How to Start Your Own Business: The Incredibly (extra)Ordinary Story of Leif Tea Co

It can be incredibly daunting even thinking about how to start your own business.

Maybe only certain people can do it. And you are not among the certain. Not mothers with young children. Definitely not an ‘ordinary’ person who isn’t an inventor or influencer.

And yet, transitioning from a job to her own business is exactly what Aimee Martin of Leif Tea Co has done. She has firmly established herself in business while being a stay-at-home mother to her young children and without any inventions or millions of followers.

Aimee’s story is proof that the ‘ordinary’ is actually extraordinary. It’s the same with tea, if you really think about it.

What seems like an ordinary cup of tea is actually incredibly special. A hug in a mug when you need it the most.

In fact, you might want to get settled with a comforting cup of tea because I’m going to break down how to start your own business step by step using Aimee’s incredibly (extra)ordinary story.

Company Profile: Leif Tea Co

Website: https://leifteaco.com/

Tagline: Tea for Beautiful Moments

Chief Cook and Bottlewasher: Aimee Martin

Brand Values: Sustainability, Organically Grown, High Quality Products, Self Care

Location: Australia

Distribution Model: Online and Brick & Mortar Retail Stockists

Products: Organic Loose Leaf Teas, Handmade Ceramics, Organic Petal Bath Soaks, Tea Accessories, Organic Eye Pillows

Aimee’s Favourite Leif Tea Co Blend: It changes from week to week. Right now, it’s two new blends that I’m working on, a lemon myrtle green tea and a hibiscus tea. Leif’s Chai blend was my favourite for a long time.

Aimee’s Go-To Leif Tea Co Blend: Sleep, to wind down on an evening. It’s better than a glass of wine!

Customers love Leif Tea Co because of its distinctive brown bottle packaging and the high quality of the tea. Its tea is sourced from certified organic farms in Egypt, China, Sri Lanka, India. Leif Tea Co is in a great market because tea is part of Australian culture. Unfortunately, as Aimee says, “Lots of people are just happy to have supermarket tea that just comes decimated in a tea bag, because they just don’t know how good tea can be.”

On the bright side, it appears that loose leaf is just beginning to become more popular with Australian tea drinkers. Leif Tea Co is taking advantage of this new consumer awareness to sell organically grown loose leaf tea in sustainable packaging.

How to Start Your Own Business: Aimee’s Story

Aimee has a quiet and unassuming demeanour that shields the full force of her inner powerhouse from the world. And she’s quite a dynamo indeed!

She did not have overnight success. Instead, Aimee persevered past a job that didn’t suit her, other business false starts and a personal loss to make Leif Tea Co what it is today.

in fact, it’s probable that her determined mindset is the key to her new success as a business owner. For instance, this study shows that scientists who persevered past a near miss in their early career outperform their peers with narrow wins in the long run.

There’s little doubt in my mind that the same is true of business. Aimee is just one example.

Let’s follow her lead to learn how to start your own business in 1,2,3,4,5.

Note to my friendly reader: Most of these phases happened concurrently. I just broke them up to be more helpful!

Phase 1 of How to Start Your Own Business

Learning and Growing

Believe it or not, Aimee studied international development at university. She says that she thought social enterprise to be a great solution to many of the problems associated with sustainable international development.

However, at the time, social enterprise was just that – a thought.

That’s because Aimee really didn’t feel entrepreneurial at all. So it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that after she graduated, she started doing legal administrative work at a law firm.

You might be thinking, “This seems counterintuitive: why take a degree in international development in that direction?”

Aimee knew that this wasn’t a great career option, but it was necessary at that time for her lifestyle (more on that in phase 2). Sometimes, we gotta do what we gotta do.

In fact, taking an unexpected turn can reveal more about yourself than you might think. In Aimee’s case, her work at the law firm solidified her interest in social enterprise. A lot of her work concerned the certification of B corporations, which she realized that she enjoyed.

FYI, a certified B corporation is a business whose impact on its workers, community, society and environment has been rated as having a positive impact by Standards Analysts at the non-profit B Lab. For more information, check this website.

Nothing in this story thus far screams how to start your own business. Patience my friend. The threads of the story have already begun to intertwine.

