[Bonus Episode] War, Business Advice and Burnout: Tijana Tamburic Interview on Immigrants Building Companies

15:02Tijana Tamburic:Yeah. And one of the things that I will say in defense of being an immigrant, and one of the things that I did get is, and I don't know if this was the same for you or your family, but being an immigrant in London and my culture is one where the children stay at home as long as they need to. In Serbia, it's quite common for a child to stay at home all the way up until they get married. Yes. And then to only move out when they can afford to buy a home with their partner. So there isn't really this culture of decade long periods of renting and living alone and doing that. And so I always felt like even if things failed, I lived in the US for three years and I lost my U.S.

15:40Tijana Tamburic:work visa and I had to come back home I always knew I could come home and that you know there was albeit a bunk bed in a councillor's right flat like it's nothing fancy but I always knew that I had somewhere I could come back to and that wasn't seen as failure and that wasn't seen as oh gosh when are you going to move out or get a job or whatever and I think that's quite conducive to foundorship because you need a place that's stable that you can be at home in and not have to worry about paying bills and things in order to create something because you have to work many hours a day to make that thing happen and you have to put any money that you do have into that thing.

16:21Tijana Tamburic:And so one of the blessings for me was very much coming back at the age of I would have been 25 and moving back in with my parents to start my business. And I think maybe that's one of the blessings of being an immigrant and our culture, because a lot of my friends at sixth form were desperate to move out. Like it was this, I'm turning 18, I'm going to university, I'm deliberately choosing a university that's far away from my parents, so that I can have this grand freedom experience, this liberation that they've been renting since they were 18 now. whereas I chose to stay at home and go to UCL which was a 15 minute walk from where my parents lived that was logical to me like I never questioned that and I had a job which meant that I could pay for my university degree so that I was never in debt maybe that's like one kind of silver lining that that and it's a big silver lining because like being able to have a physical place that I could start my business from you know I always said if I wrote a book it would be called the bunk bed chronicles or something of the the things that i was able to achieve and the meetings that i had in that bunk bedroom are like quite ridiculous yeah i completely

17:32Asim Amin:resonate with everything that you just said because uh i moved back into my mom's house when i was 31 or 32 so i was in the property sector long time invested a lot of money lost a lot of money and i just didn't have a choice and it wasn't a question of me asking my mom it was just it was just a default and then it wasn't just my mom it was my sisters like everybody pulling together like i mean i mean money home support system then i'm like okay i'm gonna start another business okay how can we support you like i mean it was it was just a given so that was like a huge superpower for me like i mean if i didn't have that support like i don't know how i would have bounced back like i mean yes i would have gotten a job this that but it would have been immensely more difficult and for sure I wouldn't be able to take a risk like the way I did.

18:22Asim Amin:So I'm talking about your entrepreneurship journey. So, okay, you finish your university. Was that, again, like a default that you always knew you wanted to become an entrepreneur? I'm just thinking because being an immigrant, you know, immigrant family, normally you would, especially parents, I would think, at least mine would do that, you know, go into your default would be okay safety security get like a safety net now you've got a degree get a job like a great great job because we want that stability and then you're doing something completely opposite was that something you always wanted to do and this is what you started or you did something

18:55Tijana Tamburic:else before yeah it's so funny because it's like so not linear but um i guess like my career journey i started modeling when i was 15 so i entered into a very weird world um at a very young age I was signed to one of the best agencies in the world and at 15.

19:15Asim Amin:Wow.

19:16Tijana Tamburic:And my parents being strict immigrants were like, she doesn't miss a day of school for this, you know, like school is more important than this. So I very much had like one foot in modeling and one foot in, let's say, the real world. But it helped me to finance my studies and finance all of the things that I wanted to do. So I had a taste of work. And I suppose what's interesting looking back, I was talking to somebody last night about this. I've never really worked for anybody else. You know, from modeling, which is very much you are self-employed. Correct. You work for yourself. You have an agent, but you very much manage your time, manage your money, manage everything.

19:53Tijana Tamburic:I did that for 10 years. So I worked for myself. At university, I chose history, which was very counter to my family's requirements. They were like, what are you going to be, a historian? I chose the subject that I loved. My trump card was that I told my dad, I'll do a law conversion course. which I never did and had no interest in doing. Sorry dad. And I studied history because I wanted to know more about my country and what happened and I wanted to hear about it from not Serbians. I wanted to hear about it from a wider breadth of people so I specialize in Eastern European studies and while at university alongside modeling and studying I did various jobs like I was conscious that I wasn't going to be a historian and I knew that I needed to get work experience.

20:36Tijana Tamburic:I think that was maybe another immigrant thing of like, no one's going to give me a job. I don't have an uncle who's a QCE who's going to, you know, give me an internship at XYZ. Like my parents did not have connections. So I went out and I interned at publishing companies, at magazines, thought I was interested in the nexus of communications, editorial, storytelling. But what would happen is I would go at intern level into, let's say, Random House. And that job would be painfully boring. And I would look around me and I'd be like, I'm interested in her job. And her job would be the head of the entire department of PR, let's say.

