Money Minded

#115 Britt Fox | How to get unstuck and use money to make life happen

• Terry Condon

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Britt and Luke have always supported each other to go after their goals. But they'd gotten caught up living life on defence. Lurching from one spot fire to the next and never looking up to define their own direction. 

In this episode, Britt candidly takes us behind the curtain to show us how they pushed forward and created their own momentum.

And how they forged a financial foundation they could build on to make Britt’s business dream a reality.

If you’re feeling stuck in a reactive stance, and sick of living life on the back foot, this episode is for you.

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Brittany Fox:

Every single part of our life was about to change. My husband had just started a new job. We were pregnant. we didn't know where we were going to live I've got this idea for a business Does it have legs? He was wanting to just, let's just get through this. And I was like, we've been, we've been getting through this for four years. I don't want to get to the end of this and then go, what next? I don't want to be living life by the seat of my pants and waiting for it to happen to me. if you haven't caught this yet, I like to be well planned. If you have a plan, or at least a North Star that you want to get to, decisions become a lot more clear

move forward when life keeps throwing curveballs we can't plan for? On the surface, this question seems pretty reasonable. But come with me for a second, and I'll show you how it's one of the most insidious tricks that our mind plays on itself. It's the premise of this question that's the problem. And if you don't really eyeball it, it's easy to miss. Here's what it sounds like when you say it out loud. We can't change our situation unless our situation changes. This is what's called circular reasoning. It is a logical fallacy that we use to justify a position that we're emotionally attached to. In this case, it's like clinging to a tree stump as a tornado approaches. It feels stable and strong, but does nothing to move us out of harm's way. Whilst we feel safer in the moment, we also get the sense that we're becoming more vulnerable. And the reason why is that this argument requires us to cast our power to forces that exist outside of our own selves. This is what psychologists call an external locus of control, and it wreaks havoc on our well being, because casting our power to external forces makes us feel powerless. It's also exhausting. It positions us as a helpless victim to a constantly changing world. The resulting overwhelm leads to a kind of learned helplessness, once again perpetuated by circular reasoning. We feel overwhelmed because of the way we're approaching things, but we won't change the way we do things because we feel overwhelmed. It's all predicated on the idea that change can only occur when things aren't changing. In reality it's the exact opposite. You either make your life happen, or your life happens to you. Brit and her partner Luke are an epic example of what it looks like to break out of this pattern. They have always supported each other to go after their dreams, but they'd gotten caught up living life on defense, lurching from one spot fired to the next and never looking up to define their own direction. Their story is one of courage and it's one of conviction. In a time of great uncertainty they pushed forward and have created their own sense of momentum and have made some big decisions that are changing the trajectory of their lives. The conversation you're about to hear is a candid look behind the curtain of what it looks like to go through this process. Brit generously takes us inside their experience and shares how they went about making these changes in spite of the challenges they were facing, and how they forged a financial foundation they could build on to make Brit's business dream a reality. And this conversation happened a couple months back, and in that time, Brit landed a huge deal with one of Australia's biggest brands. This is a massive win for the business, and it's going to go a long way to funding the tech that she's building, And also provide vital proof of value to the market. If you're feeling stuck in a reactive stance and you are sick of living life on the back foot, we made this episode just for you. I hope you like it.

Tex:

Britfox, welcome to the show.

Brittany Fox:

Thank you! I'm very excited to be here.

Tex:

I know, because you have been a listener for a while now, haven't you?

Brittany Fox:

Yes probably two and a bit years. I,

Tex:

be listening to this show doing, what did you call it? The leg lifts? The

Brittany Fox:

and do proper workouts because I was pregnant. And so I joined like a crunch fitness and I'd do their little circuits that are really lazy. You could just sit there and do leg lifts and I found your podcast and I would just listen to your podcast and I'd basically do an episode in a workout with

Tex:

Yeah, gotcha.

Brittany Fox:

workout. Yeah.

Tex:

thought about it like that, actually. That's pretty good, actually. That's probably usually how long they last, about an hour or so. So if you get, get a good pump on during that time, maybe you can learn, maybe you can learn something in that time. Now I got a question for you. I usually find that when we're talking to folks, there's somebody who's been like yourself. become a habitual listener of the podcast and then just like badges their, their partner to listen to it. Was it the same with you and Luke?

Brittany Fox:

Well, we just kept coming home and I kept wanting to talk about things and my partner would just be continuously, it was just a really stressful time when I was reading, when I was listening and he just really wasn't in the headset to be learning, I guess. He was just a bit, just in survival mode

Tex:

Yeah.

Brittany Fox:

but he did a long commute and so I would just continuously send him links and then I'd be like, I'm expecting to talk about this tonight. And he'd be like, are you serious? Did you just give me homework? I was like, yes, I would really

Tex:

Yeah.

Brittany Fox:

this because I want to talk about something I learned today.

Tex:

Do you know, I reckon on at least one or two occasions a month, I have to apologize to a partner.

Brittany Fox:

Yeah.

Tex:

I had a conversation last week, uh, with another one of our awesome members, Sharon, and I had to apologize to her husband, Ryan. She's like, is this the bloke? He said, this is the guy. And I was like, sorry, mate. She would be running. She said she'd be running on a treadmill.

Brittany Fox:

Yeah.

Tex:

So you must have been listening to it on speaker. So if you walk and pass and that you'd be wanting to talk about it and things like that. And he's like, Oh, here he is, this bloke. I said, sorry, but, but that's a pretty common experience. Tell us a little bit more about you guys. So where are you from?

Brittany Fox:

Well, so I, we live in Sydney but I'm originally from Oregon in a very small town, Ashland, which is on the border of California on the west coast. I came here in 2012 backpacking, one way ticket, only had, uh, 2, 000 to my name and a room to rent. Cold.

Tex:

Why Australia out of every other country?

Brittany Fox:

So I had studied abroad and lived in France. I'd done a bit of Europe. And when I was doing my quick search on where I could move, there wasn't that many options for the U S to be able to move, to live in other countries, work, and they speak the language. My options were. Small.

Tex:

And, and, and isn't, Oregon is Nike country, isn't it?

Brittany Fox:

It is, yeah.

Tex:

like, that part, that part right there, it's like super green, super lush, super cold.

Brittany Fox:

Yeah, mountains, we're known for microbreweries. Yeah, beautiful,

Tex:

It kind of feels, have you ever been to Bright in Victoria?

Brittany Fox:

No.

Tex:

I don't know, but I get a, get the sense that Bright is a little bit like the Oregon of Australia. Same thing, mountains, brewery, like really nice sort of wholesome place basically. Yeah. Yeah.

Brittany Fox:

to New Zealand a couple of times, so the, the, are they, I think they have redwoods there. They are, what Oregon, that's what it looks like. Yeah

Tex:

It's bloody good, isn't it? And so tell us about coming into the mentorship. Why was, why was money a focus for you and why were you listening so intently at this kind of period of your life? You mentioned before some of the challenges. Tell us a bit more about that.

