#47 - Annie Parker: What Are You Waiting For?

In this episode, Sam Bell speaks with Annie Parker about instinct, founders, community and moments when life asks for immediate action.

Annie has spent more than 20 years across international startups, technology and consulting, building ecosystems and accelerator programs in London and Sydney, including Wayra, muru-D, Microsoft for Startups and Tech Central. Now semi-retired in Tasmania, she reflects on moving fast when the signal is clear, backing founders with real commitment, and creating the kinds of communities that help people build what matters.

This conversation moves from high impact international startup scaling to selling up and moving to a farm within 79 days, to Code Club Australia, Techfugees Australia, HER, creative thinking, trusting great people and learning how to tread more lightly on the land.

This episode explores:

• Life-changing decisions and the question “what are you waiting for?”
• What Annie looks for when backing founders and startup ideas
• The tough conversations co-founders need to have early
• HER, Wayra and the delight of seeing founders grow beyond expectation
• Code Club Australia, Techfugees Australia and enabling people to build skills, confidence and companies
• Asking who else wants to help and finding like-minded people
• Moving from Sydney startup life to a farm near Penguin, Tasmania
• Creativity, trust, teams and the next chapter of land, animals and practical skills

Guest links:

• Annie Parker: https://www.linkedin.com/in/annparker1/
• Code Club Australia: https://www.codeclubau.org/

Conversation references:

• HER: https://weareher.com/
• Robyn Exton: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robynexton/
• Techfugees Australia: https://techfugees.com/
• Pip Marlow: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pipmarlow/
• Jackie Coates & the Telstra Foundation: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackie-coates-3a239529/
• Matt Hart: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthart1/ + his Natural Genius episode is coming soon!

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction to Annie Parker
01:35 Moving to Tasmania and choosing a different life
06:20 “What are you waiting for?”
09:16 Trusting instinct and backing big decisions
18:46 Founder fire, tough conversations and startup success
23:30 HER, Wayra and seeing founders grow
27:21 Code Club, Techfugees and enabling communities
31:11 Asking who wants to help and getting things done
38:20 Trusting great people and building teams that shine
43:55 Learning practical skills and tending the land
45:16 Margaret Mead and thoughtful, committed citizens

Explore further:

Develop your Natural Genius: https://naturalgenius.com.au
Learn more about Sam: https://samanthabell.com.au

Subscribe to hear future episodes.

Credits:

Hosted by Samantha (Sam) Bell in Kiama and near Penguin, 26 April, 2026
Produced at the Violet Town and Kiama offices, 26 April - 18 May, 2026

Natural Genius Podcast https://naturalgenius.com.au

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to the Natural Genius Podcast. We're here to help you tap into your natural genius. Let's go. Annie is one of those people that I feel has laughter ready to bubble out and uh just a wicked business mind behind the big smile and kindness. She has connected so many people to be successful in the Australian and beyond startup scene. She's originally from the UK. In the time that has passed since we last caught up, she's become semi-retired. So I'm looking forward to hearing stories of Tasmania here in Australia. She is a really impressive human to be around and to know. I'm so much looking forward to catching up, and I hope you get a lot out of it too. Annie, welcome to the Natural Genius Podcast. Thank you so much for your time. My pleasure. It's lovely to be here. When we uh had a quick chat just a moment ago, you would we were talking about uh friends that I met years ago that were originally from the UK and they tried out Sydney and Melbourne, and then they realized that they were all a bit too big and they had to move to Tassie, and Tassie felt like the right size island compared to the mainland of Australia. I it sounds like that might be true for you. Tell me about having moved to Tassie and how you come came to do that.

