Introduction
Are you excited at the thought of growing your business? Welcome to the Hayley Osborne show. This is the place where you’ll learn how to get more high-quality leads and sales in your business. My goal with this show is to help you grow your business. Be inspired, nail your creativity, get the best out of your marketing, and show up as the most fearless superhero version of yourself. I’ll be teaching you the tailored frameworks and tools I use to unlock my client’s superpowers and turn them into quality leads and inquiries. And I want the same for you. I started my first business at the age of 25 and continue to build three successful businesses along the way. Small business owners are the backbone of the economy. And I’m here to demystify marketing, make it easy for you and help you reach more customers. Let’s do it.
Welcome to another episode of The Hayley Osborne Show. I am so glad that you are here. We are on to Episode 82 of the podcast and today, I have a beautiful guest joining me by the name of Rebecca Saunders. She is an absolute Dynamo. She is an absolute legend and I absolutely love this woman. I met Rebecca a few months ago actually in Port Douglas. And I couldn’t wait to invite her on to the podcast to share her story and her zone of genius with you. She has a cracking story. She has created some Uber influential success in her life and created some really cool things along the way. And I really cannot wait to share this episode with you. We share a lot in common and she gives some beautiful insight into so many things. And I can’t wait for you to get your teeth stuck into this. So hang around.
Transcript
Hayley Osborne:
If you don’t know who Rebecca Saunders is, she is a business and life advisor for female Business Owners, Helping you celebrate your uniqueness. Build the business of your dreams and live your best life. Grow your business by being uniquely you. Rebecca Saunders is a business and life advisor for ambitious women wanting to do life and business unapologetically on their terms. We all want to do that, right? I know that I do. And Rebecca is the person to help you do that. Unapologetically, she helps female business owners like you turn your uniqueness into a superpower. Celebrate your successes and create your dream life and business by designing her online community, the champagne lounge and the dinner series. Business uncorked. Cool right help women from all around the world have more joy, connection and celebration in their lives. She is a bubbly extrovert, which you will see when we get started in this episode. She has her own podcast and she is a hair-free alopecia and is a fur mama to her mini Aussie Shepherd Bailey and lives in wine country in regional New South Wales here in Australia, where I am also from and Without further ado, let’s get into today’s episode. Hello, Rebecca Saunders and welcome to the Hayley Osborne show. I’m really happy that you are here.
Rebecca Saunders:
I’m so excited to be here. Thanks for having me.
Hayley Osborne:
Thanks for taking the time to come on. You are fire. You’re doing some amazing things. But before we get into how amazing you are and all your superpowers and other things, why don’t you, in your own words, tell the listeners who you are and what you do?
Rebecca Saunders
My name is Rebecca Saunders. I am now a life and business advisor for female business owners who want to turn their uniqueness into their superpower. Through that, I am a speaker, I coach and I have an online community which is an online cheer squad for female business owners around the world called the champagne lounge. And the reason I started all of that is because business can be really lonely as a female business owner and we do get to do things on our own terms in our own way. So we just need a cheer squad to keep us on track. And so yeah, that’s what that’s what I’m doing.
Hayley Osborne:
I love that. So how what was so let’s go a little like take it back a little bit. What was the reason for starting the champagne lounge? This is a new project of yours.
Rebecca Saunders:
It is a new project. So, the champagne lounge launched in February 2023. It was originally going to start in my head back in February 2020. I was really going to start it back in 2020, pre-COVID pre any of that stuff happening. And I was ready to sort of put a pause on my video production company that I’d had for the previous ten years to that and then go I want to do something different, but COVID had different ideas. And we got crazy busy during COVID time because everyone needed video content. But it still has an inkling there for me. The reason it was an inkling of just such an urge and such a calling for me to do is because I genuinely feel that female business owners feel lonely a lot of the time running their own shows. We never stopped to actually celebrate enough and acknowledge how much we’ve achieved and how much we’re doing. We just can’t suddenly jump to the next thing and the next thing. And so, for me, it was about combining all of that. So, connection, celebration and community under one banner, what better thing to call it than the champagne lounge because everyone loves a little bit of like sparkle and a VIP experience. And so it was formed just for that real connection and celebration. It’s got no agendas to it, there’s no masterclasses, you don’t learn anything. And that was deliberate because we all have such long to-do lists in our lives, both at work and at home, that it’s just, it’s there for connection and communication. And it’s a virtual cheer squad.
