ENTERPRISING JOURNEYS
Helping SME's modernise global booking systems
The Founders
Catherine Mary Said
Bio
Catherine is co-founder and CEO of Gooday. Prior to Gooday, Catherine worked for the NSW 24-Hour Economy Commissioner, specialising in precinct activation to boost economic activity for SMEs across industries. Catherine helped pass legislation through NSW Parliament that supports SMEs from a policy perspective, but realised that outdated technology would continue to be a barrier and thus, co-founded Gooday to solve it.
We are so excited to have her as one of our panellists at the Sydney Female Founder Festival.
The Business
“I spend most of my time producing and telling stories now.”
As an Adelaide identity, digital entrepreneur Lucy Cornes has spent much of her life in front of the camera. Whether it’s walking the red carpet of glitzy events, or sharing the difficult health journey of her oldest son, Cornes is a well-known face in South Australia and beyond.
But the mother-of-three has jumped behind the lens in her latest role as founder of video production company She Digital. It’s the second business that the wife of former AFL star Kane Cornes has started, and she is relishing telling other people’s stories.
“I spend most of my time producing and telling stories now,” she says.
“I wanted to get my face off my sites, I didn’t want to be an influencer. “And we do really interesting work.”
She says a story they filmed in a jail touched her more than most.
“We met the most amazing corrections officer, and it’s really stayed with me,” she recalls.
“This guy’s outlook on life, what he was giving to his job, his perspective on the prisoners, and what his role was in their lives… it is still so strongly with me, I can’t even put it into words.”
From filming cremations to caesareans to corporate clients, including Goodstart Early Learning and convenience chain OTR, the creative content company works with some of Australia’s biggest brands.
And the story behind She Digital is compelling in itself.
The Pivot
Before She Digital, there was She Shopped, an online shopping website Cornes founded in 2012. She laughs when sharing the initial inspiration behind it.
“My husband said to me: ‘You’re really good at finding sh&* online’, and I was,” she says. However, the reason why Cornes was an expert online shopper and plied her passion into an online business is far more serious. Her eldest son Ed was born with congenital heart disease in 2006, and she needed flexibility to work remotely, whether it was from the hospital, doctor’s waiting room or her home.
“At the time, I was working in broadcasting, and it became very apparent very quickly that I wasn’t going to be able to keep a normal job,” she recalls.
“So I knew I had to create something for myself because it didn’t exist out there. I wanted to work. But first and foremost, I wanted to be a mum.”
She describes Ed as a ‘bubble boy’, meaning she had to be careful where she took him to avoid him getting sick.
“You don’t take them to play group, they don’t go to parties, we didn’t do mother’s group,” she says. “Otherwise any illness lands you in hospital. So I bought everything online, and that’s how She Shopped was born.
“It was about connecting leading brands with Australian women. And at that stage, online shopping was in its infancy, so I had to be the conduit to build trust that people would have a great experience and items would be delivered.”
She says the success was instant and surprising.
“I think I invested $30,000 to start that business and took it off our mortgage… and I’d recouped it within a couple of months,” she says.
“It really took off fast, and that was by people paying a fee to be seen on She Shopped, and also affiliate marketing.”
Through the years Cornes discovered a need for high-quality content for the retail outlets featuring on her site. So she began producing it in-house, and in 2018, She Digital was born.
“Brands were giving me bad content and expecting me to drive sales with that content,” she says.
“So we started producing our own assets – photography and video when video was in its infancy. “I look back at the early days, and the content was so average, but we got good at it pretty fast.”
A turning point for the business was when the content being produced on She Shopped caught the eye of a hospital, leading to a job filming a surgery.
From there, the team filmed a cesarean birth, which has now been viewed about 14 million times on YouTube, she says.
Finding Balance
“I’ve got lots of other things going on outside of work, and I’m really focused on that,” Cornes says.
“So if I’m feeling out of balance, I really ask myself: ‘Why is that? Is my plate too full? Am I not nurturing relationships? Am I not tending to my spiritual practice? Am I not getting my exercise in?’”
Cornes says she is routine-driven and gets up at 5.15 am each day, and makes time to eat healthy, attend gym and yoga classes, and spend time with her family.
“I know that if I’m eating well and exercising, and I feel like I’ve got a great relationship with my kids and my husband. There’s a good equilibrium.
“Adelaide is a fish bowl as well. So it is quite easy to look at other people and think you should be doing that, or attending something. But I gave up on going to events and stuff a long time ago. I always fell out of sync with my energy. I am an introverted extrovert, and I need a lot of downtime. So I’m just selective, and it’s a mindset. I’m energised by time with my husband, children and certain people.”
words of wisdom
Cornes has noticed a common theme when filming female businesswomen aged 40 and above. “The one thing that women in my age group have the most trouble with is seeing themselves in a loving way,” she says. “And I find that really frustrating. I put them in front of the camera, and they might be medical professionals or CEOs. But they will hate seeing themselves or hearing themselves on camera.”
Cornes says she offers words of encouragement during the shoots. “I can't say how many times I say: ‘Step into your power and your knowledge and stand in that. It doesn't matter if you don't look like you did when you were 18 - these are intelligent, highly capable women, achieving great things.’ We do a lot of media training on our shoots, and a lot of it is confidence building and getting women to reconnect with all these incredible things that they're doing, moving beyond the vanity factor which is so easy to get distracted by in today’s society It’s about reminding them of that, and asking what they're concerned about... Is it superficial, or is it values-driven? Is this really important? It's a critical question to ask. In the end, we're all responsible for doing the personal work to achieve a sense of happiness.”
