#81 Mike Wilson - Founder of TinyMe

In this episode, I interview Mike Wilson - founder of TinyMe. TinyMe is a manufacturing business specialised in making customisable kids toys and gifts. Founded in 2006, Mike has grown the business to now bring in around $10 million in annual revenue and have expanded internationally.

Throughout the episode, Mike talks about how the consumer and commerce landscape has changed since 2006, discussing landmark events such as mobile phones, social media and COVID. Mike also emphasises the importance of setting strong business values and how abiding to them leads to more cohesive teams and a higher quality customer experience.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Highlight Clip
• 0:43 Introduction
• 7:18 How Mike Wilson Left His Job and Went All in On E-Commerce
• 10:27 How Mike Wilson Learned to Be a Good Manager and Leader
• 12:30 How Mike Wilson Determined TinyMe's Values
• 15:47 Mike Wilson's Biggest Strength That He Brought to TinyMec
• 17:28 How Personalisation of Toys Became a Cornerstone for TinyMe
• 23:17 The Biggest Challenges Mike Wilson has Faced with TinyMe
• 24:44 How COVID Impacted Mike Wilson and TinyMe
• 26:41 The Best Advice Mike Wilson Was Given Along His Journey with TinyMe
• 27:17 How Consumers Have Changed Over the Past 20 Years
• 29:34 Mike Wilson's Busineses Inspirations and Who He Looks Up To
• 30:36 Mike Wilsons Favourite Aspect of the Business
• 32:07 What's Next for TinyMe and
• 34:56 Outtro

Transcript

0:00

It's very, very common now to talk about core values and business culture. 18 years ago, it just wasn't as common. and we got convinced of that really early on. And I think I was always a bit skeptical. Particularly in the nineties, you walk in and see these posters on the walls of motivational posters that from a designer's perspective, I thought just completely sucked and just looked cheesy as. So, I was probably a bit cynical from that perspective, but often who they were quoting was actually, it was true, I think the packaging put me off. But we, we came around and realized we do need to articulate our core values and hire according to those and build the team according to those. And I think doing that early is really, really helped. Getting someone tell us this is really, really important. And that's being convinced of that early on and taking it seriously, I think has been, massive. Welcome to the Dion Guagliardo Podcast, where I interview business people who run or have sold businesses worth a few million dollars all the way through to billions of dollars. While most of my time is spent to managing investment portfolios for people after they've had a successful exit. I've always been fascinated by the entire process and hearing the insights that successful entrepreneurs and business people have learned along their. At Fortress Family Office, we're an investment portfolio manager and we manage portfolios for high net worth families. If you'd like to know more about not only the way we approach investment markets by our philosophy on life and business, feel free to subscribe to my weekly insights note. Go to www.fortressfamilyoffice.com and hit subscribe. In this episode, I interview Mike Wilson, founder of TinyMe. TinyMe is a manufacturing business that makes customized toys and gifts for children. Founded in 2006, Mike has grown the business to now bring in around 10 million in annual revenue, and they've expanded internationally. Throughout the episode, Mike talks about how the consumer and commerce landscape has changed since 2006, discussing landmark events such as mobile phone, social media, and even COVID. Mike also emphasizes the importance of setting strong business values and how abiding to them leads to a more cohesive team and high quality customer experience. If you enjoy this episode, feel free to leave a five star review and share with your family and friends. Mike, thanks for joining us. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Do you want to just kick off by telling us a little bit about the business and how it came to be? Yeah. So we've got, two brands, tiny me and a Pico tiny maze, the one that we're probably more known for. We actually make, personalized, customized kids products for tiny men. So we sort of sell to, moms of kids about. Zero to six is a sort of sweet spot, but sort of, it's, it's a bit more than that. typical sort of spare bedroom startup. So I started the business a long time ago now, started selling products in end of 2006. and as a designer. so I always liked making stuff and I studied industrial design and, it wasn't particularly strategic, this business, it was more like I, I saw an opportunity to, to make a product using a machine that my previous employer had sitting there, not doing anything and Yeah. a bit just opportunistic. and. yeah, started, started that. I'd always had other sort of businesses growing up, just cause I liked. was that sort of way inclined. and this, entrepreneurial. yeah, yeah, I like early on at school, I probably sort of thought I might just do business. it's actually my brother, he's an architect. He got, a hundred percent for art. He's a few years above. And my mom said, Oh, maybe you should do art just to get good marks. so I wasn't doing any art in year nine and I switched and then suddenly. Got really into it. And then, decided to get, I think my mom thought, Oh, I quite like that. You're doing commerce idea. And I didn't, I studied industrial design. that sort of led into the design side of things, but yeah, it was always a bit of an entrepreneurial bent. so in terms of some of the products, can you give us a bit of an idea of what that sort of looks like in, in terms of, yeah, was it something