The Founder’s Dilemma: What to Let Go Of—and What to Hold Tight

We have a very clear recruitment process. It's absolutely crucial for us that everyone who joins Olio is not just mission aligned, but mission obsessed. We hold that bar very high and we did that successfully through the scale up process. And so there was a temptation to maybe lower that mission obsession bar to bring in someone brilliant. And we did not lower that bar. And I'm eternally grateful that we didn't.

Hello and welcome to Leading the Scale up, the podcast for business leaders navigating the journey from startup to scale with me, Ben Morton. In today's episode, I'm joined by Tessa Clark, the co founder of Olio, the sharing app that is tackling food waste on a global scale. In this conversation, Tessa shares her hard won lessons on scaling a mission driven business without losing its soul. And she also shares some brilliant practical insights for any founder or leader trying to grow. Well, that's it by way of an introduction. Let's dive right in. Tessa, welcome to the show and the second episode of Leading the Scale Up. First of all, quickly, how are you today?

I'm very good, thank you. Thank you for having me along to your podcast.

It's my pleasure.

Thank you.

So let's dive straight in then. Tessa, can you tell us, was there a specific moment in time with Olio's journey where you realized that you had gone from a startup, a new venture, into that next phase that is the scale up?

Well, it's such a great question and the answer is slightly convoluted, so apologies in advance. So I can remember for many years startup was the name of the game. And then I can remember starting to hear this word sort of scale up and thinking, well, what is that? What are one of those? And I wonder if maybe we're starting to become one. And then when we raised a large round of financing, our series B, that was in the summer of 2021, that was $43 million round. That was the point at which it became quite clear to us that we probably were a scale up rather than a startup. And that's because one of the main objectives of raising that round of financing was to enable us to bring in C Suite for the first time, so a CTO and a CPO and a CMO and all that sort of good stuff. So we definitely sort of embraced that language of a scale up at that point in our life. After that, the macroeconomic meltdown happened, life became quite tricky. We all had to sort of pull back on all our international expansion, stuff like that. And we had to really focus on conserving Cash and I would say that we are now operating, I guess with the scale of a scale up, but we now operate with the mentality of a startup and that's something that's really, really important and precious to us. And actually Sasha and I's co founders don't ever want to lose that startup mentality even as the organization is scaling.

I love that Tessa. And you're so sort of immediate response to that question. I find really interesting where you said like you started to hear this name or label scale and think, oh, what is that? It's interesting that a lot of the time that definition isn't very clear. Right. And to start with, lots of people just try and pin it to either a certain headcount in the business or a certain, certain revenue. But again, your answer didn't really speak to either of those. And the more I start to talk to certainly some of the academic experts in this area or those that are teaching at some of the great universities, what I'm noticing is they tend to think of it as when you've got a proven concept. So it might be you've got a product that you know is viable and you're starting to roll it out or you work in a market and that's successful and you're starting to expand into a different market.

Yeah, but I think even, even with that the challenge is it seems to imply that you sort of reach this point and then everything is okay and then from then onwards it's just rinse, wash, repeat. But in my experience it just couldn't be further from the truth. So Odeo is definitely firmly in that startup territory, I think, kind of still, because we have recognized that in order to unlock the growth that we need to unlock, we need to continue to bring new products to market, solve a bigger share of our clients problems. I do still feel like we are thinking and acting in many ways like a startup, although obviously we are operating, you know, we're not just two people out of my kitchen or anything like that anymore. I think there is this headcount, there's revenue and then I think there are kind of systems and processes and just philosophy on life. And we have definitely drunk the kool aid on the startup philosophy, which is that done is better than perfect. And we found that when we went through that period of bringing on lots of senior people, actually it slowed the organization down a lot and it felt like we were sort of wading through glue and wading through treacle and so. But at the same time we did bring in lots of Systems that were real kind of upgrade to us. So I think you need to kind of really break it down. So we, we would, we needed a systems upgrade.

Yeah.

As an organization at that inflection point, but actually we didn't need to bring in all these very laborious, heavy handed processes and extensive documentation. We needed to remain sort of nimble and agile, but with the upgraded systems and capabilities.