Brittany Fox:

Well, I was pregnant with my second kid and we were going through a bit of a very Difficult time with understanding what our future looked like I mean I had literally a ticking time bomb inside my stomach that I was gonna be going on maternity leave Income was gonna be stretched. I'm trying to understand what that looks like. I've got this idea for a business

Tex:

Mmm.

Brittany Fox:

Does it have legs? Can we actually give me a chance at doing it? We also were trying to figure out a housing situation We were in a legal battle over it and I didn't know where we were gonna live

Tex:

Mmm.

Brittany Fox:

when we had our second baby, so There was so many things that were outside of my control and I was trying to get some kind of clarity So that I could plan past the date of baby's arrival

Tex:

Mmm. And so like a real period of flux, like a lot of things, a lot of shifting pieces of the puzzle all happening at once. Is that right?

Brittany Fox:

Oh, yeah. Every single part of our life was about to change. My husband had just started a new job. We were pregnant. we didn't know where we were going to live or when we were going to have to move.

Tex:

Yeah.

Brittany Fox:

didn't feel very secure in my career, if I did go back.

Tex:

Mmm.

Brittany Fox:

there was a lot of redundancies. You know, we had some medical things going on in different members of our family. It was a very stressful, stressful time.

Tex:

Yeah. And so you landed on money when you asked yourself the question, what can we control? Why do you think money came into focus and why did that come to the fore? Was it something for you guys where you were finding it hard to manage money at that time?

Brittany Fox:

It was felt like, well, a lot of our money was going to lawyers at the time, and we needed to figure out how we, how long I could go on maternity leave for, I had an idea for a business. I wanted to see if I could go back and I didn't want to have to wait. And have done my whole maternity leave or wait for something to happen to know if I could do it

Tex:

Mmm.

Brittany Fox:

to plan ahead. So I was I I guess I was in seeking mode for everything Everything was on the table for what I could find a way to make my future a little more clear for myself So we did lots of Oh gosh, I'm you can tell i'm a consultant. There's post its All over our windows in our old office with, I would force my husband into these workshops to

Tex:

Yeah.

Brittany Fox:

what do we want in six months?

Tex:

Yeah.

Brittany Fox:

want in a year? And there would be like, okay, what, what things are we in control of actually doing? So, even though you have, like, our work life balance was fantastic and the things that we cared about in our life were really going well. And how we were with each other and our family and all of that was going really well. But the next stages, like, we were really wanting to figure out, could we afford a house in the area we wanted to live in?

Tex:

Thank you.

Brittany Fox:

And the answer kept coming back of, well, we don't know because I'm going to be on maternity leave. Uh, we don't know because we don't know how much money we're gonna get from our house. We don't know because, like, so many factors. We don't know how many, how many, how much of our deposit's gonna be gone from these legal fees. is too many unknowns.

Tex:

Yeah, and that's where you were like, I don't want to let those unknowns dictate, like, what can we know. Is that sort of what you're thinking?

Brittany Fox:

I wanted to figure out case scenario.

Tex:

And, and sort of a part of this, you just mentioned it before and I'll just dive into it quickly. You were a consultant, you were working with one of the big fours. These are very, uh, high, high pressure jobs. They're also like really a lot of variety. You learn a lot. And there's a lot of sort of status that comes along with this. Why were you sort of thinking that? You wanted to look in new directions and maybe look in, uh, start something new as well. You talked about the business idea. What was it about that period there then that was making you kind of go, What does the future need to look like for me professionally?

Brittany Fox:

So, to answer that, I'm gonna go back a step to why I got into consulting was because I really loved diving into new people's problems. And I loved, I'm very visual. I love stitching together the customer experience across businesses. And I kind of would go in to different clients and was kind of like a fixer. You know, I'd be able to figure out what they wanted, extrapolate that and with the teams to build it into tech, to make the perfect customer experience that they wanted. And I kept doing this over and over and over again. And I went into consulting thinking this tech must exist,

Tex:

Mmm,

Brittany Fox:

would be able to see their entire customer experience in

Tex:

yeah.

Brittany Fox:

Like, you know, there's the sales forces, there's the braids, there's, these are all just texts, right? And I'm thinking that these magical places that are just going to solve a marketer's problems, but they come with so much more complexity than you expect. And I, I kept having to manually build things for clients. Over and over and over again. It just came to a point where we, we wanted to take a step forward, but I already knew my trajectory there.

Tex:

Mmm,

Brittany Fox:

There was either you go for another job and you're potentially working on client side and you're still solving the problems that you're suffering from that you're solving for them as a consultant. So I already knew the problems that I was going to be facing, but from a client side, I already knew the problems that I was Solving from the consultant side and then there was this random like itch in my brain that kept being like don't you just solve the problem that you're solving? for clients so that you don't have to go and be a client and solve

Tex:

yeah.

Brittany Fox:

over again and I Visualized it and I saw this tool in my mind and I kept sitting I literally had this giant Poster board just sat down one night and I was like six months pregnant and was just mapping out this UI and this entire flow and all the features and all these things and I don't know, I somehow convinced my husband that I could do it.

Tex:

Yeah. And that timing is super curious as well, right? Because you're not talking about a small thing here. You're talking about like, let's That's a huge unknown. What gives you that sense of confidence and what gave you that sort of sense of like, I can do this, uh, or I should do this, or I'm capable of doing this and it's worth it.

Brittany Fox:

I think there comes a point where you've proven to yourself that you can do hard things

Tex:

Yeah.

Brittany Fox:

and the alternative is resentment on yourself. or your partner.

Tex:

Mm.

Brittany Fox:

And I've always been a pretty big believer in like a self fulfilling prophecy that if you believe it, it will happen. And it's kind of always turned out. I've had this journal I've kept for years I always would write down my goals. And it was funny because a couple of years ago, my mom was like, Found it like in my one Tupperware that I keep at my mom's house in America. she was like, I found this journal and it was so funny. Cause you explained your life in quite detail. And she read it out to me and it was like my life

Tex:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Brittany Fox:

And so there was a, there was a time in my partner and I's life where, where he was deciding whether to go into the family business or his business. Passion of firefighting we sat down and I was like, you're not going to be financially making enough money that you think you should be making to support us, but I would rather you go for your dreams than,

Tex:

Mm.

Brittany Fox:

than to resent me someday doing a job that is not your love.

Tex:

Yeah.

Brittany Fox:

this came, so like I had given him that and he's like, well, it's kind of my turn to give that to you.

Tex:

You know, I, I frequently see, I can see this moment happen a lot when we do these Life by Design sessions.

Brittany Fox:

Hmm.

