Q: Can you talk about resilience, perseverance, mental health and looking after yourself?

Siobhan Bulfin
CEO & Founder 
Melon Health

A: I harp on this a lot, because people often ask what you need to start a company and stick with it. And there are two things to me that are the most important things. You need to be persistent. There are very few overnight successes. Jeremy Moon, Icebreaker, it was 10 years before they made a profit, and that’s retail. So you need to be ready to do it for a long time. You need to love it… because you’re going to be doing it for a long time.

When I meet CEO’s of larger companies I usually ask ‘if there’s one bit of advice to up and coming CEO’s, what would it be? And it’s always two things. One is, get rid of people as soon as you know you need to get rid of them. In other words, don’t continue carrying someone just because you don’t have the guts to let them go. You need a good performing team. But the other thing is to just keep showing up. And I remind myself of that sometimes, because that’s actually not that hard. Everything else is hard, but I can just keep showing up. I can do that.

So that’s persistence, and resilience is something else. We can train ourselves to be more resilient. You have to be resilient because it’s just extremely hard a lot of the time. And you just get kicked back and kicked back. Pandora the music station pitched to 333 investors before they got a dime. So you just have to get kicked off the horse and get back on it time and time again. So resilience is really important.

So persistence and resilience would be the key things, and looking after yourself. It’s hard to do that obviously if you’re working crazy hours most days of the week. But for me I run and I do yoga and I meditate everyday. And I swear by it. That’s what works for me.