Lisa Messenger is a household name, and her start up journey to success has inspired many. Messenger’s career trajectory has not been simple, but she’s persevered and now has an encyclopaedia worth of experience and achievements. Cec Busby engages in a riveting interview with Lisa, talking about the success and failures of her startup business, the Collective Hub.

Since the beginning, Lisa has been surrounded by extraordinary entrepreneurs inspiring her to make a difference. So, when she discovered a gap in the magazine market, Lisa took the opportunity to start up Collective Hub. 

“There wasn’t anything that was like the story behind the story. We often read about the glossy end product, and it’s fabulous and easy. I wanted to debunk that and reverse engineer it.”

Though Lisa had some experience with start ups with her publishing company, the Messenger Group, Lisa found that she had to learn on the go. She had to be intuitive and think about the next logical and lateral steps in the process.

When naïve, be confident to succeed

Lisa discovered that being naïve to certain aspects of the industry played in her favour and pushed her to do more than expected.

“The naivety part plays into a highly saturated industry in your favour because you don’t know the world. You don’t know the rules, so you can break them freely,” Lisa acknowledged.

“But you know, you need to have a bit of business acumen, a couple of runs on the board before you do something as big and crazy as what I embarked upon.”

When pushing to have the Collective Hub sold in Coles and Woolworths, this acumen, naivety and hard work was essential to her success. After being refused access to both supermarket giants’ magazine racks, Lisa confidently reframed her proposition.

She told the stockist, “I will guarantee you profit. Take that to your boss, see what they say and come back to me.”

Surprised by Lisa’s confidence in the Collective Hub, the supermarkets capitulated and she was able to get her magazine on the shelves. Messenger later discovered that this was unusual in the magazine business.

“I later spoke to actual publishers and editors who’d been doing it for years. So many of them said that you don’t get ranged in Coles and Woolworth until you’ve been in print for at least seven years.

“Now, if I heard that upfront, it may have precluded me from even picking up the phone.

“So, I think never underestimate a highly saturated market. It means there’s an opportunity, so never underestimate it … I think you can really challenge the status quo and do things differently.”

For the next few years, Lisa found herself succeeding, but to a point that she couldn’t control.

“We had an immense scale, and it had grown way too quickly without the right systems and processes. I suddenly thought this wasn’t looking good. The brand is huge, the bottom line is not keeping up, and I’m in trouble.

“I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and I didn’t surround myself with the right people,” Lisa reflected.

The Collective Hub grew in excess across print and digital platforms and often ran up to four events a week. The company had an extensive digital footprint with print magazines available in 37 different markets. However, this meant that they were haemorrhaging cash.

“I remember when I started, everything was in increments of a hundred dollars. But suddenly everything, I mean everything, was in increments of a hundred thousand dollars.

“And suddenly, I was drowning and felt like I was in survival mode all the time, because the business became so dependent on cash.”

Lisa was writing a book at the time entitled Risk and Resilience, intended to transcribe her journey out of this trouble. Instead, she charted her entire journey of failure.

“You have got to break a brand to remake it.”

The journey of hardship with her start up continued for 18 months until Lisa understood that they needed to make a change.

“All I could think of was that I needed to cut the guts out of this business. I needed to slash the cost base, which unfortunately meant some redundancies and hard, gut-wrenching decisions.

“I now believe there’s a better way of working, a smarter way of working, a more flexible way of working. So it was painful, but I was like, at times you have got to break a brand to remake it, which was the subtitle of Risk and Resilience.

“I feel like, over the last year, I’ve been remaking it in a much stronger, much more sustainable way. And I’m super, super excited about the future,” Lisa says.

Want more? Get our newsletter delivered straight to your inbox! Follow Kochie’s Business Builders on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.