Solo, Skilled, and Essential: Gail Greatorex’s Influence on Product Safety

Nigel Rawlins: Welcome back to the Wisepreneurs podcast. You were my first guest four years ago in 2020. This is the 61st episode and I wanted you to come back and tell us what's been happening with your business, Product Safety Solutions. So Gail, welcome to the Wisepreneurs podcast. Could you tell us something about yourself and where you're from?

Gail Greatorex: Thank you, Nigel. I'm delighted to be returning to your podcast. I know that you've, gone far and wide to find people to talk to, and it's a privilege to be able to have a repeat performance, so to speak. I'm based in Melbourne, Australia, and I have a long history in consumer product safety.

So, that's essentially around, the safety of everyday consumer products, be they household things, especially children's products. So it might be bunk beds or cots, toys, uh, any of those kind of children's products, but also a random selection of everyday products might be sunglasses, it might be remote controls containing button batteries, it might be magnets that are a problem. There's so many bicycles, bicycle helmets, just to make sure that they're safe. And so I, I had a long career with the Australian government agency that looks after product safety. That was for about 25 years and then I left them in 2012 and decided to set up my own business. I was conscious, having worked in government, that there were some gaps in the understanding between industry, retailers, importers, manufacturers, etc. And what government expected and needed of them. What consumers expected and needed of them. And on the flipside too, where government needed a better understanding of how the market works. How it changes the dynamics, the costs and all of that sort of thing. So I've set up a business that is part consulting and I consult to a range of different types of organizations. I also run training courses for those businesses. These days I really call myself an advocate as much as I am a consultant. I work with a couple of industry associations that engage with government in particular, and also provide guidance for their members on how to make products safe and how to comply, but I also help the associations advocate for the changes of a big picture policy and that sort of thing.

So, a bit of lobbying with government and engagement on that side.

Nigel Rawlins: So would you say over the last few years that the nature of products, especially with online trading taking off like it has since COVID, has that made the problem of product safety any better or worse?

Gail Greatorex: There are some traps associated with online trading. The leading platforms are making an effort and they have actually engaged staff to help to manage their platforms and all of the products, but of course, you know, even those ones have got such vast, vast numbers of products available through their own platform.

Some of which, depending on which ones they are, some of which are ones that they source themselves and they can more easily manage those, but others are third party sellers, what they call third party sellers. And, the checks and balances in terms of product safety on that front is much less effective. Some of the other platforms, very high volume and less infrastructure, there appears to be very little interest in managing product safety. It seems like volume and, and profit is the bottom line. So that's a problem in itself. In addition to the platforms and how they operate, it's the fact that we've got vast numbers of individual people who set themselves up as importers and sellers. And so they don't have that kind of background in safety. They don't know what to look for and how to find it. And it's even hard to find if, even if you are looking. So, I do get some inquiries from time to time, and I help people understand how it works. There's a handful of people like me in the business who can guide people, but I would like to see the government platforms providing a little bit more support and guidance for business, just in a general sense, getting the basic principles out there of how to go about finding, the right information on, on making sure a product is safe.

Nigel Rawlins: Okay, so if you've decided that you want to bring in some extra income, so you think, all right, I'll start a little e commerce store online, because they're simple to set up, and you source a number of products from China. How should they go about thinking about product safety, if, if they've got no idea, they've just, they just want to start a business. They're busy, you know, probably working in a job. What are a couple of things they need to keep in mind?

Gail Greatorex: One of the simple measures that I think people can take and I always recommend is sign up to get details of product recalls, get notified if there's any product that gets recalled. That's useful whether you're a consumer and you're managing a household and you want to know whether a product that you purchased last week has been recalled.

It's been found to have a terrible safety flaw in it and it's now being recalled from everybody. So to protect your own family, I think it's very good for, for everybody to be signed up to recall notifications. If you're actually a small business, or any business for that matter, that same recall subscription list will feed you through details of any product that has been recalled.

And so that's kind of a bit of free intel because if some business, a competitor perhaps, has had to recall the same product, or a similar product to the one you're selling, you can have a look at it and say, okay, well, happily, that wasn't me that got caught out with a, uh, unsafe product, but I can see now that product that is similar to the one I'm selling, has got a fault in it.

So. Let me go and check if my product has got the same fault in it, and then you can go away and fix it, and you may indeed have to end up doing your own recall, but generally speaking, not, you know, it's a case of an opportunity to review your own products and what has gone wrong with, with others.

