The Dion Guagliardo Podcast
The Dion Guagliardo Podcast is a show that brings on Australian business people, leaders and innovators from a variety of industries to discuss entrepreneurship, work ethic and how they achieved success
The Dion Guagliardo Podcast
#94 Steve Grace - Founder and CEO of The Nudge Group
In this episode, I sit down with Steve Grace, Founder and CEO of The Nudge Group. Since launching in 2019, The Nudge Group has redefined the role of recruitment agencies, helping startups scale by connecting them with top talent and a trusted ecosystem for growth.
Steve shares his journey as a natural entrepreneur, including how he built and sold two successful businesses before founding The Nudge Group. He also reflects on navigating major global challenges like the GFC and the COVID-19 pandemic, reflecting the lessons he’s learned along the way. If you enjoy this episode, feel free to leave a 5-star review and share with family and friends.
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Highlight Clip
I think I built and sold two. Yep. And I'm like, I don't want to do that anymore.
I've been doing it for 25 years or however long it had been. I want to do something different. Yeah, okay. And that was just prior to COVID. So I was like, what am I going to do? So I came up with all sorts of things. I was going to bring over tourists from China and take them up to hospitals in the Gold Coast, get them to have cosmetic surgery, sell them a house and make them gamble and take clips on all the way through.
I was coming up with all sorts of stuff. luckily I didn't do any of those things because COVID hit and it would have killed those businesses. And I just thought, you know what? Why don't I think I might have listened to a podcast actually that said, you should double down on what you're good at.
And I thought, well, I've been successful in recruitment, but I want to do something different. We'd recruited for startups in my other companies, but we'd done a really poor job because you fundamentally have to do it completely differently for startups. It's a totally different environment and recruiters didn't understand that.
So I went out and I met 50 founders and ask them all the things they hated about recruiters, which was a huge list. And then we designed nudge around solving all of those problems.
Introduction
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 Steve Grace, founder and CEO of The Nudge Group. Since launching in 2019, the Nudge Group has redefined the role of recruitment agencies, helping startups scale by connecting them with top talent and trusted ecosystems for growth. Steve shares his journey as a natural entrepreneur, including how he built and sold two successful businesses before founding the Nudge Group.
He also reflects on navigating major global challenges like the GFC and the COVID 19 pandemic, talking about the lessons he learned along the way. If you enjoyed this episode, feel free to leave a five star review and share with your family and friends.
Steve Grace's Entrepreneurial History and His Companies
Steve, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us. Great to be here. I've been looking forward to this. Do you want to just start by telling us a little bit about your, Early entrepreneurial days. Oh, how early?
Like when I was a child or like the real entrepreneurial? Up to you. I think, um, I never liked jobs. So, even at young age, my first job, 13, working in a fish and chip shop, I friggin hated that job. So, I went out and I started doing gardening for people, I started doing car washing for people. I started just going and finding things to do.
So, I guess maybe that leads into just a natural state of wanting to be in control of my life and not wanting to necessarily do what others tell me. I react really badly when someone tells me to do something. I'm getting better at it, but the hairs grow up on my neck. It doesn't matter what it is. You can ask my wife or my children, they'll agree with this.
It's you have to ask me or maybe suggest it, but if you tell me, I just react really badly. So I think that drove a lot of my entrepreneurial career, but my first proper, proper entrepreneurial role was really, I guess I did a lot of door to door sales, which is, which has a kind of inkling towards that.
But When I got my residency here in Australia, and I think the day after I resigned and started my own first recruitment business, I'd been working in recruitment then for about six, seven years, in large organizations, both here and in London. And yeah, I just knew I wanted to start my own company.
And as soon as I had the visa, boom, we were there. How old were you then? 24, 25. Yeah. Oh no, maybe And I did that actually, you know, 27, I would have been 27 when I actually started my first business. So take us through a snapshot of your sort of career path in terms of you're in recruitment and you've had a couple of businesses in that space before ending up in media.
It's a good question. I always started a recruitment company as a salesman. Because it was something that I'd learned how to do. I fell into that industry like most people do. And I started them in, in what I thought were new markets.
So my first one was in digital media. When digital media was, or digital was a word that no one really knew what it meant. A bit like AI right now. It was like, what the heck's digital mean? And that was called fingerprint consulting. And we ended up selling that business to a listed company. And we can talk about that later if you like.
I then went into another, business where I bought half of it off a very good friend of mine who was really struggling to make it work. And that was in corporate and government recruitment. And then I sold out of that one, different, very different exit to the first one, probably interestingly, a better exit financially, but a worse exit emotionally.
It was a really interesting story there. Then I started a recruitment company, which I swore I wouldn't do. Um, in the startup space and in the startup space, it's very hard to sell companies. So because of that, I decided to ask a podcast and sit here like you are and tell the stories of those founders to enable us to recruit for them.
And I just fell in love with that. And then that's led into Notch Productions, the media, and now this new podcast network that we're launching and obviously the private club. So yeah, it's been an interesting journey. I'm not a strategic person. I would love to be, I'm very reactive. I see things that I like the look of that are shiny and I go and try them.
How Steve Grace's Recruitment Background Provides him in a Media Business
how would you describe yourself though? I mean, reactive probably isn't the word, but if you're not strategic, how would you describe yourself? Opportunistic. Yeah. Okay. That's probably the better word. And when you go through those, those iterations of your business, what is it about the recruitment side?
That's your background that you find, most benefits you in your media
company?
Great question. And I think I think one of the reasons I found podcasting really easy is because you're interviewing someone and all you do in recruitment is interview people like, I mean, obviously there's a sales aspect to recruitment.