21:14Tijana Tamburic:And I was like, why can't I have that job? And it was like, well, that job requires 15 years of you climbing slowly, slowly, slowly the ranks of this ladder and doing about six jobs you have no interest in. I feel like I have some good ideas. And I could actually do her job like now as a 20 year old. And so I was very frustrated by that gap that I had to do. And so after that two month internship at Random House, I was like, what if I start my own publishing company? And so my dad, who happens to be one of the biggest collectors of comic books in the Balkans, we started a publishing company creating graphic novels by people from former Yugoslavia and helping them get published in the UK.

21:56Tijana Tamburic:And we still run that business. wow so that like became a business and i was 19 so i was like okay i can do that what what else you know and then i found this um magazine that was interesting i went in i was like look i don't want to be an intern i want to be editor-in-chief of this magazine she was like okay and so then i was the like youngest editor-in-chief they'd ever had and it was in like river square and it was a totally insane experience but i met some incredible people through it but again it was this thing of like I I don't want to be the intern I feel like I'm smart I had even then I was also like naive you know I also had the chutzpah of somebody who doesn't know that they're not good at anything and then when I graduated I was given the opportunity to move to America with an 01 US work visa which is a visa that is for aliens with extraordinary ability which my mom found very funny she was like what's the ability and I was like my face and kind of didn't really have a huge interest in modeling all time that I knew that wasn't what I wanted to do.

22:54Tijana Tamburic:But I had the foresight at sort of 21 to know that I will never get a US work visa this easily again in my life ever. And so I kind of took the opportunity, moved to LA, which was a totally insane idea because I moved alone. I couldn't drive and is very much a driving town, didn't have a driving license. So I kind of was thrown into, again, a completely opposite culture to the one that I'd now accustomed for myself to. And then I lived between LA and New York for three years doing this O1 work visa. But even while I was doing that, I was still trying to like intern and have other experiences and learn about other things because I knew I didn't want to be a model.

23:35Tijana Tamburic:The tricky thing that I had was with your work visa, you can't have a job doing anything else. Like it has to be on the visa. So everything I did was free, like I was doing it pro bono. I was just like trying to have experiences to see how businesses worked and what was going on. And then I definitely had the idea of starting my own business. So I guess the publishing was immediately me being like, I can do this. How hard is it to start a business? Then the magazine was, I was the editor in chief. So a lot of responsibility fell on me, but I didn't own the magazine. And I had the feeling that at any moment, the people who did own the magazine could go, oh we've decided to close this and my entire reputation as a journalist and editor would be on the line so about three months into that job I was very much like if I ever do this again or if I continue doing this it has to be mine I'm literally putting blood sweat tears working 16 hour days pulling in all of my connections from around the world that I know to make this thing work and it's not mine that doesn't make sense and then while in America all of these different ideas obviously percolating.

24:40Tijana Tamburic:I lived with a girl who was loads of fun. We came up with, concocted this idea of a campaign that we were going to do for Levi's. And because I'm a hustler, I ended up getting us a meeting with Levi's. And I was like, this is what we want to do. And they were like, we love it. Great. Like, what's the production company that you're doing it with? And I was like, what production company? It's just her and I, like, it's not that complicated. This was kind of before influencers and, you know, brands just reaching directly out to people and saying, hey, do you want to make this thing? This was very much the era of like, there has to be an ad agency as gatekeepers.

25:11Tijana Tamburic:And there's a system to how this works. Like you can't just come in and be like, let me make you a campaign. That was not the order of things. So I was like, ah, okay, so we need an agency. So either we go to some agency and give them our ideas, which again felt like I'm losing the ownership here, or we just start an agency. So we came back to LA with all this kind of ideas and I was just trying to figure it out. At the time, it felt too broad. It was like I'm interested in taking people's stories, like their authentic, real stories, connecting them to relevant brands and making that campaign.

25:43Tijana Tamburic:But it was like anybody, any story, any brand. It was quite broad. And I felt like I was just like one person trying to figure all of that out. And then for a variety of reasons, I came back to London in September of 2016, moved back in with my parents into my bunk bed. and that same week met a girl who I'd actually met that summer but we had like a proper sit down in her flat in Soho and I said yeah I'm really interested in this agency that takes stories connects to brands it feels really broad I don't know what it is and I was interested in the story and the creative and she was very interested in production and we've both been models that were both dropped by their agencies and wanted to see something done differently in that industry because obviously as a model I was just a face that was a blank canvas to be anybody so I could be a surfer I could be a photographer I could be whatever but I wasn't any of those things yeah and I felt with social media growing you could go on my Instagram and know that I wasn't a surfer and poof the whole veneer of the story that you've built is gone why not book an actual female surfer And the problem was, again, that old system where there needed to be models, casting directors, agencies.

