Thanks to our friends at Suncorp and their Team Girls program

For our third All Stars event we called upon some of our favourite speakers to open up about their life experiences and share the beliefs that guide them in work and life. Janine Allis, Julie Bishop, Daniel Flynn and Turia Pitt have all carved their own unique paths, and provided a day of high energy, great conversation and lots of learnings (and laughs). If you missed out on registering for this awesome online event, don’t worry, we’ve got you covered! We captured some of the best bits to look back on.

Janine Allis

Janine Allis is many things including the serious businesswoman on Shark Tank and the woman covered in mud on Survivor. She hosts a podcast, is an author, and also the most recently appointed ambassador at Australia for UNHCR with a focus on empowering refugee women. In 2000, Janine founded Boost Juice which has become one of the largest juice bars in the world with over 500 stores in 14 countries. Her vision was to ‘do retailing differently’ and over the years has expanded the Australian business, incorporating other brands under the entity Retail Zoo including Salsa’s Fresh Mex Grill, CIBO Espresso, Betty’s Burgers & CONCRETE CO. Retail Zoo has over 600 stores and almost 7000 people working across the four businesses of which Janine is a Director.

Janine Allis on doing business differently

“Find out what the customer wants and give it to them. Don’t let the tail wag the dog, don’t let the systems interrupt the customer.”

“Naivety has made me successful. I didn’t know I couldn’t do 100 stores in four years. I didn’t know any different. My lack of knowledge and education was a huge advantage.”

“Sh*t happens in business. You need to have the resilience and the people around you to help with self-doubt.”

“Something I learnt from working for the richest people in the world is that people are people. I am no better or worse than anyone in the room. I am probably the least educated person in the room, but I know my business better than anyone.”

Janine Allis on being an accountable leader

“Leadership is about communication and accountability. Whatever you are feeling as a business owner, your team are feeling that too. I will do what I say and say what I do, and I expect others to do the same.”

“Business and sport are so similar. I want to be on the best team and play with the best people. Nothing is more stimulating than sitting at a round table sharing great ideas. Nothing is more demotivating than keeping someone on your team who continues to drop the ball and doesn’t train.”

“Leadership is about having the right people in the right team. To create a great business you need a team of different skills. You need a balance to create a great team. You need your creatives to think outside the square, but you also need your analytical minds with business intelligence and numbers. As business leaders we often try and make the creatives analytical and the analyticals creative…don’t try and control everything…and don’t send ducks to eagle school.”

“(Think about) a person you’ve let go for whatever reason – ask yourself if you wish you’d held onto them longer, or cut it 6 months shorter. We tend to hold onto mediocrity for too long. Don’t give yourself excuses. Play the long game, get the right people in the right roles.”

To learn more about Janine’s extraordinary business journey, check out her book The Accidental Entrepreneur.

Find out more about the UNHCR’s Leading Women Fund.

The Hon. Julie Bishop

After spending 20 years in Parliament, the Hon Julie Bishop famously hung up her red shoes in 2018 after becoming the first woman to hold the role of Australia’s Minister for Foreign Affairs. Ms Bishop built a successful legal career for two decades before entering parliament, going on to become one of the most powerful people in Australian politics. Julie is now the Chancellor of Australian National University, works in consultancy and sits on a number of advisory boards in the private sector.

Julie Bishop on gender deafness

“I found that if I was sitting in a board meeting as the only female, the men in room either wouldn’t hear me or wouldn’t register my contribution to the discussion. Yet they would applaud loudly if a man beside me repeated my contribution. It happened so many times I dubbed it ‘gender deafness’. I raised it at a conference in Hong Kong with female business leaders, and they had all experienced the same thing. If you have more women in the room and more women supporting each other, it can change the whole tone of the room.”

“Support each other and promote other women. Don’t undermine a woman by playing the game, they may be competitors but they’re not adversaries. If you’ve been the first woman to take on a particular role, you have a responsibility to ensure it’s easier for the next woman, not harder.”

Julie Bishop on removing discrimination against minorities

“As foreign minister I travelled to over 120 countries meeting people from every walk of life, and one thing is for sure, while people will expect a level of inequality (not everyone can be a surgeon or entrepreneur),  they will not accept injustice that occurs when different laws are being applied to different sections of society in injust ways. And racism is institutional injustice – while you can change your education, you cannot change your race – so if you’re discriminated against based on your race, it is profoundly unacceptable.”

“The private sector can lead by example by the way it treats its employees and ensures there is equal access for everyone that they employ. By ensuring employees are respected and paid on merit regardless of their background.”

Julie Bishop on confidence 

“If you have confidence in your judgement and what you’re doing, (confidence) can come naturally.”

“I always learnt to not let others define me, define what I can and can’t do, and define what I can and can’t achieve.”

Julie Bishop on coping with criticism

“Coping with criticism is something you acquire over time. There are plenty of people who want to hold you to a standard that they could NEVER meet themselves, you just have to remember that.”

Get the inside scoop on success from Julie (and other incredible women) in Samantha Brett’s The Game Changers.