You have to go sell yourself to a client. You then have to sell that job to a candidate. You then sell the candidate back to the client. And then, you know, you have to get everyone to agree and be happy and join together. So there's, I mean, that's a constant sales role where you're selling back and forth and back and forth.
And you're selling people, which is really the most unreliable product, whether it be the company or the individualist, those two people really that you're trying to sell together almost matchmaking. But I think, just having done so many interviews for me to sit in a chair and interview someone, I was so, so nervous that first time.
And I did 10 shows on my first day of ever doing a podcast because we had no money. So we hired a warehouse. Yeah. And we was like, all right, we're just going to do 10. And my first one was a good friend of mine. probably more nervous doing that than I was, even though it wasn't live than I was doing live, live speaking on stage.
Yeah. I don't know why. Shaking and all that kind of stuff. Did the first one. went really well. You know, I picked someone with a lot of high energy, so it was very, very easy and natural. And then for me, it was just having a conversation. It was just, it's just what I've been doing for the last 20 years.
So it was a real natural transition. You realize that after a little while, don't you, that it is really just conversations, but I totally get what you're saying when you do your first few. It's, it's different. It's terrifying. But then you realize, Oh, hang on. I've been doing this all my career. Yeah. And I think just having, it's the fear of being watched and judged.
That's what it is. Right. I mean, even though Like I said, it wasn't live. There were like, there was a whole bunch of crew there and there were cameras and the lights. And it was just different. You know, I'd never sat on a stage. And the interesting, when I started doing it, we were in the thick of COVID. So we had to sit about three meters apart.
So we're on this huge stage on these two little white chairs. And I was literally having to shout at this person. And if they didn't shout back, I couldn't hear what they said. So it wasn't the most ideal. opportunity. But yeah, it's a very, very natural thing to do. And I think the more you do it, the more natural it becomes and the better the podcast comes.
Why Steve Re-Entered Recruiting After Swearing to Never Return
You mentioned earlier that you swore you'd never do a recruitment business in tech space. Or the startup space. Or just another recruitment business. Right, okay. Just had enough, or? So, I think I built and sold two. Yep. And I'm like, I don't want to do that anymore.
(clip: startup recruitment)
Yeah, something different. I'm thinking of it, I've been doing it for 25 years or however long it had been. I want to do something different. Yeah, okay. And that was just prior to COVID. So I had to have X amount of time off as you do when you sell a business, you're not allowed to go into that industry. So also I couldn't work for a year, so I was, I couldn't not work for a year.
I have way too much nervous energy. So I was like, what am I going to do? So I came up with all sorts of things. I was going to bring over tourists from China and take them up to hospitals in the Gold Coast, get them to have cosmetic surgery, sell them a house and make them gamble and take clips on all the way through.
I was coming up with all sorts of stuff. luckily I didn't do any of those things because COVID hit and it would have killed those businesses. And I just thought, you know what? Why don't I think I might have listened to a podcast actually that said, you should double down on what you're good at.
And I thought, well, I've been successful in recruitment, but I want to do something different. We'd recruited for startups in my other companies, but we'd done a really poor job because you fundamentally have to do it completely differently for startups. It's a totally different environment and recruiters didn't understand that.
So I went out and I met 50 founders and ask them all the things they hated about recruiters, which was a huge list. And then we designed nudge around solving all of those problems. When did you realize you had a media company in there? It's a good question too. I think there was a point where we'd been doing the podcast, maybe we'd done 40 shows.
And I was approached by someone to purchase their business, which was an online publication, which at the time I thought was ridiculous. Anyway, through a few scenarios that we won't go through, that person ended up coming to work as our head of content at Nudge and we bought that business.
And I think then that, that moment, maybe six months, maybe, I don't know, maybe sooner, but around that time when I had this creative person, I'd never worked with creative people. So I had a creative person. Working with me day to day. We were working on an online publication, which was essentially media. We were doing the podcast and we were doing it better because I had this creative person who'd come on as a head of content.
That's when I really started to go, you know what? We could actually do this all the time because I'm much preferred doing this than doing recruitment. Is that reinvigorating? When you. like almost stumble across that serendipitously in terms of you're going down that path because it makes sense for that business.
And then suddenly this whole different, or did you sort of map it out in your mind that that might be how it goes? No, there was no mapping. Like I said, the strategy is just not there. It was, it was, it's absolutely invigorating, very much like the private club that I'm doing now as well as the media business.
That's invigorating. Again, you almost feel like you're starting your first company again, which is. It's like getting a hit of adrenaline. It's that, it's that excitement. I think as a person, I'm really, really invigorated, excited, and motivated by the very, very beginning, the nought to one, as they call it.
I'm probably good until about five. And then I tend to get a little bored as soon as process and procedure and all those kinds of long words to come in, I begin to lose interest. I want to go and do something fun. I like the looseness of starting So when it's formulaic Somebody else can do that when it's working out what those formulas might be.
That's interesting. Well, I think now I've learned, like, so if you look back on my first two businesses, I sold both of them after seven years. Yeah, seven years, literally. I think now I probably won't necessarily do that because I've learned What I'm really good at what I'm really bad at and I know that I can employ people which was probably something I didn't realize when I was younger to help me take it to that next level.
I don't have to sell it at a certain level of scale because I don't know how to scale it further. I can go and employ someone who can scale it further and I can move into a different role. Yeah. And that's probably what I didn't realize. And that's something looking back on it now, I wish I'd never sold the first business, right?
It's a bit like houses, right? You buy these houses, you sell them. If you'd kept them all goodness, we wouldn't be sitting here. I'd be some island somewhere. But I think the same with businesses. I think there's, it's very attractive to sell. And if someone approaches you and offers you money that you've never heard of before, it's incredibly attractive to sell.
