August 5, 2024 • 35 mins
You’ll be hard pressed to find more of a marketing genius than Kennedy Anderson, the Owner of The Teeth Whitening Company.
Is User-Generated Content dead? What is the new age of Office Generated Content? And how can skill stacking be essential to running a business? Georgia and Kennedy ask the big questions and delve into the reality of fired, dropping out of university and what it really takes to build a successful business.
Episode 3 of ‘Bored to Boss’ covers all things marketing, guerilla advertising, paying for ads and knowing when to seek help.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From ZM and iHeartRadio. It's bored to Boss. Real stories
of how to navigate starting your own business with me,
Georgia Patton.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Sorry, I'll try not to talk to me.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
No, it's not you, it's my questions.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Okay, I have a lot of questions, but please tell
me to shut up with finding team.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
Shut up.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
Welcome to another episode of Board to Boss. Today. We
are here with i would say, one of New Zealander's
most well known entrepreneurs, Kennedy Anderson. Kennedy owns the Whitening Co,
Content and Co and Collection, and is the founder of
a few of the past businesses we'll get to in
a second. So welcome Kennedy.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
How are you giving me, Georgia. I'm great, I'm excited.
This is so cool. I'm very chumped.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
How's your week being chump?
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Chumped, chuffed and pumped chumped.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
I feel like that could be a thing. Great. How's
your week being?
Speaker 2 (00:51):
You're good?
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Busy already, as are saying on their way up here,
it doesn't feel like it's Tuesday. We've got a lot
happening at the moment. I feel like winter events, clients
and things like that. But it's it's exciting. It's all
positive work.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Yeah, well, thanks for taking some time to come true. Okay,
I'm gonna start you off with a scenario just to
get an overview of what you're doing. Are you ready
for the snow?
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Oh I'm sorr ready. Okay, it feels like at school.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Imagine we're at a bustling networking event. We've just met
for the first time, and I say, tell me about
what you do. How are you going to pitch me?
Speaker 2 (01:21):
I say, I get to make people smile for a living.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Oh there was.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
Oh, you're in comedy and I'm an a chance way
more vain. I'm chasing money and smiles. No, that's usually
what I say these days because as the Whitening Cos
kind of become more and more my full time role,
I get to say that, which genuinely makes me really happy.
The evolution of the Whitening Co's brand kind of moving
away from being permanently vanity and money driven and that
(01:46):
kind of ethos to just genuinely making people smile and
happy and it all being about that kind of thing
has really inspired me.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
So that's like my main role at the moment. That's
what I say.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
It's working because I can't stop staring at your smile.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
When well we've done that, you can wrap up, thank
you very much. No, yeah, and then I guess the
second part to what I get to do is I
get to build amazing brands online.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
It's my thirty second elevator pitch.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
That just wraps it all up into time. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
Yeah, it needs to be, because otherwise it like the Bogue,
it keeps extending.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
So I followed your business journey for a couple of
years and recently had the honor of using you as
my photographer for Board George, which was honestly, the day
was a hurt and half.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
It was so good, highlights of the year.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
So so fun. But that's actually where you started your
business journey. Can you give us a quick little overview
of where the photography business started and kind of how
you ended up here?
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (02:34):
Sure, So it did start off as a wedding photography business.
This is when I was fifteen, so it was a
while ago, and everyone asked me like how I studied
and what I did, and honestly, nothing, I just bullshit
my way through it off swearing are we doing that?
Speaker 1 (02:45):
We're doing swearing?
Speaker 2 (02:46):
It's fine.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
I taught myself everything that I knew. I did a
little bit of it through school, but that was yeah,
I guess I quickly kind of realized that I could
turn a creativity passion into money. HAVE always been kind
of a money focused human being. My parents are very
similar light that, so quickly turned it into a business. However,
I think I kind of went maybe two business too quickly,
with it being around weddings and focused on mainly the
(03:08):
money and making sure I could just be churning out
these weddings like no tomorrow. And then once I kind
of reached UNI Ah, so that was about four years
of doing that, I zoned out a little bit and
kind of went straight into digital marketing and kind of
left the photography part behind. Was like, no, cool, I've
moved on from that money maker onto the next. When
I started to combine the two with one of my
first agency's co lab, when I started to bring that
(03:29):
photography aspect back into the digital marketing, I realized that
was my little secret source, my niche was being able
to understand content, understand photography creativity, but then put it
into a marketing sense.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
What's that thing, Stephen Buttlet says, is when you really find.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
Your oh yeah, your niche. Stacking your niche is when
your niche stack skill stack, skill stack.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
I literally became like kind of important in my field
because of that. I've hired many creatives and photographers along
the years that go way to speck into photography, which
is great, but then you go to use it on
social and the photos are too higher quality or like
you know, those types of things there is you're not
thinking about the full picture where I got to and
that's kind of where, yeah, I guess everything built from
(04:09):
I kind of became this guy that was creative online
but thought about those things and tried to make it
really easy for my clients as you saw, like thinking
about like Instagram stories and posts, not just always thinking
Vogue cover photo. Basically, these days, I'm not a photographer.
I've got my iPhone, I've got my film camera, my
video camera, and my other my main photography camera, and
you're switching between all of them because whether we like
(04:30):
it or not, that's the medium these days is you
kind of just need an abundance of content.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
After you started your content studio, where did you end
up after that?
Speaker 3 (04:39):
Really quickly realized that I was probably more of a
creative than a CEO. I didn't know how to run
the business as much as I thought I did. I
made it look like it on the outside, for sure.
I was good at the brand side of things. Coleb
was bustling as everyone looked at it from the outside,
in the way, always the way, but it wasn't It
was growing. It definitely was growing. We had a lot
of clients growing, but I couldn't make it profit. For
(05:00):
the life of me. Had really dark days, had to
cool dad be like, sorry, can I please loan a
thousand dollars to pay my bills this week?
Speaker 2 (05:07):
It was hard.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
I'm lucky to be in a position where I could
even do that to make sure that my business could
keep going, but it was.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
Yeah, it was really challenging.
Speaker 3 (05:13):
So I quickly had to realize that I had to
learn first and stop thinking I knew everything straight away. Yeah,
because yeah, I basically was just going and blind all
the time and acting like I did until it worked out. However,
that was one of the biggest lessons that I learned.
Was like pulling back and asking for help. Everyone always
says it, but it mattered so much, and so I
actually ended up selling my first agency to a bigger
agency called Glass Elephant, and that was kind of where
(05:35):
all the mentorship started. I got to sit back, be
a creditive director, not the CEO, learn how to manage people,
learn how to be a boss, HR process systems, things
like that that I didn't actually have in place, and yeah,
build from there, which was pretty amazing. It was a
really hard road and like a hard decision at the time,
but really grateful for it.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
Did you come into all of this knowing what you
know through self teaching or did you go to UNI?
Speaker 2 (05:59):
I did go to UNIE, but I dropped out.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Oh my god, this is such a common thread.
Speaker 3 (06:02):
I know what their k like the entrepreneur drop out
story at second year of UNI. I got into that
flow and then kind of was like to my parents, Look,
if I really want to give Colebit's best shot, I'm
going to need to take the year off. But I
promise you if it doesn't work out, I'll go back.
And I haven't gone back, but.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
Yeah, I keep buying teath Fighting Please.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
You are my lifeline.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Yeah, so I don't have to give it to Unique.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
We actually have a similar story of how we started.
I was listening to one of your podcasts, and you
said that you started one of your businesses while you
were working somewhere else and you were bored and you
needed a creative outlet. That is my story to the
tea actually to the tas just what you're in your
side out like I could finish it by eleven am
and then just muck around through today. Sorry to my
old bosses.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
You're literally me sorry, guys.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
And then I started it because I was bored, hence
the name Bored George.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
Stop, that's so cool.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
I didn't know that also came from a travel blog,
not so Bored George. When you were working part time
and building a business. Can you tell me more about that,
because it's such it's common thing I hear from people, Yeah,
that they're kind of building their brands while they're working
for somebody else.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
Yes, I can. I think I can. Did you get
in trouble yeah a little bit you find out, Yeah
they did.
Speaker 3 (07:12):
Yeah, And I don't think it was just because I
was building the brand, like, yeah, I was building it
on their time, I guess, you know, yeah, like it
was that, which is probably not the great Like, I
think it's pretty clear that you can kind of see
a lot of entrepreneurs, they're not the best employees to have.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
I busy brains, Yeah, busy brain. I always thought I
was really good doing me wrong.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
I did the work, but I would have way too
many ideas for someone that was so low down and
like and I was like, okay, cool, Well if you
don't want my ideas, I'll just do this. It's not
a big stress. I guess the difference is is that
like the second that I started to like lead into that,
I leant out of the job. So I had this
little tiny office that was in like a server room.
It was literally it wasn't an office, it was a
server room cupboard, had a spiestos in the ceiling like
(07:49):
it was literate. It was so hot, and I started
put like designing logos for colab, pinning them up on
my wall, like.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
How obvious could you be? And then like deciding like
in front of me.
Speaker 3 (07:58):
It's actually where I met my best friends who now
works me at the whiteningco. And she'd walk in and
see like all my logos up and be like what
are you doing? And I was like, don't tell anyone.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
Anyway.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
I got back to the CEO and he called me
into his office and he said, like, this is kind
of a conflict of interest. This is something that we
want to do, and I said, no, it's not. You
guys are like branding and design. This is social media.
And he was like, what if we want to get
into that at one point and I was like, oh,
you're threatened by a nineteen year old, thank you very much.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
And I was asked to leave. Really yes, though I
quit UNI and fired from my job's big success stories.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
If you listen to most success stories, someone's been fired
or dropped out in something. I haven't been fired.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
Asked to let go, big difference.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
Fire, Yeah, yeah, not fired because it probably would have
got them into more trouble.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
So asked to leave.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
So if we then skip a few years from there,
why teeth whitening, Like it's such a specific thing to
go into it is.