that, you know, you decided to make because you were interested in designing and making that, or was there, would want to make these for your own kids or what was the, the genesis of that? it was certainly, interestingly being a business that makes a lot of, Kids products. we've never been like passionate about kids products. we've been more passionate about where design meets, manufacturing and where design meets, a customer need, and where we can innovate to meet that need. Well, I had, I had two kids at the time. I've still got, I've got six kids now, but I had two when I started the business. So I sort of, accumulating them as you go along. so I was very aware, you're living the demographic. So I sort of, I started with a name puzzle, a wooden name puzzle and I studied industrial design. I always worked in manufacturing, was really into what's called lean manufacturing, which is sort of common more broadly in business now, but we were right. Um, right into it in our, you kind of have to be to survive in Australian manufacturing. And I, I saw this one where, in that case, I could bring in, high labour cost components of a name. This is like a wooden kids puzzle with their names on it. And then use local, like a computer routing machine to sort of do the delayed differentiation on the product and and keep the margins pretty good, for a craft product, it turns out now that we actually don't make it with offshore components, we've just changed the way in that one, it's actually all made locally, local wood, but that's, that's just cause we worked out another way of making it, which is more cost effective. and, that sort of led into this business model of, um, sort of mass customization of building one off products at scale and then trying to do that in the highest labor cost market in the world, which is Australia. I think there's one European country apparently that had a lot, but we're pretty much the highest labor cost. so we've always been pretty, you know, Just very aware of that in terms of sort of KPIs, we've always had that more or less some variation of retail dollars per labor hour on the production front. we're going to go bust pretty quickly in Australia if you, and there's certain things we just don't try and do as much as we'd like to do. in our market, they just will be, will be too, could cost me a bit. Labor intensive in terms of I mean, obviously you're like a challenge, right? So you've gone down that path. Yeah. What type of examples are there of things that you won't do? product wise, we do lots of kids, bags and backpacks and lunch bags and swim bags. That those ones, we've got a great partner in China. a lot over the years and they'll make the bags. Cause we don't know how, we design them all. one of my business partners is I met studying industrial design. So we've done a lot of product design. so we'll design them, but we'll get them made. Cause you just can't, don't, don't have the capital equipment to know how. And even if we did that at our price point, we just couldn't make them, the price we need to. So bags would be an example. With something like a book or wall stickers, which is other products we make, or stationery or calendars, diaries, it's, it's sort of paper and it's, it doesn't, and we, we're not doing a commodity item, like we're not trying to sell really, really cheap books, and print them here, but we're doing one off and every, every single one's a one off and it's, it's got, it's personalized in some way, whether it's the cover. The internals might be personalized. There's all sorts of ways you can add photos. so there's all sorts of ways of personalizing them and that keeps the margins, better. And so a lot of the customized personalized products in Australia is made here. yeah. Yeah, of difference? Is it the personalization part that's your sort of your secret sauce, if you like? That makes sense. it is. It's, it's pretty much, personalization or customization. So essentially a business model where you don't have to you can make them relatively effectively one at a time, which is not that easy. lots of modification to hardware, lots of software, and systems to. To pull that off yeah, so it might just be customizations you can offer. It's not, there might be thousands and thousands and thousands of choices to choose from with no personalization. the fact that you're not holding any stock and it's made to order, helps the business model in that sense. So Yeah. And this started off as a, as a side hustle type years ago, right? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. 2006 in e commerce years, that makes us, I don't know, 200 and something. I think it's a very different world in 2006. Oh, look, I had, I did leave my job to start it. I was pretty much immediately making as much money in my designers don't get paid much. So Yeah. in that sense, it wasn't too much risk for me. I could get, I could get freelance work. I spent probably a year. Or between finishing my job and selling product that first model, I had to go find a supplier in China, which was a lot more difficult then, go over and inspect the first batch of production. Cause I didn't want to, to be sort of kids in bare feet making this stuff. Well, you know, you never to understand exactly what, what you're getting and where it's coming from, right? Exactly. I ended up, yeah, that, that's a plan. I ended up going to his wedding when I was over there and I've had some great times over there, but I was just doing freelance design work. So designers often have a bit of a, how hard can it be? Like, can you build us a website? Yeah, I'll build you a website. Can I do a lot of freelance furniture design or, lots of graphic design, just. lots of wedding