From Home to Global: The Laundry Lady Story

Title: "Scaling Success: The Laundry Lady’s Journey from Home-Based Business to Global Tech Leader"

 Welcome to Biz Bites, where we’re going to talk to the Laundry Lady and get a masterclass in digital business growth. Susan is the founder of the Laundry Lady, and she shares her journey of building a home based laundry service into a national and international business with over 300 contractors. We talk about the business model, which empowers individuals to use their own laundry equipment at home to provide services via a very sophisticated purpose built online booking system.

And how that is now enabling her to also be seen as a tech company. She discusses the challenges and strategies for scaling the business, including future growth plans. There’s also her appearance on Shark Tank, where she secured the largest investment in the show’s Australian history. There are so many more insights and what a great story she shares.

Check out this little teaser of what’s to come. Where is AI come into it for you? Yeah, it’s not drones and robots doing the ironing at this stage, eventually maybe that might be where the future goes. I don’t think that’s a long way. For us, it’s really about efficiencies operationally to be able to support scale.

So at the moment, we’re really focused on bringing AI tools and just using the AI tools that are out there already. Definitely an education for them to show them that, that how much is your time worth, how much do you spend on, on, on your laundry. Hello everyone. And welcome to another episode of Biz Bites proudly brought to you by com together, the people behind podcast done for you, because we’re all about exposing other people’s brilliance.

Don’t forget to subscribe to Biz Bites and check out podcasts done for you as well in the show notes. Now let’s get into it.

Hello everyone. And welcome to another episode of. Biz Bites and we’ve got a really interesting guest today. The laundry lady has built this amazing business and I think we’ve got a lot to learn from going from working from home being a mom to building a business on her own, to building something that is now a national and international scale, I believe.

So we’ve got a lot to learn from from Susan. So welcome to the Biz Bites program. Thank you for having me. I’m very excited to be here. Look, I suppose that, normally with guests, what I do is say to introduce your business. It’s obvious, but I think it’s obvious on a base level. But it’s much bigger than the base level perhaps would suggest.

So do you want to get, how would you introduce your business? Yeah look, the, obviously we are a laundry service, so at the base level we get your washing and ironing done, but we are a lot more than that some people compare us to being the Uber for laundry, which is a nice, simple way to explain it, but we are a national laundry service, so we are pick up your ironing or washing right from your door, bring it back to you normally the next day.

And we deliver that through a team of 300 and growing by the day independent contractors. So our laundry ladies and lads, they all work from their own homes. So they’re building a profitable and sustainable business with us. And 90 percent of them are women, which we’re super proud of that we’re helping them to create this future.

flexible work from home business model. And it’s all online booking. Like all of the ride shares and everything that you love to do online now that’s how we’ve really grown our business. So you go onto the website, you type in your suburb and book online and you’ll see all the available Laundry, ladies and lads in your area that can come and pick up your laundry and help you save time because we all have it and we, and it’s never ending.

That’s really our vision for our business is helping people save time. Okay. There is so much to to talk about in this as well. So let’s talk about the model firstly, because, this is the interesting thing is, and you reference Uber there, and I suppose that is the starting framework for a number of businesses that have now developed is that you’re using your existing infrastructure.

So this is not about creating Laundromat’s physical locations, is it? This is quite different. That’s right. And so it’s really about empowering people who are working from home to use their own equipment. So using their own washing machines and dryers that they already have and making money out of that for our contractors using their own cars and going and picking that up.

So we are providing, we are creating that service within a domestic environment, but we do service a really broad range of customers. So business and residential customers and you might think there’s lots of different laundry services out there, but actually there’s not a lot of services that do this kind of low to mid volume space.

So there is a lot of providers in that really big size of laundry space. The big commercial guys who will go and do the hotels and things like that. Obviously we’re not going to do that from our home laundries. But in the low to mid volume space, there’s actually a huge number of customers that fit into that space and the big guys don’t want to service them.

That’s places like beauty salons and medical clinics and Airbnb’s through to. Busy families and NDIS customers, aged care and lots more. So yeah, it’s really put helping our contractors put their washing machine to good use. Yeah. And I was going to say, how do you, there, there’s, there obviously are still laundromats and still some services around that do ironing and washing for you not as many.

