Nicole was hustling from age eleven, running a paper route, then waiting tables as a teenager for tips.

She carried that same sales instinct straight into one of the earliest agencies for digital advertising, training rooms of Yellow Pages sales veterans twice her age on this new thing called Google Ads.

She spent over a decade at one company working almost every department there was, then walked into the hardest, most unsustainable role of her career — running commercial teams across two continents on 2am calls — and in the end, had the courage to walk back out of it for her son.

She's since built an entire profitable business unit from scratch and survived a company collapsing underneath her, and come out stronger.

Today, she's a general manager, still building high-performing teams in the industry she's spent her whole career in.

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Gemma trained in creative arts and film production at uni, but wrote herself a diary entry early on that's basically become her career manifesto: forget the starving-artist portfolio career, just give me a nine-to-five that's vaguely creative and pays reliably. She stumbled into media almost by accident, not even knowing what the industry was when she took the leap — and then burned out completely, not once but twice, before finally landing at a major global media agency, where she's spent the last twelve years working her way from business director to running a seventy-person team through the chaos of COVID-era hiring, and now sits on the national executive team as National General Manager.

In this episode, we get into the stuff no one really says out loud: the exact moment burnout stops being about hours and starts being about feeling numb to the people around you, why every promotion you take needs a backfill plan before you say yes, how to stop over-talking in rooms to prove your value, and why being asked "are you sure?" when you go for your next role after having kids is a bias worth calling out. Gemma's built an entire career on knowing when to walk away and when to plant her flag — and she's handing over exactly how she reads the difference.

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Renee's career didn't start where you'd expect — she dropped out of a science degree six months in, took a retail traineeship instead, and was running a flagship store within six months of that. From there she was asked to run the business in New Zealand at twenty-one, then handed an even bigger regional role covering South Africa, Singapore and Malaysia, and worked her way all the way to the C-suite. And then, after all that, she went back to study and completely changed direction — today, she's Head of People and Culture at one of Australia's biggest independent media agencies.

In this episode, we get into the stuff no one really says out loud: how to actually build influence when you have no authority to force anyone to do anything, why "what can I do for you?" might be the worst question a leader can ask, why good leaders go looking for the hard conversations instead of waiting for them, and what it really means to make a team's job possible instead of easy. Renee's spent two decades in rooms she wasn't necessarily meant to be in yet — and she's handing over exactly how she got comfortable there.

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