Janelle Bostock, CEO and owner of WNA is an incredible woman! Her story is bound to keep you gripped. Having grown up in rural Queensland, milking the cows every day before and after school right the way through to year ten, Janelle knew what hard work was all about. Her purchase of the networking group was prompted by the premature death of her husband and the need for both support from her network (she had been a member since 2000) and for a new direction for her career. Janelle knows first hand the importance of having that support group around you as running your own business can be lonely!
Janelle and her husband were a tightknit team. He worked in IT and Janelle worked in Admin for Queensland health. She also organised huge parties for the company – 600 and 1000 person events – in her spare time! She was a natural.
After years of working full time and managing a block of units in Brissie, Bruce, Janelle’s husband was diagnosed at 30 with a genetic heart condition that was terminal. After having their son, who was also afflicted with the same disorder, Bruce sadly died, and Janelle was looking for a new challenge – so when the founder of WNA called and asked if she would like to buy it, she jumped at the chance.
You will love the tenacity, humour and warmth of this extraordinary woman!
Dr Elsa Licumba, author of Freedom To Belong, migrant wellbeing coach and all round amazing woman is truly helping migrants in Australia with belonging, (not integrating!) which she explains in the interview. She is a migrant from Africa, and when she arrived she found Australia to be a little bit bewildering and unusual. Elsa believes that one of the biggest challenges migrants face when they arrive in a new country is blending cultures, so she is passionate about assisting other migrants to attain a ‘belonging’ mindset and redefine their cultural identity and sense of belonging while living in a new country.
When Elsa first arrived from Mozambique she was homesick all the time, comparing and constantly criticizing the values of her host land because it was all so unfamiliar. She was suffering from culture shock! Having grown up in a close family, and studied in Mozambique, she had assumed that studying in Australia would be a great opportunity and filled with joy and happiness. But it didn’t turn out to be quite like that.
Her sense of identity and sense of belonging were significantly bruised and she later discovered that belonging is not about a place or geographic location- it’s a mindset. This interview with Elsa covers some pretty deep subject matter and yet it’s filled with laughter. I encourage you to listen and be inspired by this wonderful women!
Lisa Macqueen is amazing! After many years working in sales and marketing for the hotel and resort industry globally, she left to work with her husband in his corporate cleaning business, and it took off! In this interview she talks about the first 20 years of her career – in the BEST job ever! – and how she is so thankful she joined her husband as they grew the business to a multi million dollar turnover. Lisa is a gorgeous woman and was very generous with her tips and advice for growing a business. You’ll love this story!
Tanya Meessmann is the proud owner of two businesses. The first one is called Girl Shaped Flames and it’s a social enterprise focused on developing confidence in high school-aged girls. This was Tanya’s first foray into entrepreneurship. The second business is a sister company and a not for profit called Unique You and Tanya is the CEO and a board member of Unique You. Unique You is a service where careers and guidance officers can peruse a database of women in male-dominated industries with their female teen students. They can book a 30-minute phone call with these women and are able to connect with strong female role models. Tanya’s purpose has always been to do a good job all the time and she has always found herself guiding and mentoring young girls in believing in themselves, developing confidence and a drive to do well. Her first job was in advertising and her passion has always been creativity and filmmaking.
Tanya switched from advertising and spent 12 years in the film industry producing films. Her epiphany moment came to her whilst walking her dog in a dog park. She had a moment of peacefulness and found herself thinking about helping young girls who are struggling with confidence and self-belief and decided that she wanted to inspire them. Tanya now runs camps twice a year called “Camp Courage.” This idea came to her after asking herself, “How do I connect hundreds of girls with hundreds of women?” At Camp Courage, these girls are taken out of their environment and given the freedom, space and advice to overcome fears. Tanya grew up in a small town in Central QLD and was brought up by her single mother. She also has a younger sister.
After school, Tanya attended Bond University to study IT, through a scholarship, but after three weeks, switched degrees to Communications. One quirky fact about Tanya is that she learnt how to DJ at the age of nine and she was lucky enough to travel the world and skipped year five.