But I think you need to sometimes take a step back because starting again is, is hard. And every time it's hard and every time I forget, I guess it's like having a child. You don't remember how hard it is until you have a second one again. And it's definitely the same with having businesses and having just started too.
As much as I'm excited, it's really hard. It's so much work. It's so exhausting.
Why Steve Decided to Sell His Old Businesses
Well, take us through that, that sale process. Maybe go back to the first one when you've sold that you've get and you sort of alluded to it I think but a lot of mistakes. Well, you get to a point where what was it that made you say?
Yes this is the right time to sell and what was the emotions that followed after you've made that decision in terms of the and the That process so there was we had no thoughts to selling We just got approached. We were approached by a big listed company. You know, we were probably 40 staff, 45 staff.
I was really enjoying it. And we approached by a big listed company and then we approached by another company. We got approached by like three companies, three brokers. And I was like, Hey, something's going on here. And it's incredibly flattering and it really feeds your ego. And I'm pretty young still.
And so ego hits don't come necessarily easy when you're running startups. And I love the thought of it. Right. And there was some big numbers being thrown around. This is 2008, right? This would have been, yeah, around then. Yeah. And so for me, it was, Sadly, probably an ego hit more than anything. I just love the idea of selling my company to a listed company.
and so we did. And a lot of things went wrong in that process of actually setting the deal up. I don't believe my lawyers, and we won't mention who they were, did a particularly good job. The contract had some things in there that I was unaware of. And I think that's probably a big piece of advice. I don't love contracts.
I'm very, very dyslexic. So I don't love reading. I don't love, you know, I listen to audio books, but I don't like reading contracts and looking through detail. Yeah. And I did not upskill myself. I trusted them to just manage it for me and just sign away. I will never do that again, because I got caught out with some horrific clauses that caused us to lose a lot of money in the, in the following years.
so that's probably one of the biggest mistakes I think we probably made. Unfortunately, the GFC hit just after we sold. So that was brutal on the earn out. Yeah, okay. I was going to ask about that. That's why I mentioned the 2008 because that's around that GFC. How did that timing impact things? It was about six months and unfortunately we had a really high multiple, but it was very much back ended because I, as an egotistical young man, was very, brazen about what I could achieve with their money behind me.
So I was like, well, I'm going to take a bigger number, but put more at risk. Yeah. Going to back yourself. Yeah. As you do as an entrepreneur and who knew, who knew the GFC was going to hit. And look, I had to make about 20 people redundant, which is the worst thing I've ever done. Um, never had to do that before, obviously, and that, you know, as a manager, it never happened to me.
And I think there's a lot of young people around who haven't been through serious downturns, and it's, it's a really awful thing to do. You know, you're, you're destroying families. It's not just that person. It's all of their families, and you don't necessarily think about that all the time. You do when things are going badly, and the, the weight of responsibility for someone at my age at that, I, I found that very difficult.
Anyway, we pushed through I left the year out early. And I had to leave early on because of some of those contract conditions, which we won't go into because there's a lot of complexity in that. But, I mean, I ended up probably getting 15 percent of the money I thought I would get, which was significantly less.
It was still a win. Don't get me wrong. It was, it was still a nice amount of money, but it could have, it wasn't anywhere near. It would have been a life changing. Yeah. So at the end of that, honestly, I just felt totally lost because I'd walked away with a lot less money. I had to let all these people being made redundant and that's sort of, you know, and there are people who built that business with me and I had a lot of a lot of emotion, good, good will towards them, you know, a bit like a family issue in startups and I had nothing to do when I couldn't work in recruitment for a year.
So it was not a happy time for me. The only thing that kind of offset it a little was we were just beginning to have Children. So that kind of helped me through that. I don't know what would have happened if I hadn't had that distraction. So that was probably fortuitous, I guess. So what's the process and the mindset next when you go to the next business?
So I sat around for a while moping and then, and I wasn't allowed to do recruitment in Australia, but I didn't know how to do anything else. So I decided, right, I'm going to do a rec to rec business. So rec to rec business is a recruitment to recruitment company. It's a whole industry of recruiters finding jobs for recruiters.
And I took Australian recruiters that were suffering in this bad economy and tried to get them jobs in Hong Kong and Singapore and London. And I did that because I wanted to travel to Hong Kong, Singapore and London. Um, and I discovered I really hated doing Rectorec. And so I partnered up with a friend of mine in London, who obviously was born there, and he bought that business off me after six months.
Not a lot of money, but it was, I don't consider that an exit, it was just something I started to do. Like I said, I quite enjoy that part, I like to travel, and I got to the end of when I couldn't work in Australia. So your restraints are done now? Restraints are done, and I was about to start another business and A friend of mine, very, very good friend of mine, someone who had been my best man in my wedding and godfathers to children, known each other in London, you know, really, really sort of lifelong friend.
He is quite the opposite in terms of personality. He's very detailed, very methodical, very strategic, and he was struggling with his business. He could not get it past a million turnover. And that's because he was terrible with people. So I went, I had a bit of money in the bank, so I went and bought 50 percent of that business off him.
I think we decided that over a Sydney Swans game, and I've only been to about 10 in my life, but I remember that quite clearly. And we scaled that business massively to like 50 million. It was phenomenal. And I really enjoyed that. And then I had to sell to him for it. There was a number of reasons. He had a personal accident that very much changed his personality and we were unable to work together.
We couldn't agree on anything. So he bought me out. It was a horrible negotiation. It went All wrong, left, right and center. A good lesson from this is shareholders agreements. So we had a shareholders agreement. And because we were two shadows, 50, 50, and we had what they call a Texas Holden clause in there, which means you can throw a number down and you have to sort of run with it.