Speaker 3 (08:52):
I think at the time it was early days social media,
you did see a lot of these like same products
kind of come up a bit. One of them was
definitely teth I think it was like an early adopter
into social media influences, you know, like that kind of thing.
I had really yellow teeth at school. I was super
self conscious about it. And I have the story that
I would steal mum's credit card. Legit, steal mum's credit card.
(09:13):
I was like so upset that I didn't want to
tell her, like you know those early days school moments
where you're like embarrassed even let Mum know that I'm
thinking about this kind of thing, and that I was
so vain, but I was so nervous about it. So
I still Mum's credit card and ordered like different teeth
bighting kits online off it like obviously she's going to
find out. Well, so I'm living under her roof. They
get delivered here like it's fine, but they were really dangerous.
So I actually ended up hurting one of my teeth
(09:35):
a tooth, yeah, kind of badly, had to go to
the dentist about it. So I started to realize early
days how hictic these can be, and how unregulated it
is here. I was just buying it online, which even
nowadays is a lot more regulated buying online, but back
then anyone could post on Instagram and do any level
of hydrogen peroxide and things like that. So I was
just buying things from overseas like quite a lot, and then.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
Just ya, I'm just imagining like a hundred teeth, I say.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
Seven plus, like it was like a decent amount that
we like tried out, and your.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
Mum would have been going, Kennedy, you're trying to tell
me something about my team.
Speaker 3 (10:06):
No, I know on number sex like she was helping
me trial it. She's a little bit imaged focus as well,
so we were both like trialing them out. But yeah, no,
it wasn't that good. And so in like skip to
when I was finally ready to start my first e
commerce brand. I didn't want to just do it from
a money motivation. I wanted to have some kind of
passion or some kind of pain yeah, pain point behind it.
And I thought, well, hey, I've got you know, people
(10:29):
around me that are doing well in the space at
the time, and I thought I could do it better.
And I was like, hey, I really think that I've
got a niche here. I want to do it safer,
I want to make it chic, but I really want
none of the bullshit. For lack of a better word,
I think people are sick and tired of being lied to,
and I wanted to just say I'm not natural, I'm
not eco focused, which are all those amazing things. Don't
(10:51):
get me wrong, but this brand is dental great. It
is quality and results focused. You wanted to do, Yeah,
and that's exactly what I.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
Was going after. It ruffled some feathers, but it worked further.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Yeah, and the branding. I remember when you first launched.
I was like, this is impeakable. You're a smart man.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
Not going for the white, going everything black.
Speaker 3 (11:07):
Yeah, that was a bit controversial at the time. A
lot of business mentors told me like, but it's about
sparkling and make you feel bright, and I was like, totally.
The original concept was that everything on the exterior of
the whitening coat, the shops, the box would be black,
and then when you open things up on the inside,
it's all white to kind of show like what's undercover. However,
the black just took over and now it's like everything
it's so cool.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
It's just so not what you expect from AX that
it sticks in you.
Speaker 3 (11:32):
Actually, it's not what I would have expected. And now
there's four other New Zealand. Is it's a compliment, right.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
Yeah, I'm doing something right. People want totally totally with
your marketing strategies. Yeah, I want to dive right into
that I love your marketing brain. Let's start with diving
straight into Black Friday last year. So let's get your
water out there. Yeah, so you did something i'm gonna
(12:07):
say quite controversial and I had an opinion on it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
I like that you had an opinion the later. Yeah,
that's cool.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Can you explain what you did and potentially produce a
Pixie can put like a little video up on this
visual just to kind of find o.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
Good ones producer. Pixie was the bad ones these comments.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
Basically what happened was to those that don't know about
Black huge, huge marketing time of year four brands in general,
but specifically e commerce brands, it becomes an incredible ship
fight online for space. It's practically bigger than Christmas in
my opinion. The amount of money that gets spent online,
not just marketing, but on so many different facets, influences,
out of home, everything like that goes absolutely crazy and
(12:46):
it becomes really expensive.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
Especially those who don't know. The more people that are
trying to vie for the space on social media, the
higher the price gets. That's what he's talking about.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
So economy.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
The whole month of November, your ad spinned doubles triples, quadruples,
and you might not be getting the same visibility as
you did a month ago. For a quarter of the price.
Speaker 3 (13:03):
Becauld Yeah, you could still pay four times the price
and actually still not hit like home. Basically, you're fighting
for time on screen. There's only so many ads that
someone can see and digest in a day without someone
wanting to ditch the app. Your space becomes really limited,
and so people try to do a lot of different
ads to grab attention. I tried to do the opposite.
I learned from a couple other people. This wasn't my
own concept. I love Stephen Bartler. I love the concept
(13:27):
of absurdity as the cheapest form of marketing.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
Real marketing.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
Yeah, yeah, I truly believe.
Speaker 3 (13:31):
The idea that, like, if I want to get someone's attention,
I can do it in a way that isn't just
a big fifty percent off sales ban. I want to
like try to come up with different concepts. So what
I did was I, possibly for lack of a bitter wod,
manipulated my audience. I led them down a path to
believe that we had been graffitied. That evening, I paid
(13:53):
an artist and set up security cameras to capture this
event where someone was tagging the front of my shop. Basically,
this whole plan was that he would tag I'd release
the video. I'd wait twenty four hours and then share
a second video which was like a little bit closer
to what he was writing on our windows, and then
the third video would be like me with the artist
being like, Hey, it's Black Friday Week. That's what he
(14:14):
was tagging on the window. Yeah, Black Friday Week.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
Kind of like April Falls, but for Black Friday.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
Pretty much.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
I wanted to make sure I could get people's attention,
and then the concept of that was retargeting. So I
wasn't making any money out of this campaign. I wasn't
telling anyone to support me or gone by. It was
purely for attention. When I got enough reach on that video,
I would then retarget that audience with my own ads afterwards.
So that was an important piece of this because a
lot of people thought I was ripping them off and
(14:40):
trying to pull the wall over people's eyes. I guess
maybe the messaging, which was a learning for me, I
went maybe too deep too quickly, and I was saying
things like I'm distraught, I'm heartbroken. I really want him
to get people to share it, and it did it work.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
Oh my god. I remember watching it for the first time.
I nearly cried because as a small business owner, the
money you put into everything. And then when I saw
that happen, I remember it's sending it to my business
girls and being like, oh my god, this is so horrible,
like I feel so bad. Yeah, and when you came then,
when you came out with the truth, I turned her ray.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
Yeah, And a lot of people did, even like close mates.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
I had to like they were obviously putting up on
their stories, and if it was a business I would
reply to them and say, hey, thank you so much.
RB and Open was one of them, rene, Oh yes,
my good friend, and I was like, I'm so sorry,
and she was just like you dick, and like removed.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
Everything was like what what the hell?
Speaker 3 (15:27):
And I was like, fair enough, I'll talk to you
guys about it in like a week when it's all
kind of calm down. But for now, I needed that height, basically,
and I'd already gone so far at this point that
I had to just commit to it.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
And how much did this cost you?
Speaker 3 (15:39):
I think I'd go on record for like eight hundred
and ninety dollars total the whole campaign, So I covered
oh that's an important pieces. I covered the entire front
of the building in a plastic clear film beforehand so
that when he tagged over everything, the next video that
I could release was me just like peeling it off,
which also ruffled feathers because they were like, how dare
you trick us like that?
Speaker 2 (15:57):
But that also got a lot of views as well.
Speaker 3 (15:59):
That video, and then possibly two weeks or so later
around Black Friday, or like a little bit after Black Friday,
someone actually did tag my shop no yeah, which.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
I was like, I just had not known post about that.
Speaker 3 (16:12):
I did post the reel and I put Taylor Swift's
karma over. It also got forty thousand views, so I
was like, you know what, everyone who got the joke
got a little piece of it, But everyone who wanted
to laugh at me and like kind of have their
go also got a little piece of it. So it
kind of won on both circumstances. It was also the
best Black Friday week we've ever had as a company.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
I think it was controversial for sure, it worked and
most business owners are taking influence from it. I know
this year, we're taking different stants. Yeah, and we're taking
a leaf out of Kennedy's book Nice and we're going
to have a big marketing meeting on how we can
do something with less money so that eight hundred dollars
that you spent you got way more out of it
through four reels than you would three eight hundred dollars
(16:51):
of ads been. And that's the way we've got to
start switching our brains, is what can we do that's
not just putting money behind an air campaign.
Speaker 3 (16:57):
When you've got such a cool brand like Boord George
and how you can play on all of that, I think, Yeah,
it's harder for other brands realize that in the space
brands like Colgate and there's other types of one they
have to just do the blanket sales. You know, We've
got the opportunity to play with our audience, make sure
that they're listening, and also reach a whole new audience.
That was the biggest thing, right, Not only was I
having my current customers during Black Friday, I hit over
(17:19):
one hundred and fifty thousand new people to the White
n Inco whether they liked it or not, you know,
And so I don't know.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
To me, that was a huge win.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
Granted I took some notes on learnings for what's next,
but if that was done overseas, there wouldn't have been
another eyelid bat, you know, like it was. It's just standard.
It was a lot different for New Zealand, which I'm.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
Kind of plaud of seeing it before.
Speaker 3 (17:37):
Yeah, totally. I think, Yeah, there's just lessons still to
be learned. I was young, it's right, I'm growing.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
Yeah, Oh, should we just have a marketing meeting now?
Speaker 2 (17:42):
And I start toutching the ideas?
Speaker 1 (17:44):
So can you just steal your time? So with your
social media that was obviously on Instagram, yes, and then
you've got TikTok as well. So how do you leverage
both platforms with your social media? And do you have
different marketing strategies on both? I do CO explain?
Speaker 2 (18:00):
It depends on if you're talking about whitning Coo or Kennedy.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
Let's talk about whiteningco first.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
Sure, I think we're probably all in the realm of
understanding that TikTok is booming. I mean it's always been
booming of the last couple of years, but it's booming
like no tomorrow for small businesses at the moment.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
I mean, I've got the view on it.
