Cal Stephens, Noosa, Episode 57 (Transcript)

Susan Dunlop: Welcome to Episode 57 of Coffee and Contemplation with Susan. Hello, I’m Susan Dunlop. If this is the first time you’ve joined me, welcome. And if you’ve tuned in before, thank you for coming back.

People passionate about what they deliver to the world intrigue me and make me want to know what, how and why they do what they do.

I choose to surround myself with people who set magnificent visions and take risks to do good things in service of others and a kindhearted purposeful, and wise, be it in service or in the books they’ve written. They change lives, including their own.

Guests joining me on the Coffee and Contemplation podcast share their personal stories with vulnerability, for the benefit of others, and are people with professional or experiential knowledge of the theme of each episode.

For the first 40 episodes, I followed the advice of Russell Brunson. He said, start recording tomorrow; just start. And when you get to 40 episodes, go back and listen to the first recording don’t ever delete it and just see how far you’ve come. That and my post-it note motto, I applied to my very first coaching session as well, which was first is worst, dare to suck. It’s been about taking baby steps all the way.

Today’s guest is Cal Stevens who lives close by to me at sunrise beach here on the sunshine coast, just outside of Noosa, whom I will welcome in just a moment.

Cal and I found ourselves on a road trip to the gold coast a month back. We didn’t know each other, but a mutual friend invited us both to join her in the audience of a new TV show. I offered to drive. I picked up our friend, Nikki, and then navigated and talked our way to find Cal at a bus station in Southern Brisbane. Cal just jumped into the back seat, started talking and the conversation flowed, and it was a day of conversation and inspiration, energy, thought provoking ideas that I’d never thought before for myself. We shared back and forth. All I had to do was remember to keep my eyes on the road!

Cal’s business is unique in its model. The kind of service it delivers is about setting up young people for independence. It is about care and it touches the lives of many more people than just the young people that Cal and her team serve.

Cal’s business is Edna’s Life Skills. Today. We’re going to talk about Edna, Cal and where the business idea came about and where to from here.

Welcome, Cal. I’m looking forward to our conversation today.

Cal Stephens: What a great intro. Thank you, Susan. I’m really looking forward to having a chat today.

Susan Dunlop: It’s our first big conversation after the road trip. So I’d love to find out a little bit more about how all this idea came about. Maybe we’ll start with the moment of your first inkling about establishing Edna’s life skills. Would you like to do that?

Cal Stephens: Yeah that’d be great. Like a lot of people in 2020, when COVID hit our shores, I was feeling very rattled and as a mother and a wife and a business woman working in the financial services industry, it took its toll on me and within two weeks of the lockdown that we had here in Queensland, I resigned from my job. I had the support and blessing from my family to put us into poverty, inverted commas, but to let go of my income was a big security factor for me. I’m not used to being supported.

Financially I’ve always tried to make my own way in the world. To give up my job and step back into parenting and housewife-ism was a real challenge at that time. I think it took me 48 hours to get into the swing of things and I just absolutely loved being back at home.

What I’d given up and what I’d dreaded giving up was actually so easy to get rid of and flick off. I shed it like I threw a coat off. It was amazing.

But once everybody went back to school and life returned to some normality here, I found myself a little lost because I was so used to being a doer. I helped some friends take their children to school that were having trouble getting back into the swing of things. From there, I did some cooking with them, some homework, and one of my friends said to me, I can pay you through NDIS. I said to her what’s NDIS and she said, it’s the national disability insurance scheme. And I went, oh yeah, I’ve heard of that. I’ve heard of that. I said but, I’m not qualified. There’s no way I could actually do that. And she said to me, you don’t have to be qualified. It’s standard support. You can, if you’ve got an ABN. You can provide support to my son and I can pay you.

I was flabbergasted to be honest. So I helped my friends and their children for a little while and as I did that I realised there was a massive gap in NDIS and what services were being provided. A lot of support was around young people getting the support to go out into the community and do chores or life skills at home.

There wasn’t a lot being done around financial literacy and with my background in financial literacy, I thought, wow, there’s an opportunity to help teach coach young people within the NDIS framework to be more responsible about, or aware about, their finances.

Susan Dunlop: Wow. It’s even bigger than that. I think for any child… we’ve learned from our parents how to manage money and whether that’s a good lesson or a bad lesson… more often, I think it’s a latter, isn’t it?

