

So seeing lots of people all day, every day, having patients pushed into your lunch hour, staying back late at night, taking mountains of paperwork home after 18 months. I just went, yeah, actually that's not for me. Like if this is physio, I love studying it, but it's actually not for me. And I gave up the profession altogether, so I was never gonna be a physio again.

And my dad was actually running a business in the construction industry at the time, and his business was growing and he wanted a pa and he said, well, why don't you come and work with me? and I really didn't go and work for him to learn how to run a business, but that's inadvertently when I look back. You know, that's what I did.

I was actually in a really great, well-functioning business, learning how to run a business, and really it was just a time filler until I decided whether I wanted to go back to physiotherapy. What happened over that time is, um, I was a competitive swimmer and my swimming club had said, why don't you actually just come down and, see a couple of swimmers a few times a week and see if you still like it.

And so I did and I went, you know, maybe this could be done differently if I had more time to be able to see someone, and to be able to apply my knowledge and be able to look at not just, what's in front of me, but all the contributing factors. The health and wellbeing of the person in front of me and had time to really drill down into helping them perform, not just helping them get better from injury. maybe I might like this a bit better.

And so I actually rang every physiotherapy practice in Hobart saying, would you employ me to see people over longer treatment time even pay me less? I just wanna see if I still want to do this, and no one would employ me. So that's why I started my own business. And so I found a little room in the Hobart CBD that was just me and a receptionist, and I thought I was the only person in the world that wanted to run physio and medicine like that.

And, um, my dad helped me put together a business plan to say, you still actually have to make money doing this, so if you are gonna see people over a longer time, you need to charge more for it. I'm like, I don't know anything. I'm a new graduate. And fortuitously, I actually had a really experienced physio ring up and say, I've always wanted to work like that. Give me a job, and I was like, I know nothing. You don't wanna come and work with me? He said, no, no. I will mentor you.

To be a great physio if you give me a job where I can be a great physio. And so within a couple of months of starting my business, I had an experienced physio that moved in with me. And since then, more and more it was never meant to be a massive business, but since then, more and more people have wanted to work in the same way. I've had a business partner come and go around when I had children 18 years ago.

Go. and I've also got a current business partner that's been with me for the last 10 years. And every single time there's those transitions have happened to have people buy in and out of the business. I've made sure that I've got a water tight shareholders agreement that basically says these are the things that can't change 'cause these are why I set up my business. 'cause it would be very easy to see more people per hour put. Profit before people, not provide great services.

And yes, your business needs to be profitable and yes, you can still run a profitable business if you set it up in the right way, but it's very, very easy for these things to change over time if you don't stay the course and make sure that you stay really true to. The business values that you first set the business up with. So that's been challenging. So you've hit the nail on the head there, Janine.

It's really challenging because it's really easy for those things to morph and get out of hand really, really easily. But then all you end up doing is. Burning out your staff, having higher staff turnover, retraining costs so much money. You are better off to look after your fabulous people and grow as a team together.

and yeah, the, building blocks for that are making sure that you look after your staff as well as you possibly can so that they can provide great services to patients just like you have.

But it actually doesn't matter sometimes that it's more you identify that something had to change and you were going to do it and maybe the, the naivety. From a business perspective is actually what enabled that idea to get planted and grow. I think all of us can take, particularly in this current climate that we're in right now, you know, there is so much opportunity, I think, and it's having that curiosity to identify that opportunity and. We might not know the answers, but just, go for it.

I call it like experimentation. I'm all about experimentation then, the piece about seeking, like having a mentor. we can get mentors, but it's that willingness to listen. It's that willingness to learn and then you know, your peace on your passion around people before profit. You were almost before your time. Like if you think about where conversations about businesses are going now, 25 years ago, I can't imagine many businesses were talking people before profit.

