Episode Description
Sheree Sullivan, an entrepreneur since age 19, discussed her journey from cheese making to hospitality and electro-enhanced beer. She highlighted her parents’ entrepreneurial influence and the challenges of starting a business. Sheree transitioned from a goat dairy to a cheese factory, eventually selling 90% to a Japanese trade buyer. She then scaled Grunthal Brew, a hospitality venue, and introduced eBEER, a low-carb, high-flavour beer with unique brewing techniques. Sheree emphasised the importance of financial sustainability, leveraging products over time, and the value of fun in business.
About Sheree
Sheree is the Founder of Grunthal Brew and eBEER™.
Get in touch with Sheree:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sheree-sullivan-23b24821
www.ebeer.co
www.grunthal.com.au
Points of Interest
Sheree’s family and agricultural ambitions 3:19
Initial Agricultural endeavours 4:21
The transition to cheese making: 5:29
Sheree’s unexpected role 8:29
Business growth and challenges 12:49
Udder Delights acquisition 14:14
Burnout and recovery 21:32
Grunthal Brew and branding 24:05
Introduction to eBeer™ 27:15
Advice for aspiring entrepreneurs: 32:34
Transcript
Note: This has been automatically transcribed so is likely to have errors! It may however help you navigate the points of interest.
Michael McGrath
Mike, welcome to the troubleshooters podcast with me. Your host, Mike McGrath, Sheree Sullivan has been an entrepreneur since the age of 19, when she put her hand up to become a cheese maker in the family business, she epitomises the have a go mindset so essential in starting and running your own business. Sheree eventually sold the business to a trade buyer, and has continued her journey, having now moved to hospitality and electro enhanced beer that’s low carb beer with all the flavor. So sit back and listen to Sheree as she talks to us about what it took. Sheree Sullivan, welcome to the troubleshooters podcast.
Sheree Sullivan
Thanks for having me.
Michael McGrath
It’s a pleasure. Now. I know one of my colleagues was very keen that we get you on. He thinks you’ve got a great story, and you are a genuine entrepreneur right from early on, aren’t you? Yeah,
Sheree Sullivan
That’s right, and I realized that my parents were also so I think it was just in my blood.
Michael McGrath
I think that’s really interesting. In fact, I want to delve into that because one of the questions that I’ve tried to answer, and I do ask guests, is whether, whether you think entrepreneurs are born, or whether we can train them and make them What do you think on that one?
Sheree Sullivan
I think both. But I think that if your nearest and dearest are very risk averse, it’s going to be very hard, I think, to become an entrepreneur, because they’ll, they’ll probably try and talk you out of it. Yes,
Michael McGrath
It’s a very good point that. So I think we’ve all got an inherent risk tolerance, right? And I think that mine’s quite high, as it happens, but, but I think some of that’s inherent, but then I do think we can be encouraged and and, and perhaps learn some things that that can develop those skills, because I think they’re very important in a free economy, we want as many entrepreneurs as we can.
Sheree Sullivan
That’s right, and I think that something I learned. And it’s not that my parents failed, but and even my husband’s father as well, would often start a business and eventually close it and then start another business. And so it meant that having a go was okay. And I think that when you’ve got that in your psyche, then it is easier to go, oh, well, if it doesn’t work out, that’s going to suck, but it’s not the end of the world, you know. So I think that is sort of what you grew up with as well.
Michael McGrath
And look, getting comfortable with so called failure, like, I mean, you know that not everything’s going to work. So going back, so you were raised in South Australia, in the Adelaide Hills, I understand.
Sheree Sullivan
No, I only moved to the Adelaide Hills when I was about 18, and I was actually born and bred in Elizabeth. And Elizabeth is quite a low socio economic area of Adelaide, and so I always joke that you can take the girl out of Elizabeth, but you can’t take Elizabeth out of the girl. And so it’s essentially meant that when I build business, I try and build it to be accessible and to the people I never what I’d call posh or highbrow.
Michael McGrath
Okay, that’s interesting. So that background so mom and dad were quite entrepreneurial, right? You mentioned that they kind of opened businesses, perhaps closed them, and they had a farm business, didn’t they?