SPEAKER_02 1:35

So I I grew up in the north of England and Scotland. I'm used to big open spaces, rolling countryside, being outdoors, getting your hands dirty, working with the land, having animals surrounding me. And clearly, for a part of my life that wasn't possible. Um, my career led me to many different parts of the world. Lots of time spent on airplanes, and you know, it was great fun at the time, don't get me wrong, I really, really loved it. Something happened which really gave me a kick up the backside, and that was sadly losing my father. Um, he was diagnosed with leukemia and gone within 10 months. And he was 71 when he died, and prior to that diagnosis, absolutely fit as a fiddle, running around like an idiot. A year before, sorry, 18 months before he passed away, he and I did a trek in the Himalayas. We did two weeks um hiking the Annapurna circuit. So to go from you know, being stood on the top of mountains in the Himalayas to basically being gone within a couple of years, it was a real kick in the pants of that sucks, but also, gosh, life is short. What what are you doing with it? And I whilst Dad was in his final days, I was looking at places to live and places to move to. I knew that my time in Sydney was kind of coming to an end. I'd I'd sort of done my about 10 or 11 years there in the end, and it was it was great fun, like I keep saying. But for this stage of my life, what did I want to do next? And I wanted to go back to that more sort of slower pace of life, being aware of the world around me and and having a little slice of that land that I can take care of and just be. And you can't really do that on the mainland of Australia, not unless you've got a ton of money, which I don't I've got enough, but not that much. Um, and also I'd been down to Tassie two or three times and loved it. So about a year before I came down, a friend and I came down on the spirit of Tasmania, lovely ferry ride, 11 hours, did it overnight, start off in it was Melbourne back then, it's Geelong now. And you go basically have a dinner, go to bed, wake up, and you're in Tassie. It's amazing. Um, and we came down here for a couple of weeks, started down in Hobart and sort of around the Hewn Valley, and it was just still a bit too big for me, which a lot of people in Hobart or other people on the mainland are like, you're insane, lady. Hobart's not massive. Um, but I did want that, like I say, the rolling countryside and that sort of space. And you have to go a good hour outside of Hobart now to get that. Um, and because we come on the spirit of Tasmania, that comes in and out of a little town called Devonport. And on the way back, we spent a bit more time in Devonport, and we'd got the dogs with us. We sat outside a you know a little Italian restaurant, and literally everybody that walked past stopped to say hello to the dog. I'm like, I think I may have found my place. Wind the clock forward another year. In the meantime, I'd been working for New South Wales government and in an innovation role, which at the time I took it on was very new, and I wanted to make sure that we landed this role so that it was set up for success for the future. And I thought, probably going to take me about two years to get there. And then it kind of got to just over 12 months, and then we were about to move into caretaker mode in government, which for those of you who don't know, anybody who works in government for about a month before a state election, or even a federal election for that matter, any government employees kind of just have to sort of keep the lights on, but don't do anything rash, don't do anything big that could cause a fuss, or certainly don't do anything that hasn't had prior ministerial approval. Basically, you go into treading water mode. And it was kind of you they say it's four weeks, but actually it's more like six to eight, because prior to that it takes ages to get anything approved. Can you like twiddling my thumbs for nearly two months? I'm sorry, I can't possibly do that. Oh, Eddie, you're from Startup Land. You can't busy, I'm busy, I'm busy. And also just the politics of it as well was just a bit much. So I remember um I rang a friend of mine, Pit Marlowe, lovely human, by the way. If you haven't had her on your podcast, you should. She's quite the legend. Thank you. Let's go. Um I met I text messaged her after a particularly spicy ministerial meeting where I had to do something that I didn't think was the right thing. And I texted her and I said, How long after your dad died did you stop wanting to punch people in the face with stupid decisions? And she she called me straight away, and she just, after a bit of a chat and a bit of a giggle, um, she just says, Annie, your your your bar your barometer of what's important has forever been shifted. And you need to ask yourself, are you okay with you know doing some things that other people think is life and death? And you know absolutely for certain that it's not. And I went, I'm not sure I can. And she was okay. Let me ask a slightly different question then. What would you be doing if you weren't doing this? I said, I'd sell my house, pack everything up, move to Tasmania, buy a farm, and adopt all the animals. She went, Oh, that's quite specific. Been thinking about that for a while. I was like, actually, yes. She went, okay, well, follow-up question. What are you waiting for?

SPEAKER_00 7:27

Oh, beast on my heart.

SPEAKER_02 7:29

Any yeah. And I sat with that for approximately 10 seconds, another minute maybe, and went, I don't know what I'm waiting for, actually. So I'm not kidding you, that weekend I had another couple of conversations with friends, one of whom's an estate agent in Balmain where I used to live. She goes, I'll give you mates rates, put the house on the market the following week. It sold to the first people who viewed it. We signed a contract later that following week, and literally within making the decision to sell the house, I'd not only done that, but I'd quit my job and I was on the boat within four weeks. On the boat down here. I had no idea where I was going to live, by the way. Just put everything in storage, got it shipped down here to Tasman when I'll figure it out when I get there. And I'm I'm a firm believer in the universe providing for you when you make a big decision like that. You need to set the train in motion, so to speak. But by quitting the job and not knowing what the next thing was going to be, or where I was going to live for that matter, I got down to Tassie, stayed in a few little Airbnbs, just to sort of get the lay of the land, and ended up here on the northwest coast, just outside a little town called Penguin, um, which does actually have a giant penguin, by the way. It's it's a very, very good Australian town with a big thing. Um, and I I found my farm within three weeks of getting here. Wow, Eddie. So, all up the day I quit my job and sold the house through to physically moving into my farm a 79 days.