And if anyone doesn't understand, it's basically, you both put a number in an envelope and whoever has the bigger number buys the business on the other one. But we'd removed it because during that growth, we'd hired a CEO. And when the CEO came in, he was a shareholder. And so we didn't need that clause, so they take it out when they added him as a shareholder.
Now, unfortunately, there's been a lot of lessons in my life. He stole a lot of money off us, well over a million dollars with our CFO. so we let them go and remove them from the shareholders agreement, but we didn't add back the Texas Holdings clause, just an oversight. Yeah. So when we got to disagreement, there was no way out.
Yeah. So that it got really nasty. So you've got no methodology around valuations. You can exit, but you can't agree on the valuations. There was nothing. There was no process, right? Okay. And, and we were hating each other really badly. And just, you know, on that, I've not spoken to him since. Yeah. If he sees me in the street, he won't even, he won't even acknowledge me.
So, I mean, I lost a really good friendship through that, unfortunately. That happens in business though, sometimes, right? And it's easy for people to, you know, Um, brush over those types of things. But I think it's a really important lesson for people to learn around the shareholders agreement, around the fact that it doesn't always end well, um, on the, it might be financially okay, but in the end, but that doesn't mean that path is a lot of friendships.
I think, I think something you've got to remember, you know, the stats say if you're a co founder business, you've got a greater chance of success because you've got people with different skills, which is great. And that's very much true. But I think also. When we have such different personalities, that's okay at the beginning.
But as you grow, and as you have more success, and it cuts that business got big, your directions will not align because you're so different. And that sort of small gap between how you think grows and grows and grows and grows. So you're going to reach a point where you're not going to be able to function together, that there's a good chance if there's three of you, same thing, one of you is going to go off.
So you need to have a process for that. And you need to understand that there's a high chance of that. And you know, my lawyer, Um, who I've been through all the way through. This is a very close friend of mine, always says, everyone comes in. No, we don't need that. We're never going to argue. And he goes, everyone says it.
It turns on it literally 90 percent of people that it goes wrong in some form. That doesn't mean it doesn't get resolved, but something will happen. So I think that's super important. But that sets out the ground rules then. I think that's underestimated or underappreciated by people that having something like that is so critical.
to
Just outlining how things work if you can't agree and having that to fall back on actually just makes it very simple. That's it. That's the whole thing and it removes a lot of the tension. Like I think if we'd had that. We might have still ended up friends because it would have been a process. And the biggest advice is that don't skimp on your shareholders agreement.
You know, you can spend three grand on one or you can spend seven, spend seven or 10 because you need to cover off. The scenarios are endless and you need to make sure you've got a good shareholders agreement. Those sort of out the box ones. Then they're going to come up when it comes to the actual crunch time.
They're going to be useless to you. So it's a good one. It might always take a lot of care of our shareholders agreements. Now you go into other businesses, this one, and you've got a couple that you've talked about. Are they, for public consumption in terms of the next?
Sure, sure. So Nudge, obviously is the startup company that has morphed into production company as well. Yeah. And I'm the, I'm the sole founder of that. And I did that because of the last experience. I was literally wounded by that. I did not want to have any co founders. Yeah. Now, Everyone who works at nudge has equity in nudge, but obviously got quite a large majority share.
So in some respects, I have no co founders in that respect, and I thought that would be better. And to be honest, the one thing I've learned about that is it's not better. it gave me comfort at the start, but five, six years in now, it's very hard. You can do it. But it's so much harder.
It's so much more draining on your personality, your time, everything. So I've found that quite hard. So these other businesses that I'm starting have co founders again, and I'm really enjoying having co founders again. And I'm a bit more cautious about picking my co founders. And so one is going to be, uh, I'm not going to give you the name, but it launched in February, but it's essentially a podcast network.
So it's a, it's a spin off from the media business. So nudge productions is production. So making videos, all that kind of stuff. And we do documentaries and we do capital raising videos, events, all those kinds of things. Whereas curious will be a little bit more focused around taking other shows and helping them monetize and helping them grow and helping creators actually create their own sort of careers out of it.
So I think there's a lot of amazing creators who don't know how to monetize that. content enough to be able to actually make it their full time job. And I think that's really what our goal is, is to take amazing people and give them the freedom to do what they love as a full time job and potentially take them even further.
So that's super exciting. So you'll see that in February. And then obviously the last one is private members club. Now that's been in the works for a long time. You know, I spent 18 months looking at 80 buildings around Sydney, which is a really lot of buildings. And eventually you kind of don't even think it's going to happen because otherwise I wouldn't have started the tour at the same time.
But then the building comes along and you know, as I said, opportunistic. Yeah. And that launches in February as well, which is awesome. And that's an extremely high end members club in the city, right near my place. Um, it's an entire building, very much based off the sort of London and us model, you know, I'm being from London.
I know members clubs. There's not really anywhere in, Australia, you can go to where you've actually succeeded, like there's loads of places to go when you're on your journey and you're trying to get there, which is great, but once you've exited or once you've succeeded or once you're of a certain level of, you know, of achievement, there's no way to go and have a community just like that.
There's things like YPO, but that's the sort of, it's a meeting. It's a forced networking group where you sit into groups and you help each other. And that's got great value and employers, entrepreneurs, all of those, they have great, great value. We didn't want to create. A networking. We wanted to create a space, a hospitality play where there's restaurants, there's gyms, there's training rooms, there's working spaces, there's, you know, where you can go and you know everyone around there is at the same sort of level.