Speaker 3 (18:15):
If you're not on it, don't do it completely, Like,
don't half asset if you're going to do it. But
my view on that is personality more than anything. I
think we've all seen the Riley's, the Jazz Handmads, like
the brands that are at the face of late blessiness. Yeah,
the queens of what they're doing right, and it's this
reality TV shows, but even attention seeker are doing it
really well. You know, this concept of keeping your attention
on the screen, making it feel like you want to
(18:37):
check up the episode that happened that day of what's
happening in their life, and then you switch to their
Instagram and that's when you can see their products like
a website. I'm a big believer in the fact that
if someone wants to find out about your brand, your product,
your ethos, there's a website and an Instagram for that.
You do not need to explain in every video. You
don't need to say hello, I'm Kennedy from the Whitening Co.
And I jump eight shades wide on everything that like,
h yeah, like no one actually can.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
It's not going to catch anyone's and I think.
Speaker 3 (19:01):
Literally less than three seconds, right and without even knowing it,
we do it. And so if you want a brand,
if you're a brand, you're already trying to sell for someone,
you want to get their attention, you've got to do
the concept of making someone fall in love with who's
packing their order, make someone fall in love with why
they're eating this for lunch, the people behind the brand,
because that's what's going to make someone be.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
Like, I didn't know I could be so invested in
what some girls eat for lunch. Honestly, when the.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
Why do I care? I don't know.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
I don't know why I care. But when they go
on their lunch trips, the Riley Girls and the Remy girls,
was that Jazz had made, I'm like, oh, where are
they're going today? No?
Speaker 3 (19:30):
Fully, my girls at work are literally like Kennedy, They've
gone and got this brownie and am I okay?
Speaker 2 (19:34):
And they're like, are you going to buy phones? They're
literally like, for.
Speaker 3 (19:37):
Research, we're going to get brownies. And I'm like, doesn't
feel like the exact thing that they've done.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
But I feel like it's sitting such a high expectation
for all the people coming into business and this is
what they're.
Speaker 3 (19:48):
Take your bags. Yeah, hard things like that, for sure.
I think just separating out the two the really important thing.
And look, a lot of them can cross pollinate.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
Don't get me wrong.
Speaker 3 (19:58):
I really truly believe that the idea for TikTok is
time on site. It's how much can I grab their
attention for Even if you've had one viral video that's
really cool for your brand, what's going to keep someone
invested in your brand is continuously putting out content that
makes them feel like they're not being sold to. And
then when it's time for them to buy a piece
of jewelry or a pair of sunglasses or finally get
their teeth whitened, you are the brand that they think of.
(20:20):
Ye please don't put a call to action in every
single video.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
I will scroll past.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
What have they changed it from? I heard this yesterday
and I was that genius. It's not UGC anymore, it
is is it OGC? Fast generated content?
Speaker 2 (20:33):
Clever? Yeah, so hiring a house I do like that.
Speaker 3 (20:35):
I agree, even you g see these days we've seen
it was about to be the biggest thing ever, and
it was for a little bit I now watch those
ads and just have no interest in believing them.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
I spent so much money on GC content over the
six months. I think I had four girls on rotation
each month sending in you GC videos and I.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
Still time and place for you.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
Had to drop it off a lot because I look
at it now and I go, you know, it's not
doing it.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
It's an actor.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
It's an AD. Yeah, it is an AD used to
be and I say in quotation marks, but it is.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
Yeah, the concept of it was.
Speaker 3 (21:07):
It was an ad concept, but it was so early
that people still believed in it trended and foul way
faster than influencers did. Like I think we saw that
trend of everyone buying whatever influencers said, and that dropped off.
But now it's kind of at this plateau where you
can still convince he belive to it if they love
and believe in the brand.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
UGC was this huge trend.
Speaker 3 (21:23):
Agencies were built around it, like careers were built around it.
But honestly, if I'm going to pay you five hundred
bucks now, I better not feel like I'm just buying
an actor, because otherwise I'll just do that. You know,
Like this whole point of it is that I want.
Maybe a UGC credit these days could reimagine how they
pitch and it could say, hey, I've got a series
for you where I'm going to look for a teeth
whitening brand online without saying your brand first. Then I'm
(21:45):
going to search for all these but I'm going to
get three or four competitive brands with you, and most
brands will be like no, no, way, no, that's important.
People want to see the comparison, believe in your product,
do things differently.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
That's to me.
Speaker 3 (21:56):
How if I was a UGC credit, I'd pitch myself
these days that's way more believable and I'd pay money
for that. I would pay bigger bucks for something like that. Whereas, yeah,
you're right, these days everyone wants to hire a house.
I saw an amazing ad go Live that I got
tagged and yesterday on LinkedIn for Tracksuit, the big marketing
platform agency here in New Zealand. They are going out
looking for their person, their person to be in the house,
(22:16):
always doing this time.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
How do you feel about this, because obviously I'm the
face of the brand and as much as that was
never the plan, it has just worked out like that. Yeah,
and I always feel safe that as the face of
the brand, I'm never going to leave. Obviously, when with
all these people that are hiring specifically to be the
face of the brand, what happens when these people leave? Yeah,
I think it faces all over the socials and that's
(22:38):
how people know the brand. Does that make you nervous
for these brands?
Speaker 2 (22:41):
Yes, for sure.
Speaker 3 (22:41):
I think there's a difference between being the face of
the brand and being the brand. I think as long
as you are still there, Like I've got my two
amazing team members Jaron Briley, who are becoming closer and
closer to being the faces of the Brandy. However, I'll
still jump in every third or fourth video, and like
they purposely make videos about teasing the boss and like
doing all those those types of things that I think
it's still it's almost made it better because otherwise it
(23:03):
was only me. And as I'm sure you're aware, you
get really over talking about your own brand personally, Like
I'm like, if I've got to convince someone's teeth whitening today,
I'm like, ugh, okay, it's like kind of divvied up.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
The fact that it's not just my face of the time.
Speaker 3 (23:16):
It makes it more exciting and special when it is,
because then I feel like I'm delivering more value when
I do, and then they can kind of help the
more like essence in the fun of the brand, which
we honestly do. We write down on the whiteboard, like,
if I was to create a video today, what are
the four things that I really want to portray, even
if it is just the girls going to get a brownie,
I want to make sure I'm smiling pretty much the
entire time.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
That's our concept, that's our goal.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
I want this brand to feel like, why aren't we
getting six cvs a day to work for that kind
of thing? So like goal, if you can deliver me
five videos a week that continuously get four hundred views,
those four hundred people are really important to me because
what you've just shown them is smiles, whitening, how fun
we are, how much we're growing the orders going out
four hundred times five times a week. And that's to
(23:58):
anyone who's doing this type of thing. Please don't get
caught up in the views. It's so much more important
that you're doing that consistently, because honestly, now we get
people ordering and then writing and being like, oh my God,
I got em and MS last time from the TikTok.
Can we get such and such? And I'm like, Braley,
I do all this marketing over here, and that one
video that you did made this order.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
Be proud of that.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
Most people who recognize me will recognize me off TikTok
crazy a which means the reach is so powerful and
although your views might not be as high, I mean,
they are so much lower on TikTok than they are
on Instagram. The people that recognize me and my brand
come from TikTok.
Speaker 3 (24:31):
I think the value of someone follower on TikTok versus
Instagram still has a different value. I kind of compare
it like email lists and how the bigg of the
email list. You can kind of say, like every email
reciprient is worth about fifty cents to a brand on average.
I think an Instagram follower is worth more to a
brand purely because they're engaged, they're there, and they're there
to follow you for a reason. I can be obsessed
(24:51):
with board George and then just accidentally not follow it
on TikTok because I'm going to see it all the
time anyway, you know, So those to me that doesn't
prove anything.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
It's the reach.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
Are you running a or are you going more for
organak At the.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
Moment, we are running ads.
Speaker 3 (25:03):
I've been a very organic focused marketer my whole life. Basically,
when I was at my big performance agency, Glass Elephant,
I was the brand guy.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
We had performance teams.
Speaker 3 (25:12):
I have always been under the essence that if you
can't market your brand to someone by talking to someone
about it, it probably isn't worth selling. For a good
two out of the five years of the Whitning Coo,
I didn't run a single AD. I wanted to prove
that I didn't have to to do that. Don't get
me wrong, I definitely do now, and boy do I
spend some money on it. But I wouldn't have done
it the other way. I wouldn't have just gone straight in.
(25:32):
I think it's really scary that people rely purely on
Facebook ads to make all their money. I don't, and
I can proudly say that I don't. If you're relying
heavily on that. The day that Facebook's down, which I've
seen it happen at agencies, you lose hundreds of thousands
of dollars. If you're a bigger brand, you know, if
you're a Facebook brand. I don't run ads on TikTok
currently purely because yep, I have tried great for reach,
great for engagement. I haven't seen the same kind of
(25:53):
conversion from TikTok yet. However, however, I think it will
grow in New Zealand a lot and even just reach.
If you're doing engagement campaigns, that can be amazing on TikTok,
Like if you haven't looked into that as a small brand,
do because once it's so cheap to get that kind
of engagement and it does help a small brand look
bigger than they are, and that is a perceived value sometimes,
so that can be really important as well. I started
(26:22):
to take over my whole business. I had five shearholders
originally in the white InKo. I bought them all out.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
I heard so excited.
Speaker 2 (26:28):
That was a huge moment for me, and so a
lot of money. It was a lot of money.
Speaker 3 (26:31):
It's a big mortgage. It's not a mine. I will
be paying that off. So yeah, that was a big
moment even for my shareholders as well. They knew that
it was my baby, but were in it with me.
Really cool moment and doing that, I kind of needed
to know that my position in the company was going
to grow from that. I was doing a lot anyway,
but now it was everything and I needed to make
sure that if I couldn't be every day on my
(26:53):
Instagram selling my cats, which honestly did get a bit
tiring after a while, I had to ensure that I
had a lifeline to kind of keep that goal while
I'm designing the.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
Products, showing your adspins.