27:02Tijana Tamburic:Like that was how it worked. Like you couldn't just go, oh, here's the girl for you. But we knew all of these interesting people. We were trying to make bridge those gaps and basically lose some of those middlemen, some of those casting directors, some of those agencies. So we sat back to back on the floor of her kitchen in Soho and were like, who are the people that we're most excited about in our friendship network? two degrees of separation from us that we think are doing amazing things that we'd love to work with. Photographers make a part as stylists, cool talent. And we wrote a bunch of names down and we turned around and showed it to each other.

27:32Tijana Tamburic:And without it being a prerequisite, everybody on the list was women.

27:36Asim Amin:Oh, wow.

27:37Tijana Tamburic:And it was 2016. And Trump was about to be elected. The Women's March was about to happen. Me Too was about to happen. And I said, look, neither of us have experience in advertising. I don't have a CV to show you. You don't have a CV to show me. We're literally like ex-models who've both done a bunch of different things in different places and just know that we want to do something ourselves. Let's just start this and see what happens. We're in Soho. We're surrounded by all these advertising agencies. How do we possibly compete? And it was like, let's just call a spade a spade. I'm a woman. You're a woman.

28:07Tijana Tamburic:We're both in our 20s. It's really about this. So we called it Female Narratives and it grew into a collective of over 100 female freelancers.

28:16Asim Amin:Wow.

28:16Tijana Tamburic:So the whole point was really flexible freelance foundations or freelancers that do their own thing, photographers, makeup artists, stylists, videographers, editors, animators, whatever they might be. And then it's our job to basically put teams of those women together, the spoke teams for the project. So it's very media-magnostic, but the main bridge and umbrella for everything is that it's female stories told by women for brands. So I was able to find a way to kind of shorten the brief of what I'd been kind of dreaming up with her help. And we've been running that for nine years.

28:52Asim Amin:That's amazing. Wow. Love the story. Just if we were to backtrack, America, your visa, three years, expired.

29:01Tijana Tamburic:Didn't expire. I was dropped by my agency.

29:03Asim Amin:You were dropped by your agency.

29:04Tijana Tamburic:And so immediately, de facto, you are no longer.

29:07Asim Amin:Then you have to exit.

29:08Tijana Tamburic:You have to leave.

29:09Asim Amin:Yeah, you have to leave. If that didn't happen, would you think America would be a better place for your business? Or are you in the right place now?

29:18Tijana Tamburic:Well, if that didn't happen, you have this problem where modeling is, as my friend describes it, the golden handcuffs. It's this job that's very difficult to leave because you're kind of dangled this carrot of opportunity of, well, you could do a one day job that pays you more than an investment banker's salary. And so maybe you should just stay. and so it's this it's this thing that's like difficult to leave because you're always promised this like gold at the end and there's a lifestyle and a certain status and a clout that comes with it but what it robs you of is the opportunity to be full-time on something else like you if I wanted to get a job I'd have to show up and go hey I really want to do this but I'm also a model so I just won't be here two days a week I don't know which days because I don't know when I'll be booked.

30:03Tijana Tamburic:But yeah, it will be about two days that I'm not here. Like that's impossible to do anything seriously. It's impossible to like really fully found a business in the way that you should, if you're kind of still tethered to this thing. So I definitely saw my being dropped as like a blessing because it had been 10 years. And like, I think the natural cycle of things was, is about seven or eight years. And so I was really reaching the end of that tether. Like I was arguing with my agency a lot. I was like definitely not this like malleable, moldable model that they wanted me to be. I was also like old in modeling years, you know, as a veteran.

30:38And so it was time.

30:41Tijana Tamburic:And I would have liked to stay in the US, but, you know, talk about being an immigrant. I mean, you need serious paperwork to make that happen. There have been options to grow and move the business to the US, but I just decided not to do that. I think it's also knowing about where your niche is, what you're good at, where your network is. And my network is very much here.

31:02Asim Amin:And then talking about niche, do you think this has now become your USP? Like, do companies actually, obviously they know, you know, now it's an all-female type of unit. So do they appreciate that? Is there, I mean, is that your differentiator? Are other people doing this?

31:18Tijana Tamburic:Yeah, that was definitely the differentiator. I think we were one of the first agencies that really, we had this USP of we are all female. And so we immediately started to work with brands that had similar messaging. So Bumble was female founded business that very much was like women make the first move. And so what happened was we were doing the campaign for them. And what they realized, typically in advertising, you don't know who's made the campaign. Unless you're like reading Adweek and you're going to Cannes Lions, you might have heard of like Wyden and Kennedy. But like you don't typically really know which agency shot that campaign.

31:55Tijana Tamburic:It doesn't say like made by on it. Whereas with Bumble, they were like, we like so much that you are a female founded agency and that this whole production team has been women. This is so perfect for us. We would like it to say produced by female aggressives on the billboard. And so we started to see us ourselves as a brand in that sense. So we started to grow who we were. So we were hosting events. We still do quarterly panels at Rosewood London. We have a book club. We do all these different things to really help build our own brand. So what we were able to do is, you know, really create a thing so that brands wanted to work with us, not just as service providers, but as collaborators.

