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Meet Your Mentor: Olivia Jenkins' Business Background
208 Plays1 year ago
In today's episode, I'm excited to introduce myself as your mentor on the show and share my career journey with you.
As a 15x award-winning Business & Marketing Consultant, I've had the honour of working with some of the best CEOs and business leaders from all over Australia. But my journey hasn't been easy. I'll be sharing with you the challenges I faced along the way, and how I overcame them to become the go-to consultant for businesses looking to scale.
I'll also take you back to my childhood and share some of my early experiences that shaped my work ethic and passion for business. I'm hoping that my story will inspire you and give you some valuable insights on how to grow and scale your own business.
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Transcript
Introduction to Cult-Like Branding Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the See You's Wingwoman podcast.
00:00:05
Speaker
I'm Olivia Jenkins, your host and virtual coach, helping you scale your brand to cult-like status. Since 2019, I've helped over 100 clients generate in excess of $45 million in revenue. And now it's time for me to share my tips, tricks and strategies to help you supercharge your growth. I'm here to help you step into your power to develop a bulletproof strategy and growth mindset to match. Consider me your secret weapon to scale. Let's get started.
Olivia's Career Journey and Expertise
00:00:35
Speaker
Welcome to the CEO's Wingwoman podcast. In this episode, I want to introduce myself as your mentor on the show and share my personal story, career journey and experience as a business and marketing consultant.
00:00:49
Speaker
Wow, where to begin? I'm so excited to record this episode and share a little bit more about my background with you all. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Olivia Jenkins and I'm a 15 times award-winning business and marketing consultant at Olivia Jenkins Consulting. I specialize in serving CEOs in the health, beauty, fashion and lifestyle industries to become cult brands.
00:01:10
Speaker
I hold an MBA majoring in marketing and a master coach aka master practitioner in NLP and mother of three beautiful children. I am also obsessed with all things business, mindset and marketing, especially growth mindset. And since mid 2019, I've helped consulting clients generate in excess of 50 million in sales and have been featured in the likes of Vogue and Forbes.
00:01:35
Speaker
Today, I wanted to share with you a little bit about my mission and vision for the purpose of this podcast to explain why the CEOs Wing Woman podcast has come to life. Truth be told, this has been something that I've wanted to do for over two years now. I think I've had this podcast mic sitting in my drawer for a couple of years.
00:01:52
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And I'm so excited to be able to bring this to life and explain a little bit behind why I'm so passionate about sharing all of my stories with you through this podcast, but also interviewing CEOs and founders of Brands You Love so that you're able to take away some of their key challenges and things that they wish they'd known at similar times of their journey.
Mission to Inspire through CEO Interviews
00:02:12
Speaker
Essentially, my mission with this podcast is to inspire, empower and educate you through the episodes that we'll be sharing together and expand your mindset and supercharge your growth. That's what it's all about. For me, my number one core value in life is growth and I absolutely love podcasts and anything that helps me explore that core value.
00:02:34
Speaker
In these episodes together, we'll be deep diving on business mastery topics. You'll hear from founders and CEOs of brands you love. And you'll also tune into some guest experts as well, deliver value that honestly, you would usually pay for by the hour, but will really help you scale your business and get some great advice. On this show, I aim to be your secret weapon to scale and use my results driven strategies to help you professionally, strategically and confidently scale your business.
Influence of Childhood in Family Business
00:03:05
Speaker
I wanna touch base on my business journey just to give you a little bit of background about who I am and how my journey came to life. And the first place that I wanted to start is with my background. And essentially you could say that my business journey started from a very young age and it's part of my DNA given my mother founded a global skincare brand when I was just 18 months old.
00:03:27
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She actually convinced my dad and i don't know how she did this but she did she convinced my dad to sell the family car to raise the capital that she needed to start her business back in nineteen ninety three or nineteen ninety four and my some of my earliest memories are sitting around the kitchen table with
00:03:44
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my brother and my sister and we would label bottles of Rosa Poirot and we would put the labels on them, we'd fill them. I also remember attending so many meetings with my mum growing up, working at the office in my school holidays and going on international trips quite often as well to attend expos and trade fairs. So it's safe to say that it's definitely part of my DNA and has been for a very long time.
00:04:08
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And I remember being about 13 on my school holidays and writing business plans for fun. And what I would do is I would send them into my mother's general manager at the time and I'd ask her for feedback. And I still remember one of my best ideas today. I'm actually kind of kicking myself that I didn't bring this vision to life. But one of my best ideas was I conceptualized a range of clean pet grooming products.
