How to scale your business efficiently with Nina Briance, Founder & CEO of CULT MIA

UK productivity was ‘24% lower in 2023 than it would have been had it continued climbing at the rates seen before the global financial crisis’ according to the Economics Observatory. Given time is the most limited factor for any founder, for our eleventh season I’ve set out to find answers on how we can all improve our productivity in business.

First up, I wanted to find out how to scale a business efficiently. So I spoke with Nina Briance, Founder & CEO of CULT MIA, the online fashion marketplace for the world’s leading sustainable designers. Since founding CULT MIA in 2019, Nina has grown her business to become one of fashion’s leading online retailers.

Keep listening to hear Nina’s advice on implementing the right systems for efficient growth and how to avoid duplicating work.

FF&M enables you to own your own PR. Recorded, edited & published by Juliet Fallowfield, 2023 MD & Founder of PR & Communications consultancy for startups Fallow, Field & Mason.  Email us at hello@fallowfieldmason.com or DM us on instagram @fallowfieldmason. 

Let us know how your start up journey is going or if you have any questions you would like us to discuss in future episodes. 

Nina’s advice:

• Always aim to achieve more with less
• When you start you need a solid foundation of 1) clear processes 2) strong leadership 3) a business model which is scalable - that way you will be able to grow comfortably
• Time block your calendar well in advance
• Always ask yourself WHY you are doing something
• Keep focussed on your long-term goals
• Learn when to step back and let others make decisions (trust people and let them feel empowered)
• Save time by automating processes where this is possible
• All team members need to have a clearly defined role; a growing business does not necessarily need a growing workforce
• Keep auditing your thinking and structures

FF&M recommends: 

• LastPass the password-keeping site that syncs between devices.
• Google Workspace is brilliant for small businesses
• Buzzsprout podcast 'how to' & hosting directory
• Canva has proved invaluable for creating all the social media assets and audio bites.

MUSIC CREDIT Funk Game Loop by Kevin MacLeod.  Link &  Licence

Transcript

1 S11 E1 How to scale your business efficiently with Nina Briance, Founder & CEO of CULT MIA

Juliet Fallowfield: [00:00:00] Welcome to season 11 of How To Start Up, the podcast helping you start and scale your business with advice from entrepreneurs on what to do now, next, or never. This season, we'll be hearing about all things productivity from amazing entrepreneurs sharing how they've hacked theirs. Hosted by me, Juliet Fallowfield, founder of the B Corp certified PR communications and podcasting consultancy, Fallowfield & Mason. Our mission is to enable you to master your own storytelling, whether that be via PR or podcasting, all with a long term view.

 UK productivity was 24% lower in 2023 than it would have been had it continued climbing at the rates it's seen before the global financial crisis. This is all according to the Economics Observatory. Given, Given time is the most limited factor for any founder, for our 11th season I've set out to find answers on how we can all improve our productivity in business.

First up, I wanted to find out how to scale a business efficiently. So I spoke with Nina Bryant, founder and CEO of CULT MIA, the online fashion [00:01:00] marketplace for the world's leading sustainable designers. Since founding CULT MIA in 2019, Nina has grown her business to become one of fashion's leading online retailers and last year closed a seed round at 2.

5 billion pounds, 2. 5 million pounds. Keep listening to hear Nina's advice on implementing the right systems for efficient growth and how to avoid duplicating your work. Keep listening to hear Nina's advice on implementing the right systems for efficient growth and how to let go and delegate to your team.

 Hi Nina.

Thank you so much for your time today on How to Start Up. You are the first guest we're talking to you about productivity, which is something I know every founder needs to know more about, but before we get into that, I'd love to have a brief introduction as to who you are and a bit about the business that you started.

Nina Briance: Absolutely. Really happy to be here this morning with you, Juliet. I'm Nina Briance, founder and CEO of CULT MIA. We're building the marketplace of the future, the home of ethical and sustainable luxury brands.

Juliet Fallowfield: Amazing. And what year did you launch CULT MIA?

Nina Briance: We launched in 2019. So we're coming up to our fifth year [00:02:00] anniversary at the end of this year.

Juliet Fallowfield: Congratulations. I mean, there's some statistic that most businesses don't make it past year three and year four. So fantastic. You're looking at year five and I know that you did an incredibly successful seed round I think last year where you raised £2.5 million. Was that correct? 