Cal Stephens: Yeah.There’s an old book from the eighties called rich dad, poor dad and it certainly is one of those books that resonates in any decade. If you’re sitting around the table and you are learning from experienced financial parents then as a child, you’ve got so much of a head start, but if you have a disability, a learning disability, or an inability to count or understand numbers, it’s even more difficult.

It doesn’t matter your socioeconomic background or where you come from. No, it’s that inability to learn. So it’s trying to break it down individually to the client to help them understand that when they put a card over or cash over that it means something.

Susan Dunlop: I understand that. That there’s a greater depth than, as you said, just putting the card towards something, understanding that your bank account’s attached to that and how much money you’ve got left in the account and all that type of stuff.

Cal Stephens: Absolutely.

Susan Dunlop: The simple stuff that you don’t realise is not so simple for everyone.

Cal Stephens: Often, we start off with less than greater than. So that they can round up to five or 10. It’s grade three style maths. Now some of my clients are well and truly ahead of that, and they’re doing full on budgeting, they’re living at home or living independently.

There’s a whole host of full on budgeting that goes into play there with bills and income that sort of thing, but others, it’s just a very simple approach to an allowance and what they budget for in the week ahead and what they actually spend.

Susan Dunlop: So in terms of your business being called Edna’s Life Skills, life skills, we’ll start there, because I want to find out about Edna as well, but the life skills you are talking about is this financial aspect. Are there more life skills than that or is this the core of it?

Cal Stephens: The business actually now does way more than that, the germ of the idea was around financial literacy and I teach it via cooking predominantly. Our sessions are around meal planning, and understanding the budgeting aspect of that. Trying to find cheap ways to feed ourselves. We’re all in that boat right now. Things are expensive and if you’re on a pension the idea of using meat every meal is just not an option.

So coming up with really cheap recipes that are simple, that I can teach them to cook, but also to plan that ahead. So if you’re roasting pumpkin, you’re making a soup, that you might be turning it into a salad.

There’s a whole host of simple rules that we try and teach around shopping, going to the supermarket and identifying that one onion is more expensive than a bag of onions and that onions can sit in your drawer for months, as long as it’s dark. Same with potatoes. So just teaching them what needs to be a used-by date and what can be bought bulk.

Susan Dunlop: And it is the core to any household anyway, isn’t it, getting nourishing food into the body.

Cal Stephens: Exactly. That first meal that I cook with a client and they put on the table, I get such beautiful comments back from families, not just saying how rewarded they felt to have their son or daughter cook for them, but also how proud my client was and that’s worth a million bucks!

Susan Dunlop: So you’ve taken quite a different approach. I looked at your website and I think also the person that did the logo for you for Edna. I think it was him who said something about you’ve pulled together a team of professional mentors and life coaches to support and guide young people. And I thought, oh, so it’s a life coaching type of service, but it’s not, you’re quite different, aren’t you?

Cal Stephens: I call us life skills coaches because I didn’t want to be seen as a support person. I wanted to differentiate what support is. So we’re not just hanging around having cups of coffee or taking people for walks.

Every session has a focus. Has a plan. Every quarter we review goals. I’ve applied a business model that’s similar to financial planning. I report every week on our clients back to parents, because sometimes the parents are in the home and they see what we are doing but other times they’re out to work.

The young adult, they’re 19 to 30, still living at home predominantly, and they’re learning these skills and I want the parents to understand what we are doing with the client or their child. We do a report every week with these goals with reviews and what I find is a high level of engagement because we’re not babysitting, hence why I’ve called us life skills coaches, because I’m employing people that aren’t necessarily qualified in disability support or have a certificate three in individual support.

I’m employing people that have got experience. I have two chefs on my staff. I have two event managers. I have a retired metal worker. We call him grandpa. He’s 70 years of age, ran his own business and he loves motorbikes. He had a metal work business.

His value to my clients is astronomical because he can touch areas of knowledge and support that potentially younger people can’t. He has a wisdom and an authority because he’s mature. If you had said to him when he was 30, that he would end up supporting young people with autism I would say he would’ve never ever have thought that, but he was referred to me by another employee, which is how I get all of my staff.

