Are you interested in the growing world of property investing? Join us for an interactive 3-hour live online workshop with Simon Zutshi to understand the different creative strategies and how you can use them to fund your property investing using very little of your own money. 👇 📌 Wednesday, 29th June from 12:00 pm - 3:00 pm (UKT)   Register Now! Learn how to:  ⏩ Access hidden assets to fund your investing. ⏩ Use your equity or other people's equity. ⏩ Leverage the 5 creative finance strategies. ⏩ Use this no matter where in the world you are investing

We spoke with Renske Carbone, Founder of Colours of Australia, about her entrepreneurial journey   Renske, can you share with us about Colours of Australia, your role and how you got started? Colours of Australia was started in 1991 and our Industry sector is Early Childhood Educational Resources.  Papoose Toys is the export arm of our business.  We are based near Melbourne, Australia. I started off by producing hand painted scarves in gift boxes. It grew from there; through ranges of hand painted table linen, bedlinen, and children’s products such as bibs, painting smocks etc. Fast forward to 2005, I started working in Nepal with a Fair-Trade company making wool felt products. This range took off like a rocket and within a few years we started to attract educational customers, resulting in starting to work with all the majors in Australia in the school supply industry. I am one of two directors and fill the roles of Creative Director and Strategic Planning. My role is to design the products, work with our suppliers to get the products made and work with my larger customers/distributors to develop new products. I also oversee the manufacturing and the relationships with our suppliers. By 2010 I realised our business had changed; we were now an early childhood educational resources company. This was a very important moment in the history of this company: going forward we fully focused on this market segment, avoiding the collapse of the home and giftware retail markets in which many of my friends worked and subsequently many lost their businesses due to diminished sales, people going direct and online trading.   How did you come across Genius Group and what inspired you to join the community? Our business developed nicely, it was small-ish but healthy and we had a great lifestyle with lots of travel.  However by 2018, I was bored! I was thinking about what to do next; business had become repetitious, new products, new customers, tradeshows, replay…again and again. It was my husband, myself and one or two casual staff and I couldn’t see myself doing this another 5 years, let alone 10. In 2018, I was invited to a free ’10X Your Business’ seminar led by Roger James Hamilton and decided to go along. I signed up for the Crystal Circle mentoring with Roger at that session, hoping to be challenged into bigger and better (more exciting) things.   What was your experience in Crystal Circle?  Did the mentoring benefit you and your business?  Over the next 3 years my business went from AUD (A$)650,000 to over A$5 million and we’re on our way to A$10 million in the next 12-18 months. We have grown both domestically and internationally, supplying all the majors in Australia and many smaller businesses as well as having distributors in China, USA, Canada, New Zealand, France, Spain and The Netherlands to name some. This is what changed: My expectation of myself. I took a renewed interest in the business, being challenged by Roger to see the difference between linear and exponential businesses. Roger insisted that I needed to go on social media, something I had seen as just another pain in the neck job until then. I am active on Instagram, and it has raised our business profile no end! We have over 24,000+ organic followers (@Papoosetoys) and I really believe this has made a big difference to our business. I use the platform to support my customers as we do not retail direct. We were a 2-legged chair, I realised I needed a bigger team around us. When we travelled, we just closed the doors for up to 2 weeks, dealing with orders etc when we came back…not ideal. I have had terrible people working for me that stole products, lied to me and otherwise behaved badly. I had to change my expectation from: what kind of awful person am I getting now, to, I am attracting fantastic, motivated, and valuable people into my business. Lastly, I cannot ignore how much COVID has impacted on my business. It went berserk. Home-schooling, more disposable income, relatives wanting to buy stuff for the kids they couldn’t visit etc. My online retailers did fabulous business, we attracted a whole lot more of that kind of business and my large customers were still trading very well as well. I haven’t taken on board financial goal setting/planning/quarterly stuff etc as I really don’t feel that after 30 years of business I need to put myself through that torture (haha).  My involvement with other entrepreneurs has been stimulating and took me out of my rut. I love listening to Roger’s ideas, I like following and participating in events like the recent Investment sessions and am sure that the parts important to me embed themselves somehow in my psyche, to be drawn from when I need it.   Where are you and your business at today and what are your future plans? At 60, I am now looking forward to about five more years of work, growing my business so I can comfortably move into a new future of hopefully lots more travel and indulging in writing and painting and lounging around my pool in Bali (villa to be purchased!) I am still very motivated to grow the business further, we are on a high and I think right now I’m not ready to change gears yet. The excitement of dealing with large companies around the world, developing product in a different way and seeing the take-up from our customers, the pleasure I get in working with Fair Trade overseas and employing refugees locally gives me a focus outside of the daily grind of the business. Our team is now 11 strong, I can focus on the bits I like (design and meeting with my larger customers) and the rest is done by my fab team. I’ll be working on our exit plan in the next 12 months, as I can see there’s several different strategies possible.   Where can we find out more about your business? https://coloursofaustraliashop.com/

😀 Have you registered for The Young Entrepreneur PitchFest Competition yet? Register now before the entries close on 30th June 👈 Prepare your Kids for a Radically Uncertain, Digital Future. Join this competition hosted by Genius School Global and empower your child to launch a digital project/business they can be proud of! The YEA will deliver a personalized learning path for kids from 10 to 18 years old. For 2 weeks, they’ll be inspired, learn the latest entrepreneurial techniques, and receive advanced digital resources. This way, they’ll develop the necessary skills to grow as entrepreneurs, artists, changemakers, or leaders. 🎓  Hurry, it ends soon! Discover the amazing prizes waiting for your kid!

📅 Mark your calendars for the 24th of June [10:00 AM UK / 5:00 PM SGT] Join fellow entrepreneur and investor, Chad Pope in this exclusive masterclass to learn about investing for strong income streams in unpredictable markets. During these 60-minutes, Chad will cover: ✅ The key principles to predictable income streams. ✅ The 4 steps you can implement now. ✅ Examples of how protection and predictability can be built-in. ✅ The impact of creating multiple streams of income, and the cost of not. ✅ The resources available to you today to activate your plan. Register Here Now!

We have all read and heard the famous phrases: Love what you do and do what you love, and if you love what you do, then it does not feel like work. The main denominator in both phrases is love. Passion is the higher degree of love, which charges our beings to surmount mountains and leap over valleys, both literally and metaphorically. Entrepreneurship is one such vocation that begins and runs on passion. Let us explore the term passion, specifically for an entrepreneur, understand its importance for a successful business and inner satisfaction, and its importance for an entrepreneur profiling. Read the full article here 👈