Hayley Osborne:
Yeah, I love that. It’s got no masterclasses. You don’t have to do anything. Cool. So, the champagne lounge, but I want to take it back a little bit. I want to talk about your business journey from the start. So what did that look like? And what led you to, I guess, where you are now? because I love to hear people’s stories and backgrounds. And I feel like that is the thing that gives, say, someone starting out at their version of one inspiration to get to that point, right? So she’s done it, I can do it. And I think there’s really a lot of power in people’s stories. So give us a like the 101 on the Rebecca Saunders show.
Rebecca Saunders:
Well, I moved to Australia in 2012. I moved with the sole intention of living in Sydney, living in staying in building a life in Sydney and staying in Australia. One minor detail was that I had a working holiday visa. And so anyone who’s been through that process will know that the Working Holiday Visa gives you a year’s worth of time to work in the country; you then have to do some kind of fruit-picking stuff to get your second year. And in order to keep staying on after that, you’ve got to find some lovely person to sponsor you. And in my opinion, you’re then chained to them for the next four or five years, while the residency sort of comes through, new citizenship comes through. And so, being the entrepreneur that I am, I’m not a very good employee, but I don’t really follow directions very well. I’m always finding solutions for things and moving at the speed of light. And so I knew that getting a job and being hitch too tied to stuck in a rock roll. And a company like because of a visa was not something that I wanted to sit with. So I built my video production company, I founded my video production company to sponsor myself to stay in the country. And so what that meant was I could only do the job on my visa. So because of my background in journalism and media, my visa was all around content writing and script writing for the video production company. And then I had to hire a team to do all the other stuff. And so back then, I really didn’t have a choice. It was like, Well, this is the way I’ve decided to go. I’ve now got to, like, find enough clients and enough projects to pay me my award rate salary from day one because that was a visa condition and pay my team to do all the jobs that I wasn’t legally allowed to do on the visa. And so I say that out loud.
Rebecca Saunders:
Now I’m like, Oh my gosh, you So it is possible to pay yourself a salary from day one if you’ve got the right mindset to go and do that. And so that’s sort of why I started the video business that has now run and operated for the last 12 years. And it’s been it’s been a journey. And it’s been a lot of fun, at that time. I’ve scaled the team up and I’ve scaled the team down and we produce a feature film. And if you’re listening in Australia, you can go watch that on Stan right now on Stan. So, we produced a feature film as part of a passion project. We’ve worked with some amazing clients. We had LinkedIn and Microsoft as our first two clients coming on board when I started the business. Exciting, right and then it’s grown from there and we’ve worked a lot with big corporates as well as small individual business owners, course creators, content creators, and then we took on a studio space, so in the video world, video is really, really good. If you’ve got one, you can control the sound that you’re filming in. And so, in the co-working space that we were in, there was a studio space that came up for rent. And the whole building used to be Fox Sports. So used to be completely full of all these beautiful soundproof studio spaces. And then there wasn’t one left because, over the years, they’ve all been ripped out to make way for offices. So I jumped in to take that on because that, to me, was the hot thing off. If I don’t take it on, it’s going to get ripped out, and then the industry is going to lose out and people miss out on that. So we took on a studio space, and that had its ups and downs for us. It’s a soundproof windowless box. So, being that for a long period of time does drive you a little bit nuts. But it was our saving grace to survive and COVID. Because when the rest of the industry fell apart, we had 10 years under our belts in terms of positioning who I am, what I was responsible for and what people knew me for. But it also had a space that enabled us to be a, what were the words they use? critical service. And so we were considered a space that people could go to conduct but can’t think of the right phrase that they use, but either way, I had to keep running. That’s the one, yes, essential service because we were filming and broadcasting CEOs and C-suite panellists coming in to keep their teams motivated and other companies going.
Rebecca Saunders:
So it’s been it’s been a journey. I still don’t film and edit. And for me, their business has always been around running a business, which has been my fun side. We took it up to scale it from zero, literally from nothing. I wanted to stop it again in February, like February 2020 time. And then, from sort of wanting to stop it through COVID, hit seven figures of turnover for the first time in a pandemic. And then I’m like, Okay, I want to do the passion project that I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. And that’s how the champagne lounge came about. So, if I take my last 12 years of business experience, that’s what I love to share in terms of my coaching and advising and things from a business side. And I love it. Like, I love doing that now. And it’s hard, though, it is hard, but you kind of ebb and flow through business, right?