They’re all word-of-mouth referrals. They come to me with a skill set and often I’m looking for a specific skill set to match a client because if I interview a client and I find out they want to play chess or they like analytical things like trains or something, I go and look for a support person that has a similar interest. sometimes also on the spectrum.

Susan Dunlop: I like it. Wow. So let’s go to Edna. Where’s Edna from?

Cal Stephens: Oh, Edna. It’s a big story. Strap yourself in.

Edna’s my mum and she’s, she was, amazing. She was a 1950s housewife. She was a seamstress. She used to do preserves. We had our own veggie garden. We were self-sufficient. She milked cows, made butter, skimmed cream. Everything we had at home until probably the eighties was made from the farm.

She made most of my clothes. She knitted, she tatted, she crafted she was just bloody amazing. And I didn’t realise how amazing until I got into the workforce and then had a child and realised the skills that I had to manage a house and be resourceful. I created a cottage business called clothes for dolls earlier on while my child was little so that I could work from home and I had a break from financial services.

All the things mum had taught me whilst I thought I was just working like a slave on the farm, with my mum. I wasn’t the slave, she was teaching me all of these amazing skills.

On a Monday, mum would make stock that she would turn into stews or soups or something the next day. Wednesday might be bread day. It was like our whole food and life revolved, every day, we rolled from one to another

She was an amazing cook.

She did a bit of acting on the stage.

My dad and my mom were the debutante teachers in a small environment called Newland where we grew up. And dad was part of the footy club. They trained all the debutants and they did it for, I don’t know, 50 years.

Mum was really well known in the district. Every generation knew her and consequently, when she passed away, we had over 350 people at her funeral, it was phenomenal and they weren’t middle-aged or old people. They were young people too. She touched so many lives.

I took all of these skills and I’m starting to teach young people with disabilities. I didn’t have a business name. It was just me. I was doing it for about six months on my own. And then I realised that this was something I needed to teach others to do and I needed to take mum’s skills and display them in a corporate fashion so that other people could benefit from it.

So we tossed around a few names and Edna’s Life Skills came up and I went to Patch Creative and asked them to build me a Life Be In It type character, from The Simpsons, or Life Be In It, type character that would enhance what Edna was and is in a 1950s modern day setting. And they came up with our logo, which I’m extremely proud of. I think she’s gorgeous.

Susan Dunlop: She’s sweet. I love her.

Cal Stephens: She’s fun! In our reports for the clients I receive from my support staff, who do an enormous amount of work outside the support hours they work, they write about something good, which is normally what they’ve done in their session. Something funny and something to work on, which it’s either their skills or the skills they’d like to work on with the client because being self reflective is really important and having something funny that they have to report on means that you’ve always got to have a focus at some point that your session has to be fun.

Like you do have sessions that are really hard and deep and not fun, in a sense of sharing something funny, but it’s really important that most of the sessions are fun. That we’re engaging and enjoying ourselves and the minute we’re not enjoying ourselves, we need to address what’s going on.

Susan Dunlop: And laughter is such a tonic. It is so lovely that you brought Edna’s legacy through. God, I could imagine you could expand on it massively in all kinds of ways with that much experience on the farm that you learn.

Cal Stephens: It’s incredible.

Susan Dunlop: So you’ve come to a startup stage of a business after leaving your industry. I know in any type of business there’ll be certifications, standards and all of that, that you would be required to have. And the NDIS I imagine is more than just the ABN. How did you go with all of that, finding all of that out?

Cal Stephens: When I started, there was absolutely nothing that you needed to have other than an ABN but having done some business coaching in financial services with financial planning practices, I decided to model my business on theirs. I went out and got some basic insurance in the beginning and then as I corporatised and started employing people, I reviewed the insurance and realised it didn’t cover me.

That was probably my first business heart stopper. You have lots of heart stopper moments in business where you wake up in the middle of the night and go, oh, gee, am I doing this right? Or you question what’s going on.

But my insurance was absolutely one of those moments that could have stopped Edna’s Life Skills for two reasons: one is NDIS was going through an enormous amount of claims and Zurich, their underlying insurer for Mabel, which is a support service online that matches participants to support workers, was having an enormous amount of claims. And I could see that there would be changes to the industry and changes coming really quickly.

If we didn’t build a business that was compliant and had the procedures in place and had reports, et cetera, then we would end up as a small provider being out of business.

The larger organisations, have all those rigours in place, but small independent organisations or one-man bands, don’t.

