Life Uncut - Uncut with Grace Beverley - Becoming a high net worth woman by making a hobby into a hustle.

Episode Date: March 20, 2023

Joining us on the podcast today is Grace Beverley. Grace is now 25, and she's already been on the Forbes 30 under 30 list.She created a huge following on instagram by wanting to be held accountable with going to the gym. She has turned that into two incredibly successful businesses.In this chat we talk about:-Building a business from the ground up-How funding works-How much privilege comes into being a 'success'-Being taken seriously in the business worldWe also speak about the difference that a 2023 lens puts on the way we used to look at 'empowering' women in 2006 and how P!nk used Paris Hilton's sex tape as humiliation.You also gave us the most savage break up texts that you've ever received and your exes sound like garbage!If you haven't already, we'd love a cheeky review on apple pods or a star rating on spotify. Hit follow and all of the other stuff.Tell your mum, tell your dad, tell your dog, tell your friend and share the love because we love love! xxSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Life Uncut acknowledges the traditional custodians of country whose lands were never ceded. We pay our respects to their elders past and present. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land. This episode was recorded on Darug Wollongong land. Hi guys and welcome back to another episode of Life Uncut. I'm Laura. I'm Brittany. And we have a huge episode for you today. We're interviewing Grace Beverley.

And Britt, I know that this one you are so excited about. Yeah, I've followed Grace for a very long time. For those that don't know who Grace Beverley is, she's the founder and CEO of two very big successful companies. One's Tala and one is Shreddy. Now, they're very fitness-based companies. She's from the UK and I reckon I followed her for six or seven years from before she was as influential and as big as she is now.

She just used to be a real fitness person. She had a great booty. She used to work on it. I was like, I want a booty. So I started following her from back then. But she's graced, that was not even a pun, she's graced the Forbes 30 under 30. She is a highly successful entrepreneur. She speaks a lot about business and she's built it all herself from the ground up, which I have always found very inspirational. And I know we get a lot of messages from you guys wanting to know how to start a business. How do you do it? How do people go and get funding for their ideas? How do they put into practice? How do they copyright ideas? There's so much to it that I think the average person that wasn't born into

that world finds it really difficult to know. Yeah. And I think even, I mean, both of us, we started Life Uncut, but then for me, myself being a business owner, it's so incredible to listen to other women speak about how they started their businesses. And Grace, when she made it into Forbes 30 Under 30, she was only 23 years old. So she has just an unbelievable wealth of advice. If you have ever had an idea about starting a business, if you've ever kind of thought maybe I would like to dabble in something, turn my hobby into a full-time career, there's so much to this that I think you'll find empowering and very interesting. We're also going to talk about this whole Paris Hilton and Pink film clip thing, the

Stupid Girls film clip that Pink released many, many moons ago. And we're seeing it everywhere now because Paris Hilton has just released her memoir where she talks about it. We also have your most savage breakup text. Oh, and they're so savage. They're awful. Let's get into it. I'm having a really bad start to the day.

You look really good though. Oh, thank you. In a little matching pink ensemble. Do you know why that means so much? And I'm in a matching blue ensemble. Oh my God, I didn't think of that. Oh, we need to get a photo. We look like Powerpuff Girls.

I am in a pink set. Pink on pink on pink. It's denim, pink pants, pink jacket, and you are in my favourite shirt of yours. It's blue with checks and then you've got blue pants on. And yes, I know what you're going to say. I said one day she looked like a tea towel. Britt is saying now that this is her favourite shirt of hers. Every time I wear it, she's like, oh, my little tea towel-y.

Hi, tea towel. Do you know why I quickly had to get that out? You know when you know someone's going to write you off so you quickly do it to yourself before I knew you were going to throw me under the bus. So I was like, I do not sound like as much of an arsehole. That's all. You were like, how do I make it sound like I haven't been paying Laura

out about this for the last two weeks? The thing is, it's my favourite colour. I wear that colour. I love that colour. But it does look the checks on it. I would be lying if I said it didn't remind me of a tea towel because, you know, standard tea towels, everyone knows, are those big checks.

That's what a standard tea towel is. You're not digging up. You're like digging sideways. I'm not trying to dig. Admit it, though. That's the tea towel. Like the square is the tea towel. But it's a great shirt.

It makes your eyes look amazing and you look banging. And we do look like Powerpuff Girls. It's a little bit tea towel-y. I had a different set on today for this record. I was really going all out today. I had an all white satin slash silk. I don't know what it is. Satin, I guess.

No, it's fleece. What's that? It's that like crinkly material. It's a type of fabric. Oh, okay. Well, for the plebs like myself that don't know fashion, it was silky satin. Crinkly, silky satin fleece. It was a crinkly, silky satin fleece.

Anyway, I had this beautiful white, they're like wide leg pants and it was a matching top and I was really five, you know, and then I was trying to get ready this morning and I bought a brand new yesterday, a brand new foundation, Estee Lauder double wear, not sponsored, but like when I have really long work days, I wear this thick double wear because it doesn't move. Once that goes on, that shit's there forever. Like SPAC filler. Oh, and I opened my makeup bag and it was like slow-mo, it flung out and it smashed on the ground onto my feet. And when I say it went everywhere it went all up my satin silky pleath what was it called please please it went all up my satin silky please it somehow splashed up to my breast did you get any on your face

though that's the important part no but it was a brand new double wear it's expensive it smashed onto the ground and it did go everywhere but it was sort of sat in like a puddle so you picked out some of it even though it's gonna have glass that's what's on my face right now i was like i'm not wasting this so like i dabbed my fingers onto the top of the puddle like ow ow pain is beauty beauty is yeah i think i got cut no i didn't it's like scraped the glass across my face but i was like can't waste any makeup anyway it was a really shitty start to the day and then i didn't even clean it up i just closed the door i was like i don't have time so delilah i'll probably get home in july i'll have a face of makeup but that's my start to the

day but otherwise i'm feeling good well i feel like we've had such i mean we had such a good weekend we had mitch tree's birthday party on the weekend it was barbie themed it was very fun okay i'm just gonna stop you there awkward it was mitch tree's boyfriend's birthday it wasn't mitch's it it was hayden's birthday but mitch invited us so we felt like it was also like a joint housewarming it was yeah it was a bit of an everything party it was a barbie themed fantastic party oh you were blue to that as well you are having a blue moment last year i was vibing the green and this year i'm vibing the blue what's that about do you think don't know it's just my color of the season i guess i did jaeger shots you did jaeger shots we don't do shots what the

what like who am i who were we i don't know mom's gone wild until 10 30 p.m that's when i had to get home for the babysitter i literally like we had a babysitter booked until 11 we had to get an uber back i was dragging matthew johnson out of this party you mean ken well when we arrived matt even said to me he's like oh i don't i'm not gonna know anyone here can you just make sure you don't leave me like i don't want to be stuck in small talk talking to people i don't i was dragging that man out of the party like yelling at him to come the uber was sitting at the front saying i'm going to drive away he was everyone's best friend like best friend i think he's so inappropriate i actually think one of mitch's cousins or something he's going to have a beer with matt no it's mitch's

brother-in-law oh they were like best friends i think they're gonna run away and you know start a commune something i wanted to talk to you about it's something that happened to me on the weekend And I kind of wanted to do this as a call-out question, so keep in mind where this is heading. So we were at the beach on a Friday. On a work school day? Friday afternoon. I take the kids down the beach.

We have a little picnic in the Arvo. It's kind of like our little family tradition that we do each week. And we ran into one of Matt's friends, one of Matt's single friends. I won't say his name, but, you know, look, he's good-looking and he's looking for a girlfriend. I think I know the one. Because you kind of dated him. With a wink.

I just did. Britt knows exactly the one because she softly dated him. Oh, many, many, many, many full moons ago. Okay, so he's at the beach. We run into each other. We're having a chat and after about 20 minutes he's like, I've got to go. I've got a hinge date tonight.

And then he grabs a backpack, like what looked like an overnight bag. Like it was a big backpack to wear on a date but it wasn't so big that you would mistake it for a suitcase. Okay, so hang on. He was going directly to the date from the picnic? Yeah. You meant he had to go now? He was leaving.

He was going to the date. And I was like, what's going on here, pal? He says, he's like, oh, I'm going to stay over tonight. She's from Melbourne. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Back it up, back it up. So wait, you're going on a very first ever hinge date with a girl from Melbourne and you've taken an overnight bag

to stay at her place. Is that what the backpack was? Oh, it was what the backpack was. An overnight bag. I was like, has she said to you that you should expect to play the away game tonight? Like has she given you any hints that you're going to be staying over tonight?

and he was like, oh, like, you know, yeah, like we've been pretty flirty but he's like. The audacity. He's like, I know I'm going to stay there and the reason why I want to stay there at the hotel that she's staying at is because she's got air con. So we're in the middle of a heat wave in Sydney and he wanted to stay at the hotel because she had air conditioning.

