BWOTW: How this serial entrepreneur changes the everyday life of parents

Featured

16 Feb

This week’s Bizwoman of the Week is Judith, owner of the parent support business The Confident Eater.

Judith shared some of her journey and goals as a woman in business in our community this month, telling us how spaces like She Owns It has supported her personal and professional growth

Introducing Judith

Hi, I’m Judith, The Confident Eater

I am a serial entrepreneur building and running businesses since 1987 (eek). Although admittedly, the whole digital world is not my happy space!!

For over 20 years my focus has been in children’s nutrition, with the last 10+ exclusively in picky eating.

I am super passionate about what I do and am always looking for ways to improve. To that end I have spent the last 6 years back at university studying psychology and then embarking on a PhD.

For my PhD I designed and delivered an intervention for parents of picky eaters to give them more confidence to support their children. More on that later in the week …

I have also done qualifications in a whole range of areas that support the parents I work with such as sensory sensitivities, neuromotor development, paediatric feeding and parenting from a psych perspective.

I have written two books, Winner Winner I Eat Dinner and Creating Confident eaters and also train clinical staff at other organisations.

I have been heavily featured across print, radio and TV media including RNZ National, The Herald Now and morning and evening TV.

As importantly, I am also mother to two amazing boys and this will be my first year in forever without a child at school – gasp. It’s a bit of a change for me but exciting too to see them share their gifts with the world.

I am so grateful to be a part of this amazing group and have developed some fast friendships with some of the members and would love to get to know more.

Five things about me as a woman in biz you should know:

I couldn’t decide what to list here, but I think I’ve got it! It reflects my crazy perfectly.

Some of this will resonate and some won’t, we are all women so we have commonalities but also a rainbow of differences and isn’t that fab!

1. Serial entrepreneur. I have, aside from brief contracts, run my own businesses since I was 18 (OMG 40 years!!). I never set out to do this as both my parents were teachers so that was the model I’d seen, it was just the path life took me on. My motto was always follow your passion and do what lights you up. This has dragged me across continents and seen me do a wild and whacky collection of things from manufacturing from kangaroo leather to running a last chance facility for alcoholics. I have lived a whole selection of lives and loved every one – even when things have gone terribly, terribly wrong! It has both blessed and cursed my boys who both now only want to do things that they are passionate about …

2. Family. My boys are my world but I can’t not work. Max was handed around my staff in Indonesia like a pass the parcel from the moment he was born and been present at board meetings as I breastfed. Both boys got dragged around shops and to buyer’s meetings when we owned a chain of shops in Melbourne. Joe slept in one of the rooms at the alcohol treatment facility and Max ran PowerPoints at my nutrition seminars at 8 y.o. Has it always been easy – HECK NO – school holidays especially almost pushed me over the edge on multiple occasions. We also came up with a deal no school holiday programmes but they do dinner every night in holidays. That was brutal to begin with but great in the long-run. Both my boys were managers in their part-time jobs at 16 so something rubbed off …

3. Ethos. Service, trust, connections come before money. Money is important for what it can do (hello uni fees) but is a low priority when I factor in how I want to move through the world. I have always lived by this philosophy and found that if you are passionate and generous that the money will come.

4. Fit. I always joke that the harder I work, the fitter I get and there is a lot of truth in that. When I am working/studying 6 ½ days and 4 nights as I am at the moment there is zero room for sickness or being off the top of my game. That means my nutrition is excellent 95% of the time and I exercise like a demon, while still making room for my neuromotor development regimen which I feel has expanded my capacity to cope with stress and my intellectual acuity. I also subscribe to the Seal mentality, when you feel you can’t do anything further you can do 7 times more Not quite, but I’m Gen X and it fits well with my personality.

5. The dream. I feel I was given a whole basket of gifts – intelligence, an amazing education, commonsense etc. and that my responsibility is to use those gifts for good. I don’t feel like I haven’t done that so far, but I also don’t feel like I have anywhere near lived up to my potential. My dream was always to change the world and as Steve Jobs said, I may just be crazy enough to believe I can. Now I feel like the years and stars are all aligning and I have the opportunity through my PhD to launch a support programme for parents of picky eaters Aotearoa NZ and then internationally (woefully under supported area of public health) that can slot into public health or through NGO’s. I feel like I am living my dream every day at the moment and there is nothing more exciting than that. If I could leave a legacy such as this I could retire in peace (or maybe not!!). Interestingly, I have been talking about my dream at the university for years and initially the academics dismissed me and thought I was a bit mad (plus this is not the way one does stuff). Now they are beginning to believe and say things like “well if anyone can do it …”

Three wins I am proud of:

Sharing 3 wins is a hard one for me, primarily because I feel like Santa most weeks. Being able to bring peace to dinner tables, reduce stress and frustration for parents and empower children to move more easily through social occasions feels like gifting a golden egg. And I get to do that every week! Enabling a tween to go to camp, a mum to go out for dinner with her children or a 4-year-old to sit at the meal table at daycare is indescribably magical.

However, if I look on a global scale these would be my 3 stand out factors:

1. Writing 2 books. Anyone who has written one understands the amount of time, energy and frustration that it brings. I was lucky to have some amazing people support me on my self-publishing journey, particularly as my first book, Creating Confident Eaters contained not just text but 100’s of images that were hand-drawn and then digitised. The photo above is Melissa Stokes talking about my second book Winner Winner I Eat Dinner on breakfast TV. Less of a trial to bring into the world but still crazy amounts of work!

2. My PhD. I went back to university in 2020 to support my business and have been there ever since! I set out to qualify as a psychologist, but then realised that was not my path. Instead, I embarked on a doctorate. My PhD project is designing and testing an intervention for parents of picky eaters to give them more confidence to support their children. It’s been an absolute pleasure and privilege to do this and the results have far exceeded my expectations. I am about to begin publishing articles that document my results.

3. My reputation. This is an interesting one but I think belongs on the list. Last week someone tagged me on a post on one of the big Wellington parenting sites where a parent had a question about fussy eating. As I was tagged in I got notifications and by the end of the day 6 other people had recommended me either because they had worked with me, been to one of my talks or heard about me from friends. It made me reflect on how important it is to me to be someone who is worthy of recommendation. I also realised (and I’m hoping I’m not jinxing myself), I have never received a publicly negative comment. That is something that I am super proud of.

3 tough lessons I have learnt:

This is a bit of a downer so I should have started with this and finished on a high!

But because it was the hardest to write it was left to the end – which is probably quite revealing in itself!

1. Bright shinies – I am very, very careful how I spend my money. Less spent, less needed to be made. However, I have paid for programmes that were supposed to deliver specific things and haven’t, not just once either. Even though I’ve done my homework, sought independent reviews etc. I have still ended up with a lemon. TBH I still haven’t worked out the solution to this but it’s something I’d love help figuring out

2. Complacency – I sat too long in my happy space on social media and missed the Instagram boom. FB is easy, Insta was not so much, particularly at the start but that’s now where my audience is … and I’m not (in a meaningful way). I kick myself for not realising sooner that the train was leaving without me

3. Too busy to learn – see point 2. There are crimes of omission or complacency that I am still committing in my marketing. Even now my Insta does not work the way it should but it’s a problem that I am not solving. I may post every day, but doing that more effectively would be more sensible

Let me share about how I can support you:

The experience I’ve gained by both working with children and now their families has given me the sunshine and rainbows box of tools and strategies that enable me to teach you how to teach your child how to eat well. Even children who have extreme food fears can benefit from our programs.

Your success is our success so we work very hard to find the things that will move the needle for YOU.