00:04:33
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And this was back in the mid 2000s, early to mid 2000s. So there were lots of pet grooming products available, but none of them at the time were clean or natural. And so I developed this entire business plan and I remember sending it to Emma, the general manager at the time and asking for feedback about
00:04:50
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this amazing business idea that I had. So that was quite common for me to spend my time doing things like that. And I know they say that things that you do as a child for fun are often a little bit of an insight into what you might end up doing later in life. And I can definitely relate to that and writing business plans because still to this day, it's something that I enjoy very, very much. Fast forward into adulthood.
00:05:16
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I started my career in corporate almost immediately after school. My first role was essentially, you know, receptionist or even lower than receptionist. I was like a sponge learning everything that I could. And I realized now that that was the beginning of my growth mindset.
00:05:32
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and although i probably didn't realize that's what it was at the time i just remember going into the business and just being a sponge and wanting to learn absolutely everything that i could take on as much responsibility as i possibly could and i worked extremely hard throughout my late teens early twenties i really dedicated myself to my career and
00:05:53
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Sadly, there were no trips to Europe and that's still on my bucket list. I just focus heavily on investing in my education and getting as much experience as I possibly could in my career. I never really had any desire looking back to place my career on hold for any type of travel.
00:06:12
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life event really and I think that's testament to me now being a mum of three and you know my kids have come along for this crazy journey as well throughout all of my career journey and also starting the business. So that's definitely been something that I've noticed throughout.
00:06:28
Speaker
I really applied myself diligently though because in that first position, in that first business, I knew that I was in a family business. And for anyone who's listening that has a family business or has been part of a family business, you would know that when you work for family, you're under the magnifying glass more than any other person in that business. So I was always very conscious that I needed to be working at 150%.
00:06:53
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And I quickly took on more responsibility. As I said, I acted like a sponge within the business, learning as much as I possibly could and putting my hand up to take on any extra tasks that would see me expand my knowledge and improve my business skill set. I also studied business and marketing and I invested in my first ever growth mindset experience with Tony Robbins actually, Unleash The Power as a 21 year old. And I just knew that that was the beginning of my love affair with growth mindset. I enjoyed that experience so much.
00:07:22
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And from there, I continued to build upon my skill set in the family business and ended up leading the business through a rebranding process, total restructure of the sales strategy and launching several new products. My role took me overseas many times as well visiting international distributors and representing the brand at international trade shows.
00:07:44
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And honestly, it was a very fulfilling and rewarding role, particularly working in the family business, of course. However, I think part of me knew that in order to really reach my full potential, I needed to carve my own
Transition to Global Health Brand
00:07:57
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path and my own career journey. And so I decided to leave the family business where I was a general manager at the time.
00:08:04
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And I stepped into a new and exciting role with a global health and wellness brand, which was a much larger business and ended up being bought out for $1.7 billion in a two-step deal in 2015 and 2016.
00:08:19
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It was a really incredible experience given the dynamic nature of the business and a lot of the team members that worked there were very young, very dynamic and many of my colleagues now have gone on to achieve amazing things and own their own very successful businesses with national and global footprints. So I think it's safe to say that there was something in the water in that business.
00:08:42
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And as much as I loved working in that business, I was presented with another opportunity quite early that was simply too good to refuse. And I was headhunted for an incredible position as a general manager with a brand that I know and love.
00:08:57
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So this represented an amazing opportunity. Because it was a brand that I knew so well, I knew that it had really strong brand credibility as the pioneers of natural tanning within Australia. So for those of you who are familiar and listening to this today, Vanity is the brand that I'm referring to. And if you are familiar with the brand, you would know that they're an iconic tanning brand with a rich history of creating high performance spray tanning solutions. So
00:09:24
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The CEO and founder of Vanity Tanya Walsh is one of the most inspiring business women you will ever meet and has an incredible story to share about her business journey. I actually spoke to her this morning and she will be joining me on the podcast and I can't wait to dive into her story in more detail.
00:09:42
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Tanya, if you're listening to this, I adore you and thank you for everything. Tanya is one of the most angelic people that you ever come across and I'm so excited to share a little bit more about her journey. So going back to the storyline now, I started with Vanity as the general manager in 2016.
00:10:00
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And I began studying to acquire my MBA majoring in marketing around the same time. So essentially I set to task almost immediately on the strategic planning process, which involved a lot of researching and collating data so that I could map out the best possible strategy and strategic plan to take a very successful B2B brand that had huge brand awareness in the salon market and turn them into a wildly successful e-commerce brand at the same time.
00:10:30
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Now, to put this into context, this was within the first couple of years after solariums were banned in Australia. So many of the tanning solons had closed down, unable to survive on just doing spray tans alone. And this represented a huge threat to the business. So essentially, it was my responsibility to come in and ensure that we had a strategy that would see us balance out the B2B and the B2C offering for the brand to really protect its position.
