Welcome and Victoria's entrepreneurial origin story

Rob: Welcome to the National Virtual Expo. I'm Rob Malicki on Garigal land in Sydney, and welcome to this session on becoming an entrepreneur or starting your own business. My guest today has got a lot of experience to share with you. I think you're going to really love it. Before we get to that, if you have any questions as we go, make sure you drop them in the chat if you're joining us live. And if you're watching this on the replay, thanks for watching -- you can ask your questions in the chat using your unique Discord details down below. If you're a parent, we have a Facebook community also linked down below just for you. Every single question will get a personal answer, and there's nothing too micro and nothing too macro. Let's get into this session with Victoria Rose Tucker. Victoria, welcome to the National Virtual Expo. Thanks for joining me.

Guest: Thanks so much for having me. Super excited. I'm really pumped about today's session because entrepreneurship is so close to my heart.

Rob: You're an entrepreneur with heaps of engagement in this space. Tell me about your personal journey.

Guest: Honestly, I would say it goes right back to my childhood. I was always a little bit entrepreneurial, and I think it was because I grew up with a mum who was a business owner. Being one of seven kids, we had to be frugal, so I had to get creative and find ways to make money. One core memory I can remember is when we used to go on school camps and do fundraisers. One of the ways we would make money was to get boxes of chocolates the school provided and go door to door selling them. What I realised was that I wasn't getting that much profit from those chocolate bars, so I went to the supermarket, found the big blocks of chocolate at half price, bought those, and then went around selling them for double to triple the price and kept all the profit. That was a moment where I thought, you just need to find a way to widen the profit margin. But the real interest in entrepreneurship was sparked at university when I came across a poster promoting a student startup pitch competition. I didn't even really know what entrepreneurship meant at that point, but I thought, I have an idea -- I could do something with that. So I posted my idea on Facebook, recruited a team, we pitched it, and got into the competition. Honestly, the rest is history. It's been a real fun journey so far. Now I'm working on my own business, and it's been very rewarding and very challenging, but we're really just getting started.

Rob: Talking about university -- you're at the University of New South Wales. We've got a whole session with Sam Brew, who's also an entrepreneur at UNSW, talking about that environment because it is literally the best in the country. If you're interested in starting your own business or getting involved in entrepreneurship at uni, that session is essential viewing. I'll make sure the link is down in the session description so you can find it.

What makes a good business idea

Rob: Thinking about ideas for business -- someone's watching this and wondering what makes a good idea. You talked about spotting the gap with the chocolate and increasing your profit margin. But what makes a good idea for a business more broadly?

Guest: I love that question, because all the time I meet people who are innovative, intelligent, and brilliant, but they don't necessarily have ideas for businesses or startups. The biggest thing is that it's not necessarily about having the most brilliant or novel idea. It's about being curious and being able to identify problems, inefficiencies, and ways of doing things better. It's not about lightning bolts. It comes more from a place of curiosity and frustration -- when things aren't built in a way that creates a good experience. Things in your day-to-day life where you constantly find yourself getting annoyed at how something works or doesn't work, and then thinking, I could actually do something about that. That's what really sparks the best ideas.

Rob: It's like "scratch your own itch," right?

Guest: Absolutely. In that chocolate example, it was also about tapping into value for money. For the buyers, they were getting a bigger block for what felt like a better deal, and for me I was making more profit. It was a win-win situation.

Why entrepreneurship isn't what social media makes it look like

Rob: Can I ask you about the mega business successes we see in the media? The Facebooks, the Atlassians -- these massive companies that suddenly become unicorns. That's not the reality of 99.9% of entrepreneurship, is it?

Guest: No, it's not. And I think that's probably one of the biggest difficulties with entrepreneurship: it is glamourised and sold to us as a really great way to have freedom in your life, to make a lot of money and get rich and successful really quickly. Unfortunately, the number of startups and businesses that fail is significantly higher than those that succeed. But that's not to discourage people. It's more to say that those who make it are determined to make it. What you'll find is that many of the very successful entrepreneurs publicised today have actually had multiple ideas in the background, things that have flopped and failed. But instead of taking that as a final result, they've learned from it, reiterated, or completely started again. The key thing is being willing to keep trying when it's clearly not working.

Rob: The core skill of an entrepreneur is to be able to fail, get back up, and get going again. And by way of that, getting started can be a real challenge. So what holds people back from starting their own thing, and what can they do about it?