So I wanted to set up this small business with the rigours of a large business so that we, if we needed to, with the changes of NDIS, that came in gradually over the last 18 months, where we needed to do online training, et cetera, would be in the right place positioned well ahead of the curve.

That’s the plan.

So the insurance, no one wanted to insure me. I couldn’t even find a broker to return my call. Eventually, I got a broker in Brisbane, Matt, who had two clients that were in NDIS businesses much larger than mine. And he said to me, I will chase down some insurance for you, but it meant I had a meeting with an underwriter to explain to him that we were doing standard support, that we weren’t washing people, providing medication. The sorts of levels of support that the larger organisations that are registered do, and that we were basically life skills coaching. We were doing it within the NDIS framework, helping people learn how to do chores, helping them shop, helping them learn how to manage their own homes, plan meals, et cetera. So eventually when I sat with the underwriter on the phone, going through all of my procedures, all of my codes of conduct, privacy statements, all of the rigours I had around my business, he said to me, yes, he would insure me, but I wasn’t allowed to promote my business. I made an agreement with him that I would be word-of-mouth only and that I wouldn’t advertise.

Susan Dunlop: Oh, really? Why is that?

Cal Stephens: Because if I went out to the marketplace and advertised myself, clients that come in, I might not know. And I convinced him that a level of comfort around us doing business would be word-of-mouth referrals.

So people that come to me are people that are either friends of existing clients or other allied health professionals, such as psychologists, speech therapists, or neurologists. They come to me vetted and I know things about them. I can then accept all the client based on whether I think we’re the right fit for them. I work with and I refer to other organisations on the coast here, Above and Beyond, Craft, Independent Living, NAO Caring, because I can’t provide the level of support or service for everybody.

It’s really important to understand who my client is and for those I can’t support I know that I can refer them to amazing businesses within a 20-kilometre radius that have great people who work for them.

Susan Dunlop: It’s a dream really in a way. Everyone dreams of having word-of-mouth referrals, as where you’re going to go with your business, rather than having to market yourself. But that’s actually an essential part of your business. That’s making it a safe business to operate.

Cal Stephens: Yeah, it is, and I’m itching because the business development side of my skillset hasn’t had a run for a while and I am itching to actually take the business and grow it. But I’m frightened as well that we might lose what we have is a real essence of who we are, that we’re small, we’re personal.

How do I… that’s my challenge now, how do I take that group of wonderful life skills coaches that I’ve got and how do we replicate perhaps in another marketplace, like Gympie or Maroochydore? How do we do what we’ve done here?

I think it’s a franchise model. I don’t want to lose what we have here because of our relationships in the community with our clients, we’re all family.

I give permission for my staff to fall in love with the client. Now that might sound really weird, but we are in people’s homes. We’re with them every second day, week in, week out, we know what’s going on in those families. We know what’s going on with that client and it would be wrong if we didn’t love and respect them.

Susan Dunlop: I think you’re a heart centered type of woman and heart centered business. And I know also, obviously you’re saying that with professional boundaries applied to loving your clients as well. I get there’s that, but I think if you did it without that care, it would just be shallow, skirting the surface of people’s lives. And that’s probably what the problem is anyway, with life skills, isn’t it that people have had to skirt the surface and they’ve missed out on all this depth that you had with your mother.

How about we talk about wins? Have you had any beautiful wins then that have made you realise that you are making a positive impact?

Cal Stephens: Weekly, daily. It’s just, it’s amazing, Susan. I can’t tell you, like I come home from work after a support session and 99.9% of the time, I feel the most incredible cathartic experience. Like I come through the door and I feel just blissfully happy. And that sounds weird, but it’s exactly how I feel, amazing.

Then I have awesome support workers, employees who ring me and say, oh, you’ll never guess what happened today. And it’s not just about perhaps the participant. It might be about a family.

We’ve recently, just eight weeks ago, had a new client come on board. And the first support session, the life skills coach rang me. He said there’s more going on here in the family that needs support than just our client. Can I have permission to work with the other sibling? And I said I’ll contact the mother, but I’m sure it’ll be fine. What are you thinking? And he said, oh, I think he’s lacking in confidence and he needs a job. I said, okay, off you go. So within two weeks… and twice a week, he’s in their home. Within two weeks, he’d identified the sibling’s needs.