00:10:57
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And still to this day, looking back, it was one of the most fulfilling and rewarding career milestones for me. We worked tirelessly over that three and a half year period to rebrand the business, to rationalize the range, to reposition the brand and ensure its continued success as an iconic tanning and makeup brand.
00:11:17
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And I don't want to give away too much of the story because Tanya will be joining us in a later episode, but let's just say it's an epic tale of transformational success. And after working with the brand for three and a half years and completing this turnaround process alongside Tanya.
00:11:33
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I decided with my two boys in tow that it was time for me to start my own entrepreneurial journey and launch into my consulting career.
Choosing Consulting over Product Business
00:11:43
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And it's funny because I feel the most obvious step would have been to create my own brand and I know previously I've had this question asked of me so many times but in my heart of hearts, there's nothing that I love more than being of service to a CEO.
00:11:59
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So for me, it made more sense to honor my calling as a service provider and step into a consulting business than it did launching my own product space business and essentially going into competition with CEOs and founders that I loved. So that was the decision that I made and I am so glad and grateful that I did because I've just had the most incredible past almost four years running Olivia Jenkins Consulting, which I refer to as OJC for short.
00:12:27
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Now I want to unpack this a little bit more so you have some context about the type of work that I do in my business and what I'm known for with my clients. I started OJC in mid 2019 with one clear vision in mind. To create a luxury white glove consulting firm specialising in serving health, beauty, fashion and lifestyle brands and helping them become cult brands.
00:12:53
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And what really sets me apart, I believe, from other consultants is my unique approach to business and my signature combination of advisory and implementation. When I work with clients, I focus on a whole-of-business approach, a sum-of-all-the-part situation, and everything that I focus on with clients is centered around strategy.
00:13:14
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I'm not a consultant that just cares and is concerned about the revenue number. I'm also deeply concerned about profitability, about working with every client, every CEO and founder that I work with to make sure that when we're putting together a strategy for their business, that it's aligned to their personal goals as well.
00:13:31
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And this is one of the very first questions that I get my clients super clear on in the early stages of working together, is really understanding what exactly it is that they're wanting to achieve in their business. Because one client's level of success may be different to another client's level of success. And it's my job to really understand what it is that that client wants to achieve.
00:13:54
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When I first started the consulting business, I honestly thought that I would be working with clients in an advisory only capacity and that I would essentially meet with them once a month for a board meeting where we'd look at the numbers and we'd look at our strategy and our strategic plan and we'd review our action plans and our results for the months and we would craft an action plan for the following month for the client to go away and implement. And what I worked out very quickly is that clients needed support with the implementation too.
00:14:23
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Whether that was because they were under resourced in the business or they may have had resources in the business but potentially not with the skill set that they needed. Or it could have been out of convenience and knowing that I would be able to execute to a high level which would in turn create the results. And so the business grew very rapidly and I was honored to have the three days per week that I was replacing initially be booked out on the first day of launching my business.
00:14:51
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And early in the following year, which was the start of 2020, I started the business in mid 2019, and then it got to early 2020.
Challenges During COVID-19 and Pregnancy
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And of course, COVID hit at that time. I did have that thought run past my mind of, oh gosh, what have I done? You know, I've left this
00:15:09
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comfortable job in corporate with a CEO and founder that I absolutely adore and a team that I love and love coming to work with every day to pursue this business. And you know, I couldn't have timed it more perfectly with a global pandemic, but here we are. But I really just went all in with clients and I just embraced the season that we were in and just did whatever I could to support clients through that challenging time.
00:15:32
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and you know the uncertainty that came with running a business at that time as well of what's going to happen and what does this look like for me. So that's what I did and not too long after that I think it was about April of that year I fell pregnant with my beautiful daughter Charlotte
00:15:48
Speaker
And that was also an oh gosh moment as well. As much as I wanted to have three children, obviously it also started my business just six months prior or eight months prior. And I was freaking out thinking, oh my gosh, I've got all these clients and I'm pregnant and I'm gonna be morning sick and all of the things. But what ended up happening was I had a high risk pregnancy. And so I developed a pregnancy condition that was diagnosed about eight weeks into the pregnancy, so very early.
00:16:16
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and that landed me on bed rest for the rest of the pregnancy which was essentially the 2020 year and so what I had to do was essentially scale my business on bed rest and that was incredibly challenging because I was quite unwell and
00:16:32
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you know it was the middle of a global pandemic as well so in terms of challenges running a business with multiple children through a global pandemic working through a high-risk pregnancy i actually ended up delivering charlotte on black friday which is the busiest day of my working year
00:16:49
Speaker
And that's a story for another day that I'll unpack with you guys in another episode, but essentially just supporting clients as well through the ups and downs. These are some of the challenges that I faced along the way running the business. So I can definitely relate not only on the level of having my clients have challenges as every business does and being able to hold space and help them through those moments, but also facing some of these challenges myself. And being a business consultant doesn't make you exempt from facing challenges. So I've certainly,
00:17:18
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being through storms and being able to weather things and take those lessons forward in my journey as well, which I'm really excited to be able to share those learnings with you as well, so they're helpful.