Sheree Sullivan
That’s the reason why we moved to the Adelaide Hills, but I think in all of this story, my parents occasionally were working for their own business full time, and then occasionally working full time, and then businesses on the side, or one parent was working the business, and one parent was working a job, So and so by the time we moved to the Adelaide Hills that they were working full time, but they were sort of low to mid 40s, and I remember them when they were telling me about their idea that it was actually about their retirement, and it was about We nearly paid off the house we have, but it’s not really where we want to end up. So let’s buy all this rundown property and start some sort of agricultural endeavor on that land, because my mum loved gardening, and one day that will pay our retirement. So I, you know, I look back, that was sort of low to mid 40s, and I go, Wow, pretty ballsy, like, I think their friends would have got, you’re mad.
Michael McGrath
So it was a goat and dairy startup, right?
Sheree Sullivan
Back then it was raspberry farming. So, so they sold it to me as 33 acres of easterly facing slopes and good bore water. And I remember thinking, I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about, but they thought were going to be raspberry farmers, but there was a rundown dairy on the property. And in, I guess, in my parents journey of career, my dad did everything from tech studies teaching to corporate jet flying. He was very smart, but really good with his hands. My mom did everything, pretty much while, always in an office setting, but really good in the garden. And so what it meant is they could look at a project like this old, rundown dairy and say, Hey, why don’t we start milking? We’ll fix the dairy. We’ll weld it, we’ll engineer it, we’ll wire it, we’ll plummet because they just could so, meaning they could do it themselves, and that’s how they often did business on the smell of an oily rag, because they were just very capable. But obviously, then had to put massive hours in. That’s what happened. Got a little goat dairy.
Michael McGrath
I mean, that generation were very practical. I mean, you know, I think there was, I mean, we’re less practical now, because we’re kind of, we do technology, and we’re all in the city, but, but, you know, back then you had to be much more technical, like, you know, I remember guys that could fix cars, hired mates who could fix cars and, and now, you know, hardly anybody touches a car now. So, yeah, interesting. So, so you so they decided that they might do something with the dairy. How old were you at this point, Sheree
Sheree Sullivan
I by now, was at uni, so I was like, maybe 18/19, and they I was staying with my grandparents in the in the week, during the week, and then coming home on weekends and and by then, they had probably 40 milking goats. And so it’s a very big endeavor to milk morning and night, and then commute and work full time in the city, and then now we’re raspberry farming, so it’s massive hours.
Michael McGrath
So 40 goats, right? They produce a lot of milk, don’t they? Because I know my mom and dad had a couple of goats.
Sheree Sullivan
They were selling the milk at this point when they could, and when I say when they could, sometimes it was literally being poured down the paddock. And then one day, dad dropped the goat milk off to, I guess, the best customer we had, and they just said, Oh, Trevor, that’s his name, Trevor. Next week, we’re dropping the price of goat milk by 10 cents a litre. And I’ve since learned that this is what happens to the primary producer. It happens forever and always and tomorrow, meaning that the market will often dictate the price, whether it’s feast or famine, and you have no control. So my parents had a conversation, and I honestly don’t know who said what bit, but the end result was, we need to value add. We need shelf life. We need control. We need a brand. Let’s build a cheese factory. Like, let’s do something with this milk. Wasn’t because they particularly like cheese. It wasn’t even because they knew how to make cheese, because they didn’t. And I grew up on craft that lived in the blue box in the cupboard, like full blown plastic cheese. But because they could build they could build a factory. So in their mind, like, oh yeah, we can build a factory. So that was sort of, I’m gonna say, about 1998 by then. And I also think, and even when I got involved in the business, I sort of think, why did we keep going? Because I could only see, I remember thinking, I think it’s going to be okay 10 years after I’d started that journey with them, and you sort of think, why did you keep going? Because stopping was bankruptcy. Stopping was nothing.
Michael McGrath
So the story goes like this, that you, that you your parents hired a cheesemaker, right? And the cheese maker left after six months. And then you put your hand up and said, Okay, I’ll be the cheese maker. So talk to me about that, because that’s a very ballsy thing to do.
Sheree Sullivan
I started in so basically, my degree at uni was jazz piano. I went there, loving music. I went there actually loving maths. I’ve got a maths music brain?
