Hi lovelies!
Exciting news!
There’s a few changes that we are making to the company in 2016.
I thought I’d share about them here.
So, firstly a quick recap of 2015:
In Feb, I offered Grant (who was working for us as a tech contractor) the role of Chief Operations Officer.
I had been on the lookout for a Project Manager/COO for quite some time, and had filled the role previously but it ended up being a mishire. Anyways, once we found Grant and realised he has the most amazing dedication and ethic, we all knew we’d found a gold star. And he had the skills and experience that the company needed to fill that COO role.
He started part time to begin with, but quickly realised that LDI was the perfect home for his gifts, and he became full-time within 3 weeks.
Since then we have been rocking and rolling with activity:
- He lead a US team retreat of LDI staff.
- We rebuilt + redesigned our Academy membership site from the ground up (a huge undertaking)
- We expanded our 2016 product collection + rewrote, reillustrated + redesigned 3 books + 2 products.
- We welcomed 900 new members into the Academy just in September alone.
- We’ve doubled our team size.
- We’ve doubled our revenue to $2m a year.
- He led our first US Academy event.
- We created a shit tonne of new content at a rate faster than ever – Academy courses, blog posts and webinars.
- We increased our support to the Academy by instituting weekly “Ask Me Anything” posts, regular coaching calls + call-in hours.
- Behind the scenes, we’ve created some fantastic Standard Operating Procedures + business systems + reporting to get us working like a smooth company.
All in all, I’m really, really, really proud of what we’ve managed to accomplish together.
By the end of December, we started realising the limitations of just me and Grant managing the company.
We’ve grown the company and the team so much that it was taking more and more of our time just to manage it all and keep all the plates spinning. In order for us to go out together to forge new territory, create even more new things and vision the next growth of the company, we needed somebody to take over more of the operations and project management.
Plus, we’d already had a mishire on a marketing manager, and needed someone who had the experience in operations, project management and marketing. Someone who would be devoted to making all our wheels turn smoothly.
Once it was in our heads, we knew just who to call.
I’d met her 12 years ago, and we became best friends from the moment we set eyes on each other.
She even had created some of the original Academy material with me – the Radiant Goddess health program and Creating Your Goddess Haven decluttering program! She also ran my very first spiritual retreat with me!
This is, of course, Sonya Forrest (aka: Sone, as I commonly refer to her).
Over the last five years since we’ve been off living all around Australia, Sone had been on her own journey. She’d continued ascending through the ranks of design agencies in Sydney from Project Manager to Senior Project Manager to COO to CEO.
When I was a finalist for the Australian Business Woman of the Year, I went to Sydney and asked Sone to be my date for it. It was our first one-on-one time in half a decade. It was completely amazing though – even though we’d been many miles apart, each dealing with our own life transformations, we had ended up on exactly the same path. Both of us with a deep, passionate interest in business, entrepreneurship, philanthropy + making big, beautiful things to change the world.
Sone, two lovely women who I can NOT for the life of me remember the names of because we only spoke to for about three minutes but we totes look like best friends in this picture, and me. It’s cool guys. I know how to camouflage myself SUPER well at business award events!
It was then she asked if she could do work experience at my company, and I laughed in her face and told her “sure, but fuck you very much, I shall be paying you!”
She immediately started to organise our Canberra Retreat.
Once we realised we needed something more than just an event manager, Grant + I both realised that Sonya, just as Grant had been, was the perfect fit + skillset + mindset for what we needed.
Role changes!
Sonya will be joining us as Operations Manager starting next week. She’ll be heading up operations, project management, events management and marketing.
Grant will be moving into the role of General Manager. He’ll be heading up strategy, customer advocacy, user experience, tech, teaching + content creation.
I’ll continue being CEO, and continue taking responsibility for the whole company, with my specialties in Head of Creative, Teaching and Strategic.
Basically: we’re still a start-up, so we’ve all got many responsibilities + there is overlap. Which is totally fine. We’ll work with it!
We’ll be adjusting around from being a two-wheeled bike into a tricycle, giving us more power, more brains, more heart, more energy, more time.
We’re all feeling immensely excited.
(I should mention here as well… Sonya told me years ago of a very strong vision she had that she would eventually be working in an entrepeneurial environment with two other people. Of course… neither of us knew it was each other until a few weeks ago! Ha! I love how the universe works!)
What it means for you:
You’ll see even more of me and Grant:
- More Academy courses.
- More webinars.
- More content.
- More live events.
Having Sonya tending to our thriving, bustling work machine means we’ll be freed up more to be out doing things in the world. Which is a wonderful, wonderful thing.
What we’ll be focussing on:
Our strategy is simple.
We’ll continue focussing on the same two things we have done for 5 years now:
Our focus is on making them bigger, better, more profound + more beautiful in every way we can think of.
We’ll be focussing on supporting our Academy members + our workbook users, and looking at ways we can deepen our community there.
And we’ll work out ways we can keep on deepening our philanthropic arms as well.
We’re delighted that we’ve been able to hire someone of Sonya’s calibre + capability to join superpowers with us.
“By our powers combined…”
– Captain Planet
It’s going to be a fucktonne of fun + I can barely wait.
I’m so excited to be starting off the year with two of my closest friends by my side. They are two of the smartest, hard working + passionate people I’ve ever been blessed to know.
And I feel quite certain that we can create some big miracles together.
Watch this space!
All my love!
P.S. For those coming to our Shining Biz + Life Canberra Retreat next month, you’ll be meeting both of them! AND Denise (pictured below!) and our favourite indispensable kinesiologist Kerry Rowett… EXCCCCITING!!!! So many of my favourite people, all in one room!!!!!!!
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