Getting organised with a remarkable woman who just sold her influential agency

Getting organised with a remarkable woman who just sold her influential agency

Lorraine Murphy has just announced the sale of The Remarkables Group, the influencer agency she started from her spare bedroom in 2012, initially to connect influential bloggers with brands.

While staying on as a consultant during the transition period, the move will see Lorraine’s business partner Natalie Giddings become the sole owner of The Remarkables Group.

Making the official announcement on Monday, the news comes as Lorraine has also just launched her second book, Get Remarkably Organised.

I was lucky to attend the launch of the book late last week, where Lorraine dropped some hints about her next steps, without making the official announcement.

Lorraine’s looking to now focus on her speaking, writing and training career. She said seeing how fast time has flown since the birth of her daughter in June 2017 led her to realise it’s time to get on with what she’s really passionate about. In the immediate short-term, that’ll include taking a trip to Bali and doing a “shitload of yoga”, but later she believes she will start more businesses.

The Remarkables Group was the first dedicated influencer talent agency in Australia. Incredibly, it did more than $1 million in revenue in its first 12 months. “I had an idea that I thought would solve problems, I had some savings, so I went for it,” she wrote on her blog discussing the sale of the business.

Lorraine’s entrepreneurial experience, as well as the insights into ‘remarkability’ she’s now shared in two separate books, makes her well placed to share her knowledge all over the world.

 

It can be rare to find an influencer on the entrepreneurial speaker and training circuit with such real-world experience – someone who has built a unique and successful company and exited it on their own terms.

She’s also already shared the realities of being a mum in business, after a LinkedIn post outlining how a contact accidentally emailed a ‘WTF’ to a request they meet in a café with pram access, went viral. Lorraine wrote about the experience – and the great feedback she received from her own network – for Women’s Agenda late last year, where you can also see the email chain.

As for the title of her second book, Get Remarkably Organised, you can see Lorraine lives what she preaches, even despite the chaos of a newborn. She talks about routines, to-do lists, journaling, goal-setting, making time for exercise and meditating.

Having interviewed Lorraine a number of times, it’s clear that when she has an ambition, she throws everything at making it happen. In 2015, she told me about the moment she first voiced aloud the fact she would start The Remarkables – it happened while brushing her teeth.

She had an idea to solve a problem, the savings to get started and a spare bedroom to work in. She initially spent weekends working on a website, figuring out the accounting, legals and admin, and signing up the bloggers she’d represent.

She got her first mention in trade publication Mumbrella on the day the Remarkables launched. It would be the first of many media mentions, along with numerous industry awards.

“Those first six months were spent pushing shit upshill,” she concedes on her blog. At that time, in 2012, much of her work involved educating brands on the value of working with bloggers. Landing Woolworths as a client in that first six months changed the game, and immediately doubled the number of bloggers Lorraine represented. She then hired her first employee.

“The Remarkables Group brand began to grow, as did I as an entrepreneur, but also a person. Starting a business has a strange way of forcing you to deal with all your own shit – from feelings of inadequacy, fear of letting others down, to the omnipresent uncertainty. Ah the uncertainty!!!”

She says that on at least three occasions in the last five and a half years, she considered closing the business – due to being either exhausted, overwhelmed or disillusioned.

Wondering if there was a secret code she just hadn’t personally cracked, she realised everyone’s dealing with their own challenges. “I can tell you that 90% of the time running The Remarkables Group that I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing, and was scrabbling every week, day and hour to figure things out.

Lorraine once told me that a positive attitude to risk is essential when it comes to building a great business or career. It’s the way to move forward, quickly. And it’s certainly helped Lorraine’s career.

It’s amazing to see just how much she’s achieved in a little over five years: Starting and exiting a game-changing business, writing two books, earning a swag of awards and having a baby.

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