Yeah, and you mentioned inflection point there. So at or around that inflection point, what were some of the changes that you realised you needed to make personally as a leader based on where the organization had got to and where you wanted to take it to?

Yeah, so we would characterise Olio as actually having lived through three life stages. We're in the third one right now. So there's, and we talked about this internally. There was Olio 1.0, which was just absolutely, unequivocally scrappy startup. There was Olio 2.0 where we raised a lot of capital, we brought in a C suite, we pretty much doubled the headcount of the business. And then There was OLIO 3.0 which is actually really trying to meld the very best of 1.0 and 2.0. But in order to get to 3.0, we did have to sort of live through some of the pain points of that scaling piece. And one of the biggest challenges, I think, is that as a founder you are used to having your fingerprint on every single part of the business, every single detail. And you then hire all these brilliantly experienced, wonderful people who you're paying a small fortune to. And there's then this really interesting sort of tussle where, you know, intellectually and, and very sensibly that you have got to empower them because you've got to set them up for success and they want to be empowered and you're paying them a fortune, so they definitely should be left, you know, some space to kind of run and do their magic. But equally you need to kind of not go too far away from the business. So I can remember at that sort of transition point I actually, the lens that I used was I recognized I need to change my role. And so I actually kept a document which was on the desktop of my laptop that I therefore kind of saw every time I opened up my computer. And that document was called Uniquely Me. And I would document in there sort of each week just some bullet points of the stuff that I was going to work on this week that only I could uniquely do given my position as co founder and CEO. And that was just a helpful kind of accountability tool to myself to make sure that I didn't go trumping around doing things that, yeah, couldn't be sort of uniquely done by me, that could be done by others.

Yeah, it's really interesting, I think, whether you are someone who stepped into a much more senior role within a big corporate or you're a founder of a startup entering the scale up phase, there are, there are certain jobs that we perhaps used to do before we brought people in to work for us that we absolutely love and therefore can, can struggle to let go of. Like, despite the fact that intellectually we often know to your point around your uniquely me document, we absolutely intellectually know like I shouldn't be doing this anymore, but we really struggle to let go. Like, what was one of those for you? One of the things you found the toughest to let go of, the toughest.

For me is product. And so for Oleo, that's sort of the core app. And I'm still not sure actually as to what extent the co founder should or should not let go. So certainly all the prevailing wisdom at the time back then in 2021 was that you need to empower these folks and you need to let go of that stuff. But since then I have noticed about a year ago, I think it was Brian Chesky of Airbnb wrote a piece and did some talking about it. And then Paul Graham wrote the piece about Founder mode where actually they said, well, no, hang on a minute. The founders do bring something truly unique and truly important and powerful to the product perspective. And if you're not all over the details, then how are you actually going to be able to challenge the team to do their very best work? And I have to say that both Sasha and I are definitely very aligned with that Brian Chesky type perspective. For something as important as the product and the user experience, we feel that is something that actually maybe we shouldn't be relinquishing. But some of the more operations and process based stuff then absolutely we should kind of struggled with the product piece and felt guilty that I wasn't letting go of it more and now I've stopped feeling guilty about it.

Good, I love that. And again, you mentioned that tussle when you started to bring in your, your C suite and you said one of the tools you used to help help you with that was the Uniquely me document. Can you share with us something else rather that you think you did really well in terms of managing that tussle when you brought the people into the Business. And one thing perhaps that had you had your time again, you would do differently to prevent listeners making some of the mistakes that we all make along the way. Right.

