What are some of the biggest lessons you have learnt?
My first two lessons were around money and people.
When we were two years into Udder Delights, I was in a business mentor program, and my mentor asked me several times “What’s the profit per cent of your best-selling cheese?”. I kept deflecting the question and showing him our latest PR or award. Finally, he insisted “Would you stop marketing and start doing the costings!”
I thought, I’ll show you. So, I found a food manufacture and costing guide (which I still have to this day) and spent two weeks creating Excel spreadsheets. And I discovered that our best-selling product was running at a 10 per cent loss! That was a really painful realisation. I remember feeling very ashamed for about two weeks, and then I said to myself, it’s time to fix this. From that moment on, I became the product costing guru.
My next lesson happened when I was involved in a stressful industrial dispute with a former employee. A businesswoman friend of mine reminded me that difficult scenarios like these had a lesson in them, for my employee and for me. And an opportunity.
I decided that day, I was going to get really good at HR.
So, my theory around business is this: every business has a trade; some might be environmental engineers, others hairdressing. Ours just happens to be cheese making. The key to running a successful business is learning to manage people and money.
What motivates you to get out of bed each morning? Do you have a ritual?
I love breakfast, I love not rushing, and I love reading while I’m having my breakfast.
But when you’re in crisis - when you wake up with dread in your belly - it’s just grit and determination that gets you up.
What has been your hardest day, and how did you get back on track?
The hardest time was when my mum died. Mum and Dad were my business partners from the beginning. I also paid my mum to be a nanny to my two daughters, and to be the bookkeeper in our second business, a food tourism business. My mum got really sick, they diagnosed her with three brain tumours and she died four months later at age 58. That was the hardest period in my life because I couldn’t take time off to grieve. I had to take her role, and shuffle everything around.
Another time, some really expensive equipment we’d bought from Germany started shredding metal into the cheese. We had to go through an internal product recall and then fight the insurance company for 12 months. I woke up feeling dread every single morning for 12 months, because our house deposit was funding the business. If we didn’t win, it would have been 16 years of business for nothing. But they eventually paid out.
After we sold 90 per cent of the business, I still had to manage through our first ever public product recall, which was the result of buying new equipment again. And then a month later, we had bushfires in our town.
My friends were saying, wow, this must be the hardest thing you’ve ever done. And I’m like, it’s not, because my house is safe.
What have you done that has helped transform business in Australia?
When I first started on the scene, people always said French cheese is better. But I read books, hired a consultant, Saul brought his dogmatic focus, his relentless drive, and we went through lots of trial and error. Now we’ve shown that Australia can make brie that’s just as good as the French.
What do you think is at the heart of the entrepreneur?
You have an appetite for risk. You work very hard. Ultimately, you want freedom but it’s ironic, because you give that up for a long time until it comes.
You have the right balance between chasing after the new thing and making sure the foundation is built. I’ve noticed a lot of what I call “the entrepreneur syndrome”. People are distracted by the next shiny big thing, which means they’re not bedding down their first shiny new thing. Sometimes those people don’t make it.
How has your business made a social, purposeful impact on Australia?
Udder Delights buys direct from 10 family-owned dairy farms. That helps those farms stay viable, and the children of the farmers are buying in because they can see there’s a future in it.
Also, by providing employment regionally. Most people want to work where they live, they don’t want to travel far.
And my purpose? I was born and bred in Elizabeth in South Australia, a traditionally lower socio-economic area established primarily as a manufacturing heartland. I joke that you can take the girl out of Elizabeth, but you can’t take Elizabeth out of the girl. What that meant for me, as I was building the Udder Delights brand, was not making it posh, or intimidating or fancy-pants, which cheese can be.
And that partly came from having two close, dear friends who are complete foodies, who were raising kids on their own with very little to live on. I thought of those people who love good cheese but can’t afford it all the time.
So that was always my driving force: to make the best cheese, to make it good value, and make it accessible to as many people as we could.
