From growing up in housing commission in Brisbane to building a multimillion-dollar enterprise and being invited to Richard Branson’s Necker Island – twice – Leela Cosgrove knows the power of the hustle.
It’s what has driven the success of her business-to-business growth consulting firm Strategic Anarchy, which has seen her named among Australia’s top 25 female entrepreneurs and one of the top 50 fast-growth companies in Australia.
Leela’s source of inspiration came from her childhood. Before moving to Brisbane at the age of nine, Leela lived in Sydney with her mother and grandmother, who owned a secondhand bookshop.
“I say to this day that those first nine years of my life seeing the two most important women in my life running a business, it just never occurred to me that I wouldn’t run a business,” Leela tells Kochie’s Business Builders. “I just always knew that that was something I was going to do one day. In fact, my first jobs in high school… everybody else was working at McDonald’s and I was dressing up at a fair and doing kids’ parties. I always had that hustle in me.”
It wasn’t an easy road, though. “I grew up in a place that was fairly violent with a lot of drug use,” Leela explains. “The idea that somebody who came from kind of a lower socioeconomic background – that they could start a business and grow a business, it just wasn’t really viable then. Certainly nobody in my high school was talking about entrepreneurship as a career path.”
Getting into freelance writing, online courses and marketing in the early ’00s, Leela found a niche in personal development and business content. By 2009, she launched Strategic Anarchy to help boost other businesses’ bottom lines with her learnings.
Networking to the next level
“In 2009, I spoke at a networking event and there were maybe 20 people in the room,” Leela recalls. “It was a hyperlocal, small, women’s-only event. And for the next four years, I could basically trace every sale I made back to speaking at that event. I grew my business from $80,000 to a $100,000 a year to like, $350,000 a year.”
Leela says it comes down to being “all in” when you’re at a networking event. “I didn’t go to every one of these events. I went to a few of them,” she adds. “But when I’m there, I’m 100 per cent there. So be all in, but you don’t have to be all in all the time.”
Now based in Victoria’s Bellarine Peninsula, Leela is the CEO of Strategic Anarchy, media company The 8 Percent, sales tech company Iron Cage and Australia’s largest witchcraft business, High Priestess. To help lift up more women entrepreneurs, Leela recently became the first-ever Australian Chapter Leader for the Dell Women’s Entrepreneur Network (DWEN) and joined its Global Advisory Council.
“In 2019, I went to a DWEN conference in Singapore and was just blown away by the women who were in the room,” she says. “I got to meet so many really fantastic Australian women. At that point there was no chapter in Australia. And I was like, you know what, this is something we need. We need to make sure more women in business have access to this same kind of network, because it’s phenomenal.”
Globally, DWEN has been around for more than a decade, connecting women entrepreneurs and providing them with free access to resources and networking opportunities to grow their businesses. In Australia, it’s gaining traction with people like Leela as its champions.
She’ll be hosting Kochie’s Business Builders and DWEN’s next in-person and online panel and networking event, Building Brave Businesses: Female Founders on Innovation and Impact, the latest in our series of 2022 events. The event takes place in Leela’s home area of Geelong on September 14 – you can register to be there in person or watch the livestream here.
Additionally, DWEN has partnered with Leela’s The 8 Per Cent, to host the Women’s Leadership Festival 2022 in Melbourne this October. The Women’s Leadership Festival is a two-day, non-profit event for women in leadership roles, with interactive keynotes, panels, workshops and experiential stands. Find out more here.
To get you ready to network, Leela has shared a few helpful insights:
1. “It’s not who you know, it’s who knows you”
“You know how they say that in business, it’s about who you know – I don’t think that’s 100 per cent accurate. I actually think the most important thing is who knows you,” Leela says.
“I don’t go to networking events personally to land clients. I go to meet other people, whether it’s for inspiration, whether it’s people who are doing so much better than me who might be mentors, whether it is people who might partner with me, whether there’s opportunities I can give people and they give me.”
To prove the point, Leela wouldn’t have been invited to two leadership gatherings at Richard Branson’s Necker Island if she hadn’t put in the networking groundwork.
“You have to be recommended by somebody who’s been previously who can vouch that you’re a good person. There is an application and interview process because they obviously don’t want crazy stalkers there,” she says. “And then it’s got a lot to do with the work we do with Virgin Unite, their philanthropic arm.
“They bring together the most amazing groups of human rights activists and people who are doing incredible things all over the world. You hear about what they’re doing, but you also get to figure out how you can work with them to help them get their message out.”
2. Even introverts can be networking powerhouses
“People always laugh when I say this, but I’m actually a massive introvert,” she says, with a laugh herself. “The first events I ever did where I spoke on stage, I vomited for half an hour before I got on stage because the idea of speaking in front of people terrified me. I have had to learn.
“And I think that actually the most important thing, and what I always try to do when I’m networking is actually not going into it trying to get anything or even to pitch myself. I go into every networking event really thinking ‘what can I give?’”
“So the first thing I’ll always ask people in a networking situation is, ‘What’s going on for you right now?’ Then, ‘What’s your big goal? What’s your big problem? What’s your big challenge? How can I help you?’ Because that to me is so much more effective.
“I find it’s easier as an introvert too, because it’s not like, ‘Here’s me and all the reasons I’m fantastic’. It’s a networking event – an hour, two hours, you’re not really going to get a chance to sell anyway. So why not add massive value to people and start forming those relationships? Because that give and take is what tends to work long term.”
3. Bring more women to that table!
“How women really excel in business is through community. And when we have spaces that are specifically geared towards doing that, I think that’s when women’s businesses are really able to explode and where women really shine,” she says.
Over 17 years of being a part of women’s networking groups, Leela says that “more and more, women are taking other women with them.”
“Women are just so intensely supportive of each other because they’ve realised that there are these institutional power structures,” she adds. “And that the only way that we break those down is not by being one woman in there, but by breaking it apart and making sure as many women as possible have a seat at the table.”
Join DWEN today for free access to a global network of women entrepreneurs and valuable resources to grow your business.
Want to meet Leela and an amazing panel of women entrepreneurs? Register now for Kochie’s Business Builders and DWEN’s Building Brave Businesses event on September 14. Join us for drinks and networking in Geelong or watch the panel online – we can’t wait to see you.