Michael McGrath
They say that maths and music are very linked, don’t they
Sheree Sullivan
They are. Not on all my friends, but a lot of them
Michael McGrath
Not necessarily great training to become a cheese maker
Sheree Sullivan
Not at all, but I remember going to uni thinking, I don’t want to be a music teacher. I don’t even know if I want to work in music, but I want to finish this journey. I started when I was five, and I and I didn’t. I was sort of generally good at lots of things, but not one thing stood out to me to do. So I thought I’m just going to go finish my my degree and always love food, always, and didn’t even think ever about a career in food, and my theory on that is because MasterChef wasn’t around, like this whole celebrity chef thing wasn’t around, so I just didn’t even think food was a thing. Finished uni, got out, I was performing, I was doing a bit of teaching, and then said to my parents, why don’t you just put me on commission and I’m going to go sell this cheese. Because by then nothing was selling. And that’s the whole marketing, sales function of a business. So that’s how I first got involved. Went out to the shops in Adelaide, just trying to work out how it all worked, realized the success factor. As I said to them, take the cheese on consignment. If you don’t sell it, you don’t you don’t pay for it. And I’m just going to do heaps of demos. And then six months in, cheesemaker resigned. And I remember the day. I remember we were sitting around the dinner table. You know how you can often remember an emotion more than what was said. I remember happiness. And I remember my dad saying, cheese factory is an absolute mess. There’s a note in it that says, I resign. And I I don’t know, but I remember saying this. I remember saying, I’ll do it. And I remember that I’d had two weeks training with him once before, he’d been away on holidays, and he said, Do you want to keep the cheese going? And I’m like, Sure. So I sort of call it like, you know, youthful naivety. Um, loved cooking, so I just approached it like cooking. I said, I’ll do it. And I don’t know where I pulled this figure from. I pulled a few figures out, I said, I’m going to give you a five year commitment. When I’m making cheese, I’m going to charge you $15 an hour, severely underpaid, but whatever, when I’m selling product and when I’m working on the business that’s going to be commissioned based on sales, and at the end of five years, let’s either call it a day or let’s recommit and they just went, okay. So that was literally my job interview. That’s how I started. And I guess significantly at the end of that five years was when I married my husband and business partner, Saul, and we just, from then on, just flew. But there was lots and lots of painful lessons in that first five years and in the sub which Udder Delights, turns 25 this year. So that’s how long it’s been now. Yeah. So you can actually buy Udder Delights all around Australia, one of the leading manufacturers of Brie and Camembert, if not the leading one in Australia.
Michael McGrath
Brie and Camembert, who doesn’t like that, and so tell me that’s that’s fascinating, that idea that you right off the bat saying, Pay me commission.
Sheree Sullivan
Yeah. Well, the thing is, I said it because they didn’t have they didn’t have enough money to pay me anything that commission, and I was able, like I look back now on financially, how we made this work. And I think we followed a migrant family journey, which means we lived on one property. I lived in a shed, but I was living on the property, we pulled resources. I would cook dinner. Mum would start the washing. Dad would go to the factory. My brother, at one point, was helping to milk, you know, and it was just they didn’t charge me bored. I you know, I wasn’t too much of a burden on them. So, you know what? I mean, you just had to made it work? Wow, they worked full time supplementing business loss. They you know. So would we do it again right now, at my age that I am now. No
Michael McGrath
When did it get to a point where you said, Look, this is actually a business. We’re going to be okay. You mentioned earlier that you were sort of 10 years in, and you thought you could see the light.
Sheree Sullivan
We had within five years, probably four staff, you know. So it wasn’t that it wasn’t a business by year 10. I can’t even, can’t even remember how many staff we had by then. Maybe we had 20, or 30. But I think when you are starting in business and a business owner, particularly when you choose a very capital heavy business, and you want to own a cheese factory. So we’re talking manufacturing plants, not, you know, not a service business where the overheads aren’t too high. I just think it was year 10 that I went I think, I think we’re going to be able to draw a decent wage now, because until then, you I think, as business owners, often you have, you don’t get paid what you would out in the market. And so, yeah, so Saul and I guess, have since realized we will often charge our businesses less than we would on the market, but we get our pay days in that journey.
Michael McGrath
Yeah interesting. I mean, that idea that it takes a while to build something good, you know, like, I mean, you were saying 10 years and and you were sort of 20 staff, and then that’s, that’s a long time, and then, and then, when did you, I mean, you eventually got some nice scale, and you were acquired, right?