And yet it's gonna be interesting isn't it, over the next few years 'cause it sort of went profit, people before profit. And now we'll see what happens in the back of what's going on economically and the boundaries you put around that. and congratulations. Congratulations for what you've achieved. As you said, 25 years. There's so many businesses that fail, in such a short time, but you are here and you're not only here.

You're doing the thing that you love according to your values, and it's growing and continuing to grow. what do you think when you reflect on those 25 years, what have you learned about yourself, Kellie?

so I had access to a really good accountant at that stage as well. And what we did, my dad as my business mentor and myself and my accountant, is we just sat down really regularly and we made sure that we discussed all elements of the business. They made sure I was paying myself first. I wasn't. making $20,000 and putting it all back into my business, they made sure I was paying myself first. They made sure I had money for growth. They made sure I knew where I was going.

They made sure I had a plan. But every single time they would sit down and they would go, you know, you could be making more money if you do it the other way. And I was like, guess I could, but I saved money because I haven't got a high turnover in. Staff. And so it is really easy to see an hourly rate and go, you could see three people an hour and you could make more money. Yes, we charge more for longer treatment times, but it's, you want people to access your service as well.

You're actually really making sure you've got a bit of staff downtime built into that. And, um, they would remind me, but then they would also congratulate me for sticking to my guns, knowing what my values were and how I wasn't actually gonna change it. And so in terms of. Profit in the business, it probably grew a lot slower than other businesses might, if that makes sense.

But it also gave me a chance to make sure the business wasn't growing too quickly in terms of putting administrative procedures in place. making sure whenever a problem came up, you know. First time someone's going on maternity leave, how do I manage that? What does that look like? How can I make sure they're looked after? How can I make sure I'm looked after? How can I make sure my client's looked after?

I better write a policy for that, so I know how to do that next time, once I've tested it, I better change that. So when you start your own business, you know you are not in a big corporate world with a whole heap of policies and procedures behind you. You have none of them. Um, but actually one of the things that my dad taught me is make sure you do all of those things as you go so that you've got things to lean back on.

And then when you have enough profit to employ someone in a management position, you've already got the script for how you want it to run. that's allowed me to have a lot more freedom to be able to, since I've had children only be in my business three days a week. And be at home two days a week, probably doing a whole heap of business in the background when they're at school or childcare or, or whatever. But also when they were little, have more time with them at home.

Um, it's allowed me when my children were in primary school to travel with the Australian Rowing team for 10 years because I had, I. Policies and procedures set up in the background where everyone would be able to go to those things first before being on the phone and asking me, and me trying to troubleshoot things from, you know, Europe when you were there for six to eight weeks of the year.

So, I had great business mentors, but they really respected my values and the way that I wanted to set things up. what I learned about myself is they were unwavering. I was sort of lucky that I learned a lesson about burnout really early in my professional career because I was never gonna go back there. 'cause I knew what it felt like and I knew I didn't want to be in that space. that sort of, I. Held my values too, if that makes sense.

And, um, and certainly, Yeah. they come from the way I was, brought up, the service that I wanna provide, all of those sorts of things. I'm certainly not saying that, you know, I made silly decisions where my business wasn't profitable. You just making decisions where maybe you were slightly less profitable in some ways and you gained efficiencies in other ways over time. And having. Sort of the broad ability to have a look at all of that rather than just what's here and now is sometimes hard.

You've gotta step out of what you're doing and to be able to look at the bigger picture, to figure out why you're making these decisions and be able to justify 'em all the time.

but the reality is that for many of us, it's about actually working out what is the right move at the right time that's going to enable that bit of growth. And the other piece that you talked about was the, the patience around. Actually, I don't necessarily want to make that decision because we're not ready for that next period of growth, which is the business smarts.

Right. And I see, both sides of the spectrum in other people where they're moving so quickly that all those foundations and the policies, et cetera, aren't happening and their businesses fall apart. And then on the other side, the fear, the procrastination that stops 'em from doing it. But, but this self-awareness that you've got, Kellie of.

those decisions that you made, and I've got a very good friend of mine, Chris Power, she talks about these inflection points in your business where at every single point it feels to me like you've been very considered in your decision making. I just wanna go back as well, 'cause we, as we tend to do as moms, right? we jump over the fact that you've been in business for 25 years, you've got twin boys. How old are you boys?

