Building Resilience, Growing Your Business & Evolving Your Brand Message with Tahlia Meredith
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In business, it’s incredibly rare to make a success of things flying completely solo.
We need other amazing people to help us reach our goals, because there are simply not enough hours in the day to do it all (and believe me I have tried!).
Tahlia Meredith AKA The Melbourne Freelancer was my very first Virtual Assistant and we’ve remained steady business buddies, colleagues and friends across the last decade.
Today, Tahlia has evolved her business into that of an Online Business Manager (or OBM) and she is particularly specialised in helping consultants and solopreneurs who have online courses pull #allthethings together.
In our 10 Years, 10 Stories chat, we talk about how being strategic has evolved in my business, the significance of resilience, how you need to evolve your brand message in order to grow, and how authentic connections are key in a world of artificial intelligence.
Meet Tahlia Meredith
Relationship to me:
Colleague, Collaborator, Supplier, Client & Friend
Years we’ve known each other:
9+ years
Specialty:
Online Business Management (OBM)
What we’ve worked on:
All the things that make a business tick, including marketing, administration, systems and product and service development.
Interview Highlights
Meet Tahlia
Tahlia is (in my opinion) one of the world’s BEST Online Business Managers.
She works with seasoned business owners, supporting them with all the things that happen behind the scenes in order for them to implement their big picture strategy.
She’s an experienced and multi-talented legend, who specialises in supporting consultants and solopreneurs who have an online course (or an idea they want to turn into one).
We met at a face-to-face networking event, where I saw her, loved her and hired her (you can hear more about this story in the interview). And whilst she left me to pursue a 9 – 5 for a while, I’m so pleased that she’s back in the driver’s seat of her own business, doing what I know she loves.
She’s a fellow stationery nerd (we cannot go to Officeworks together) and loves flamingos. Which are just two of the many reasons she’s still one of my business besties.
Our favourite project we’ve worked on together…
Tahlia was there when the first version of The Brand Story Strategy Workshop came into being.
We even have some early tapes lying around from when recorded introductions for each module (I was very pregnant with my second daughter at the time, though you can’t tell from the videos!)
But this isn’t what Tahlia remembers as her favourite project with me.
During our chat she reminded me of our epic “Days of Yay” – which were essentially strategy days. She recalls –
“I remember that we would have our days of yay, where we would spend a whole day together and map out a project and talk through, you know, why we were doing what we were doing and what the goal was and how we wanted to get there and get started digging in and doing the things.”
It was an opportunity for me to bounce ideas and figure out a path forward.
I should have kept calling them “Day of Yay” – that’s still the feeling I have after a day of planning and moving things forward strategically in my business. I might have to bring the naming back.
What we love most about working together…
I still love working with Tahlia, and we spend time with each other regularly in a networking group we both frequent.
What I’ve always loved about working with her is how she just gets me and my creative brain. We have great conversations and always bounce so naturally off each other.
We learned a LOT from each other too. Tahlia says:
“I learned so much because you are so knowledgeable about marketing and brand and business and people and human nature and the way we work. And so, the stuff that we would talk about, like I would spend the whole conversation just being like, YES, because it was always interesting and unique perspectives and something different to think about.”
What Joanna thinks will change for business in the next 10 years…
Working with as many business owners as she does, Tahlia is seeing that those in business who are constantly refining their messaging are the ones that are succeeding.
We won’t be able to rely on the rinse and repeat that marketers have leaned into in the past.
She says –
“I think something that's going to really matter is really connecting with your ideal client and getting really granular about where are they at.
What do they need? How do they talk? What are they thinking about? And being willing to shift and pivot to follow that because it has changed over the last couple of years and it's going to keep changing. And what I'm seeing is like I have a couple of clients and we've been working really hard on that messaging and they haven't been afraid to sort of shift their offer just a little bit to follow that group where they're headed.
And so, they're able to be brought along with their clients who still want to engage with them versus if they'd stuck with that, you know, the messaging I had two years ago, and then everyone's going to get left behind.”
Key Interview Insight
I think the best thing any business owner can work on is mindset. Because that's the thing that's going to trip you up. You can learn skills, you can learn software, you can hire people, you can do all of those things to move you forward, but if you get stuck in a spiral of, I'm terrible at this, I can't do it, I'm getting everything wrong, that's the thing that's going to bring you down
- Tahlia
About the 10 Years, 10 Stories Interview Series
This interview is one of a series of ten interviews I did in 2024, with ten people who have impacted my business journey throughout my ten years in business.
Each and every conversation full of insight, advice, memories and celebration.