This is all free. He’s doing it off his own bat because he cares, the support worker, the life skills coach found an area of employment that he thought the young fellow would enjoy. He took him out the next week to introduce him to the organisation, explained to him what potentially might be a job on the way home in the car, blew this young fellow’s mind. Then the next week they interviewed for the job. The week after he started.

That young man’s confidence has gone from sitting in the lounge room chair beating himself up that he was not any good at anything to walking on cloud nine.

He’s ready to date. This young man, he’s now coming to our social group that we run and it’s just, I just can’t tell you… these are what my staff do. They go above and beyond to find a solution for a family. The client’s just one aspect. It’s a family that share this and most of our families go without, because they put all of their energy, either financial or emotional into the child that is on the spectrum or disabled or whatever.

And so to be able to give to another sibling in that environment, like that was a huge win.

Susan Dunlop: Having to be responsible all the time, for the parent, that’s an overwhelming responsibility. I think that can wipe you out a little bit too, that you can’t see the forest for the trees.

Cal Stephens: Absolutely. To see that someone else might have needed something. That’s amazing. Getting himself up to a dating stage. Edna’ s Tinder? I don’t know, what would my insurance company think?

Susan Dunlop: Yes that is you going a bit public. Have you ever felt like packing it all in?

Cal Stephens: Oh, hell yeah. Hell yeah. Just recently, actually 18 months into the business, probably over the first six month hurdle of COVID where I had all of the staff in their right positions with their right clients. No one was sick and my whole body just stopped. I had carer’s fatigue because it had been such a massive six months. I hit the wall. I just emotionally hit the wall and I also had a client trigger me with memories from the past that were really hurtful. And I knew I needed to take a break from being in a client’s space. I was lucky enough at that time that nobody was sick and I was able to step out and have my shifts covered.

We always have a team of people in play and we’re not relying upon one person with one client and I was able to step back out of it and go and have some time for myself to think about what Edna’s Life Skills meant.

I’m not making a great deal of money out of this. I’m working seven days a week and I was like, do I continue. Is this my charity. Should I be looking at making it a viable, profitable business to pay myself a decent wage or is the good I’m doing both with employment, life skills coaches, clients, families, is that my purpose, is that my meaning? So I had a lot of soul searching and got to a point where I thought I needed to go and talk to someone.

I started down the psychological path of having a chat, because I needed to understand whether my need for caring was about only me and what I needed to do to make myself feel good. Sometimes at the detriment of my wonderful family, my own family. Bain and Ally support me 120% because they love what I’m doing. They love the impact I’m having. And of course they hear daily stories, but they also could see the wear and tear on me as a carer and carer fatigue. I’ve only been at it 18 months, but I’m giving my heart and soul.

Some clients step on you. I’m not going to tell you that all of my clients love me. I have a couple of clients that don’t for some reason or other, that’s hard to take when you can never do anything right by them yet, you’re giving them your all. I’m not protecting myself.

Going down the path to talk to someone is about acknowledging that for a long time I was my mum’s carer and then my mother-in-law’s carer, and both of them passed within a year of one another just before COVID. My mother-in-law, who was the light of my life, she was my champion. I bloody loved her. When she passed away, I felt so grief stricken, that the reason that I was put on earth was to care for them and they weren’t here.

So I switched my business from leaving financial services, to jumping straight into a caring role and looking after 30 clients.

Susan Dunlop: It’s interesting. Because, and thank you for sharing that, because I think a lot of people in the type of service that you are offering, whether it be nursing or in the type of skills that you’re training in, we definitely all get touched by, and I think I shared with you before, the drama triangle roles?

Cal Stephens: Yes.

Susan Dunlop: That we run through the human default drama triangle roles, and they’re the victim, persecutor and rescuer.

Cal Stephens: Yes.

Susan Dunlop: I know even in coaching, it was very easy to see straight up that I went into rescuer mode. For you, it’s carer mode. I’m going to fix the world. I’m going to make everything right for everyone but it just takes all your own energy and it blurs…

Cal Stephens: oh, I make myself giddy flipping backwards and forwards between those two, carer and problem solver.

Susan Dunlop: In that space, you’ve given yourself. that space to stop and breathe, and obviously, it’s great that you’ve gone to have someone to speak to about it because it’ll just make your business then have a stronger base to grow from once you actually understand where you are coming from.