Ayla is the wedding coordinator and founder of the ever-growing and unique business called Wed Sites. Basically, Wed Sites is an online platform helping couples plan their weddings. It can be accessed from anywhere and is your one-stop shop for keeping everything you need to keep track of your wedding in one place including budgets, guest list tool, digital invitations, dietary requirements and absolutely everything else! It’s a personal experience for couples and the most appealing thing about Wed Sites is that it does not contain advertising. Ayla was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan and is an only child who was brought up by her single mum. After graduating from high school, Ayla moved to the US where she completed a law degree at university. Upon completing, she returned to Japan to look after her mum and studied web design. She later travelled to Australia with her partner and loved it so much that they returned to Japan for two weeks and proceeded to pack their belongings and returned to Australia on a student visa. Here in Australia, they developed an idea to create a WordPress theme and this was the beginning of Theme Boy, an online store based around creating sports club software.
After moving to Melbourne and searching for community, she discovered that the industry was male-dominated and began searching for female connections. Wed Site came about after burning out and Ayla found she developed a passion for wedding planning. She developed it after she got engaged and it was officially launched in late 2019. In the past 12 months, since covid hit, Wed Sites has had a 400% growth. Along her journey, Ayla realized that pricing is everything. Once she increased her pricing, her sales numbers also increased.”Perceived value” is everything according to Ayla, especially because her product offers so much more than competing products and services. It’s worth more and does more! Increasing her pricing has been her biggest pivotal moment, along with covid. Now that Ayla is 10 years into her journey, she’s able to have a better work-life balance and chooses not to work on weekends. During the week, she has reduced her hours and now only works from 9-5.
Melanie De Gioia is my latest guest for the She’s The Boss Chats podcast. You’ll love this amazing STEM advocate and a podcasting guru as she explains her career path and how she went on to create Ramaley Media.
Discovering podcasts was a pivotal moment in Melanie’s life. It was a moment that led her to create Ramaley Media, a podcast agency and network that specialises in sharing stories of STEM and innovation. Her podcast, Engineering Heroes is now one of the top 4 engineering podcasts in the world!
With no background in engineering (or podcasting for that matter!) Mel started her podcast to gain some understanding of the industry and what engineers do. Since then she has interviewed engineers from all over the world, including NASA!
For over 20 years, Mel worked extensively in the IT space, never realising she should be considered as working within STEM. It wasn’t until she started her first podcast – Beer with an Engineer – that Mel really realised her passion of being a STEM Advocate.
And through Ramaley Media, Mel is shining a light on all things STEM to encourage and inspire the world. Mel’s story is really inspiring and you will love this woman and what she is doing!
Janelle Bostock, CEO and owner of WNA is an incredible woman! Her story is bound to keep you gripped. Having grown up in rural Queensland, milking the cows every day before and after school right the way through to year ten, Janelle knew what hard work was all about. Her purchase of the networking group was prompted by the premature death of her husband and the need for both support from her network (she had been a member since 2000) and for a new direction for her career. Janelle knows first hand the importance of having that support group around you as running your own business can be lonely!
Janelle and her husband were a tightknit team. He worked in IT and Janelle worked in Admin for Queensland health. She also organised huge parties for the company – 600 and 1000 person events – in her spare time! She was a natural.
After years of working full time and managing a block of units in Brissie, Bruce, Janelle’s husband was diagnosed at 30 with a genetic heart condition that was terminal. After having their son, who was also afflicted with the same disorder, Bruce sadly died, and Janelle was looking for a new challenge – so when the founder of WNA called and asked if she would like to buy it, she jumped at the chance.
You will love the tenacity, humour and warmth of this extraordinary woman!