Core Values Driving Business Growth
00:17:28
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But essentially, what I have done from the very beginning is stayed very true to my core values.
00:17:34
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being very aligned with the work that I do for clients and providing the best possible client experience and results that I'm capable of to build the brands for clients and build the brands for myself based on word of mouth referrals and that is essentially how I've built the business has all been through word of mouth and it was my belief going into the business as a service provider very early that
00:17:57
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If you do good work, then you will get referrals because your clients will be thrilled with the results that you're bringing to their business and that is essentially how I build the business and I am so beyond honored and thankful every day that clients have placed their trust in me with their beautiful brands.
00:18:15
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And I know every client looks at their brand like their baby, like their child. So for them to look to me for support as the trusted advisor within their business is just so heartwarming for me and is the reason for being, is my reason for being and my why. So it has been an incredible journey since mid 2019. And fast forward to now, it's currently April, 2023. And I honestly could not be more proud of what I've been able to achieve in this timeframe.
00:18:45
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whether that's helping consulting clients to generate in excess of $50 million, working with over 100 CEOs to help them gain more clarity, more confidence and more success in their business, winning 15 of my own business awards for my own business success, but also the success I've been able to help clients achieve too.
00:19:04
Speaker
and essentially changing my clients' lives and their family's lives forever. Whether that be financial success that they didn't even dream would be possible, or retiring their husbands so that they could either be at home or working in the business with them, or simply just giving their brand the recognition that it deserves.
00:19:22
Speaker
And that for me is one of the most fulfilling things because it really centers back into my vision as well of helping my clients achieve cult-like status and have iconic brands. And this journey has just been such an amazing experience and one that I am eternally grateful for. So there's nothing I love more than being by my client side, which essentially is where the name come from as well. And I wanted to explain that to you guys so that you understand where the CEO's wing woman name came from.
00:19:50
Speaker
This was actually a phrase coined by my clients and I loved it so much I decided to use it as my tagline in the business and it's now a registered trademark. So I thought what better name to call the podcast than the CEO's Wing Woman. So hopefully that gives you a little bit of insight as to what to expect on the podcast and also a little bit about me and the work that I do.
00:20:12
Speaker
I also wanted to touch base on growth mindset because as you know, a big part of this podcast is being known as the ultimate growth mindset
Personal Growth and Education Investments
00:20:21
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podcast. And I wanted to explain a little bit of my own journey with growth mindset and what it means to me. So part of having a growth mindset in my mind is the commitment to the never ending search for excellence and continually investing in your own education.
00:20:37
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Over the years, I have invested well over $100,000 in my own education, whether that be through tertiary education like my MBA, master coaching accreditations like my master practitioner and NLP, seminars, coaching, mentoring, plus so much more. All of these investments combined have allowed me to expand my mindset more than I could have ever imagined possible.
00:21:00
Speaker
but it's also increased my emotional intelligence. It's helped me learn how to better understand human psychology and behavior and essentially how to create a life of my dreams. And as your mentor on this podcast, I'm really excited to share the things that I've learned along the way in my journey so that you can benefit from them too.
00:21:19
Speaker
Sorry, I promised you all a short episode so I'll wrap things up here and hopefully this gives you a little bit more insight into my background, education, areas of expertise, my business and what this podcast is all about. I'm looking forward to sharing some exciting episodes with you throughout this podcast journey and I want to thank you for being a listener here.
00:21:41
Speaker
I would absolutely love it if you can share this podcast to your business bestie or someone you think could benefit from these episodes. I know for me when I share things with my community and with those around me, a lot of the time I'll get a message back and say, thanks so much. I really needed that today. So if there's someone that you can think of that would benefit from these episodes, I would absolutely love for you to share. And I just want to say thanks for being here and thanks for listening. I'm really excited about this podcast and I'm really looking forward to bringing you some amazing episodes coming soon.
00:22:11
Speaker
Thanks so much and I'll see you on the next episode. Thank you so much for tuning into today's episode.
Connect with Olivia for Collaborations
00:22:18
Speaker
If you love today's show, be sure to let me know by leaving a five star review. You can also connect with me via Instagram at OliviaJenkins.co or learn more on how we can work together at www.OliviaJenkins.co. Have an amazing week and I can't wait to connect with you in the next episode.