Guest: I've coached hundreds of people at this stage, and the biggest thing is the internal dialogue. The common voices are: I'm not ready yet, I don't know where to start, I'm not smart enough, what if I fail? What it really comes down to is a fear of judgement. Especially for young people -- they feel that if they try and fail, that's the most embarrassing thing, and there's a lot of shame around it. That can also be linked with perfectionism, and what they do oftentimes is disguise perfectionism as preparation. They think, when I've done this, when I get to this point, when I make enough money, when I'm at this age, then I'll be ready. But really, it's procrastination -- it's finding a way to put it off because it feels risky. If I'm being completely honest, that's excuses. It's not typically actually reality. People could do the thing they've been thinking about for years, but the excuses are never-ending.

The entrepreneurial mindset and why it matters beyond business

Rob: How would people identify themselves as having an entrepreneurial mindset, and why is that important in young people anyway?

Guest: An entrepreneurial mindset encompasses many things -- it's not just about having a thought of being able to start a business. It's really a way of thinking. Curiosity would be number one. Number two is resilience, because the path is not straightforward -- there will be many ups and downs. And then initiative, which to me is about being willing to put yourself out there, being willing to take a no and flip it to "not yet," and finding a way around that no. Honestly, this isn't just useful in entrepreneurship. An entrepreneurial mindset is useful in any career. Some people may have heard the term "intrapreneurship" -- that's where you take an entrepreneurial mindset and apply it to the industry and career you're already in. It's about outside-the-box thinking, problem solving, and being innovative in the way you show up to the workplace. That's a really valuable trait if you want to be more employable, too.

Rob: I've been running my own businesses for 25 years, and maybe it's only in the last five that I went, "oh yeah, I'm an entrepreneur." To begin with I just wanted to do something on my own, contribute, create something. A lot of the skills -- sales, conversation, all that sort of stuff -- I was really bad at them to begin with, and you learn them as you go. Suddenly at some point you think, actually I'm kind of good at this. So just because you don't see yourself as a salesperson or an entrepreneur doesn't mean that in your heart you're not one.

Guest: Absolutely. One of the biggest hurdles for people is that they don't see themselves as fitting the mould of what an entrepreneur should look like. A lot of young people don't see other very young people out there being successful, so the first thought is: I'm too young, I'll have to wait until I've got more experience. To that I would say: if you are trying to solve a problem that stems from a personal experience, you've already got experience. You are someone who is deep in the pain points of that problem, in the ways the current solutions aren't meeting your needs. That means you can start building something, because you've already been frustrated enough to know something needs to be done.

Rob: I feel like you're an entrepreneur if you've ever thought, "this could be done better" -- whether you're standing at the supermarket, doing something online, or waiting in a queue. If that thought goes through your head, there's a kernel of entrepreneurship in you, because you can see the problem. And it's really the problem you're trying to solve, isn't it?

Guest: Absolutely. The big thing is that you won't feel ready at the start, and confidence doesn't come before action -- it comes after. A lot of people are trying to find confidence in order to start. I really challenge that, because confidence comes from conversations, small wins, and building evidence that you actually can do it. But you can't do that when you're stuck in your head.

Building confidence and borrowing belief from others

Rob: We did a whole workshop on building confidence on day one of the National Virtual Expo, so you can go back and watch the recording. But that's also something having a coach can assist with, Victoria.

Guest: Definitely. What I sometimes say is that borrowing belief is a really useful tool. That could look like talking to mentors and coaches, or being in an environment that expands you -- rubbing up against people who have done the thing, or who at least have belief in you that you may not have in yourself yet. That borrowed belief means that even if it's not part of your identity now, if you surround yourself with those people and those environments long enough, it will start to build and become more part of who you are.

Rob: So what are some ways people can work through self-doubt and build that identity?

Guest: The biggest thing is normalising it. Realising that everyone has these thoughts -- it's so normal, even for experienced founders to question themselves and think, "maybe I don't have what it takes," even when they're already building a business. Normalising it would be the first step. The next thing is separating thoughts from facts. Just because you think it doesn't mean it's true. A lot of the time we are our biggest critics. You see a group photo and you'll hone in on yourself and think, that's terrible, while your friends are saying it's a nice photo of you. We always pick out the tiniest of flaws and blow them up. So the real question isn't "is this a good idea?" -- it's "how can I test this idea?" There's no single definition of a good or bad idea. It's much more in the approach than the idea itself.