Tex:

And I think it's probably the most underrated part of this conversation because you're asking each, you're asking, what are your hopes and dreams? Well, how do you want to live in the future? What choices do you want? And I've, I've been in a couple of situations where I've seen that moment where the partner, one partner turns to the other and says, I didn't realize that was so important to you. And I want that for you just as much as you want that for you. And it's. Like I recently read some research and it said 87 percent of couples who manage their money together report higher levels of satisfaction in their relationship. And I think it's a big part of that where it's like, we're managing this together, you know, to both get what we want. So I think it's such a powerful thing to be able to do for the relationship. And even everybody's kind of worried about the, you know, like you said before, do you, are you going to make as much? Should you just make as much as you possibly can? I always think exactly what, what you guys think, which is like, The best thing for you is to be the best version of you.

Brittany Fox:

Hmm.

Tex:

And wherever you need to be to make that happen, that's where I'm going to get the best version of you. That's what I want, the best version of you. That's it.

Brittany Fox:

Yeah.

Tex:

so, it's super powerful, isn't it? And what was that like for you to hear that after after you'd had that same conversation years before?

Brittany Fox:

It was. It's one of those moments where every day I come back and he is beaming proud of me and I know he's my biggest cheerleader and there's never ever, even on, even when I've gone through stagnant phases or phases where I'm just spinning my wheels or I'm pulling my hair out or I'm thinking I'm just not good enough to do this, he still goes, you got it. Like you got it.

Tex:

Yeah,

Brittany Fox:

I'm here and I'm still gonna. gonna get through this and we're gonna do it and it's like, okay, because you never, the self doubt all the time, right? And then if you've got someone else who's in your side, every day you come home and you just want to make them proud. And then because they're proud, you're, you're able to share your life better together and, you know, you're not holding anything back and you're not, you know, like, I wanted to go this stupid job because

Tex:

yeah.

Brittany Fox:

you didn't let me go for my dreams. Like, oh God, could you imagine? That's just setting yourself up.

Tex:

100 percent it is. 100%. You said something earlier that I want to come back to and it was, You get the sense that you can do hard things. Where did you get that sense?

Brittany Fox:

Uh, I think everyone figures out when they can do hard things when they're faced with hard things, right? And so when I was 20, I was studying abroad in France and I got a phone call from my dad that my stepmom had passed away. And this is the mother of my half brother, who was 13 at the time. And while he's on the phone with me. He starts slurring and he starts sounding really just not, I couldn't get a sentence out of him and then the phone hung up. 24 hours later after I've called all around trying to find him, I find that he's in a hospital and he's had a stroke.

Tex:

Well,

Brittany Fox:

And so my 13 year old brother has just lost his mom and my, his dad has just had a stroke. So, and my grandparents were quite elderly. It was it was, I just needed to, I, I, I know there was people who probably could have taken this on, but I, I couldn't, I had to step up and I had to, so I left, I left France. I got like a dental assisting certificate and then I had custody of my little brother when I was like 21.

Tex:

so that's, that's where it comes from. You're like, I can deal with that. I can deal with this.

Brittany Fox:

Well, I think if you can raise a 14 year old going through some crazy stuff, and move into a new town, drop out of school, and, you know, Yeah, so I was a, I was a college dropout for a couple of years, and then when my dad, I, while I was doing that, I got into entrepreneurship. I was waitressing at a restaurant, and a couple of friends from college had started an SMS marketing company, you know, during the time when like QR codes were like really interesting, and you know, no one had a smartphone, and I was literally going door to door to these small businesses selling SMS marketing during the day, and waitressing at night, taking my brother to wrestling matches on Saturdays, and. just wild. And then when my dad was rehabilitated and able to take my brother back, I, I kind of went back with a new lease on what I could do. And so I went back to college and got my degree, but in communications this time

Tex:

Yeah.

Brittany Fox:

and wanted to just explore more. I just, I just needed to see more because there was You know, I was 24. I'd already had custody of a kid, studied abroad in France, graduated school. I was like, what else can I do? Like, that was, that was wild.

Tex:

I think you're winning your rights to have a bit of fun at that stage.

Brittany Fox:

Right?

Tex:

Now this is interesting, right? So there's a, there's kind of an insight here, which is there's a need. I see this need. I'm dealing with this need every day and I'm solving this problem. And as we know, you get paid for the problems that you solve and you're kind of going, well, I'm getting paid in this capacity, in this vehicle, which is as a consultant, what if I was to do this a different way? So there's that realization. What if I was to do this a different way and start building my own asset and start kind of moving in that direction. The plan is really kind of different. So coming back to that conversation with the post it notes and working your way through this, like, how did you stage this out?

Brittany Fox:

Like, executing that I was going to take on this business.

Tex:

Yeah.

Brittany Fox:

Well, I started with, like, research.

Tex:

Mm hmm.

Brittany Fox:

my wheels with Google. Dr. Google. And I joined like this very small accelerator which was just about validating your idea. And the whole part of that was just doing your research to validate the problem. And validate how you're going to solve it. And that was fantastic because I actually spent, a couple hours a day whilst I was on maternity leave. Thank goodness my, um, baby was a good sleeper. So during her naps, rather than folding laundry, which my house was a disaster, I would anybody who would talk to me that was in a marketing role and ask them questions about what problems they faced as being able to solve the Being able to see the customer experience. Did they struggle with their analytics tools? Did they struggle with collaboration and aligning on the problem? Did they find gaps between channels? And that was just enough to keep me feeling fueled. So when it came to like December, I got this point where I was like, okay, if I'm going to go for it, I can't go for it and still work at Deloitte or say that I'm working at Deloitte because that's unethical. And so I just, I was like, I bit the bullet. So we, I moved house and quit my job in the same week.

Tex:

And this is why the mentorship came into focus for you, right? Because it was, was it about kind of giving yourself a runway and knowing like how to move through that with the finances?

Brittany Fox:

Yeah. It was the first time we'd actually been able to forecast and it was a different way of forecasting. So I think there's. I think there's how you think you're going to do it, where you go, how much money do I have at the end of every month? Okay. If I put that in a savings, then I'll be able to figure out how many months I can go where the way you guys have set it out is actually quite different. And when we broke out our savings account and started looking about what every making every dollar count, we actually figured out that I had such a bigger runway. it was also about changing the psychology of my husband's. way of thinking because we had this nest egg of money that we'd had for literally our entire relationship and it hadn't done a single thing

Tex:

Mm.

Brittany Fox:

but it was like this safety net that he needed to have and once we started to figure out we could make it work for us and actually do things suddenly the picture looked very different

Tex:

Mm.

Brittany Fox:

that we We're bringing in any new money. It was just that we worked at differently.

Tex:

Yeah. And so you mentioned the change in psychology and specifically coming out of that first session with a couple of realizations around what did matter to you guys and allow, and that kind of being a shifting point. Can you say more about that?

Brittany Fox:

So, like I said before about how we do workshops and I have these post its on our, you know, each goal. But the way you guys did it for us was actually a big aha moment because when we did our life by design session, was more about, you know, Every day in the micro decisions, the way that you want to live the things that are super important to you, the relationships are important to you. And on that thing, there was not a single materialistic item.

Tex:

Yeah.