photography, did craft markets, just, just, it was never really to sort of get rich. It was just to pay the bills. And, you've always sort of got a trade, so to speak in that sense to fall back on. So, but the first product went quite well. We just, to be honest, we just under priced it and Right. we, it was made then, and made it very easy to sell when you just, Okay. when it's priced really well. So that was a good lesson actually. but this probably sounds like it's taken on a life of its own in terms of over that sort of since 2006, you're talking sort of 18 years, nearly 20 years. From what I've read, you're now turning over sort of plus 10 million a year or something like that. Yeah. Look, right? it's. Yeah, look, look, it's grown, and it's just been organic, Yep. growth, like pretty early on my business partner, I've got two business partners, one, Nick McLennan, I met at studying uni. we sort of followed each other around in jobs, and had really complimentary skillset, like I could sort of make it look cool and he could make it work a lot that, it's sort of got a hundred percent for physics at a stall secondary college. She was one of those sort of, he's actually a great engineer, even though he didn't study engineering and then, another business partner, Ben, who came from, he was ex Goldman Sachs as an assets manager, uh, done his MBA. But he's also my second cousin, so I, I was often chatting to him about work stuff and he just done his MBA wanting to sort of put into practice beyond Goldman's and that was a big deal for him cause that's leaving Goldman's, that's a bigger step down in salary compared to Nick and I, who were, didn't have much risk. So, yeah, we just grew organically, moved around premises a lot and just, reinvested and, built the team. and, and we've, put a lot of in housing, from an early, Stage I think for better or worse. I think we've, again, with a bit of a background of, oh, we'll just give that a crack. We've sort of often trying to do stuff and then realized, oh, I need people, I'm not that good at this and, I need to get better people. Mind you again, doing design work, I'd always done collaborative stuff with developers on websites. I'd design them and work with devs getting them built. yeah, so we just built up in house dev team, engineering team, team like mechatronics, mechanical, electrical engineering. And then production compliance and risk design marketing. Yeah. Just the normal bits you need for, How many people in the team yeah, and we've got production as well. So we've got, we scale up, cause we make stuff. but yeah, probably picks at about 70, 70 people. and then the core teams probably about 30, 30 people. So And how did you find that going from, you know, when you first started coming up with the design, the concepts, that sort of stuff. over the years, you've obviously had to add more to your, your management and leadership sort of skillset. How was that? What were the challenges there? yeah, look, I think it was pretty, pretty gradual and just I've always been a big reader, and learner. So, that's helped a lot. Actually, early days, we also got a business coach, that was quite good. It's actually a lot of the stuff we'd been reading, that was sort of putting in, helping us put into practice. that was pretty early on. and it's very, very common now to talk about core values and business culture. 18 years ago, it just wasn't as common. and we got sort of convinced of that really early on. And I think it, cause I was always a bit skeptical of. Particularly in the sort of nineties, you walk in and see these posters on the walls of motivational posters that Yeah. from a designer's perspective, I thought they just completely sucked and just looked cheesy as So I was probably a bit cynical from that perspective, but often what who they were quoting was actually, you know, it was true, but I think the packaging put me off. but we, we came around and realized we do need to sort of articulate our core values, and hire, According to those and build the team according to those. And I think doing that early is really, really helped. having two business partners, that are all on the same page as well, and very complimentary skillsets. We're all really different. argue a lot, and model that to our team. and if it ever got, like in a very civil way. Yeah. It's a good kind of arguing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Debating some stuff or yeah. And, So I think that's helped us just. learn and put things in place, realizing your weaknesses, and putting in things to help. I get distracted easily, always have, naturally not that organized. so you just put things like we get every person in the whole business to read a copy of David Allen's getting things done, which is personal productivity book. I was really early on into getting, probably because of the lane manufacturing and, influence, into theory of constraints, which is another thing we, get everyone. There's many people on our team to read, about we've had people come in and train on that. cause those sort of things just underpin running a good business. And I think just, just learning and implementing and experimenting and testing and seeing what works, just put us in good stead. So how did you formulate what were your values? I mean, you know what they are, but you sort of bring that together. It's not just you, there's other people involved. And then how did you go about articulating that to your team? so we just had sessions years and years ago of trying to sort of. what makes us tick, what's got us from here to here. and making sure we preserve that. And I was facilitated by a business coach years ago, a long, long time ago. and then we wrote them down like a