32:37Tijana Tamburic:so with the brand we're very much part of every process part of the creative process like sometimes franzi and i like are in the campaign as creative director and producer like that's part of the story that we're telling so we're very much taking people behind the scenes and some of the things that we make to show them um that it's an all-female team now we're um in an age where maybe being called female narratives is maybe not that great maybe it's like too gendered Maybe it's not broad enough. And so I think we've just recently done a big rebrand of the business at the top of the year. And our kind of flagship line is very much around brand creating brand intimacy.

33:19Tijana Tamburic:We've broadened female to really be more like feminine. So it's about bringing feminine business practice, feminine ideas, feminine ways of working. And as part of that femininity, like creating this intimacy for brands. And we do that in a myriad of different ways.

33:34Asim Amin:Yeah. I mean, that was going to be my follow up question, because people are finding that as a USP. But do you have, you know, a different narrative on the flip side with people thinking, okay, you're not inclusive? I mean, you know, and also like, who are you? Okay, Bumble, maybe, maybe is an anomaly, you can correct me if I'm wrong. But who are your buyers? I mean, are your buyers also? I mean, are you selling to a to all women team? And or is there like a mix? And, you know, so I mean, are they also looking at it from a perspective? where okay because if it's all women it's not inclusive it's not diverse um so the production or the output maybe will lack you know that type of flavor yeah two questions so i'll answer them

34:17Tijana Tamburic:separately the first one is a good one because obviously um we started to get more and more non-binary people that wanted to join our collective for example and we had a big chat with them to be like what do you think about this is our name you know our name is female narratives and we had a really great conversation where um some of them said you know we completely understand the roots of why you called it that because at the time the advertising industry was so not female focused you know it was very few females in c-suite positions if you go on a set a production team very few women and so they said we understand the revolutionary nature of it in its in its beginnings and what you were trying to do at the time is what we are trying to do now.

35:02Tijana Tamburic:So we really resonate with where this came from and what you were trying to do and how you were trying to basically rail against the system. Like we changed a lot about how an agency operates. We just completely rewrote the rules of how we thought it should operate. And also obviously having been models, everything we hated about that industry and that way of working, we do completely differently. So they really loved that. And they said, we're more than happy with the name. We just obviously, there's certain wording in the description of the company that we think could be more inclusive. So we did that.

35:31Tijana Tamburic:And then, as I said, in this big rebrand, we no longer say like an all-female collective. It's just more about like it's the collective and the work. That's kind of it.

35:39Asim Amin:Gotcha.

35:40Tijana Tamburic:And in terms of the brands, we have a split between the brands that are very much female-focused, targeting women. So, for example, Your Juno, which is an app for female financial education. so that's like a clear client for us or Bumble which was all about women making the first move like all of these kind of tech enabled businesses make a lot of sense for us female investment platforms that kind of thing then we have a much larger chunk of our work which is much bigger state of the nation brands where we're doing their like women's campaign so like Nike have Nike women and we might build something for Nike women so what I mean okay so our biggest project the last three years has been for the outdoor hiking brand Merrill and we run a thing called Meryl Height Club, which is for women.

36:24Tijana Tamburic:So it's targeted at their women's products all over EMEA, and we host hundreds of events. We do PR, merch, influences, like all kinds of different things under the umbrella of that project with the mission to get more women out into nature. So that brand will also have trail running and like other things going on, but this is their like female-focused campaign. Got it. And then we might also work with, on the opposite end, a brand that is a much more heritage masculine brand that is looking for a fresh injection of ideas because sometimes they'll be stuck in their ways and they're actually seeking the opposite energy or an example was a couple of years ago we did a christmas campaign for churches which is obviously a very english heritage brand now owned by prada and we came up with this like really kooky idea that they said yes to on a whim and we made it and they loved it and it was like their most viewed video ever because I think it was that exact right contrast of something new and something fresh.

37:24Tijana Tamburic:So that's really the span. Everything from very clear female focused brands to normal brands that have a women's offering to very masculine brands that are like looking for something else.

37:37Asim Amin:So I mean, so my next question was going to be a go-to market strategy. How are people finding you or you finding people? But then your ICP really is, I mean, it's also interesting because, I mean, the complete end of the spectrum or extreme spectrum is that super masculine brand. But the narrative is changing from a place where that masculine brand, and I don't know if this is the conversations you've had with your clients, where the buyer behavior, A lot of masculine products are also bought by women for their partners, for their fathers, for their whatever. So, you know, targeting those type of, you know, different subsegment and absolutely makes sense.

38:22Asim Amin:So your go to market strategy. So how are people finding you? Was Bumble really like your catalyst that boom, like that changed everything for you?

38:31Tijana Tamburic:It's so interesting because obviously there's so much business terminology and like he's doing things and what's the ROI on this? And it's like ours was just so organic and so grassroots. Like I said, neither of us had business degrees. Neither of us had jobs in the general industry that we were trying to start a business in. We didn't know anybody that worked in that business. We just started a limited company the next day after we'd had this idea and went, even if we do one shoot that's different to the way that we were treated as models, this will be a success. So it was very low stakes and expectations.

