Episode Summary

Are you ready to take your business to the next level? You’ll feel inspired and equipped after listening to this podcast episode!

Host Melissa Swink interviewed Alina Stansu, founder of The Orange Notebook, about authentic strategies for growing and scaling a business. They discussed Alina’s journey of starting a business during the pandemic, effective lead generation techniques, the importance of building genuine connections, and the lessons she has learned about outsourcing. Alina also spoke about the significance of understanding one's identity in relation to business and shared insights on navigating challenges while maintaining authenticity.

Key Highlights:

• Effective lead generation requires a balance of inbound and outbound strategies.
• Building genuine connections is key to fruitful networking. Your sales outreach should focus on relationship-building.
• Understanding your identity is crucial for business success.
• Investing in your business is important, but do your due diligence, especially when it comes to outsourcing.
• The right support can save time and energy in business growth.
• Authenticity in leadership fosters a strong team culture.

About Our Guest: 

Alina Stancu is the founder of The Orange Notebook as well as a Brand Identity Expert & Strategic Advisor. Alina’s background in storytelling means she’ll always find a way to illustrate difficult concepts with a story. With a passion for mindset, self-development and mental health she’s able to spot patterns and explain a client’s actions through a psychological framework that usually allays fears and brings peace. She is committed to caretake their vision of becoming the business leader they wish to become. Alina has over a decade of content and PR expertise, a degree in Marketing, Advertising and PR and has previously set up the entire PR department for a cybersecurity startup in the UK.

About Melissa:

Melissa Swink, Founder & CEO of Melissa Swink & Co., has a team of virtual assistants who provide administrative and marketing support for small businesses and non-profits.

Since 2012, Melissa and her team have helped more than 100 businesses grow through the services they offer, and she is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs create profitable, scalable businesses they love.

Her work is all about doing what works (and eliminating what doesn’t) and driving real, measurable results. Visit www.melissaswink.com to learn more! 

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Hi everyone, welcome to the Make Space for More podcast where we talk strategies for growing and scaling your business in a way that's authentic and aligned for you. I'm your host, Melissa Swink, and I am very excited to be joined by Alina Stansu from the UK across the pond as she is the founder of the Orange Notebook. I will introduce her formally in a moment. Alina and I met each other through an online networking group.

I know many of us as we were growing our businesses, we started off with some in-person networking and certainly since COVID and beyond that, now that we're kind of out of that phase in our lives, we're able to connect with so many people around the world. And I think we've learned how to do that even better since the pandemic happened. And so I've been doing some online networking over the last several months and was

grateful to have met Alina. We've had so many great conversations together. I actually joined in on one of her mastermind calls last week, which is fantastic. Met a whole bunch of wonderful people from all over the place during that call. I've been talking a lot about the impactful conversations I've been having with others and I've been sharing that with you on the podcast. And so this is born out of some of those conversations, but

Without further ado, I'm going to introduce Alina and have her share a little bit more about herself and her company. And then we're going to talk about lead generation. So this is something that Alina and her business partner do very, very well, but that was not always the case. And there were some lessons learned in terms of outsourcing this aspect. And we're going to talk about some of the tips and maybe the mistakes that have happened along the way and certainly share about where they're headed.

going forward here. So Alina has over a decade of content and PR expertise, a degree in marketing, advertising and PR, and has previously set up the entire PR department for a cybersecurity startup in the UK. At the Orange Notebook, she helps founders understand their own identity in relation to their business and translate that into the brand identity and the vision they hold for the business. Alina, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you so much for having me, Melissa. It's been lovely meeting you and having those conversations with you.

Absolutely, absolutely. So I know you and I have talked many times, but for our audience, do you wanna just share a little bit more about you and where you're located and then we can dive into some of the business things.

Yeah, absolutely. the Orange Notebook was a business started by three Romanian friends. So guess that's the fun aspect of it. But we're based in the UK and we serve largely US client base.

Yeah.

We're a little bit cosmopolitan here in that sense. But I guess it started because we left Romania, we left to study, we met at university.