SPEAKER_00 9:16

Amazing. Tell me that instinct and that belief in the universe from when you make big decisions and start to act on them. Is that something that you carried into many different business initiatives when you saw founders and you worked, you sort of trusted your instinct, but then you also could encourage founders to be courageous, believing in that.

SPEAKER_02 9:43

Is there something around that then? There's there's certainly something about that in terms of a thread through my entire career. Even was even as a kid. I remember I was seven years old, and I really wanted to go on a horse riding holiday over an I think it was Easter break or something, and I found this thing in a horse and pony magazine where you could go to a farm in Wales and you basically worked and on with the you know, learnt how to tack up and clean all the saddles and the bridles, and you but you were basically bunking up at this farm for a couple of weeks. Oh, I think it was five days. Anyway, I took it to my parents and said, I really want to do this over Easter. And they said, Annie, this is for it says age 12 and over. I said, Oh no, no, it's okay. I've already rung them. They've told us, they've said, as long as you're okay, it's fine. So having that gut instinct to just trust I can do something, it's always been there. And fair play to my parents, they backed it every single time I've done something like that. I remember um I was two years into my degree, and I just got bored. I I'm a I'm a busy person, right? Sitting in a lecture theatre for another year was just giving me absolutely zero vibes. So I found, and this was back in the uh late 90s. So there was now it's completely common for you to go out and do a year in industry within your degree. It wasn't back then, but I found uh it was one of the automobile companies in the UK, where it's a French company called Peugeot, they did sandwiches where you could go and work for them, do a like four different rotations around different departments. And I told my parents, look, I've I've got the job. I went through all the interviews and everything before I kind of told everybody what I wanted to do because it was pointless kind of saying I wanted to do something completely off-piece if I hadn't got an option. So I got the job, and I had to not only get my parents' approval because, of course, they were funding my time through going through a degree, so this was putting off-free. I said, Yes, but think about it, I can pay for myself for a year, you don't have to pay anything. And they're like, Interesting. Um, but I actually had to go and pitch this to the burser of my university because it was so uncommon for people to have a pause in their degree. And the guy was like, Why don't you just finish your degree and then go do it? I said, Because I am so bored, I'm not sure I'm gonna be able to get to the end of it. And they went, Well, under that circumstance, and given that of course it was a very you know, sort of organized program, um they said yes. So I went off and did this year out, and I got a job with now a permanent offered job as soon as I finished my degree in the bag. So I'm like, seriously, I'm the smartest woman on the planet. Look, I did this thing, I got paid to do it, and then I got a I got a permanent job offered at the end of it, which by the way, I turned down because I didn't think it was the right thing. Again, trusting my gut of knowing this isn't right, this isn't enough. And even then, I got a job at uh Anderson Consulting, as it was back then, and they they were okay for the job to be offered for 12 months. It was valid, the offer was valid for 12 months, so I went off from around the world for nine months instead and did some traveling. And my parents like, would you just stop adding extra things in and just go and get a normal career like everybody else? Just it's just not me. And I think the more times you take that leap of faith, the more you realize that actually it's not as scary as you think. And the more times that you trust your gut instinct and rewrite the foot rewrite the path in front of you because you're not happy or it's not quite giving you what you hoped for, you realize that actually if you go out and say to the universe, this is this isn't right for me, I'm not sure what I want yet, or I do want this, I want to go and travel for a year, or I want a different career path, or I want to move halfway around the world, you can do it because what's the worst that can what's the worst that will happen? It doesn't work out, you get back on the plane and go home, or you go back to the career that you were doing before because you've got those skills, you know it's that path is always there for you. So whenever I'm speaking to founders, it's it is that thing of trusting your gut to be that brave soul to go, no, I think there's something better for me.