Phase 2 of How to Start Your Own Business

Understanding Your Ideal Lifestyle

When speaking with Aimee, she really struck me as a woman who has her priorities firmly in place.

At every single point of her career, she has been focused on supporting her husband and her children. They are her priority. This is the reason why Aimee chose to take a position at a law firm, instead of pursuing other opportunities in international development.

As a result, she evaluated any career opportunity against the flexibility that she needed at home. Her husband has a pretty demanding job so she spends a lot of time as the primary caregiver for their two beautiful children, both under the age of 5.

However, Aimee has always understood that she needed to have her own career. And she really wanted to know how to start her own business as that career.

In her own words, “I’d wanted to have a business but couldn’t think of a service…I’d thought about products at some point but I had no idea where to start.”

Phase 3 of How to Start Your Own Business

Trying New Things

Aimee decided to take up marketing at the law firm to try something new. Since it felt like a good fit, she decided to leave the firm to take up a more flexible marketing job to allow her to be more of a stay at home mum.

It involved a lot of cold calling and some social media. There was a learning curve when it came to social media, which she found really interesting. The cold calling…not so much.

While this move into marketing doesn’t seem like much, it actually shows how important taking a risk to meet your ideal lifestyle can be.

In fact, taking risks can be associated with greater contentment with life. Taking risks also helps us learn. The University of Common Sense would endorse this statement: whether we fail or we succeed, a person with common sense will learn something useful.

Nevertheless, taking risks need not be foolhardy. As Dagfinn Moe has said about his risk-taking research, “…it takes brains to take risks”. A calculated risk can be all the difference when it comes to how to start your own business.

In Aimee’s case, the risk was worth it…but only for a bit. While she thought that the marketing job would last a while, a conversation with her boss about all the reasons that she would leave quickly changed her mind.

This unexpected twist of events left her a bit at odds with how she should go forward.

It was precisely at this moment that opportunity met preparation (what some people call luck).

Phase 4 of How to Start Your Own Business

Seizing an Opportunity

A week after that eye-opening conversation with her boss, Aimee found out that a friend was selling Leif Tea Co.

This chance felt absolutely perfect to her. In her own words, “It just felt like it answered so many questions.”

For instance, Aimee always been a tea drinker. She loved the brand’s messaging as it played right into her love for social enterprise. The business also married her desire to work on her own with the flexibility she needed to meet her familial responsibilities.

In short, the opportunity to buy Leif Tea Co ticked every box.

And in her signature quiet fashion, Aimee jumped at the opportunity in late 2019. And, in doing so, she answered her own musings on how to start your own business.

Phase 5 of How to Start Your Own Business

Making It Your Own

Sadly, what should have been a happy start to her own business was tragically marred by her father’s passing. Still grieving, Aimee threw herself into Leif Tea Co for a reprieve and to help her heal. She told me that “Leif is something that I consider just for me. And I love it.”

In the process, she has overseen an explosion in growth.

Leif Tea Co’s stockists have grown from 5 to over 100. During a global pandemic.

Let that sink in for a bit.

Even Aimee thought that the lockdown would have killed Leif. Instead, demand for her products rebounded by April 2020 and continued growing. It didn’t hurt that she used her cold calling experience to expand the company’s number of stockists.

During this time, she has also expanded Leif Tea Co’s product offerings and innovated procedures to make it easier for her to process orders more effectively.

Bear in mind that she’s done all this while being the main caregiver for her two wonderful toddlers.

Time to pick your jaw off the ground my friend.

What’s next for Aimee and Leif Tea Co?

In the long term, Aimee eventually wants Leif Tea Co to become a social enterprise with all the certifications. In this phase of Leif Tea Co, she would be able to remove herself from its daily operations with the help of dedicated staff, in order to focus on management and strategy only.

Another long-term possibility on Aimee’s mind is focusing on a B2B income stream, since it should help Leif Tea Co expand even more.

More recently, she achieved her short-term goal of expanding into her own warehouse space with help lined up for packaging orders for shipping. Go Aimee!

When I told Aimee that I thought that her story was amazing, she seemed surprised.

A testament to her humility. She’s the perfect person to sell tea really, which itself is humble and yet, absolutely marvellous.

Your story is just as amazing. Just like hers, it is still being told.