Perhaps is there might have used to have been, but are you, do you find yourself you’re competing with those services? Because they’ve got, they would have significantly large even though they might be servicing, local people, they’re still they would have bigger equipment and bigger facilities.

So how do you compete with that? Yeah, actually, we actually have a lot of laundromats who are our contractors as well. Majority will work from home, but we have some who run a laundromat and want to, just add more value to their services that they provide there. And then also some of our laundry ladies and lads will use laundromats.

because they might have really large blankets or things like that don’t fit into their regular machines. So they’ll use that as a complimentary part of it. So we don’t really see ourselves as competitors to laundromats really it’s a complimentary part of the service and, and we love to work with local laundromats as well to be able to deliver even more services.

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Now back to Biz Bites. How, so the interesting thing about this is that. You started scaling this business, what in 2021, is that right? That’s right. Yeah. And that’s on the back of COVID when people are at home. So how, it’s almost counterintuitive to have a service that does this for you when there are more people spending time at home.

So how, first, I suppose the first thing is just, how did COVID actually impact you? that decision. I gather you were working towards that prior to COVID happening anyway. But how did all of that impact? So I actually started it back in 2012 and I was the original laundry lady and just doing laundry services in my local area, which is when I really learned about the business and what could work and how scheduling could work and all of those sorts of things.

And, due to life and other commitments, I had to return to work full time. And it was really hard to, and I’m sure a lot of people who are starting out a business, I can understand this, you get stuck working in the business and or you get stuck working, full time in another job and it’s really hard to make that leap to leave the job because you need the income and commit to the business.

And that was certainly where I was at for many years. In the lead up to COVID and I always said, I had this model in place. I had I had about 10 contractors working with us, but I just, was trying to juggle that with working full time. And so when COVID hit, it really was.

A little bit of a dream come true for me in a lot of ways because, there were lots of different government handouts in that time. There was job key file. There was, all sorts of things, which really gave me the six month runway that I needed in the business to be able to come back to it full time and really commit to without having that full time income at the same time.

And so that’s what happened. So I committed to the business and almost restarted it in a way after COVID and and started to grow it. And so my first plan was to launch into Melbourne because I thought there was. Not so many lockdowns in Melbourne, which was obviously very ill informed because they had the longest lockdowns in the world, but we started in Melbourne.

And so laundry is an essential service. It still continues. And obviously there were some customers who weren’t. operating during that time, like beauty salons, for example. So we didn’t have those types of customers, but there’s a lot of people who physically or mentally can’t do their laundry.

For example, our NDIS customers who absolutely need to have services and residential customers as well. A lot of people were working from home during that period. And even though you think, Oh, I’ve got time to get my washing done. Sometimes you just don’t on top of trying to homeschool and do all the other things.

There’s, there really is no shortage of laundry. Obviously we all have it and a lot of businesses have it as well. There is a real never ending and recurring nature of our business model. So it was certainly grow, the slower growth right in that COVID period when we were in lockdowns and things like that.

But as we started to open up again, it was super busy. And, and that was really, a period of rapid growth for us. Yeah, I can imagine it was, and it’s opportunistic to do that because I think on the one hand, while COVID seems like a strange place to start with a business that is working from home, on the other hand, The one thing that happened as a result of COVID, more and more people are working from home.

So this provides an opportunity to, whether it’s a side business or an additional business. And I gather what’s, tell me a little bit about the kinds of people that have taken up the opportunity to work with you. Yeah, we certainly made working from home cool way before COVID with our business model, people are really focused on having that kind of flexibility and being able to work from home.

A lot of people who join us, really resonate with my story of why I started, which was because I was a new mom and I’d left my corporate career and I just couldn’t, didn’t want to be juggling that type of work as well as being a new mom and, missing all the things at school and not being able to go to my son’s sports days and all of those sorts of things.

And so that was why I started and a lot of our laundry ladies and lads join us for that same flexibility, whether it’s, to be there with their kids or whether it’s to look after elderly parents or, it might be husband and wives who want to be able to work from home and work together.

So not, as I said before, 90% of our laundry ladies and lads are women which we’re really proud to be able to support. a lot of women who, might be starting a business for the first time or working from home for the first time or returning to work for the first time after having kids and to be able to give them what’s not just a flexible business.