Nina Briance: Yes, super super exciting, especially in our industry where a lot of the big platforms haven't had the best run lately. So

we were, I would say, really reassured that everything was pointing in the right direction and to really be able to supercharge growth looking

Juliet Fallowfield: Yeah. Well, it's not only something to raise, but raising this economic climate is impossible. Everyone tells me so the fact that you've done it, you obviously must be doing something right. So I would love to ask you a bit more about what that is. Before we get into that though, the episode title, we called it how to scale your business efficiently.

And anyone that's worked with me will roll their eyes a little bit about this because I love a process. I hate double handling. I love being efficient because time is the most precious resource that we have when we're working [00:03:00] or generally even in life. How would you define scaling a business efficiently?

It's quite a weird question.

Nina Briance: I say Very simply put, it's achieving more with less,

but zooming out a little bit to me, scaling a business efficiently means growing in a way that really optimises your resources, maximises your output, but maintains or improves the quality of whether you're selling a product or a service and how that resonates with your customer.

During that journey, it's about. Like you said, streamlining processes to really ensure sustainable and scalable growth.

Juliet Fallowfield: And when you're scaling this business, what would you need to implement implement before you grow further? Like, are there things that you did at the beginning that really set you up for success?

Nina Briance: Yes. No, I think, you know, you can have a really clear game plan when you're launching a business and then sometimes you scrap it up and go back to the drawing board. But I would say before scaling, I thought it was really important to [00:04:00] establish a solid foundation of clear processes and really strong leadership and a scalable business model so that, you know, you can ensure that your operations can really handle increased demand, which involves robust systems.

If you have, you know, supply chain, or if you have a marketplace in our case, customer service and financial planning were kind of the key three pillars that we looked at.

Juliet Fallowfield: Yeah, I find this so interesting because when I started, someone said to me, well, are you going to sell it? Is it a lifestyle business? What are you going to do? It's like, I was made redundant. I needed to make up a job, so I just started and I hadn't got to that next step of what am I doing this for? What does success look like?

But one thing I did do because of my Chanel training, I would give them credit for this, is be laser focused on, you we may be small, but we can be mighty and we wrote a company handbook. Well, actually it wasn't a company handbook to start with. It was just a process document of this is how we book a courier.

This is how we share information as a team. You know, basic things like that. As [00:05:00] Over the last four years, that has grown into the, the company handbook, but it's, are there any pieces of advice for someone that might not be so detail oriented that they could start with? 

Nina Briance: That's a 

Juliet Fallowfield: take a lot of notes.

Ah,

Nina Briance: In terms of kind of practical tips and advice, I would say clearly time blocking your calendar a week or two in advance. I think we all, I used to have an approach where I would only book in meetings, but you realise you also have to book in a lot of your own work and really kind of have that protected focus time

is the first way I started to find structure for myself. For my team. We looked a lot at aligning at the top first and rolled out very early on into the business and OKR system.

Juliet Fallowfield: Mm 

Nina Briance: we were quite ruthless in saying, if this isn't going to move the needle towards our North Star goals, is it worth doing it at all? And really challenging ourselves and having a framework of and we have five whys, which is simply just continuing to ask ourselves five times.

[00:06:00] Why are we doing this? Is it moving us in the right direction? So I wouldn't say we had a specific handbook per play, but we had, I would say the right kind of strategic frameworks in place to keep us in check

as we're thinking through lots and lots of changing priorities as it is for a startup. 

Juliet Fallowfield: Also you were thinking things through and I think when you start a business you are thrown in at the deep end with so many things you need to consider because you become all the hats and you're building your website, you're working out your payment terms, you're learning how to recruit someone or fire someone or write a company newsletter, all the things you wouldn't have done in your previous day jobs you can get stuck in the weeds.

So I love the fact that you kept thinking big picture before you went into the weeds. welcome. Is this going to be the best use of our time? Is this going to get us to where we are going to go to? So did you have an idea at the beginning then where you wanted to take the business? Was it really clear and has that changed since?

Nina Briance: Yeah, I always kind of anchored this business on the big goal of being the biggest independent fashion destination in the world, underpinned [00:07:00] by, I would say, the values of the future. So

Juliet Fallowfield: Oh, so not, not a small goal then.

Nina Briance: I was dreaming big from the beginning and figuring out, right, you know, what are the building blocks to get us there? That goal hasn't changed. It's still kind of our, our biggest North star. I'd call it our sun actually.

How we've thought about getting there has changed during the last five years, but the goal has kind of remained the same, which is interesting. 