And I think the idea is that you'll develop genuine friendships with people of a certain sort of level of achievement and see what happens from there. So nothing, it's very natural and organic as opposed to being, we're coming together to help each other.
What Type of Business is Steve Grace's New Private Club
What type of business is that in your mind? Is it hospitality?
Is it as obvious as that? Or is it something different? How do you define it? It's a really good question. I get asked this a lot. So, I can tell you what it's not. So, it's not. a party club. It's not an old man's club. It's not a sports club. It's not a networking club. It's none of those. It is all of those.
So to me, it is a hospitality play that enables a certain community to come together that otherwise have nowhere else to go together. And it's private and it's discreet. And it's somewhere where. You can go without being bothered. And what I mean by that is when you have achieved certain things, people in your industry know who you are.
And if you go to an industry events, there's a lot of people which want to talk to you. And that's fantastic. And you want that. But there are other times where you don't want that. You just want to go and be left alone. And it's, it's a safe space for people who've achieved something. And I think if you put amazing people together, Amazing things will happen, and it will happen organically and naturally and in a very genuine way.
That, that's the idea, but it hasn't opened yet, so we'll have to see. But I'm, I'm super excited about that because I've been wanting to do that for a long time.
How Steve's Past Experience in Recruitment and Media Helps Him in his New Businesses
What about your past experiences in, in recruitment and subsequently media and production, that type of thing, do you see, uh, influencing? It hasn't helped me at all.
Well, how does it, how does it influence your thinking? How does it influence my thinking? Yeah. I think. Being able to switch from recruitment to media has given me the belief that I can switch to anything. Yeah, okay. And I think I would have needed that. I mean, this is a big, big project. You know, the idea for this club was an 80 square meter bar.
It's now a 19 square, 1900 square meter entire building right next to my own place. That's a big difference. It's a big difference and it's a massive, it's probably the riskiest thing I've done, but it doesn't, like, if you look at it from above, I don't know. If you look at it sensibly, but it doesn't feel risky because I think my belief that I can switch into something else has come from the changes that have happened probably the last five years.
Now, there's four of you in that. Is that right? So the start out as two, when it became a whole building, we got another two. And then we realized we probably needed to get more. So we got another two. So there's now six of us. There's a variety in shareholders. There's four main shareholders, correct? But there's six founders in total.
Um, and founding members that also have the ability to have an ownership in that. They can invest in the sort of business. And we, the plan is to open more than one. Obviously this one's city based. There's been a lot of pressure for us to open them in Melbourne, um, and Brisbane. And we've already got conversations going around buildings, but we're sort of focused on, you know, Yeah.
The first one. Get one right and go for it. Because that's coming in about, what, 14, 16 weeks or what? I was going to happen really. February next year sounds like a long way away. It's not. It's not. No. And February's short. We should have picked a different month. Like, we can't even keep pushing it out. So, as you've gone through the, your business journey.
Steve Grace's Experience with Raising Money and Venture Capital
Have you raised money along the way in any of those ventures or it's all been just your own Blood sweat and tears or I'd never raised money until the private members club. Yeah, okay Yeah, and to be honest, I'm not that involved in it Yeah, because two of our founders are very afraid of raising money Yeah, I have helped raise money as a venture partner for VC funds Yeah, I have helped other people raise money, but personally I've never done it.
I've seen a lot of people do it
Doing it myself. I can't say I love it. Yeah And that's probably because I just haven't had to do it and I haven't, I think if I got into it, I would probably get into it because I tend to get really into things, but I don't think I've got two people who are very strong at that and I've got other strengths.
So it hasn't made sense to me too. So not, not really. I've always been around it and I've worked in incubator, I've helped so many people, but it's not something I've done personally. In terms of the strengths of the co founders in that particular business, what are the skill sets you looked for in each person or that came together?
Um, That you've sort of looked at over the course of your, um, other businesses that you thought we need somebody with that, or was that a consensus type? No, no, that was, it was, there was a little bit of strategy around that just a little. So, I mean, I think leases and buildings and, and running properties was not something that either of us, um,
um, had
Any experience with so that my initial first co founder was Matt Brown, who runs a VC and he was a tech founder.
He had two very successful businesses, um, the people would probably know those companies. So neither of us had ever really done that. So we looked for someone with that. And then honestly, I know the people that we've invited in. We just need someone who was really sensible, like really sensible and almost your Debbie Downer.
And Jono is, is very sensible. I mean, again, massively successful, obviously built and exited Airtasker. And now building another business of his own. And he already had, Some investments in other clubs, so we had some insight and ability to look at financials of clubs and workings of clubs So that was domain expertise.
Yeah, so the domain expertise and also just so so sensible right just really I need sensible people in my life I get way too excited and Make crazy decisions without too much thought sometimes so it was it was It was such a big project we really needed to have that and it's worked really well. And then the other two, one had design skills and the other one very much connections in spaces that we thought members would be appropriate.
So everyone was sort of hand picked to a degree, um, but I, I knew everybody beforehand. So we haven't brought in anyone I didn't know. You talk about your strengths around sort of being opportunistic, uh, being excited about opportunities and that type of thing. That can also be like you sort of, you know, alluded to of weakness as well.
Absolutely. How do you, how do you manage that process where it's your greatest strength, but maybe your greatest weakness in some respects too, probably. Uh, how do you work with that? I look at how many people roll their eyes when I throw ideas out. Um, I don't manage it well. I think I'm getting better.
Steve's Business Failiures and the Lessons Along the Way
(Clip: failures )
I'm 50 now. And I think I've had some great successes. I've had a lot of failures. I've had some things go really badly wrong and I'm not in the in recent years, you know, nudge went through an incredibly difficult time where I thought we're going to have to close the business. And that to me was quite painful because I'd never failed in recruitment before.
