Podcast My Business

Why do you want to have to just regurgitate a bunch of stuff you've learned by rote? 

So what we do instead is we connect our students with global companies small and large, and be involved in live projects that they have a problem in their business they want solve, so to serve a continually talking to business businesses globally to say, what is the problem in your business? 

With the Landing Pad space for entrepeneurs here in Newcastle it's something very practical we can do to try and help de risk, by having a partnership like the landing pad with the University of Newcastle and the amazing facilities that it brings just to make it that little bit easier for somebody thinking of relocating to a regional city to take advantage of the better quality of life that a city like Newcastle is able to bring.

I can speak from personal experience as someone who has moved from Sydney to Newcastle 12 years ago that, you know, one of the reasons why we wanted to relocate was housing affordability, we love the beach, and we wanted to be close to the beach.

But if we wanted to stay in Sydney, we just seem to get further and further away from it. And the commute time. So I would take public transport, and it would be one hour each way from where I lived in suburban Sydney to Alexandria. And I was like is this what my life is going to be like, especially with young children but i had luckily married a Novocastrian.

And it was a somewhat easier transition to a leap of faith to move to Newcastle because I was sort of familiar with the layout, when you Newcastle initiative was up and running at that point, which supported creative entrepreneurs to access space for them to be able to operate from and that really interested me, but otherwise, I had no networks up here. And my background was marketing.

And, you know, while the COVID and hybrid work opportunities or being able to work 100% remotely, has really opened up the doors, I think, to people to consider moving to regional locations like Newcastle. And that's been demonstrated by those figures that Declan just outlined, yes, working from home is fantastic.

We all like being able to be in our pajamas while we take zoom calls or put a load of washing on during during lunch break. But ultimately, at the end of the day, were connected humans that need to be able to be in person with each other. And that's what the landing pad ultimately  ultimately is able to provide is that face to face interactive connection into humans and people that are going through the same journey you are, particularly if you're starting a new business.

Danny Davis from lct.org.au joins us too discuss if the Federal Government delivered on a wellness or wellbeing budget?

Also we look at waste and covering your arse in the NDIS

But by being in control, you can make sure that you're not falling out of the sky on a regular basis. The cybersecurity risks, the innovation disruption risks are just not being met on a on a competent basis at this stage. 

I mean, it's a bit of an accusation, but I think it's true. I think boards from what I have seen firsthand, and from the research that I've done as well, are generally just not engaged with the level of change and risk that is out there. 

Delivery can be arranged not just same day but within a few hours. 

Clients get notifications by text message, and so forth. They can literally watch him on the map driving through the streets to their own home. So it really does give a next level of visibility and in the event that they have a contact issue they can call him they can text the shipper and the shipper can text them and get back as well. Everything's marked for privacy, obviously. But it's a sort of level of service, you just don't get with other carriers

If you're doing that you feel great for your customers, they'll keep coming back when they log online. And notice that you can get delivery of your of your T shirt in a couple of hours, where, you know, a dress for the cocktail dress for the evening. You know, a lot of consumers want that. 

And they'll take that up on the go, when they when they do receive the delivery. The commentary that we get is always really high, we ask  our customers to rate the service. And we're sitting around that sort of 4.9 out of five

Yep, Australians are mad for what we call alternative milks, alt milks. They call it in the trade. And it's growing exponentially. and what's also interesting is each state has a little bit of a bias towards what their particular alt milk is.

Victorians have a strong bias for oat milk. And then New south Welsh people have a bias for almond milk. And then the Queenslanders have a bit of a bias still for soy milk, which was pretty much the original of alt milk that came on to the scene. 

But you go to any cafe now Tony in their entire fridge is full of you've seen it, haven't you like the cardboard boxes of probably They're about six particular different types of milk. So it's pretty hard to manage that kind of inventory. But that's what customers demand now.

So if you had some quick tips for and we'll use that 20 year benchmark because again, it's I think it's what most of us start thinking about. If you're 20 years out, or between, say 20 years and then 10 years, what things do you think people should be doing to prepare for retirement.

Okay, the first thing that we must do, of course, is to make certain that we understand the financial implications, and have we got enough now, those who want to travel around the world every year and drive a Mercedes, they need a lot more than the person who says hey, I'm not interested in that.

So we've got to one understand the financial implication. So that's the first thing.

The second thing is we've got to develop the habits, so that we can successfully fill in 11,000 days. And the problem is this tony too many people in retirement. In fact, the average in Australia is watching screen time. That's telephone, tablets, computers, TV, and the big screen, nine hours a day, nine hours a day, they're watching television.

Now, I do not believe that it is reasonable or even sensible to spend all your life preparing for this time called retirement, saving money, getting ready, so that you can watch nine hours of television, I got to be joking. So that's a big one as well.

Physically fit. We must be physically fit. We know that there's these things like dementia and Alzheimer's and those types of things that are just around the corner for many, hey, but they're not. If you prepare well, in other words, anyone who is physically fit low on alcohol, plenty of exercise, good diet, and so on and so forth.

They do they attract dementia and Alzheimer's less than most people. Now, I'm not saying that you can avoid it, you can't avoid it. But you can delay it. So there are a couple of things that are really critical.

Again, web hosts will offer backups. But I recommend you do your own backups to either to OneDrive, or Google Drive or not on the website server. And the reason for this is that if the website server gets compromised, your backups will get compromised. And also the backups that website hosts offer. Some websites posted, you can get it back, like when you want it on demand others, it's just a disaster recovery backup.

So if the server goes down, they can bring it back up. But you can't just restore your own website. So make sure it's being backed up and make sure it's being backed up to another server just gives you that control and redundancy and safety. If something goes wrong, you can get everything back.

There are plenty of plugins out there that will do backups for you. And you just need to check when you're installing the plugin that it will backup to a third party sites. So one that I recommend is updraft might be Updraft Plus, that's that will do the backups, it will copy them to a third party server for you. They do have a free version, which I think allows you to backup to one destination. The premium version allows you to backup to more services. So you just need to check which one works for you the best.

I think people really underestimate how important exercise is for all around health and weight, around health and well being, but also our mental health and well being. So often people only exercise when they want to lose weight, for example.

But exercise is such an important tool for managing stress and anxiety, increasing our confidence, for helping us feel connected to others. So we've got an online platform. 

So if you're on the country, it can be quite isolating. 

If you can't get access to gyms, or you don't have time to go to the gym, you can join our community and get that sense of sense of community and purpose through your exercise, which is really important.

So having that planning was key. And that's something I think people will start doing more of now. 

And it's something we learned in our growth, growth of our business was to plan better. 

Think of what happens if the, you know, having the contingency plans of what if things go better than we expect?