He probably didn't even like the poor girl. He probably just went through all the hinged dating being like, who has air con? Please tick yes, no, maybe. It's like one of the prompts on his profile. Well, no, this got me thinking. I was like imagine if you went on the date and you actually didn't really like the person but then you were like so committed to playing the away game because you needed whatever they

had at their house and in this instance it was the air conditioning like maybe your water your plumbing's been turned off and you're like shit I really need to shower I'll just put my feelings out online dating or maybe your housemate has a dog that you can't stand so you're like I'm gonna go and stay at someone else's house tonight to get away from it and so did he stay no oh that's the best part she apparently had one of her girlfriends staying there the night no she probably just saw him turn up with an overnight bag and that's such a turn off right like if somebody had done that to me i would be like that is so presumptuous that i am turned off unless it was like chain tatum bring your whole suitcase bring your wardrobe move on in bring

your toothbrush bring your toilet paper you can go and stay forever actually you can use my toilet paper. You can use me. So stupid. Look, the only reason I sort of get that backpack thing is I've been in that situation once in the past, but it was, it was a little bit different. I had met a guy online. This has got to be 10 years ago now, but we're still friends. You know the one. And But he was from overseas, which is standard for Brittany. And he was coming from across the other side of Sydney to go on a date. And in my head, I was like, do I just tell him to bring a backpack in case he wants to stay? Because it was too far away.

I'm never going to go back to his house if it went that way. So I said to him, look, don't get any ideas. But if you want to pack a backpack in case it goes well. And I just put it out there. I said, it might go well. Bring a backpack in case. But it doesn't. Yeah.

But I was like, also, it might not. and I said and if you do want to stay the night I more put it like you know maybe if we have a drink you can stay but not with me I said I have a yoga mat in a spare room if you're happy to sleep on that that's what I said so I made him think that he was coming and if he stayed he was going to be in a spare room on a yoga mat that definitely did not happen we did yoga moves but it didn't we did not say on yoga mat in the spare room but I sort of get the backpack thing if it's that situation but you can't just rock up to a first date you don't just go to dinner and be like got my overnight bag I think even if I was into the guy even if I was like invested and I thought

yeah this is someone who I could take home I would be so instantly turned off by the fact that they were that presumptuous that they were going to come home with me on a first date like I would take that it would then become like a challenge you're not coming home with me absolutely I think that's what this girl did I think she was probably keen until he pulled out his toothbrush and he's like I'm really ready for some air con turn it right up baby all right well look if you've ever played the away game and it wasn't because you were actually just super into the person it was because you wanted something. Maybe they had a pool.

Maybe they had a boat. Whatever the reason was that you went and stayed at their house and tried to get away from your own house, we want to know. All the stupid reasons. There's definitely been times that, like, I've had friend groups of people. This makes it sound so bad. There's definitely been times where people have been, like, seeing someone and they're like, look, I don't think he's the one,

but should I date him a little bit longer? He does have a boat. Like, who are you friends with? Oh, I had some friends that. You're like, it was me. Okay, it was me. No. I had some friends that one of them was dating somebody

that did have a boat. It was not a yacht. It was just like a large dinghy. But it's heatwave season. They're like, do we stick it out another week to call the boat? And I was like, no, you can't. Do what you've got to do. No, I did say no.

Live your best summer life. Yeah, if you just like hangs and bangs, go for it. But don't like lead someone down a garden track, you know. We're all about authenticity. For an air con and a boat. Okay, okay, okay. There's something I want to talk about that is doing the rounds online at the moment and I have found it very fascinating and I have gone down a bit of a rabbit warren with

it but it's this stuff between Paris Hilton and Pink. It's not beef. I feel like it is beef. I know Paris Hilton has come out many times in the last little bit saying she has no beef with Pink but I mean let's call a spade a spade. There's a bit of beef. Okay well let's just set this up for a second. Some of you might remember back in 2003 Paris Hilton had a sex tape released. She did not release that tape. She did not give approval for that tape to be released. It was her boyfriend at the time who was 33 and she was only 19. So then Pink went on to do a song called Stupid Girls and the whole film clip around that was parodying famous women. Some of the women that were parodied in this were like Jessica Simpson, Mary-Kate Olsen, Paris was obviously one,

we had Lindsay Lohan. So there were a bunch of what I think were the it girls of the time. and these were also the it girls at the time that were being dragged in the media they were like the heroine chic or they were in the media for partying heaps as much as they were very famous they were also famous for being completely trashed by our media so pink released this film clip one particular part that she was mocking paris about was the sex tape and some of the lyrics i'll read them to you pretty will you fuck me girl silly i'm so lucky girl pull my hair i'll suck it girl baby if I act like that flipping my blonde hair back pushing my bra like that I don't want to be a stupid girl I don't remember the song I remember stupid girls and at the time it was really

heralded as this real feminist song it was like these girls who are playing it up I guess like wanting to be loved it was almost like these are the lengths that they're going to and pink was trying to really create this ethos of like no you don't have to be that type of girl in order to make a feminist point pink has taken down all these other women which i think is the irony in that the reason why with today's lens is so problematic is because paris hilton has come out and she has talked about that sex tape experience she's talked about how the sex tape was released without her consent how she felt bullied into making the sex tape in the first place but i just wanted to read out this quote from paris because she's recently come out with

her memoir and that's what's brought this all back to light and she said he kept pushing i kept making excuses. I was tipsy and I was tired from a long night partying. The lighting wasn't good. My hair and makeup were beyond and he told me that I always look gorgeous no matter what and that it shouldn't matter anyway because this wasn't a performance. It was just us and no one else would ever see it and then he told me that if I wouldn't do it he could easily find someone who would and that was the worst thing I could think of to be dumped by this grown man because I was a stupid kid who didn't know how to play grown-up games imagine being a 19 year old girl who creates a sex tape with their 33 year old boyfriend it's released without your consent for everybody to

mock for everybody to call you a slut for the media to turn it into like you've asked for this narrative to be written about you and then a number one pop song and then to have pink who is a feminist icon create a film clip that mocks you even further for being a stupid girl i mean this is paramount victim blaming. Paris got branded with this really loved sex, was cheap, was a tart. But in her memoir, she's come out and said, it's actually so far from the truth. I thought my whole 20 years I was asexual. I didn't really have sex. Like I didn't really enjoy it. She even nicknamed herself like the kissing bandit because she only wanted to kiss them because she didn't enjoy anything sexual. And that was because she said that when she was 16,

17 at Provo Canyon School. She was assaulted there. She was abused physically, mentally, sexually. I really feel for Paris. And I think she's doing some amazing things right now because she is out there advocating for a lot. She's trying to shut schools down. She's speaking her truth now. And she is not the woman that the world saw her as. And she's not the woman that she was branded with. And she did play into that. She has said that too. She's like, I developed that character. I started to play dumb and ditzy. And it was a cover for what I really felt in my life because I was very shy. I wasn't that person at all. It was like her safe place. But I think she also like created as a brand around herself. Like not only did she lean into

it, like, I mean, she starred in the TV show, The Simple Life, like which inadvertently was calling herself simple. And she went on to say that she used it as almost like a cloak of armor, that she became the brand personified, but that she isn't stupid. It was something that she used in order to market herself and use it to protect herself. The reasons come up. Paris isn't out here saying i hate pink she needs to give me an apology she's not saying that she's actually said i don't have beef it is what it is it's just a part of my story so i'm putting it out there so i don't know if we want to see pink come forward and apologize for something that happened that long ago i don't know what the answer is here but i think paris's stories there is a lot to it so

pink was made aware and there is actually some quotes about this so pink knew that paris was upset with the music video because she appeared on watch what happened live wwhl which was five years ago now. She spoke about the film clip and she was asked, had anybody taken aim or was any of the girls who were parodied in it upset by it? Pink did go on to say that she had heard from Paris. She said she was at a club and Paris said, I just want you to get it. I'm not dumb. I just play like I'm dumb. And then Pink said, yeah, that was kind of my point. So I guess the reason why I think this is still an issue is because we can look back on this with a 2023 lens. And I don't think that Pink should be held necessarily accountable for the way that she framed this

film clip in 2006, because it was a very different landscape back then. And she was playing into the media landscape of that time. But I think knowing what she does now, knowing the circumstances around this conversation of consent, especially in Paris's experience with this film clip and with her sex tape being released, I think that there should be some acknowledgement that maybe that isn't the way to empower women that isn't the way to try and empower feminism by shitting on other women in order to raise up a certain selection of people that you think are entitled to be empowered yeah but then you think back at the time when pink released it it was celebrated so we didn't view it like that then the world no one called her out for it not one person