I was, I was reflecting, you talked about burnout and I was going, oh my God, if I look back, there was definitely a moment in time where I must have been on the brink of juggling. I had three children under seven at the time, and it was the start of my business. I was like, I actually dunno how I got through that. So you had team and clients that were relying on.

So before I became pregnant, I was having these little mini trips away all the time, and recognizing that the business needed to run really, really well without me there. And so we needed policies around everything that we did from opening up the business. And I've read, you know, books about franchises that had, you know, they have policies right down to exactly what you do when you first walk in the door.

The first person walks in the door of the business each day, and it seems really pedantic, but actually.

If everyone follows the same procedure, whether you're, you know, one admin staff or another that comes in in the morning and everything is done and your business is presented in a really, great way, it gives you the confidence that when you go away, that your business is being, it's reflecting your values and your service in the way that you want it to, otherwise it's too stressful to go away. So that's probably the first part of it.

the second part of it is that I knew I wanted to become a sports physiotherapist, when I gave up. Swimming competitively. And I had this dream that I wanted to go to the Olympic Games and I didn't really realize how hard it was to get there. Not many females, um, not many physiotherapists get to go to the Olympic games. so I was really on this sports journey and wanted to become a sports physiotherapist to be able to give myself an opportunity to do that at some stage.

And so I started my Master of Sports Physiotherapy while I was. in the infancy of my bi of that business. So I was like six years down the track from starting the business of course. so I was studying as well as traveling with swimming, but had, you know, no children at that time. And I thought, you know what, if I have a baby over this period of time, I'm gonna be at home a lot and I'm gonna be able to finish off my sports masters.

Like, you know, that's how naive you are before you have a child. Right. And then I got pregnant with twins. Now, you know, we took those twins to Melbourne as nine months old for a two week lecture block and, you know, crazy, crazy time. But, I had a husband that also ran a business. Okay. So he also had lots of challenges with having, you know, twins come into his life. But the one thing running a business affords you is flexibility.

If you have a business that's set up really, really well with the right people around you, you have flexibility. So over that time of being pregnant and finishing off my masters, Jason worked a little bit less to allow me to be able to get to that point. I wanted to spend time and obviously you, you have to spend more time with your children once you have them because you are the person that can feed them. And so I wanted more time to myself. after that period.

And, and he worked more at that time. So we've always had the thought process that if you're both working flat out all the time, that's when things are gonna fall apart. So when one of you needs more support, the other works less. And so when my boys were two is when I was asked to travel with rowing for the first time. And, um, I can hear probably lots of you going, Oh. my God, like, how do you actually go away once you've got, you know, two, two year olds, if that makes sense.

And, um, I had been working with rowers and swimmers in Hobart. I was thinking I'd just start traveling with swimming again when the boys got a bit older. But rowing came and said, okay, we've got this, this trip coming up. It's Junior World Championships and non Olympic World Championships. So the senior boats don't go to world championships in 2008 in the, in the Beijing Olympic year. It's a two and a half week trip to reckon you can do it. My first thought was.

How can I do that with two, two year olds? And I came home and spoke to my husband. He was like, if you don't say yes, they won't ask you again. Like, is this your opportunity? You know, there's more elite rowers and swimmers in Hobart. Is this your opportunity to go into Olympic based sport? And I was like, Yeah, probably is it. He is like, well there's never a great time for it, so I'm gonna wind my hours back. So he put more management in place in his business and he worked.

25 hours a week in his business. over the period that I started working with Australian Rowing and running my own business, when I'd go away, he'd drop his hours down to 15 hours a week, and do a lot of management from home. And, yeah, so essentially in 2008, I, traveled every year with Rowing Australia to Europe, and then to an international competition, starting with their junior teams and under 23 teams and senior teams. Yeah. I was.