So and we got through that luckily and we can't get side and came out so much better. So I think a lot of those experiences that I've now been through have probably just taught me to be more cautious. I think that does come a little with age. I, there are certain things that I do. I don't tend to act on things the same day I hear about them now.
I try not. I did yesterday or something like that. Deliberate, very much so. Yesterday I let myself down badly and really reacted to something really badly. and I shouldn't have done it. And I still think the reaction was fair, but it was probably should have waited overnight. So I tend to. at least give myself one night.
Yeah, okay. I still don't sit down and do pros and cons, but I do do it in, I do do it in my head, but I think age has brought that on. Have you got an example where something, being a little bit more spontaneous like that, really worked and played in your favor? But also, is there something that comes to mind where it really didn't work and you go, I did learn from that?
Um, I think, I think the whole podcast thing, that was very spontaneous. Like we were like, how the hell are we gonna make people understand what these startups are like? How are we gonna get someone to leave a job and go and work at a company they've never heard of if they won't even talk to us? Because we can't tell them what that company is like.
We'll just create a cool piece of media. Okay, let's go and do that. And we went off and set up to, I mean, that was our first, we didn't film a little pilot at home. We hired a studio and did 10 straight out. That was our first hit. But there was no, there was no dry run. All in. Yeah. All in. I'd never done anything like that.
So that was pretty big. And that worked out arguably so far really, really well. As someone who's done a podcast and started it and now sort of nearly a hundred episodes in going all in on, you said 10 episodes in one go is a pretty big deal when you haven't done it. And it was in a proper studio because we were still in COVID, as I mentioned, there was There was a couple of businesses that did live events that had nothing to do because there were no live events.
So I contacted them and we set up, we built a stage in one of their warehouses. The level of equipment we had was wild, like the wall of controls, like the, the, the sound engine is everyone else. We had a whole crew far more than we ever have now. It was way over the top because we just had the ability to, so that was full.
It was like creating a television show day one, so that was very full on. But hey, it was, that's why it's fortuitous. That's why I was terrified. Ones that haven't worked, gosh, there's quite a few. Like, I think taking nudge overseas was probably, I would close those now. Like, um, there was, there was some reasons why I made those decisions, but launching into London and Singapore.
Um, very early on, like maybe 18 months in was probably a stupid thing to do. I thought it was going to be cool and I figured because I'd done recruitment in Singapore and because I was British and I'd obviously done recruitment in London, how hard can it be? Yeah. It's really hard to take a company overseas and maintain it and keep the profitability up and it's really hard to hire leaders over there, which means that you are pretty much working 24 seven and that really wiped me out.
Like it was, I was on meetings all the time. with those other countries, and that means you neglect your, your home countries in Australia. And that, that was probably one of the reasons we got into some of the trouble that we did was that mine was way too thinly stretched. So what I should have done is build Australia up first, get it to a certain point, and then get someone around Australia and then go and do another one in Singapore or London or wherever it might have been.
So I think, yeah, that was probably stupid. It makes sense when you say it like that. At the time, there was obviously reasons why you thought that was the way to go. Just seemed logical. I mean, everyone, again, COVID had changed everything. You didn't need to, you know, if you look at recruitment prior to COVID, every interview was done face to face in an interview room.
You know, we would interview our candidates. Rarely would we ever do anyone over video. Um, pre COVID, I've done two face to face interviews post COVID. So I've done two face, everything's over video. So to me, it was like, well, if we're just doing it over video, we can do it anyway. What's the difference? That was my mindset.
Um, which was wrong. Because it wasn't as simple as that. What sort of advice, or what's the best advice you could give to someone starting in business today? I think one, understand that it's going to be so much harder than you think, but it just takes a lot longer. I think you've really got to find something that you genuinely enjoy doing.
Doesn't need to be your passion, as a lot of people say, I think it's great if it is, but it doesn't need to be, but you need to like doing it. Because you have to do it so much to break through. And you have to work harder than everyone else, and you have to try and do it better than everyone else, and you have to try and always improve on something every day.
And I think, like I said, I'm not strategic, but you also need to recognize what you've achieved. And we try and do that a lot. And a book that really hit home for me, and I recommend everyone should read it, is called The Gap in the Game. Okay. And it talks about where you're going, but it also makes you look back on what you've done.
And the very simple thing that I still do now, and I've done it ever since I read that book, is every night I have a little, I don't like journaling again the dyslexia is not, it's not a big thing for me, but there's a journal app on my iPhone, um, and I open it up and I, every, every night I put the three things that happened that day that I felt were the best things.
So I'm recognizing what happened best in terms of enjoyment, best or achievement, whatever I
feel.
feel that if someone says to me what the best three things happened that day, that's what I write. Sometimes they could be achievement. Sometimes they how I felt. Sometimes it could be a gym session. Sometimes it could be a deal.
Sometimes it was something as good as lunch. Like it doesn't matter, but I always write those things. And then every morning I get up and I write the three things I want to achieve every day. Now they rarely match up. Okay. Which is super interesting. Yeah. But what it does is it gives you a sense of I'm going in and I know I need to do these three things and I'll tend to work until those three things are done.
So even if it's six o'clock, you know, have those days where you go, I haven't done anything today, but you've been super busy. I'll open it up and say, okay, I haven't done any of these things. I need to do these right now. So it keeps me on track in terms of always slightly moving forwards. But it also, even if I've had a bad day and I do those three things, but they maybe didn't go well, Okay.
