Sarah Gillis | Founder: Aspire Australia
I’m Sarah Gillis, the Founder of Aspire Australia, where for over 25 years my team and I have been helping clients to reunite with their partners, bring their parents or extended family here or start the next chapter of their career in Australia and realise their dreams of migrating to Australia.
Creative and practical advice
Originally, I sought Angela out to help with rebranding my business and repackaging our services. I needed to clarify and define what I was offering and was anticipating a pretty straightforward experience.
But right from the start Angela saw the differentiation opportunity I’d missed, and tabled an idea that could quickly and clearly communicate the value we offer to clients. From there, we developed a 7-Step Migration Action Plan (MAP) that visually defined exactly what we did in an easy and compelling way.
As the owner of the business, you can get so ingrained in what you’re doing, that you can’t see how it looks to someone else. Before this initial work we did together, we’d not necessarily considered how little the client knew about the process and laid it out so clearly for them. Our new MAP immediately built trust and credibility for Aspire.
The difference you made
Angela had, and has, so much experience of other businesses – how they work and how customers and clients respond. So her advice is not theoretical, it’s creative, and it’s also practical.
In our case, she seemed to just know that once the MAP was implemented on our website, it would provide distinct points we could use as hooks to explain the entire migration application process, step by step, to people. And it did, allowing us to break it down, to make it accessible and reassuring and to also make their financial investment easier to understand.
This new approach transformed an unknown experience into a process with certainty and that made sales conversions easier and elevated the brand, giving us confidence in the market too. And that was just the start.
The results and what I value
I trust Angela, her judgment and her wealth of experience. That’s really important because there are a lot of sharks out there.
She’s honest and direct. Having her on my support team means I feel confident and motivated. Encouraged. She’s not sucking up to me and telling me what you think I want to hear – she’s sharing what she sees and what she feels needs to change. I need clear steps, nothing wishy-washy. Angela creates action plans. That’s useful. That’s valuable.
Angela also has a great network and often puts me in touch with people she knows in areas of business where I wouldn’t know where to start.
Thanks to our work together I ended up moving from an office the size of a cupboard to investing $50K fitting out a new office, and hiring six staff.
And all businesses change over time, so it’s about every couple of years I come back to talk through the next steps with Angela. I value that continuity.
I recommend you
If a business owner is feeling uncertain about what to do next or has multiple pathways, ideas and options and is feeling confused, or if they know they want to achieve a very different outcome, but can’t see how to get there… If they don’t have someone external and neutral, someone without self-interest to talk with, they should definitely connect with you.
I know when that conversation happens, when they see how quickly she develops insight into their challenges and issues and begin to lay out a way forward they’ll see her value and hire Angela on the spot!
Just like I did.