Well my guest today is Sarah Marco and the term thriving under 30 certainly comes to mind when you meet Sarah. Sarah is a vibrant, charismatic entrepreneur and the founder of inner works business solutions, along with her personal brand is called Sarah Jane. Now, Sarah actually founded in a works business solutions when she recognized a gap in the recruitment market for businesses to receive a scope of support services. And she has a huge history of working in the hospitality industry. She started at a very young age in Newcastle, working in her family owned business. You may have heard of it called McDonald's, and then has worked her way up in catering as a restaurant manager managing teams of people. In fact, after 10 years of growth and experience in the hospitality industry, Sara and her partner Daniel unleashed their inner entrepreneurs and created their first sales and marketing business. Their leap of faith paid off as their business became a thriving success. And look unfortunately from that they were forced to dissolve that business but it's from that experience that Sarah gained resilience and motivation. And today, Sarah has over eight years of experience running her own businesses, which are now multi million dollar revenue streams. I always love it when someone has tried and failed and can then talk from that Lessons Learned perspective. Sara's mission is to share her experience and expertise with her clients solely focused on their business success. Sarah is a wealth of knowledge. Well, Sarah, welcome to Perfect Public Speaking. It's so great to have you here.
Thank you. It's my absolute pleasure to be here and have some great conversation today.
Now I have so many things that I want to ask you about. Oh my goodness, and I think we first met during our BNI we meet every Wednesday BNI you castle and then of course you did my paid to speak course. And it's just been great to to sort of work alongside you for the last almost 12 months now. But let's get started. I want to ask you so many things, particularly a lot of our podcast listeners, business owners, and you know they want to do all the things to get their name out there. They're launching their paid speaking career, but you've just launched you're about to launch. Maybe by the time this goes to air it will be out there, your ebook. So tell me a little bit about the process behind that and why you are launching in April.
Yeah, I'm very excited. I've been working over it in that Christmas. Break where a lot of people enjoy time with busy working away. Look, one of my top things I have to ask my clients when it comes to recruitment is what does your company profile look like? And I talk about it a lot company profile all the time. I'm talking about recruitment, and it's just something that people don't quite often look at until they need to. And this book is a step in the right direction for business owners that are looking to attract top talent. They are wanting to retain great employees modernize their workplace and how to really incorporate fun into their workplace.
Yeah, how awesome and so from a marketing perspective, though, with your ebook, what is the whole idea behind that? Can you let us in on the secret will give me as a bit of a segue into a whole bunch of things that I'm doing. My admin VIP days. I'm very excited about I'm doing some recruitment and consultation where I am essentially helping build processing your business rather than me do the work for you. And then I will be launching probably midway through the year because I still have to keep building it. My recruitment online course and that is essentially going to teach business owners how to build the whole entire process in their business. So they can do the recruitment in house they can have the tools and templates and everything that they might need to to get that done.
So I said this to you recently. I feel like as a business owner, there are two camps. There are people who think I can just do it all myself. I'll find the right people and sometimes I'm sure that works out for some people. And then there are people who are like I'll just outsource it. I'm going to out find do my Facebook ads. I'm going to outsource this I don't want to learn I'm not even going to try. So what you're kind of catering for those people in the middle, right who wants to do it themselves, but really have no idea where to start and can't really afford the time or the money to make mistakes.
Yeah, correct. And recruitment can be a really big leap for some business owners, especially in that small to medium business. Range. You know, spending $10,000 to find a qualified accountant, you know, that's a lot of money and people aren't always prepared to spend that money. And yes, I do offer other price ranges. It's not just a percentage package, but it's really for those people that want to do it in house. They really want to take pride in it. They love having those conversations with people they want to pick the right person. And this essentially gives them the opportunity. They still have that control that they really want. But also have the modernized tools that us as recruiters use. So by setting them up with that they're going to have a higher chance of success rather than just kind of fumbling through it themselves.
You mentioned before VIP days and that's kind of a new concept, something which I hadn't heard of until the last 12 months. What's the idea behind a VIP day and what does that look like in your business?