Sheree Sullivan
Yes correct. So in this whole journey, we were growing, and I remember there was one period in time and and the reason I remember is it forms part of an insurance claim and a business interruption claim. And so I remember having to prove 36 months of financials and growth. And honestly, the insurance company were horrified because it was between 35 and 40% year on year on year on month on month on month. So it so we were in fast growth. But when you’re also in capex heavy business, it meant we’re constantly physically sat in a factory. Um, rebusting all the time. So, um. So we had lots, I guess, lots of hiccups along the way, but Saul and I, we worked full time in the business. My mum was working full time elsewhere and doing book work on the side for utter delights. My dad was working full time and then doing all the maintenance and construction on the side for utter delights. And it was probably, I’m gonna say 15 years in that finally they stopped work full time and just worked for utter delights at that point in time. So instead of, let’s say, doing 60 hour weeks, they probably went down to 35 hour weeks. Yeah, and in all of this journey, we had lots of ups, lots of downs, and I think it was because we were together, we were able to traverse that together. And there’s lots of things we can talk about. We can talk about product recalls, cash flow, insurance, fights, whatever, but the biggest one in all of it is that my mum, who was our business partner, and also, like the nanny to my children and the bookkeeper to another business that Saul and I ran, ended up dying of brain cancer. We had four months of of you’ve got cancer. This is terminal to her dying. So it was incredibly tough. My dad was 59 by then, and at that point, or almost went into retirement, maybe he was doing 10 or 20 hours a week. And then within a couple of years, wanted to go into he went into silent partnership. We were at data succession. And then in all of that went away, actually, with his new wife at the time, and my husband fell through my dad’s floor because ants had eaten the home. And so I remember my dad going to the bank saying, Can I have a loan I’d like to rebuild? And even as part of the succession utter delights. Was going to pay dad until the day he died, but the bank didn’t give him the line because, essentially, he was retired. So that is what triggered this. We need to get dad out. So, you know, Dad came to me and said, Can you buy me out? So we owned half of the business with my parents and I at that point in thinking what we is like, we’re already so highly geared. And even at that point in time, we hadn’t yet bought a house for ourselves. My husband and I, we had bought a few investment properties, but we were gearing up, you know, to finally buy a house and stop pouring money back in the business, because it was like my line in the sand at that point. And and also, my husband was saying to me, this business is getting really stressful, and it’s a load that I don’t know if I want to keep carrying, but it’s also a load I don’t know if I can mentally keep carrying without falling in a heap. And sometimes people get surprised when they hear that. But you make Brie, you know, like you, and I think it’s because you associate Brie generally with relaxing times. You know, you’re hanging out, having a glass of wine, whatever that we could literally make or break 20 grand a day in profit in terms of things that could go wrong or right. And you say, Well, what go wrong? A truck picks up pallets of cheese at the correct temperature at your factory, and for whatever reason on their behalf, delivers it at seven degrees, not five, and it gets rejected, you know, things like that. It was just this constant. So anyway, that that took us on a journey of at least trying to find a business partner to help my dad exit. That was, that was our first goal. And the second goal was, could, could solve an ID risk in any way. And so, you know, they say it takes a year to sell a business. So that journey took us about a year and and we ended up finding business partners who ended up buying 90% off the cheese factory, so all of my dad’s share, and then Saul and I stayed on with 10% in the game.
Michael McGrath
Ok interesting. And was that a corporate buyer?
Sheree Sullivan
Well, it was a trade buyer in that they were cheese makers, head office, listed company in Japan, but cheese makers in Australia. And who would have thought? Like, I never would have thought Japanese cheese were a thing. They’re not sort of something at the forefront of what we think
Michael McGrath
You bet. And did they approach you? How did you come across them?
Sheree Sullivan
We put ourself on the market, and we came up with a big list of potential acquirers. And interestingly, it was my husband who looked down the list and went, where’s snow brand? And essentially they’re called Snow brand Australia, and they ended up being our acquire acquirer, and we ended up working with them for four years as chief executive and managing director. So we really had to go from an entrepreneur to an executive or bridge that gap, because then it became, you know, reporting to head office. So, yeah. So, um. Uh, working, I guess, making that change between entrepreneurship to executiveship. I guess, if you want to call it, that was our journey.