Cal Stephens: Absolutely.

Susan Dunlop: And do you need to drop some part of that part of you and pick up on all your other strengths that are the other part of you?

Cal Stephens: So if the business wants to have longevity I know I have to move to leader and not carer. And the carer part of it gives me all the warm, fuzzy, wuzzy awesomeness, but it also exhausts me.

So yeah, I know that this is such a necessary part of people’s lives and there’s not a lot of people doing it and I have a skill set I can share that I need to stop being the carer and I need to step forward and be the leader of my business.

Susan Dunlop: And the alternative beautiful roles to the drama triangle, which is the stuff that I’m training people in, it’s the new way of saying leadership is that we need to adopt the alternative roles, say from victim you become the creator; from rescuer you become a coach; and from persecutor you become a challenger.

And if you can adopt all three of those roles and practice them as a leader that’s where your business will boom. Because it’s you caring about your people and your clients on a different level. It’s just amazing to see the shift in high-level CEOs who are all about money. And they say, I can’t believe how much easier it is to have conversations when I’m coming from the coach aspect or to co-create with someone, we know we can make something happen, it’s just beautiful. That’s where you sound like you’re shifting to.

Cal Stephens: Yeah. And I think if the business, if Edna’s Life Skills wants to continue I need to be able to replicate it in a way that I can. I’ve been able now to coach 15 people. We have a mentoring business too, which is young people nine to 13, where I have other amazing young people that I normally recruit from the surf club at sunshine.

These young people who are surf life competitors, they do volunteer work on the weekend, patrolling our beaches. And I recruit them to come and work with our younger clients who might have autism or processing disorders or some sort of disability. That means that they find it difficult to communicate with others and so we put young people with these young people. It’s incredible now those mentors that I employ, they’re amazing. But man, they suck up a lot of times but it’s really rewarding. It’s really rewarding.

Susan Dunlop: Gosh, you’ve got a few aspects of you haven’t you?

Cal Stephens: It’s amazing. They are incredibly rewarding. And once I have them on and running and look at what they can achieve with young people, giving them confidence. Once again, it’s all goal set. We deal with a lot of homeschool children. So part of it’s about just getting the child away from mum and dad so that mum and dad don’t kill them. But most of it’s around creating some sort of capacity building aspect to their life.

Susan Dunlop: Ah, what a woman! Goodness, me.

Cal Stephens: I felt so tired just talking about it.

Susan Dunlop: I was just thinking, oh my gosh, so that carer role that you’re in, it’s letting go of that in a way to let you lead this thing to be… what is your ultimate vision for it?

Cal Stephens: I don’t know because we’re 18 months in and we’ve surpassed what I thought we’d achieve. If you had said to me that we were going to have 30 clients and I’d have 15 staff when I started this 18 months ago, I would’ve said not a chance because we couldn’t advertise or anything like that.

So I just underestimated word-of-mouth in a small community. We’ve plateaued. We haven’t had a new client for eight weeks. It’s just so unusual. But that eight weeks came with the same period of time where I took some time for myself to sit back and go, okay, how do I, what do I want, how do I manage Edna’s Life Skills?

Do I want to be the leader or do I want to be the carer and continue to work in the business? And I think there’s too many people that need the skills that Ednas has to continue in the carer role. I need to be a leader.

Susan Dunlop: And I’ve seen so many business owners make that shift and it’s an uncomfortable space too, to work your way through. Any business is a living, breathing organism and there is a life cycle. Infancy, there’s toddler, teen, adult, and you’ll see what you’ve got in place at each stage. As you work through those, you’ll go now I’m up to nearly becoming a teenager. So what do I need to do to make the company become adult and fully mature?

Otherwise if you’ve got confusion around all that sort of space, it takes a lot of energy from you. If it’s only physical and emotional energy, without a real vision to tap back into. That’s the part where I see people start to fall apart and get distracted and come up with new ideas and shiny sparkly objects syndrome. I’d been there, done that myself, but just establishing your WHY is so important.

Cal Stephens: And I think if I was going to give somebody advice, if they were thinking about coming into the NDIS space, or any new business, paying the money for a coach. I’ve had a business coach since day one.

Susan Dunlop: Oh, that’s good.