39:07Tijana Tamburic:And then it just grew and grew and grew to the point where like both her and I were like, shit, I don't even we're now doing role. I don't even know what this role is. I don't know how to do it. We were having to learn things on the go. We spent every year we would reshift our like org structure in terms of what she was doing and what I was doing based on our individual aptitudes, interests and skills. So much of business that I think if founders are honest with themselves is like figuring it out as you go along and and getting an opportunity to do a job and Bumble being like, can you do this?

39:38Tijana Tamburic:Have you done out of home before? And us going, we've done this before. What do you mean? And then being like, oh, my God, I have absolutely no idea how to do that. And then figuring it out. And I think you only figure things out by being thrown into those situations. Otherwise, I would have never done that would have gone. I don't know how to do that. Somebody else can do that. so so there's that that's the caveat and then what we realized was you know we tried writing cold emails we tried making trend reports and sending them out to people none of that worked what worked for us was a word of mouth obviously like like people recommending people our network working with a brand that recommended us to another brand that definitely worked but then what we realized was like events we've been basically hosting a panel of some version of a panel talk event for the last nine years.

40:26Tijana Tamburic:We started at the W Hotel. They said, look, we've had this series that we do at the W everywhere. We'd like you to take over the series as basically curators of that series. Like we'll pay you to like run this event series for us that's every other month or something at the W in London. We went great. So first we started hosting it and then we realized, actually, this is the ideal place to invite a potential client. Because what we started doing was we'd go, okay, W, we think that the next theme should be on tech women in tech they're like great sounds good so we're like cool so we're gonna um invite the founder of natural cycles the like women's tracking app we're gonna invite the cmo of bumble we're gonna invite you know two other things and so then what we would do is make a panel of potential clients and you get lots of linkedin messages isn't it better if you receive a message that says hey louise absolutely love what you're doing at bumble think it's incredible we'd love to have you on the panel yeah of this flagship series that we do at the W London, about 100 people attend in the audience.

41:25Tijana Tamburic:These are the other people on the panel. And of course, you respond to that. You respond to that so much better than me going, oh, can I get 15 minutes of your time to tell you about my business? No, I don't have time for that. This is flattery. This is like, I love what you do. We'd love to have you on stage with us. We don't tell them anything about our business. They go, great. She showed up. She came early. We chatted. She had the event. The event is like our audience. It's our network. It's half of our collective. You know, it's our photographer taking the pictures. So she gets a sense of who we are and the community that we pull together.

41:57Tijana Tamburic:Then on the back of that experience that evening, as she was leaving, she went, I actually don't know what you do. I have a brief on my desk for somebody, an agency to come and shoot some Bumble Reel stories. People that really met on Bumble success stories and like in a studio, like sharing, you know, so we can make some like Reels and content out of that. is that the sort of thing that you do? We were like, yeah, it's the sort of thing that we do. Real stories, people doing it. Great, sounds great. She's like, okay, cool, I'll send it to you. It's not a big budget, but it's like, I just thought it might be interesting.

42:29Tijana Tamburic:Great. So we did that little brief to the absolute best of our ability. Of course. We used every penny of that budget that she gave us, no agency fee, to just make the best thing that we could. That then went into success stories for the UK, Germany, Spain, India, lots of different countries doing this series, making it bigger, like making all of this content. And then off the back of that, she said, okay, now that we know what you can do, we're doing a pitch process, which is what most bigger clients will do, pitch processes, where you have to be one of the names in the mix. So this was the biggest out-of-home campaign Bumble had ever done outside of the US.

43:07Tijana Tamburic:It was to launch Bumble Biz in Europe, starting in London. And it was about Bumble Biz, like people who'd really met on the business side of Bumble. And so we pitched for that along with other agencies and we won that pitch. And then we ended up doing that. And that was huge because it was 60 working Londoners and we took photos and videos and did this whole campaign. So I think to answer the original question, if I can meet them in person, that's game changing. Because then they get a sense of who we are. And I think we're different from a lot of agencies. And our point of difference is different and our attitude is different and our people are different.

43:43Tijana Tamburic:And so much of this business, of the agency world, is do you like the people? Do you want to be on set all day with these people? And that's still our main thing. That's why we've moved venues. And it's funny, like we've literally grown to like the best venue in London. So we went from the W, we did the Albright, we did Soho House, and now we're at Rosewood, which is like the nicest place. And so we have this like, that's our flagship event series that remains, which is these panel talks. and it's our opportunity to invite press, to invite clients, to invite prospective clients, old clients, to have people on our panel and really like keep that going.

44:17Tijana Tamburic:Then of course you use that as social collateral, right? So you can share about it. So maybe even if a client didn't come, you're still doing something in culture. You're still leading some kind of conversation. So rather than just jumping on the back of things, you're actually hosting the thing. Like you want to be the host. So I don't really have a business answer, but if you can try and be the host in as many situations as possible, I think that's a great lead gen.