SPEAKER_00 14:24

So it sounds like you used to pitch from an early age, so you have that instinct or that ability to be able to think through the negotiation and work out what's important to people and be able to pitch to that. So sometimes I think even with Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours, maybe you've some people have done certain things since they were really little, and those 10,000 hours coming in early.

SPEAKER_02 14:50

I think I will I will go back to a statement I said earlier, which was I was really lucky to have great parents who backed that. Yeah, let's face it, late 90s. I'm a woman going into industry. I mean, it was the telco industry at first, but it was still highly technical back then. This is back when you know we were just getting things like GPRS. You remember that? Um, you know, so it was highly still quite technical. And being a woman in that kind of industry leadership role was still unusual and hard work. And I've often been asked the question because I'm I'm quite small as well. I'm uh in in old money, I'm five foot one and a bit, which I think is about 156 centimetres Aussie kind of thingy. Um, so I'm small, but I've always been quite opinionated. And I and I think that's one of the things that I've seen change over the last couple of decades as well, is the language we use to describe women in leadership has changed from oh, she's a bit feisty, to no, no, she's just got opinions. And those opinions are valid. Thank goodness it's still not gone far enough, of course, and we need way more improvement on you know stereotypes of what women leadership what women in leadership look like. And I think that's something that I'd really love for this. If I got one message across to any woman that's listening to this, or any man who's a parent of a daughter, is please, for the love of goodness, just back them and back yourself. If you want to not have kids and not get married and retire at the age of 46 to a farm in Tasmania, hello, you can do it. I'm right here showing you. And I think you know, the the the options now for younger women coming through, it's like you you can do that if you want to absolutely be a mum, absolutely have a family if that's what you want to do, but don't do it if there's something else that you think will fill your cup. And you know, I never really wanted kids, it was never my thing. But gosh, darn, do I want animals around me and ducklings? Ducklings, oh my gosh, I've got two ducklings living in the house at the moment, they're adorable, and they the dog and the ducklings play together, and I'm sitting there looking at it, going, I'm basically living a Disney film now, and I could not be happier, but it required me to be sensible to my own choices and kind of going, actually, no, I I don't really want to settle for a man that isn't right for me. I don't really want to settle for that lifestyle that isn't going to sort of put me in the position where I'm gonna bounce out of bed every morning looking forward to the day. So I think that trusting your gut instinct to follow your passion is absolutely something that is a sort of you've got to stick with your dream and stick with your decisions. And that clanging, by the way, is the dog just getting a dream.

SPEAKER_00 17:58

Sorry about that. Oh, I can't hear it. And Google makes fantastic at background noise. Um, and also the ducklings makes me giggle because I've got a dear friend in uh South Africa. So you and her were both sending me duckling photos at the same time. It's just it's so fun to receive. Tell me about that instinct and that intuition, Annie, that we're talking into. When you were doing things like choosing founders for programs and maybe investments, tell me about what what that felt felt sense or how did you did you just know, or is it a feeling in your body? What's the what's the any criteria, or how do you trust that a idea is a good one to back?

SPEAKER_02 18:46

But you you start off with the the the sensible part of it, looking at the business, looking at the opportunity, looking at the innovation itself, and is it something interesting? And then you know, if you pass that sort of first, you know, kind of set of criteria. Honestly, it's all about the people. I have seen hundreds, if not thousands, of potential startup companies fail. And it's very, very rarely just about the business not being right. There are those those moments, of course, where it's just doesn't quite work out and the people are great, but most of the time it's because the founders haven't had that tough conversation up front to go, what are you in it for? What am I in it for? And does that match? So I might be in it to change the world and this is the rest of my life, whereas the the other founder might be in it to make a million dollars and then move on to the next thing. Both of which are totally legitimate options. But if you haven't agreed on that up front, it's it's always going to go wrong. Then the other thing I often see is working styles. So you might have a couple of founders or a group of founders, and three out of four of them are pulling their weight, and one isn't. And again, they just haven't had that tough conversation up front to say this is what work, our work ethic looks like. And we're going to hold each other to account on that. And you know what, that usually unravels to a point of you've got to then re-look at the cap table and boot a founder out and see if you can buy them out with options, or if ideally, what you've done up front is written all of this down and got some advice on making sure that you've understood how to apportion not just the equity potential worth of business, but also who's doing what, what does work look like in terms of effort and commitment, all those different things. And I know it sounds bloody boring, but that's usually why founders don't work or an a startup doesn't work, is because of the tough conversation they have or haven't had up front. The the other thing though is just that fire, that sole commitment to wanting to solve the problem that they want to solve. Because if you've got that commitment, no matter how many hurdles you come across or up against, you you can trust that that person is not going to stop until they've tried literally everything before they give up. If it's a person who you can sort of see has the right skill set to deliver this kind of company, but they're looking at it as more of a transaction rather than I'm so wedded to solving this problem because you know, either it's something that I've I've seen myself in business and I've batted my head against this problem for 20 years and I want to fix it, or a person in my life has a disability and I'm trying to solve for that. It's like the a person. Commitment to solving the problem is ultimately the most critical thing because that's the thing that's going to get them through whatever or whatever problems come their way. And there will be problems, that's the thing. We know this. We know that there are going to be bump, many, many bumps in the road. So you want somebody who's committed.