I wanted and you go, well, those are the only things I was going to do today. And they didn't go, well, you go, I'm feeling pretty flat. But then you go, actually, no. What were the three things that actually did go well, because there's always three things in your day. It doesn't matter what they are. And that gives you that little lift those, that, that little thing, which takes two minutes each morning and night has completely changed my attitude and I always feel like I'm progressing and moving forwards.
And that in itself is what really motivates people. The feeling of moving forward and progressing is really motivating. I was going to ask, what's the, the. Intention behind the book where it talks about, that's where you got it from. Yes. In doing those three things looking back, is it designed to help you realize you are making progress when you might otherwise forget it?
Or to be too hard on yourself? Absolutely. Yeah. Human beings thrive on feeling like they're moving forwards in whatever it is they're doing. Right? Whether it's swimming lessons, whether it's cooking lessons, whether it's what, what, what doesn't matter. Whatever it is, human beings respond well if they feel like they're progressing.
So if you don't feel like you're progressing because you're focusing on the things that you haven't done or you're always looking to the next thing. So I've just done all these things, but all I'm focused on is those next three things. You get exhausted and you begin to get to burnout. If you just take that time to reflect and go, you know what?
This is actually what I did that just even for five minutes, the impact it has on your psyche is. Unbelievable. And mental health. Unbelievable. Like I can't stress enough. There's a lot of other things in that book you can do. I chose to do that because for me, that was easy for me to implement in my life.
And I know what I'm like, if it's not easy, I won't do it. And I haven't stopped doing it since. And I do it on the weekends as well, right? So it's not a, it's not just a work thing. And I think it's just, always makes me feel like I'm achieving, but it always makes me feel like I did something that was worthwhile that day.
So I don't go to bed feeling like it was a terrible day. Yeah. So that's such a simple thing to do. How long does it take you to do? Minutes. Two to three minutes each time. So six minutes a day at the most. And there are times where it really does change your mind in terms of how you feel about that day once you've reflected.
Totally. So I'm quite habitual. So I get up in the morning. I usually get about five 30, quarter six. I get up. I read a chapter of a book. I do this. Then I have my green juice because that's another habit I've got into. By the way, I love that. That's one of the best things. I have a coffee and then I go and have a shower.
So I do that every morning. I go and work out. Yeah, I did. That's my sort of morning routine and I've stuck to that. And there are days obviously where that doesn't happen. But the one thing that I always do is always have a coffee and I always do my, my three things. Okay. And then at night. my family all need a lot more sleep than me and I, I always have six to six and a half hours.
It's not like I'm a low sleeper, but they all seem to need about a hundred. So they all go to bed really early. So I typically work quite late cause I'll, I like to have a break in the afternoon, see the kids. So I'll stop working at five and I'll have dinner and see the kids and then I might start working from eight and I might work till 10.
So just a couple of hours at the end of that to get my brain out of thinking about work. Yeah. I'll go and watch some inane television or a movie. I love movies. So usually go and watch a movie. It might take me five days to watch a movie because I won't watch it for too long, but I'll watch it for half an hour.
And as soon as I stopped watching the movie, I then get on. And the last thing I do is I add those three things to my app and then I go to bed. And that just seems to help me sleep. I go to sleep like that in seconds, which annoys my wife, um, but it, it just seems to put my brain to rest, going to bed, feeling like that's a little bit of closure for the day as well.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It is. Now sometimes you go out and you'll go out to dinner and you might have a few drinks. There are occasions where you miss it, right? But you, you don't, don't worry about that. That's like everything in life. You're not going to do everything every day, but I would say it's, it's minimum days that I don't do it.
It would be rare for me not to do it. And if I, So get to 10 o'clock in the morning and I realize I haven't done it. I'll do it right then. Yeah. And if I get to the next night and I haven't done it, I'll go back and I'll still fill in those gaps. That's what I mean by I always do it. So let's say I get up and I'm having to get up at five and take my son surfing or something and I don't get time.
I go straight to work and then that night I'm at an event and I have too much champagne. I come home and go straight to sleep. Didn't do anything that day. The next day I'll do that day and then I'll do the next day as well. So I'll catch up. I really like that idea. It's so easy. It's the easiest thing Easy and easy to do.
And impact. It keeps you current. Yeah. As well. You need to look forward. Absolutely. Of course you do. But you also need to understand that if you always look forward, you'll never be happy. Yeah. So it's more about a mental health happiness thing than anything else. But I think that's really important.
I think it applies to the big picture too. I mean, I have a bucket list myself in terms of big picture stuff. Yeah. Absolutely. But I have two parts to it. One is the stuff I want to do, and the other one is the stuff I've done. Yeah. And I'm really conscious of, of not just having stuff that you want to do one day, but actually ticking things off every year that are on there and done.
Yes. that balance I think is important. And it's the same sort of concept. It's, it's, but it's a very simple way. I think, I, I agree. I think it's, and you know, we all know from Atomic Habits, Tiny Habits, all these other books that I'm sure lots of people have read. Yeah. Just tiny little incremental changes add up to a huge amount of time, you feel like you're always making progress forward and that really helps you.
Business People Who Inspire Steve Grace
Yeah. What about business people that you look at and admire the way they go about it, whether that's locally or whether it's overseas or, tell me about people that you've looked at in business and sort of, read about or, or they inspire you in some way? It's an, it's a really interesting question. I get inspired.
mainly from podcasts where I listen to people who are doing incredible things. So it's less business people. Look, I read all the books about the Richard Branson as well. It could be anyone that inspires you. Yeah, absolutely. I've got friends who I look at the way they go about their work and I look at how they prioritize their life and how they resist certain temptations and, and, you know, are strong in certain areas and not in others.