44:45Asim Amin:Absolutely. And ultimately, you're in marketing. People do business with people. Correct. People don't do business with companies. And it's great, you know, this whole virtual environment. It's just made this world so much smaller. And we're able to connect with people across the globe. We're able to do work with people across the globe. But nothing beats this in-person connection. I mean, you and I sitting across the chair also makes the world of a difference. Now this one hour conversation, obviously, we'll have a different type of relationship versus if this was a virtual podcast. So 100 % agree with that.

45:20Asim Amin:you're obviously it's very interesting i mean your trajectory we spoke about covid and then we spoke about you know trump potentially you know at that time coming in and how things were shifting in the whole uh the the women agenda then now we're saying post covid how things have also shifted uh but the marketing world as we both know is highly highly competitive and not that other industries aren't but i was also the digital marketing space for about three four years back in the days when I first started. So I know how highly competitive it is, especially the whole client and agency relationship.

45:57Asim Amin:Like, I mean, at least my experience has been extremely ruthless. So I know how highly competitive this space is. If someone is trying to start in this space today, and we don't have those catastrophic events, you know, what would you advise them?

46:14Tijana Tamburic:yeah it's i mean it's definitely a really difficult space to enter into now i mean would i do it again right now i don't know with ai with like everything that's coming around the corner but i think there's some things that just were change great storytelling the ability to tell great stories for brands always needed i think i can now see as i said a lot of businesses go in these like seven year cycles so you've either scaled and sold by then or like something's happening and so i'm seeing agencies of that started when we started getting so big that they now can't take on certain clients right they have a threshold of well it costs 100 grand to work with that agency and we started our agency precisely because we had friends who were starting brands who were like i can't go to an agency it's too expensive can't afford it so we were like okay how do we find a way to work with freelancers to make this cost less for you?

47:10Tijana Tamburic:And there will be a next generation that always does that, that's scrappier, that it's not necessarily cheaper, but like, because they're not cumbersome in the way that a big, big business is, you know, they don't have so many overheads, they don't have an office. New people can always undercut and come in with just a scrappier, leaner way of doing things. But the key thing will be story, and it will be network. Who do you know? So much of agency work is fundamentally being like, this is the talent and the creatives and the people that we know and you can't really fake that and you can't really buy that and you can't do any kind of complicated marketing strategy or linkedin funnel thing to try and get those people you either have serious relationships with talent and creatives or you don't um and i think if you are somebody that is like looking around like we did at our friends at our immediate circle of friends and going wow this is an incredible this person's off doing that that person's off doing this that person would make a really great face for this campaign or whatever it might be like if you feel like those are the people you surround yourself with and you have genuine connections with then I think you can do it you spoke about

48:17Asim Amin:the seven year cycle and I agree with that I think it's seven to ten years right so most businesses and I think now with the whole AI you know exponentially I think changing that cycle as or maybe it's also going to shorten the cycle. But you've been in business now for about nine years. So you're coming close to that. Sherry. So you're coming close to it. Where are you going in the next two to three years?

48:41Tijana Tamburic:Yeah, it's to the point of the unlearning and rewinding and trying to rewire. Like that's been such a big piece for me in this business. You know, five years in is where you kind of really need to make the decision of like, are we scaling this, supercharging this? Are we hiring people? Are we trying to make this into, you know, who are going to be the people that potentially sell it? What are those M &A deals look like? And we very much started down that path of scaling. And then it became so overwhelming and so wildly outside of our aptitudes, outside of our interests, outside of the lifestyle that we kind of wanted to live.

49:17Because if you go down that road, that's like, you know, AI withstanding,

49:22Tijana Tamburic:it's probably at least a five-year serious, serious head-down time. work right to to scale and sell and was that what we wanted to do with our early 30s and we sat down together and asked each other some questions that I'd never asked myself that I'd never thought to ask or think about in business which was do you want to do that with your time what kind of life do you want to have over the next five years what are your goals how much money do you want to make I think having been a model and doing all this kind of freelance ad hoc work and working for myself, I was never taught how to budget, how to do finances.

50:04Tijana Tamburic:Like that wasn't something that I was educated on. So what you have is the scarcity mindset of, OK, I have to say yes to all of these projects because I don't know when the next project will come. But the reality is you just haven't done a budget. You haven't figured out like how much do I actually want to make a year? OK, that means doing this many jobs a year. cool that means if i've achieved that by september i can chill out a bit if i want to we'd never done that i'd never done that i never thought about doing that um and so we asked ourselves these questions and we wrote down a number of like actually we would quite like to earn this much a year we'd never really set that out before because you know salaries as a business with we're the only two employees and obviously we do the structure of like the most minimal salary for us and then there's like dividends there's that and the other so we'd never really looked at what is this number that we would like to earn?