So I think what we did well was through the recruitment. We have a very clear recruitment process. It's absolutely crucial for us that everyone who joins Olio is not just mission aligned, but mission obsessed with. We hold that bar very high. And we did that successfully through the scale up process, even when we're operating under a lot of pressure to get that hiring done and get people onboarded. And also it was at a time when the market was very, very competitive for talent. And so there was a temptation to maybe lower that mission obsession bar to bring in someone brilliant. And we did not lower that bar. And I'm eternally grateful that we didn't because it's just really weird if you've got nine people who are super obsessed about something and someone else is like, meh, you know, take it or leave it. That just creates a weird, funky team dynamic. So I'm glad we didn't sort of lower that bar. And then the other thing that we did was we really recruited to our company values as well. So everybody in their final presentation had to talk to us and demonstrate to us how either through their professional life or their personal life, they lived up to each of our four company values, which were inclusive, resourceful, caring and ambitious. And that worked really, really well to make sure that we had mission obsessed people in our company who did embody our company values. The stuff that didn't work so well and that I would do differently is when we started Olio 3.0, we really invested some time to write down our sort of just our operating principles, just sort of our approach to our work in more detail. And I think that was about a sort of 20 page slide document. And there was a thematic area on the top and then there was some real tangible examples about sort of how we go about doing this work. And I wish we'd done that earlier on. And then another document that I wrote at the start of earlier 3.0 is how best to work with Tessa and Sasha. What you know, how to get the best out of us and what we appreciate from you. And I wish that we had invested the time up front in creating those two documents before we had started that scaling journey rather than further down the line.

Yeah, I love that. And just to finish up this piece around some of the shifts that you went through or any founder goes through at that sort of transition in inflection point, were There any. As you transitioned, were there any assumptions that you really had to challenge or any assumptions you had around moving from startup to scale up that you realized were untrue?

I think the biggest assumption we had was that people who have had incredible jobs, incredible other companies with incredible logos on their cv, we assumed that they would sort of know more than us or that they were the expert. And I guess we're a bit sort of insecure about our own knowledge and our own capability because we only know one thing, which is really kind of olio. And what we learned through that process was that actually it's really important to listen to your instincts. And if your instincts as a founder are telling you that this is not the right approach for your organization, no matter how wonderful that other person is, no matter how much expertise they've got, no matter how well it might have worked in another organisation, if your spidey sense is telling you that it's not going to work well in your organization, then you should listen to that and not let their expertise override you.

That's a really common theme I hear from people like yourself. What advice would you have then, Tessa? Someone who is grappling, trying to find the answer to. Is my spidey sense right, to use your phrase there, or am I making a decision based on some blind spots, maybe even naivety and being super precious about kind of your baby that is your startup? Was there anything you used to help you, I guess, assess your instinct in your gut feel?

I use my co founder Sasha a lot as a sounding board. So we basically sort of divide the business into two. I'm responsible for the build half of the business, she's responsible for the go to market half of the business. And so when I was encountering these challenges in my part of the business, I would bounce stuff off of her and get, you know, kind of am I being crazy or Now I guess the challenge with using her as a sounding board is that we are very, very aligned. Well, I guess that's not a challenge, that's a great thing. But she might share the same biases or blind spots that I do. And so to try and sort of counter that, I also spent a lot of time during that part in our journey being out in the market, speaking to other founders who had been through this process already and just trying to sense check with them. And that therefore kind of gave me that more impartial third party perspective.

Yeah, got you. That makes sense. Back to the piece around culture as well you mentioned in your recruit and onboarding like you kept the mission bar very, very high and made sure people were really aligned to your values. Now I'm almost guessing this wasn't the case for you, but were there any particular challenges you have experienced so far in terms of really keeping that mission alive and central to everything you do as you started to scale, maybe linked to your investment rounds? Like was that tested and how did you keep true to the mission?

So honestly that has not been a challenge for us. And I do, I recognize that that makes us quite unusual. I think the reason why our culture has not come under too much stress or attack or has been frayed is precisely because we've been super clear on Ms. Obsession always. Not just mission alignment. We've really, really focused on not just recruiting people against our four company values, but we do our 360 feedback and performance management against those company values. We do our employee satisfaction survey where we ask ourselves on a team basis and also a company basis, how well are we living up to our company values? And we use our company values on a day to day basis to make our decisions. And then I definitely, I remember very vividly once being at an event where one of the co founders of Slack said that one of the biggest mistakes he made was forgetting the importance of his role as the company scaled to continue to remind people of the mission and why it mattered. And so in that respect I felt like I was quite sort of forewarned as forearmed. And so I would make sure through we have a weekly company call on a Monday and also we have various Slack channels and I would make sure to be continually reminding us, just drip feeding reminders as to what is our mission, why is it important. So I would say that's something actually that we did really, really well. We've built an incredibly strong company culture that has that scaled very, very seamlessly with us, not only as we grew on the way up, but actually even more importantly, all that investment we made in the company culture as we were growing is what really helped us when we had to go through the very, very difficult time, like pretty much everyone else did, of restructuring rounds and redundancies through 2023. And it was that strong company culture that meant that actually we emerged the other side of that, all things being told, in actually a pretty reasonable, even robust shape because the culture carried us through it.