As any great friendship story starts, we can stand each other when we first met, you know, opposites attract and all that. But we became friends and then went off to start the business. Because we started in the middle of the pandemic, for us, it was quite natural to just connect with people everywhere, remotely. So it didn't really make a difference. We couldn't go locally to network anyway. And that's kind of how we started.

to gain our first few clients in the UK and the US and from then on we kept networking over in the States and that's kind of how we got to have a client base over there.

That is fantastic. Tell me a little bit, just to back up, you and your co-founders met at university and then eventually you started this business. What made you decide to start a business together?

Yeah, so it started off as three co-founders, but it's two of us now. So we met 15 years ago, we studied together, we then went off on our corporate career paths. Each one of us in marketing in different areas, marketing PR, advertising, and...

We were doing okay on the corporate ladder. But then one day we were...

for lunch as you do with friends and having a drink and we were know putting down our dreams putting talking really talking out loud about our dreams and our hopes and how nice would it be to actually work together and Corina at the time had this orange notebook she had it from a conference she had this orange notebook with her she pulls it out and starts making notes and those notes by the end

Okay.

We didn't pick it back again until the pandemic came and we were in a pretty bad situation at that time. A pretty toxic workplace that didn't feel good, didn't do us good. And at that point, because I think it matters the fact that we have come over from Romania to study and to build the life and build different opportunities for ourselves. And so at that point, we were just as good as it gets.

and I guess we weren't very happy with the answer. So we said, you know what, maybe it's time for the Orange Notebook. Maybe now's the time. And full-on pandemic, the most uncertain economic...

context that I'm sure a lot of your audience is going to relate to this, where everybody was hanging on to their jobs for their life, we decided this is the moment to register the Orange Diary Book and we registered with absolutely nothing. Nothing. So much so that looking back at what we did then, it was foolish. It was... If I could give myself the advice to do it easier, I absolutely would.

you

You know, that's interesting though that you bring that up. So there's a couple of things that I wanted to unpack based on what you told us so far about your business journey. I have heard from a couple of people who have started businesses during, you know, recessions and not so great economic times that that's one of the best kept secrets to starting a company because it's like if you can establish yourselves and grow from that, you can survive.

a lot.

I guess it's a double-edged sword. I'm not saying no. And some people can capitalize on recessions, pandemics, bad things that happen in a really good way, or they can create solutions that become viable business propositions. But for us, I guess it was a time of you sink or swim. And it...

you

Very true.

I don't know how it is for others. I guess for us it was just a story of a hell of a lot of resilience and grit. yeah, that's really all I can tell you. We really wanted to make it. I guess that's all I can say from our side.

and you had bills to pay. At the end of the day, you had bills to pay. So it was, if we're doing this, we're all in. It's like burning the ships. Like we've left our jobs. This is the option. Like this is where we're headed. And I always find it fascinating how the money and the clients always show up.

is to try and help.

Yes, well.

Eventually, right? I see the positive. Eventually, it shows up. Sometimes, not as timely as we would like it to, but it's hard to describe to those who aren't in business.

So, to put it in some real figures context, we started with £30. I actually double checked this with my co-founder the other day because I nearly forgot. But no, was £30 that we opened that business with. Nothing else. And when I say nothing else, I mean there were just three months of wages in the bank. The end. We had to pay rent, we had to pay bills, we had to pay for ourselves. There was no rich parents, rich husbands, rich uncles, nothing.

Mm-hmm.

Okay, there was no rich treasures anywhere and it was that three months of wages to pay bills and then you so you knew you could see the rope there was no

but whatever. That's it. It's going to end in three months. You either make it or you don't. And the way that the money showed up was, guess we really, really, really did our best to put ourselves out there to get that money in, to make it happen. We had really good projects, funnily enough, from month two-ish, three, and then...

Yes.

From then on, we were able to get more clients on board and pay wages. We're in a different place now. Thank you.