of course not but people didn't have the information or the context that's what i mean so it's easy for us to say now that's not how you empower women we know that now but at the time that was stand like that was a normal thing pink didn't look at it like i'm going to bully these girls which is what it was like i'm going to humiliate and bully them i don't think that was the intention but it was definitely the outcome but i guess the other question is what if it was a willing sex tape what if paris hilton had been like yeah sure let's do it let's release it or even jessica simpson being parodied in that film clip because she's sexually washing a car she's being mocked by pink I wonder whether regardless of the context regardless of being

a victim are any of those things justified or did we used to have this understanding back in 2006 that to be a feminist you had to be this one type of female whereas like yeah that's exactly what it was yeah and if you lent into your sexuality if you were a sex icon if you did things because I guess it's partly this understanding that if you're a sex icon it's for the male gaze like you're betraying women because you're doing it to be liked by men is that still something that would hold up in a film clip today do we still mock people for the same reasons parodies are still very prevalent they can be hilariously amazing but I think the context is what is important here and that's what we've learned from Paris Hilton the context behind the parody and if

it's actually going to be highly offensive to somebody yeah and I guess it allows us to have a bit more empathy for it as well. Totally. Because I don't think if Paris hadn't come out with this memoir, anyone would talk about it or even give a second thought about it. Yeah. Because it's in the past. You wouldn't like, there's no reason to think about it, but we understand a lot more now what it's done to somebody. We're all human. So once you know the emotion behind something, it changes everything. We had a question that came in and now it was an ask uncut question and I'm going to leave it in the bag for, you know, when we can actually answer it properly but the question was around how honest you should be during a breakup and I feel like in

my 20s I was particularly dishonest because I didn't like hurting people so I didn't like to give people the true reason as to why so what reason would you give oh you know like it's not you it's me yeah but that's fine no that's fine it's not you it's me I use that all the time well one breakup with all your breakups now one break yeah that's fine that's not a breakup reason it's I feel like, oh my God, there's been a death in the family. I'm so sorry. I'm going to have to focus on that. And then that was a lie.

Like it's not you, it's me is like the most standard breakup line. No, but I also mean as in there has to be some level of, I mean, obviously you want to give some truth to it because you want to give them some homework to go and improve themselves, especially if they are a monumental douche. But the question is how honest is too honest? We were pretty sure that some of you probably have received some maybe too honest feedback or maybe you have given some too honest feedback in the past. So we did a little call out on social media

and that was what's the most savage breakup text that you have ever received? I want to start it with possibly the funniest one I've ever heard. I was asked to be his girlfriend over text. I was very excited to say yes. He replied with, I was afraid you'd say that. I just really don't want a girlfriend at the moment. Why ask the question?

Why put it out there? That's so funny. Hey, do you want to be my girlfriend? I would love to. Oh, fuck. I was worried you'd say that. I was worried. It's so funny.

It's funny when you listen to it again. Okay, being with you is like being on a roller coaster and I'd really like to get off this ride. You're not enough for me to fall in love with. Oh, that's mean. that's super mean that's so mean so is you've turned me off marriage and relationships fuck that's harsh hey quote like you're gonna be single for forever because it was so bad being with you how about this hey i'm just on my way to break up with insert name yeah he accidentally

left me a message that he meant to send to someone else he was on the way to break just be like don't worry i got the message i don't date during the summer fair that's fair a lot of people don't date during the summer yeah they keep it open summer's the time or is it the opposite do people know they snuggle down for winter and then they date for summer yeah people usually break up in the summer yeah because they want to be like a free agent so you need to get a relationship towards the end of summer so you can snuggle through the winter yeah that's what people do yeah okay i wanted to break up for a while now but our sex was just so intoxicating however i found someone else to do that with now oh okay mate what about this one she sent me an email

dot pointing everything that was wrong with me maybe there was a lot wrong with him could you imagine maybe he needed the work maybe like a powerpoint presentation here are some things for you to go and work she's helping him I've decided to start dating my flatmate I've got a new girlfriend if it comes up on Facebook just don't comment on it hang on were they breaking up or was he trying to say I've just got a new side piece maybe they were only seeing each other and then he got a girlfriend and he was like well I made a commitment just it wasn't to you that is so cool he sent me a teo cruz song break your heart and said that that's how he felt like he made the song do the dirty work for me like he didn't do the breakup he just sent a breakup song

and then was like listen to the lyrics of this do you know to be fair i had my boyfriend of six years break up with me once in the car when we were listening to fuck what's his name he sings your body is a wonderland jason jason maraz no maraz no it's not no no what's his name it's john Mayer. So John Mayer has a breakup song. Some of the lyrics are something along the lines of like, I know I'll never love someone like you, but we just can't get it right. And we got in the car, he put it on, and then he broke up with me after listening to it. It was set up. You need a backing track for a breakup. You need a solid backing track. He was also a musician. So he set the breakup mood and then he broke up with me off the back

of John Mayer. Okay. What about this one? This is the entire message. I have enjoyed your company. that's it past tense enjoy it not i enjoy your company that was how she knew it was over because he said enjoyed in the past what about this you were everyone's dream just not mine joining us on the podcast today is business entrepreneur author podcaster and one of forbes 30 under 30 grace beverly by the age of just 23 believe it or not grace had been named first in Forbes 30 under 30 retail and e-commerce list. Graduated from Oxford University and attained a sustainable business accreditation from Harvard Business School. Grace is now 25 and the founder and CEO of Tala and Shreddy. And Grace, way to make me feel like I'm not doing enough in the

world. Welcome to Life Uncut. Thank you. Thanks for having me. So Grace, I discovered you, told producer Keisha and Laura about you. I've been following you on the gram for what I feel like must be you must have been 20 maybe really I think so it was when you just released your booty band yeah remember you was a long time ago yeah so my sister Sherry she's a nutritionist and a PT uh-huh she got me onto you so she still actually has your booty bands the original booty bands that you ever released back in the day when you were Grace Fit you weren't Grace Beverly because I remember also when you changed your name as well the big transition I was like what's she doing she's really too big for her boots yeah she's Grace Fit sit the fuck back down

Am I allowed to swear? You obviously don't listen to the podcast. Yes. We never start an episode without an Accidentally Unfiltered. It's an embarrassing story that all of our guests have to do. What do you have for us today? And we were kind of just talking about this before. I feel like everyone's only embarrassing stories revolve around shit.

They do, yeah. Like as in that's all I can think about. And what's wild is like I definitely have some terrible, terrible stories because I have some great content that I think, do you know what, this would really go viral, but it's just not on brand. And so I often have to decide. name a businesswoman not sure well exactly I have to you know make the decision between would I like

to go viral or would I like to maintain this as you know very sleek and perfect personal brand yeah but my story the first one I could think of was actually so when I just finished uni I did a little like backpacking trip in Central America so the first three weeks I was with my ex there and it was just like just us two and then we were going to meet some friends we were like going up this mountain to this really secluded hostel which was like in the clouds it was meant to be amazing and on the way up it was this really long journey and I was starving so I stopped off at this kind of restaurant place had like a little something something that should not have gone into my body or anyone's body and then went up to this place and it was suddenly downpouring like a

good few days a complete downpour no one could even get down the mountain so we were kind of stuck up there which was actually amazing like would kill for that now please someone take me but like didn't have any reception didn't have just like any wi-fi anything but essentially in the middle of the night some things occurred became very apparent that some of the things consumed on the way up the mountain had not been the right things to be consuming spent the next day or so just kind of like in bed in like a bad situation very bad situation also we were in shared rooms and in shared bathrooms so you can imagine the situation was like not very nice for me or anyone else in there we then had to check out we'd kind of been there for too long we were

meant to be moving on the day before or whatever so we went to the next place which was the place that we were most excited about going to it was really hard to get there like I had to have a lot of Imodium like I overdosed at least like 10 times on Imodium to be able to even take this journey to get to the next place every 15 minutes I cannot even tell you how like often you know how like with 75% water or something scientifically I was not I had lost 70% of my body weight by the time that I came out of that situation but it essentially just like got worse and worse so we got to this hotel or not hotel very kind hostel we got to this hostel which is what we were most looking forward to because it's like voted the best hostel in Latin America really looking forward to this it

just kind of got worse and worse and once again we were now staying somewhere that was really hot this place we'd come down the mountain really hot no air con obviously no fan it was literally like 40 degrees and then the bathroom was a 15 minute walk away so when you're shitting fluorescent every 15 minutes and the bathroom's a 15 minute walk away but you can't even get back you literally can't even get back I was bringing my books like my kindle to the toilet and just stationing up there literally all day I finally after about like 24 more hours of this at the new hotel I suddenly kind of think do you know what I'm actually feeling fine like I think my body's maybe dry like I am the sorrow heart is inside like there is no way that I can actually excrete

more anything I couldn't even sweat at that moment I'm sure I would have just passed out and so I went down for some food had some plain rice I just thought you know I can manage this and then me being like oh health culture what should I do to make myself better I'll have some kombucha oh so I think do you know what my stomach's been through a lot I'm gonna give her the happy bacteria that Instagram says I need to give her and drank this kombucha which was like homemade kombucha from this place in a petrol can yeah you could see the bacteria coming off of it and I spiraled whatever had been going on before this point I think my entire recovery process just went into overdrive so I think I experienced what would have been the next two weeks of this I