Joanna Downer is the Founder and CEO of a startup called Kitl. Kitl is a tech-enabled and flexible job matching platform described as the “Tinder of jobs”. It developed after an earlier creation of a similar concept called The Content Crowd. The brilliant and unique name, Kitl, was created after a brainstorm with Joanna’s two partners and cleverly comes from a combination of Little Talent Tool Kit. After receiving funding in June, they re-grouped and set about structuring the business to create a better version of the platform and focused on labour-hire and legalities.
Currently, Kitl is experiencing a soft launch phase based around organic digital marketing such as blogs, strong content marketing and networking. Much of their business comes from word of mouth. One of their biggest challenges was taking responsibility for other people’s money and they felt that they had to define each of their roles in the business. Their real challenge has been making strong decisions about the direction of the company and backing themselves in a different way. Joanna was also the co-founder of Snap Tribe and worked as the Production Manager at Babyology. Quirky fact about Joanna is that she once met Michael Jackson.
If anyone is living the dreamlife, it has to be Debra Johnstone. Debra is living in far north QLD and in her professional life she works as a transformational business and career coach. Most recently, Debra has been working as a transitional midlife coach, as well helping women entering midlife re-discover who they are and develop clarity on what they want in life. She focuses on women in their forties and beyond. Debra has had her own coaching practice for eight years but was initially working at a management level for small businesses. Her first pivotal moment came to her one day, on NYE, when she was de-cluttering her inbox and came across an old email about being a life coach. She immediately enrolled in a two-year certification. This change was triggered after Debra had reached a barrier in her career. She felt that she didn’t have the tools and skills she required as a life coach, even though she was good at it. Growing up in Leister, in the UK, Debra was bullied at primary school so she left school at the age of 16 and began working in fashion retail because all she wanted to do was make money and travel. She eventually landed in Australia and fell in love with the country and a man.
When the marriage ended, Debra became a single mum and did lots of little jobs in retail and as her kids got older, she moved into small business management in different areas such as retail and events. Inconsistency of income flow led to a stressful life and Debra burnt out. She was doing too many things and the stress led to adrenal fatigue. Full recovery took Debra five years although she was able to return to work after 12 months. This period of Debra’s life taught her the importance of letting go. She learnt to structure herself and created the Your Success Planner which is a two-yearly planner broken into daily amounts, based on giving yourself a structure to follow and setting goals. The Your Success Planner is a large spiral-bound book. Debra has also released a new program, earlier this year, for midlife women and beyond, for self-discovery. The greatest professional female mentor for Debra was Jo Attles, a four-time author and a weight-loss consultant. Jo gave Debra loads of marketing suggestions when she first started out and inspired confidence in Debra.
The biggest pivotal moment in Debra’s life was when her father passed away. This left a massive hole in her life and she lost motivation and direction for everything. However, her father also gave her a gift and she started building a community for midlife women. She found purpose again by listening to her intuition. This isn’t the end for Debra. Next year, she will be a certified yoga instructor and she has no boundaries anymore. One quirky fact about Debra is that she used to live on a barge in Leister and lived there for a year. Debra’s favourite business app is google my business but she also enjoys looking at realestate.com. If you’d like to contact Debra, you can reach her at success@debjohnstone.com.au or on her website.