Brittany Fox:

literally we, you know, suddenly the house owning a house wasn't as big of a deal. It was, that was a, that was a belief that we thought we had Make ourselves feel like we succeeded,

Tex:

Mm. Absolutely.

Brittany Fox:

reality on what we valued in our life.

Tex:

Mm. And so that made it easy for you to start to think about your money differently. What does it need to do for us? What does it need to buy for us? And how can we use it to buy these choices, have these choices, have these experiences? Is that right?

Brittany Fox:

Yeah, and it might mean that we don't own a house for a couple of years, but we were going to be struggling to own a house anyways, and we would have owned a house and been really struggling and been really stressed

Tex:

Yep.

Brittany Fox:

right now we can afford renting, take two steps back, let me hopefully catapult us ahead, and then we'll be able to buy it probably at the same time, but less stress in between the last three years of

Tex:

Yeah.

Brittany Fox:

and never getting the chance to take that leap.

Tex:

I think, you know, this is a really important point because, you know, you could be forgiven for listening to this and saying, Oh, now you've gone away from the safe thing, which is house, and gone and done a risky thing, which is business. If I find it, uh, It's too simplistic, I think, because, you know, we always make that comment which is wealth is having more of what you value and for you and for, for for Luke when it comes down to these choices, you can still have these choices. Actually, you're having more of these choices in some ways, but you're giving yourself a better chance to have more of those things by building an asset through this period or giving yourself a chance to build an asset versus buy one that you hope other people want to buy in the future. So, And one of them is productive and another one is speculative. And like property in Australia is speculative. That's just the nature of what it is as an asset. So the idea that property is the safer thing it's just not always the case. And for you, what you're essentially doing here now is you said at the start of this, you're controlling what you can control and you're making the surest bet, which is a bet on yourself, your own expertise, your background, your experience, your insight to be able to do it. And if you're right, then you'll have an asset. can provide for you the income that you want and potentially much greater income and to be able to buy those other things that you want along the way. So, I think what you guys did was really smart here because you thought about the best way to use or configure your money. You know, and I see this a lot where, uh, what you said before, where the money's sitting there and it's doing some sort of emotional job, but you can't really put your finger on it. You don't know what it is. You move from that and you start thinking more logically about, Okay. This thing here, this thing called money, it's got to do a certain job for us. Is it doing its job? Is it working for us? Or are we just working for it? It's, you know, it's just there and we're just going like, make sure you stay there, I'm gonna keep working. But I know that this, you know, these aren't easy conversations, but they're so important. So important and, and I think, you know, what you've said before about the way that Luke supported you. It's really important, I think, to be able to have that first conversation to know what does our best life look like together and also individually within that. Because if you can both have more of what you want within it, it's so much, uh, more likely that you'll have this kind of, uh, relationship. shared future where it goes in your direction. How has it played out for you so far?

Brittany Fox:

well, I'm stressed in business, but my family life thriving. took that life by design session and live and breathe it. It's, it's making sure that our businesses work and our work life balance works around. there for as a family unit. So we prioritize that we work, that we are together at breakfast, and we have breakfast with the girls. And then at dinner time, we do dinners together, and we do bedtime together. And as long as we're able to do that with the girls, because that's really the only time we have, and then we spend good quality time on the weekends, then we can absolutely give our hundred percent effort our work during the hours. And the girls are just so bloody cute that I just, why wouldn't

Tex:

How old are you?

Brittany Fox:

I've got a, so, 14 months and 4 years.

Tex:

Yeah, gotcha.

Brittany Fox:

Yeah.

Tex:

Yeah, it's a bloody good time I reckon. Especially like that four years when they start kind of having a personality. It's so interesting.

Brittany Fox:

Yeah. And I, it could be, I mean, I got told a lot, like a lot, Oh my god, you are crazy. You're so, you're sleep deprived and you have a baby. Who starts a business when you're on maternity leave? But was the alternative? The alternative was I go back to my job, I balance out some time, I postpone this another year, I still, I might have been actually more stressed in having to go to work the things I didn't want to do. It probably would have just kept pushing it off. I don't feel like I've missed out on my girls lives. I work from home most of the time, and I would just, I'd probably be making more money, but, but I would have pushed off my own dreams,

Tex:

Yeah,

Brittany Fox:

don't want my girls to ever, ever push down a dream. Yeah.

Tex:

yesterday and this pattern and the logic as well is really interesting to me. I would call it like a, an offensive approach or a stance to life. Because the reality is a lot of folks in that scenario that are asking the question, like, why would you do this now? The logical, the thinking in that scenario, and you tell me if I'm wrong about this, is why don't you wait till your life settles down? Why don't you wait till, you know, the girls leave school and then it becomes why don't we, why don't you wait till, it just keeps, just keeps, there's always something outside that has to change in order for you to, to that you want. We had a really interesting conversation about even just doing the mentorship at a time like this. Can you say more about that? Because I feel like it's actually quite important to, to think your way, the way you, you guys thought your way through this and the way that you manage that conversation at a really stressful time, a time of flux and change. I think a lot of people go back on their heels there. But that wasn't your instinct and it hasn't been your instinct since. So, how, how do you sort of explain that to, how did you explain this to Luke? How did you guys work through this together and how do you explain it to your friends?

Brittany Fox:

So, when I wanted to do this, And Luke wasn't, he just hadn't been brought on the journey with me, right? I hadn't, I had been listening to the podcast. I was sending him once off, but like, he was so head down, needed to get through this. And, and then, you know, because he's been through so many big events. So he was part of the 19 or 2019, 2020 fires. It was in and out of a helicopter, straight into floods, straight into COVID. had a very stressful career.

Tex:

Mmm.

Brittany Fox:

then we were going through this right when I was pregnant. So, you know, figure, he was wanting to just, let's just get through this. And I was like, we've been, we've been getting through this for four years.

Tex:

Mmm.

Brittany Fox:

there's always going to be something

Tex:

Mmm.

Brittany Fox:

and I have to make a plan he knows this about me and there's, there's, look, I can get things done for us. need you to jump on the bandwagon with me right now so that I can sleep at night and I can feel like I've got some of the things working for us because I don't want to get to the end of this and then go, what, what next? I don't want to be living life by the seat of my pants and waiting for it to happen to me.

Tex:

It can be really hard at these points in time because it's easier just to sort of tunnel in and just go, we just put one step in front of the other. We put one step in front of the other. We put one step in front of the other and it can feel like, very superfluous even very self indulgent to actually step out of that for a second. Just like, just detach yourself from the situation and actually go, what do we want? Like, what are we trying to optimize for here? Because, you know, when you're putting that step after step after step, you need to make sure those steps are in the right direction, right?

Brittany Fox:

Our mentality changed as soon as I was like, I need to do this. And we even had the first call and hadn't actually paid or like actually started the program. And it took us like two months between the first call and actually paying because like starting the program. I'll be honest, like it's, only just finished the program. So that's a year from start. So that's not saying that this was an overnight thing. This is saying like, we've, we're working on this on two hours, but it's on the front of our, like in the back of our mind of the things we need to do. But it's the fact of it's the mentality change.