Congratulations though. That's an amazing feat for anyone and much less during a global pandemic. So one thing that I know that we have talked about at length in our previous conversations is lead gen. So there's a couple of different aspects of lead gen that I'd love to have you share with our audience. So first of all, this is something that you and your co-founder have done

really, really well. You have developed a great way to really engage people on LinkedIn in a way that is not spammy or salesy because I don't know about you, but certainly many of our audience members can relate that I'm getting lots of messages from people and they're trying to share information with me that I never asked for. All of them are going to make me a seven figure business owner tomorrow.

Like there's just a lot of stuff on LinkedIn, but you've really found out a way how to cut through all of the noise on LinkedIn. Do you mind sharing maybe some of the things that you've seen success with doing on LinkedIn? But I also want to share then after that, that it was not always this way and there was a process for getting to this point. Yes, there was. Yes, there was. Let's start with the good and then let's deconstruct it with how we got there.

Quite a painful one too. Yeah.

Yeah, okay. So we do use We do outreach so we do have a good ratio of Inbound versus outbound. I think any business should have that it's not all Let me build it and then we'll come because that is a dream that has been sold a lot by contact creators And i'm sorry to say but a lot of it is bullshit So as a business you're gonna have to sell you're gonna have to put yourself and you're gonna have to do some outreach as well

Now how you do that, that does matter. It does make a difference. Now with regards to outreach, we do connect with a lot of people in networking events as well through other initiatives too. But over LinkedIn, what we've used is, there is a tool, there are many, I won't name this one in particular, but obviously you can just do a search, you'll find loads. But using automation tool, I would tell people only

after you manually test it so you've manually sent out messages to see what actually connects people to you and what doesn't because otherwise you're gonna just waste a lot of money for no good reason

I've heard the same thing about doing ads as well. Like test out the content first before you create this ad and you think it's perfect and you spend however much I'm putting it out there and the messaging just doesn't land, it doesn't resonate. So I love that idea of before you go all in and start sending large amounts of messages and using a tool, let's test it out and let's see if it gets a response.

As a side note, with ads you will always need the content to it up. You can just put an ad out there and hope that it's going to work. That's just never going to work. But yeah, with the messages. Anything, yeah. Always test a little bit and then once you have the proof, the evidence, you go with the next stage at large scale. The thing we use is really, really simple. There's an automation sequence. Yes.

Right, yep.

We connect with people in a very polite and very...

soft approach that I would use in normal conversation if I were to connect with you in an networking event. So human to human, the connection is always would you like to connect? Would you like to network? Let me tell you a little bit about me because that's always nice so that you know who you're talking to. So I'll share a couple of details, business and personal. And then I will make an offer to make a good

introduction for you. So how do we leverage each other's networks? What can I do for you? But also learn about your business, what you do so that we can see if there are any possibilities for partnership, for introductions to my clients, to your clients. So there's always a... when you give people a tool, a freebie and this was a few years ago, it was all the rage like give people freebies,

give people something to connect with them. No, because they haven't asked for it. But if you go straight up and transparent with, let's connect.

working purpose. Let's see if we can leverage a good introduction, maybe a partnership down the line. Then it's a little bit more open and transparent. People don't have to go, what's the hidden agenda there? What are they trying to sell? And that's the other aspect of it. We don't ever use the outreach with an intention to sell no matter what. And I think that's where a lot of people go wrong. Our intention always

is to see do I like you? Do you like me? Can we connect? we we can we do anything that makes sense in the business in a professional way? If yes then we explore what that is. Then we explore what that is. Not straight up hey I got something to sell to you. I don't know if I have something sell to you quite frankly. I may not.

It's as simple as that.

Yes. Yeah, starting off with a simple conversation or what I call them a virtual coffee chat of, know, tell me a little bit more about you. You know, what problem do you solve for your clients? What services do you offer? You know, who do you work with? Like, how can I help you? Who are you looking to meet? Those are all great conversations to have on a simple conversation.

But the other side, here's the other side. A lot of the time I network for my clients' benefits. So I will go out of my way to connect with, well, I'm gonna use a CFO, but I already have a great CFO that I always recommend, to connect them with an accountant, to connect them with somebody that they may need, a lawyer, right? Well, I'm not gonna...

that many lawyers and I'm not going to have that many lawyers everywhere, right? In the UK, in the US, in every state. So maybe when I connect to you, I'm also looking, could I recommend you to my client because they may need something and you're not going to know that. So that's one side. The other way, and I've made introductions that have translated in millions of business, work for people because I love connecting people. You're not going to know that.

