Episode Details

In this episode we meet Cliff Gale former Managing Director of Lite n' Easy for over 20 years and talk about passion, respect for your people and keeping the soul alive in your business.

Cliff bought into Lite n' Easy after he saw a two line ad in a paper in its very early days. He then led the business for over two decades and grew it into one of the most successful businesses of its type.

Key Points from Cliff:

• Know your business inside out
• Treat your people and customer with respect and recognise their efforts
• Keep the business emotive and build its soul
• Focus on the things that count and profit will come
• The difference between givers and takers

A special thanks to Sarah Chamberlain from The Real Estate Stylist for recommending Cliff.

Key Quotes and Points from Cliff:

"You know, because we don't see it all the time, it's great when also when we see you like that, it makes you feel like you care. You care about the business, and you care about us." I said, "Well, I'm glad you said that because I do. That's it." I was so, yeah, passionate about the business. I was so focused on making the business successful. I was never focused on the profit of the business. The business was a very profitable business, but I knew that if we got all the blocks in place, that the outcome would be profit. So I never had to worry about that at all, and it was much more fun running the business by just being able to do things properly and for me to be myself there.

I prided myself on the fact that I really carried myself very similarly in my workplace as I did out of my workplace. I didn't have a suit. I never wore a suit at work anyway, but I never felt like I put a suit on when I walked in the door. I never wanted to be seen like that, and I don't believe I was ever seen by that either. I was just Cliff in there. I was seen to be the driver of the business. Yeah.

Look, we had to pay people the right amount of money. That was a core ... I learned that as well. You had to make sure you're paying people a fair and reasonable amount for the role they did, but I learned, and I'd learned this emphatically, that a lot of why people continue to work for you and wanted to do the right thing by you, and I guess that was something that I always felt a lot of people really wanted to do the right thing by I me, was because I treated them with respect in the business. I ran the business morally correct. We were generous in the way we ran the business

I looked at my business very simply. If we traded people right, they would basically give it back to you. In this world, that might sound very, very simplistic but I think it's very, very underrated. I think the value of just doing the right thing by people, and of course, look, there's mentoring on the way of your staff and all that sort of thing. Yeah, there was all that stuff that was involved in the business as it kept growing. We had logistical issues. We had all sorts of production issues, but I reflected on the sense of why the business was successful, because people basically wanted to do the right thing.

We then found by just focusing on what we did and doing it very, very well ... and that was a very important part of I guess why the business was so successful. We didn't try to be all things to everybody, but we tried to do everything very, very, very well. I reflect one time and thinking about you one time, we might even get as big as Jenny Craig or one of those sorts of business. I think in the end, we're probably 10, 15 times bigger than Jenny Craig as a business. I guess that's one of the nice things I reflect on. I reflect on the success of the business. And, yeah, look, as I said