Yeah, I'm so beyond excited for this. I've spoken a lot about in the last year at conferences and events, your online storage and your organization within your business and within yourself. And this is a day designed and I'm only doing two a month and it's only for business owners in each session so that I can really hone in and help these people. Essentially you bring your laptop, every kind of piece of your business with you and we transform it so we're going to rip it all out. We're going to reorganize and structure your emails. We're going to say organization, we're going to organize your online storage and drive and really create procedures and policies as well. So probably around five depending on what their business needs are. And really just get it all done. So when these people come in for a whole day, me and my employees have helped them they're gonna walk out so organized and so refreshed and have some structure that they can just essentially go put in place the next day within their business.
So not giving away all your secrets. But what are some of the tips because I struggle, my files and my Google Drive are all over the place. My inbox is a mess and I did see a productivity coach last year who kind of gave me some tips. I'm still working on it, but the Google Drive in particular, is a shambles. I'm just glad that Google allows you to search to find files assuming you know what they were called. Shot. What are some quick tips people who have Google Drive or if they use the Windows version? What are some tips you can give people?
Look the basic structure you could start with and I always just say try and draw it it sounds really basic, but if you look at you know like a rabbit hole you keep finding and that's what our mind maps and that our Google Drives for fun storage turned into. But if you want to try and create just basic structure, so that could be you know, organizing it into years that could be organizing it into, you know, launches or anything in particular we could start by grouping specific things and then you know, you can delve further and further into that and that's how you become super organized. But if you want to start really basic just start with even a year or the foundations of something that you can start with It Works well within your business.
What about law that sounds great if you're starting from scratch, but what about if you've got like this, like Shem masala, the Google Drive, what do you do? Do you Yeah, he goes through
scratch. Yeah. So you do eventually have to go through it all.
Yeah, that's the inevitable.
Unfortunately, I'm here that's how we help you but it is a big job. And honestly, if you if you have everything that's in in undermine drives, in your emails, and it's under my drive, and all your stuff is just kind of dumped in there. That's actually a great place to start because I would create a shared drive and the shared drive you can start from scratch so then you can essentially start building your processes as you go now. And then in your spare time, or when you're ready to clean up the rest and transfer it and that's really interesting because I see the shared drive online and I have I have a Microsoft laptop. So I've actually made Google Drive for Windows, just so I can get to them. easily without actually having to go into Google Drive. But I hadn't seen a shared drive there. And I didn't really know what it was. You're saying I could go to shared drive and just start creating. So what's the benefit of that being a shared drive as opposed to my Drive? Yeah, so the good thing about a shared drive is that once you create your structure and folders if you say let's just say we collaborated on an event, and we want to work together and we needed to dump all this info and pamphlets and receipts and all this stuff together. You can create a folder and just share that with me. And so it can still be in your structure and you can still have all the records that you're going to need but you can share it with someone. And you don't need to share your whole drive or you don't need to share one thing you can share a folder so that you can both keep working in the folder and feel that little bit more structured. So when you have team members, it's a really great collaboration tool to have the shared drive.
So I'm just going to ask this question and I hope someone else is thinking this listening to this right now. But um, can I just share the folder from my drive I can go into share and then make anyone who has this link can open it you can share.
Yeah, you can share. It's just once you've done it as well, you can unshare the folder quite quickly. It's just it's a lot easier for both shared partners. So if you were safe, he shared with me and it was in your following you just shared it with me I have to go shared with me in my folder, and then it will show up but a lot like the 1000s of little random documents that come see Yes. In the shared drive, share the photo, I just go into my shared drive and then it just comes up as the folder in the shared drive.
Oh, okay. Yeah. All right. Well, that's really motivating. I'm going to start doing that I think because it's just a hidden mess but all the idea of going through it is just years and years of folders and and documents but how do you know this stuff? How do you learn this stuff? Did you like grow up going? I'm going to be like a productivity and recruitment expert. Like how do you know all these tips?
Yeah. So when we first started our business and we're coming in, I think it's to the ninth year I keep saying eight years for a long time, but I'm pretty sure we're in to nine now and lots of employees and I just had to learn how to be organized. It was if you don't become organized, you're losing money as a business owner. You're not there when people need you and things are just really messy and hard to manage. So I just learned very quickly that as the administration side of the business, that was my job role to do that and I just had to keep running. In this day and age with technology. You just have to keep being up to date and keep learning it along the way and I guess that's how it started. That's really important.