Fortunate enough to be asked to go to the London Olympic Games with the Australian Rowing team, which was amazing. then after that, I was asked to be the lead physio for Australian rowing for the whole Rio Olympiad. So traveling a lot around Australia, looking after our best rowers, making sure our physios placed right around Australia. Were looking after our rowers really well, and, my husband went well while this is here. This is great. Really, really happy to support you.

but there needs to be an end point. We can't do this forever. And so we really went right af after two Olympic games. That's it. I will work less while my kids go through high school and my husband will work more. And so that's how we, we've juggled it that you both can't be going flat out all the time, but also that, you don't want. To remember those years as a child with your mum being away a lot. So we made sure we planned things like every second year.

Jason and the kids came away with me and lived with the Australian Row team. They got to go to two Olympic games. We made sure they had positive experiences to remember, you know, we really saved our pennies to be able to make sure that they didn't remember mum being. Away they remember these amazing experiences that they wouldn't have got otherwise. So, we really had, a challenging period of time over that time to balance what was going on with all of us.

But you just have to act as a team, right. And, um, make sure that you can pull it off together and, I'm working a bit less, my husband's working more, that's affording me great flexibility to see my kids, you know, through a later, later stage of high school into the university studies, which has been an absolute pleasure.

It doesn't happen without effort. What did you learn, from being at the Olympics?

When you're dealing with people that are striving to be on the Olympic team or that get onto the Olympic team when you're overseas, while they're preparing to do that, they're striving to be the absolute best versions of themselves, both physically and and mentally. And so what you become involved with is not just treating injuries, but actually working with coaches to accelerate human performance.

And so you are constantly making sure that you're communicating in the right way to not, put fear into athletes to be able to give them support, to be able to be appropriate in your role. but also on top of that, you're actually breaking down strengths and weaknesses physically of the athletes that you are working with.

Or a combined effect, say maybe if you're out on the water with a rowing coach and looking how they can make that boat go faster, and you are looking at the very small gains in human performance now, You look at something like that and go, that's fabulous. You know, I've helped people row backwards as fast as they possibly can. And is that as important as helping someone to get off the toilet and be able to be independent in their life, in their home?

Nowhere near as important, but those lessons that you learn about human performance and how to get the best out of human performance from a strength point of view, a flexibility point of view, a movement control point of view, they are. Really squishing, all of your knowledge out of you making you perform at the absolute best that you possibly can, making you think at this much higher level all the time about how can we do better than the rest of the world?

How can we, you know, it's this curiosity constantly of pushing you to be the best version of Yourself, you can be as a practitioner in performance health, that you bring all of those learnings back to your environment to, number one, educate all of the other people that work with you. But then number two, for your everyday patients to benefit from, because you know, the Olympic Games is the pinnacle in terms of human performance.

But actually all of those learnings I can apply to every single person that works through my clinic do probably actually have a greater impact in their life.

and obviously I think you see it that firsthand when it comes to athletes because it's not just you as the physio that's contributing to that performance, but there's other parts of that team. And equally there's the athlete themselves. And I'd love you to share the story, which literally just I wrote about on LinkedIn. Around one of those female athletes that you were looking after and, the awareness that she had in terms of how to get to that next level.

And from your perspective, I'm curious about what you took out of that, that you take into everyday life.

So for her, she hadn't achieved that in London. She wanted to achieve that in Rio. And so she had committed to rowing the single skull, um, for four years to be able to try and get a gold medal at the Rio Olympic game. She was based in Canberra and I was based in Hobart, but I would go into Canberra for training camps. And I came in for training camp one day and I sat down with her and we'd been talking about some back pain that she'd had and how we were gonna manage that.

She said, right when you are working with the Men's Going Program, and they're mainly based in Hobart, before we would go overseas, um, you're doing this trunk conditioning program with them and, you're doing, all of this work to make their abdominals as strong as they possibly can. She said, do you realize that my race is longer than their race? So they're in a quad. They've got four people rowing two kilometers.