lot, like we've got ones like creativity and like in individual words, they're pretty lame, to be honest. And so then we've written a bunch of just. sentences below each of these to sort of describe what they, what they mean. and even those will fall short to some extent, in terms of then trying to keep them alive in the culture. So that's sort of how we, we sort of came up with this, set of core values. some of them we debated with our, business coach at the time. And he sort of thought you can't do that. It's too general. But then we sort of went to articulate a bit more what we really mean by this. We had one's like integrity and he goes, Oh, you can't do integrity. Everyone would say integrity. And we're like, Oh, well, no, like if this is actually, we're going to do stuff, even if it's going to cost us money, if it's the right thing to do If you define it, I think that's different, right? Because like you say, everyone says integrity, but what does that integrity mean to you? Is it integrity in the product? Is it integrity in the construction or is it integrity in the way you do business? There's, there's so many. Definitions within that and that's what you probably have to, sort of work through. That's right. Yeah, it's true. And integrity is one like that because it does refer to other things other, like the certain effect of sort of moral integrity, but there's a, there's other elements of it as well. and then, and then we do, there's a few practical things we've done. We've got them, we do daily standup 903 daily standup meeting. We've done it for over 15 years. used to be the whole team cause there wasn't many people and now it's sort of Someone from each team, a way of communicating, and we record it for our UK team. And it's a way of communicating things sort of up and down the business. but that's got an agenda item there every day on core values. A staff address will agenderize putting core values in, and so we, we put them in where practical as a, an actual point. And if someone doesn't have anything to say, we just skip it. Nearly always someone does. And it's pretty easy to pull out something that's either not going quite right in the core values or, or that's going well. and so in that sense, you just talk about them a lot. So our team would probably, And they become real then. It's not actually, because you're talking about real stuff. I might be quoting something, but it's often pulling out an example that this happened yesterday, and that was a, you know, our dynamic core value at work, and this, and this, and this. So it is. the conversations you have. Is that sort of what, what you're getting to there? the culture and the values that become embedded through conversation, through education, I guess. Yeah, that's right. look, it sounds a little bit clinical putting them as an agenda point to talk about, but, if we've already, it's almost like piggyback, like sort of that, habit stacking sort of thing. If you've got a habit that's every day, anyway, you might as well piggyback something there as an opportunity for people to vocalize it. And then, and the team starts to as well, they start to sort of pick up. On the semantics so that's worked relatively well for us. It is a hard thing to get core values that are written down in a book, and actually get them to, become part of the culture, through just talking about them, you do have to actually have to, they actually have to be there. You have to hire the people that are aligned with those and deal with stuff when it's not, but I think it's been really valuable for us. it becomes a bit of a, somewhat of a strategic advantage in a business because, whether you're getting the business and the team and sort of saying, okay, now we're going to do this, which is a different tack. Some of that stuff can actually just be very, very good for, no matter what problem you're trying to tackle. And what about your biggest strength around, leading people and, and within the business, what was the, key strength you, felt like you brought to the business from the early days? I've always had lots of ideas. My business card, I think it still says ideas, man. always had lots of ideas and always managed to. Not like, how am I going to try and convince other people? This is a good idea, but just like, just if I'm into something or I want to tell my friends about it, you know, that sort of stuff. Yeah. that's a business idea, I'll try and, Get other people on board. So I was often the one like getting my mates and my kids to go, okay, let's go, wash these cars or let's go to dragging them into Mike's ideas. so those things, and so there's an element of leadership in that, I guess, which is just often, a mixture of enthusiasm and, optimism. And why don't we give this a crack and, and, other people, Coming on board with that, I guess there's a, an element of articulating it well, which I've not that great at, but, I think enthusiasm can sort of cover over that and people, people get, I think that's an underrated asset, right? yeah, I think, I think a lot of people think. Leadership can be almost what I'm describing, but they've sort of got to go on, work it up. And that can fall flat. If you're not actually passionate about something, it's hard to fake. it sort of helps if you're sort of someone that's a bit of an enthusiast to begin with. And people can see that, right? People can understand when someone's naturally enthusiastic about it versus trying to manufacture it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so other areas of the business where I'm. might better go and help more on a managerial perspective, but, which is really, really important, often running projects really, really well, is a very different