10 Things I Learnt from the Daring and Disruptive Lisa Messenger
For the last few years I have admired Lisa Messenger’s entrepreneurial spirit, being an avid reader of the Collective Magazine and her books.
When an opportunity emerged to hear her speak through my friend Bel and a Flight Centre Business Travel ‘Women in Business’ event I was very excited.
Lisa certainly didn’t disappoint with an authentic sharing of her entrepreneurial journey so far.
Very timely for me as I look to build my LaunchPad Media business – more on this to come!
Here’s what I learnt from Lisa:
- Follow your purpose – Lisa shared the guiding purpose for the Collective Hub has been ‘Ignite Human Potential” – Once you find your why and what to do with it, anything is possible!
- Outsource as much as you can – One of my favourite sayings from my entrepreneurial aunty is ‘hireable skill’. Lisa paid forward that she isn’t great at detail and organising and outsources this to her awesome team. I know an area of weakness for me is financials which I’ll be looking to outsource!
- Work, life “blend” versus balance – Lisa said when you love what you do it blends into your life versus having work life balance. When I shared my recent decision to build LaunchPad Media with a business owner I admire he said “You’ll no longer have any work-life balance as when it’s your business you’re always on, but it won’t feel like work when living your passion and the flexibility with your family will be great.” Work-life blend J
- Be lean and proud – I was inspired to hear Lisa be really proud of her lean staff base and big network of freelancers. In a traditional sense this may not seem like success but is the modern, agile way! From my work with the awesome SWOOP Analytics team I have learnt about the power of this and will look to take this forward with LaunchPad Media.
- Test, iterate, test – See what the market wants by asking them and then test and iterate. Lisa shared a real example of asking her twitter followers if they were interested in a digital course the Collective Hub could run which then sold out in 20 minutes!
- Make it easy for people to say yes – Lisa told the story of how she made it easy for Sir Richard Branson to say yes to her Necker Island pitch by keeping it simple and offering to send a box of Collective mags there every month knowing the influence this could have – read more about this in her blog ‘How I got Richard Branson to say ‘YES'” – (Thoughts with Richard and the Necker Island community after it was devastated by Hurricane Irma – you can donate to support the community here).
- Everything in life is a two way energy exchange – Give and receive, don’t just look for gain were Lisa’s wise words. One of her partnership approaches which helped build the Collective Hub is the question; If we remove money as the currency – what can we trade? This reminded me of an article I wrote on the Barter Economy.
- Don’t think everything has to be linear – Lisa recommended us taking our skill sets and looking outside our industries to keep developing. When she launched the Collective Magazine she had no prior magazine experience and utilised her transferable skills from her previous ventures including event management and book publishing.
- We’re only responsible for ourselves – Lisa shared she’s never felt ‘less than’ for being a woman in business. When asked a question about female sabotage in the workplace she said try to be the bigger person and that we’re only responsible for ourselves.
- Human connection is the most important thing – When Lisa was asked about her inspirations she said that until she meets someone she doesn’t get too attached to them and that we are all equal. Some of the most extraordinary people she’s met are making it up along the way J
To finish, a paragraph from Lisa’s ‘Daring and Disruptive’ book which really resonated with me:
“To succeed in business – hell, to succeed in anything in life – you must have unwavering, insatiable, tenacious self-belief. You have to be able to back yourself’ to harbour that kind of unbridled passion for winning that will stop at nothing until you reach your goals.”
Thanks Lisa for sharing your lessons with us, I look forward to reading your new book ‘Purpose’ which is available for pre-order here.
Image Citations: https://collectivehub.com/lisa-messenger/ and https://collectivehub.com/product/Purpose
Dani Matthews 
Thanks Dani – I love the Collective Hub magazine which was a gift from a colleague last Christmas. I read every article avidly and it’s great to hear that Lisa Messenger is as inspiring in person as she is in print!
Thanks Monica – wonderful to hear you’re a Collective Hub magazine fan too!