Mm-hmm.

Wow.

until you talk to me. So be...

Yes, you have made great connections for me as well. I I've thoroughly enjoyed conversations with the people that you've connected me with. you know, even just thinking through my own approach to networking these days, I've been able to connect some great people with my clients as well, based on, you know, where they're at in business and, you know, what makes sense, like what their goals are or who they are looking to connect with or what's next for them.

Exactly. That's what I'm saying. It's whatever the message, whatever the person, it's always a sale. It's not. Until I know you may be of help to me. Who knows?

Yes.

It's true. It's true. So you're leading in with just connection. Like when we're talking Legion, we're even, that's probably not even the right terminology because I look at it as we're planting seeds. Like every time I have a conversation with somebody and learn more about their business, share a little bit about mine, we're planting seeds. And just like anybody who's a gardener, my mom's a gardener. I do not have a green thumb.

But I also understand the concept that some seeds are going to sprout and some are not. And the speed at which seeds sprout vary drastically. There might be one that comes up right away. There might be one that takes, you know, six, 12 plus months down the road to come up. But just having quality conversations and being real with people, I think is huge. And I've never, I mean, it's never failed me taking that approach.

Exactly and I think a lot of people either get a bit too much in their own head about doing any outreach at all because they think it's all gonna be sales or has to be salesy and spammy and ewey or because they have their own

feelings, their own preconceptions about being soft too. They go, but I don't want to be that guy, I don't want to be that person because it makes me feel this way. And that's the thing, it doesn't have to be just that way. It can be that there's grey in between the black and white.

That's very true. That's very true. So we're prioritizing relationships over sales. And ultimately that has never steered either of us wrong in terms of growing the business. I want to talk a little bit about some lessons learned along the way in this journey. So I know in my podcast, we talk a lot about growing your business beyond you. A lot of that has to do with building a team and certainly outsourcing.

And so as you and your co-founder were growing the company, you had invested in some help with sales and lead gen in order to try and accelerate reaching your goals, which I am all for. But there were some lessons learned along the way. Do you want to touch on some of those? Because we also want to share the cautionary tales or sometimes briefly visit the dark side of

Things can go wrong sometimes. We can hire the wrong people to help us with the tasks and projects that we're looking to outsource.

Yeah.

Absolutely. Well, the reason we got to learning how to do outreach on LinkedIn in a good way is because we failed miserably by being scammed in our first year of business. So by now we've been scammed twice. And you may think, well, shouldn't they know better? There is this whole thing with branding, marketing, PR, sales. Why don't they know about these things? Because...

it's

There isn't a fail safe way of doing this it's you're gonna learn through some mistakes and you're gonna create your own process afterwards Sadly sometimes So the first time we we invested in lead generation It was a lead generation service She showed up very professional. She had the whole script down through the process we invested

Mm-hmm.

did, 1800 at the time, got pretty much nothing back and then she ghosted us shortly after so that was within the first month I think. So obviously at that point it became clear that this wasn't going to go anywhere and we had to chase through lawyers, file a CCJ, it didn't go very well but basically we recovered about half the money back which is really kind of the best you're going to get unless you want to spend a lot of money basically.

Mm-hmm.

Yes. Yep.

That however, because we saw what she did, the good part of what she was doing if you like, we kind of looked at that and thought okay well good initiative for execution. So we were like can we do it better? Yeah we can.

And that's kind of how the whole let's find the tool. Let's try the messaging manually. Let's see if we can connect. And we did. And then from there on, and we've been doing this for three years now. This is an approach that gave us very good results. So other than a great number of partnerships, friendships, networks that we were able to gain through this, we also had quite a few clients off the back of that. So.

really poor start, really bad story, good results in the end I guess.