If anybody knows how to re-invent themselves, it is Carol O’Halloran. Currently, she hosts and produces many TV shows and is commencing a new one through seniorsonline.vic.gov for the seniors festival. Carol started a TV show when covid first hit, for the over 50s market called, “Over 50”. It’s focus is that you can’t use your age as an excuse to stop you and it’s run through channel 31. In Carol’s earlier years, she worked in TV and realized 10 years ago that TV is where her passion lies. Carol was born in NZ and after high school, attended a business course for one year. She then went on to teachers college for 3 years and majored in the Maori language and physical education. She became a primary school teacher for a couple of years but didn’t enjoy the environment so she left. Carol’s always enjoyed dancing and after learning ballet and jazz, started performing in nightclubs and football clubs before dancing on TV. She also ran fitness classes for women which she started doing at the age of 17. Carol has managed to reinvent herself many times over. She was one of the first people to instruct jazzercise and travelled all over NZ setting up franchises. One of Carol’s greatest achievements was producing a fitness record on vinyl in 1981 which broke three world records and was on top of the charts, above the Rolling Stones, for 6 weeks. This catapulted her into a new mental frame of mind and she was only 25. Carol has been specialising in the over 50s since 1988 and has produced numerous fitness videos. She’s travelled around the world training other fitness instructors and health therapists, with the help of sponsors. She’s also had her own TV show called Slender Secrets which was an infomercial about weight loss. After fitness instruction, Carol became a product manager for a chocolate company and she travelled the world and managed to double the sales of the company in a very short time. She stayed with this company for ten years. Currently, Carol is a producer of her own TV show and she has full creative rights to it. She has also written a book that sold over 11,000 copies. Carol’s biggest inspirations were Jane Fonda and Richard Simmonds and along the way she has learnt that networking and persistence are vital if you want to succeed. Carol’s biggest pivotal moment came to her at the end of last year when she decided to never promote unhealthy foods again and to stick with her greatest passion, healthy living. She has re-invented herslf at the age of 64 and knows that she is not done yet! Carol is producing a TV show every week and she’s extremely disciplined and tries to work from Monday to Friday only. Carol says that everyone thinks she’s not domesticated what so ever however she enjoys knitting, sewing and crocheting.
Koko Casey is an extraordinary fierce woman with an inner strength most of us will never know. She has overcome life’s biggest adversities and is a survivor and this has led to a remarkable new career. Koko is a motivational and inspirational speaker, working alongside the airforce on a high performance and safety team. They travel around to airforce bases to speak about managing stress, performance and safety because these people are operating at such a high level. The people Koko is working with are Olympic trainers and people from the Institute of Sport, sleep doctors and sports psychologists. Koko once operated at that level, prior to being involved in a life-threatening plane crash.
Koko decided that she needed to take control of her life early because, by the age of 30, she was divorced with three kids. She returned to University and proceeded to complete a Bachelor of Nursing. In Koko’s words, “This was her key to freedom to get out of her marriage”. Learning gave her the most strength and enabled her to move on and cater for her kids. Her career as a nurse progressed and she worked as an intensive care nurse before becoming a trauma nurse for V8 Super Cars. This led Koko to international atraumatic nursing where she travelled to different countries on a private jet helping save critically ill patients, also working alongside the Australian Defence Force. On one of these life-saving missions, the jet Koko was travelling in was caught in a major storm and the plane crashed into shark-infested waters at 200km an hour. Koko, and the other five people on the flight, were left floating in the violent ocean for 90 minutes, with only three life jackets between them. It was a miracle they survived and it was a miracle they were eventually rescued.
The crash left Koko with numerous injuries including spinal, neck, jaw and smashed teeth. After all this, Koko lost her financial independence and her freedom and felt as though she was slowly decaying every day. But, Koko is a survivor, a fighter and a warrior and came back fighting for her life. Understanding PTSD, anxiety and depression and understand how debilitating they are has given Koko an insight into adversity and enabled her to be highly successful at what she does now.
Catherine Jonathan is gorgeous, bubbly and passionate about her African community and she’s driving the change for African businesses by providing visibility to their brands. Catherine runs her own PR Agency called, Emerging Brand Africa, and it’s an Agency for African/Australian owned businesses in corporate Australia. She’s helping small businesses thrive in a multicultural arena while celebrating diversity and culture. Nobody else was doing anything like this so Catherine decided to do it. She feels a personal sense of responsibility and this stems from her social conscience. Catherine’s generosity has no bounds and she wants to lift the people around her, especially women and youth. She’s raising up the profile of Africans.
The idea came to Catherine when she first migrated to Australia from Kenya, nearly two years ago. She felt there was a big gap in selling African stories and she wanted a fair representation in the media space, after realizing there were too many negative media stories about African youth gangs and crime. She had to do something and she wanted to show Australia that African people are here, doing amazing things. Catherine grew up in the eastern regions of Kenya and studied IT before diversifying into marketing and PR. Currently, Catherine is working on an exciting new campaign, compiling a catalogue for emerging brands.