skillset. And there's other ones in the business where I might be involved in that. and I don't, I'm not as passionate about it. And so there's less of a leadership element there and more of a management and they do merge a bit together. but they are, they are different. I'm fascinated by the personalization aspect of the business. when it first sort of became an idea that you thought the personalization part is key? you can just talk to us a little bit about that part, because it's a, it really is a point of difference. And I, I kind of get that important to people, but what's your rationale around that part specifically? Yeah. It's worth saying that not, Not everything wants to be personalized. I must say, Right. like sometimes there's value in the personalization and that's what we've got to watch as well. Like sometimes are you adding personalization and customization? What really doesn't I've heard these people talk about mass customization, that everything's going to be mass customized. And you, you know, your box of Kellogg's cornflakes is going to be, like, my kids are fine with a Weet Bix just as Weet really need, you can differentiate and do your, whatever version of them, but, you Like really customized right down to, Isaac Wilson, the 16 year old boy that like it, I think that's just ridiculous really. so there's a bit of a realism in it, but it sort of stemmed from in Australia, working a lot in the furniture industry. And a lot of them were just going, I could see the writing on the wall. They were partly the way they're running their businesses. It seemed from a kid, really, I was a kid out of uni's perspective seemed like this is not going to last, but from a design perspective, I sort of thought they're going to have to. I didn't even have the words for it. They're going to have to work at some way of differentiating, finding a niche. otherwise I could see all this stuff going to be coming in from China and it's just going to, take them out. They're going to be able to make the stuff. Better. So from a man, if someone that's interested in manufacturing, being doing all the automotive tours, doing all the tours of factories for years, instead of seeing them, like some of them, you could see it culturally, you walk into a place in a furniture place and there's porno on the walls and you sort of think, man, Yeah, right. for goodness sake, like, it was a bit of an eye opener when I was, as a kid, like, really, like, come on, man. Yeah. and others, you could sort of say, we were learning getting into lean manufacturing differentiation. So I sort of was predisposed a bit to, to that from the manufacturing perspective. So I was always sort of thinking, how can we do something where you can actually, Differentiation actually adds value in this case, personalization or customization, where people are willing to pay for it. And then hence the margins could be such that you could actually then make it to that price. and then also the challenge from the labor side, how can we do as much automation, as possible to keep the margins intact? yeah. And from a, the business side, the capital side, the finance type of side, was it always just you and your business partners? You didn't raise money outside? Or you did? Or what was your thought process around that side of things? Yeah, we, we've never raised, early days. We, we did a few, lease machines or Yeah, whenever we're buying early days before buying Mac computers. Cause we're, we always had Macs cause we're designers, but, they're the same price, whether you got them three years interest free at Harvey Norman. Which is yeah, card you didn't know about, then you went to the next door. So some of those ones we just thought, okay, we'll rather use someone else's money if we're just going to pay the same price anyway. yeah. but yeah, we haven't really taken on any, any debt. we did get approached a lot very early on. We're in the sort of fast 100, B R W fast 100. Yeah, I was gonna say stuff like private equity or private investors, that type of thing, right? And we we got approached a lot by private equity. I know I've got other ideas where that would be more capital intensive, that would really require capital. I've always kept in touch and, but, account model, we've always been pretty big on low cap X and we've always had a very, Yeah, pretty strong on the printing industry, the traditional printing industry. So in manufacturing often puts in massive capital, relatively speaking. and then they're, forced to go. the commodity space. And you've just have, I've seen so many people go bust. And I sort of thought Yeah, I'm going to put in massive capital. We're going to put in like, ideally in the case of like smaller machines and lots of them, like case with our first product, we got it outsourced through my previous employer. Then I bought a really cheap Chinese CNC router. Then I bought a Chinese CNC router with an Italian spindle head, like, Yeah, I bought an Australian made router, and as the product proved itself, we didn't have the words for it, but it was a minimum viable product. yeah, okay, We'll still do that now a lot. So we'll do the low cap X version, in design that like to say a casting aluminium and start with a sand cast and a, a gravity die cast and a high pressure die cast. And one's going to be five grand tool up and 20 bucks a piece. The next one might be 50 grand tool up and 10 bucks a piece. The next one's going to be five, 200, 000 up, but hardly anything. We'll sort of manage the business that way. And it's not massively capital intensive. it's pretty labor intensive also in terms of the engineering. Cause we do build a lot of our own machines. Well, jigs and fixtures, more automation, we're