Tex:

Oh yeah.

Brittany Fox:

once we had the Life by Design session, honestly, that was enough for to keep us going for the next two months until we started the program

Tex:

Yeah. Yeah.

Brittany Fox:

Suddenly when you're in that step by step by step by step and you're just taking a decision by day, you can figure out what's important and you can even learn one more tool and put that into play for the next time, that can get you through to the next stage. And then you go, okay, I'm ready to learn more.

Tex:

Yeah.

Brittany Fox:

even that step by step, this can be a step by step.

Tex:

Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah.

Brittany Fox:

just committing to change so that you don't have to be slapped in the face by life. no plan. If you have a plan, or at least a North Star that you want to get to, decisions become a lot more clear and suddenly you're not getting pivoted and railroaded by that shiny object over here that's actually not aligned to what you wanted.

Tex:

Yeah. It's interesting when I hear you say that. I I recently started. listening to this book that I've heard for a long time and it's a really old book. I think it was written in the 1930s. It's like a hundred years old, this book. And it's, it's called Outwitting the Devil. And it's written by Napoleon Hill who wrote this other famous book called Think and Grow Rich. And, uh, you know, he had sort of studied all these successful people and he started to sort of put this thesis together and he sort of, he uses a conversation with in parentheses, the devil as a metaphor for explaining like what stops people. And. Basically this whole conversation, basically the devil says here, here's what stops people and he says, I call it drifting. If I can just induce somebody to drift through their life that's how I actually get what I want, which is you doing fuck all. Uh, you, you living reactively. It's a, it's a quite an interesting, I don't agree with like everything, everything that he says in there. There's some really backwards ideas on your 1930s. But just as a concept, he goes through and he talks about all these different ways where it's just like, yeah, fuck, that's true. You know, when I, when I find myself in that situation, I'm just drifting. I'm just drifting through life. And he's like, the only way that. The only way that I can't sort of impact people is like when people have a definiteness of purpose. And it doesn't matter what the purpose is. It just crowds out my, because it's just entropy, right? It's like, if you don't plant seeds in the garden of your mind, you'll always be pulling weeds. And you'll always be, like you say, just getting slapped in the face by life. And that's where your focus is instead of you going, yeah, life happens. And we just keep moving towards our direction, you know? And it's just that definiteness of purpose. You either have it or you don't. And I think that's why that session is so important because you don't come out of it without a definiteness of purpose. You know exactly what it is. So you can sort of start to problem solve and you can deal with the challenges on the way without getting smashed by life.

Brittany Fox:

And it's also just, sometimes you need a facilitator to extrapolate things. What you both find important. Luke and I were always aligned, there were these little gems in there that I didn't know were important to him or things that he wanted to do in his life or things that he found really important. And was great because it was putting it all on this board that we have, we know we're

Tex:

You would have loved the post it notes.

Brittany Fox:

Oh my goodness. Yes. sat there and I was like, this is what it's like to be on the other side of workshop. I facilitate a lot of workshops and it was pretty nice to be on the other side.

Tex:

Yeah, that's good, isn't it? So you can just actually, you can relax and not have to be the one running the conversation. You can actually just be part. I don't do it for myself either. I get Mitch to do it for me.

Brittany Fox:

Yeah,

Tex:

year, I'll probably, I'm due soon, I think. We did it in July last year. We'll do it again July this year. And it's actually crazy how much changes in that period of time.

Brittany Fox:

if you, could see my fireplace mantle behind this. Yeah, there's, there's a poster board up with like

Tex:

Love it. So, so tell me more about the business, right? So you, you talked about this idea, this insight, which is most things are kind of stitched together. We did some early work together, and I think this is what I really wanted to implore you for as well. It was just how do I get busy solving problems and getting to the real world? Were we your first sort of test case? Like were we the, were you number one or was there a couple with us?

Brittany Fox:

Well, I had done two practice ones, but they didn't actually have a business. So I was helping them design their business, the, the flow. guys were definitely my first like audit, I guess. And that kind of came about the, like, I didn't expect it. I had through your experience and there was like a couple little glitches. And I just, you know, screenshot them and send them to Ryan and be like, Hey, just letting you know that this is broken. Like,

Tex:

Let's fix this broken thing.

Brittany Fox:

help myself. And,

Tex:

it's awesome. Oh,

Brittany Fox:

with Ryan to just get us back on track because we hadn't actually and we hadn't actually done anything in a long time. And the session, I was like, okay, so we've made progress. We haven't made progress in this, but we've made progress in at least understanding what we're going to do. And so now we're, I'm starting the business and. he was like, tell me about the business. And it must've been a time when you guys were going through quite a bit of design in your brand and trying and putting in quite a few layers across channels that you were trying to get people come from the podcast or the website to become a community member. And then the app and trying to put it all together. And I must've resonated.

Tex:

100%. Yeah, it's it was good timing actually and it was so, it was so funny. Like, and I think this is, it's so worth talking about because the only thing you need as a business, the only thing that defines a business is if you have a customer and the customer needs to invest two things. Time first and money. And so the first, the first part is can you get people to invest their time to be able to solve this problem? Do they care enough about it to actually spend any time on it? And so you're validating these things as you go, but building evidence and also getting Insight, getting feedback as to sort of like where the value is. And so we actually did a few sessions together and like, like you, you, what you said is true, like you really sort of mapped it out, you guys had gone through and did you have some sort of scraping thing and you'd gone through and sort of looked at like where all that traffic was coming from, what was happening and then we sort of went through different stages of the website. That's what's happening, yeah?

Brittany Fox:

Yeah, so I had, at a very basic level, we had built a crawler that crawls your website and it screen grabs every image on your whole website. And then we, and then I would manually map it and all the different pathways between your website. And I think you came to the first session completely blind, like you had no idea what I was going to do. And, and Ryan had just told you to show up. So that was actually great. That was fantastic because didn't know there was a need.

Tex:

Yeah. Yeah.

Brittany Fox:

And so I got really honest feedback from you of that. This is time that I'm taking away and I need. And so it was great because I was validating that time So because my client base had always been enterprise, it was such an easy sell. They know they had a lot of siloed teams. What I hadn't, Hadn't worked with was small businesses and what you guys showed me was time. It was about time where that's never important in enterprise. so

Tex:

you've got a lot of people on different layers who need to be busy in certain ways because you just need to be busy.

Brittany Fox:

And some of their KPIs might not be as like, get this done as soon as possible. It might be it done. Yeah.