I guess we’re quite different to gig economy like Uber and ride shares and AirTasker because we have a very recurring and sustainable part model within our business. Because laundry never ends. Our contractors are really getting a very sustainable level of income once they build to that level.

They’re getting that repeat business every week or fortnight that that brings to that. Yeah. I think that’s a, it is a really interesting thing because that’s exactly it, isn’t it? That, that it’s the recurring income, which is, Going to create the biggest attraction for people.

And so tell me the model itself, how did that come about? Because as you said, you were doing this on your, you were doing this on your own. So you had a business servicing your local area. What led you to start thinking? This could be bigger. And how do you even go about doing that? I actually, when I very first had the idea for the business, it was always my vision right from the start that it would be a scalable business.

Back then I thought it would be a franchise model because that’s what I knew. I knew, lots about franchise models, things like independent contractor models was only just starting. Uber was only really just starting around that time as well. And so I went off to a franchise expert.

And they told me it would cost probably around 200, 000 to start setting up a franchise model. And I had no money at all. I was a single mom. I, didn’t have any income any investment to be able to put into the growing of the business. I had to really get smart and find a way that I could do it.

With, without that investment. And and obviously Uber was starting at that time. And also I was a Thermomix consultant at that time, so two different, independent contractor models. But both really worked in a similar kind of way in terms of having people as contractors, which means they can have a really cheap.

Startup costs compared to a franchise model where, it might cost 60, 000 to buy into. And so I started thinking about this independent contractor model and talking to lawyers and working out that actually it was quite simple to do. To do that. And it meant that I could, bring this opportunity to people at a very low startup cost and quickly and effectively.

And so from there it was just really working out how the technology was going to work because I applied for a grant of $5,000 from the Queensland Digital Grant, and I went off to my web designer with my $5,000 and showed him an Uber style system that I wanted to have, and he laughed at me and told me that, it was going to cost at least 60 grand, even at mate’s rates. And so he told me to go out and find something off the shelf that I could use to build what I wanted to do. And so that, that’s basically what I did from that point. Yeah. Cause I was going to say that’s one of the things, isn’t it?

That the technology has to be there to make this as easy as possible for people to do it. Both obviously for the potential clients, but also for all the contractors to easily and quickly get all that information and to make it seamless and transparent. Because I imagine the way you’ve got it set up is that it runs itself that you don’t have, you don’t need an IT person overseeing it full time, do you?

So we started with this kind of off the shelf system that was built for salons, which was a booking, booking platform and connected that to a whole lot of different programs to be able to run the business. But we really outgrew that a couple of years ago as we were scaling and we always knew that would happen, it, it just, it costs a lot of money to get that done.

get the tech created. But we now have our own technology platform that we’ve created and spent quite a lot of time and resources to build that and to build it custom made for all of the different aspects of our business. So it’s an online marketplace, but it’s also an enterprise resource planning system that manages every part Of, the contractor’s journey as well as the customer’s journey.

So that’s taken us a really long time to get to the point of having our own technology. But now that we have that it to be able to support our future scaling plans, we’ll be absolutely investing huge amounts of money into that technology to put AI into it and all sorts of things to make it, really be able to support that.

So talk to me about that platform. What does it need to do outside of the obvious, which is the, okay, I’ve I’m coming on as a client. I’ve got some washing, potentially some ironing to do. Here’s my address. Someone’s going to come and pick it up on this day and deliver it back.

And this is what the price is. That’s the obvious part of it. But I imagine there’s a lot more happening on the back end, particularly for the for the contractors to learn the business and manage their part as well, because that would be, you’ve got to manage that as well. Don’t you? Because if they’re looking, if they’re working from home and they’ve got, I imagine one or sometimes two washing machines, if they scale it’s how do you actually manage to do that?

Because if suddenly you’ve got 10 people that want their washing done today and they’ve all got, two bags suddenly you might be in a bit of trouble trying to do that at home by yourself. Yeah, that’s right. And so it is so much more than just a booking and scheduling platform, but even the booking and scheduling part of it has been.

incredibly advanced technology behind that within the algorithms that are managing that. So all of our contractors can set their own schedules and times that they will do their pickups. So when you go to the website and you type in your suburb and you see who’s available there, that’ll be looking at, their availability in terms of when they can do pickups.