That point you said there where it's you're losing money, essentially. And that really hits home for me because I think of all the time wasted to find things that I've duplicated things. There's different versions that I have a VA and I'm always saying goes in the Google Drive folder. Which one so you write it last time for the business owner which equates to lost money.
That's right. Yeah.
Yeah, very big love. less time, less money. That's your time you're paying the money to try and find the stuff as well. But then as well, if you have agreements and signatures and things that you need to find if you somehow have lost it in that save a base, and you actually need that to say no, this is why we agreed on this price is something of those thoughts. If you don't have easy access to that you don't have any grounds to stand on with that either. So money can can really just dive into a lot of different aspects of admin organizations.
Well, good luck with your VIP days. What else can we expect in store for Sarah Marco in 2023?
Yes are actually launching it. Now which is my first launch for the year is my recruitment consultation process. And that is 997. I am going into the business owners office or if they want to come to mind, no worries. And we essentially look at what their job role is that they need to recruit for and we're just looking at writing their ads so I go through all the unusual things. I'll do analytics, price comparison, all those things. And then I'm helping them create that entry level process. So then we fine tune that interview questions. We really look at what they should be asking how to draw out those red flags which quite often get missed from business owners do it themselves because we just claim to oh, they're a great personality. There's more to it than that. When we do the recruitment process, and personality quizzes and reference checking and things like that and just setting up that process to before you even get to that interview stage.
So just finally is there really we keep hearing about staff and skill shortages in Australia isn't as bad as people think. And if it is, why do we have such staff shortages across so many different industries?
Yeah, look, I really delved into the thing. COVID And one of my presentation was based on so many statistics, I really delve in there. So look we were in a much worse place in 2020, 2021. When they close the borders. We have always relied upon a lot of international employees and that is in every industry that's in the health industry, hospitality and technology industry. Those big industries that we rely on we just have short of their supply and so that meant as well, but those opportunities that might have been taken up by skilled workers from other countries opened up the door for more Australians to jump into those positions, whether they were that experienced or not. People were just taking them on board which then left holes in other industries. So this massive domino effect just went across the nation. And I mean, when it comes to recruitment now I'm definitely seeing a bigger influx. It's been a lot easier as a recruiter towards the end of last year and into January than normally January can be a bit tired of a month but I've had pretty good candidates coming in the door. I think in comparison to 21 and 20. Everything's now like yeah, there's more than one choice how exciting for people. But yeah, look, it is. It is changing now and I the board has had a big thing to do with it. There's no denying that. And you know, people were getting paid to sit at home for most half a year at some point. Why wouldn't you hang out with your family if you're getting paid to do that? And so those job opportunities that people did need to jump into, they just weren't doing that as well. So I looked there's a whole range of reasons why recruitment could be tough, unskilled shortages, people not going into that area. So for example, hairdressers in the year of 2025. They're going to be over hundreds of 1000s of hairdressers short than what they actually need for the country to survive. And so just a statistic like that people are looking at that now going, oh, you know, you don't have any people. I want to be a hairdresser. Because they're looking at other things. Now digital marketing is such a big industry now, but it's taken away administration. A lot of females used to go into administration, they are now going into other industries which they have the choice of which is fantastic for us. But those industries that really relied upon those people are now suffering and so that, as I said that ripple effect from each different industry just carries over.
Yes. So interesting. Yeah, hopefully things are going to be different in 2023. I would say thank you so much for coming onto perfect public speaking. Just before I let you go public speaking, how important is that for you in your business and putting yourself out there? I know I've seen you speak in public a couple of times, and how much value do you place on public speaking?
Yeah, look, it's just something that is so underestimated. You really need to be able to be clear and precise and talk about what you need to to get your point across to potential clients and people it could be influencing people as well. You know, if you're a teacher having that that voice and tonality to really reach children in a sense, it gets carried over into a lot of industries and I loved my PageSpeed cos it was awesome. So definitely get on that and just have it like it is it is good to just I guess realize that there's more than one way looking at public speaking and there's more than one way to tackle it. You don't just have to face this big giant fear first you break it down and go right let's just start taking things off and then before you know it, it's easy.
Yeah, just put yourself out there whether you're ready or not. You get ready. Sarah Marco, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom. I have so much to learn from you particularly with the organizational digital declutter, but we're really, really grateful to hear from you today. So thank you.
Yeah,thank you so much for having me