Juliet Fallowfield: So far, I think I mentioned before we started recording that you're the 106th interview for this podcast, but everyone says you have to be so resolute in your determination of what you're solving, that either the product or service, you have to be the believer like no one else.

And when you hit tough times, you, that kicks in and that resolute belief will help you. But that obviously has also helped you work back into the day to day. So is it on like an hour by hour basis? You'll look at that North Star and think, it sounds like it is the questioning and everything, but who gets to make the final decision?

Nina Briance: It depends. When it comes to kind of [00:08:00] big strategic priorities, it's still me. When it comes to how that is executed within departments and on a day to day basis, it's our CEO, our COO and our department heads. So at CULT MIA, we have an e commerce marketing and partnerships departments. And I think a really big part of enabling this business to get to a bigger scale was learning when and how to take a step back and learning when to not make every tiny micro decision because by nature I'm an ex investment banker. I'm very, very detailed. I'm very, very hands on. I'm a perfectionist and it took quite a lot of work to really learn how to let go and when to let go. And I realised that was probably one of the biggest barriers to rapid growth was, you know, trying to wear all the hats all at once. So that has been, you know, an interesting personal journey for me,

Juliet Fallowfield: How did you do it? Cause I know you've got a team, but I was gonna say, how did you do it? Because [00:09:00] for me, it's me letting things go, but then also having the right people in place that can do those things won't go away. You still need to do them. 

Nina Briance: yeah, 

Juliet Fallowfield: was it a case of you had the people in place, but you still weren't letting them get on with it?

Or you weren't ready to recruit or a mixture of both?

Nina Briance: I would say. We were at the pre seed stage, you know, your budget's tight, so you know all the different roles your company needs, but you also have a clear budget and you're not going to be able to fill all your dream roles. So it was about prioritising what the business needed most and focusing on recruiting those roles. For me, the kind of most difficult role to let go of was the COO position. I kind of essentially was wearing the CEO, COO, and CFO hat all at once last year. And because I was the person who had uploaded our first product on the website, packaged our first order, you know, wrote our first newsletter, post our first Instagram post, you know, I [00:10:00] was so embedded in the weeds of everything that happened in the business.

And I honestly loved it. every single little piece that makes CULT MIA a tick. So to really start to remove myself to, you know, being a proper CEO, being on the board of the company, being the face of, you know, the liaison with investors and really relying on someone else to keep me updated on what has happened in the last week was a huge you know,

cosmic change for me, and the biggest trigger was a personal one, which was I got pregnant last year. I was going to have a baby in June, exactly a year ago, and there was no way I was going to be able to go on maternity leave, come back, and still be pregnant. I don't run the business in the same way, nor should that have been the case anyways, because the business was doubling in size every year or more. And it was time to split up my role. So I would say it [00:11:00] was a positive forcing mechanism on the personal side that kind of unlocked that proper hand over and delegation,

but I needed a bit of a push. That's the truth.

Juliet Fallowfield: Well, it's really hard because also, in fact, this morning I watched a post, I think that Elon Musk had made years and years ago about how being the boss or the founder or the person that started the business is awful. It's He said something about swallowing glass and looking into the abyss because you are the funnel where you delegate all the bits that can be done by other people and you're just left with the shit bits and hard bits and the things that you can't, you don't even know how to fix, but that's why I think it's quite hard to let go of the Instagram posts or the newsletter or the things that you did at the beginning, because you know how to do those and you can do those and you can take them off a list and you get job satisfaction when you're left with all the abyss bits, you're like, Oh God, take me back to Instagram. 

Nina Briance: Easy stuff. Yeah.

I think going back to your initial point, you know, it's all about trusting the people that you bring on board and the bigger your business gets, you have the [00:12:00] opportunity to attract real experts in different areas. And while you might think as the founder, because you've been for the longest, you know best, you need to kind of do a little bit of a self check and realise that people you're hiring with, you know, 15 years of marketing under their belt, know better than you. They might need some steers on your vision and the direction, but you need to let everyone feel empowered to do their roles. And that's when they'll do them best. Yeah,

Juliet Fallowfield: And if you're paying someone your money to do the job for you, you hope they're going to be better than you.

Nina Briance: it's true.

Juliet Fallowfield: Gosh, so that forced nudge when you would take some time away from the business. How did you find that? Was it really difficult and conflicting because you wanted to do both or was it like, you know what, the team are there, I'm going to go on mat leave, I'll check in if they need me, but this is a good forced step away.