Speaker 2 (27:03):
Go up, oh my god, and watching your revenue go up, to.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
You start to learn the correlation of your rois.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
And yeah, conversion rates and all that.
Speaker 3 (27:11):
It's just it's stuff that genuinely gets you excited when
you're going.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
To crisis and stuff to me though, and I'm.
Speaker 3 (27:15):
Like, oh, yeah, totally yeah, ab CPC.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
Yeah, And then I'm like, please explain it.
Speaker 3 (27:21):
She looks like, as long as it's money making, I'm
fineways is the important one.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
That's the important one, and I trust her. I think
that's the number one is we've got employees and staff
to do these jobs.
Speaker 3 (27:31):
I personally believe in finding these like outsourced contractors for
your brands, for your businesses, because they live and breathe
your brand. They're active as if they are employed by
your brand, and it's really important that I can email
someone and say, hey, I've got a wacky idea, what
if we do X, Y Z, And then by tomorrow
it's live Because we're trying to grow and we need
to kind of think on our feet and move. I
could have an entire campaign laid out for a month
(27:52):
and one trend will end up changing a whole week's
worth of ads.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
Oh, definitely with your marketing campaigns. Have you had any
fail Yeah? Can you tell me some that you were like,
this is going to be absolutely banging and then it
sure comes to it and it just didn't perform.
Speaker 2 (28:07):
I've had more fail than going right. Yeah, Yeah, for sure. Absolutely.
Speaker 3 (28:10):
I had to do a lot more work on the
Ebrush than I thought I was going to, and I
think it's because I fell into that trap of being
the creator of the product.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (28:18):
I spent two years, like yeah, a year and ten
months working on this one product, and I did the
old school way of doing that, which was don't tell
anyone about it until like a month out, and that
was whilst TikTok and everything was kind of like starting
to build.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
Oh you missed an opportunity I did.
Speaker 3 (28:34):
I missed a huge opportunity because yeah, over that two years,
I could have been documenting the entire process, and I
was just keeping it so head and so to myself
because I genuinely thought I was making the best toothbrush
on the planet. I ordered so many from around the
world and then just wrote down my two favorite things
of every single one and made sure that my product
had the two best things of every single brand that
I could find, whether it was a thousand bucks where
(28:56):
it was one hundred dollars.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
That was my goal.
Speaker 3 (28:57):
I didn't talk about any of that, and I just
expected everyone to realize how cool this product was, which
it was, and don't be wrong, it's still kind of launched.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
I just couldn't believe that.
Speaker 3 (29:06):
Like, I think I sold thirty on the first day,
and I was expecting to like maybe sell two hundred.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
Yeah, and that is totally the reality.
Speaker 3 (29:13):
And I think people just think to see those like
chin goes off and don't be wrong, God, how amazing
is selling thirty on the day. I used to dream
of those moments, but as a business owner, I was
so upset and so deflated, and everyone was trying to say, hey,
to me like how cool is this?
Speaker 2 (29:26):
And you're like, I get it.
Speaker 3 (29:27):
I don't mean to sound ungrateful, but everything I've been
doing is working towards X y Z number, and I
think it's really important to realize that there probably was
never a number that I would have been like, happy, amazing.
If I had two hundred, I would have been like,
why haven' it been five hundred?
Speaker 1 (29:40):
Yep.
Speaker 3 (29:41):
The biggest thing there to me, and the lesson learned
was realizing that just because you believe everything of your
soul has important to something, how on earth are they
supposed to know you literally have to like spoon feed everybody.
And I did kind of know that I would do
that for my clients. I just had this gut feeling
that I was like, this is the best thing ever,
all of the six surround it has been penned to
(30:01):
explaining it a lot more and being out of be
like even just like handing it to you just before
and saying like three months battery life. People are like wait, what,
and I'm like exactly, like why wasn't it even?
Speaker 1 (30:11):
But I get so excited over an electric toothbrush. I
opened that box and it was like I was opening
a gold bar an apple product.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
Right, Yeah, for sure, that's what you meant.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
Actually it does feel like stop it.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
Yeah, no, honestly, And that's that's the feeling.
Speaker 3 (30:24):
That's the feeling that when people open these up and
then I get these textes being like, I'm going to
think about you every time this is in my mouth. Now,
I'm like, who else gets tixses like that about a toothbrush? Like,
I'm pretty proud of that I've managed to make something
that's so mundane into something that's so cool. But honestly,
that's all just through marketing, right, Like there are plenty
of other things out there that can do the same thing.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
We launched one of our best sellers again yesterday. It
was our seventh three stock, which is that congrats Inside
it's crazy brain can say they've sold out of a
pair of sunglasses six times, not mini And we had
a fantastic day. But all I could think at the
end of the day was why didn't we do better?
And I have to check myself and go, oh my god,
Georgia three years ago would have sold one pair of
sunglasses a week and been so happy. Why are you
(31:03):
not happy with this incredible day? And you just want next, next, next.
You just have to check yourself sometimes.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
Only Yeah, yeah, hard, And this one's good to have
team members around to like check yourself as well, because
I'm sure Charlie's the same thing to me.
Speaker 1 (31:16):
She's so excited and I'm sitting there going it's not
good enough.
Speaker 2 (31:18):
Yeah, shit, the days sucks.
Speaker 3 (31:20):
No, I agree, and I think, yeah, the comparison thing
is super hard. We have daily targets. Most days we
don't hit them. On this day we did, and this
particular person helped us get there. I'm going to pack
your order for you. Little moments like that like Dane's
going to message us or she's going to receive a
free pack of strips, makes people realize that, like this
still matters to me, Like, oh my god, heading the
daily target, this one person's order still really matters to me.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
Granted, I'm terrible at packing it.
Speaker 3 (31:43):
If you watch that video, I'm shocking it doing it,
commited to my team, but it really really matters to me,
and I think that that's the part that I really
want to keep showing.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
And since being a small business, there's still that small
business touch point on every single product. I only just
got somebody and to start packing in March. Before that,
for four and a half years, I pecked everybody's orders.
I could recognize every single person's name that popped up
four or five, six, seven times, And when they came
into the shop over the last month, what should.
Speaker 4 (32:10):
We give as into the back keep chain head, we'll
find her a tote bag and Bradley's that writing her
this big note and it's like she ordered some strips,
like everyone is to calm down, but it matters so
much to us, like it does.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
So during all of this, you did a short stint
on The Apprentice, so you do. Yeah, I really wanted
to bring this up. You think going on that show
influenced both personal brand and your future businesses.
Speaker 3 (32:36):
I obviously went onto it like a lot of people
go on to the shows hoping for business opportunity. More
so when we got on there, that's when we found
out the prize money. We didn't know it until then
because they wanted to fill our reactions. And when I
found out it was fifty grand, not sounding wanky, but
I was like, oh bugger, because I'd seen love shows
get like one hundred grand, and I was hoping that
(32:56):
if I was going to spend five weeks away from
work unless going for something bigger than that, And so honestly,
my mind clicked into how am I going to make
this worth my time? Whether this is like people like
this or not, I'm not sure. My goal then became
to try and get business from the show. I wasn't
allowed to talk about my brands on the show.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
Come on, that is why everybody goes on, whether they
say it or not.
Speaker 3 (33:15):
Oh no, but internally, so basically I went. I was
in a room with fourteen other business people, right, so
I pitched Glass Elephant, my agency at the time, to
these other business people and ensured that before I'd left
the show, I walked away with around seventy grand.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
Worth of work.
Speaker 3 (33:28):
And you did, we walked a with five clients from that,
and yeah, about seventy k worth of business, which was
bigger than the prize pool.
Speaker 2 (33:33):
So I feel like I want done. I feel like
I won.
Speaker 3 (33:35):
We had an amazing opportunity and yeah, the way that
it built, I guess my personal brain was probably the
biggest thing from that, which then in turn trickled down
to the white inco.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
I wanted to do a real quick touch point on
burnout because you are someone who I'm always watching doing this,
doing that, going on the Apprentice, running all these businesses.
Does it ever hit you?
Speaker 2 (33:53):
Yeah? For sure, And I have to get better at
showing it for me.
Speaker 1 (33:56):
I have clear signs. Yeah, I call it my three
step burnout. I had number one. I get little rashes, yeah,
number two I just cry at the drop of a pin.
And number three is a little bit more like panic attacking. Ye,
and I've never learned. What are you doing to learn?
Speaker 3 (34:11):
Like, honestly, travel, living to work and not working to live.
I'm a huge like hustle, culture, work late, do all that,
and I truly am and I do believe that you've
got to do that to succeed.
Speaker 2 (34:21):
However, within reason.
Speaker 3 (34:22):
Everything in moderation, including moderation is like my dad's little
tagline that he'd say to me. Yeah, I think realizing
to call yourself out early is a big one. Yeah,
finding out what makes the work worth it is really important.
Speaker 1 (34:33):
Yeah. Are you proud of what you've done and what
you've achieved?
Speaker 2 (34:36):
I have my days, but I promise you I am. Yeah,
I'm really really stoked.
Speaker 3 (34:39):
I think probably the whitening co is my most proudest
moment realizing that like, of course, I'm building a life
for myself, I'm creating money, I'm building a brand all
of that. But like coming downstairs and my sister's wrapping
up a customer, and this person's just done having scrapping
up a customer, just wrapping them up, sind out, just
finishing up with finishing up with the client. And we've
(35:00):
got tears in their eyes because they're feeling so grateful
of being able to smile with the teeth again.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
And I'm like, shut up, I've created this. This is
pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (35:06):
I'm proud of you.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
Thanks, babe, so cool.
Speaker 1 (35:11):
Thanks for listening. Boor de Boss is a z M
podcast for iHeartRadio with me Georgia Patton. This episode was
produced by Pixie Copperrell, engineered by Me Cutt and Call
It with production help from Sam Harvey. If you liked it,
hit subscribe to get notified whenever we release a new episode.