And do you think your current culture and set of values are the ones you need to get you where you want to be in five years time or do you sense they might need to change slightly?

I mean never Say never. But I don't think our company values those four words will change. But we absolutely. Underneath each of those four words are five or six bullet points or a couple of sentences, small paragraph. And that wording underneath that value absolutely has continued to evolve as we realize. Ooh, at this stage, what had perhaps been obvious and intuitive to us previously needs to be clarified and documented as a bullet point here. So a small example of that might be the importance of kind of dogfooding and using your own product in the early startup days. You don't even have to say that. That is just bleedingly obvious. Whereas as you start to scale, you have to state some of these facts more explicitly. So, yeah, I think we will continue to tweak and refine them, but I don't anticipate a wholesale review of them because they work and they just reflect very authentically who Sasha and I are as human beings and as leaders of the organization.

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No, I wouldn't say so. So I would say we wholeheartedly embraced the new systems. We were really excited to upgrade our CRM capabilities, to upgrade our analytics capabilities, and we all sort of grabbed onto those opportunities with two hands. Where the resistance came is really around the processes that started to emerge around the company. And actually we brought in C suite of leaders who brought in some very, very robust processes. So examples might be around how we did promotions in the engineering team, or it might be how we did sort of workshopping in product development. And in those areas we realized that actually the processes were just too robust, they were too brilliant, they were too wonderful. I can remember looking at some of the outputs from the workshopping, just thinking, oh my goodness, I would give that a 12 out of 10. That is just truly, truly exceptional world class workshopping. But if we're being really honest with ourselves, if we'd written down our hypotheses on the back of a napkin at the beginning of that day and what came out at the end of the day when you boiled it down to it probably weren't a million miles apart and yet we've spent this whole day doing the workshopping and then all the subsequent days breaking it down and blah, blah. So what has the harder work has been figuring out which elements of the more robust process are very helpful and valuable and which we need to slim right back down again.

Yeah. And I guess part of that is in the recruiting, right? Trying to try and get a sense of that. When you bring in some senior people in, like how flexible are they going to be and how well attuned are they to knowing? Look, I've got this amazing experience perhaps from my corporate career, but I've got the maybe flexibility, humility to be able to flex and know like what bit is going to work in this organization and what won't work.

Yeah, I mean, I think the reality is some people just love a good process. I mean they just really do. And operating at true scale in a really, really large multinational corporation is all about the process. But when you are going from startup to scale up, it really isn't about that heavy handed process. It needs to be about an evolution of your processes rather than the revolution of your processes. And yeah, I think also a lot of processes come in from people who've operated perhaps in lower trust environments. Whereas in a startup generally, if it's a healthy, well functioning startup, there's a high degree of trust, there's a high degree of empowerment and there's a high degree of reliance on just belief and faith in common sense. And actually you don't, you know, processes are often there as sort of guardrails or in the absence of those things. But we had all of those things and so the processes didn't speed us up, they just slowed us down.

I think that's so, so fascinating. I think you're bang on there, Tessa, that he said in a, in a healthy startup like trust is higher. And I think for me it comes down to the fact that it's smaller, right. There are less people in the organization, so it's easier to build those relationships and human connections with people because there are less of them. And it's that human connection that builds trust in a sense of psychological safety. Right. That is, I think one of the big competitive advantages like scale ups and startups have, right. That there's trust that comes.

Your communication almost gets onto the telepathic level because you're just also in sync with one another. You know what stage appropriate looks like. And yeah, you, you kind of trust and empower one another. And also linked to that is not just the size but also often in startups, if you have a team of people who have been working together with one another over many years, you've just seen lots of things come and go and you understand what makes the other person tick and you understand sort of organizationally what success looks like.