Nina Briance: I would not [00:13:00] say most people would probably call what I called my maternity leave as a real break.

Juliet Fallowfield: Yeah, I was going to say.

Nina Briance: I thought I would be able to properly disconnect for at least a few weeks, but given everything that was happening with our fundraise, it didn't work out. It didn't prove to be possible. And there's just like you said, certain things that you cannot delegate. And you know, negotiating terms, our valuation, et cetera, is not something I could hand over to anyone in the business, nor did I want to. So

Juliet Fallowfield: That cluster of timing is hard. 

Nina Briance: The timing, yeah, and like we said at the very start of this conversation, you can plan, plan, plan, but, you know, sometimes that plan gets ripped up and this was one of those moments. And I felt like it was overwhelming with everything that was going on, but I had fantastic support networks, my team, was incredible throughout. And they really, [00:14:00] really came through and kind of showed the real team spirits. Interestingly enough, we're all women in the company or 14 women at the moment.

And I think there was a special kind of connection there during the mat leave period in particular. And then family, friends, you know, on the personal side, were hugely, hugely supportive and important in kind of helping me manage everything that was going on. But the reality is babies sleep a lot at the beginning.

So you do have time to do work. And I think as long as you can kind of manage when you do it, you can find a balance. And I also think it's really important to know yourself and I love what I do. I've always loved working, and I feel like I would bring the best energy to family time, kind of knowing that I was stimulating my mind and kind of keeping up with my work and so on.

Juliet Fallowfield: Absolutely, and I think, what's the expression? Give somebody busy something to do [00:15:00] because you know they're going to get it done. 

Yeah. 

And efficiency, I think, I think not just in self employment, but in any role, it gives a lot of people job satisfaction. And I have worked in the past with people who are inefficient, but they still seem to get job satisfaction.

I just don't understand how they do it. I am OCD. I get laser focused on things. I love that. ticking things off a list, that list will always, this is something I realised last year in year three, was that the list is like a rolling, it's never going to end. There's always, as soon as you get something off the top, something else will bubble up.

And if you run out of things to do, then you've got to worry about it. But with efficiency of time, are there any systems and processes other than time blocking that you'd recommend founders take into their day to day?

Nina Briance: About time specifically.

Juliet Fallowfield: For me, someone gave the great advice of saying no to meetings that don't have agendas. And I was like, great, if someone doesn't know what they're coming to the meeting for, then just say no.

Nina Briance: Yeah. I think that's a really good one. Hmm.

Juliet Fallowfield: Don't worry if there isn't, we can move on to the next question. Completely 

Nina Briance: Nothing specific comes to mind, to be honest. I'm sure later today I'll be like, oh, I do this. But

I'm 

Juliet Fallowfield: Voice note me.

Nina Briance: yeah, I'm drawing a little bit of a blank on kind

Juliet Fallowfield: No, that's fine.

Nina Briance: specific time management tactics that people would find interesting.

Juliet Fallowfield: Has technology and software helped you scale as well? How important has that been in your business development?

Nina Briance: I would say quite hugely [00:16:00] important. We have focused really early on in our journey on what are the blockers and how can we automate them?

And for a business like CULT MIA, I realised one of the barriers to growth and efficiency was manually uploading products from the designers that we work with. And there was literally only a certain amount of products the team had capacity to upload on a weekly basis. So in year one, we developed an automated onboarding tool, which not even a platform like Farfetch had. Because, you know, we were thinking, how can we catch up with some of these big platforms quickly? And how can we really make that process efficient? So we went from about two days of work to bring a designer online just on the e com side. Today it's down to 30 minutes, which is pretty incredible. Again, thinking 

Juliet Fallowfield: Anything to save time. [00:17:00] Yeah.

Nina Briance: anything to save time, but also to remove manual checks, manual error, you know, there was a lot of also thinking about treating our designers as customers and not just shoppers and making the onboarding process really easy and efficient for them. So quite a few efficiency angles that we were looking at to kind of. Rapid scale, but be able to sustain. Much, much bigger demand in the future as well.

Juliet Fallowfield: Yeah. So that automation piece is key.