Tex:

a, it was such a useful experience. Cause it just, uh, like the analogy I gave was like, you know, when you build a business, you basically, you just add on layers, you know, you solve one problem and you cannot always know the. interdependencies that you're creating. And what you end up with is like a lattice work of different journeys that you can take people through. And I was like, this just looks like a maze. It looks like a maze. And it's so funny because you cannot step out of it until you have a person who's out of it, looking at it from within. And we're in that, I think it might've been the second session and you're like, yeah, so talk me through this. So all your traffic, most of your traffic is coming from the podcast. You know, you've got this, this many thousand people coming through, blah, blah, blah. And so they're all in the podcast, right? And then you're hitting this one page. And you're talking about the podcast? Why? I was like, that is a really good point, Bruce. Let's, let's not do that anymore.

Brittany Fox:

Yeah, and it's such an easy one to get caught in and, and it was, uh, very nice to be able to go through your website and your experience because I've, I've been a customer. And so I know the value and I know what you were trying to say and, and what you were, what you were trying to get across, but when you're in execution, so you're executing in a podcast and at the bottom, it just says. Oh, here's some text for you to add links different places. And if you just didn't, oh, yeah, that's just like an admin task without thinking about what you, what you were talking about in that podcast and what you want them to do and what's the problem you're solving. It's very easy to just send them to the homepage and then they go to the homepage and then they've got this plethora of options

Tex:

Mmm.

Brittany Fox:

and you might even be sending them straight back to the podcast

Tex:

Yep.

Brittany Fox:

guys were.

Tex:

It's a circle.

Brittany Fox:

Right, but

Tex:

Yep.

Brittany Fox:

of those things where if you don't think about every tool for its intent and how it's actually going to be utilized to get them through the funnel. That's that gap between channels and the channels and the places that you're executing in, they're only looking, helping you look at a channel. They're not helping you figure out the end to end between channels. And that was the big gap and the big aha moment working with large enterprise and siloed teams was they would execute on a channel level or on a campaign level, and they never had visibility on each other and no one took responsibility for the end to end because they literally couldn't.

Tex:

Yeah, and

Brittany Fox:

I, I, I aimed to break that and I aimed to find a way for teams to be able

Tex:

we'll have a look at our, like, we were just laughing about it yesterday, but I'm like, if you have a look at our website now, it's so, so completely different. We actually broke it down, actually changed the whole website, uh, got rid of the other one completely, and now we're rebuilding very deliberately in terms of what that looks like. So if you hit our front page, and then you go to the mentorship page, like it all looks completely different, how you get there is different, and then how we're building out. Like journeys on top of it it's almost, it's almost irrecognizable in that sense. So it's been awesome, but I also want to sort of just talk to what you did after this, right? Because essentially you're saying, will people invest the time to want to solve this problem? Do they even see this? Can they perceive that it's a problem? But we talked about as well The idea that you've got to get out there and actually find that out. So we were an early conversation. Tell me more about what you were doing in groups and what you did on LinkedIn and sort of the dialogue, uh, the inner dialogue that you're going through there and what you found on the other side of it.

Brittany Fox:

Oh, there's a big fear that I don't know what I'm doing

Tex:

Yeah.

Brittany Fox:

I need, and you, if you haven't caught this yet, I like to be well planned. So, and that's not. you can really do in a startup. You can be planned to an extent, but there's, you just kind of have to put out, put yourself out there and and fail. I thought I was just test and fail, but I haven't failed yet. There's just been learnings, which has been fantastic. So I was a bit afraid to post on LinkedIn, which is silly now looking back at it. I was just thinking, how can I, no one's going to. not a thought leader. But, what makes that other guy who's been getting all these comments and likes a thought leader who's 20? And I was like, I actually have a lot of knowledge to give. I actually have been advising C suite years across large enterprise. don't I know good enough things that other people would find of value? And, I just started writing about Just things I knew. It was, I got started to get really good feedback and people coming back to me. But then I also just started joining literally every community. And collaborating and taking anybody up on an opportunity. And then one day I just did a post on a Facebook group offering a minute session just to get quick advice. I got absolutely inundated.

Tex:

This is gold for a startup, by the way. Like this is striking gold.

Brittany Fox:

Well, yeah, because I, I was testing a hypothesis that small businesses also struggle to see their end-to-end customer experience. And I just literally said, I'm offering up 30 minutes of my time. No sales. Just if you have a problem across your customer experience, you don't know what to do next or how to, how to connect to dots. Me and I had like 50 people message me in the first like hour. and so I, I spent. a week or two just doing these calls.

Tex:

Yeah.

Brittany Fox:

some of them were a waste of time as they always are. I didn't give very good criteria, most of them, anything, they were validating

Tex:

Oh yeah.

Brittany Fox:

and I got three clients out of it actually. That

Tex:

a, that's the thing, right? Like think about, so you've got two things solved, which is enough people perceive this as a problem. That's like. 50 people and then they're willing to actually invest their time to learn more about solving the problem. That's the number two. And then we, yeah, that was 30. And then three of the 30 actually want to spend.

Brittany Fox:

Three that I've sold right now. I've got four more that are still in proposal stage, but yeah.

Tex:

Yeah. So like an amazing return on effort when you think about one post, right. And I always sort of say, like, it's funny to me, like, uh, I'll talk to people at times and they go, Oh, you just could never do what you do. Like put yourself out there like that. And you know, I'm just not a self promoter and I'm like, Sorry, and they, uh, and they don't realize that it's a, it's insulting to hear that, because what I usually say is I kind of go, if you look, you'll see that I'm never really taught, like, I might tell a story of mine, but I'm not promoting myself. I'm talking about an idea. I'm talking about an idea, and so the idea might be the five life windows, or it might be this other framework that we talked about, or this lesson that I learned, or whatever, but it's coming through as a story, but I'm not promoting myself, I'm promoting an idea, which hopefully is of value to you, and they're like, well, I didn't really notice that, and these are the same people That you hear nothing from, except every six months or so, I'm thrilled to announce that I just got promoted to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, that's fucking self promotion. That is self promotion.

Brittany Fox:

And I think it was actually you who I was speaking to when I, maybe I was saying that I was afraid to start posting and getting myself out there and you're like, what for what? Like, I think you actually did that to me. And I was like, I. I don't know. I think I'm afraid. And I, and then I was like, wait, what am I afraid of? I should just bite the bullet and start getting out there. And yeah, I've grown my LinkedIn quite, largely over the last month, which has

Tex:

You've done, you've been doing an awesome job. And I've seen Brett, your co founder as well, getting amongst it. And this is where I think we really have to move into the way the world works now. And there's a, there's a, there's a real schism happening between people who are thinking that we still live in the world of atoms.

Brittany Fox:

Mm hmm.