I was going to say there were benefits and there were good things that came out of that learning experience for sure. Yes. So you hired somebody who had, it seemed like they had good intentions. The execution phase of that just kind of fell apart. They didn't. Yes. Yeah. That's so...

Hmm, yes. Second time round.

It seemed they

As a service provider, I know you and I have talked about this, as service providers, that just breaks my heart because I feel like we put so much time and energy into gaining trust. And I feel like abusing that trust is just never okay. But anyway, so you hired the wrong person. You took those lessons and you started doing your own outreach.

and then at some point you decided to try again with another service provider, right?

you

some point we decided we need to amplify this and we were looking more to what's the next step in scaling the business. And obviously to scale the business means whatever efforts we are doing ourselves, we have to be able to duplicate that outside from ourselves so that it's not forever tied to us. And I'm sure a lot of business owners have hit that conundrum at some point. It's like, what I'm doing is working,

can't always be me because I'm gonna die here. Exactly. At that point you were okay well I need to find people that can help me do this.

that on this occasion it was worse and it burned far worse because well the investment was much higher to begin with but we had already been burned so we were already coming in with our trust and we made that very clear.

And I think it was it was double painful on one side on obviously the financial side but on the other side because it it was literally our trust being betrayed at that point because we came to you we told you this was the situation you seemed as if you were

caring about that and then no. And so we came to find out a lot more bad things after things had gone down the drain. But it was four months of...

pretty much up and down and waiting for things to happen and very unprofessional behaviour and lots of really bad signs along the way to put it mildly.

Okay. What were some of the signs that you were seeing just out of curiosity?

Okay, so very poor communication, very poor customer experience, being late for meetings, counseling meetings, not answering emails or messages on WhatsApp when the agreement was with Communicator on WhatsApp, us making a lot of information or materials that we were asked available only to then be asked if we've done the materials and

So obviously nobody had checked in, nobody had looked over. Oversights like leaving customer data in a folder, really bad, bad things. Really bad.

Lots of red flags.

and ultimately the results weren't there because we were supposed to get very clear results. They weren't happening, there was a lot of being misled from one meeting to the other, from one week to the other and then...

The report that we were supposed to get was just never have been updated. The same seven weeks that were on that spreadsheet we ended with in four months, which is appalling.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. my goodness. So lots of lessons learned with hiring the wrong people. Now, as you continue growing and scaling your company, which I know you have goals that you're working towards through this year and the next several, have a very solid plan in place. What else are you looking to outsource or what are you going to be investing in next in order to

to support that growth.

Well, I'm not... I'm not... both of us... we're not going to back off.

from scaling the business. We're not going to detract, even though this was quite impactful, we're not going to detract from trying to find the right people. So I guess in that respect it helped us clarify a bit more what those people should look like, what those agreements should look like, what are the processes for it, because we're not going to stop from trying to find the right people.

We have a couple of people in place now to do that work and that is off the back of the very poor experience we had. The next area of investment outsourcing is still going to go towards amplifying the business, towards sales, towards marketing to back it up.

Because we have our our small operational team. We have the delivery piece in place With all the associates, that's fine, but it's it's still Getting the business out there that that's the area that means the biggest sport

Yes, so expanding sales and marketing in order to grow and scale on the delivery side of things. You and your co-founder obviously work very closely with your clients. Do you have others on the team who help with the delivery of the services you're providing as well?

We did.

Yeah, we do. We have a fantastic team of seven, by now, associates. Very, very experienced people, which I'm very, very proud of, to have in our corner backing us up. And because we've also got some very good partnerships in place, we've got a software piece that can address the data aspect of our service. And we've also got...

an advisory firm that we're proud to partner with on the side for bigger, larger projects.

That's incredible. Now you're part of an accelerator program, right? I think you've mentioned it once during our conversation today. So tell us a little bit about that. I'm always curious, like what type of coaching or mentorship or guidance that business owners are receiving while they're growing and scaling as well.

Yeah.