experienced in about four hours I feel like the more that we talk about it on this podcast the more people feel like it's okay to tell their story right well we're fighting the good fight Grace we're going to get into all of your entrepreneurial skills how you set up your business but first and before we touch on that I would love to know a little bit about you as a person what was your childhood like? I grew up in guess what we considered the English countryside when I was 8 till 13 but generally grew up in London I am definitely from a very privileged background I think that's like very important to reference when talking about like careers and everything and like how I've got to where I am then when I was in sixth form which is like

your last two years of school then you can go to like sixth form or college whatever it's called a few different things before you go to university so I was at a kind of school doing that and then basically I decided to start a fitness account because I just always tried to go to the gym and I could just never stick to going to the gym and it was like in the middle of that like very what year was it like 2015 so it was like Instagram was like the fitspo oh I remember it was in its fitspo heights and I lapped that shit up and I basically started an Instagram account there to keep myself motivated and accountable but at the beginning it wasn't I like didn't show my face it was like a private account it was like under a different name well you became grace fit UK which

is when that's when I discovered you you're grace fit UK how did you grow so rapidly from being in this little account that was you just said you didn't want anyone to know who you were how did you go from that to who you are now I originally didn't want anyone to know who I was because obviously school like very not cool to be like posting yourself online especially I feel like now someone could start a fitness account or like post selfies of themselves or like whatever it would be and that would be very accepted it was not like that was not the time like not even everyone had like a personal Instagram like it wasn't a thing basically it just got to a point where I was like well I either stop this or I like grow this then I just became like quite

strategic about it so I was working an internship at IBM for a year before I went to uni just to earn some money and to like get some experience in like the corporate world because that's always what I thought I would go into before work and at the weekends I would film like hours and hours of content and this was like before YouTube or anything it would just be like for Instagram so either make recipes or workouts like whatever it would be and then I was just like super strategic about posting times like what people liked that was the time where you'd post like five times a day well i think it was the time as well when it was easier to grow because not everyone oh my god 100 not everyone had an account the algorithm was different people were more interested back then

whereas i feel like there's a level now people that it's too competitive oh my god 100 even so one of the most interesting part of my job i'm not sure if other people agree on this but one of the most interesting parts to me is that i work on both sides of like as an influencer myself but also my businesses work with influencers so I see a lot of both sides of both the business I guess impacts of return on investment all of these different things of like putting money into influencers and one of the biggest things that's changed is that people now follow hundreds of people that never used to be the case like you'd follow maybe like two three hundred people max and the majority of them would be your friends and maybe like 10 would be influencers or celebrities

that you decided you liked whereas now we follow literally about 500 influencers or you know obviously that's a gross generalization but it will be tons of influences it might be models it might be experts in your kind of field whatever it might be like it's not all about your friends it's not just like a social networking platform for friends so I feel like at the time if you were doing well you were able to definitely take off like I was not giving people enough content for them to be liking me that much but it was definitely definitely a big part of like right place right time right at the beginning of that kind of or not right at the beginning of the Fitspo thing there were definitely like a few years before I came right at the beginning of

like relatability Fitspo so less oh my god I look amazing and more like let's kind of do this together like keep each other accountable and you were booty gains as well oh yeah yeah oh yeah she was all on that side I decided to quit while I was ahead stop trying to you know change my entire body shape like my body was fighting against me being like that is not your body shape honey like let's not do that and like also we'll say one of the big things there is like the body types and trends thing is completely terrible I would also say I was there at very much a point where like that type of body type became something that people were working towards something we think is really interesting here and we have touched on a little bit and it's this body type trends and

diet trends and I mean I think the Kardashians are to blame for a lot of it definitely the Kardashians have played into it and I think especially the fact that like we're seeing them changing their body types again that really feeds into that so we're now seeing the kind of much smaller physique kind of come back in but I also think it serves the media very well to create the women as the things that we both critique in terms of who caused it I mean you can sell things over and over when body types are changing all the time because you're always aspiring to some next thing which literally feeds into consumerism and making people read the media and like all of these different things so I kind of feel like there are some people up there who are like laughing and

being like ha ha ha they laugh it up again so what was your journey like when you started did you try conform to a body type that wasn't yours because that was a trend and then how did you find your way to a place where you're comfortable and you were just authentically yourself and just being like this is what i am i'm making the best with what i've got because i feel like correct me if i'm wrong i feel like that's when probably your real success took off and when a lot of people do when they actually sit back and be like i don't give a fuck anymore yeah this is who i am ride with me or don't you know yeah oh i'm not sure i ever actually personally got to a point while I was like still doing fitness that I was like this is who I am take me or leave me any of

that I think all of it was very insecure like I took a step back about like three years ago and basically until this September when I restarted my podcast and restarted like putting out some content kudos to the people who kept following me because fucking hell I was not giving you enough to go on but what happened was I like got to a point where I was like oh I blew up on social media from when I was like 18 which is like quite a crucial point in finding your confidence so I was quite like an insecure teenager so I thought that I'd gone from like an insecure teenager to like a confident adult but actually what has happened was I was getting like loads of external validation online I was essentially being told I was great and making lots of money for like

looking a certain way and like don't get me wrong like I definitely worked for it but I also think that I essentially like substituted a lot of self-confidence for actual external validation like the way that was so I feel like while I definitely turned around and was like originally I was doing workouts that were definitely made to very much shrink you and that was the media buzz at the time that was the body type you wanted and I definitely lost a lot of weight but I also I grew up with like a very athletic body type at a time where like an athletic body type was not something that like women were like generally told to aspire to so I hated having muscular legs I hated like I used to be a gymnast you're preaching to the choir oh my god like I also like one of my

best friends now she's got a very similar body type we're like isn't it so funny that the things that we love about ourselves most now it's literally the fucking media like it's brainwashing because it's like well the things we love about ourselves now I'm sure is a lot because actually it's part of it will be confidence but like a lot of it also will be because it's an accepted body type but it's also those were all the things that we were the most insecure about way back when like I literally used to look at other people and I remember people always I mean the rowing team would always try and recruit me be like you have such big quads i was in the right place at the right time when the tide kind of changed towards grower booty how great does muscular look and now

i think there's lots of different streams i think one of the good things about something like tiktok is there's actually so much content on there i will go on there one day and be like oh my god you look great and then i'll go on there one day and be like oh my god you look great and it's like completely different body types and you can very much find people to align with whereas i think back in the noughties and the early tens, it was very much like, it's going to be lonely. So how did uni come into it? So you were doing this internship and at the same time, your Instagram took off, but how was it that you made the decision to kind of focus on the corporate world? So I got the internship in corporate before I started my Instagram. So I

got it in around January of 2015 and I started my Instagram in February of 2015, but I wasn't starting the internship until like six months later or like until the September when the school year ended so I was always going to do that for a year and then go straight into university I was never going to go straight to a career like I really wanted to study music at university yeah well there's this weird thing in the UK that like you really don't need to study something vocational like you very much can but like I remember doing work experience and someone being like oh I studied history I studied English I studied and I was like oh like and then all in bank and I was like yeah okay I'm gonna do music then and kind of my idea was that like if I do

well in it and if I have some corporate experience then surely I'm like more appealing as a candidate because they like difference of thought and all of this and I then applied for Oxford when I was at IBM and started there the following year probably when I had around like 100,000 followers so it still wasn't it wasn't where it is now where it was like a few years later but it was definitely a lot bigger than the year before and at the time I thought I was I thought I was unstoppable I thought I was the biggest the biggest fish in that pond well so most of us were like I remember when I was at uni we were waiting tables I was working at a surf shop but you were launching companies when did you launch your first company so I technically sold my first product the year

before I went to uni so just because I was like spending all my weekends cooking loads of recipes like what I started doing a lot of was like healthy versions of unhealthy quote-unquote foods and so we'll just do more of those and those like people really enjoyed them on Instagram it was very like Instagram was very recipe whereas I feel like it's not now anymore yeah so I was like spending all weekend like I literally spent like 12 hours on Saturday and 12 hours on Sunday like doing this content and then I was like I need for this to be more viable financially even like buying all the groceries to be doing it yeah you'd be going backwards I'm losing a lot of money because also at the time like influencer marketing when you were a micro influencer was not a thing

now you can get a lot for being like a micro influencer like it's a good you know there's so much kudos in it but at the time you were having to persuade someone you'd be like I'll do 50 Instagram posts for this t-shirt like I will literally sell my soul to you you could have my firstborn child for this honestly that's what it was like at the time if you give me this peanut butter for free yeah literally like it would be like something that would be like three pounds like it was very very very different interestingly I think this is quite strange but it was basically I made money from like my own products and Instagram before I made money from like brand deals which I feel like has kind of switched in the past few years and like more influences

obviously like it's a great thing to do to start business and I'd like recommend it to a lot of people but at the time it was like it was kind of an easy way to do it because I didn't need a brand to agree with me and I just like put together these pdfs and sold them for five pounds each and I could have just like made a few hundred pounds off them over the whole year so it wasn't like a it was a boost to my income and especially at the time when I was earning like 18k in that internship living in London like it's you know London's very expensive that was that was helpful but then so the next year I started what has grown into Shreddy now so my first business I started that in December of the first year of university and that was after when we'd broken up for the