It’ll be looking at things like their capacity around how much they can do within those as well as looking at what actual areas. each of them service because it can be different for all of them. So we really work with our contractors to make sure that they, are operating in an area that suits them or that’s close to their house and home, as well as, that’s going to get them customers.

So that’s the easy part, but also has some very complex behind it. But then it manages every part of, our contractors business. So journey. So there’s an app that the contractors. They see all of their bookings, they see a dashboard which manages all of their workflow. It also has real time messages.

You’ll get a message to tell you your ironing is on its way or we’re coming to pick you up. Those types of things through to invoicing and payments. And our payments model is super sophisticated in terms of, being able to support different payments. Options for businesses and for NDIS, which have really complex invoicing requirements.

And then it also manages other parts of their business. So their commission payments, which there was actually no tools on the marketplace that we could manage our commissions. So just moving into that system now has saved us in our head office three days a week in terms of actually creating our commissions compared to how we had to do that before.

And also, some great tools like energy. So we’ve got connection to energy monitoring devices in, in contractors homes where they can see how much their laundry appliances are using in terms of energy. They can manage, measure, the cost of that, which helps them with their tax as well.

And so yeah it’s really, a management tool for every single stage of their business. And then for head office as well, it’s a really important, tool. tool for us because we, use a lot of the data that’s in there to be able to manage how we market and where we put up paid advertising and all of those types of things through to, looking for efficiencies and help and supporting our contractors.

So it’s quite a extensive advanced technology system that, has taken a lot of time to build and we will definitely be, enhancing that. A lot more in the years to come. I think that’s this it’s amazing really what, when you start unpacking it and thinking about all of these things, what all the options are of things that you have to do with it.

It’s I suppose it starts going into, do you start offering deals as far as electricity is concerned, because you’ve got. So how many individual operators have you got now? Yeah. So we’ve got about 300 we’ve got nine in New Zealand and the rest are all throughout Australia. So in city and regional areas and yeah, there’s lots of things that we, so we provide them with supplies.

So things like laundry liquids and bags and things like that. And, we can get data from that system to tell us how many washing loads they’re doing. So we know, how much detergent we need to order and those types of things. As we get more volume in our team, we’ll certainly be able to bring a lot more benefits to our team around, things like fuel or energy discounts.

And we certainly add, have a lot of those kinds of things in place now with insurance and things like that. Yeah, I can imagine. And so talk to me about the AI part as well, because I’m fascinated at how you envisage AI coming into, cause you think, cause on the face of it, you think. You’re doing people’s laundry.

What, where is AI come into it for you? Yeah, it’s not drones and robots doing the ironing at this stage, eventually maybe that might be where the future goes. I think that’s a long way off. For us, it’s really about efficiency. to be able to support scale. So at the moment, we’re really focused on bringing ai tools and just using the ai tools that are out there already in a lot of cases to you know, manage our customer service much more efficiently.

Things like chat bots are really great tool in being able to do that and we’re be launching our chatbot very soon. And AI tools around reporting again, which there’s lots of things, that you can use already around that. Where we’ll really be building our own AI technology into our system is, it’s really around the sophistication of that location and capacity management of, our service providers, making sure that we’ve got enough supply to meet demand, all of those kinds of things that.

That’s where we’ll really be building some of those AI tools in that to streamline that. We bring on around 30 new contractors a month at the moment, and we’re planning to be able to, bring that up to about 150, 200 a month in the next few years. It’s really, streamlining every part of that to make, to be able to handle that kind of scale.

And is the scale the scale is beyond Australia, isn’t it already? Is it? Yeah. So we went into New Zealand that was, which, New Zealand’s like another state of Australia, really, but it was really our testing ground is for setting up a, an international business and learning what would work and and, all of the things around that.

Yeah, we’re often running in New Zealand, which is very exciting. And we are planning into, Going to other international markets. So we’re working out what those markets are going to be at the moment. And we’re actually looking for investment partners at the moment that will, help us to really do that at scale and to do that, that quickly, there’s actually not a lot of laundry services like ours.

Globally, so we’ve been looking at markets like Canada and Japan as well as the UK and the US. Just working out exactly where we’re going to go with it, but we’ve got a really good base model in Australia that we can continue to build on here. And then that will, support that international growth.