Nigel Rawlins: So if you were one of these businesses, an e commerce business based in Australia, and you've imported and you've sold a product and it gets recalled, what happens to that business or that, that owner? What have they got to do?

Gail Greatorex: you mean the owner that's conducting the recall?

Nigel Rawlins: They've sold the product through their e commerce store. What are the implications if there is a recall for one of the products they've sold?

Gail Greatorex: Well, conducting a recall is complicated and it depends how you've sold the product. If it's, if all of your sales are online, then you should have records of everyone you've sold it to and you can directly contact them and, and let them know to stop using the product and you can provide them with a replacement or refund or whatever the case may be. It's not quite as easy if you've sold them through a physical store, because not everyone will have the details and you have to rely on working out how to contact the people and let them know. If you're conducting a recall, then you have to let the government know, and in fact you have to do that within two days of making the decision to recall. And the government agency then gets involved in helping you work out how to achieve the best result of contacting your consumers and retrieving all of the products. So, the best situation with any kind of recall is to have a plan ahead of time. The last thing you want to do is have a situation where you've never given any thought to the idea of doing a recall in the past and all of a sudden the government knocks on your door and says, Hey, we've had a complaint to say that somebody's got injured by this product, we think you need to recall it. You've got to work out whether that's legitimate. Did the consumer actually misuse the product in some way, or did it have an actual flaw in it? So you need to understand how to, how to make that assessment in the first place. But at the same time, you know, you, if there's any kind of publicity around this, you're going to have media hounding you. . If you're a small business and you go to a lawyer, the lawyer might say, well, don't talk to anybody about this. Don't admit any fault. But if you've got a PR person, they'll say, Oh no, you have to be up front about it. And, do a bit of a mea culpa. Say you're sorry on your Facebook page or whatever. There's those, competing forces you've got to contend with. And you might have customers, giving you a hard time. It's much better if you've given it some thought in advance and worked out what if, what if any of the products that I'm selling end up injuring somebody or a hazard is identified and I might have to do a recall.

So definitely a bit of forethought and planning goes into recall. And that's really the case with anybody selling any kind of consumer product.

Nigel Rawlins: I think that's really quite an important point. It would be crazy, and people probably are crazy. They go into something, they think it's a fabulous product, they sell it, But if you're a tiny, tiny online reseller, that could destroy your business, I mean, and if they're not careful, they could bankrupt themselves, lose their house if they own a house.

So there are some repercussions for being naive about this sort of thing.

Gail Greatorex: Absolutely. There's product liability laws as well. So if you've sold something and it injures somebody, then they can take you to court. And, that's certainly to be avoided. And if you've, sold something that is not compliant with one of the actual regulations, such as sold a toy with a small part that breaks off to a child under three, then you would be potentially in breach of the consumer law and face penalties from the enforcement agency, the regulator.

Nigel Rawlins: Well, the point I was trying to make there is there's a difference between the knowledge that you have, because you are an expert in your field, as against the novice. And it sounds like there's an awful lot of novices out there. So they won't know how to think about this thing. They see, well, I think some of the things you've talked about is the children's head restraints car seats and other things.

Could you explain what they are, rather than me go on a bit. Somebody obviously thought something was lovely for little babies, but there was a a bite with it.

Gail Greatorex: Yeah, and that's one of the reasons why government has to step in and why conscientious businesses actually learn enough about their product to identify where there might be a hazard. It's not always obvious to the consumer. It's not always obvious to a small business person who doesn't take the time to, to look at what safety is involves. You mentioned the headstrap, so what you're referring to there is a little project that I've had. I saw something on my LinkedIn feed I think, and that's often my source of information of unusual hazards. You never know when a new hazard is going to emerge. So, somebody has come up with the idea of having a little head strap that children can wear when they're sitting in the car seat, and it loops around their forehead and attaches to the back of the child restraint, with the idea that it stops their head lolling about. in the car, especially if they fall asleep. Now, a lot of people would think, well, that's a good idea. It seems a bit uncomfortable and maybe even unsafe to have your child's head lolling around. And we're talking kind of children, the ones that are sitting up in the car seat. So maybe between two or three and six, something like that. And so, it seems like a good idea, it's a very simple product, but I read online that if in the case of your car having a collision, anything restraining the head from moving forward, the thrust of the collision will move your body forward and if your head is not coming at the same time, then it can actually break the child's neck. It only takes a split second and it can be life affecting or even fatal. I'm pleased to say actually that we haven't identified any Australian physical stores that are selling them. The main way that they're being sold is through overseas online platforms. And so I actually led a group of road safety and related experts to lobby for a, a ban on them. And, , the ACCC, being the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, which looks after product safety and the consumer law, is considering the situation at the moment. The first step there was that the minister actually released a warning notice in the last few weeks to advise consumers to stop using them and stop purchasing them. As we said, you can't really anticipate that there's a hazard with those and, and that's where the government needs to step in to, to help manage these things.