Hayley Osborne:
Yeah, you do. What would be your number one piece of advice for someone starting out right now?
Rebecca Saunders:
Give yourself grace. Definitely, actually, I can say that from the position I’m in right now, in starting something new because the Champagne Lounge is new. I’m starting it from scratch. It’s six months in. And it’s bloody hard. I guess I have to check myself in the mirror all the time. But you have, like, you’ve got your first five people and a blink, you know, you’ve got 60 people. And I know you wanted to be at this point at that time. But you’ve thought of all these things that you’ve done, then you’ve built from scratch again. And so you’ve got to give yourself grace, which is why, for me, the celebration piece is so important because we constantly look at all the things we haven’t done. And we never actually properly acknowledge the things that we do. And even when I talk about it and preach it and share it and have a whole business around celebrating it. I still find myself going. Oh, it’s really hard. Oh, I haven’t done it the right way.
Hayley Osborne:
Let’s just pause here. Go back to what you wanted to have. Your goal was to have 50 members by was it July. Or June 30.
Rebecca Saunders:
I wanted 50 members by the end of July. And I hit 50 members on the first of August.
Hayley Osborne:
That’s a win in my book, which was amazing. Congratulations. That’s, you know what, you set the goal, you achieved it.
Hayley Osborne:
You did all the things so I wanted to talk to you about making your uniqueness a superpower because you and I have that superhero superpower kind of thing in common. And I would like to know your take on it. So when you are speaking to, I guess, the crew in the champagne lounge and your clients that you coach one-on-one, what are the things that you talk about? Like how do you start off by making someone’s uniqueness their superpower?
Rebecca Saunders:
Oh, that is such a multi-layered question. And that’s hard. Um, so I think to go back to, I should probably tell My story of, like, harnessing my superpower because that’s the big thing. So for me, I’ve had alopecia since I was seven. Alopecia is an autoimmune disorder, which means it essentially attacks your hair follicles. There are different variations of it. But I don’t have hair anywhere. So for about 25 years, I was wearing wigs every day, making sure that I was looking at the part from a societal perspective, not because I had friends and family that expected me to do that and wanted to do that. And that was the way of coping with it. There was that wasn’t the way it was at all. It was very much for me. I want to have fun with wigs. And I want to look and be like other people and like blend in, as most people do, because standing out is hard, right? It’s hard.
Rebecca Saunders:
After you look at my ten years in business, the communities I’ve been a part of and the way, as a business owner, you go through personal and professional development, and a lot of professional and personal development on a deep, deep level. Surround myself intentionally with people who think big and do things differently. And so, Inklings had started, for me, people going, if you like, just went with your own this whole hair-free scenario, your business will go gangbusters. And I’m like, yeah, yeah, whatever. Fine. Or ironically, like when I did decide to ditch the hair and go out just loud and proud like I am now, that was the year that we hit seven figures in the business. Owning your business, right? So, owning your uniqueness makes such a huge difference. And I think it makes a difference on so many levels because you’ve got, you’ve got to do the work. So it’s not just a flick of the button. I’m going to show up that way, too. Like you’ve got to do the work so that you can actually show up authentically as yourself in your own way, doing your own thing.
Rebecca Saunders:
There is a lot of time involved in that time. And that work is different for everybody. So we start on those Inklings in terms of a teaching perspective because it isn’t just a switch, and it’s not a golden bullet. But once you get to that point where you can ease into who you are and start sharing that piece, that’s when, energetically, it’s so much easier to get up and function in the day. You know, like how I remember looking back going, I literally documented what colour wig I was wearing to what meetings so that I made sure I was literally this like it’s insane how much I was energetically unaware and really draining myself. Of all the things I was thinking about before, I was fully okay with being me. And that’s what I share. And so I share that I talked through that from an experience perspective. I am very much of the opinion that when you are being yourself and energetically, everything is just a hell of a lot easier and more fun when you can just show up as who you are. And in doing that, some of the stuff just sheds off, you know, people or things you don’t need around you or that are holding you back. And the word of this interview. Hayley is hard. Like it is hard, but it wouldn’t be like everyone would do it if it was easy. Yeah. So the champagne lighter cheer squad, right? Because you need those people who go, it’s okay, like we’ve got you if it works great. If it doesn’t, we still got you.