Listen every Tuesday on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your
podcasts and make your business idea a reality
From ZM and iHeartRadio. It's bored to Boss. Real stories
of how to navigate starting your own business with me,
Georgia Patton.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Sorry, I'll try not to talk to me.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
No, it's not you, it's my questions.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Okay, I have a lot of questions, but please tell
me to shut up with finding team.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
Shut up.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
Welcome to another episode of Board to Boss. Today. We
are here with i would say, one of New Zealander's
most well known entrepreneurs, Kennedy Anderson. Kennedy owns the Whitening Co,
Content and Co and Collection, and is the founder of
a few of the past businesses we'll get to in
a second. So welcome Kennedy.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
How are you giving me, Georgia. I'm great, I'm excited.
This is so cool. I'm very chumped.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
How's your week being chump?
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Chumped, chuffed and pumped chumped.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
I feel like that could be a thing. Great. How's
your week being?
Speaker 2 (00:51):
You're good?
Speaker 3 (00:52):
Busy already, as are saying on their way up here,
it doesn't feel like it's Tuesday. We've got a lot
happening at the moment. I feel like winter events, clients
and things like that. But it's it's exciting. It's all
positive work.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Yeah, well, thanks for taking some time to come true. Okay,
I'm gonna start you off with a scenario just to
get an overview of what you're doing. Are you ready
for the snow?
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Oh I'm sorr ready. Okay, it feels like at school.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Imagine we're at a bustling networking event. We've just met
for the first time, and I say, tell me about
what you do. How are you going to pitch me?
Speaker 2 (01:21):
I say, I get to make people smile for a living.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Oh there was.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
Oh, you're in comedy and I'm an a chance way
more vain. I'm chasing money and smiles. No, that's usually
what I say these days because as the Whitening Cos
kind of become more and more my full time role,
I get to say that, which genuinely makes me really happy.
The evolution of the Whitening Co's brand kind of moving
away from being permanently vanity and money driven and that
(01:46):
kind of ethos to just genuinely making people smile and
happy and it all being about that kind of thing
has really inspired me.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
So that's like my main role at the moment. That's
what I say.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
It's working because I can't stop staring at your smile.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
When well we've done that, you can wrap up, thank
you very much. No, yeah, and then I guess the
second part to what I get to do is I
get to build amazing brands online.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
It's my thirty second elevator pitch.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
That just wraps it all up into time. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
Yeah, it needs to be, because otherwise it like the Bogue,
it keeps extending.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
So I followed your business journey for a couple of
years and recently had the honor of using you as
my photographer for Board George, which was honestly, the day
was a hurt and half.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
It was so good, highlights of the year.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
So so fun. But that's actually where you started your
business journey. Can you give us a quick little overview
of where the photography business started and kind of how
you ended up here?
Speaker 2 (02:33):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (02:34):
Sure, So it did start off as a wedding photography business.
This is when I was fifteen, so it was a
while ago, and everyone asked me like how I studied
and what I did, and honestly, nothing, I just bullshit
my way through it off swearing are we doing that?
Speaker 1 (02:45):
We're doing swearing?
Speaker 2 (02:46):
It's fine.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
I taught myself everything that I knew. I did a
little bit of it through school, but that was yeah,
I guess I quickly kind of realized that I could
turn a creativity passion into money. HAVE always been kind
of a money focused human being. My parents are very
similar light that, so quickly turned it into a business. However,
I think I kind of went maybe two business too quickly,
with it being around weddings and focused on mainly the
(03:08):
money and making sure I could just be churning out
these weddings like no tomorrow. And then once I kind
of reached UNI Ah, so that was about four years
of doing that, I zoned out a little bit and
kind of went straight into digital marketing and kind of
left the photography part behind. Was like, no, cool, I've
moved on from that money maker onto the next. When
I started to combine the two with one of my
first agency's co lab, when I started to bring that
(03:29):
photography aspect back into the digital marketing, I realized that
was my little secret source, my niche was being able
to understand content, understand photography creativity, but then put it
into a marketing sense.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
What's that thing, Stephen Buttlet says, is when you really find.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
Your oh yeah, your niche. Stacking your niche is when
your niche stack skill stack, skill stack.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
I literally became like kind of important in my field
because of that. I've hired many creatives and photographers along
the years that go way to speck into photography, which
is great, but then you go to use it on
social and the photos are too higher quality or like
you know, those types of things there is you're not
thinking about the full picture where I got to and
that's kind of where, yeah, I guess everything built from
(04:09):
I kind of became this guy that was creative online
but thought about those things and tried to make it
really easy for my clients as you saw, like thinking
about like Instagram stories and posts, not just always thinking
Vogue cover photo. Basically, these days, I'm not a photographer.
I've got my iPhone, I've got my film camera, my
video camera, and my other my main photography camera, and
you're switching between all of them because whether we like
(04:30):
it or not, that's the medium these days is you
kind of just need an abundance of content.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
After you started your content studio, where did you end
up after that?
Speaker 3 (04:39):
Really quickly realized that I was probably more of a
creative than a CEO. I didn't know how to run
the business as much as I thought I did. I
made it look like it on the outside, for sure.
I was good at the brand side of things. Coleb
was bustling as everyone looked at it from the outside,
in the way, always the way, but it wasn't It
was growing. It definitely was growing. We had a lot
of clients growing, but I couldn't make it profit. For
(05:00):
the life of me. Had really dark days, had to
cool dad be like, sorry, can I please loan a
thousand dollars to pay my bills this week?
Speaker 2 (05:07):
It was hard.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
I'm lucky to be in a position where I could
even do that to make sure that my business could
keep going, but it was.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
Yeah, it was really challenging.
Speaker 3 (05:13):
So I quickly had to realize that I had to
learn first and stop thinking I knew everything straight away. Yeah,
because yeah, I basically was just going and blind all
the time and acting like I did until it worked out. However,
that was one of the biggest lessons that I learned.
Was like pulling back and asking for help. Everyone always
says it, but it mattered so much, and so I
actually ended up selling my first agency to a bigger
agency called Glass Elephant, and that was kind of where
(05:35):
all the mentorship started. I got to sit back, be
a creditive director, not the CEO, learn how to manage people,
learn how to be a boss, HR process systems, things
like that that I didn't actually have in place, and yeah,
build from there, which was pretty amazing. It was a
really hard road and like a hard decision at the time,
but really grateful for it.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
Did you come into all of this knowing what you
know through self teaching or did you go to UNI?
Speaker 2 (05:59):
I did go to UNIE, but I dropped out.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Oh my god, this is such a common thread.
Speaker 3 (06:02):
I know what their k like the entrepreneur drop out
story at second year of UNI. I got into that
flow and then kind of was like to my parents, Look,
if I really want to give Colebit's best shot, I'm
going to need to take the year off. But I
promise you if it doesn't work out, I'll go back.
And I haven't gone back, but.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
Yeah, I keep buying teath Fighting Please.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
You are my lifeline.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Yeah, so I don't have to give it to Unique.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
We actually have a similar story of how we started.
I was listening to one of your podcasts, and you
said that you started one of your businesses while you
were working somewhere else and you were bored and you
needed a creative outlet. That is my story to the
tea actually to the tas just what you're in your
side out like I could finish it by eleven am
and then just muck around through today. Sorry to my
old bosses.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
You're literally me sorry, guys.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
And then I started it because I was bored, hence
the name Bored George.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
Stop, that's so cool.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
I didn't know that also came from a travel blog,
not so Bored George. When you were working part time
and building a business. Can you tell me more about that,
because it's such it's common thing I hear from people, Yeah,
that they're kind of building their brands while they're working
for somebody else.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
Yes, I can. I think I can. Did you get
in trouble yeah a little bit you find out, Yeah
they did.
Speaker 3 (07:12):
Yeah, And I don't think it was just because I
was building the brand, like, yeah, I was building it
on their time, I guess, you know, yeah, like it
was that, which is probably not the great Like, I
think it's pretty clear that you can kind of see
a lot of entrepreneurs, they're not the best employees to have.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
I busy brains, Yeah, busy brain. I always thought I
was really good doing me wrong.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
I did the work, but I would have way too
many ideas for someone that was so low down and
like and I was like, okay, cool, Well if you
don't want my ideas, I'll just do this. It's not
a big stress. I guess the difference is is that
like the second that I started to like lead into that,
I leant out of the job. So I had this
little tiny office that was in like a server room.
It was literally it wasn't an office, it was a
server room cupboard, had a spiestos in the ceiling like
(07:49):
it was literate. It was so hot, and I started
put like designing logos for colab, pinning them up on
my wall, like.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
How obvious could you be? And then like deciding like
in front of me.
Speaker 3 (07:58):
It's actually where I met my best friends who now
works me at the whiteningco. And she'd walk in and
see like all my logos up and be like what
are you doing? And I was like, don't tell anyone.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
Anyway.
Speaker 3 (08:07):
I got back to the CEO and he called me
into his office and he said, like, this is kind
of a conflict of interest. This is something that we
want to do, and I said, no, it's not. You
guys are like branding and design. This is social media.
And he was like, what if we want to get
into that at one point and I was like, oh,
you're threatened by a nineteen year old, thank you very much.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
And I was asked to leave. Really yes, though I
quit UNI and fired from my job's big success stories.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
If you listen to most success stories, someone's been fired
or dropped out in something. I haven't been fired.
Speaker 2 (08:37):
Asked to let go, big difference.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
Fire, Yeah, yeah, not fired because it probably would have
got them into more trouble.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
So asked to leave.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
So if we then skip a few years from there,
why teeth whitening, Like it's such a specific thing to
go into it is.
Speaker 3 (08:52):
I think at the time it was early days social media,
you did see a lot of these like same products
kind of come up a bit. One of them was
definitely teth I think it was like an early adopter
into social media influences, you know, like that kind of thing.