50:52Tijana Tamburic:We went, okay, let's do the math. Like how much profit do we need to create as an agency? How much needs to come in in terms of work in order for us to pay everybody else and then also be able to pay ourselves this and pay corporation tax and do all the things. And we did crunch those numbers and then looked at our year and it was about, yeah, like September, October. And we were like, oh, we've already achieved that for this year. And in that particular year, I'd been like pushing myself to the brink to be like, what's the next thing? what's the next thing what's the next thing and we had great relationships with all of those clients there was no reason why those clients weren't going to come back next year and be like let's do it again so we sort of went okay if we could maintain this salary and just maintain the business rather than being like gross girl gross girl gross girl how would that make us like feel and that was back to this idea of my definition of success like would i feel like a failure if, you know, the PR stopped and I stopped being put on lists or I stopped being called up for interviews or whatever it might be because I no longer had the high energy, you know, growing business.

52:02Tijana Tamburic:So that was a personal question. And I said, okay, well, for my sanity and for, you know, the goals and dreams that I have in my early 30s of starting a family and doing all these other things, maybe I'm happy with and if I can stick to the salary which obviously still requires a lot of work and getting all these things in maybe that's what I want to do and so we've spent the last few years very much maintaining our business so still working still doing all the things but not trying to scale and grow it and I have the exact opposite example in my house every day which is my partner who runs a creative agency that has decided to scale now has 90 employees and three different continents and different offices around the world and the level of responsibility and work and pressure that he has every single day is not a feeling I want to have I also know what I'm good at I'm good at being in the work I'm good at being the creative director of the project I'm not good at being a manager of people, which is kind of what you end up having to become.

53:07Tijana Tamburic:And so I think knowing yourself and knowing the kind of work that you want to be doing is super important. And if that means forfeiting this kind of pot of gold that might come at the end of a sale, which by the way, might not happen at all. Like very few companies actually achieve sale at the price that they wanted. And LinkedIn is awash with this idea that everybody's succeeding and everybody's doing it. Everybody's killing it and you're not. The facts and the numbers don't lie. And so we could have put in all of our energy, our entire lives, forfeited friendships, relationships, all kinds of different things for this five-year growth period, only for it not to succeed.

53:46Tijana Tamburic:So, yeah, we very much looked at, you know, what would bring us joy in the now. And that's what we're doing. And it's actually created a much better relationship between her and I too, because the pressure of trying to do this huge thing or having the responsibility of lots of payroll on us just doesn't exist. So we're able to be more flexible. We're very selective about the projects we choose, which is also a benefit because then what we put out in our portfolio and what brands think of us is that we're choosy. And we are. You know, I think if we had to hit certain numbers, we'd take anything, right?

54:24But then, you know, who are you

54:26Tijana Tamburic:when you don't stand up for your values and your morals. We work with a lot of B Corps. We work with a lot of female-founded businesses. And we work with only value-driven businesses. And so that then immediately narrows down your client scope. And then we work on special projects. We are not your retainer agency that does your social media. We work on female-focused projects, which are often one-off or special projects that run for multiple years, but they're a specific project. And when every single thing that we do sign off and we sign a scope of work to do, we love. So there's no sense of like, oh, I have to go do this thing.

55:01Tijana Tamburic:Like I love waking up and working every single day because I'm working on the stuff that I chose, that I love to do, that I'm doing like for me, not because we have to hit some sort of number. So I don't know if that answers your question, but yeah.

55:13Asim Amin:It does, it does. And I was not going to ask you a follow-up question, but now I will on this specific thing because it's also very difficult when you're successful and money's coming in and you're getting all these projects and so on. it's also difficult to stop yourself. I mean, yes, there's social media, but there's also internally, you're like, okay, but I'm growing. Like what I'm doing is working. It looks like everything I touch is turning to gold. So, I mean, does one have to go through burnout or have a partner and see their life so intense to actually, you know, take stock, like stop and take stock?

55:46Asim Amin:And would you also advise people to actually take stock?

55:49Tijana Tamburic:For some people, yes. again I think as I said to the beginning of the of our conversation around this like raise for autonomy raise for loyalty I was raised for I'm just going to do it myself and that's impossible to do in a growing business makes you a terrible delegator yeah and I was I felt responsible for everything so I wanted to touch everything I needed to be involved in every single aspect I needed to be in CC on every single email and that's like that will break you like it's not possible and so what happened for me was we were working on our biggest project ever 2019 and it was my birthday and I got on a boat in Sicily and I was doing neither thing well I was neither in the office with my team handling this very complicated project that was in post-production nor was I on holiday with my friends I wasn't being a present guest I was also sick I had just run myself to the ground.