Yeah, so the accelerator, I'm very, very proud of it, very happy. The accelerator is here in the UK. It's widely known on a national level, but I don't think it translates very well across in the States, but I'm sure you will have your own accelerator programs over there. I absolutely recommend it. I recommend it for, yeah, for the coaching. You're gonna get coaching with your

Got it.

are fellow business owners. There will be 10, 12, 20 people at any given time in the room and you're going to coach each other, you're going to learn from each other. Plus the program managers they offer coaching. Plus the mentors, there are also mentors, former alumni or other business owners that offer their services, their support. Plus alumni. So you kind of get coaching and advisory from

four different areas that that's not very apparent when you're doing so that that's really important but then it's resources like you're gonna you're gonna have access to banking resources that you didn't know about

Okay.

accounting resources, can know about invoicing systems, process tools. Sometimes they'll bring in somebody from the bank to talk you through something called releasing funds from your accounts receivables, invoice funding, not something that you generally typically come across very easily. I'm going to get the bank managers to tell you about what loan options are available, what type

Sure.

funding is available, what differences there are for businesses. So really a lot of information that you wouldn't you just want to come across. Six months.

How long is the program?

Okay, so that sounds like they cover a lot of ground in six months. I would imagine it's a fairly significant time commitment for you.

Yeah, and there's two of us taking place. So we've decided to have a little bit of a strategy. Quintana goes on the selling workshops, learning events. I go on the funding events. So what do I need to get investment ready? What do investors want to see? What funding options are there? So we're sort of spreading forces a little bit.

short.

Gotcha, yeah, and as you're talking here, I know the program that you're participating in, of course, is there in the UK. Just thinking through, for the US, people that I know even locally have done similar programs through their local Chamber of Commerce, the SBA, Government Organization, SCORE, which is affiliated with SBA.

you

Those are all great places to receive the type of mentorship and information here in the US that you described, Alina. And I know there's plenty of local programs as well that people can check out as well. love the fact that you're receiving that information because you don't know what you don't know. And so it's so helpful to not only receive, I don't want to say insider information, but that information that the average person may not

No.

realize or have access to and have that blind spot, you know, where you have other people like, hey, did you ever consider this or have you ever thought about that? That's huge.

It is a bit difficult.

It is a little bit of an insider because they've been doing it for 10 years and for some things they have the roadmap. okay, how do I get investment ready? Well, okay, do these workshops and do that and download these resources and talk to these people. And then you're in better stead for that. And that already puts you 10 steps ahead.

And how much time and energy did that save you by having somebody tell you exactly, like, who do you need to speak with? Here's what you need to prepare, like, rather than trying to figure it out yourself.

Okay, I'm gonna do a poor estimate here but it's only been a month and a bit but more or less a month into the brogan september it started and I'm gonna say it saved me probably a whole year of

Sure. So you're about a month into the program.

Mm-hmm.

finding out all these resources, all these people, all these places, all these events. Because I would have had to do this in parallel to running my business just like I do now. But like I do now, I do it in a concentrated way. Because two or three days a week we're over there and we have access to a hundred business owners at any given time.

Yes.

three, four program managers, five to 10 different mentors, two, three groups of different competences, capacities, whatever they do in their respective areas. Alumni that's gone through this, been through XYZ, they can share their experience, don't do this, do that, blah, I mean, yeah.

Yeah, you have access to a wealth of information that you wouldn't normally have access to because you were willing to commit the time to a program like this.

It's not easy, I'll be very very honest. Because you do it in parallel to what you normally do and you...

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, the day to day that doesn't go away. The running the business doesn't go away, but it sounds like it is paying off tremendously for you. As we start to wrap up here, I want to give you an opportunity to talk about your identity 360 program. Can you share a little bit more about that? Like

Who is that for and how can somebody request something like that if they're interested in working with you and your co-finder and your team at The Orange Notebook.

So we offer identity 360 it was an author born out of love and experience and our own struggles with our own identity by the way but seeing how this gets reflected across everything else in your business is so important. Now we offered this for typically for mature growing businesses but we're very much looking at

the founders relation to the business. We're very much looking at the founders relation to their leadership team, how it all reflects back and how it all translates into your brand strategy, into the visibility of it you're going to take, your marketing strategy and so on. If you're wondering why is this important at all, why should we even care about it? It's because if you don't have that identity very clear, if you're not very clear on how it's going to get reflected in your brand.