not building printers or that'd be stupid or laser cutters or whatever, but we're, Building lots of modifications. Yeah, okay. Yeah, but yeah. And it's also not the space where there's been huge exits and huge businesses. Like there's ones like Vistaprint, which are publicly listed. one of our competitors got bought by a publicly listed company that they chatted to us and we're like, I think we've still got a lot more growth. didn't want to, didn't want to sell at that stage. but they're, they're not typically buying mass customization. That's sort of more buying more manufacturing sort of stuff. So, yeah. Because the businesses that are buying and expanding are sort of more looking at scale, and what you're talking about there is a bit more niche. Compared to what they're looking at if they're looking at bigger and bigger and bigger. Look, and there is examples in the States and Europe more so where, but there's still not big like there's been, quite a lot of private equity and exits. And very few that, I don't know if there's been any in the billions and, and some in the hundreds of millions, but not, not many, it's not like, the software space or, or. okay. Almost any other space. there is some, but if you're in Australia, like part of going internationally, that does, there's just way, way bigger markets for us. and we can definitely expand that sort of kids niche into, other niches without, core capabilities and our strengths. and so I think that's where a lot of the growth opportunity is for us, but it's not, I must say if I starting a business from scratch now for a big exit, Cause I didn't start with that in mind. I didn't even, yeah, okay. Yep. I think it was more like a like business, like making stuff and selling it. It's a very messy, complex bit. Like, many people want to acquire someone that's got manufacturing in Australia and in UK, that's got a, very bespoke, custom software for, for doing manufacturing of this ilk, there's certain people that would love it, but there's just not that many of them. Cause it's very, it is very bespoke. So. Yeah. Well, what's some of the biggest challenges you've faced over the years? yeah, good question. we did early on in the business, have a recall. our very first product was this name puzzle. I had these wooden letters with wooden pegs in them. right. And someone, a peg came out of one of the puzzles that the piece. okay. Yeah. And so that triggered a, I triple C got in touch that were really difficult to do with Atelier. and, and we, but look, that could have, put us out of business now because we'd sold direct, we did a little bit of wholesale early on, but we pretty much sold direct. We can almost contact every single person. And we're sort of saying, you've got to send these things back, but that would get them and they, they were fine. So a lot of people did send them back, which is what we asked them to do, but I think a lot of people. We did the right thing and said, send them back and replace them. Some people might do their own modifications. Well, the fact is hardly any of them actually out in the field were, had anything wrong with them. Right. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. and when we knew that and so like we ran a very, very efficient, recall, and a lot of, I think it actually ended up building a lot of custom loyalty. It's not like, we've been completely. some of this stuff had got out there. Then we started pneumatically testing every single peg that went out of our, and then, Okay. and then, and then we changed the way we make it and decided we're just easiest way to not have any pegs falling out is not put pegs in the first place. and so we just designed it out of the product completely and thought, Oh, I might just don't have to, don't, I don't want to deal with that. so that's probably the biggest challenge we've had. and that, that was a long time ago now. but any business, you just got lots of, yeah, a lot of Yeah, always, always challenges. It's, and it's, COVID, how did the business go through COVID? I mean, that's challenging for everyone in yeah, absolutely. like a lot of people at first, it's sort of our sales really ground to a halt. And then we're like, oh mate, what are we going to do? then we all send everyone home. we could keep, making, so I think we classified under printing or e commerce warehousing. Like there was no personalized product industry sort of thing. So the term, a couple of classifications that we're sort of closest to were allowed to stay, keep, keep making, which was just grace. That was fantastic that we could, cause that would have, If we couldn't make anything and we're made to order and didn't have stock, we would have just gone on there pretty quick. and then, and certain categories just did well. E commerce in general did really well. Lots of my e commerce buddies, from industry, a bunch of in public, and, yeah, friends at the door and, yeah, just lots of friends in e commerce did very, very well. like we had a pretty good period of COVID, but it's not like ours was, offline equivalent of what we're making. So can go to Kmart and buy, Yeah, a personalized name puzzle or a personalized book or a personalized backpack. So the only spot you can really get it is us and people that are doing similar sort of things. But we probably did quite well. Cause just gifting in general was down, people might buy our product instead of a Nerf gun or something. we had a bit of a COVID kick, but probably not as much as some other e commerce players where, you know, if you wanted to get something, the only place you could go, you couldn't go to Myers, you had to go to Myers online or, Hatcher or Kogan or, you know, the others that were just booming, so. It