I had really yellow teeth at school. I was super
self conscious about it. And I have the story that
I would steal mum's credit card. Legit, steal mum's credit card.
(09:13):
I was like so upset that I didn't want to
tell her, like you know those early days school moments
where you're like embarrassed even let Mum know that I'm
thinking about this kind of thing, and that I was
so vain, but I was so nervous about it. So
I still Mum's credit card and ordered like different teeth
bighting kits online off it like obviously she's going to
find out. Well, so I'm living under her roof. They
get delivered here like it's fine, but they were really dangerous.
So I actually ended up hurting one of my teeth
(09:35):
a tooth, yeah, kind of badly, had to go to
the dentist about it. So I started to realize early
days how hictic these can be, and how unregulated it
is here. I was just buying it online, which even
nowadays is a lot more regulated buying online, but back
then anyone could post on Instagram and do any level
of hydrogen peroxide and things like that. So I was
just buying things from overseas like quite a lot, and then.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
Just ya, I'm just imagining like a hundred teeth, I say.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
Seven plus, like it was like a decent amount that
we like tried out, and your.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
Mum would have been going, Kennedy, you're trying to tell
me something about my team.
Speaker 3 (10:06):
No, I know on number sex like she was helping
me trial it. She's a little bit imaged focus as well,
so we were both like trialing them out. But yeah, no,
it wasn't that good. And so in like skip to
when I was finally ready to start my first e
commerce brand. I didn't want to just do it from
a money motivation. I wanted to have some kind of
passion or some kind of pain yeah, pain point behind it.
And I thought, well, hey, I've got you know, people
(10:29):
around me that are doing well in the space at
the time, and I thought I could do it better.
And I was like, hey, I really think that I've
got a niche here. I want to do it safer,
I want to make it chic, but I really want
none of the bullshit. For lack of a better word,
I think people are sick and tired of being lied to,
and I wanted to just say I'm not natural, I'm
not eco focused, which are all those amazing things. Don't
(10:51):
get me wrong, but this brand is dental great. It
is quality and results focused. You wanted to do, Yeah,
and that's exactly what I.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
Was going after. It ruffled some feathers, but it worked further.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Yeah, and the branding. I remember when you first launched.
I was like, this is impeakable. You're a smart man.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
Not going for the white, going everything black.
Speaker 3 (11:07):
Yeah, that was a bit controversial at the time. A
lot of business mentors told me like, but it's about
sparkling and make you feel bright, and I was like, totally.
The original concept was that everything on the exterior of
the whitening coat, the shops, the box would be black,
and then when you open things up on the inside,
it's all white to kind of show like what's undercover. However,
the black just took over and now it's like everything
it's so cool.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
It's just so not what you expect from AX that
it sticks in you.
Speaker 3 (11:32):
Actually, it's not what I would have expected. And now
there's four other New Zealand. Is it's a compliment, right.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
Yeah, I'm doing something right. People want totally totally with
your marketing strategies. Yeah, I want to dive right into
that I love your marketing brain. Let's start with diving
straight into Black Friday last year. So let's get your
water out there. Yeah, so you did something i'm gonna
(12:07):
say quite controversial and I had an opinion on it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
I like that you had an opinion the later. Yeah,
that's cool.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Can you explain what you did and potentially produce a
Pixie can put like a little video up on this
visual just to kind of find o.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
Good ones producer. Pixie was the bad ones these comments.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
Basically what happened was to those that don't know about
Black huge, huge marketing time of year four brands in general,
but specifically e commerce brands, it becomes an incredible ship
fight online for space. It's practically bigger than Christmas in
my opinion. The amount of money that gets spent online,
not just marketing, but on so many different facets, influences,
out of home, everything like that goes absolutely crazy and
(12:46):
it becomes really expensive.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
Especially those who don't know. The more people that are
trying to vie for the space on social media, the
higher the price gets. That's what he's talking about.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
So economy.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
The whole month of November, your ad spinned doubles triples, quadruples,
and you might not be getting the same visibility as
you did a month ago. For a quarter of the price.
Speaker 3 (13:03):
Becauld Yeah, you could still pay four times the price
and actually still not hit like home. Basically, you're fighting
for time on screen. There's only so many ads that
someone can see and digest in a day without someone
wanting to ditch the app. Your space becomes really limited,
and so people try to do a lot of different
ads to grab attention. I tried to do the opposite.
I learned from a couple other people. This wasn't my
own concept. I love Stephen Bartler. I love the concept
(13:27):
of absurdity as the cheapest form of marketing.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
Real marketing.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
Yeah, yeah, I truly believe.
Speaker 3 (13:31):
The idea that, like, if I want to get someone's attention,
I can do it in a way that isn't just
a big fifty percent off sales ban. I want to
like try to come up with different concepts. So what
I did was I, possibly for lack of a bitter wod,
manipulated my audience. I led them down a path to
believe that we had been graffitied. That evening, I paid
(13:53):
an artist and set up security cameras to capture this
event where someone was tagging the front of my shop. Basically,
this whole plan was that he would tag I'd release
the video. I'd wait twenty four hours and then share
a second video which was like a little bit closer
to what he was writing on our windows, and then
the third video would be like me with the artist
being like, Hey, it's Black Friday Week. That's what he
(14:14):
was tagging on the window. Yeah, Black Friday Week.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
Kind of like April Falls, but for Black Friday.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
Pretty much.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
I wanted to make sure I could get people's attention,
and then the concept of that was retargeting. So I
wasn't making any money out of this campaign. I wasn't
telling anyone to support me or gone by. It was
purely for attention. When I got enough reach on that video,
I would then retarget that audience with my own ads afterwards.
So that was an important piece of this because a
lot of people thought I was ripping them off and
(14:40):
trying to pull the wall over people's eyes. I guess
maybe the messaging, which was a learning for me, I
went maybe too deep too quickly, and I was saying
things like I'm distraught, I'm heartbroken. I really want him
to get people to share it, and it did it work.
Speaker 1 (14:51):
Oh my god. I remember watching it for the first time.
I nearly cried because as a small business owner, the
money you put into everything. And then when I saw
that happen, I remember it's sending it to my business
girls and being like, oh my god, this is so horrible,
like I feel so bad. Yeah, and when you came then,
when you came out with the truth, I turned her ray.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
Yeah, And a lot of people did, even like close mates.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
I had to like they were obviously putting up on
their stories, and if it was a business I would
reply to them and say, hey, thank you so much.
RB and Open was one of them, rene, Oh yes,
my good friend, and I was like, I'm so sorry,
and she was just like you dick, and like removed.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
Everything was like what what the hell?
Speaker 3 (15:27):
And I was like, fair enough, I'll talk to you
guys about it in like a week when it's all
kind of calm down. But for now, I needed that height, basically,
and I'd already gone so far at this point that
I had to just commit to it.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
And how much did this cost you?
Speaker 3 (15:39):
I think I'd go on record for like eight hundred
and ninety dollars total the whole campaign, So I covered
oh that's an important pieces. I covered the entire front
of the building in a plastic clear film beforehand so
that when he tagged over everything, the next video that
I could release was me just like peeling it off,
which also ruffled feathers because they were like, how dare
you trick us like that?
Speaker 2 (15:57):
But that also got a lot of views as well.
Speaker 3 (15:59):
That video, and then possibly two weeks or so later
around Black Friday, or like a little bit after Black Friday,
someone actually did tag my shop no yeah, which.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
I was like, I just had not known post about that.
Speaker 3 (16:12):
I did post the reel and I put Taylor Swift's
karma over. It also got forty thousand views, so I
was like, you know what, everyone who got the joke
got a little piece of it, But everyone who wanted
to laugh at me and like kind of have their
go also got a little piece of it. So it
kind of won on both circumstances. It was also the
best Black Friday week we've ever had as a company.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
I think it was controversial for sure, it worked and
most business owners are taking influence from it. I know
this year, we're taking different stants. Yeah, and we're taking
a leaf out of Kennedy's book Nice and we're going
to have a big marketing meeting on how we can
do something with less money so that eight hundred dollars
that you spent you got way more out of it
through four reels than you would three eight hundred dollars
(16:51):
of ads been. And that's the way we've got to
start switching our brains, is what can we do that's
not just putting money behind an air campaign.
Speaker 3 (16:57):
When you've got such a cool brand like Boord George
and how you can play on all of that, I think, Yeah,
it's harder for other brands realize that in the space
brands like Colgate and there's other types of one they
have to just do the blanket sales. You know, We've
got the opportunity to play with our audience, make sure
that they're listening, and also reach a whole new audience.
That was the biggest thing, right, Not only was I
having my current customers during Black Friday, I hit over
(17:19):
one hundred and fifty thousand new people to the White
n Inco whether they liked it or not, you know,
And so I don't know.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
To me, that was a huge win.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
Granted I took some notes on learnings for what's next,
but if that was done overseas, there wouldn't have been
another eyelid bat, you know, like it was. It's just standard.
It was a lot different for New Zealand, which I'm.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
Kind of plaud of seeing it before.
Speaker 3 (17:37):
Yeah, totally. I think, Yeah, there's just lessons still to
be learned. I was young, it's right, I'm growing.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
Yeah, Oh, should we just have a marketing meeting now?
Speaker 2 (17:42):
And I start toutching the ideas?
Speaker 1 (17:44):
So can you just steal your time? So with your
social media that was obviously on Instagram, yes, and then
you've got TikTok as well. So how do you leverage
both platforms with your social media? And do you have
different marketing strategies on both? I do CO explain?
Speaker 2 (18:00):
It depends on if you're talking about whitning Coo or Kennedy.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
Let's talk about whiteningco first.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
Sure, I think we're probably all in the realm of
understanding that TikTok is booming. I mean it's always been
booming of the last couple of years, but it's booming
like no tomorrow for small businesses at the moment.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
I mean, I've got the view on it.