SPEAKER_00 22:23

And Annie, with all of the thousands of pitches that you would have seen through your career, that fire must have been so nice to spot from time to time.

SPEAKER_02 22:32

Yeah, and you you usually can see it pretty quickly. You know, it's it's the not necessarily the way that they pitch, because that can be a style, but you can learn that as a process or you can learn that as a skill. It's after a couple of meetings when you sort of see this is what they said they were going to do in the last two weeks, and then you meet up with them again. And if they haven't sort of given you an explanation as to you know why they haven't done those things they committed to, or that they have done them, and here's where it's moved them on. It's sort of that that sort of progress that you can see. It's sort of like, oh, okay, they they're they're doing it. So you you can see it pretty quickly, usually.

SPEAKER_00 23:14

I love that, Annie. I mean, you must be so proud, and with the humility that I know you to have, it it must still be lovely to know that you've had an impact on some of these ventures, and then the delight of seeing them go beyond what you might have expected.

SPEAKER_02 23:30

There's um there's a really great example of this one. So the first ever pitch session we ran, and this is back in London, um, for the old startup accelerator program I used to be part of called WIRE, which is still going. Um, and I know the literally the first ever group of pitches, and we went to loads of different meetups to encourage people to apply. And it was our first program in London, so we kind of also had to pitch to them somewhat to sort of say, no, we're we're legit, you can trust us. Uh, it's not just money, we are genuinely going to invest in you and your your your skill sets and help you develop as a founder, not just you know, flash in the pan, here's a bit of cash. And there's a there's a young woman who was pitching this idea for a dating app, and we're like, gosh, we love her. She was fire, absolute fire. But she was a solo founder and she didn't have a um didn't have a technical co-founder and she wasn't technical herself. And we're like, oh, dating app, we're not quite sure what the uniqueness is for that. And oh, we love you, but you know, we don't know whether or not you've got the capability to build these things. And so she got all the way down to sort of like the final 15. And then we we basically said, Look, we're sorry, you're not you haven't quite made it this time round. So it wasn't a no, it was a not right now. And bloody hell, this woman she went away, worked her ass off, refined the pitch, refined the idea. Um, so her name's Robin, and she is from the LGBTIQ plus community. So she designed the dating app, but specifically for her audience, the people that she knew, the people who she knew weren't actually being served at that point in terms of a really safe place to find people that they may fall in love with, or even just friends, right? So she came around and pitched again on the next batch, and I swear to you, she was top of the top of it by far. And she still didn't have the technical co-founder because she'd worked on that herself and said, I've learned the skills, I've built a version of it in beta. And we were like, Holy shit, this girl can do anything.

SPEAKER_00 25:56

Oh my god, she's the first body code at any.

SPEAKER_02 25:59

She was unstoppable. She ended up going through Y Comp. She went through Y Combinator after us um and was one of the few people to pitch not asking for money because she didn't need it, because she worked that hard on the business that she actually wanted to keep control over it herself and not invite in further investors who would muddy the waters. She didn't need them. And like, geez, that's amazing. Um, so the dating app's called Her, by the way, if you ever want to know about it, they're still doing brilliantly. Um, she was visiting Sydney, it was during during Mardi Gras, about sort of six or seven years later. It's about a year or two after I'd moved to Sydney, and she took me out for dinner and paid. I was like, look at that. This founder, she's made it. And I just thought this is she's incredible, absolutely incredible woman.