Hayley Osborne:
I truly believe that. If the business journey was easy, 100% everyone would do it. And it’s not. There are so many challenges. There are so many brick walls that you have to climb over and glass ceilings that you have to break through. And for everyone thinking, well, I’m just like, an everyday kind of a person and I don’t have a superpower. Yes, you do. And that is the work that Rebecca is talking about. That is work and I have also done the work and if you haven’t done the work yet, because you don’t know what your superpower is, well, you gotta go do it. You know, and if that means taking yourself out of your office or whatever it is, looking at what that looks like for you and then go for it.
Rebecca Saunders:
Completely. Yeah, your uniqueness piece and your superpower are outside of your comfort zone. It will become your new comfort zone. But you’ve got to get outside of your comfort zone.
Hayley Osborne:
I feel like you and I both think big; we want to surround ourselves with like-minded people. We have really big dreams, big business dreams. Where do you see yourself in five years?
Rebecca Saunders:
Oh, in five years, this is a tricky one, Hayley, because I actually haven’t thought about it in terms of where I’m going to be. But I have marked what I want to have done in that time. So, for me, my 10-year plan involved take involves taking a year off in 2026. And travelling to Australia and doing that. And I want to do that knowing that we’re financially stable enough for me to do that. And I can run the business from wherever I am, which is kind of what I’m already doing. So my goals aren’t necessarily; I want to tick this one and tick that one. It’s actually how I can make it so that it’s financially secure. Without the ups and downs, that’s what I want to achieve. So, for me, that looks like being mortgage-free and being able to help more people with my time because I have more time because the business is running in a different way. And so, for me, I can’t quite articulate what that five years will look like if you asked because I’m living my dream life now, you know, so it’s that whole, I’d love to give back more and work out how to do that in a way that is impactful to the world and the community, but not detrimentally impactful to the way I’m living life and building financial stability and personal wealth in that in that way, because we have to kind of balance so it’s two as the smart business choice.
Hayley Osborne:
So, how do you deal with all the things going on? How do you switch off? What’s your what’s your number one piece of advice? What do you do to, like, disconnect?
Rebecca Saunders:
I don’t think this is a good word for will look at me and go, that’s not switching off back. That’s not but it is for me. My switch-off time is cooking. I absolutely adore cooking and am hosting dinner parties. I hosted two in the last two nights. And most people will go, oh my god, just like order in. Now, I don’t get the satisfaction out of ordering in. So alright, you know, all the time, I don’t get satisfaction out of going to a restaurant, knowing that I could have cooked better at home and I just had a bit of time. So, my downtime on my switch-off time is cooking because it gives me creativity without needing to be attached to tech. And so that’s something I’ve trained myself to do. Because otherwise, it’s so easy to just be attached to a device all the time. So I do the cooking. And then I also love walking my dog and I do that without any headphones. So no music, no podcasts, intentionally just making sure it’s one-on-one time. So their my two to switch offs.
Hayley Osborne:
Do you find that you get the best ideas when you’re in the kitchen or walking the dog?
Rebecca Saunders:
Yes, Oh, God, I need a pen. Where’s my pen on my dog? Well, I haven’t got it.
Hayley Osborne:
Don’t forget, don’t forget. Beck, it’s been so lovely to have you on the podcast. You are energy. You are a vibe. And if people want to get on that train, can you please tell us where we can find you? I’ll put it in the show notes. But I’d like you to drop your things.
Rebecca Saunders:
My happy place on socials is Instagram, so you can find me at @theRebeccaSaunders and online at www.Rebeccasaunders.com or www.thechampagnelounge.com.
Hayley Osborne:
Beautiful. Thank you so much for being here. And I’ve absolutely loved talking to you. I think you’re amazing.
Rebecca Saunders:
Thank you, my love, right back at you. It’s been fab. Bye.
Hayley Osborne:
I hope you’ve enjoyed listening to this episode. If you have hit subscribe, you don’t miss any new episodes released every Tuesday. And while you’re there, leave me a review. I would absolutely love to read it. Also, don’t forget to tag me @HayleyKOsborne over on Instagram and share this post with your audience so they can learn to remember that sharing is caring. If you want more, head over to www.Hayleyosborne.com.au/category/podcast for today’s show notes and links. Catch you next week for another episode of The Hayley Osborne show.
Links
Rebecca Saunders Instagram
Rebecca Saunders Website
Champagne Lounge Website
Hayley Osborne Instagram
Hayley Osborne Website