Christmas holidays I was just like out to dinner one night and then I got an email from the university and it basically was like you've been suspended from Oxford for not paying your fees and like if you don't pay them by this date which was like a month later like you will not be allowed to return to campus and I was so confused because I was getting student finance like it was meant to come straight through from student finance into the university so I like freaked out obviously like emailed them back being like what do I do like this was meant to come from student finance like I'll call them tomorrow like all of this just like the most incomprehensible email they ever would have received I sent that through and they didn't reply for a few days later but when

they did they were kind of like no worries like I'm sure it will come through this happens all the time but obviously in that time I'd freaked the fuck out and I was like because I'd sold those recipe books and I was doing lots of workout content at the time and workout content was just going through like workout pdfs were going were the thing or they were like starting to be the thing and they were going for a lot more money like you could sell them for like 35 pounds which is crazy to me now because that's like a year subscription and shreddy but like that was the kind of going rate so I basically decided to make similar pdfs but of workout plans for 35 pounds and basically because it was like Christmas like very much fed into like the January rush and was

just like they're going to be on sale on Boxing Day and then we're all going to start on January the 1st and they like blew up it was insane the way those blew up and just at the time in proportion to my following it was you were like I also didn't even have good engagement that came later which is why a lot of it was like right place right time and I do think it was quite different from the aspirational fitspo at the time like it was like this is what we're all gonna do I'm doing it too because I need to get off my ass let's do it together yeah and I don't think that was really the messaging used at the time I think that's a lot of the messaging used now but like I don't think that was kind of really what was done and I was at uni so I always credit like the fact that

I was at uni for about three years after my well when my career was kind of starting in that way you never really become the unrelatable influencer I guess when you're like also at uni like it's not like I was living in London in like a high-rise flat like whatever like I am now where it's I don't really find this that interesting it was like I was still in a room like writing essays and so I kind of definitely think that played into it as well. Relatability. We get a lot of questions that are around businesses and I mean in terms of you obviously we started Life on Cart but your success is a whole other level. What advice would you give to someone who's wanting to go out on their own limb and start their own business? I would say one of my biggest pieces of

advice is not to overthink it and wait for the leap of faith and just to start as soon as you can. So obviously for a lot of people that sounds terrifying. I think we think of a new business as like literally like inventing the iPhone. Like we think of it as like having to, I don't know, create something that's like really really different or really really new and that's so not the case it's like a lot of the time as soon as you start a business you'll realize all the things that all of the assumptions that you made that were wrong so like how customers will respond to things what parts of your business they use the most all of these different things which is why it's so important to start with the earliest version of your product so there's this whole

ethos called the like lean startup which basically talks about how you need to get a minimum viable product out there as soon as possible so if you're doing some sort of coaching business it might be a pdf thing it might be like not quitting your job yet and actually just like having one or two clients on the side so you actually gain the information about how much time it takes you what the things they want the most from it are what marketing works the best try a few facebook ads seeing what people respond to all of these different things one of the most effective things that I did early in starting the business was I never put all my eggs in one basket it shreddy is a fitness tech business now it literally started as pdfs and then it went into

like physical product like it shaped its way to where it is now and i think that we get so caught up in being the business that we want to be like this like big shiny thing and ultimately actually you can never become that until you just start on one of the things because i promise you when you get like even a few weeks in your business it's going to be so different from what you thought and the sooner you can get that information the better like no matter what type of business is one of the best things I think is like if you're not embarrassed by your first ever product then you started too late oh you should listen to the first ever episode of the podcast but this is the thing and like I think if you'd thought like oh well we need to have proper mics we need to have

a setup we need to have all of this like even like an episode plan a format like any of these things if you'd thought that you would have got so caught up in the like perfectionism of it and I'm sure even at the time that was painstaking to get that version out and you thought that was really great like I always look back at things and I'm like fucking hell like I'm surprised like how am I surprised anyone like bought this or like thought this was great or any of this but it's literally things change so quickly and you need to get as much information as possible and there are so many ways for you can do that to do that you can literally do that with like Instagram polls asking people even like just your friends asking people like the types of products they'd like what

do they like about this branding versus this branding what do they like like gather as much information as possible go into Facebook groups where your target customer hangs out so like say it might be a product for new mums, like go into new mum Facebook groups and ask them questions. Gather as much information as possible because I promise you once you start the business what you end up with will be so different from the first iteration that you'll be like why did I spend six months on that first one when actually all of the information I needed to create the next thing was I could only get once I actually started. We always joke here that we thrive in chaos. We absolutely don't thrive, it is just chaos and sometimes we're just surviving. I mean I'd say

thrive do we yeah well we get off on it I don't know if we do but we sure as hell try it look I mean you strike me as someone who also follows the mantra of thriving in chaos when was it that you decided to start Tala and how did that come about so Tala just like some background on Tala is that we create sustainable activewear but at a price point that's competitive to non-sustainable activewear so the whole premise is that we kind of don't believe you should have to pay for the privilege of making better decisions so using recycled materials knowing about your factories like all of these various different things the reason I actually started Tala I guess quite like a happy coincidence but I was not looking to start a new business at all like hand on heart I was not

looking for that I was working with activewear brands at the time I had gone through like a personal journey moving away from fast fashion and kind of just being like oh it's probably not something I want to support if I don't want to harm the environment or believe in not exploiting women like all of these various different things just like for a while had wanted to move away from it and I had these big fast fashion contracts and I was kind of like but I make a lot of money like yeah it took a bit of time but then was like do you know what I just like woke up one day and I was like I can't do this like I actually like I hate it so again probably quite selfish because it just got to the point where I was like I don't feel good about this anymore but essentially like

stopped all of that and then because I was doing fitness I guess about six months later I realized that a big gaping hole in my logic about like fast fashion was the fact that like I didn't see my active wear as fast fashion at all but like it is like just because you feel like it's essential and you can't wear your like jeans to work out or whatever it might be that doesn't mean that it's not made from kind of materials that are contributing a huge amount to landfill or made in terrible conditions or like all of these various different things and so I was like still I guess promoting fast fashion in one way not really knowing about it so I originally went out to find brands because that was a huge part of my income I went out to and I did like a lot

of fitness all of that so like I might as well be being paid for it when I'm making the content anyway and so I went out to try and find sustainable activewear brands that I could sign to that I could be promoting and there were some really like we were absolutely not the first sustainable activewear brand there are some amazing sustainable activewear brands out there but essentially what I found was that I had a highly student audience and all of the sustainable activewear that was out there was about two and a half times the price of the non-sustainable activewear so like I quite strongly believe that you can't sit there telling people to make better decisions and then charge 2.5 times the price well it's the same sort of thing when you go to the

supermarket and pay for organic right everything's like especially here in Australia I don't know what it's like over in the UK anymore but it's like 10 times the price yeah and it also becomes like a status symbol it's like okay well people who can't afford it now have to feel guilty like I also very strongly believe that people who have to buy fast fashion because they can't afford better options are not the people contributing to like the climate crisis or whatever like you're not like enough is not being consumed that's not what's essentially causing the problem but essentially I was like well I don't feel comfortable promoting this anymore but I also don't feel comfortable asking people to pay double the price so started talking to some factories about because