I think it’s going to be fascinating to watch, from a real estate point of view where things go, because. With real estate becoming more and more expensive and people wanting to maximize living space and things, laundry represents a, can be I’m saying an intrusion, but it is a part of particularly if you’re living in an apartment can be.

A significant part of square footage sometimes, even if it is put into a cupboard, it’s you’re losing cupboard space for other things. So the question will really be in the future whether they start to build more apartments like they did in, in, the olden days for whatever better term where there wasn’t that.

A laundry in an apartment and that they were having to use either a communal laundry or external services. So it’s going to be interesting to see where that goes in coming years. Do you get a sense that is something that’s changing as well? Look, I think there’s places like New York where I think that already happens, because it is You know, real estate is obviously, that’s probably the most expensive real estate in the world and I think there’s a lot of places, a lot of apartments there that don’t have laundries at all.

And I think that’s going to come for us as well and as, houses get smaller and blocks get smaller and smaller. It’s a bit of a waste of space that you can turn into a home office, for example, with so many people working from home. We’re down last season because, see, We’re in the process of building a house at the moment in the house that we had on that piece of land, we use that for about a year while we were getting things ready to build.

It was a a small house, two bedroom and there were four of us. So my, my office doubled as a bedroom for my two my two daughters. Both in their twenties, mind you as well. So that was a significant thing to share that three ways, but then we had a laundry and my wife is is an artist and decided to use the laundry as her art area, which meant we didn’t have a laundry.

So it was actually quite a nice long room with plenty of space. And so she was able to spread and spread out and you do it for her artwork. They’re perfect because it has a sink and things that she can use. So it was it was a wonderful space to be able to use. I can see. See that happens for people that they make use of that space.

Yeah. I think Australia is one of the very few countries that actually has big laundry spaces in their homes. I think a lot of, countries, it is just part of their kitchen or whatever that is. But, I think more than that, it’s also, people just hate doing laundry, right? It’s a, it’s never ending.

And there’s always a pile, of clothes. It’s somewhere that you’ve got to fold or put away or wash again and I, it’s just that constantness of laundry, I think that just, people hate. So that’s where our service comes in to just, save people time and get them to not have to do that so they can focus on other things in their life that they’d rather be doing.

My artist. It’s interesting, isn’t it? Because traditionally, in Australia, there are a lot of things that we think I will get someone else to do. We’ll go and we’ll drive somewhere to get our car washed. We’ll call someone else to mow the lawns. But how’s the psychology been around laundry?

Is that as something that you’ve had to change mindsets a little bit on, on doing that? Yeah, look, I think a lot of our customers are using a service like ours for the first time. Businesses might’ve had their employees doing it who hated taking it home and having to do it, or or they just didn’t have time to do that or and a lot of the residential customers have just didn’t know that a service like this would, was available and that they could.

something like that. So it is definitely an education for them to show them that, that how much is your time worth? How much do you spend on, on, on your laundry? We’ve got a a business customer just locally that we were chatting to the other day who does colonics.

And she was saying, this is. Say this service is now saving her four hours a week. Four hours a week is a lot of time when you’re, time poor when you’re trying to, run a business and be there for your customers as well as, be connected to your family and, if you’ve got little kids as well that you’re trying to manage it’s a lot to try and fit that extra four hours in every week.

Outsourcing, I think, I outsource everything every week I feel like I’m signing up to something new because. Cause you know, it’s, we’re all poor on time. And so anything you can do to create more of it is, I want to be able to spend time with my kids, or sometimes I want to not spend time with my kids and get time away from my kids whatever it might be.

But, it’s anything you can do to give you more time back for that is, is amazing. Yeah, I a hundred percent agree with you. And I think that’s it’s, whether you’re in business or in your personal life, choosing what you spend time on there’s nothing worse than going, Oh, I’ve got to do all of these, sort of household things when you can get someone else to do a lot of them.

Of course, it all comes down to managing budgets and things, and it depends, but certainly from a business point of view, there’s a false economy isn’t there that, that you think, Oh, I can save money by doing it myself. But if you actually work out. How much time it takes you to do it and not, add in the costs of the equipment and all the other bits and pieces and real estate can sometimes be an impact there as well.