SPEAKER_00 26:52

Annie, you are so lovely to chat with. I love your humility around that. I love that you uh when you have a decent impact on those around you to retain the humility, especially in all the different senior roles that you had, and to know that you have had an impact, like a decent impact, and now you're in a different chapter of life. That must feel really delightful.

SPEAKER_02 27:21

It does. It does, and it's it's also some of the other things I've done around the edges, you know. So obviously that was the day job, but we we particularly in Sydney, there was a chunk of time there where I I wanted to see how much we could enable different communities. So we started um something called Code Club, which was helping getting coding skills into primary schools because at the time it wasn't part of the curriculum. And yeah, Code Club then got bought by the Telstra Foundation or merged into the Telstra Foundation, and that's still going, and that's well over 10 years, and they're still providing through primary schools and libraries across Australia access to skill sets, knowledge base around understanding the concept of um programming and logic and problem solving. And of course, that was specifically around learning, teaching kids how to code, but also that mindset of problem solving, collaboration, and you sort of the the logic part of it is applicable to pretty much every job you'll ever do. Um there was another program I started with another couple of friends in Sydney, which was around helping newly arrived migrants and refugees to start companies because the statistics are so high on if you can teach or enable migrants and immigrants and refugees in Australia to give them employment or for them to create their own businesses, the speed at which they then integrate into the local community is vastly, vastly improved. And just these humans, by the way, particularly people who are here because they're here on a refugee visa, they're here because they have nothing. Nothing, like absolute zero. They're starting from zero, but they have that desire to want to create something because they have that motivation because they've got nothing left. They have to start from scratch, and it is just so incredible watching these enormously talented people then get the confidence and learn the new skills and create these new companies. We ran a um we ran basically a weekend kind of startup hackathon for newly arrived refugees and migrants, and there's this young girl, she would have been, I think, about 16, 15 or 16, and she's uh a Hazara refugee. So not only was she coming from a war-torn place in the world, she was coming from a place where girls didn't go to school, where girls absolutely didn't learn things like engineering and technical skills. And she came to that hackathon and her parents wanted her to go and be a lawyer. Uh she went to UTS, she did an engineering degree, she's graduated now. And part of it was just because her eyes were opened during this hackathon of oh wow, there are other options for me. So I oftentimes when I look back at what I'm most proud of, sure, investing in some companies that have done incredibly well is is wonderful, but it really is about the people and about enabling them to be their best selves and to follow their passions and their dreams.

SPEAKER_00 30:54

Eddie, outstanding, what beautiful stories you tell. So you can get so much done in that space when you're in Sydney. What do you think drove you to do those extra initiatives over and above already contributing in the startup scale environment?

SPEAKER_02 31:11

There was a little bit of I'd seen other people do it in London and just saw it was possible or that other people were doing things similar at the same time. And I just thought, well, I wonder if we can do that here. And it was fascinating because as soon as you put the call out. Does anybody fancy doing something like this? And yeah, whether it was the coding um charity or the refugee and yeah, startup hackathons piece. You you ask for that help, you see who else might want to be involved. I very rarely did any of those things by myself, in fact, none of them. It was a a group of people who go, actually, yeah, I think that we should go fix that problem or see if we can do something. Um so you find your like-minded people, what's the phrase? Um, oh gosh, I'm gonna, it's one of my favorite quotes. It's sort of never has something been done by other than people who are committed to solving the problem. I've got that completely wrong. Um, but you know, it's that sort of thing of sure, you can probably solve part of the problem by yourself, but if you involve other people who care about solving it too, you'll just get way further, way faster. And meet some rock solid humans along the way. Yeah. And that's absolutely true. Pretty much everybody that I've worked with in those sort of key moments where I'm most proud of the work that we've done. They're still, you know, very dear and close friends. They're people who I count as you know, being wonderful humans in my life who I would you know walk through fire for.

SPEAKER_00 32:54

Yeah, I'm not too sure if one of those might be Jackie Coates from the Telstra Foundation in the U.S. She has quietly created so many connections. So, Annie, tell me how did you get so much done, or how do you get so much done? Because being in different positions running things outside of your day job as well, you've been able to get a lot of things done. Any tips?