I guess one of the things I felt confident in was that I already knew the target audience because I was already talking to them with Shreddy so I'd had three years of business essentially working with Gen Z millennial crossover women who were into fitness like pretty much the exact same target audience so I went talked to a load of factories became very apparent why it hadn't been done part of it was that it was the going rate so like why would you charge less for something when people are happy to pay double the price for something sustainable and they feel good about and it also becomes a status symbol because they're wearing an 150 pound hoodie or whatever it might be I think this is such an interesting point because I think most people would think that

it just comes down to the manufacturing costs around creating something that's sustainable but people don't realize that they're actually buying into the brand and into the privilege of being able to buy something that's sustainable which comes at like a higher price point exactly as in you become superior in terms of both your morals and your financial position which is like a great way to get people to buy into things like there's lots of that out there now and what I will say is that like sustainable clothing does take a lot more money to produce it does cost a lot more to produce so generally sustainable clothing being priced at more than fast fashion is the right thing like no one's being paid right when a dress is being sold for 10 pounds like come on

but I will say it costs a lot more but I also will say that definitely doesn't cost as much as some like it is sold in some areas so how did you get a company to come on board with you and make it at a price point that was affordable to the average day person so I talked to a lot of factories to try and work out how it could be done everyone was like you're ridiculous like first of all people will pay more so why are you gonna pay for it less and I'm like because there's a gap in the market and they're like who is this like 21 year old on a fucking pogo stick like bouncing into this meeting being like I want leggings for 40 pounds and like I want them to be sustainable and made from plastic bottles and they're like honestly fuck off you can sell them

for double that amount why wouldn't you but to me people who care about sustainability are more likely to be in the millennial gen z crossover audience like it's definitely been something that's grown in the past few years and also because consumerism as a whole has very much grown and so people in the generation above that actually often think like well you wouldn't be buying enough to be causing that much harm anyway whereas actually that's obviously not the case in the time that social media has been about on top of that for me the Venn diagram if you're talking about people who are interested in sustainability Gen Z millennial crossover audience you talk about people who are interested in activewear Gen Z millennial crossover audience but when you talk

about the price point that they can access it was like completely different so to me I was like this is the perfect like middle ground between all of those things they're interested in it they believe in it and they can afford it like you can't have them interested in it and believing it and not able to afford it like you're accessing a different audience there so essentially that was like my concept and I like went around it was not going well for a while and then we worked really closely with this factory who worked out that if you take down the recycled content from 100% recycled to 92% recycled which our first range was you could sell it for about 42 pounds versus like 100 pounds and for me I was like originally I was like no I want it to be 100% recycled because

otherwise we're still creating more like we're still creating putting more materials into the world with that eight percent and then I was like actually but if the other option is that people are only buying zero percent recycled then it's better to have better rather than perfect and so we were always like essentially that's what we were launching with and launched with the first line in May 2019 first launch went fucking terribly I mean it went great in terms of people interested in it but like the whole site glitch the whole back end glitch it was two weeks before my finals which was like 100 of my degree it honestly i know like what the fuck is wrong with you and then people are like that's so impressive but that's not impressive that's

fucking stupid like why would you trust someone who makes those decisions in their life that makes absolutely no sense but anyway she's me like it went so badly that i had to post on the university facebook chat being like will anyone work for 10 pounds an hour replying to customer service comments and we had tons of students logged in to our back end replying to customers because it all fucked up like the entire launch fucked up and it took like weeks and weeks and weeks to fix i was so excited about people being so excited about the concept and i was like if you have this one terrible experience like because also more people bought into the concept than would even like one thing that i people obviously always go on about how like influencers can create

businesses because they have set demand 100 but also you have to create a business that operates at the demand of x thousand people from the off you have no trial run when you're doing that so you automatically have to have a team that's big enough to deal with that with absolutely no trial run in the first place but also on top of that more people were buying into it than were liking my stuff like there'll be a launch day for example of a new product more people will buy that than will have like liked my last reel and i'm like this is how we know that it's a great concept like this is not because you're not even following me you don't even like me yeah just like that like as in like you want the leggings which is great which is all I want like as in like that's

fantastic to me but yeah in terms of the I know you asked like why I started Tala in terms of that but like in terms of the actual like chaos thriving like in case you haven't noticed yeah that is my bread and my butter yeah and I'm trying to I'm actually like trying to move away from that from chaos or from from chaos in general I feel like when it becomes your like operating point yeah it's just it's not good for me it's exhausting that brings me to a really good point which i think is really important and you've sort of just touched on it but it's it's failure and it's going wrong and why it's not such an easy road to the top and i think a

lot of people think that people like yourself come out as an overnight success which nobody sees the behind the scenes the 10 years of the grinding but what are some of the bigger mistakes you've made and things you've learned from them on top of that you know you had your first launch it was disastrous after that moving forward because you've launched so many products you've been in a bit and you do so much yourself you don't just hire a team like you're in there what are some of the biggest mistakes you've made honestly I make like a catastrophic amount of mistakes like every month and I know that sounds like such like a like press interview response but like genuinely I think that is the you're only going to see the generally most of the time

you're only going to see the ones that go wrong you're not going to see the things that were ordered that then like actually I don't know completely fucked up somewhere in between because of communication issue whatever it might be and then you lose all of that money you like all of these things you're not gonna see that but like that is literally running a business like look at my career or businesses now and you'll see the sum total of everything that's like gone right like that's why we've ended up there you do not see like you can't look there now and go like oh which product did she release in 2019 that like sold one unit they fail like and like cost 50 grand or like whatever it might be if you're not comfortable with that you're essentially going to be only

launching something you think is perfection but the problem with launching anything is that like you literally cannot if you're making more than one you cannot predict that people are gonna like it because you know like it's not only going to be you like you need to be able to like essentially make like an educated guess and like sometimes that's going to be wrong like a lot of the time that's going to be wrong you see companies that are like doing incredibly well fall over the next month and that's fucking terrifying I mean I've made so many mistakes like the past few months I would say like my biggest mistake has just been getting too excited by opportunities and therefore doing far too much and the problem with that is that like really compromises the

people around me and my teams because it's like I'm the one who decided to take on all these opportunities and now I'm not communicating the best with all of these different teams now they're finding it hard to work and their job's becoming a shit show and it's all because I got a bit little bit like excited about like taking on this new opportunity but yeah essentially like that happens a lot I mean that is pretty much what like running a business is but I would say one of my biggest flaws is I'm very bad at not taking opportunities when actually one of the best mottos you can ever have is like do less better does failure scare you or do you have this confidence that you're always going to bounce back or get back up on your feet if you fall down some failure

definitely scares me I also feel like I fail on like I guess an acceptable level a lot every month I guess that you become quite comfortable with it because you're like we can't move forward without making these decisions and sometimes they're going to be wrong so it's kind of like that's a normal thing in business but you kind of need to take that into your everyday life as well with literally anything whether it's like dating friendships like taking on a new hobby like whatever it might be like you kind of just need to like sure you can do nothing but then like also the guaranteed is doing nothing like you kind of need to be stepping forward in some direction it might go wrong but it also might go right some of it definitely scares me one of the things I find most traumatic about

having a business is these like huge failure things like suddenly come on I've had it before years ago where you'll realize say like when the pandemic hit or like any of these different things and you're like oh my god if this one launch doesn't go well we actually could be fucked that's big failure like that's really really stressful and actually like by having a business you see the amount of businesses with like far more capable people than me and far more like people who've been to business schools that I haven't been to like whatever it might be they fail at businesses so it's terrifying in lots of ways but it's also nice to have a break what's it been like for a very young female in a male dominated industry what's your experience

been like when you're coming up against men maybe that's you trying to raise capital maybe you're just trying to sell a product whatever that is have you had a lot of pushback or do you feel like you've really had to fight harder than probably I hate to say it but that a male your age might have had to fight yeah I mean I don't hate to say it I love to say well I mean also on top of that not that it matters but you're a beautiful young female I can't imagine what it would be like as a 20 year old young beautiful female to walk into a boardroom of older males and try and sell your product or get somebody to take you remotely seriously so what I used to do was look at like okay so I've had a huge amount of success as well because I'm a woman like as in

like say in the fitness industry like you look at the way that I've been able to like do certain things that I definitely wouldn't be able to do in the same way but that is so not comparable to the barriers that there are to women and being able to be like taken seriously in like business say like if you look at the funding gap worldwide venture capital funding gap 2.8 percent of funding goes to women 2.8 if you looked at a gender pay gap if you looked at a I don't know any industry a 97.2 wow and 97.2 yeah yeah I could sing for you but like 97.2 percent of stuff was actually going to men in that industry that would be talked about everywhere if every single business and therefore everyone's jobs is started from entrepreneurship the fact that 97.2 percent of

that money is going to men you cannot tell me that we are not like way further back than we think we are in terms of like gender pay gap etc etc and then if you look at that figure that's for like white women like if you look at that it's 0.024 percent of funding goes to black women 0.24 percent of funding goes to black entrepreneurs in general like how can you create how and like it's not talked about anywhere and so then as soon as people like yeah but like you look like this it's like but do you understand what it like as in like going into an investment committee going into pitching to businesses and i'll have advantages because i went to oxford and people are much more likely to invest in businesses where you know like the founders went to oxbridge or ivy league or

whatever it might be but like that is horrendous 2.8 worldwide it's one percent in the uk and i raised funding in the uk but like 2.8 worldwide and that was in our highest year ever and that was before the pandemic since the pandemic has obviously gone back because what do people do when they feel uncertain they bet in things that they know work what do they know white men in tech like as in like that's just the way it works I actually love the fact that you're just saying it how it is right now it's black and white because that's what it is but it's also what's really interesting I find is that like when I look at women online and when I look at successful women we know every single fact that's like the butt that's used after their name so like

