Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand, with the interview available as both audio and a transcribed excerpt. This week Simon speaks to Natalie Robinson of Mum’s Garage about coaching people with ideas to get them market-ready.

We talk a lot on this podcast about start-ups and founders and entrepreneurship. But how do you go from where you are now to where you want to be?

We’ve spoken to people at incubators and accelerators, but by then you have an idea and are building it. But what if you know you want to be an entrepreneur, but haven’t got to your idea or to an understanding of how you can make it happen?

Enter Natalie Robinson of Mum’s Garage, a start-up that offers a series of programmes to get people from idea to market, a community, events, and support. Over the last three years she’s been helping validate, coach and guide founders through the journey from dream to reality, and has run events for thousands, built up a community and helped graduate schools, big corporates and existing incubators create programmes.

As part of TechWeek Natalie will be running To Start a Start Up, a great event bringing together experts on all the aspects of getting going, to let people know what it takes in terms of finance, legals, marketing and, critically personal growth. There are hundreds of events happening in Tech Week, up and down the country, so get along to techweek.co.nz to find out more about Natalie’s event, or the 400-plus others on every topic facing tech and business growth here. But for now, to find out more about the first steps on the entrepreneur’s journey, Natalie Robinson joins us.

Either download this episode (right click and save), have a listen below or via Spotify, subscribe through iTunes (RSS feed) or read on for a transcribed excerpt.

At what point did you realise you’d found your problem to solve? 

When I quit my job I was working on a couple of other ideas, at that point I started learning more about how you start a company. That was the first time I’d immersed myself in other communities where there were people who were starting companies as well.

I started to learn and I did a few other programmes but I found that they were all focused on later-stage development, and also not really the deep level of personal development and the depth that comes from an individual. There are these fundamental concepts around how you create value in the world and how you influence people that are so crucial to business but nobody’s really teaching those components.

What are they and how did you come across them?

I came across them because as I was developing Mum’s Garage I realised that mindset was a huge part of building a company. I started learning a lot about the psychology of people and mindsets, I read a lot of books, I had a mindset coach for a period, which really helps. One of my core drivers is understanding the fundamental truths behind why things exist. I studied science for a year at university and there are concepts about the world and creation that you experience.

When you’re starting a company the first part you need to develop is yourself. You’re developing yourself from your current reality, maybe a job you don’t enjoy, with certain skills you’ve got through study, but you really need to develop yourself, evolve yourself to be able to start and grow a company. You’re having to shift to where you really want to be.

That’s what we want to do at Mum’s Garage. We want to help people move from their current reality to their desired reality.