Nigel Rawlins: Now, one of your other projects that we did talk about, I think on the first episode, was button batteries. And there's been a victory there, hasn't there? So what's happened with button batteries?

Gail Greatorex: Well, I'm pleased to say that the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has actually led the world in introducing a mandatory standard for button batteries. In fact, there's standards that apply to both batteries themselves. So spare batteries, which now require childproof packaging and warning labels. It's the reason why we all struggle to open our packet of batteries, which seems very frustrating, but it's come about through necessity. And, the other standards are for products that actually use button batteries. So they now have to have, child resistant compartments and warnings. Now, just to give you some background, the problem with button batteries is that young children in particular are prone to swallowing batteries. In fact, seen a study that said the most common thing that toddlers will swallow will be coins. Now, we've got fewer and fewer coins around at the moment. Those button batteries that are similar to a coin's shape and size, if they can get stuck in the child's esophagus, on the way between their throat and their stomach. And if it lodges there, then it will start to react. It actually activates the charge in the battery and it starts burning through the muscle that is in your esophagus. And of course, that's a terrible thing. It's not something that is obvious to a consumer without thinking about it, or even if they do think about it. I'm pleased to say that the level of awareness is now very high in Australia. I don't talk to very many people, certainly not parents, who aren't very aware and vigilant on button batteries, but it's something that I got involved with around about 10 years ago, although it had been an issue prior to that. It's not, wasn't something I, involve myself with, but I've recognized the extent of the challenge that's involved with this particular product problem. So I helped work on the industry guidelines and I helped work with associations to work out what the standards should comprise and then the guidelines about how to meet the standards. They still ended up being quite complex and businesses are still struggling to, to meet the standards. It's always a problem when you go first in writing a brand new standard. Other jurisdictions around the world, including the USA, have brought in some new standards, which is great, new regulations. So there's starting to be a bit more effort there, and I think finally the battery companies and other independent researchers are trying to work out how to resolve the problem altogether. So, it requires an all in effort of all sectors to try to work out how best to manage this, but, I've been frustrated that despite the fact that the Australian regulation has been in place for more than 12 months now, there's still about two recalls a month or maybe even one a week these days.

So either the businesses haven't got the message or the standards are too tricky to meet fully, I'm not sure which, but I did post a blog recently on my website to say one of the measures that I think that could be being taken by the government is for them to work for the ACCC to work with the customs people to require a Declaration of Compliance where any importer brings in a product that uses a button battery in it. So I'm hoping that the ACCC is, is engaging with the border force agency to bring that about.

Cause you know, there's so many different products increasingly electronic these days. One of the things that of the responsible businesses have done is telling their manufacturers to not include a button battery. And the other thing is to have something that's rechargeable where there's inaccessible batteries and you just use a USB to recharge it. So there's ways and means and hopefully we'll get there, but not there yet.

Nigel Rawlins: Okay. Anybody listening can tell that you're an expert in the product safety field. How do you keep up to date yourself? What do you do to keep your mind sharp and focused on these issues?

Gail Greatorex: Well. I mentioned that I get a bit of intel from LinkedIn through my contacts and other things that come through on that platform. I get an email from Google if anything comes up with button battery in it or magnet and swallow, if you swallow more than one powerful magnet, that'll cause problems in your digestive system as well. So, probably one email a day at least on that front. Oh, and toppling furniture.

That's another, been another one of my main projects, with, with the risk of particular types of furniture being climbed on by children and then toppling, and having potential crushing injuries. One of the other main ways I stay in touch is with these associations and their product safety committees. I work with the National Retail Association and with the Infant and Nursery Product Alliance. They're two of the most active in the area that I work in and I'm so impressed with the work that gets done. People take on different projects and quite often, a couple of times I've actually raised an issue that I've seen on my socials, and they'll take them on and say, okay, let's form a working group to go and sort out how best to manage this one.

Nigel Rawlins: Now, I guess the thing I'm thinking about here is obviously we've got some major companies across Australia and in the other advanced industrial countries as well. Do they have people working in product safety within these companies? I think you mentioned some of the big online companies do.

What are some of the positions they have? And, how do they go about training themselves up to be expert like you?