How much time do you spend, Tessa, thinking about how to, to maintain that high degree of trust and connection that you've got? Because as you said, like that's a challenge, right? Because when you get to a truly large organization like process is key and you have a lot more people, so it's harder to maintain that connection. Do you, does that occupy much of your, your thinking or not yet? Because you think that's some time and distance into the future.

I'd say we take a little and often approach to this. So rather than sort of ignoring stuff and being focused by lots of bright, shiny, sparkly, fun projects over here, then just letting things slowly creak and break and then you kind of go, oh, yikes, now we've got an emergency. Now we need to do a really significant upgrade or change. We try and take just kind of an always on type approach. So we're just constantly a little bit like whack a mole, just kind of dealing with these issues when they're small so that hopefully we don't ever take things to that breaking point. Yeah. So I'd say that's kind of really been our approach to date.

Love it. One of the things I've heard you speak about elsewhere in interviews or other podcasts, Tessa, is some of the challenges that female entrepreneurs face in securing investment now done. I think you said you've done your B round of investment, so clearly you've found ways to overcome that yourself. But how have you done that and how hard have you found it?

It's been extremely hard. Thankfully I haven't had to do it for a couple of years now. So I'm generally much happier than I am when I'm going through the fundraising process. I'd say, in terms of how I've dealt with it, there's been a couple of things. One, just learn the data, just accept the reality, and so know that the odds are horrifically stacked against you, and then work around that. So I'm definitely a big believer. You've got to kind of play the game to then eventually win the game and then change the game. And that's the order in which you need to do things. So for me, how do you play the game? In order to win the game, you need to directly tackle the both conscious and unconscious biases that exist against you. And so, for example, as a female founder, the assumption is that you're not particularly commercial and you're not particularly ambitious. So you need to make sure through all of your communications and in particular through your pitch deck, that you are just putting to bed any niggling doubt that might be in an investor's mind that perhaps you're not commercial, perhaps you're not ambitious. And so that means things like bringing the financials and the commercials kind of much earlier on in the deck, making sure that the level of ambition is really, really clearly mapped out. And then something that we did pretty early on, for a long time, people would talk to us about kind of you girls with your project, so kind of really using language that wasn't really taking us that seriously or as seriously as we would like to be taken. And so bit of a turning point was when in our deck, I decided, let's have the first page be Sasha and myself, then underneath a each of us, a summary of the kind of logos of the respective places that we have studied. So Stanford MBA and where we've worked, McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group and American Express and JP Morgan and stuff like that, to really make sure that people kind of sat up and took us seriously. And we felt that really helped to set the tone for then the subsequent presentation that we went on to do. And then the other thing that we really did was. I've listened to it several times now, Dana Kanzi's talk, It's a TED Talk, which she's a university professor who analyzes the pitch process in particular, and how female founders and male founders have very different experience. And what she found was that female founders are asked what is referred to as prevention questions. That's all about the downside. You know, what happens if Facebook or Google come in and start competing against you, Whereas the male founders are asked what she refers to as promotion questions, which is all about the upside. How big can this be? How fast can you grow? What could you do with an extra million? And sort of, I guess the clue as to how you resolve that situation as a female founder is to always answer those prevention questions with a promotion response. And I can definitely attest to, as a female founder, it is just a barrage of prevention questions, male cynicism about sort of what you're doing and whether it will really work. And on the few occasions where I've had I have experience of that real sort of promotion questioning type environment, it's been an absolute joy and delight. I can remember sort of skipping home, saying, Sasha, oh, I. I understand why male founders enjoy fundraising. It's really fun when you get lots of promotion questions. So, yeah, and I should also say that the experience of female founders have, is very much in common with any founders of colour, any founders from diverse or different backgrounds. It's challenging for all of us and unfortunately not much is going to change until the gatekeepers of power are gender representative, ethnicity representative, socioeconomic representative, etc. And sadly, we're quite a long way off that.

So how long was it between your A and B investment rounds, Tessa?

I think our experience was fairly common in that we imagined we would do a seed round and then a Series A and then a Series B. And what we found each time was that we had a round sort of in between each of those rounds because we just weren't quite ready for that next round and we used, we thought very carefully about the language that we use for those rounds. So you definitely don't call them a bridging round or an extension round. That's a big sort of red flag. So we did our pre Series A and our post Series A. So yeah, language is a signal, so you've got to be very careful with everything you say.