but you know they don't have a successful relationship or they've not had children or like but they you know came from really privileged background but like this I know every single fact about every like we all do we all know that that comes after anyone successful we know whether they are high up in business whether they are a celebrity whether they are an influencer like but they have a really good body and therefore like they were on whatever it might be like we always know the conditioning factors for like why women are successful or like there's luck they feel into that the timing was impeccable we don't ask any of those questions I don't know those I don't know what schools like these successful men went to I we require that of women because

actually in our head it's so unbelievable that they're in the position that they're in we need to give them contingent factor on like why they got there and like that to me I think proves the issue because like if we need to explain it somehow more than just the fact that they're good at their job or whatever it might be or like the fact that actually every single person has something that's helped them to get there whether that's right place right time whether that's like I don't know who they know whether that's like all of these things these contextual things are very important to talk about very important and I'll always be the first to talk about them when it comes to like my own success but I also think that like we require that of

women so much like we require women to almost like back up exactly why they're successful and it's like why is that it's because to you a woman being in that position or making that much money is so unbelievable that you actually need to know like she couldn't have possibly done it on her own right tall poppy syndrome is very much a thing I've heard about it a lot in Australia I've heard about it a lot in the UK I've heard about it less than the US but I think it's very much a thing most places but I think it's also something that we apply to women because of this thing of like it's so unbelievable that they're in that position it must be because they were given a leg up in some way and I like I feel like it's really really really important to say that whenever I'm saying

that I'm not negating how important it is to talk about privilege and like I will be the first to do that in every like single situation I think it's really important but I think the fact that we only apply tall poppy syndrome to women and we almost make it so that actually because there's so many men within a space there has to be one woman and therefore the women have to fight against each other to be there realistically that's not the case at all there's space for everyone but we're made to think there's not space because actually we can only see one woman in that position so it's like i don't think it's fair to blame women for the existence of tall poppy syndrome because women have had to fight to like be in that position and who does it make sense to fight against the one

other person they can see that looks like them in that position like it's not women's fault that we've created a society that puts them in that position where they feel like the only way they can be there is if that other person isn't there's this really really great harvard business review article which is basically saying like stop telling especially black women but like stop telling women they have imposter syndrome and start making workplaces better for women like why do I have imposter syndrome probably because when I sit in this room of everyone else who's been invested in by venture capital for example I sit in this room and I'm the only woman here why wouldn't I have imposter syndrome imposter syndrome is literally based on believing you

don't belong somewhere if you look around and everyone's white or everyone's a man or everyone's like of course someone has imposter syndrome technically by the statistics they are an imposter like they're not supposed to be like as in like that's like everything is stacked against them and therefore like we're constantly like we give it these names and we're like oh you have imposter syndrome you hold yourself back and it's like ah that's so interesting because when I look at the statistics I don't think it's me holding myself back so for all those me included there's not so business minds out there you've talked about raising capital raising money you've raised 5.7 million for Tala. What does that look like to someone? What is raising capital? Whose money is

it? Where does it come from? How do you get it? How do we get the money? Could we have some now? Yeah, sure. I'll just. So essentially raising capital comes in like lots of different forms. So when you're talking about like a business raising funding, I was so confused when we started a funding round, like I knew bits about it. I've done a lot of work and reading and everything within kind of like the business sphere. But I think we think about raising capital is like those startups in silicon valley that raise like 100 million to start the next apple or whatever it might be like we don't hear about this kind of like smaller amount or we hear of someone being given a three grand fund to be able to like start a small business whatever it

might be but essentially raising capital is raising some money to be able to give you a bit of a boost to be able to say if you thought about over time if you were making 100 000 in your first year and 20 000 of that was profit first of all that's incredible like for businesses to be profitable in the first place it's like very very impressive but essentially you would only be able to invest that 20 000 into extra growth like to extra ad spend to extra inventory say if there were loads of people wanting to buy your product but actually you could only afford a certain amount of that product until they bought it and you can reinvest that in essentially what it does is it gives you that boost from earlier on so it can either be for funding inventory for getting

more staff for tech advancements it can be for building the product itself if it was say like a type of car or like whatever it might be but essentially there are lots of different types of funding i won't go into all of it but there's venture capital which is like the silicon valley type of one there's angel which is like private high net worth individuals there's private equity which is usually slightly later in a journey's a journey's business help in a business journey yeah so there's like loads of different types venture capital is the one i'm talking about when i'm talking about 2.8 percent of funding don't worry the stats don't get any better in any other industry especially if you think of like angel investing men like to invest in men

generally huge generalization again but statistically they do and also men have a huge percent more of the wealth in the world and therefore if you're going to high net worth individuals they're much more likely to be men but essentially so when I talk about funding I talk about raising money either through an individual or a overall fund like a venture capital or private equity or whatever it might be in order to grow your business faster or initially grow your business in the first place so like the first thing that i think about here is how do you literally where do you find these people how do you go okay i need to start a business i need to raise some money you don't just google like who's rich in a two kilometer radius and oh you do

interestingly you very much can like i know people who have like as in gone to specific literally linkedin dm'd people who like say they have an interest in something like sustainability flexibility or in soup or like whatever it might be and then you go to them individually and you're like I'm actually making this but obviously it's harder to do that way the hit and miss ratio is going to be like very different you can get really lucky you cannot get a lot of no's for that one yeah so there's so many different ways you could do it I know a lot about the I guess the kind of sphere in like the UK a lot of what you do is literally like cold outreach or I got in touch with lots of people who have similar sized businesses and was like essentially I know

raise funding could you tell me your experience with your investors and then I'd ask for an intro whatever it might be but it was generally like DMing people on Instagram or going via obviously like I have quite a high profile in terms of that so I was able to I'm sure like get a meeting with people a lot sooner we were also post revenue which is really important to talk about so we weren't taking a guess on whether the business could make money we know the business makes money and we know it's profitable so we were able to kind of go and be like this is what you'd be putting your money into therefore we can estimate that your return would be x y and z whatever it would be obviously it's still a huge guessing game like the most accurate way of describing

a business i think especially like a high growth startup is essentially like building a rocket ship while you're on it or like sailing across the ocean while building your fucking boat like that's what it is you're trying to work out how it works because you have all of these assumptions you're like if we put three pounds in it will create this based on all of these different channels and then you put it in and it gets to a threshold and it's like actually no it doesn't create that at all and then you have to redo the entire investment model which is really fun so does it work like a loan do you have to pay it back with interest so it completely depends on the type of funding but say like debt financing would be that versus I essentially like sold a proportion

of the business like a small proportion of the business in return for that money so as the business grows they put say the 5.7 that was US dollars into the business and they bought a certain proportion of the business like a minority stake in the business and therefore as the whole business grows there obviously their stake grows and so if there's an exit event in future whether that's going public whether that's selling to someone whatever it might be the amount they'll have made will be hopefully a lot more and do they earn anything back in the interim or is that just money they're putting in for now so you know how it's like dragon's den do you have dragon's den here shark tank shark tank yeah so like in shark tank for example they'll be like i'll give you a

hundred thousand for ten percent and they'll be like and i want a return within two years so they'll want an exit event within two years and that will be higher than what they originally put in or like they'll say plus interest like it completely depends it's a very sticky like I remember when I first started talking about raising funding and I literally like when it got textbooks and I was like sitting there like whoa like help please are you a to-do list person I am more than a to-do list person I know that everyone gets very excited you know when people talk about tables and all of this and like I'm here to give everyone what they want to know which is my very boring to-do list technique which is essentially that I like not only do I love

lists I actually like lists make me very overwhelmed so I need to write everything down I need to know everything I'm going to be doing all of this but I feel like if you have like a 40 thing long to-do list you're going to be overwhelmed because everything is going to feel like it's like the same waiting like you'll have I don't know wash your hair but like to send one email and then you'll also have on the same list like this presentation you need to do that might get your promotion or like get you fired and then you also have to finally sort your insurance for something or whatever it might be so like when you look at that that's like so stressful and I get overwhelmed very easily and so I have things in place to mean that I don't get overwhelmed so I can still be

productive and fun and one of my best tips is about splitting your to-do list in terms of so I call it a to-do table but it's into quick ticks tasks and projects quick ticks take under five minutes tasks take five to 30 minutes and projects take 30 minutes plus so you never just have like a big list it's essentially weighted in terms of like the amount of time it takes you that gives me anxiety to think about creating that I'm like the least listy person ever I'm like oh my god that sounds hard to make the list on a list on this well you could have it in a little table in your notes app you could you can say that louder by a planner do you have a grace do you have a planner well okay so this was a prime example of me like not being able to know to

project but basically like I've always done this and I've always like written it out in like a notebook so I have like three different columns and I do quick ticks tasks projects and people got really excited about this because people started trying it and actually like I will say it really solves a lot of problems like just try it one day and I promise you you'll feel less overwhelmed and so basically I was like you know how you can go into those websites and like design your own planners I was like making one for myself and someone replied to my story and was like will you make these for us and I was like does anyone want this and then like a few thousand people replied to the poll being like yeah and so I was like okay I'll go talk to manufacturers of course