Rob: You think about a company like Uber. Where now, with what they faced, it seemed impossible in some ways -- like, that's a stupid idea, there's already a thing called a taxi. And yet somehow they grew it into a multi-billion-dollar company that has infused everyday life. So it's not about the idea, it's about solving a problem and then working your butt off to make it happen.

Guest: Hard work is definitely a big element. And unfortunately, that's oftentimes what scares people away from entrepreneurship. Once they start doing it, they realise it's not an overnight success -- you'll make a lot of forward steps and then have a lot of back steps. Being able to work with that is a really testing process.

Practical first steps: from problem to idea to validation

Rob: What's the journey if somebody has an idea -- or as we've alluded to, they see a problem they want to solve and don't necessarily know the solution yet? What's the series of steps if someone's thinking about having a crack at starting their own business?

Guest: The most common mistake I've seen people make is jumping from identifying a problem straight to getting obsessed with a solution -- thinking it's the coolest, most novel idea -- without the steps in between. You can't jump from A to B like that; you've really gone from A to Z. What I would say is: don't jump to building a business or spending money on things that are going to drain your resources, your time, and your energy. Start with finding a real problem worth solving, and that involves talking to people. Don't talk to your mum and your friends, the cheerleaders who are going to say, "oh my gosh, it's the best idea!" -- that encouragement isn't really valid. Talk to the people who are going to be your target market. Send out surveys that really focus on the problem, not the solution, because a lot of the time you don't actually know how to solve the problem until you deeply understand where it stems from, what the root causes are, what the symptoms look like. People often try to solve the whole picture of the problem, and it's just way too complex. What I encourage people to do is hone in on which specific part of the problem they want to address, go out and talk to people, and test whether others are experiencing the problem the same way you identified it. Only then can you start mapping out what a good solution might look like. If you jump to the solution too early, you'll often end up creating features and functions that people don't care about, and there's a mismatch between problem and solution.

Rob: I remember hearing on a podcast -- Tim Ferriss or something like that -- a guest asking, "how can you test your idea in a weekend?" What can you create in one weekend to see if it has legs? And these days, using tools like Claude or OpenAI, you can build solutions really fast. But in itself that's not enough -- you need something that puts some runs on the board, like paying customers or real users of a website. Even just having conversations where the feedback validates your idea. How do people manage this alongside going to uni, having casual work, and trying to balance everything?

Guest: It's a great question, and transparently, I've launched my own coaching business while also having a full-time job, so I am juggling those. When I'm not working my full-time job, I'm working my business. I have the benefit of not having children at this point, so I have a bit more flexibility. But when you're a student, you've got studies that can take up a lot of your brain capacity, and if you're a parent there are other people's needs to consider. The big thing is that in the beginning it's so important to think in micro steps, not giant leaps. You're really just building the rungs of the ladder. A great resource for getting everything on one page is a lean canvas model -- a simple one-page template that gets you to think about the basics of what the idea might look like and what your assumptions are at this point. Then you go and test those assumptions through conversations, surveys, and research. You can Google publicly available research that could help you validate or invalidate your assumptions. From there you identify the key patterns and themes emerging, and then you come up with a simple prototype or landing page -- something super low investment. Don't spend a lot of money or time on anything at this stage. The biggest mistake is spending hours investing time and energy into something nobody wants. Once you've got some validation, you can start to think about a very small sample offer -- something like a free e-book that captures email addresses and gets people interested, which could later lead to a paid product or service. And from that process you'll get feedback: if nobody responds, you haven't developed something valuable yet, so you need to go back to the drawing board and ask why -- is it the language, the platform, am I not talking to the right people? Stay curious and keep digging through those questions before you really start building.

Rob: In my experience, the things that have worked have almost invariably not been the things we thought were going to work right upfront. Once you get started and put something out into the world, you're constantly learning -- they didn't want this, but they liked that part of it, so let's do more of that. And that's how businesses grow. One of the best pieces of advice when we were starting our first business was from my brother-in-law, who said, "start with no money, because your mistakes will be less expensive."

Guest: Yes, and a lot of young people think they can't start because they don't have money, and I really challenge that. So many entrepreneurs started with no money. It's an excuse you can work around. And that's why getting into this stuff at university is such a great idea -- you end up in a community of people who can support and guide you, without needing money. What you're looking for is experience and a network to help guide you.

Advice for parents of aspiring young entrepreneurs

Rob: Let's think about parents, because we do have a lot of parents registered for the National Virtual Expo. What can they do to support their kids if the kids are interested in starting their own business?