Nina Briance: It's super, super, super key. And that touched on different parts of the platform and the customer journey. You know, things like site merchandising take a huge amount of work for e com businesses, literally moving products around and other platforms have huge headcounts dedicated to site merchandising. You know, we don't have a single headcount because we have an AI driven site merchandising tool based on your own profile data, really focusing on kind of a [00:18:00] personalised offering, which was completely game changing for us. We,

Juliet Fallowfield: How did you find out about it? When was the light bulb moment?

Nina Briance: It came hand in hand with wanting to add more brands and products. So you want to upload lots of brands, but then you want to maintain the discoverability and the experience for customers. So we're like, okay, we fixed this automated upload process. We're going to have tons of new products coming live every week. Gosh, now we have to make sure that we're merchandising them appropriately. How are we going to keep up with that? So it was a little bit of a chain effect of kind of automated one piece. Now I need to think about how to kind of automate or alleviate the workload for the impact that that's had. I don't know if that answers your question.

Juliet Fallowfield: No, it does. It's really interesting because I think a lot of the solutions we found have come out of really big problems. So I've been presented with a problem where I've gone, Oh God, Oh God, this is a potential nightmare. But then being put into that hot water going, how do I fix this?

We've then found answers for many, [00:19:00] many other things. So I think someone else called it the trampoline effect where you hit rock bottom, you bounce back up stronger. And I really like it because that whole, and every single guest has said, be okay with the rollercoaster and I am not okay with it, but I accept it, but that when you're at the bottom, you're so excited because you're about to go back up again.

So when you're in the thick of that problem solving, you're like, well, what else am I going to learn? I've sort of. And for you, that really, my favorite quote of all time has been from Uwern Jong where he said, automate, delegate, solve. If anything keeps cropping up, just do those three things. Automate, find, find the process, delegate to someone who's better than you, or solve the problem, fire the person, hire the person, whatever it might be, fix it.

So it stops recurring in your brain. So you free it up for the next thing. And this automation piece, especially for your platform, I'm sure was completely game changing. And Are there any other pieces of software, like, I mean, I, I kind of joke that, you know, when you're self employed, when you spell zero with an X there's other software platforms that I've become mildly addicted to, like Canva, Toggl for our time tracking.

What other platforms do [00:20:00] you use?

Nina Briance: Yeah, so we also use Xero. We also use Canva. We use Asana for project management, which we absolutely love. It's kind of like Trello. I don't know if you're

familiar with it, but can really build out really clear roadmaps, calendars, project management, delegation, task and time management feeds right into your calendar. So we found that to be incredibly, incredibly useful. I'm trying to think if there's anything else that we use on a day to day basis.

Juliet Fallowfield: Well, I think less, oh, sorry, FreshBooks for receipts.

Nina Briance: freshworks

Oh, So it's a whole kind of CRM customer service system that channels, all of our messages, whether it's social media DMs, emails, live chats, all under one platform can be reassigned to different members of our team that don't just sit in customer service and kind of grouping all the customer requests and comms under one roof has been game changing in the last quarter for us.

Juliet Fallowfield: Always 

Nina Briance: think also with these things, less is more because you want a few that talk to each other. But if you had a hundred logins, it's a pain 

Yeah, [00:21:00] exactly. Exactly.

Juliet Fallowfield: And is it a case that to hire, sorry, I'll rephrase this. Is it always a case that you need to hire more people to scale your company? I don't think it might be in this case.

Nina Briance: Absolutely not. Interestingly enough, our kind of operational expenses as a percentage of our turnover. Revenue is less than 15%. Which means we've been able to really scale up incredibly, incredibly efficient. And yes, we're 14 people today, but for the next two years, the team won't go beyond being able to 18 people, you know, so we have kind of the core team in place to really maintain all the key functions, support this next stage of growth because we did so much of the automation work early on. And the business is really set up to run on its own efficiently now. And it's just about kind of overseeing and iterating and making those incremental improvements with the heavy lifting.

Now, 

Juliet Fallowfield: at that 

sweet spot. 

That's 

Nina Briance: sweet spot. Yeah. Yeah. I love a lean team. And I think [00:22:00] everyone has a really clear and defined role and everyone who joins the business. We've spent a lot of time scoping out specifically what they will do. And I think if you ask anyone in the business, they would kind of refer to our team as like a football team, like an American football team where there's like the running back, the quarterback. I love that analogy because it just speaks to everyone knowing their kind of purpose and contributions and being able to come together behind our kind of big mission and goal really efficiently and effectively.