Daniel Flynn

Daniel is one of Australia’s leading social entrepreneurs, as Co-founder and Managing Director of Thankyou, a social enterprise that commits 100% of its profits to impact. Starting when he was just 19, the enterprise has overcome many challenges and given more than $6.8m to projects to help eradicate global poverty.

Daniel Flynn on the new normal

“What if COVID-19 isn’t a blizzard, not a season, but an ice age?

“I think we will move to a new normal that is different. We’ve stopped the world machine and its put a spotlight on the divides in the world (such as the Black Lives Matter movement). We need change, we need leadership in that change, and so the challenge to all of us is – what’s in our hand? Because in every single movement, every singe moment, we can be part of that change”

“The whole world has become a start up. Who you serve and what you serve hasn’t changed, but how you do it has. Processes that previously took six months need to take six days. COVID-19 has shown how reliant the world is on supply chain.”

“In this season – think about what needs to change, the injustices, the gap between extreme consumerism and extreme poverty. It’s the time you put in, the partnerships you work on, the work you do.”

Daniel Flynn on creating a consumer movement

“To get a result the world’s never got before, you have to be prepared to do something the world’s never seen before”

“To make an idea or a dream a reality, you have to get out of your comfort zone and get uncomfortable – (for our book) we rotated the print file to change the convention of books, and backflipped on user design for comfort. The result is a book that stands out in people’s hands.”

Daniel Flynn on overcoming fear

“We often have a fear, ‘What if what I have isn’t big enough? What if its average or not good enough? What if I get attacked?’ Fear of failure is a big deal,  fear of failure has killed more dreams than failure itself.”

“We (Thankyou) don’t have it all together, but we have to push pass the fear barriers of , ‘what if I’m not good enough’, the world needs authenticity, it doesn’t need perfection. The Thankyou story has got more wrong than right. We sit in it, we embrace it. Our most read article on our website, Better Before Bigger, is a list of what we’ve got wrong”

Find out how you can support Daniel’s mission to end global poverty by shopping at Thankyou.

Turia Pitt

At just 24, with her entire life in front of her, Turia Pitt’s world drastically changed. While competing in a 100km ultra marathon she got caught in an out of control grassfire and suffered burns to 65% of her body. Surviving against overwhelming odds, she rebuilt her life and defied every expectation others had of her. She is living proof that with the right mindset, anything is possible. She’s written multiple books, won a bevy of awards and off the back of the 2020 bushfires, launched Spend With Us, a community for Australian small businesses who have endured hardship.

Turia Pitt on happiness

“One thing that my accident has taught me is that there’s nothing wrong with feeling sad, angry, hurt or disappointed. I used to believe that if I felt a negative emotion there was something wrong with me. Now I know that all those emotions are perfectly valid and part of the human experience. Just because we feel those things it doesn’t mean that there is something inherently wrong with us. It’s about experiencing the whole spectrum of human emotion instead of chasing down certain feelings. You need those darker, heavier times to provide the shade and contrast to happier times”

“I personally don’t subscribe to the belief that everything happens for a reason, but I think in life you reach turning points where you can go different ways.”

“There’s a difference between doing something that you enjoy, and doing something out of obligation that you said yes to and didn’t ever want to do. I ask myself if I’d say yes to it in two days time. This helps me filter out what I want to do genuinely or what I feel obliged to do”

Turia Pitt on resilience

“I’ve made a lot of f**k ups. The more you make mistakes, the more you get used to getting knocked back and rejected, the more resilient you become. You cant grow resilient in theory, you learn it in practice. I’d encourage everyone to get out there and try something where you might fail. It will feel pretty s**t, but after a few week and months it wont have the same intensity. Become comfortable with failure and rejection.”

“When I am floundering in self-doubt, I’d ask myself, am I doing the work? And then I’d make sure I’m speaking to myself the way I’d speak to someone else, or the way I’d speak to my boys. I’d never say to them – you’re failures. I’d always take the encouraging approach and be more compassionate.”

Turia Pitt on chasing dreams

“If I have an idea, I try not to get too caught up in the practicalities of carrying it out. If you’ve got a good idea, you need to go with your gut. Spend With Them came about this way. From conception to when we pushed it out was four hours – if we had engaged teams it would have slowe the process down and we probably wouldn’t have launched it. If you have a good idea, instead of doing a business plan, try and go for it to see if its even viable. There’s no point investing all this time to ensure something is picture perfect if it’s just going to fall over.”

“I ask myself – am I doing the work? If you’re not doing the work, you have to ask yourself, do you really want what you’re chasing bad enough?”

Sign up for Turia’s newsletter and receive weekly tips and advice, or buy her book Unmasked.

 

Business Chicks and Suncorp Team Girls have teamed up to bring you the Business Chicks of the Future content series. Visit the hub to find more content to equip you to build meaningful connections with your teen and tween girls in order to build their confidence, strengthen their mental health and overcome difficult circumstances.

For more information on how Suncorp is helping to build a nation of confident girls, visit the Team Girls website.