And suddenly you think it’s just doesn’t actually make financial sense to keep doing it yourself. Yeah, exactly. How much is your time worth? I think you’ve always got to be measuring that and counting that. And we certainly see A big increase in bookings every Sunday night when people get to the end of their weekend and think, Oh my God, I haven’t done my washing.

And that’s when we see our biggest jump in terms of new bookings from customers who, who need help with that. And it’s not always washing, sometimes it might be just ironing, which ironing, But I feel like if once I get my ironing pile done I’ve, tripled the amount of clothes I’ve got in my wardrobe.

Plus, just that feeling of getting your clothes back and it’s all ready to go and you just put it straight away as, such an amazing feeling in your week. I now for everyone listening in, we’re going to have a little bit of a bonus section. People will be able to tune into that.

We’ll provide a link later on where we’re going to talk a little bit about growing the digital platform and really growing this business. So stay tuned for that. But right now, I wanted to go back a little bit. And I know you touched on your corporate background, but give me a little bit of a sense of view.

Where the, where it all began, were you an entrepreneur? Was that the budding thing that you wanted to be when you’re coming out of school? What was the what was the dream at that point? And what was the career path? When I finished school, I went and studied a bachelor of business in tourism and went off and worked within the tourism industry, but very much on the business development side.

So I was working in a membership organization and that sort of led to a career in government. And I worked for Austrade, the Australian Trade Commission, for about eight years, which was a fantastic job because I got to help businesses, export tourism to Australia. internationally which is a really exciting stage for businesses because it usually means they’ve, got to a point of success on and and want to, scale that.

And I was really always very passionate about helping business. And, and I’ve always had this dream that I’d have my own business. So my, my dad owned a Tempin bowling center, my mom and dad, when I was a young kid. So I grew up in that environment. I always wanted to have my own business.

I just didn’t really know what it was going to be. And and it was when I left Austrade and I was literally walking past my spare room and saw the clothes just. Piled high on the spare bed and I was at this point in time in my life where I just knew I couldn’t go back into an office, I just really needed to be able to create something that I could do from home but also had no money to invest in, in starting a business like that.

But saw the clothes piled high and thought, I’m Wow, I could really do with a service like this. And also I thought at the time, if I’m being paid to do washing and ironing, maybe I don’t hate it as much, and I can watch TV. I can have this flexibility to go and pick up my kids from school or go to, their sports day, not have to ask for permission from my boss to do that.

And so that was really where the idea was born. And I also knew that there was a lot of moms like me that were struggling with that, flexibility of having that kind of flexibility in their working life. And so I knew there’d be other people I could recruit to come on board as laundry ladies or lads as well.

Yeah. And once I, that idea started ticking away, it just started ticking very loudly and very quickly. And before I knew it, I was jumping in and became the original laundry lady. Fantastic. I love it. I love the journey. I want to talk about, you touched on a little bit earlier about having, looking for investors in order to be able to expand.

And that in itself is a difficult path to go down and to understand what you need to do for that. But you’ve had some experience in that in that space. So talk to me a little bit about getting onto Shark Tank. I’m firstly interested to know what made you want to go on to the program and think that you could get through and what you had to do to prepare to really get that pitch through because for those people that Maybe you haven’t heard you did create a record on Shark Tank that grabbed quite a bit of headlines around the world.

And I think if you make it onto have you been paying attention there as a reference in the quiz, you’re making it right. That’s the ultimate tick, is it? Yeah, I think it was something about laundering money or something like that from the laundry lady. It was very funny.

So yeah, last year we went on to Shark Tank. The Shark Tank is just something that I think when you’re in business and excited by entrepreneurialism. You’re always excited by Shark Tank. I’ve had, friends who have businesses who’ve been on it. So I always thought, oh, that would be amazing to be able to take our business on there.

Imagine the exposure and all of that, that would come with it. But Shark Tank went away for a few years. It hadn’t actually run since 2019, since before COVID. And So when we heard that it was coming back on and had all new sharks and some of those sharks, like Jane Lou from Show Po, I had been following her and absolutely love what she does online.

And so I didn’t even really think about it. I just jumped in and put the application together and I think the producers were trying to pull it all together quite quickly. So it was all very super fast from when put the application in and and then heard back from them that we were going to be on the show and And, going off to Sydney and recording that.