I'm in a single, I've got one person rowing two kilometers, and I'm a female that don't have as much muscle mass. So their race is over and done within about 200 strokes, but mine could be 250 or 300 strokes, and so it lasts longer. My trunk and my abdominals need to be stronger. My capacity needs to be bigger. I've already talked to my coach about the fact that I need to train more on the water than what they do. But for you, I need you to make me more physically prepared to be able to do that.

And I hadn't really thought about that before. And she really had thought about exactly what her needs were, to be able to get to where she needed to. Not just from a, when I get back pain, this is what needs to happen, but also this is how I need to perform. And so we put a trunk program together for her, um, that involved some endurance trunk work, some strength trunk work. Worked with her strength and conditioning coach.

Worked with her coach, we had to periodize it into her program so she could do it when she wasn't fatigued, or we didn't want to do her to do it before she went out of the water and fatigued her trunk so that she got back pain when she was on the water. So we put this whole program together with how we were going to stage this, and then I would have to leave and come back to Hobart and she would have physiotherapists in Canberra looking after her.

So we needed to make sure that everyone was on board and everyone understood the why. So they'd keep supporting her to do this. And, Then when we got overseas, she was like, you know, I've done it. Like I'm good. And we had like a lead in to the Rio Olympics for about six weeks with the team. I'm, I'm here, I've got this. She was like, but you know, I can't always apply it in the boat.

And you know, my coach says that we go out on the water and sometimes my trunk doesn't look that strong, but when I'm doing the exercise in the gym, it does. And so we had this sort of just general conversation 'cause you're living with the athletes overseas at this stage. And the men's coach that I'd been working really closely with from Tasmania said, well.

Why don't, whenever one of my rowers has got a niggly back or, or can't row, rather than us just going and sitting on the rowing curve, why don't you jump in elbow. We know how to use it. We do it from the moment we push off the pontoon. And so that's what we did when we were overseas. Whenever they had someone that had, you know, a cold and couldn't do a session or had a niggly back and couldn't do a session, she would jump in.

And it was pretty unheard of for the girls to jump in with the boys because they're producing so much power. But she learned how to apply that force, which was really, really lovely. And there's so many beautiful things that come out of that aren't there about not just physiotherapy and human performance, but team the learning for me was how to get her to a point where she could win a gold medal and she did in Rio, which was amazing. And it was really lovely to see that journey.

But the other part for me was when I'm at home in my business, I am the leader of that business. When I was working with, um, Australia's best rowers and the Australian rowing team, I wasn't the leader in that domain. So it was making sure that you knew how to be a really good team member in that environment. And not overstepping your mark. Mark, even though you've got leadership.

Skills, leaning into them occasionally, but also trying to do that would've been disruptive because there was already a plan. So knowing your role in team, knowing when asked to push a little bit harder, but also when, there is team management there already and you might have the skills to be able to contribute there to go no. my place in team is here and this is what I need to do and this is what, how I need to be the best version of myself and my place in team.

that's actually pretty hard when you've got great leadership ability. But you know, what I say to the people that work with me at the moment is not everyone can be a leader at the same time. Like we all have to be a cohesive team. And sometimes I drop back into a team role. Other times I'm more in a leadership role. But over there I really needed to know where my place was. Otherwise I could have been really disruptive, if that makes sense.

and they have guided every decision that you've made, right down to actually then setting up the head stuff, the policies and the procedures to enable that vision to come to life. and as a result of that, that's then unlocked more opportunity for your business. And this last piece that I've you know, what I take out from what you've said.

is understanding your role, understanding your role, what is needed at that moment in time, and understanding that your role doesn't operate in silo, but actually you are always part of a team and learning how to operate within that team and around that team and lean into that team. and overarching all of this is, this taking ownership of your dreams? which Kim did, the athletes do as you shared at the Olympics.