Speaker 3 (18:15):
If you're not on it, don't do it completely, Like,
don't half asset if you're going to do it. But
my view on that is personality more than anything. I
think we've all seen the Riley's, the Jazz Handmads, like
the brands that are at the face of late blessiness. Yeah,
the queens of what they're doing right, and it's this
reality TV shows, but even attention seeker are doing it
really well. You know, this concept of keeping your attention
on the screen, making it feel like you want to
(18:37):
check up the episode that happened that day of what's
happening in their life, and then you switch to their
Instagram and that's when you can see their products like
a website. I'm a big believer in the fact that
if someone wants to find out about your brand, your product,
your ethos, there's a website and an Instagram for that.
You do not need to explain in every video. You
don't need to say hello, I'm Kennedy from the Whitening Co.
And I jump eight shades wide on everything that like,
h yeah, like no one actually can.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
It's not going to catch anyone's and I think.
Speaker 3 (19:01):
Literally less than three seconds, right and without even knowing it,
we do it. And so if you want a brand,
if you're a brand, you're already trying to sell for someone,
you want to get their attention, you've got to do
the concept of making someone fall in love with who's
packing their order, make someone fall in love with why
they're eating this for lunch, the people behind the brand,
because that's what's going to make someone be.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
Like, I didn't know I could be so invested in
what some girls eat for lunch. Honestly, when the.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
Why do I care? I don't know.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
I don't know why I care. But when they go
on their lunch trips, the Riley Girls and the Remy girls,
was that Jazz had made, I'm like, oh, where are
they're going today? No?
Speaker 3 (19:30):
Fully, my girls at work are literally like Kennedy, They've
gone and got this brownie and am I okay?
Speaker 2 (19:34):
And they're like, are you going to buy phones? They're
literally like, for.
Speaker 3 (19:37):
Research, we're going to get brownies. And I'm like, doesn't
feel like the exact thing that they've done.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
But I feel like it's sitting such a high expectation
for all the people coming into business and this is
what they're.
Speaker 3 (19:48):
Take your bags. Yeah, hard things like that, for sure.
I think just separating out the two the really important thing.
And look, a lot of them can cross pollinate.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
Don't get me wrong.
Speaker 3 (19:58):
I really truly believe that the idea for TikTok is
time on site. It's how much can I grab their
attention for Even if you've had one viral video that's
really cool for your brand, what's going to keep someone
invested in your brand is continuously putting out content that
makes them feel like they're not being sold to. And
then when it's time for them to buy a piece
of jewelry or a pair of sunglasses or finally get
their teeth whitened, you are the brand that they think of.
(20:20):
Ye please don't put a call to action in every
single video.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
I will scroll past.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
What have they changed it from? I heard this yesterday
and I was that genius. It's not UGC anymore, it
is is it OGC? Fast generated content?
Speaker 2 (20:33):
Clever? Yeah, so hiring a house I do like that.
Speaker 3 (20:35):
I agree, even you g see these days we've seen
it was about to be the biggest thing ever, and
it was for a little bit I now watch those
ads and just have no interest in believing them.
Speaker 1 (20:44):
I spent so much money on GC content over the
six months. I think I had four girls on rotation
each month sending in you GC videos and I.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
Still time and place for you.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
Had to drop it off a lot because I look
at it now and I go, you know, it's not
doing it.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
It's an actor.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
It's an AD. Yeah, it is an AD used to
be and I say in quotation marks, but it is.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
Yeah, the concept of it was.
Speaker 3 (21:07):
It was an ad concept, but it was so early
that people still believed in it trended and foul way
faster than influencers did. Like I think we saw that
trend of everyone buying whatever influencers said, and that dropped off.
But now it's kind of at this plateau where you
can still convince he belive to it if they love
and believe in the brand.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
UGC was this huge trend.
Speaker 3 (21:23):
Agencies were built around it, like careers were built around it.
But honestly, if I'm going to pay you five hundred
bucks now, I better not feel like I'm just buying
an actor, because otherwise I'll just do that. You know,
Like this whole point of it is that I want.
Maybe a UGC credit these days could reimagine how they
pitch and it could say, hey, I've got a series
for you where I'm going to look for a teeth
whitening brand online without saying your brand first. Then I'm
(21:45):
going to search for all these but I'm going to
get three or four competitive brands with you, and most
brands will be like no, no, way, no, that's important.
People want to see the comparison, believe in your product,
do things differently.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
That's to me.
Speaker 3 (21:56):
How if I was a UGC credit, I'd pitch myself
these days that's way more believable and I'd pay money
for that. I would pay bigger bucks for something like that. Whereas, yeah,
you're right, these days everyone wants to hire a house.
I saw an amazing ad go Live that I got
tagged and yesterday on LinkedIn for Tracksuit, the big marketing
platform agency here in New Zealand. They are going out
looking for their person, their person to be in the house,
(22:16):
always doing this time.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
How do you feel about this, because obviously I'm the
face of the brand and as much as that was
never the plan, it has just worked out like that. Yeah,
and I always feel safe that as the face of
the brand, I'm never going to leave. Obviously, when with
all these people that are hiring specifically to be the
face of the brand, what happens when these people leave? Yeah,
I think it faces all over the socials and that's
(22:38):
how people know the brand. Does that make you nervous
for these brands?
Speaker 2 (22:41):
Yes, for sure.
Speaker 3 (22:41):
I think there's a difference between being the face of
the brand and being the brand. I think as long
as you are still there, Like I've got my two
amazing team members Jaron Briley, who are becoming closer and
closer to being the faces of the Brandy. However, I'll
still jump in every third or fourth video, and like
they purposely make videos about teasing the boss and like
doing all those those types of things that I think
it's still it's almost made it better because otherwise it
(23:03):
was only me. And as I'm sure you're aware, you
get really over talking about your own brand personally, Like
I'm like, if I've got to convince someone's teeth whitening today,
I'm like, ugh, okay, it's like kind of divvied up.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
The fact that it's not just my face of the time.
Speaker 3 (23:16):
It makes it more exciting and special when it is,
because then I feel like I'm delivering more value when
I do, and then they can kind of help the
more like essence in the fun of the brand, which
we honestly do. We write down on the whiteboard, like,
if I was to create a video today, what are
the four things that I really want to portray, even
if it is just the girls going to get a brownie,
I want to make sure I'm smiling pretty much the
entire time.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
That's our concept, that's our goal.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
I want this brand to feel like, why aren't we
getting six cvs a day to work for that kind
of thing? So like goal, if you can deliver me
five videos a week that continuously get four hundred views,
those four hundred people are really important to me because
what you've just shown them is smiles, whitening, how fun
we are, how much we're growing the orders going out
four hundred times five times a week. And that's to
(23:58):
anyone who's doing this type of thing. Please don't get
caught up in the views. It's so much more important
that you're doing that consistently, because honestly, now we get
people ordering and then writing and being like, oh my God,
I got em and MS last time from the TikTok.
Can we get such and such? And I'm like, Braley,
I do all this marketing over here, and that one
video that you did made this order.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
Be proud of that.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
Most people who recognize me will recognize me off TikTok
crazy a which means the reach is so powerful and
although your views might not be as high, I mean,
they are so much lower on TikTok than they are
on Instagram. The people that recognize me and my brand
come from TikTok.
Speaker 3 (24:31):
I think the value of someone follower on TikTok versus
Instagram still has a different value. I kind of compare
it like email lists and how the bigg of the
email list. You can kind of say, like every email
reciprient is worth about fifty cents to a brand on average.
I think an Instagram follower is worth more to a
brand purely because they're engaged, they're there, and they're there
to follow you for a reason. I can be obsessed
(24:51):
with board George and then just accidentally not follow it
on TikTok because I'm going to see it all the
time anyway, you know, So those to me that doesn't
prove anything.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
It's the reach.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
Are you running a or are you going more for
organak At the.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
Moment, we are running ads.
Speaker 3 (25:03):
I've been a very organic focused marketer my whole life. Basically,
when I was at my big performance agency, Glass Elephant,
I was the brand guy.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
We had performance teams.
Speaker 3 (25:12):
I have always been under the essence that if you
can't market your brand to someone by talking to someone
about it, it probably isn't worth selling. For a good
two out of the five years of the Whitning Coo,
I didn't run a single AD. I wanted to prove
that I didn't have to to do that. Don't get
me wrong, I definitely do now, and boy do I
spend some money on it. But I wouldn't have done
it the other way. I wouldn't have just gone straight in.
(25:32):
I think it's really scary that people rely purely on
Facebook ads to make all their money. I don't, and
I can proudly say that I don't. If you're relying
heavily on that. The day that Facebook's down, which I've
seen it happen at agencies, you lose hundreds of thousands
of dollars. If you're a bigger brand, you know, if
you're a Facebook brand. I don't run ads on TikTok
currently purely because yep, I have tried great for reach,
great for engagement. I haven't seen the same kind of
(25:53):
conversion from TikTok yet. However, however, I think it will
grow in New Zealand a lot and even just reach.
If you're doing engagement campaigns, that can be amazing on TikTok,
Like if you haven't looked into that as a small brand,
do because once it's so cheap to get that kind
of engagement and it does help a small brand look
bigger than they are, and that is a perceived value sometimes,
so that can be really important as well. I started
(26:22):
to take over my whole business. I had five shearholders
originally in the white InKo. I bought them all out.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
I heard so excited.
Speaker 2 (26:28):
That was a huge moment for me, and so a
lot of money. It was a lot of money.
Speaker 3 (26:31):
It's a big mortgage. It's not a mine. I will
be paying that off. So yeah, that was a big
moment even for my shareholders as well. They knew that
it was my baby, but were in it with me.
Really cool moment and doing that, I kind of needed
to know that my position in the company was going
to grow from that. I was doing a lot anyway,
but now it was everything and I needed to make
sure that if I couldn't be every day on my
(26:53):
Instagram selling my cats, which honestly did get a bit
tiring after a while, I had to ensure that I
had a lifeline to kind of keep that goal while
I'm designing the.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
Products, showing your adspins.