Cal Stephens: Before we named Edna’s and before we corporatised. It meant I was accountable to someone every week. His name is Michael Hunt and he’s a local guy. We patrol together. He rescued me in the surf when I was doing my SRC surf rescue certificate, because I can’t swim very well and I decided I wanted to be a lifesaver…. ridiculous.

I’m very good eyes on the beach. That’s my job. But I give restaurant and tourism advice. Actually, people come up and constantly they go, what do you do as a surf lifesaver? I give restaurant and tourism advice, I don’t save any lives. This is a good restaurant. This is a great restaurant. What do you like to eat? So he’s an amazing man and he’s just been so incredibly supportive to me personally, but also challenging me in the business.

We’d meet with my husband once a week, because the business was growing so quickly and so fast in the initial sort of first eight to nine months. The goals would change or the direction would change. And I would have to update Bain my husband because he’s my business partner. He signs off on all the cheques. He’s responsible as well, whilst he’s a silent person in the business. He still has his name in the business. So I just wanted him to know where we were at each week.

That was just amazing to be able to have a guide was very good. And now we’re down to seeing each other once a month, probably about to ramp that up again to weekly as we redefine.

We’ve got our first full financial year of data to have a look at, so we can start looking analytically at the business, from a business perspective, what does our client look like? What are all the things they have in common? I think I know, but do I really?

So I plan to unpack it all, bare it all. And then we will build it back up again, and it should look similar with a version of how we grow it, how we move it forward without losing the intimacy and that love that we offer.

Susan Dunlop: It sounds like Edna’s in good hands.

Cal Stephens: Yeah. I hope so.

Susan Dunlop: I know we did the same thing. We had an independent director back in the days when I’d be sitting at the dining table with my slippers on when our nursing agency was growing. And my husband, Tom, he was an independent director as well. So it just kept us, it keeps you honest, doesn’t it? It just makes you tune in enough so you can keep moving forward with purpose.

Cal Stephens: I’m lucky enough to have made great friends now with above and beyond craft, independent living, NAO caring, being able to go out and find my clients had other relationships and then go and meet those other caring relationships and say, Hey, this is what we do. We are here to refer clients to you because you do something completely different.

Susan Dunlop: Quite the puzzle piecing together.

Cal Stephens: It means that we can support a whole client. If I’ve got a client that’s looking to move out and live independently and I can’t begin to do that, that’s a whole skill that someone else has.

Susan Dunlop: You don’t need to be the jack of all trades, master of none. In terms of About You, you’ve had that space to stop. How do you give yourself time around this business? Do you give yourself much time on a regular basis?

Cal Stephens: It’s been pretty all consuming. This year I’ve employed a trainee and Abby came on and she’s taken in the last probably eight weeks to 10 weeks, she’s taken an enormous amount of work off me. That sharing in the load has given me once again, that opportunity to be introspective. So having a look at me and how I’m coping. Like I was a hamster on a wheel and I jumped off the wheel and had a look around and went, okay, I need to do some work on myself. This is not good.

Abby’s coming into the business has been awesome because I don’t feel like I’m trudging along on my own. I’ve got this brilliant young woman who I shoot information to and she comes back and she goes, yes, for the business, I think you should do this and this. And I’m like, oh my God, I love that.

Susan Dunlop: oh, bless you. Bless you Abby.

Cal Stephens: She’s totally invested. She goes out and supports a young girl who’s 10 years of age and they’re a perfect match for each other. The parents just absolutely love Abby in their home, whether she’s there after hours doing some babysitting or whether she’s there doing support, taking the young girl out for a support session. They’re just perfectly fitted and she’s a great kid and I’m happy. I’m really lucky to have it that has allowed me to have some space.

I think probably yoga and PT. I have to actually go. I can never do it here in the lounge room. I have to actually have an appointment and be responsible and accountable and go to someone because just me tuning into a YouTube, I will put that off because there will be a million and one things I need to do for the business or to help run the family or things that I would do instead of looking after me.

Susan Dunlop: It is that time off, isn’t it, the time away from the tools that give you better thinking space too.

Cal Stephens: The other thing is I’ve got a really beautiful bunch of friends in three sort of different circles and amazing women. Like all of them are amazing women. And I just feel so grateful to have ended up here in Noosa and have met these women through my child. They’re all mums. I look forward to going into the next phase of my life and retirement and having this network, this community around me.