Juliet Fallowfield: I find it so, 

sorry, 

I was going to say, I find it really funny. A lot of people, when they find out I'm self employed, ask me how many people I employ, as if that is a metric of success. And everyone has a sort of different idea. They're like, Oh wow, you employ X many people. That means in their brain something.

And I'm like, no, no, for me, if I can just employ three people and we are doing what we're doing and we've got the. Client testimonials that are coming in. I'm thrilled. It's less payroll, less pensions, less annual leave, less worry, less responsibility, [00:23:00] less is a 100% is my mantra for this year, less is more.

But I think on the outside world, people kind of think head count equals success. And I feel like it's the opposite. And I was going to ask, sorry, you go.

Nina Briance: I was just going to say probably one of the things I'm most proud of, we were on Sifted's fastest growing startup list this year.

Juliet Fallowfield: Congratulations. 

Nina Briance: The only fashion business on there, they picked a hundred companies. And one of the metrics that they put was employee number. And they took the figures from the end of 2023 when we were eight people. I'm not joking. We must have been. At least five times smaller team size than the, than every other company on there. You know? And it really speaks to that kind of like success metric being employing a huge amount of people. But I kind of want to say like, maybe you should rank us higher for achieving this growth with such a tight knit kind of

Juliet Fallowfield: Totally quality, not quantity

Nina Briance: Yeah.

Team. But yeah, you're right. I think it'll take time for, [00:24:00] I guess, the world to rate team size a little bit differently. Hmm.

Juliet Fallowfield: for me. It all comes down to efficiency. You've got less people doing more work at a very high level and everybody's happy. That is success for me. And it's a constant question I ask is what, what does success look like to us? And that is something that has cropped up quite a lot because people are the hardest part of any business, I think.

And I was going to say, when you're scaling the business, how do you avoid that duplication of work? Because presumably the 14 people, they're not all reporting to you. How, well, you've talked about letting things go and letting your department heads have that responsibility, but how do you ensure that efficiency is trickled down or trickled through, I should say, the business?

Nina Briance: That is a good question.

Juliet Fallowfield: Something about scoping people's roles a lot before they, you brought them on. Is that due diligence piece at the beginning? Does that save you time later on, do you think?

Nina Briance: It definitely saves time because that means that everyone knows their remit. It means [00:25:00] that everyone has very clear sets of responsibilities and they know their territory and they can really own it. And that sense of ownership, I think, by nature, really creates efficiency because then you don't spend a lot of time going up and down asking who should do what and what do I need approval for what and who do I come to for, for this.

We have really clear financial delegation of authority and a decision making matrix. So when you think about if you're getting stuck on how to prioritise your work, we have the three core metrics we're trying to impact, but we're also ranking them and the spin off metrics from there. So if you're like, should I run this promotional campaign, or should I launch an ambassador program? Well you'll think about the metrics that these two pieces impact, you'll think about kind of our decision matrix of how those metrics stack up and then the answer is quite clear. Actually, [00:26:00] right now we're focused on top line growth, so we're gonna go with a promotional strategy because we need to boost revenue completely made that example up.

But just to bring to life that I think giving the team a really clear visual picture of what should we be focused on moving and in what priority answers a lot of questions and avoids a lot of inefficient. unclear

Juliet Fallowfield: Going around the 

Nina Briance: management, essentially. Yeah, I used to work for some lovely luxury ,

Juliet Fallowfield: brands, but I'd never experienced self employment. I'd witnessed my father who was self employed, but he worked as a one man band, so I'd never seen it as a team and seeing I had a CEO once that was obsessed with going through the Instagram copy and I was like, haven't you got better things to do than this?

And we go round and round and round the houses and it just was never let out of the door and I left the business in the end and said, I don't have any job satisfaction. I can't achieve anything. This isn't working for me in my role. I think, especially when you get time poor, you get really good at saving that efficiency.

But. I was going to go on to the question of, as you've [00:27:00] got bigger, have you found it harder to be as efficient or actually easier because you've got these systems in place?

Nina Briance: It's an interesting one. I think as a business grows, obviously complexity increases and it can make efficient scaling more challenging, but I think if you have the right systems, processes, team, with a mindset of, you know, continuous improvement, it's definitely manageable and sustainable. So it really comes back to the groundwork that you've done at the beginning. Maintaining kind of that agile thinking and mindset to keep auditing your own thinking processes and structures so that you are continuing to be set up for that efficient scaling, the bigger and bigger that you get.

Juliet Fallowfield: So never rest on your laurels and don't ever take anything for granted.