SPEAKER_02 33:20

My mum always says, if you want something done, give it to a busy person. On the flip side of that, I'm really, really, really terrible at doing nothing. I just I get bored so quickly. I always have. So even now I'll sit towards you. I'm twiddling with a pen, I'm scribbling down some notes that something else has come into my brain. It's like I know that if I keep myself busy, I actually come up with my best ideas then as well, or my best thoughts in my there's a very good friend of mine, a Kiwi guy called Matt Hart, and wonderful human. He always talked about how we come up with our best ideas. And it's a mix I know Matt Hart. I think you might have introduced me to him or the other way around. What a what a gorgeous human. Um, he and I did some work when I used to work at O2 back in the UK, because my my marketing team at the time had said that they couldn't come up with any more new propositions to take to our customers. I'm going, that sounds rubbish. Uh, because they're all very smart people. And I'm like, um, what they'd forgotten to do, you know, this thing of where we put people in meeting rooms and go, let's have a brainstorm. It's like, okay, brain, storm, do something. And of course, it doesn't work like that. We're not you know, our brain isn't a performing monkey to do tricks, it needs it needs feeding. No, we had to remind the team this how do you get your when are you at your most creative? And you know, I was like, well, for me, it's when I'm walking the dog, because I've got time for you know my subconscious to work through things, and for other people it was singing, for other people it was photography, um, going to the gym, just the bit where you give your brain a rest, but also that you feed it something. So maybe it's maybe it's reading some research, maybe it's watching some great TEDx videos, maybe, but you're feeding something into your brain to give it new information. If you don't give it new information, it's gonna go the same information's gonna go down the same pathways, and you're gonna come out with the same ideas. So new inputs. So what we did, we took um, we broke up my team into pairs and sent them to different parts of London. Some went to the South Bank, some went to Chelsea, another one went to King's Cross. Um, and thankfully, because we were in the mobile phone business, it was actually pretty easy to do what I asked them to do, which was just watch. Just watch what people do. Whether it's with their phone or whether it's because of their phone, or you know, just no observe. Go and observe. The guys that went to um King's Cross Station came back, and their key observation was they stood there and they realized that most people were sort of converging into odd spaces in the train station. Turned out that's where the plug sockets were. So we came up with a like five or six different ideas of putting in free charging points in different parts of town. Then another group were um in uh they were watching people who were having lunch at a pub in Chelsea, and they noticed that a person had got two phones or a BlackBerry. If you remember the Blackberry for the kids watching, go do some research. Um, one of them had got a Blackberry. Or not, yeah. One had got a Blackberry and one had got a normal phone on and on their table, and they just said it was almost like watching Jekyll and Hyde, that they were two different people. When they'd got their phone, it was their personal life. And then when when work interrupted, it sort of turned them into oh no god, get my head down to listen. So their observation there was around this sort of dual personality of some of our customers. Great observation. And what we basically said was the observations, let's just write them down, and they were probably like 20 or 30 different things that across the groups they'd all sort of observed. And from that, we came up with about 150 ideas. Now, not all of them were the things that we went forward with and turned into full propositions to take to market, but all I said to my team then I sat there smugly at the end of it and went, told you, because they wanted to bring in consultants, you know, spend money on agencies. And I'm like, No, you know how to do this. You've just forgotten how to be creative, how to think about putting new inputs into your brain and letting the brain, you know, kind of work it through and come up with new ideas. So it's fascinating, absolutely fascinating. But again, it's sort of trusting people, and when you know you've got great people, you know you can do anything.

SPEAKER_00 38:02

Oh, I totally agree, Annie, and giving them the environment from which to shine. Yeah. And so you were talking about getting things done, Annie. What is it that you think that might be unique to you, or what are the tips that you pass on to other people to get it?

SPEAKER_02 38:20

I think I think it is finding like you said, finding great people and just trusting them to do their job. You know, that there's so many managers out there who mark everybody's homework, and it's sort of like, well, what a waste of time that is, because you might as well have just done it yourself. And also, you letting your people thrive means that you get the very best version of them. Why wouldn't you want that in your business? And sometimes, of course, that means that they grow out of that role and they move on, but that's an amazing thing, too. So you get way more done when you trust the great people in your teams and the people around you. That was that African proverb. You know, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

SPEAKER_00 39:05

And and yeah, I've been delighted. There's been a couple of conversations I've had in the last month that is about people who are building their businesses around everyone on the bus in the business being like family, which is not necessarily a new way of thinking. I just love that it's getting out there more. And I wonder also whether this is doing business well in that there's enough financial buffer uh that the business is profitable enough to be able to support that.

