Success Interview with Andrea Warner 

Some of you may know that I’ve started to talk to fellow female business owners about why they started their businesses and how they measure success. In this post, you can either watch or read the interview with my latest guest Andrea Warner.

Interview Transcript

Welcome to success interviews.  This is where I’m chatting to fellow female business owners to find out a little bit more about why they started their business. How they measure success and to ask them for some tips for their younger selves.

Today I’m joined by Drea Warner. I met her in 2014 when I joined a networking group that she was a co-founder of.  I’ve followed her journey a lot since then and she’s had several businesses. Today she’s going to tell us a little bit more about what she’s doing now.

Andrea is the Director of CREATIVE in TiME, a dynamic digital marketing agency with a passion for helping businesses succeed. With over twenty years of experience in starting and running award-winning businesses, she understands the importance of digital marketing and specialises in SEO. Her expertise helps companies get FOUND on Google. With an ability to “read the room” and ask the right questions, she ensures that the heart of the business is at the forefront of all marketing strategies  

Why did you start your business? 

I was originally running a beauty business and as you can well imagine, during Covid when everything was on its knees it was difficult.  I had to pivot, add or change it up or find myself in a different place.

I now run CREATIVE in TiME along with my partner and we have different roles and responsibilities in the business, but I essentially kind of like manage everything and am the face of it a little bit more, that type of thing because we both come from different backgrounds. So, CREATIVE in TiME focuses on SEO which is search engine optimisation. It’s where people click into Google or Bing or different search engines to find businesses or whatever they’re looking for. We help our customers rank at the top, to get found more easily.   

I am the happiest I’ve ever been in any of my businesses and any of my endeavours and in my personal life.  

How would you measure success?  

I suppose it’s the amount of time that I spend smiling and laughing versus stressing.  That’s how I measure success when I can wake up and I don’t feel dread coming over me because of the things I have to do or the people that are going to be in contact with me because they’re not happy or whatever, or the, you know, getting out with the family and doing activities, being able to switch off as well from work, which is still hard to do as a business person or an entrepreneur or anything like that and it’s just having more time to be creative as well, which I think is super important.  

Take self-care, reading books and everything like that. One of the things that is often talked about is that past a certain age, you stop being creative. You start being an adult. You start being serious. The most genius ideas and my most inspired times come out of being creative and so that is downing tools. It is taking time and it is putting yourself in a different environment sometimes. Putting yourself in a different situation can inspire more thoughts and more creativity in general. So that’s how I measure success for myself. The more I am happy and the less I am stressed and things are going well, I’m in a good place, I’m happy.  

Absolutely love that and I love that you didn’t mention making a certain amount of money there. It’s such a traditional view, isn’t it, of success that we have to be hitting six figures, then seven figures and pushing further and further and sometimes that actually makes us more stressed and takes away from our happiness. I think what you said about as long as I’m smiling every day and laughing, that’s my version of success. I absolutely love that.  

Money is important and that has come with being successful financially and the only reason that I’ve got successful financially is by allowing myself to be creative and enjoying life. It’s kind of like money brings money and creativity brings more for us. So, it kind of naturally follows rather than chasing the pound  

What one tip would you give to your younger self?  

One of the tips I think is if people are saying really good things about you, listen to them, they’re probably right. If they’re saying bad things about you, they’re probably idiots. So don’t listen to them. That’s what I would say. Don’t listen to them. Is it so hard? We’re always so hard on ourselves. Never mind listening to other negativity around us. When I started, most people were saying, that would be a really good business and really you should do this as a business and it took me a while to listen to them. I wish I’d listened to them sooner, essentially.  

I would also give a tip of saying research is not cheating. Trying to find ways to get to where you want to faster. If it’s already been done, don’t reinvent the wheel.  Take what they’ve done if it’s been successful and use it. Also know your numbers, revenue is vanity and profit is sanity. If you’re scared to look at your numbers, it’s probably because you’re not in a great place and you know what? You kind of know it deep down, and it’s better to look at it and be in the know and you can make more informed decisions going forward. So all of those things I think would have sped up my success and my happiness faster if I had known them back then.   

Thank you for joining me and sharing your version of success Drea, if you would like to share your version of success with me please get in touch.

Watch the Interview