Guest: The first thing I would say is: don't panic. A lot of parents think, "oh no, my child wants to be an entrepreneur" -- it feels like a lot of uncertainty and risk. I would really encourage parents to shift away from the "is this safe?" question towards "what could they learn?" Encourage experimentation over perfection. When I was involved with entrepreneurship at university, it was such a valuable, practical, hands-on learning experience outside the classroom. I found real value in trying, failing, and figuring things out. So I would really encourage parents to lean into that. Support doesn't mean removing all risk or lending them thousands of dollars before there's any validation. It means helping them think through it, being available for conversations, being a sounding board. I'm so confident that many parents will have career experiences they can share with their children that would be genuinely insightful.

Rob: You're not going to say this, but I'm going to say it because I think it's important. If you want your kid to learn a musical instrument, you pay for lessons. If you want them to get educated on just about anything, you pay for tutoring. So having a coach who can take them through the process of how entrepreneurship and business actually work is something parents can action. Someone like you, Victoria, is incredibly valuable because one of the hardest things about entrepreneurship is that it seems all mysterious -- you feel like you have to figure it all out yourself. But you don't. There are people who can help you on that journey and shortcut a lot of the hard lessons.

Guest: Absolutely. That's really where my work leans in -- that very first part of the journey. Having someone as a sounding board when you're thinking, "am I crazy, is this actually a good idea?" Having someone to listen, to challenge you when your thoughts are self-limiting or likely to become blockers. And then to sit with you and ask, "what does action look like? You've been thinking about this for a long time -- how can we take you from thinking to action?" That's one of the biggest parts. When you have someone to keep you accountable, you can't just give up quietly, because there's someone externally who knows what you're trying to build.

What to do if you want to start but don't feel ready

Rob: If someone's here and thinking, "I'm curious about it, I really want to, but I'm not ready -- I don't want to take the risk," what advice would you have for them?

Guest: Point blank: readiness is a myth. That moment is never going to arrive. You have to start before you feel confident. I had a woman I coached for two years who had a long list of reasons why she wasn't ready -- it was too hard, she was a mum, she worked full time, and there was a real lack of confidence. I heard her. They were all very real things. But she was very dedicated to helping her daughter reach her goals, so I sat with her and said, "this is about progress, not perfection. If we can move just one step closer each week, that's enough." I think everybody has one to two hours a week they can commit towards a business idea. The feeling of not being ready oftentimes comes from thinking you have to do everything right straight away, which is just not the case. I think about it like a metaphor: you have a destination you want to reach, say the Blue Mountains. If you have a car and your foot on the accelerator, no matter how fast or slow you're going, eventually you are going to get there if you're pointed in the right direction. Some weeks you'll have a whole weekend free, put your foot down, and make a lot of momentum. Other weeks you'll be drowning in homework, working, or the kids need everything -- so you'll take your foot off the pedal and maybe just talk to one person. That's not going to get you far that week, but it still gets you closer to your destination. As long as you're doing something, that is so much better than doing nothing. And the more you do it, the more confident in yourself you will become.

How to connect with Victoria and closing thoughts

Rob: This session has been with Victoria Rose Tucker. Victoria, where can people find you if they want to connect and learn more?

Guest: I'm most available on LinkedIn or Instagram. On Instagram you'll find me at Victoria Rose Coaching, and on LinkedIn as Victoria Tucker. I have free discovery calls for people who have an idea and don't know where to get started -- that session is really just about getting clear on where you are now and where you want to be. There's no obligation; it's just exploratory. I also have a full programme that takes people from idea to implementation and launch, for those who are ready for that.

Rob: If you want to grab one of those discovery calls, that's such a great idea if you're just thinking about it and want a bit of guidance on whether this might be for you. Check the session description below -- we've got a link directly through to Victoria. Victoria, I'm super glad to have chatted with you as part of the National Virtual Expo, and thank you for sharing your expertise today.

Guest: Of course. I just looked at where I got my first grade at uni and I laughed out loud -- it wasn't just a pass. I actually got a high distinction. I'd always done terribly at school. I did the pathway course at SCU, which gave me the foundations I needed to study at uni, and I didn't fail -- I got good grades. So I kept going, studied a Bachelor of Psychology, did alright, kept going, got into honours, and now I'm writing a thesis. Getting that first grade was the first time I felt like, "I can actually do this." It has led me to where I am now, and I'm really grateful for it.