was such a weird time, right? Where suddenly if you happen to be in the right spot, you've got this massive upswing, or if you're in the wrong spot, obviously the other way, but it was such a unique case by case. And sometimes unusual too, in terms of like the way businesses, fortuitously or the other way, that bonus type of thing, you know, it was Yeah. quite amazing. Yeah, it was weird. And just also running businesses where we had, like a lot of, like some of our engineers had to keep going to work, but we're sort of trying to develop product and it's very physical product and they sort of got this, it doesn't work well at all remote. Yeah. we pretty much brought someone, I've been a little bit cruel cause I was home today, but I normally, everyone else, cause in our business, this doesn't really work well remote. So those sort of normal challenges. So. Okay. That makes sense. what about the, the best advice you were given Is there anything that sort of stands out Yeah, probably like I was talking to you earlier about this, the advice on the core values bid, essentially I'm really glad that someone made us aware of that sort of early on. I think it wasn't, for what I said about the sort of cynicism of the posters on the wall, other elements of it were sort of bought into early on. We sort of actually had a bit of conviction in, what I call some of the softer stuff, in running a business. and so, but, Getting someone sort of tell us this is really, really important. And that's being convinced of that early on. and taking it seriously, I think has been, massive. about, in terms of consumers, what are the changes you've seen? I mean, you started, you're talking about at the time, iPhones or social media and all that sort of stuff was not really a big thing at that So you've seen over that sort of 18 year journey, a massive change in all sorts of aspects of society and the way we do things, buy things. What's the biggest changes you've seen from a consumer perspective? yeah, and there's been some massive ones. So, mobile was just huge when we started. It was, I remember trying to get my dev team mobile first, mobile first in design, really early on. Cause you could sort of say that this is but when we started, there's no iPhone and no e commerce done on phones at all. There was no, no Facebook on commerce. No, that came in pretty quick. And that's been another massive trend of, the intersection of commerce and social. and so we've, had some great successes through that over the years. I must say we haven't been, compared to a lot of the, well, certain other brands, we haven't been at all on the cutting edge of getting onto social early on new platforms, we need to do a bit more of. is that a deliberate choice or is it? I'm not so deliberate. It's, it's probably also, a bit of the team. And so marketing team reports to me, but, and I'm pretty involved, but, the three directors, none of us are that, I don't think Ben even has that, like he has WhatsApp for, Yeah. hockey club and to you guys. school and, you know, that sort of stuff, but, we're not social natives at all. and that does have a bit of an influence probably and the marketing team, is to some extent, but weren't really early on Tik TOK and, and we've also worked out how we've got to work out how you, and we still are, how do you, play in those platforms and have some sort of authenticity, as a brand, who we are in that platform because it's, the brands have their own sort of almost aesthetic and, and why they work, and you have to behave differently in the different platforms to some extent, but how do you do that now? Maintain your brand integrity, and try and not be things that we're not, not pick up on trends just for the, like, I've really struggled with this sort of thing of not struggle, but I really don't like trying to pick up on some social trend, Yeah. just for the sake of sort of cashing in it from a business perspective. it just really doesn't sit well. Um, get it. That makes a lot of sense. And there's a bit of that in social and we've just had to sort of work the line. And I must say we haven't done it that well in that sense. and I think we need to, to, to crack that side a bit more, but there's certain things of just, even on the paid side, the organic side of just, communicating some of the basics of our, of our product, to customers as well. So, yeah, What are some of the business people that you look at and really admire the way that they go about things? Okay. I'm reading through, um, poor Charlie's Almanac, Charlie Munger, Munger and Buffett. So, they're just very, funny, funny guys, very, very smart, intelligent, and often I'll just find what they're saying. I, it really, makes me sort of stop and, I think about things quite differently. I think very long term I've often been fired, not long term at all. Just like, in some ways, we're influenced a lot by, Jim Collins and the, the good to great, how the mighty fall and that sort of more academic study, but just a great read. And, And, and, that's influenced that business quite a bit, actually. that's sort of the concept of the, here's a concept with a 20 mile march of a sort of essentially working persistent. That's a great, great story. and the analogy gives, yeah, some of those, themes have influenced the business quite a lot. a book I mentioned earlier, a guy called Eli Goldratt, who's, has this academic theory called Theory of Constraints, Constraint Thinking, and that's been quite influential. and then I've listened to a lot of, yeah, podcasts over the years. I've particularly liked, sort of start up, found a podcast Of how people are built, built out, companies. And I've always just find that sort of stuff inspiring. Okay. What do