Michael McGrath
How did that feel? I mean, how did it feel, sort of reporting to them. Was it a couple of years? How long was it that you
Sheree Sullivan
It was four years. Um, we had a we had a really good relationship with them. And I remember at the end of our due diligence period, which, to be honest, was excruciating, and especially because I now realize that Japanese generally are also quite risk averse, and so the level of due diligence was so high, and even the company we worked with said, we’ve done massive projectory, yours is up there on the level of due diligence compared to the relatively smallness of the deal. But what it meant, though, and they said this to us at the end, they said, You’ve got really good business partners, like we knew our values aligned. We knew and I would say the significant difference between Saul and I and our business partners were just the speed at which we delivered. And I don’t think that’s a surprise, entrepreneurs are quite fast and agile. Large firms just naturally slow down, so that was probably the main difference. But it went really well. We’ve still got a really good working relationship with them. And in all of it, we kept the license to trade as something called out of Delights cheese seller. So we still operate a tourism arm of that business through a licensing arrangement.
Michael McGrath
Okay, so you successfully exited. That was four years to kind of work out do whatever you had to do. What did you do then? What was this? What was the story from then?
Sheree Sullivan
We always had, we always had this tourism business on the side called Udder Delights cheese seller, while we were operating, I guess, Udder Delights cheese factory. And I, at this point, I’m now thinking, we’re either going to close it or we’re going to scale it. I must also say that I was completely and probably unsurprisingly, completely burnt out by the time we did our initial deal where we’d sold 90% and I often talk to people about when they are selling, don’t just negotiate the sale price. If you’re staying on, negotiate your hours. And so it was really important to me that Saul and I didn’t just then go and work 60 hour weeks, or even 40 hour weeks, like I ended up negotiating 15 hours a week as chief executive, we had a great team. They knew what to do. So was managing director probably four days a week, you know, nine to four. So I just had to recover, I reckon, for the first two years. So who’s really good at all these ideas were like, Why don’t we do this? Why don’t we do that? I’m like, No. I was I went back to the no because I was just so tired. And we still had, you know, a tourism business. We still had some investment properties. We still had a short a share portfolio. Young children are still managing all that so. So eventually an opportunity came, a property became available in the Adelaide Hills, which was very iconic, but burnt down and had sat there as an eyesore. And the opportunity came that we could open up a venue in this site. And so we ended up scaling instead of closing. And so that has now been open for about two years. And so going back into startup again, that was a interestingly. I said I’d never do it. It was a Greenfield. So it was a build from site. And when you’re physically building a business to be a shell, to be a facility, to operate a business from, and then you’re also trying to build the business with systems and people and branding, whatever, doing that in conjunction with each other is incredibly difficult. And it’s the second time I’ve done it, and I remember saying the first time, I don’t want to do this again. And anyway, I did it again.
Michael McGrath
And that’s called Grunthal right?
Sheree Sullivan
Yeah. And at two years old now, and when we were offered the site, so we’ve yet we I made so watch Simon Sinek start with why that very, very old TED Talk. Because I thought, if we’re going to do this, I want to start with why. Because, when you’ve already started your business and you watch that talk, it can be quite difficult to work out your why. So we we want and the why, my wife opening has got to be your wiser customer to use our business in whatever format. So anyway, we watched start with why. Couldn’t work it out, couldn’t. And then a couple of days later, I woke up and I said, Saul, let’s do Grunthal because it’s going to be fun. That’s our why.