Typically things will happen organically as they do, they will unfold somehow and you may not like the result you're gonna end up with. So what happens usually and we've seen this is business owners will go on a journey, they will have their own identity reflected more or less but not really articulated very clearly.

And then they're not very clear about things. That means that their team is not going to be very clear. That means that the results they're going to get are not going to be very consistent. And they're going to wonder why is my team leaving? Why is my team not behind me? Why is my team not helping me reach the targets I want to reach? And it can have very important financial consequences. It can have very important turnover consequences. And you're going to think,

I don't have the team to deliver this very important project, where have they all gone? If we've not put the time to understand how your identity reflects in your culture and what that means for your brand at large, then you're not going to have the team to be behind you to deliver that project.

Mm-hmm.

That's why it's so important. So we say that we're building the number one identity program because we really are. We are very, very good at identity. We're very good at drawing out those elements and articulating them very clearly for internal use, but also for external reflection. And that's not something that a lot of brand agencies, marketing agencies give a lot of thought to because a lot of the time they're concerned with the pretty of it, the aesthetics

of it and that's pretty much it. We look a lot more in depth because we felt the consequences of that and they're not good they're not pretty at all. The website yeah looked great what was happening on happening behind the scenes complete shambles and it hurts it hurts a lot for it for you individually as an employee but it will hurt the business ultimately that's what we do

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. You make so many excellent point with this and really at the end of the day in this day and age, I feel like people crave authenticity and that starts with leadership. That starts with transparency and you know, your values in your mission. All of that is so important with the way that you conduct business nowadays.

Absolutely. Anybody can build you a website, can build you a brand color scheme, anybody can... Nobody, nobody can build your vision for you, nobody can build your values for you. You have those, but you need to be very sure how you articulate them and how clear you are about it.

Alina, if somebody is interested in learning more about the Identity 360 program, where can they find that information? And we'll make sure that we put those in the show notes as well.

Yeah, so it's on our website www.theorangenowbook.co.uk. There's a site, a slash to identity 360. So you can find that in the menu. Also by speaking to us, so you can always book a call and we can network. We can learn more about each other's business as always.

Absolutely. They can find you on LinkedIn as well. We established that in the beginning of this conversation.

Yes, and I promise not to sell anything to anybody that doesn't have a need for

No, all of my conversations with you have been very, very genuine and you and I have both been on the receiving end of those salesy and slimy conversations and we don't want any repeats of those. So Alina, thank you so much for sharing your business journey and the successes and the tips of here's what's working really well for us as we're growing and scaling our company. Also, here are some things that

We want to caution others against making some of the same mistakes in terms of hiring and outsourcing and things like that. So you just shared a wealth of knowledge with us today. So many different aspects of business, but I just want to thank you for taking the time to share with us today.

Thank you so very much, Melissa. Just a side note, I don't want to put anybody off investing. So don't put off investing in your business because that's really important. Just double check. Double check everything before and always ask for referrals and testimonials where possible.

Yeah.

Yes.

Yes, absolutely. think even in your mastermind group on Friday, we were talking about ask your network for people, for recommendations. If you're looking for a resource for something or if you're looking for a company or an individual to outsource something to ask other trusted people in your network, you know, who have you worked with personally and have gotten a great result or had a great experience? That's really, really important.

at the end of the day, no matter how bright and shiny the website might be. Right? Yes. Yes. 100%. So thank you so much, Alina. Thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in today. I hope that you found plenty of golden nuggets in here. There was so much information to unpack. If you had an aha moment during today's episode, if you wouldn't mind sharing this episode with somebody in your network who you think would

Exactly.

be interested in some of the things that we shared today. We greatly appreciate that. And our goal really is to share what's working and even some lessons learned along the way as we grow and scale our businesses as well. So I will be back next week with another episode of Make Space for More and always sharing practical tools, tips and strategies to grow your business beyond you. So thank you so much everyone for tuning in. Have a wonderful week.

Bye!