Speaker 2 (27:03):
Go up, oh my god, and watching your revenue go up, to.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
You start to learn the correlation of your rois.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
And yeah, conversion rates and all that.
Speaker 3 (27:11):
It's just it's stuff that genuinely gets you excited when
you're going.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
To crisis and stuff to me though, and I'm.
Speaker 3 (27:15):
Like, oh, yeah, totally yeah, ab CPC.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
Yeah, And then I'm like, please explain it.
Speaker 3 (27:21):
She looks like, as long as it's money making, I'm
fineways is the important one.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
That's the important one, and I trust her. I think
that's the number one is we've got employees and staff
to do these jobs.
Speaker 3 (27:31):
I personally believe in finding these like outsourced contractors for
your brands, for your businesses, because they live and breathe
your brand. They're active as if they are employed by
your brand, and it's really important that I can email
someone and say, hey, I've got a wacky idea, what
if we do X, Y Z, And then by tomorrow
it's live Because we're trying to grow and we need
to kind of think on our feet and move. I
could have an entire campaign laid out for a month
(27:52):
and one trend will end up changing a whole week's
worth of ads.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
Oh, definitely with your marketing campaigns. Have you had any
fail Yeah? Can you tell me some that you were like,
this is going to be absolutely banging and then it
sure comes to it and it just didn't perform.
Speaker 2 (28:07):
I've had more fail than going right. Yeah, Yeah, for sure. Absolutely.
Speaker 3 (28:10):
I had to do a lot more work on the
Ebrush than I thought I was going to, and I
think it's because I fell into that trap of being
the creator of the product.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (28:18):
I spent two years, like yeah, a year and ten
months working on this one product, and I did the
old school way of doing that, which was don't tell
anyone about it until like a month out, and that
was whilst TikTok and everything was kind of like starting
to build.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
Oh you missed an opportunity I did.
Speaker 3 (28:34):
I missed a huge opportunity because yeah, over that two years,
I could have been documenting the entire process, and I
was just keeping it so head and so to myself
because I genuinely thought I was making the best toothbrush
on the planet. I ordered so many from around the
world and then just wrote down my two favorite things
of every single one and made sure that my product
had the two best things of every single brand that
I could find, whether it was a thousand bucks where
(28:56):
it was one hundred dollars.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
That was my goal.
Speaker 3 (28:57):
I didn't talk about any of that, and I just
expected everyone to realize how cool this product was, which
it was, and don't be wrong, it's still kind of launched.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
I just couldn't believe that.
Speaker 3 (29:06):
Like, I think I sold thirty on the first day,
and I was expecting to like maybe sell two hundred.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
Yeah, and that is totally the reality.
Speaker 3 (29:13):
And I think people just think to see those like
chin goes off and don't be wrong, God, how amazing
is selling thirty on the day. I used to dream
of those moments, but as a business owner, I was
so upset and so deflated, and everyone was trying to say, hey,
to me like how cool is this?
Speaker 2 (29:26):
And you're like, I get it.
Speaker 3 (29:27):
I don't mean to sound ungrateful, but everything I've been
doing is working towards X y Z number, and I
think it's really important to realize that there probably was
never a number that I would have been like, happy, amazing.
If I had two hundred, I would have been like,
why haven' it been five hundred?
Speaker 1 (29:40):
Yep.
Speaker 3 (29:41):
The biggest thing there to me, and the lesson learned
was realizing that just because you believe everything of your
soul has important to something, how on earth are they
supposed to know you literally have to like spoon feed everybody.
And I did kind of know that I would do
that for my clients. I just had this gut feeling
that I was like, this is the best thing ever,
all of the six surround it has been penned to
(30:01):
explaining it a lot more and being out of be
like even just like handing it to you just before
and saying like three months battery life. People are like wait, what,
and I'm like exactly, like why wasn't it even?
Speaker 1 (30:11):
But I get so excited over an electric toothbrush. I
opened that box and it was like I was opening
a gold bar an apple product.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
Right, Yeah, for sure, that's what you meant.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
Actually it does feel like stop it.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
Yeah, no, honestly, And that's that's the feeling.
Speaker 3 (30:24):
That's the feeling that when people open these up and
then I get these textes being like, I'm going to
think about you every time this is in my mouth. Now,
I'm like, who else gets tixses like that about a toothbrush? Like,
I'm pretty proud of that I've managed to make something
that's so mundane into something that's so cool. But honestly,
that's all just through marketing, right, Like there are plenty
of other things out there that can do the same thing.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
We launched one of our best sellers again yesterday. It
was our seventh three stock, which is that congrats Inside
it's crazy brain can say they've sold out of a
pair of sunglasses six times, not mini And we had
a fantastic day. But all I could think at the
end of the day was why didn't we do better?
And I have to check myself and go, oh my god,
Georgia three years ago would have sold one pair of
sunglasses a week and been so happy. Why are you
(31:03):
not happy with this incredible day? And you just want next, next, next.
You just have to check yourself sometimes.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
Only Yeah, yeah, hard, And this one's good to have
team members around to like check yourself as well, because
I'm sure Charlie's the same thing to me.
Speaker 1 (31:16):
She's so excited and I'm sitting there going it's not
good enough.
Speaker 2 (31:18):
Yeah, shit, the days sucks.
Speaker 3 (31:20):
No, I agree, and I think, yeah, the comparison thing
is super hard. We have daily targets. Most days we
don't hit them. On this day we did, and this
particular person helped us get there. I'm going to pack
your order for you. Little moments like that like Dane's
going to message us or she's going to receive a
free pack of strips, makes people realize that, like this
still matters to me, Like, oh my god, heading the
daily target, this one person's order still really matters to me.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
Granted, I'm terrible at packing it.
Speaker 3 (31:43):
If you watch that video, I'm shocking it doing it,
commited to my team, but it really really matters to me,
and I think that that's the part that I really
want to keep showing.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
And since being a small business, there's still that small
business touch point on every single product. I only just
got somebody and to start packing in March. Before that,
for four and a half years, I pecked everybody's orders.
I could recognize every single person's name that popped up
four or five, six, seven times, And when they came
into the shop over the last month, what should.
Speaker 4 (32:10):
We give as into the back keep chain head, we'll
find her a tote bag and Bradley's that writing her
this big note and it's like she ordered some strips,
like everyone is to calm down, but it matters so
much to us, like it does.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
So during all of this, you did a short stint
on The Apprentice, so you do. Yeah, I really wanted
to bring this up. You think going on that show
influenced both personal brand and your future businesses.
Speaker 3 (32:36):
I obviously went onto it like a lot of people
go on to the shows hoping for business opportunity. More
so when we got on there, that's when we found
out the prize money. We didn't know it until then
because they wanted to fill our reactions. And when I
found out it was fifty grand, not sounding wanky, but
I was like, oh bugger, because I'd seen love shows
get like one hundred grand, and I was hoping that
(32:56):
if I was going to spend five weeks away from
work unless going for something bigger than that, And so honestly,
my mind clicked into how am I going to make
this worth my time? Whether this is like people like
this or not, I'm not sure. My goal then became
to try and get business from the show. I wasn't
allowed to talk about my brands on the show.
Speaker 1 (33:12):
Come on, that is why everybody goes on, whether they
say it or not.
Speaker 3 (33:15):
Oh no, but internally, so basically I went. I was
in a room with fourteen other business people, right, so
I pitched Glass Elephant, my agency at the time, to
these other business people and ensured that before I'd left
the show, I walked away with around seventy grand.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
Worth of work.
Speaker 3 (33:28):
And you did, we walked a with five clients from that,
and yeah, about seventy k worth of business, which was
bigger than the prize pool.
Speaker 2 (33:33):
So I feel like I want done. I feel like
I won.
Speaker 3 (33:35):
We had an amazing opportunity and yeah, the way that
it built, I guess my personal brain was probably the
biggest thing from that, which then in turn trickled down
to the white inco.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
I wanted to do a real quick touch point on
burnout because you are someone who I'm always watching doing this,
doing that, going on the Apprentice, running all these businesses.
Does it ever hit you?
Speaker 2 (33:53):
Yeah? For sure, And I have to get better at
showing it for me.
Speaker 1 (33:56):
I have clear signs. Yeah, I call it my three
step burnout. I had number one. I get little rashes, yeah,
number two I just cry at the drop of a pin.
And number three is a little bit more like panic attacking. Ye,
and I've never learned. What are you doing to learn?
Speaker 3 (34:11):
Like, honestly, travel, living to work and not working to live.
I'm a huge like hustle, culture, work late, do all that,
and I truly am and I do believe that you've
got to do that to succeed.
Speaker 2 (34:21):
However, within reason.
Speaker 3 (34:22):
Everything in moderation, including moderation is like my dad's little
tagline that he'd say to me. Yeah, I think realizing
to call yourself out early is a big one. Yeah,
finding out what makes the work worth it is really important.
Speaker 1 (34:33):
Yeah. Are you proud of what you've done and what
you've achieved?
Speaker 2 (34:36):
I have my days, but I promise you I am. Yeah,
I'm really really stoked.
Speaker 3 (34:39):
I think probably the whitening co is my most proudest
moment realizing that like, of course, I'm building a life
for myself, I'm creating money, I'm building a brand all
of that. But like coming downstairs and my sister's wrapping
up a customer, and this person's just done having scrapping
up a customer, just wrapping them up, sind out, just
finishing up with finishing up with the client. And we've
(35:00):
got tears in their eyes because they're feeling so grateful
of being able to smile with the teeth again.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
And I'm like, shut up, I've created this. This is
pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (35:06):
I'm proud of you.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
Thanks, babe, so cool.
Speaker 1 (35:11):
Thanks for listening. Boor de Boss is a z M
podcast for iHeartRadio with me Georgia Patton. This episode was
produced by Pixie Copperrell, engineered by Me Cutt and Call
It with production help from Sam Harvey. If you liked it,
hit subscribe to get notified whenever we release a new episode.
Listen every Tuesday on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your
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