And yeah, the reason I ask about the timing was based on the follow up question I wanted to ask, which was have you noticed any progress since through all the various funding rounds you've gone through, have you noticed that anything is checked? Not at all.

Not at all, no. So Sasha and I have been co founders of Olio for a decade. We have raised five rounds of financing. There has been absolutely zero progress in terms of the proportion of venture capital funding that goes to female founded businesses. So it's. And actually I think last year it went backwards. So it's always been roughly 2% of VC funding goes to female founded businesses, roughly 85% goes to male founded businesses. And the delta goes to mixed teams. So all of those office hours and sort of mentoring programs just are not working. And I'm absolutely convinced that the only thing that is going to budge this is when we have truly representative investment committees. Now the only thing that has changed over the past decade is that a number of the VC firms have made progress in terms of recruiting junior female investment professionals, which is great. But what we have found is that unfortunately it just elongates our fundraising process and we still don't get the money. Why is that? It's because the junior female investment professional completely understands the problem we're trying to solve. They're really authentically excited by our solution, our traction, our prospects. But then when they present internally to their investment committee, which is just the regular demographic of investment professional, they are then getting knocked back. And so we've just spent much longer working with that fund to still not get the money. And what's really quite concerning to see is that a lot of these young female investment professionals are now leaving the industry because it just gets exhausting for them to be constantly pushing a boulder up the hill, not getting their deals done. And so, yeah, they're going elsewhere.

So if we can recap that, particularly to help female founders, what would you say? And you've touched on some of these, so it probably will be a recap. But what would you say are three really strong pieces of advice you would give to female founders who are trying to raise investment?

I'd say watch the Dana Kanzi TED Talk about prevention versus promotion questions. I would think very carefully about every bit of signaling that you do, including the clothes that you wear and how you present yourself in the meetings and then do everything you can to counter those implicit and explicit biases that assume that you're not commercial, you're not ambitious.

Brilliant. Thank you, Tessa. A few quick fire questions to finish up. First one, what would you say is a book that has profoundly, significantly influenced your leadership approach at Olio?

Not sure if it's our leadership approach, but it's just sort of how we show up on do our work every day. I would say, without a doubt is Eric Ries's book the Lean Startup. We still even today, when I guess technically we're a scale up, we approach absolutely everything with that lean startup mentality, which is how can I get something into the hands of my customers as quickly as possible, no matter how crappy it is, and just start getting real feedback rather than sitting in an ivory tower designing something for months and months on end. So yeah, I would say the lean started.

And do you have a sort of leadership motto or core guiding principle that you like to keep front of mind as you build in the organization?

Gosh, it would be impossible to narrow it down to one, but sort of, I guess sayings that I am known for repeating within the organization are around, let's cross that bridge when we get to it. And then another one would be life is too short to be miserable. So we definitely take well being really seriously at Olio and actually a lot of the things that you do to make people happy and enjoy their job actually makes you build a far better performing business. So yeah, I'd say those two.

Yeah, brilliant. And link to that. One of the later episodes of this show we've got coming up is with Lord Mark Price, who is one of the former MDs at John Lewis and Waitrose for many, many years and he's spent an hour with me talking about that very thing. It's like happy, happy workers, happy colleagues just are much more productive and they've got so much data.

It's not rocket science.

But the nice thing is for the, for the skeptics through the organization he runs now called Work or he's got so much hard data that proves it and backs it up. So brilliant. What would you say has been one of the most successful failures or mistakes you've ever, ever made? And by that I mean something that on the surface looks to be a failure in inverted commas, but actually taught you a really powerful lesson.