But also you've done this and you're doing it for both your clients, your customers, and also your team. as we wrap up, Kellie. ' cause I'm sure there's people listening to this that are either where you were a few years ago or they've got dreams within their business.

They may even be, you know, so part of my work is I see so many women that have created something and as opposed to it bringing them the very why that they set out, it's almost become shackles around their ankles or it's negatively impacting their lifestyle. what would be some of your key messages to those? People that may be listening, going, yeah, I've set off with that. I've got the vision and dah la la but I feel constrained. cause this is what's inspiring about your story.

You've got a business, it's established, it's growing. You've fulfilled this dream of being part of the Olympic team. You're a mom. This beautiful flexibility that you have. And I agree with you totally in terms of. Sometimes we can't all be on at the same speed all the time. what would you say to anyone listening, going, yes, I want, how, what, what would be your, your message to them?

And so I engaged the services of a branding company and I met this wonderful woman called Heather Rose, who's also a Tasmanian author, and she had a branding company at the time, and she wanted to learn about my values, my beliefs, my journey, what my business needed was all about before she helped me. Rebrand my business and she had a marketing business at the time and that's where the name Body System came from. So, you know, that was a creation of, of her marketing business at the time.

But she listened to my story and she said, gosh, you've got so much going on. She said, can I give you a bit of advice? And because this was just, you know, when I was having children and when I. Studying and I had so many different things going on and she said, I've got lots of things going on. I'm an author, I've got a company, I'm a mom. She said, if I can give you one bit of advice, this is a bit of advice that I would give you. You can only do one of those elements.

Well, at the time she said, what I like to think of is putting a literal hat on. When I'm sitting at work in my marketing business, I'm not, oh my God, I've had a good idea of my novel and writing it over there. I put my business hat on and I'm in business, and I'm there for all the people in my business. I'm not closing my door and trying to do other work. I am there for that, and then when I get home, I take my business hat off.

I put my mom hat on, and if you answer that business phone call with your mom hat on, you will not be the best version of yourself and your kids will go psycho in the background. We all know that as soon as you put your, you know, pick up the telephone when your children are young and you don't have a good conversation anyway, so put your mom hat on when you go in the door.

And then when you're doing your sports related stuff on, try and have your sports hat on and not be running your business at the same time. And that was some advice that I got back in, 2009. So eight years into running my business and when I had toddlers as children it was a fabulous piece of advice. Heather actually went on to nominate me for a young Tasmanian, Telstra Businesswoman Award. So we got to know each other really well through that awards process, which was really fabulous.

And that's actually when I got invited, to become a member of Women of the Women's Chiefs Association. That, we have met through, but. That bit of advice. I still hold really dear to me that you can only do one thing well at a time. And when you try to juggle three at once, you'll never make the right decisions.

And so now I do things like I walk to work, so I've got time between I. Home and work to be able to turn the work brain off, make the couple of phone calls on my way home before I walk through the door and everyone's there waiting for you and, and wanting to debrief their day. And so yeah, trying to wear one hat as a time as a female business owner, whether that's mom or business or whatever else you've got going on in your life. And. Often we've got business but also a profession.

That's why we started our business in the first place. So there's an element of working in the business and on the business. I try and do one of those things at the time and do it really, really well. That's one of the rules that I've stuck to and, and really has resonated well with me for many, many years. 'cause I still talk about it now. And, um, yeah, it was a lesson I learned, but really, really early on in running my own business.

And I, and I think it really has made a massive impact on how I've been able to. Achieve some success in lots of different areas.

And I just wanna thank you for allowing me to reach out, uh, without really understanding what I wanted to talk about. You're like, yeah, sure. And just knowing that there's so many gems of fabulousness in here that are going to help. So many people. your work is important and, uh, people can find you on LinkedIn. I will put your details in there for anyone that's interested. Make sure to check out Kellie's details in the show notes it's so been so fabulous to have you, Kellie.

Thanks for joining us.