Nina Briance: That's a much better way of saying it.

Juliet Fallowfield: Oh, no, not at all. It's just and also in English, we have so many [00:28:00] expressions for things. I worked for California and Boston, New York once, and I'd said, Oh God, it's raining cats and dogs. So I was working in New York and she's like, Well, I know those are English words, but I just don't know what you're saying because I've just come up with all these expressions and she, she's just, I don't even get me started on the Australian version.

But she just would laugh at how many weird colloquialisms we have over here. So just quick fire questions. I think you may have answered these already, but if you have anything else to add, please do. Otherwise we'll just chop them out. How do you protect your time?

Nina Briance: I would say by prioritising tasks, really delegating effectively, setting up my own boundaries and I said this already, and it's not revolutionary, but really time blocking to ensure I focus on the most high impact activities or work that needs to be done.

Juliet Fallowfield: Thank you. I time blocked once and then was like, Oh God, I've been completely unrealistic of how long I think things take. I was like, I've got 30 things to do today. I'm going to time block them. I'm like, Oh no, that's not going to happen. That's just not, what was I [00:29:00] thinking? It's hilarious. And then on prioritisation, how it's some, it does prioritize, I can't even talk today. I'm so sorry. Prioritize, I can't even say the word. 

Um, when you're coming to prioritise things, is there advice you'd give somebody how to do that?

Nina Briance: I would say you focus on your tasks that align with your long term goals and have the highest impact. And then from there, you categorise kind of the tasks by urgency and importance and tackle the most critical ones first. And I keep coming back to this, but I love the concept of the five why's to really drill down on what will make that impact and keep you focused on your North stars. Because it's so easy to go down a rabbit hole, especially, you know, going back to the roller coaster, you can have a great week as a startup. You can have a not great week and you can spend a huge amount of time dissecting why your sales went down one week when really. You can focus on the big picture and realise you're still on track and you still have lots of work to do to keep yourself moving in the right direction.

Juliet Fallowfield: And not waste time on the worry. Someone told me that recently. I [00:30:00] found that really useful. It's like, well, where's that going to get you? Unless you're learning something from it. Don't worry about it.

Nina Briance: yeah, exactly.

Juliet Fallowfield: Yeah. 

Nina Briance: that.

Juliet Fallowfield: And how would you avoid feeling overwhelmed by everything? Cause you've got an incredible business.

You have a family, you, you've achieved so much. How do you manage that overwhelm? Or does it come and go?

Nina Briance: I would say I try to break things down into digestible pieces because when you're growing a business, you feel like you get over one little hump. You did a fundraise and then you get to the top of the peak and you see a much higher mountain in front of you. So that can feel overwhelming, but I think if you really think about breaking things down into smaller tasks that you can get the satisfaction of ticking off your list, manageable kind of steps, taking regular breaks and trying your best to maintain a healthy work life balance as easy as that sounds.

It's not always so easy. That has helped [00:31:00] me kind of stay focused and not get too overwhelmed.

Juliet Fallowfield: The one thing that you,

Nina Briance: a time, essentially.

Juliet Fallowfield: yeah, very true. And someone did say. You know, when you get to the end, by the way, there isn't one, will you have ticked it off the list or actually is it the day to day that you need to learn to enjoy? And I was like, Oh God, that's really hard. And that work life balance, taking yourself out of the weeds and taking, removing yourself from it to then have perspective on it, I found quite helpful.

Is there one thing that you do to relax and recharge yourself?

Nina Briance: Honestly, for me, it's being outdoors. Whether

it's running or just really long walks through the park getting out of the city. I feel like it really, really clears my head. I also love to exercise. I've always played lots of sports my whole life. Just a proper, proper disconnect from my phone and my laptop is,

the best way to help me relax and recharge.

I went on a family safari two years ago. And the first day that we were out in Botswana, my [00:32:00] phone didn't work. There was no signal. No one told me. I think my parents did it on purpose. So like I wouldn't pre freak out that I wouldn't be getting emails. And I kept checking my phone the first day. Like there was nothing coming through.

There was no signal, but that habit of just like constantly checking on the latest and then the next day and over the next week, honestly, I could not have been happier, what a liberation.

So trying to,

recreate that within reason a week is not really possible, you know, to do

all the time, but trying 

Juliet Fallowfield: but even a few hours is golden.