Michael McGrath
Fun became your why at that point, right? So tell us how that’s gone and how that’s how that. So how has that kept you on track? And how has that driven Grunthal
Sheree Sullivan
When we were in those final let’s call it one month of opening, it wasn’t fun. And so I think Saul kept saying to me, this is fun, remember? And I’m like, Oh man, like you just do the hours, particularly when I manage a building project while I’m, you know, managing that, Saul and I decided I was going to take the burden on this one, and he was pretty much, well, going to do all of the children and the parenting and whatever, while I ran the project the first year, honestly wasn’t that fun for me, but it’s fun now and and it’s because you’re in the startup. Startup is exciting and is also exhausting, but in terms of the fun, what? What that’s kept us on track with so Grunthal has probably about 40 staff now. Um, is, if my chefs say to me, I’d really love to serve this dish and it’s just way too fancy, I’m like, no, because it’s not fun. So I’m really, really conscious of of making sure that what we offer and how we present it. So essentially, I call ourselves a party venue. You know when there. And if you want to come and have a wedding with us, don’t come for a white wedding. You need to go to all the wineries that are around the Adelaide Hills for that, come to us for your engagement party, you know. So it’s in a really nice place right now, even though I don’t know what it’s like around Australia, but certainly in South Australia, it’s just hospitality and brewing. It’s getting a bit of a doom and gloom news all the time. This one’s shutting, this one’s shutting. This one’s shutting. I’ve just worked really hard with the team to try and cater to what the people want, so that that’s not our story. And so far, it’s going really well.
Michael McGrath
That’s great. And so I know that you moved into sort of a brew, the brewing area, and you’ve got some pretty exciting stuff going on there. So tell us, tell us a little bit about that.
Sheree Sullivan
Yeah so the site, this hospitality site, had a while it was burnt down, and we needed to rebuild. What hadn’t burned down was a small brewery that was on the land. And so when we were offered the site, I did say to Saul, because he was an excellent cheese maker. If we do this, if we say yes to this, you have to learn how to brew. And this, I guess this was a lesson of my parents opening a cheese factory and not knowing how to make cheese, and I didn’t want to be held hostage. So it’s like, we’ll employ a brewer, but you have got to learn that side. So So we’ve agreed with this venue. Saul has to oversee all the brewing with that Brewer, um, and we’ve refurbished it and made a beautiful brewery. And Saul’s brain is one that is always inventing and thinking and pushing and and so he came up with a whole brew concept, essentially, so Grunthal Brew. We don’t sell our beer off site. We, we’ve got gin, we’ve got one, we’ve got all sorts of things. We decided that we weren’t going to be the next beer brand. We’re all about a venue. And if you want to try what we make, you’ve got to come to the venue. When soul started on this whole new tangent, it’s it’s almost the opposite of Grunthal is its home, but this is a brand we are rolling out, but it’s essentially called E-beer. And e-beer stands for electro enhanced beer, and it’s made where we call it. It’s a supercharged lager, literally supercharged in that throughout the brewing process, we are introducing some electromagnetic frequency, and it has the most significant impact on the yeast and all this. So we’ve now got a doctor involved and all these things, but essentially, it’s just in this massive journey of discovery where this won’t only impact the beer making industry, it’s going to impact any industry that uses yeast, in particular, I would even say pharmaceutical. So we haven’t journey ahead on that, and I’m not sure where it’s going to land, because there’s lots it could land, but that’s, that’s where we are right now. So that’s Saul’s baby a fair bit, except my job is always to come in underpinning with legals and accounting and brand and all that side of things.
Michael McGrath
So this is this electro enhanced beer. This is low carb, high flavor beer. And so where can people get hold of it? Do they buy it through your website
Sheree Sullivan
You can buy it through our website. In fact, you can actually get two samples for free if you pay postage. But where we’re rolling out in South Australia first, and it’s really about proving the concept, and it’s about showing the beer industry something new. And something we learnt when we’re in Udder delights, is every year large retailers would say, What have you got for me this year? What have you got like this constant reinvention, and beer is getting pretty exhausted. So I think it was more about, how can Saul just get this incredible, amazing flavor? How can you lower carbs? Because normally you have to sacrifice flavor and mouth fill for lower carbs. How can you do that? So we went on that journey, but what it has found is all these other things are coming out of it. So we’re about to lodge a patent with it. So I can’t talk heaps yet about it until patent, and we can unpack it a bit more.
Michael McGrath
Well, look, we’ll put the we’ll put your website in the show notes. So if people want to try some electro enhanced beer, low carb, high flavor, they’ll know. They’ll know what to do and where to come and they get a couple of samples free as well. That’s correct, yeah. How good is that? So? So what does the future look like Sheree?