because what else would you do obviously another business yeah exactly brilliant basically like the people I already work with for shreddy in terms of manufacturing they were like yeah we'd kind of done notebooks before like all of this so went down that route and then the planners now have had a wait list of over 70 000 people what yeah can you send us one the problem with which a great problem to have but basically obviously if i were to make 70 000 in one production run that would cost like a million pounds oh my god like it would cost a huge amount of money right and so i've only done them on a pre-order mechanism so i've only done it there's like a pre-order window of like 48 hours so i've done three pre-order windows so far because it's not another business i promise

you. Because it's my hobby. It's like how some people have gardening. I have planners because I can't operate it like with a full team, like I would with my other businesses where I'd make sure Tala's trust pilot average for this month, for example, is like 4.8, 4.9. Like I really care about this. And so I make sure that the previous ones have been dispatched before I do the next lot, just because I can't give all my time to it. For someone who's so busy in their working life and has prioritized their working career so highly how do you even have time for your dating life and how do you manage to have a dating life or be in relationships with people and still give that a hundred percent yeah no like I feel like it's obviously like your personal life takes a

hit and it's also I do feel like in a way like I've done things backwards like I'm not going to meet many people my age who feel as strongly as they do about their work and that's not to say that all of my friends don't work incredibly hard like they very much do and often like harder than me in lots of ways and like I have more control or like whatever it might be but say like if something comes through I can't just be like no how dare you this is horrible I'm leaving my job like I can't like I literally physically can't and not that I want to but like it's a hellish job a lot of the time I will generally say that people who have businesses that their entire lives rely upon and also so many people's like say in Tala for example in our office alone in like a London

office alone like there's 30 people's lives mortgages children rent there's a lot of fucking responsibility to yourself and to other people and therefore like it's not the same as just deciding to be on your phone at dinner because you want to reply to some messages or because you're bored so I would say that's like generally been like an obstacle but I do I have really made like a conscious effort especially over the past few years especially since I left uni I think I did uni wrong in a lot of ways and like obviously I can say that now because I've reaped the rewards of it and like of course you would but I clearly wanted to grow up so fast I was like going back and forth from London like all of this I should have just been having like a good time and I

should have been just like enjoying myself but I was so intent on like making these businesses work that when I came to London I actually made a conscious effort I didn't move in by myself like regardless of financial situation like I moved in with friends I made sure I went out a lot I made sure I moved in with people who definitely like weren't all about their work not to say that they didn't you know like work really hard and that was really good for me and I tried to make sure that that was a big thing I've had relationships I've wanted to be single at times like there's definitely obstacles do you find dating men have you ever had the trouble of a man being intimidated by how successful you are or that the relationship doesn't progress

because they feel a level of well what am I going to bring to the table um I do feel like it's actually quite a helpful way of whittling people out I don't know like there's definitely been and I definitely I think I used to get not like upset about it but like there'd be someone like I really liked and it would be like such a mismatch in terms of career or even like the amount we care about our careers or like whatever and like that's usually the other way around I think that's very accepted if it's the man in a like relationship or a dating situation and I do not think that is the case the other way around like there'll be certain people and like people are always going to be like well I don't care and it's like cool but like generally people do and generally people

get emasculated and all of that but it's like ultimately all that assures is that I'm not gonna well you're not with the right person yeah and like i wouldn't be with someone who like thought that was unattractive or like wanted me to stop working so it's like ultimately we're gonna get to a roadblock here and yeah i know which one's gonna go you know that we never finish an episode without our suck and our sweet our highlight and our low light of each and every week britney harkley my sweet was you looking like sia at mitch's party and you held onto that wig for like dear life you know when someone gets into character and then they just don't break the character that was you it was the whole outfit otherwise i just had a pink dress on but my wig

really brought it home the dress okay i feel like this is going really off piste for our second suite the dress that brit wore to the party it was very booby you looked literally amazing and a million dollars she rocked up and i was like wow that is a hot and revealing dress and she was like yeah i bought it to wear it to your wedding and thought it was inappropriate and i'm really glad that you made that decision like you could have worn whatever you wanted but like when you said that you're gonna wear that to the wedding I was like far out when I say I was going to wear it that was only I looked at it online and online was on this tiny little model that wasn't very revealing shouldn't really have boobs and I was like that's a hot dress it's nice to wear some

color and as soon as it arrived I didn't even have to try it on I was like oh there is no way I can wear that that does not you know when you buy something it looks amazing online and you get it you're like why don't I look anything like the person that had it that's how I felt so don't why i wasn't actually gonna wear it to your wedding and that's why i never told you could you imagine the daily mail articles if that if that had been the photo of you with like yeah i would have been dragged you would have been you would have been like kendall jenner rocking up in a handkerchief and again there's nothing wrong with this if i wanted to you would have supported it but i chose do you know what wouldn't have supported it that dress and your boobs it did

not support them it was supportive unless i ran it was supportive if i just stood there if you with still and didn't move but there wasn't a lot of jumbling around when I said all right what is your suck my suck is probably Delilah goes to play group when I'm at work for the big days because like we have really big days where we do all podcasting radio so we're out of the house for like 10 hours she goes to daycare and she goes to doggy daycare she goes to doggy daycare I've got loads of photos that's really cute but she's gone to a dog fight she's gone to a like a fight proper fight she's real badass she had like a bleeding lip but um street fighter now she's fight club she's a fight dog she can't talk to me about it though Delilah did not start the fight

the dog minder told me that she was like she did not start it but boy did she finish it yeah Delilah is not a pushover she's so cute and like loves life and eats flowers and she's like the sweet little angel but if you go her she'll go you back so that was my suck but it wasn't bad she didn't get a puncture or anything I think she probably bit her own lip knowing Delilah I think she'd probably like bit down her own lip but she's fine she's fine my sweet do you know what it probably is Mitch and Hayden's party I had a really fun time I felt like it was just nice to catch up with friends we were in hysterics the three of us I don't know why you know when you just get silly and everything makes you laugh and we just couldn't stop laughing and I just had a

really good time and I was see ya even though I was supposed to be Barbie you look great what was okay my suck for the week is i woke up i don't even know if i told you this properly tell me and i'll tell you like nine days ago i woke up and i had a really fucking sore tongue i told you this you said you have burning mouth disease i don't have it's apparently not burning mouth so i woke up nine days ago i woke up and i was like i can't speak properly i can't eat i have a really sore tongue really sucks not be able to speak properly when you speak radio podcasting anyway it progressively got worse it was like the ends of my taste buds on the tip of my tongue were like inflamed right okay but then it was getting worse and it was getting worse so eventually

I went to the doctors you'd been brushing your teeth with denker up you've just been using no they don't know but I'm on steroids now I've been taking steroids I do think you were looking jacked and I do have a lot of hair on my chest yeah those biceps so I've had to do four days of steroids for your taste buds yeah so apparently I have chronic inflammation of your taste buds what the fuck is that how does that happen I don't know so it just like all of a sudden my hung it was like the redness the inflammation was just going up my tongue it was so weird it was the weirdest thing ever it was all last week anyway did you not ask where that comes from well i got to friday last week and i went to the doctors in the afternoon like after i record and i was like

i cannot speak i cannot eat and she was like i don't know what that is but i'm gonna give you some steroids classic doctor move so i don't know what it is take this yeah but the steroids worked pretty much immediately but she was like the only thing i'm worried about is that it's gonna work so well and then it's going to come back really aggressively because it's a band-aid maybe yeah so i'm on day four i just finished them today and it's still there i can feel it like this burning sensation working out at the same time like just to get the most benefits from the steroids i'll clean my tongue and i'll do some extra workout i've been to the gym oh so that's my suck so i'm like yeah i don't know what's going on with my mouth that's weird

i'm glad you've cleared that up yeah i'll keep you updated guys and my sweet for the week is i mean it's boring but you know not boring to me it's my kids they they have been the freaking best i've had the best weekend with my girls they're so funny they're very cute i was looking back on photos of them from you know a year ago it blows my mind how quickly they're growing everywhere we go ever i show people photos of my kids sometimes i look over we're in a work meeting and sometimes she's just like scrolling photos of her kids and i'm like what are you doing jack i just need to check in on them i'm obsessed with them yeah i know it's cute and also i think you know being a working mom and the fact that i don't get to spend as

much time as matt does with them because he's yeah a bit more stay at home than me i get fucking jealous like yeah he'll send me photos and i'm jealous that they're off doing stuff that i would love to be doing so fridays like i said we go and we have like a cute picnic down the beach every afternoon and then we just had a really fun weekend as a family that's cute that's very wholesome yeah it was i love that anyway that is it from us guys we hope you loved the episode if you did jump onto apple podcast leave a review also go and subscribe it doesn't cost anything we're not saying join our subscription pay $10.99 a month what we're saying is hit the little plus button it is free and it means that the podcast will be in your library every single time it

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