Tex:

But actually we live in the world of bits. And there's real estate for the taking. And the real estate is, if you give enough value to somebody else, and invest in that person, you can own a space in their mind, until they're ready to solve the problem, which is exactly why you came to us, Britt. We invested in you for two years. until it was time for you to do it. And so every time you go out and give value and every time, you know, we put this podcast together and every minute we invest in it. And by the way, it's a lot of time and it's a lot of money to do that. It's totally worth it because you're owning digital real estate and you're owning psychological real estate because you've given and you've invested in somebody who's, who's, who's at some stage going to want help. And so if you've already helped them and you've already given them value, it's really obvious. Okay, now I actually want to solve the problem. Who am I going to go to? Well, who else? And like, if you're a knowledge worker and you have expertise and you're just expecting the world to turn around and acknowledge you because you have those things, it just won't. Like, you actually have to show that, prove that all of the time. And if you won't do it because of some faithless crowd of critics, you'll never get to anywhere near possible what you could achieve. And that's, that's includes whether you work for someone or whether you want to work for yourself or build your own thing. I just, I see this as an opportunity that you just go, it's infinite scale right now. Every episode that we put up on the internet, it costs us 15 cents an episode. To have a hundred episodes

Brittany Fox:

was great.

Tex:

accessible at all times, going globally, that is an unparalleled opportunity that didn't exist before. And while I'm talking to you now, I'm in the ears of thousands of people, and that's happening effortlessly because of the work and the investment that we put in beforehand. And so, I just, yeah, that's, I think I might have, I might have shaken you a little bit and go, Come on! Let's go! Because you can't not, right? Like, yeah. You've got to give yourself every chance. You've got to give yourself every chance.

Brittany Fox:

Yeah. And I met with a lot of founders thinking they've got all this wisdom. They're going to share it with me. And a lot of it was that they just had consistency and that they put themselves out everywhere and that they were social. So yeah, you do have to be a bit extra extroverted. I, I found that to be quite hard when I was in corporate because I wasn't aligned

Tex:

Yeah,

Brittany Fox:

To the work. I didn't find passion in it. It was a job. It wasn't my life's work. It wasn't like I was gonna go to these network events and like preach. And I just felt like it was very, eh, sales. Where, I'm selling now, I have no problems talking to you about. And I actually don't care if you buy from me. I'm, I'm more invested in the relationships now. I actually started doing a, a networking thing called BNI. And it's a, it's about giver's gain. And it's a, It's just actually really nice to work with small businesses who are invested in each other and that the referral will come down the line. And that's actually been really powerful in this business. And I would rather learn about you and see what you need. If I give you someone in my network who's having, and I've helped them and now I've helped you.

Tex:

100%. It's it's hard to deep reprogram yourself of this, but like, we get conditioned to go, you know, if you do X amount of study, then you'll get X result. If you follow X rule, then you'll get this. And it's kind of this mentality of like, if I do this, I should get this. I call it the worker B mentality and it will ruin your life if you let it, because you'll only ever do things in a transactional way. I do this, I should get this. You'll never actually move from that to an investor mentality, which is I'm going to do this, whether or not I get any result for it now, and I'll do it consistently enough until things start to compound. And that's exactly what happens. All the time. And so people go, well, I don't have money. So therefore I'm not an investor. I'm like, you are, you invest every day. You invest your time in certain relationships in businesses and environments that you're in every time you invest right now, you're listening to this podcast, you're investing your time. And so do you get return on those investments? And can you be more active in the way that you invest to make things compound? And I think we just get so caught up in like, what visually it looks like from the outside. I've been posting for 18 months on LinkedIn. And you go, well, you picked up 4 thousand followers, that's, that's okay. Picked up 400 thousand impressions, that's okay. But nothing happened for 10 months, cause I was shit. Like, I didn't, I didn't understand the platform at all. And I'm not saying, you know, I'm really good now. I'm saying, I kind of get it now. And then you start getting inbound opportunities. We've got B2B opportunities now that are worth well over a million dollars. And that would never happen if I stuck with that worker bee mentality where I'm just like, well, I posted and I didn't get a like, so. Therefore, this is a waste of time. There's no ROI in this for me. I better just go and do something else where I expect an immediate result as well. You robbed yourself, I reckon.

Brittany Fox:

I've been posting for six months and I had a call last week from a CMO of a very well known brand who I worked with in a previous life and she called me to tell me she was so impressed by the quality of my content and can I have a meeting with her and her head is. Digital and CRM. She wants to be a part of the journey. And I was like, well, yeah, like, I didn't know she even saw the post.

Tex:

This is what's interesting. This is what's super interesting, right? You assume that if you're not getting a like, people aren't watching. Actually, most of the folks that actually have come through and done business with us, some of them have never liked a post of mine,

Brittany Fox:

Mm hmm.

Tex:

but they, I was at a 40th recently, and I was talking to a guy there and he's like, Oh, I love your posts. And I'm like, Really? Never seen you engage with anything. And he's like, Oh, no, I read it. I read every single post. I read every post

Brittany Fox:

Yeah.

Tex:

and I'm like, okay. And so people just, you don't realize because you think, you know, it's all about likes and engagement. That's what I think. It's actually not. Most of the time it's not. It's, it's, it's, yeah, it's, it's, it's exponential in that way.

Brittany Fox:

And that actually goes back to the customer experience of like the problems that I'm solving is everyone just looks at the numbers and the analytics and that's the only metric and the data they use measure and make decisions on the experience where some of it is just really common sense on if I read your post, did you want me to do? Who are you talking to? And then where do you want me to go? And if I do do that action. Do I have the content on that next page that's going to give me the answer to the problem that I'm trying to solve? And most of the time, it's not.

Tex:

Yeah, most of the time it's not at all. It's not linked up at all. Actually, I do want to come back to this. So in the business, so can you, you can say the name, right?

Brittany Fox:

Yeah, Nevum CX.

Tex:

Sorry, we should have said the name. Nevum CX, yeah?

Brittany Fox:

Yeah.

Tex:

So.

Brittany Fox:

don't know, uh, okay, Nevum CX, I probably should explain why it's Nevum CX. So, Nevum is the word maven backwards. Maven is actually from Malcolm Gladwell's book, The Tipping Point, where he named people connectors, uh, connoisseurs of things, and I just thought, you know, I'm the back end of your connection points. Nevem. Also, mean, I love the word a lot, Maven, and I named my daughter Maven.

Tex:

Did you really,

Brittany Fox:

Yeah, yeah, my, my four year old's name, Maven.

Tex:

what's the mission? So what do you wanna accomplish? What change do you wanna make?

Brittany Fox:

Well, I want to change how businesses, uh, find, identify problems. and collaborate on them.

Tex:

Mm

Brittany Fox:

if businesses can optimize the customer experience by being able to see things visually and, and find it in one place, they'll be able to align on the problem a lot faster, saving them like crazy amounts of money and meetings. And this is especially for enterprise and then being able to integrate into their own project management tools where they can execute on it and have visualization across and just. Being able to see your entire experience in one place, what problems exist, how everyone's acting on it, will implement a change in the way businesses work. So we're definitely going towards more of an experimentational culture,

Tex:

mm

Brittany Fox:

businesses are really struggling to do that a wide scale pace, where a tool like this will allow them. To optimize on a micro level across their customer experience and and marketing is getting messier and messier with a I creating content all the time. It's becoming literally unmanageable to see all that content in one place and all the different experiences, especially when you're using tools that are generating new pathways.