All of that happened within the space of about a month. So it was super exciting and in some ways it was good that it was so fast because it didn’t, it meant I didn’t have a lot of time to think about it. Cause I think if I’d spent a lot of time thinking about it, I would have been really panicking about what I was going to say and how I was going to say it.

And I was certainly panicking even just going on and doing that because you just don’t know how you’re going to come off. Did you have the business plan and everything sorted already? Was it like, how much was what you needed to create new for that? So this was only last year, so we were already at a our business was already doing around 3 million and in turnover.

I really knew the business and I knew what worked and I knew our numbers and all of those kinds of things. And I’ve, pitched at things like particularly in business awards programs and stuff like that, where you are answering questions. Questions to judges about your business.

So I felt really comfortable going in and talking about the business. The most terrifying part is the pitch. So you’ve gotta do a two to three minute pitch. And you’ve gotta do it all in one take. ’cause if you don’t, then they’ll play that on tv. That was the most terrifying part for me.

Even though I know the business really well, I wanted to say it perfectly. And just being able to remember that and go on there and do that. But I think once I got one. Once I got past them playing the music and all the background stuff and getting out there, I almost forgot that the cameras were there and, really relaxed into just telling these, people who are also, they might be these shiny sharks on TV, but they also have amazing businesses and backgrounds that some of them are billionaires, some are multimillionaires so to be able to have that opportunity to tell them about my business was super exciting and something.

That, that was like a major part of our year. That’s for sure. So tell me about the process then. So you get and maybe you let you tell the story of what, what happens and that point you have, you finish the pitch and then you’re waiting for them to start. Giving their response.

Yeah. The hardest part is you go and stand on this circle and listen to the Shark Tank music playing for about two minutes. I think I could hear my heart beating in it through the microphone. So you do your pitch and then they jump into questions and my gosh, they fire those questions fast.

And it’s not like a normal investor pitches. Cause I’m going through those. Those kinds of conversations now, they certainly are not, jumping in and all over the place like this was. So it was very intense. But again, I just, I forgot the cameras were there. I just relaxed, listened to their questions and when you’re really passionate about your business and you know your business well then it’s easy to answer those questions.

And. So I did. So I answered the questions probably I have no, no concept of time. But I feel like I was in there for maybe half an hour or so. And then they all, make their offers or their declines and goes from there. And so tell us about that moment of getting the offer because blew everyone away.

You, I’ll let you tell what the offer was. Yeah the first four sharks said no. And had said various things that we were doing a really great business, but maybe it was the valuation or, it just wasn’t the right business for them or that sort of thing. And then we got to the fifth Shark, which was Robert Hija, who is an international billionaire, and he is on the US.

And Canadian shark shark tank show as well. And he has a big cyber security business internationally. He came in and basically just raved about the business and said he increased our what we were asking for and said, You’re going to need more money. And he offered a million dollars investment, which is the biggest ever investment on Shark Tank Australia history, which I didn’t know that at the time.

I didn’t know that till much later. So that was, enormously exciting to see, someone who knows, who sees businesses all the time, all over the world, and is having people pitch to him all the time for him to see that kind of value in our business was, a real kind of. Spine tingling moment for me as, as a single mum who started this on my own and, to see what I’d created and to get that kind of offer.

So yeah. And what happens from there? And once the cameras stop, what does that? What does that really look like in? Once it’s all said and done. How does that? How does that actually translate? Is it like a normal investment? Is there? Are there strings attached? Is how involved does he get in anything?

Yeah. So you certainly don’t wake up the next morning and have a million dollars in your bank account. That would be lovely, but no, obviously it’s still a handshake deal on television. Still go through the normal processes of due diligence. That any investment would go into the hardest thing was really that it was another six months before the show aired.

I had to fly back home and I had to keep the whole thing to myself for a really long time. And that was really hard cause I’m a bit of an open book and tell people everything. And we couldn’t even tell our contractors that we’d been on the show or anything like that.

And we spent a lot of time just preparing for. for when it was going to air and what that was going to look like. And the main goal of going on the show was getting the exposure. And so we really spent a lot of time just getting ready for that and, getting our website ready, getting lots of social campaigns ready and all of those kinds of things.