you love most about what you do within the business? Yeah, I think what we do for, again, for better or worse for a small business, it's a bit overly complex. I do love that side. We, we've got a new product, if we're developing a new product, often it's got to be how we're actually going to make it at scale with low, low, labor cost, how all the, the software behind that, cause it might be quite a complex build intensive. Files and, it's a bit hard to explain, but how that's actually going to be built. There's a lot of software behind that. So you need a dev team, an engineering team, design team, marketing team, all working together. to get that. To happen. And I love that. I love these projects where you can't have one person that, that can do it. and, and the more, complex that gets, I find that more, more and more exciting now that you don't want to overly complicate things, particularly if no one's going to buy it, Yeah. they sort of want to do where that complexity builds sort of, competitive defensive, some defensive, mode, so to speak in some way. and his decent margins that's, that's sort of the sweet spot, and so I've got to watch that. I don't just get caught up in love the whole process of building something if it isn't defensible or if it isn't, got the margin. at the day, right? Absolutely. and so we try and vet that pretty early on. So we don't, and we try and do an MVP and, lots of trying to a minimum viable product. So we can find out and test and see if it's actually worth investing further. I do love that side of thing. And also I think because we've hired well and got team we love, I must say it's very different if you're working with people that you love as opposed to people that like just a jerk. So, That's important, right? it is. short to spend it in an environment where you don't want to be, which is often why people start businesses in the first place. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. What's next for the business? Yeah. Well, I think we've put a lot of our strategic pillars in place cause we're a manufacturer and, I think people are now so used to things like Amazon prime where you're on your phone and you click a button and it's a Saturday night. And Yeah. before we, Head out for church in the morning and putting on our doorstep, it's just nuts, isn't it? and that's the expectation they're getting with personalized product, to some extent. And so we're found in the UK, which is our biggest market outside of Australia is putting in manufacturing there, mainly around the spread of shipping. it's helping us grow that market. It does mean also mean that it's relatively, effective. We've got an Island site, which is, Island site, which is shipping into EU. and another one for us would be looking at doing, we've never done any multilingual. So we've sort of got 10 localized tiny me domains. but they're mainly in markets where they buy our kind of product in English. So Singapore, So that's 10 different countries, English speaking predominantly. yeah, well, it's, it's sort of, Hong Kong, Malaysia. There's a, our kind of product they will buy. Now, most of our products you can actually personalize in any, you can personalize it in Arabic or Hebrew or, you know, Um, not all of them, but quite a few of them. So, and it can be bilingual as well. So you can put a line of this and a line of this. but they're markets where they used to be the e commerce experiences is in English, it's not a foreign experience being in English, New Zealand, Canada, UAE, U S obviously. So, the only one we've got manufacturing in is, UK. and so that's an opportunity in terms of the system to have built. and the software we've built, we can be multi site that, that's an expansion opportunity for us. lots of the jigs and fixtures, I'll have the same laser cutters and same 3D printers and everything over there. So if we design it here, they can get it printing overnight for the spare parts and, you know, they can. Implemented and then lots of, the parts of parts, you know, whether it's actuators or solenoids or whatever, you know, those sorts of stuff you can just get anywhere in the world. So, so There's still a lot of growth from your perspective in terms of if you go into other countries, this is a, this is a huge upside, I guess, potentially, right? there is, yeah, other countries now that I'm still got this other brand of Pico, which is like tiny me, but, other products. and that one, we, we've got the brand there. It's more of a foot in the door and we just haven't given it, it needs almost like an anchor tenant, so to speak in terms of a product. Really, really. And we've got a whole bunch of ideas in the product pipeline that could fit into that, that wouldn't really fit into tiny me. That'd be a bit like, Oh, Okay. I'm on a kid's site. Then suddenly how, how come I'm getting this other product? and so we have to say grownups, cause if you talk about adult content, it's a bit, um, I come different connotations. Right. Fair enough. it's grownups anyway. So but that's a big opportunity as well, obviously, like, a bigger play, which is more B2B, like a Vista print, but they're, you Yeah. They're not doing much in the kid's space. it is a bit like it's a great market. It's not overly cynical. It's, quite wholesome. I don't know. There's a lot to be said about selling kids product. That's really good as well. So No, awesome. Mike. But that is a fantastic story. And, fascinated to see what you do next. yeah. coming on the show. Thanks mate. Cheers. Thanks. Thanks for listening to this episode. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, we would really appreciate if you would leave a five star review and share with family and friends. Thanks.