Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Richard Phu, Managing Director of Outsourcing Angel, located in Sydney, NSW, Australia.

What's your business, and who are your customers?

At Outsourcing Angel, we help to redesign business owners out of their businesses with systems, automation, and virtual assistants. We are focused primarily on the small to medium enterprises that are in the growth stages of their business but often have the founders trapped in the business.

Tell us about yourself

When I was growing up, I never thought of myself as one who could become a business owner. I went through university and found myself in a corporate job in management consulting. I thought it was my destiny to become a partner at KPMG and live a high life, but that came crashing down very soon after I joined the graduate program. I couldn't understand my life's purpose was to go and consult for big companies on how they can cut jobs and make squillions doing it. I was left searching for something more meaningful, and I started to go down the rabbit hole of personal development. Learning and attending seminars and workshops from people like T Harv Ecker, Tony Robbins, and many more until I finally bought into a dream of branching off to start my own business being... a 20-something Love Coach!

I was so spurred on with my life learnings about loving myself before anything else that I was compelling myself to be spreading this gospel. Eventually, I branched off to become more focused on men after launching my own virtual summit called 'The Ultimate Man Summit' where I was hosting some amazing people like John Gray (Author of 'Men are from Mars'), Commando Steve (Trainer on The Biggest Loser Australia), Nathan Chan (Founder of Foundr Magazine) and others. I was so invested in this business that I decided to quit my corporate career and move from Sydney to Singapore to start this business journey to become 'Asian Tony Robbins.' Little did I know Asia wasn't just quite ready for Asian Tony Robbins just yet, but that's when I came across Dan Priestley from Key Person of Influence (now DENT) on my podcast show, and this conversation changed my life. He told me that the greatest entrepreneurs are not those in the spotlight but the ones who control the spotlight to shine on their teams and others. This fundamentally changed my way of thinking, and I took a step back from the Asian Tony Robbins dream and started focusing on helping and supporting others.

So I dabbed in a systemisation consulting company I started which then led me to become a partner in a new online marketing agency in Singapore, where we grew it from 0 to 15 members working from 6 different countries, all remote before covid. Yet I soon realised I wasn't in the right partnership and duly left the company to relocate back to Sydney, where I joined Outsourcing Angel. It's here where we live and breathe freedom and work every day of the week to figure out how we can create more freedom for our clients, angels and team because that's what life is all about!

What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?

My biggest accomplishment was recognising that I didn't need to start a business from scratch in order to be a business owner. It was looking at how I could support and deliver value to someone else who had the skills I didn't have and who could recognise my talents for what they were. It was when I accepted that I'm not an inventor, but I'm an implementor, and that is what a lot of entrepreneurs lack when it comes to growing their businesses. That's what Linh (Outsourcing Angel Founder) did for me by taking a chance on me to be able to systemise the business and reinvent it in a way to be ready for scaling that has freed her up to do more of what she loves to do.

What's one of the hardest things that comes with being a business owner?

Facing the unknown and having the conviction and faith to believe that it'll all work itself out if you work at it and continue to find a way to make it work. You'll constantly be tested on your commitment and desire for what it is that you want, and you just have to obsessively believe in what you're seeking with a degree of evidence/signs that you're on the right path.

What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?

  1. Always be true to yourself as best as you can, and try to etch out regular self-reflection time to find your true core. Without knowing yourself as truly as you can be, you cannot become the rock your team needs to lean on in difficult times. Get yourself centered and know where your genius zone lies.
  2. Seek to understand, always. It's easy to assume it's someone else's fault for something going wrong. Even if it looks blatantly obvious, I always remind myself that there is always another perspective, no matter what. So in any difficult moment, I focus on trying my absolute to work on trying to understand the potentially different perspectives because I never always know everything. This has made it much easier to work with my team to resolve issues and, most of all, to empathise with them.
  3. It's a loooooong game. Business (and much like life) is a long game. Making decisions should be based on what you think about for the next few years, not today, tomorrow, or next month. Chasing trends and fads won't keep you in business for long, let alone able to sleep well! It's all about focusing on the long term for your business to allow room for growth and scale that will be your defining moments on your journey, like when I led an executive team approach to push forward for a 20% pay reduction at the height of covid lockdown. Knowing this short-term, personal pain was what we needed to rally around to become stronger in the end.

Where can people find you and your business?

Website: https://outsourcingangel.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/outsourcingangel
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/outsourcingangel/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-phu/

If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.

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