And I find that fascinating. And I look at the ones who. Perhaps have had great financial success and they're the ones that perhaps seem happier and I look at all of those things. So I'm always looking. I mean, that's why I probably went into recruitment. I'm fascinated by people. Yeah. So I'm always sort of looking at that.
There isn't an individual particularly, but I love listening to, so for example, um, you think about Diary of a CEO, that podcast with Steven, right? He has some of the most incredible people, like doctors who've achieved incredible things, people who are trying to save thousands of poverty by doing things.
I love hearing stories where people are having a massive, massive impact on the world. Those fascinate me and they inspire me and I just because I love. the fact that there are so many human beings out there that dedicate themselves completely to others. I find that inspiring. So yeah, there's not a person per se, but I think mostly it's people who've fallen and got back up.
That was probably the thing that always, always makes me feel. Proud to be human, if that makes sense, like the fact that we can do that, it goes through some of the most horrific things. And then I also think that, you know, you hear some really, really, really horrific stories and then really, really incredible achievements.
That's often the case. But I think sometimes the more interesting ones and the harder ones are the ones where they're not that big a fall, but they happen a lot, but they keep getting back up. I think to some degree, I'm not saying it's not. it's easier to do that or harder to do that, but it's different.
Yeah. And I think that's not recognized. We recognize the big, we sort of romanticize some of that sort of stuff because that's what ends up in movies, but sometimes it's just the relentless grind on people that wears them down and their ability to continue, I think is sometimes more inspiration. Yeah.
And the, and the ability to push through the stuff that which never ends, right. We all get it all the time. so that to me is always, I'm always inspired by that continuous. Belief in themselves and drive, which we say continuous belief. It's not continuous belief at all. It's like a yo yo It's going up and down like nuts, but they keep going regardless of when they're not belief.
Steve Grace's Favourite Business Books
You mentioned earlier a book What are the books in business or any other area? So many books. What are some of the, what's your top? What are some of the ones in your top three or five? I think look if anyone hasn't read Atomic Habits, they have to, but I think, I think, I like the ones that are um So, I forgot his name.
Tim Ferriss has done some great big books, right? Um, Titans are, I forget the names of them. There's, there's two really big Tools of Titans? Tools of Titans, and there's another one as well. They're massive books. Yeah. And they go through, um, lots of different people's stories. Yeah. And there's another one called, I believe it's Start Up to Scale Up.
Um, and it's written by a lady whose name escapes me. I can't remember anything today, and she was a consultant, and I find this really interesting because it's an area that Australia was really bad at, and she talks about startup founders moving into scale up founders and how difficult that transition is.
And I've been through this. It's incredibly difficult and how bad Australia is a turning good startups into great scale ups. And so it's she did this consultant in the U. S. To a lot of very famous people and talked about the ones that could do it on their own. Someone can't, the failures, the successes.
It's just content like I've never read anywhere else. So it's called startup to scale up and it's a fascinating, fascinating read. And these amazing people that you've heard of, you get a real insight into all the things that they did wrong. Right. Okay. And I think that's interesting. And I think alongside that, one of the most impressive, and it's because there's more programs around startups right now, was when, um, Luke from Safety Culture did The Founder and they did the four episodes, right?
Yep.
Yep. Um,
It's the TV documentary. It's a TV documentary. I think it was ABC, SBS, can't remember. I watch, might have been Amazon, I watched his episode. And I love the fact that he filmed it all because he thought he was going to build a billion dollar company. So I like the foresight, but what I like more than anything, and there's a lot of things to get spoken about Luke over the years.
What I liked about anything was his willingness to show all the things he stuffed up really openly, which is not done before he hadn't had the opportunity, but he was really open. I don't think he edited it to make himself look good. Like perhaps some other ones that I've seen. I really liked that willingness to show, you know what, I might have a billion dollar company, but it wasn't easy.
It was a disaster. I found that really impressive with his ability to do that. Well, you want to say that rule real, but you don't see that much. No, no, you don't. It's very difficult. So it's actually pretty cool when you do get to see it. And most people on podcasts just talk about the wonders of how it all went.
Well, you know, you don't hear too many tough stories. So I appreciated that for someone who obviously, I think he paid for it and funded it and did it himself. So he obviously wanted to get that out, which I think is, you know, I think it's not, I think it's a nice thing to, to let the world know is that you're not, you're not as good as perhaps the polished image that you see now.
What's Next for Nudge Group and Steve Grace
Yeah, really interesting. What's next for Nudge Group? Yeah, so Nudge is continuing to grow. the recruitment will continue to power on. Um, we've got some new products that we launched around on site. Nudge is a service and a few other things and, and there's a person in the business that I'm hoping wants to step up and run the business and they have indicated they will.
So we're looking at doing that, which I'm quite excited about. There's obviously the new media business, which is sort of off to the side. So that's gonna run and I've got my co founder who I think will end up running that. Nudge Productions will expand. Nudge. Um, I think, and then obviously the club will go with the club.
So for me, I'll, I'll probably want to start something else. But I think the most interesting thing is nudge as a business. And I was talking about this with my head of content the other day. It changes every six months like completely and we never know where or how and I love that and I love the no strategy.
Let's just go out and be opportunistic and that doesn't mean that the whole business change. We still do the other things we do, but we'll find something else and it maybe it will be. In the production business, maybe it will be something else. I don't know, but I would imagine that nudge will morph again in six months and it morphs in such a good way.
I feel like we level up, yeah, but we don't plan to. These opportunities just come along. Maybe that's serendipity. Maybe it's just the ability to keep your eyes open and see things, but I don't know where it's going to go, but I know in six months it'll be different again. I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes and how different it is.
So Steve, thanks very much for coming on the show. Pleasure. Loved it.
Outtro
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