56:46Tijana Tamburic:So I was like not feeling well. I had a cold. I was just like weaker and weaker and weaker, but still like trying to, and then feeling bad, trying to juggle these two things. And then on the second day of this trip, whilst like, you know, I would leave dinners to take calls, to do all of this stuff. Um, I, I developed a rash. So I got a full body rash. Wow. Literally from my head to my toes, mainly on my hands. So it was like this tiny, tiny um dots it's called contact dermatitis and it was like all over my hands and it was itchy and it throbbed and on that second day i literally had both of my hands in two vats of hydrocortisone so like to like stop the um reaction that i was having and i was using my nose to swipe up on my phone no way to read the email and in that moment i was like this is not good and I could sense that my body was literally shutting me down and like sending me signals and I'd never been someone that was like into somatic wisdom I'd never talked you know friends who were like oh if you have a problem like go to yoga and figure it out I was like the fuck does that mean like no like tell me the answer like I'm a practical pragmatic like Serbian like give it to me straight and so all like my body was literally going mayday mayday like red flag like alarm alarm alarm like sending me things and it was like making me sick giving me headaches then I had this like full body rush that was like you cannot use your hands like you literally can't use your hands and I was still trying to make it work and so with all of those factors I came back from that trip and I just like completely collapsed like I just couldn't operate and it took me like slowly like coming back to some kind of semblance of self and like health and be like oh I think I just like pushed myself to the edge of what because I couldn't figure it out I was like I'm not doing anything physical why is it hurting me like I couldn't work out that something mental and that something that was like pushing me in my mind could have such a physical reaction in me so just like reconciling all of those things took me ages and obviously I didn't next day go oh my god his helmet changed my life I think everyone I've spoken to that has had burnout has either had cycles of burnout or has had it happened to them three or four times before they eventually like something shifts but that was definitely the worst kind of clearest expression that I had that made me sit up and go okay this is not working I can't do it this way so for some people it really does require some kind of slap on the wrist from the universe for you to go ah OK, but some people instinctively, intuitively have a much better mind body connection and are able to go, OK, that's out of alignment for me.

59:38Tijana Tamburic:That's too much for me, whatever it might be. But some people have a different problem to me, like their people pleases. They want to say yes to everything and then they overstretch themselves. That's not my problem. I want to be involved in everything. So I find it hard to delegate because I'm built for autonomy. People have it in different ways, but the end result is the same, which is pushing yourself to the point of no return and hopefully learning something from that.

1:00:03Asim Amin:Yeah, that's pretty extreme, by the way. Like, wow, I've heard Bernard's stories, but this is like crazy. And you're crazier, by the way. Now you're still using your nose to swipe up and down. But I think, you know, I mean, I'm sorry that, you know, you went through that. But in hindsight, you know, whatever happens. Yeah, whatever happens only happens for your own good, which is just, I mean, fantastic. It's like, Tiana, thank you so much for everything and sharing your journey. And, you know, it's amazing what you guys are doing. And I wish you all the best. But before I let you go, I need to ask you a last final question.

1:00:35Asim Amin:You've obviously achieved a lot and you are a pretty smart woman. I know you've said multiple times that you don't have a business degree and so on. But, you know, I mean, this is how you do proper business. Correct. This is how you do business. School of life. You know, school of life. So it's fantastic what you've achieved so far. and it's just great what you're building. But if you were to go back now to the Tiana who is still in Serbia and now doing that shift and just moving to the UK, that little girl, nine-year-old, what would you tell her today?

1:01:07Tijana Tamburic:I would tell her you're valuable for who you are, regardless of where you've come from. You don't have to prove that to anybody. I would tell her you're not a burden I think I had a real sense of I'm not welcome in certain spaces unless I'm over giving like I was always like if I stayed if I was a guest in somebody's house I'll cook I'll clean you know I'll I felt that I needed to do those things because why else would they have me there I had to earn my place always um and I was always very jealous of people who could just like walk into a room put their feet up on the sofa and just start talking I was like, oh, my God, you know, how, you know, the brazenness to do that is so wild to me.

1:01:53Tijana Tamburic:And so I very much lived that way for a very long time. And then I was in L.A. a few years ago with my best, best friend, who's a clinical psychotherapist called Lauren Tauss. And we'd had a beautiful New Year's together in Topanga and we were driving home. And I mentioned that to her about, you know, feeling like a burden sometimes on her. and like was I doing enough to kind of compensate for the time I was spending at her house for example you know for free in her house she stopped the car and made me get out and was like you're not a burden from now on you're staying at my house for another week no cooking no cleaning I just want you to be here be my guest because I love you and I want you here and that was like a really difficult thing for me to hear and process this idea that I didn't have to do all of this stuff to be valuable to her and that she loved me for just the way that I was.

1:02:45Tijana Tamburic:So I think that definitely came from somewhere from childhood and this sense of needing to prove myself and needing to do something more than the English people did. And so I think that's what I would go back and tell her.

1:02:59Asim Amin:Wow, that's beautiful. That got me a little bit emotional as well. So I mean, that's I mean, thank you so much, Tiana. This has been an absolute pleasure and I wish you all the best. You have definitely inspired me and hope you've inspired a lot of people listening as well and who perhaps learn from you and walk your path as well. So I'm glad you've also come to that conclusion where you are okay with the future that you're creating for yourself and you're not in that spiral. I'm actually envious and hopefully that's going to you know there's a lot of reflection for me as well so thank you so much for sharing that

1:03:40Tijana Tamburic:and i wish you all the best thank you so much for having me this has been great