Susan Dunlop: So retirement?

Cal Stephens: One day, 75, I’m going to work until I’m 75.

Susan Dunlop: Cool. You are having these conversations now with your coach and your husband and it gives you a map to work towards.

Cal Stephens: So as long as I keep nurturing myself and take breaks and have the energy, there’s no reason why I can’t have that mindset. I want to work. I can’t imagine not working. I think the wisdom that we have in those life experiences, I just know with my coaching of the staff, it’s the stuff that I’ve experienced. Not necessarily as a carer, because I’m very new into this space. I’ve got people that work for me that are way more experienced in the carer role, but it’s the parenting role or the family role or other life skills that we’ve learned.

Susan Dunlop: The wise woman.

We’re coming towards the end. How quick was that?

Cal Stephens: I know. So there you go. Gee, hope someone listens to the end because the end’s going to be brilliant.

Susan Dunlop: What is your favourite sing out loud song in the car?

Cal Stephens: Oh. Right now having seen the Elvis movie, it would have to be in the ghetto. It’s always a song that I loved.

My brother-in-law used to sing it. It was his karaoke song or stand by me, but in the ghetto has taken on new meaning for me, since I saw the movie. I probably hadn’t understood the poverty that Elvis’s family was in prior to his success. I knew a little bit about it, but that’s a really powerful song.

Susan Dunlop: What’s your go to mantra or affirmation to get through a challenge?

Cal Stephens: Am I allowed to swear?

Susan Dunlop: Yeah of course!

Cal Stephens: Ah, look, I’d probably say if my back’s against the wall, if I’m challenged and my back’s against the wall, I’d probably put my head down and go fuck it and just meddle on, bulldoze through. It’s probably something I need to change because I’ve got myself in trouble so many times by not sitting back and being a little bit more reflective, but I tend to double now and just go, oh fuck this. Or I’m gonna get this done or I’m going to… so I get assertive.

Susan Dunlop: Is it a fuck it that’s about knowing what you’re actually aiming towards is meaningful and important?

Cal Stephens: Yeah, probably. I think it’s not like I’m blowing it off. It’s put everything else behind and go for it. Clear the deck. Clear the deck girl, stop making excuses. Get out there and go for it.

Susan Dunlop: There’s so many uses for those two words.

Cal Stephens: Yeah, there is. I just realised that.

Susan Dunlop: Cal, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you also for delivering such a well-thought-out service.

Cal Stephens: And I want to thank you Susan because when you initially approached me, I was like, hell no, but the more it sat in my mind, and because we had that trip down to the Gold Coast. That was just so inspirational. I so enjoyed that day. It then gave me an opportunity to start sitting back and having to think about who we were, what we did, etcetera. And I’ve been in a cathartic space, I think in the last eight weeks, as I said, but I really want to thank you because it’s given me an opportunity to reflect and I really appreciate that.

Susan Dunlop: I think COVID has made us have to reflect. I’ve done the same thing. What is the stuff that I’m resisting? And when I realised the things I’m resisting happen to be all the good stuff I wanted, I was getting in my own way. I think, what am I doing? So all kinds of levels at the moment we need to reflect.

Thank you. As I said, brilliant to have you on, and obviously we’re going to be catching up for group sessions with Nikki.

Listeners, the transcript of our conversation will be shared on my website in coming days. If you’re a person who likes to read articles, as well as listen to podcasts.

Like Cal today, I’m forever thankful for my beautiful guests in allowing me to understand them more and to share their stories with vulnerability.

In prep for today’s session, it’s also had an added benefit in letting Cal just notice that she had float to the surface that she was needing to check in on her WHY for her business.

At some stage all business growers, as we are, we need to go from Worker Bee to Queen Bee. What is that, what’s that going to take? It can be quite a massive shift and it might take time. Having the right support around you helps that happen.

If you’d like to join me as a guest on the podcast, please reach out via the Contact Form. And if you baulk at the idea of having a magnificent business owner’s vision, that’s all scrumptious words and makes you go deeper, just reach out and I can help you from getting your thoughts out onto paper. You’re welcome to book in directly into my calendar for an intro discovery chat – the button is also in the menu above.

I’m signing out.

Trust that you are blessed even when you forget that you are blessed. Take care of yourself.

Thank you for now.

Susan