Sheree Sullivan
What does it look like? So I’m not very good, really at looking too far ahead. Um, we’ve got we’ve got daughters who are sort of in year nine and 10. So I feel like we should probably just keep building the businesses we have. I also do business coaching on the side until they finish high school, because I don’t want it, because the price you pay in your time to start a business is very high. So I feel like we’ve already got two and we’ve got a few more things in the part. Let’s just keep growing and keep doing that, and keep discovering what E Beer is all about. And then maybe when they get to the end of year 12, you can ask me.
Michael McGrath
So look for for aspiring entrepreneurs, people who are maybe we’ve got a corporate job, but they want to do something. What’s your advice to people? I mean, clearly you had entrepreneurial parents who encouraged you, and they certainly demonstrated a very high work ethic, didn’t they? And I mean, there’s no getting around the work is there if you’re going to be an entrepreneur, which is back to fun. If it’s fun, it’s not so bad, is it? So suppose that you know, getting that right, making sure you’re in the right place. I think can help but you tell us about what you know. What would you tell you yourself 25 or 30 years ago? If you could go back and and whisper something to yourself, what would it be?
Sheree Sullivan
I think it would be. I think I did it anyway, because I was living at home, but in that I was able to reduce my expenses, and I had a side hustle. So I think that whenever you start a business, you have there is going to be a period of time where you’re not going to be earning money, or, even worse, which is usually my story, the business needs a lot of money for you to even start it before you are going to draw a wage. So my my question is, normally, you’ve either got to, do you have anything of worth that you can sell and live off. Because Saul and I did that with our first real estate to fund our second business we did that. Or have you got enough savings? Or is, can you go back home and live with your parents? Or are you living with a partner who can financially support you? So that would be, you know, getting your ducks in a row about, how are you going to financially sustain it while you start it. I think sometimes businesses maybe, if you’re in a service industry, you can, and if you’ve got enough clients and you’re a consultant, there may be those occasions where you can instantly generate income. The challenge, though, with consultancy is you can only earn as many hours as you have in a day, whereas the product takes longer to earn the money. But then it almost becomes you earn money when you sleep because of the product selling. So, you know, there’s two days, but that’s that would be my starting point. How earn money while you’re building.
Michael McGrath
That’s interesting, that distinction you just made between selling your time and then being able to leverage that by selling some products which are not time governed. Think that’s a key distinction, isn’t it, when you’re kind of weighing up a business or an opportunity. But look, that’s been fascinating. It’s so interesting to hear your story from music and maths through to deciding to become a cheese maker. That’s not an easy thing to do, by the way, if anyone I know a little bit about cheese, because I started out in the pizza business, which requires a lot of cheese. And the first company that I think we were about 7% of our revenue was cheese and Well, I think we peaked. To maybe 20 million Sterling. So we were buying a lot of cheese, and I remember running out of cheese. I had the first shop, and I ran out of cheese, and I rang the cheese guy, Robert seguesa, at Dairy born foods. This is in the UK, back in the 80s, and he was in Luton, and he sent me up a taxi full of cheese from Luton, which was about 150 quid taxi ride. And I stuck with him for about a decade by this cheese, because he he kind of, you know, he was one of those guys that knew Addison, but I would often go down and have a look at his cheese factory, which was fairly substantial and not didn’t look like an easy business to run to me.
Sheree Sullivan
Yeah, the minute you add refrigeration, short shelf life, you know, animals.
Michael McGrath
Yeah, as you said earlier, you got to deliver it plus five degrees. No more you go over that it gets, you know, big problem. So, not easy to do that. Okay, excellent. Such a great chat. Wow. Thank you, Sheree for joining us today, and good luck to you, and good luck to your project and your husband’s project in E Beer.
Sheree Sullivan
Thank you.
Michael McGrath
Very interesting. Who doesn’t need a few less carbs without losing the flavor? So thank you.
Sheree Sullivan
Thank you, Michael.
Michael McGrath
Take care. Bye. Well, there you have it. Hard work and persistence combined with a supportive partner and family can get you a long way. If you want to try out electro enhanced beer, pop onto the E beer website, https://ebeer.co/ Shout out to our sponsors, Oasis partners. If you want some practical import on how best to exit your business speak to the guys at Oasis. Now if you like this content, be sure to share it with your friends and leave a like and even a comment. Only good ones, please. As you know, we’re very sensitive, so until next time.
Link to previous episodes: https://www.oasispartners.com.au/podcast/tom-hardwick-from-suits-to-start-ups