Carol - every one of your posts offers up such a huge amount of value. If you do business anything like you post on a forum, I can see why you and your products are so successful.
How did you get through this constant advice towards the slowlane? How did you keep motivating yourself not tolisten to those around you and quit going for your dreams, despite the obvious risks and your (at the time) very recent experiences of failure?
G'day
@Laughingman21 ,
Thank you! That's fabulous feedback.
What you read is me. I talk to everyone like this. When my customers ring - which they don't do as often as I'd like : online shopping is so seductive - we have very long conversations about what's happening in their world. We trade stories. Their experiences. My experiences. I look at situations not as problems. But as opportunities to offer solutions.
A customer who always ordered online rang recently to place an order. I asked her how she was. She blurted out that her husband had died not so long ago. We chatted for an hour. About how confronting it is to lose someone suddenly. Who she depended on. And the problems she had to overcome. Especially as she also lived on a rural property. We discussed all the things that can go wrong. Water pumps stop working. Blocked gutters need to be kept clean because they're the source of water that goes into the tanks.
Because of all the people I talk to, I'm able to put myself in their shoes. And discuss their problems in a way that they know I understand what they're talking about.
When she hung up she paid me the best compliment ever. She said she rang to order a cover. And ended the call discovering she found a friend who she could talk to.
That's all most people want. Someone who will listen to them. And who can feel their pain.
To your question about the constant advice to stay in the slow lane.
How did we get through it?
With difficulty.
Our decision to leave Sydney and move to the bush was two pronged. First. It truly was the only place we could afford to live.
Second. Victor needed to get away from the fear his parents wanted to envelop him with.
As a business couple, Victor and I had a very high profile in the Sydney business community. I was on 3 boards of directors. Victor was the dream architect all developers loved. We had a gorgeous terrace house in the trendy inner city suburb of Balmain. Before the building industry came crashing down on top of us, life was good.
Victor's parents personal pain at our loss was palpable.
Especially as his father was Australia's leading coal mining engineer in coal preparation plants. He was an industry giant at the time. Extremely well respected for his knowledge and skills. Not only in Australia. But overseas as well.
His parents were very wealthy. And they intuitively knew how big and devastating our loss was. As parents, they wanted to wrap us in cotton wool. To protect us from any further hurt.
They had a house in the country which they offered to us to live in. Free. But I instinctively knew this would be a bad decision.
We relocated to a totally different area. In the opposite direction. A four hour drive between them and us was enough of a barrier for them to not constantly be on our doorstep.
But then there's the telephone. The nightly calls from his worried mother became a nuisance that we just had to live with. She so wanted Victor to find a job.
Fortunately, Victor wasn't influenced by his parents. He knew our vision. Which wasn't much of a vision. Reinvent ourselves so that we could earn an income. And start getting out of debt. Without succumbing to getting a job. That was about as detailed as the vision was.
To be truthful, if Victor had been swayed by his parents, we wouldn't be together now. It would have been a wedge driven between us.
But the opposite happened. This catastrophe joined us at the hip. And although we disagreed on many things. We never disagreed about how united we were. And that's how we resolved all our problems. Compromise comes in many guises.
25 years later we are still united at the hip. And still disagree about many things. We live and work together 24 hours a day! But what unites us is far deeper than what we disagree about. And we have a shared history of experiences that few other couples possess.
The constant flak and disapproval about our low brow product amongst people in general - who irons? all covers are rubbish! - did affect us. And surprised us.
Whenever the flak became too intense, I always told Victor that the people we should be listening to are our customers. The people who put their money on the table. Not the people who would never use our product. And who had no idea of what it was like to start a business from scratch.
This was the era of the dot com boom. Sexy and high tech was in. Functional and low tech was not.
And guess who's still in business when they're not!
You do need to have a spine of steel when enduring such criticism. And disparagement. And an enormous, unshakeable, belief that this is what you want to do. And that your product choice is spot on.
Every time we were tempted to throw in the towel, we'd say. OK. Now what do we do next? Nothing materialised. And as time went on. It became more difficult to toss away all the hard work we were putting into our customer service. And the friendships we were developing with our customers. And the six other products we were developing because customers wanted more of our quality and Victor's intuitive designs.
When the Sydney Morning Herald wrote an article about us in 2002 in their lifestyle magazine, Domain. When we sold $25K worth of product as a result of that article that lasted 24 hours. But was kept by people for months. It was our breakthrough moment.
All our friends saw it. Victor's family and their friends saw it. And suddenly we weren't so low brow, down market. We had butlers from big houses order. A few Sirs and Dames. Australia's richest woman at the time placed an order. A smattering of celebrities. Solicitors and barristers. Throw in a 5 star hotel. This magazine was high brow. And these people all lived in salubrious suburbs.
The journalist who wrote the article was one of the few journalists we came across who ironed. He agreed to receive a cover from us to test drive. Which he did. He also gave it to a few friends to test drive.
What did the article say? It was a full page. Complete with photos of the product. But the killer words were: "This is beyond a doubt the Rolls Royce of ironing board covers".
8 years after we started wandering in the wilderness, we were an overnight success!
How many journalists turned us down when we asked them to write a story about our cover? Over a hundred. We were like JK Rowling getting turned down by every book publisher. Except the last one.
Tenacity. Persistence. Self belief. A united front between you and your significant other. They go a long way towards overcoming the obstacles. Not everyone has those traits. But those of us who do are the fortunate ones who get to travel in the fast lane.
Thank you for asking! ~Carol❤