SPEAKER_02 39:35

If you take care of great people, they will take care of you and your business. It's it's it's not complicated, it's hard to do in some sense in some experiences because you perhaps you don't have the money or you don't have the um you know sort of leeway within your overall company to make those decisions. But geez, you can do you can give them the emotional support and that emotional sort of platform to go, I've got you. Um whatever it is, I've got you. And we'll figure it out. I mean, obviously, if you're if you take liberties with that and you know, you take the mick, then obviously that that platform gets taken away. Probably something else I learned uh from another uh person I used to work with, uh, which was hire slow, fire fast. And if I look back on any moments in my career where I think I've made mistakes, it's because I haven't I haven't taken those people out who are not great, right? They're they're they're little cancers giving everybody else all the bad vibes, and it's slowing everybody down and making everybody's life miserable. And there are thankfully, there's only two or three of those that I look back on and go, do you know what? I knew they weren't right. I knew it wasn't the right fit, but I kind of just kept giving them a little bit more of not, yeah, because you you do want the best out of people and you do want to believe that given the right circumstances that they can be the best version of themselves. But sometimes for whatever reason that isn't possible. My my advice to anybody who's perhaps feeling that right now is again, trust your instincts, back yourself and get rid of those people who aren't great. Because it's it's it's hurting everybody, it's not just about the job not being done, it's hurting everyone around.

SPEAKER_00 41:31

I love this term grow the good health in an organization.

SPEAKER_02 41:34

Do you want to share more about Tazi? I probably for the rest of my life. My challenge is to understand the land I live on, to understand the land that is providing me this existence. And it's fascinating to me how humanity, and a lot of this is because of sadly the colonialization of many countries, of which, of course, my homeland is um hugely guilty of. Sorry about that, everybody. Uh, but it means that for you know the past couple of hundred years, we have ignored, ignored, completely ignored tens of thousands of years worth of knowledge of this land that we all get to call home. The absurdity of that to me is just mind-blowing. The fact that we have the oldest continuing culture on the planet that we could be spending time with and learning from and asking for help. And we're only really just getting around to it. It's it's baffling. The original innovators, the original problem solvers, the original founders, if you like, who've solved problems for thousands, ten thousands of years, and yet we've ignored it. Completely insane. So that is the sort of my lifelong commitment now, particularly here in Tazi. You know, we've got this beautiful land that is relatively unspoiled, and it's gorgeous. And we if we learn more from the land itself, listen to the seasons around it and how it's working. And of course, with the changing climate, you know, we we need to understand how to better provide things like dealing with bushfires, dealing with drought, all of those things are happening across the whole of Australia. It's and it's certainly uh happening down here as well. We we've got a job to do to make sure that make sure that we do pass on this planet to the next generation and the ones after, and the ones after that in as best way as we possibly can. And I think you know, we've got a we've got a lot of work to do there.

SPEAKER_00 43:51

Like you've got so many skills and so much fire there, Eddie.

SPEAKER_02 43:55

No, oh, that's one other thing I wish I'd learned how to use power tools. I wish I knew because seriously, if you don't if you don't know I've learned I've learned on the job, you know, I've learned down here, I've been building stuff and all that. I started off with just a drill. And now I think I own like 27 different things in the garage, and I've turned into one of those people that's got a tool for everything. But I never knew how to use these things. And think about how practical that is and how useful it is to know how to drill a hole or how to build something. You know, we if I could change anything now, it would be to go back into those schools and add in proper DIY lessons for women. Sounds great. When you when you build it yourself, not only is it hugely empowering and great fun, but it's like it's so practical to know how to fix things on your farm or at your home, or it's just baffling that we don't know these things. But yes, the next the next chapter of my life is all about learning how to tread lightly on this land and and leave it in a as much better shape as I can as when I found it.

SPEAKER_00 45:12

Well that Annie, thank you so much for your time. No problem.

SPEAKER_02 45:16

And I did want to go back because the quote I was trying to remember earlier is a Margaret Mead quote. Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Because it's the only thing that ever has.

SPEAKER_00 45:28

Annie, what a beautiful way to end this lovely conversation. Thank you so much for your time. You're very welcome. Thanks for listening to the Natural Genius Podcast. Please share this with anyone who came to mind and visit us at naturalgenus.com.au. Thanks so much.