And then when it did air. Despite the fact that we’d spent a long time getting all of those things ready, but a lot of things fell apart. So our website crashed and our website crashed continually for about five days. So we had done everything that Amazon had told us to do to be ready for the traffic, but there were, Bursts and all kinds of things happening that the website just couldn’t handle.

And, this is our main platform that everyone has to book through. So it’s not just for new customers. It’s also for our existing customers. And so that was, very annoying, but obviously amazing to know that we were getting that kind of traction and interest in the business.

And. And then our Facebook account got hacked which didn’t happen immediately after Shark Tank, but it happened fairly quickly after Shark Tank. So it may have, or may not have had something to do with it. We don’t know, but if anyone’s had face, had their Facebook account hacked, we’ve had it happen a couple of times not just from Shark Tank, but earlier than that as well.

It’s a bit of a monster to try and deal with, the Facebook robot to try and get it resolved. And that’s a, a main driver of our business. So of new customers to our business. And obviously we also had all of these new campaigns ready around, centered around Shark Tank.

That was really frustrating and took us, several months really to get it done. to resolve and get on top of, but, the interest from new contractors was so amazing. We, we increased our the interest by about five times in the weeks afterwards.

And, so it was amazing to get that kind of interest and just, every business and every customer we’ve ever had anything to do with, we’re putting all these fabulous. Testimonials and things online. So even though we didn’t have ads running, we were still getting so much attention on the business.

And that was really the main goal of going on there. Yeah. Fantastic. Look we’re going to talk a little bit more about growing digitally in our bonus content in a moment. I guess I just wanted to finish up with asking you about what what is driving at the moment for people to want to be in contact with you, both from, becoming a contractor and also wanting to use your services?

What’s what is the primary driver at the moment? Yeah, look, certainly we have a big reliance on digital advertising, be that paid. advertising or organic as well. I think one really supports the other. So it’s important to do both. And we also, really focus on other media that we can use.

So things like coming on podcasts and and we go into lots of awards programs and go along to a lot of different events and things like that as well. And obviously, go on Shark Tank and things like that. I think, when you’re in business, you’ve got to not be shy.

You’ve got to go out and. and talk about your business wherever you can because you never know where you’re going to get a customer from. It might not be from where you think it is, from your paid ad, it might be someone listening to this podcast who thinks, yeah, I hate my laundry. I’m booking it in right now.

We have, we’re really, we we have a really low customer acquisition cost. So we, really focus. our ad campaigns very heavily around the locations and some of those things that we were talking about before around the digital system and, and the data that comes out of that so that we can really effectively drive customers to the business.

Excellent. We’re going to talk about that a little bit more in a bonus section in a moment. Just before we end this part of the podcast, letting listeners know we’ve got a special offer for a discount code that Susan’s kindly put together for us. So we’re going to put that information into the show notes for people so you can check out the service.

Test it out for yourself and get a little bit of a discount in trialing that out which is exciting to be able to do. And I’m sure many people are looking at a pile of washing at the moment thinking, what a really good idea. Let’s get someone else to do it for us. Just. And test it out and see how it it functions.

So thank you for putting that offer together and I’m so fascinated by the story and thank you so much for sharing it because it’s quite a journey in a relatively short period of time to, to grow the business as you have and and seeing, you’ve already got one big investor from Shark Tank and you’re out there looking for more as well, which I think is an important thing that people understand there’s many assets.

Aspects to your business and what you’re doing at the moment. So it’s a big learning curve, I’m sure. But but one that I can see that is really starting to see this business grow in a very big way. So I think we’re probably on, on the cusp of something that’s going to go quite global, I can see.

Hopefully that’s the plan. So yeah, it’s it is a really exciting time in the growth part of the business. Every stage has been very exciting, from when I first put my very first contractor on and to, having eight or 10 of them and To now having 300, every single stage is super exciting and challenging.

And so we’re really excited for the, what the future holds. Fantastic. Thank you so much for being a wonderful guest on the Biz Bites program. And as I said to everyone, stay tuned for the bonus. Content that we’re going to make accessible through a link in the show notes. But for now, Susan, thank you so much for being part of Biz Bites.

Thank you. Thanks for having me. Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bites. We hope you enjoyed the program. Don’t forget to hit subscribe. So you never miss an episode. Biz Bites is proudly brought to you by Podcasts Done For You. The service where we will deliver a podcast for you and expose your brilliance.

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