Nina Briance: Golden

Juliet Fallowfield: Yeah, I saw a friend in the co working office we used yesterday and he said, Oh, I've had been at the office all day at meetings. I've just got to clear my emails. I was like, I've done this before. And do you find it actually, you can clear a whole day's worth of emails much quicker when you sit down in one batch rather than sit at your laptop hour in, hour out.

And he's like, actually, you can make a really good point.

Nina Briance: It's so true. I don't know if you've worked a bit kind of remotely and you

wake up and it's already, I don't know, 2, 3 PM [00:33:00] in London and you have all your emails, you can just bang them out rather than

being drip at emails and constantly checking.

I love it. I find it so efficient. It's

Juliet Fallowfield: I used to work in Australia for a French brand, so I'd overnight get all my answers and then I had the whole day to get back to them. 

Nina Briance: nice. I love that structure, honestly.

Juliet Fallowfield: Actually, my team made 

Nina Briance: You can create it for yourself if

you just don't check your email every 10 minutes, you know?

Juliet Fallowfield: Well, it, it really hit home. I went back to Australia for a couple of months last winter to get away from London's winter and my team made me laugh. They were like, yeah, we kind of preferred it when you were over there because, you know, you just leave us alone all day and then we'd leave you alone all day.

So we just kept handing things back over to each other with a time difference because it was so extreme. We'd have an hour overlap maybe. And it worked so well. We, cause you can just get one thing done at a time rather than feeling like you pulled in a million different directions, which is blissful. 

So yeah.

Nina Briance: That is the dream

to recreate. Not always possible

Juliet Fallowfield: and being realistic about it is not always possible, I think is good. Something that we do is we always have a question from the previous guest for the next guest and Hind from Waldencast had a question for [00:34:00] you around what is the big goal, sorry, rephrases, what is the big goal with your business and what keeps you going?

Nina Briance: The big goal. You know, I really, really want to be the destination for independent and ethical luxury fashion. Why that's the goal. We didn't speak about this, but you know. I spent part of my career at the U. N. working with a team called Women in Trade, helping women owned micro enterprises scale up in the most remote parts of the world, in the most challenging circumstances, you know, across violence, poverty and I saw these women succeed against all odds. all the odds out there and it really, really inspired me to continue on that mission in some capacity through CULT MIA and yes,

there's huge commercial goals behind the scaling to be the [00:35:00] biggest independent fashion destination out there, but the knock on effects that we have on the communities, on the women, on the, you know, ethical brands that we support are enormous

and the comments that we get back from the designers that we work with saying, you know, being

listed on the platform has, you know, allowed them to send their kids to school or, you know, allow them to finish building their house.

You know, There's no bigger motivation than feeling like your work, which on the outside might seem like this kind of, you know, superficial fashion business has so much depth on the impact side. And I would say that for me personally has always been a huge motivation. And one of the reasons why I wanted to set up this business. And that was

a really long answer. 

Juliet Fallowfield: No, it's, it's brilliant though and I think that is, It's going back to that being resolute in your value. Like there's a bigger why here, what you're doing this for, and that will motivate you to the cows come home. There you go. It's another English expression. And would you have a question for our next guest 

and I can tell you who it is or can I actually, I think we've got some dates moving around that, you know, I can't tell you who it is yet, 

unfortunately. Anything about entrepreneurship, productivity,

Nina Briance: Yeah,

Juliet Fallowfield: what big question are you battling with at the moment?

Nina Briance: yeah. What, [00:36:00] What would make you feel outside of, you know, a big check or a big valuation. What would truly make you feel like you've succeeded in what you're building?

Juliet Fallowfield: Let me write this down, what you're building. Perfect. Love that.  It's a big question, but it's, you need it because it isn't about the money. It's definitely got to be a bigger why. I love that. Thank you so much. It's been lovely chatting to you. Thank you for your time and huge congratulations on everything you've done.

I mean, you've made it look very, easy, but I'm sure it's not,

Nina Briance: No, no, no. And there's an army behind me. So I would say it's, it's a big, big team effort. And I'm super proud of the CULT MIA team. And

Juliet Fallowfield: an efficient army too.

Nina Briance: very efficient army, I have to say. Really nice to chat this morning, Juliet. Thank you. 

Juliet Fallowfield: No, not at all. I, let me quickly, chicks, join in. 

 I really hope you've enjoyed this conversation, you can find a recap of all the advice so kindly shared by guests in the show notes, along with our contact details, we'd love it.

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