She’s working with African businesses to showcase their products and services and this catalogue allows Australians to collaborate with these African brands. This is the first-ever African catalogue like this. Quirky fact; Growing up in a rural village in Kenya, Catherine helped her grandmother farm the land by hand and fetched water carrying a large pot on her head, sometimes whilst dancing!
If you’re looking for inspiration and empowerment, Dr Olivia Ong is the woman for you. She is incredibly strong in every way and is the founder and CEO of The Heart-Centred Doctor, as well as being a physician in Melbourne. In her business, The Heart-Centred Doctor, Olivia is a medical leadership coach who helps busy high achieving doctors avoid burnout and exhaustion. She also helps them achieve balance, energy and time flexibility through her life transformation for doctors programme, which essentially is a one on one and group coaching programme. Olivia is also a speaker and runs workshops and attends speaking engagements on self-compassion and burnout recovery for doctors, so they can stay in the game longer as compassionate leaders and leave a positive legacy for upcoming generational young doctors. It took a traumatic spinal cord injury in 2008 to transform Olivia’s life.
The experience was a radical awakening to her soul. Olivia was walking to work one morning and was hit by a car at 60kms which rendered her a paraplegic, paralysed from the waist down and she was told that she would never walk again. Olivia proved them all wrong and would not take no for an answer. So she travelled to Santiago, in the US and spent two years rehabilitating at a spinal cord centre called Project Walk. She truly is remarkable. Self-compassion is at the core of Olivia’s business and she believes there are three steps required to achieve this. These are mindfulness, connection and acceptance. Finally, Olivia is about to become an author. She is writing a book about her spinal cord injury in order to help doctors utilise self-compassion and overcome burnout. One very quirky fact about Olivia is that she has watched every single episode of Master Chef live since it began.
Sandy Abram has a bubbly and jovial personality which is contagious! She is the founder of an organic business called First Ray, a wholesale distributor built nearly 16 years ago under the core values of organic, sustainability and ethics. Sandy has recently launched a new marketplace called Ollee which allows purpose-driven brands to connect with businesses and retailers. It’s a unique digital platform where retailers can source their products from a ‘one-stop shop’.
Ollee sells a wide variety of products, in a number of categories, including food, drinks, personal care and lifestyle. Sandy is one of the first pioneers to sell sustainable and organic products. Sandy’s journey into an organic lifestyle began when she was diagnosed with endometriosis. She refused to believe that she couldn’t get better so began a long search for an alternative path. She started living an organic lifestyle, changed her diet, took up yoga and found a Naturopath and the healing began. Her doctor was amazed when he saw that she had cured her endometriosis through clean food and alternative therapies.
Have you seen (or been part of) the trending hashtag #thislittlegirlisme? Are you curious about who set it up and why? In this interview with the founder of Inspiring Girls in the UK, and the brains behind the #thislittlegirlisme campaign, Miriam Gonzalez, you can hear all about it! Miriam is an extraordinary woman who grew up in a tiny, dusty village in Spain. With a father in politics and a mother who was the science teacher in the village, Miriam had some great role models, and as she says “this is why politics is in my blood’!
Miriam left the village to go to uni in Bruges, Brussels, where she met her husband and married. They both moved to the UK (her hubby Nick is an Englishman) where he became the Deputy Prime Minister from 2010-2015, and she went on to become a trade negotiator and advisor on trade law, and relations with the Middle East to both the European Union and the British Government. She is also a Member of the European Council of Foreign Relations. This woman is truly amazing!
When you hear how she set up Inspiring Girls International, raising funds by releasing a Spanish cookbook, and her passion for lifting women up, you too will become a fan. Her mission is to make female role models visible to young girls, as research tells us they feel that they have no role models to look up to. What’s not to love! On top of that, she is just the nicest, warm and funny woman.