What might be of interest is how we think about failure because it's not really a. Well, it's not at all a word that we use. At Olio there kind of almost isn't such a thing as a failure. We are just constantly moving quickly and just constantly learning. And you know, the quicker you fail, the more you learn. And the more you learn, the faster you get to where you want to be. And I'm also just a kind of a big believer of karma. Right. And just fate and sort of everything happens for a reason. So I do make sure that we always take the learnings from when things don't always go our way. But we definitely don't dwell or obsess upon sort of anything in particular. I guess if I had to dial back and kind of look over 10 years worth of Olio, I mean, I would say that perhaps Sasha and I were too idealistic for too long and we thought, and, and this is perhaps not unusual. I think a lot of founders think that, well, businesses should do this or people should do that because that's the right thing to do, or that's logical thing to do, or that's a rational thing to do, or that's a thing that's good for communities or good for the planet. But no one ever does anything that they should do. And the sooner you can kind of almost sort of set aside your idealism and just get really gritty and practical and meet people where they really are and use language that really resonates with them, the faster you will get real traction and progress.

Yeah, it reminds me of going to the dental hygienist and being told that you really should floss your teeth. Like, we know we should do it, but how many of us do we should?

Yeah, exactly.

And final question, Tessa. Is there a particular unique habit or routine or something that you do in order to sort of maintain your energy, play at your best that kind of listeners might find interesting or slightly unusual?

Well, I don't know if it's either interesting or unusual, but it works really well, which is that I don't have any meetings or sit down at my desk until 10 or 10:30 in the mornings. And that is because after taking the kids to school, that sort of hour, hour and a half is my most valuable time. That is when I'm exercising, preferably outdoors, maybe listening to a podcast. That's when I do all of my sort of well being work. But it's also when I get all of my breakthroughs. I have my best creative thinking, my best strategic thinking. So I've gone from feeling really guilty about this because it doesn't look like I'm working to actually feeling really proud of it and ring fencing that time as the most precious time of the day. And it just sets you up for success for the rest of the day.

I love that. And just before we go, seeing as you mentioned it, I'm just gonna share something with you and listeners that might help those other people who are like you in the past when you, when you felt felt guilty about it. This is one of the most fascinating things I've probably learned in the last five years, certainly. But if you think about how our brain works, as humans, we use different networks in the brain to complete different tasks, right? And there's one brain network called the Central Executive Network. And it's the network most of us who are knowledge workers working in the office environment use most of the day. It's the network of the brain that we use for decision making and analysis, problem solving. And it's really really important. And we tend to think of it as being sort of task orientated or task focused. Then there's another network of the brain that's called the default mode network. And it's called default mode network because sort of as soon as consultant neuroscientists had access to brain scanners, one of the questions they wanted to answer or ask is what's the brain doing when it's not doing anything? And the answer is it sort of goes into this default mode. And we come to learn that the default mode network is where creativity comes from. Not just painting or dance or something like that. It's creative problem solving. It's also where we make sense of our emotions and other people. So team dynamics. And we can think of the default mode network as being tasked negative because it gets activated when we're not consciously doing anything. Now here's the amazing thing that it's like a toggle switch between the two so they can't both be turned on at the same time. So when the central executive network is active, the default mode network is off. So to you, what you said, that's where you get your best ideas. Ask anybody where they are when they get their best ideas or the sudden breakthroughs. It's when they're not consciously thinking about them. It's when you go into default mode. So for most people it's walking the dog on the same route. It could be the commute to work, it could be swimming lengths in the swimming pool where you literally are on autopilot. You don't need to think about it. So like I think of that now as leadership time. It's not something to feel guilty about or something bad like especially as leaders. It's what we're paid to do. So if we are not, we don't allow ourselves to drop into that brain network. We're not allowing us to use our full potential at work. So I love the fact that you've got that as well.

Thank you for giving me the science to justify what I've sort of intuitively found works really well. And I, I do believe that actually it's the most valuable time for Olio is where I get actually the highest ROI on my time even though I'm not working.

So you are.

Yeah.

But you are subconsciously.

Yeah. 100.

Tessa, thank you so much for joining me on the show. It's been great to have you back on, on the new show and there's so much gold dust in what you shared that I know listeners are really going to appreciate so thank you very much indeed. Great.

Thank you.

That's it for today's episode, and huge thanks once again to Tessa for such a candid and insightful conversation. If you did take value from this episode, please do follow the show and share it with your network. And finally, if you're serious about leading through growth and change, make sure you do check out my Leadership Capability Scorecard. It's a free tool that helps you assess your organization's leadership capability across nine key areas. Just head to the link in the show notes. Thanks for listening. And until next time, lead on.