Tex:

mm

Brittany Fox:

see all the different pathways you're creating, you can't AI could be creating loops that you don't know about or different pathways and personalization that doesn't actually resonate. And you need to have a view of all of that in one place and be able to work with your team quickly so that it's not catastrophic financially or for lost customers, because the, loyalty of customers is as short lived as one bad experience.

Tex:

Oh, the amount of time you have to invest Now it's, it's such a low trust environment. The amount of time you have to invest in a customer now is a lot more. And there's so much you can, there's just little things you can do that just, you have no idea. I'm sure we do it all the time, but you just have no clue. The vision for you, if you make this change, is it that every business kind of has a. A bird's eye view that they can very quickly go from a bird's eye to a worm's eye view of exactly where the gaps are, where the leaks are and where, where they can sort of twist a few knobs to change the outcome. Is that what you're trying to do?

Brittany Fox:

Yeah.

Tex:

Because it's actually a software you're building, yeah?

Brittany Fox:

Yeah.

Tex:

Should clarify that. So you're, you've been, you've been consulting just to really learn this problem, but you've got a co founder, Brett, who's a technical side of things. And he's helping you, I guess, bake these principles, these lessons into a tool you guys are building to make it happen now. Yeah.

Brittany Fox:

Yeah. And every time we do it with a client and a new insight that we find on a problem that we've found that doesn't pick up these problems that we're finding, you know, like your, your podcast example, analytics isn't going to tell you that your traffic's dropping and then they're dropping off on the homepage and they're going back to the podcast. Podcast. That's not something that. Analytics is taught to do. So we're trying to find the insights that are from a scanning of content view and just make sense. And then we feed that in to look for it again. So then every time we find a new insight, it can find it for the next client. So then everybody is building off these new insights that they can act on. So it's not just about Seeing, pulling data and showing you a dashboard that then you have to diagnose. It's actually giving you a bird's eye view and insights that you can act on and assign to somebody and act on. It's like

Tex:

That's the gap. Yeah.

Brittany Fox:

that's the big gap. And the amount of time that businesses spend trying to find the problem and then figure out what to do with it and then try to talk to teams to execute on it. We're just trying to shorten that right down.

Tex:

Do you know what I just realized then when you said that, is you probably spend most of your tickets trying to diagnose correctly or going from one misdiagnosis to another without actually getting the result you want, and so by the time you actually did find the thing, you're just out of gas. You're just like, oh, fuck it. So you're trying to, you're actually trying to collapse that period so that you don't spend all the energy to get to the answer. You can spend all your energy on actually acting on the answer. Is that right?

Brittany Fox:

And that came from years of working with clients and implementing like experimentation cultures or helping them find problems that they needed to execute and then having to spend hours in meetings with different stakeholders to convince them of the problem, put it in their backlog, act on it. Then we measure success, report on it. look back on, then try to find, like, set up an experiment, design it, blah, blah, blah, then you find the results a month later. That's crazy. That's crazy. And no, no customers are going to be that patient anymore.

Tex:

No, exactly, exactly. Hey, this has been so cool to be able to dig into this with you and it's awesome to see what you're doing. Really want to encourage everyone to check out Neevum. And I guess just follow the journey as well. And if you're interested at all, like, what are you looking for at the moment in terms of support, connections, partnerships? Is there anything specific?

Brittany Fox:

Well, right now we're looking for that are SAS products in the scale up mode that are either going through a rebrand or they're replatforming some things they're now finally, maybe looking at the customer experience for the first time. And they've just been in getting sales mode, improving themselves. And they're, and they're probably going for more of a product market fit or diversifying past that first ideal customer profile. And so they need help. Finding the gaps in their customer experience and optimizing. So that's what the, our current clients are right now. And that's what I think I'm probably in this space for. Also early adopters, if you're a large enterprise and you want to be an early adopter and come with us and let us build the tech for your business, that'd be a pretty fantastic story to jump on. Well,

Tex:

for folks who are listening to this inspired by what they've just heard from you and wanting to know how you would coach them, advise them through going after something that they care about, one of their own dreams?

Brittany Fox:

you already know what you're going to do in the next six to 12 months doing the thing that you're already doing. Pretty much most people do know financially where they're going to be in a year doing the thing they're already doing. I mean, unless you do something drastic, you cannot expect anything different.

Tex:

Yep.

Brittany Fox:

Fundamentally. So it's, taking a bet on yourself and it's just saying yes to one thing. Try something new. I mean, the cost of course is, pennies on the value of your time a year or two wasted doing the thing that you're already doing when you could have a better plan and a better outlook a year from now.

Tex:

Like just start acting. That's what I'm hearing from you. Just start moving. And what about like how, so the point you made before about having a plan and being planned and not being reactive? If you're talking to somebody who you know is living that life right now, how do you encourage them to change their stance?

Brittany Fox:

Most people, they just don't know they accept their status quo. So it's about. Don't be afraid to go and ask an accountant all of your stupid questions. Because they're not stupid.

Tex:

No. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Brittany Fox:

go and ask a mortgage broker. Go and ask three of them. I got one mortgage broker who got really upset with me when I went with another one. He's like, but I invested in you. I'm like, that's your job. Like, I could have got you the same deal. That's great. I didn't click with you. But, it doesn't matter. What I'm saying is Just, you just have to start finding, I just call people and I just start sending out emails. If you're afraid of calling and talking to people and that's like a really hard thing, I just send emails and ask stupid questions. And if they don't get back to me, whatever, I'll ask the next person. I don't care. Everybody's trying to get your business. So, if they really care, they'll get, they'll answer your questions. And if they, if, if they don't care. You can just ignore them after you get your answers if you don't want to do it. Like, I don't know, but you just have to try. And just keep finding out the information, because otherwise you're going with half the information and no plan.

Tex:

I love that. Now, where can people find out more about you and Nevum as well?

Brittany Fox:

Well, I'm on LinkedIn, Brittany Fox, and my company is Nevamcx, which is N E V A M C X. And I love to connect with new people. try and see if I can solve anybody's problems, but also just connect them with other people that they might be seeking or solve problems that they're trying to find. So, I, I definitely like to live by the Maven mentality of being a connector.

Tex:

reckon you're pretty good at that, actually. I'll give you, I'll give you some pretty good kudos on that. We've had like three or four conversations where you've connected us with folks, so it's awesome.

Brittany Fox:

Yeah, I, I, I, I would rather connect people, I actually spend a lot of my time connecting other people, I think. But it always pays back in good karma.

Tex:

Absolutely. Absolutely. Hey, thank you so much for coming on, sharing your story. It's awesome to see what you guys are doing. And I think as well, if you haven't already said it, I'm sure you have. Acknowledge Luke as your best investor.

Brittany Fox:

Oh, I have. Actually, I gave him a shout out on LinkedIn. Like, my first, my first investor. He's our best one.

Tex:

Awesome. Hey, thank you so much. Let's talk again soon.

Brittany Fox:

Thank you.

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