Gail Greatorex: I think that it's a lot of learning on the job. I think they have created some of their own in house learning. But there is no formal training training program for product safety, which is a frustration of mine. The people who work as product safety practitioners and compliance practitioners, a lot of them are within the big retail firms. You know, Australia doesn't have terribly many manufacturers these days, but those that we do have and those elsewhere, they really get their heads around the issue of how to assess a product for where the hazards might lie. And then whether there's a standard that tells you how to address those hazards, or if there's not a standard, then they have their own understanding of the sort of measures that you can put in place to, to counteract that hazard. Ideally you'll eliminate it, but there's a process you go through. If you can't eliminate the hazard then you might put a guard in, or put some other kind of stopgap that stops the actual hazard from being as likely to occur. The number of products that are on the market is always growing. The number of regulations that are in place around the world seems to grow exponentially as well. The job that these practitioners have is just extraordinary because they're not just looking at the product itself.

They then have to manage their relationship with their own company, where the buyers are wanting to either have some attractive little element on a product, which may or may not be safe. And they want to get the product for the cheapest price, which might mean that there's a risk of cheaper materials or cheaper production practices. So they have to negotiate that in house, and they then have to possibly negotiate it with the suppliers themselves. So a bit of supply chain management. We've got, not just the manufacturer, but you've got your distributor or your wholesaler. And at the other end, at the very start of the manufacturing process, you've got your raw material suppliers. So there has to be checks and balances for all of those to make sure that it's working. And then there's testing companies and third party inspectors. All of this has to be factored in by these practitioners. So I really don't envy them their job. And in Australia we've got generally got some good harmonization nationwide, but electrical products is regulated by each different state and they're all different, and that gives everybody nightmares. Thankfully, there's some action at government level to try to fix that at the moment. But I do worry that there's no training, there's no recognized qualifications, and without that, it's less attractive as a career option, so this is where I'd like to see a bit more support for those practitioners in the game.

Nigel Rawlins: Now, that's an interesting point because you are an expert, from having worked for the ACCC in Australia and through the work you've done over the number of years, you've become more expert in this. Yet, if there's not a lot of support for product safety people within the organisations, who's going to replace you when you've said, I've had enough?

Who's going to be the experts in Australia if they're not coming through.

Gail Greatorex: Well, that's right. I'm pleased to say there have been a couple of younger people going out into the consulting business lately, which is very heartening. Most of the people who are involved and active and proactive are getting older. So, it's a bit of a concern.

Nigel Rawlins: Okay, let's Just shift a little bit. You're self employed. You're running your own business. How do you go about getting new business or attracting these people who need your help? And what are some of the things you do? You mentioned training and consulting. What are some of the other things you also do?

But how do you get people to find you?

gail_1_08-28-2024_144737: Oh, look, I think that thanks to your advice back in the early days of me starting off, I've set up a website with quite a few standard pages that are available, but, I also write blog posts that keep people informed on new issues, and sometimes they argue for one particular course of action, or alert people to a new safety problem. And, by maintaining the website it seems to keep me front and centre on search engines. Whereas I mentioned that there's a few other consultants around, but they don't have the same level of online presence as far as I know to manage their searchability. So that's, that's one of the main things I think quite often, where I get a inquiry out of the blue, it'll be somebody who's just found me by doing a simple search. I guess that's the main way some people can sometimes find me through LinkedIn too, I guess. And, and as well through my networking, by doing some of the advocacy, which a lot of which is unpaid, I'm still putting myself front of mind for people who then understand that I can potentially help them out with different aspects of their product safety needs.

Nigel Rawlins: I guess you could also say you're in a very specialist niche too. There's not many competitors in your field, and that helps. Plus, I should be honest, I've worked with you for many, many years. I'm a backend marketing services person. So you're one of the websites, or I think you've got two websites.

I look after, you have got several hundred pages on your website. I haven't done that work. You've done all that work. You've been writing the articles, and they are specialist articles, and I get to see, Gail's statistics, and she does pretty well. But you've also put a lot of effort into, and I haven't done this myself, but you have downloadable papers.

And, one in particular is your manager's checklist. So tell us something about that.

Gail Greatorex: That's one of the products that I've got on my website. It's a two A4 sheet sized checklist, which is a summary of the two ISO standards on how to make products that are safe and how to manage them after they've left the factory, which includes the recall side of it. The two standards are global standards and the only two real documents of their kind. And I just thought in developing the checklist, it was just simply a lot of considerations for managing product safety. And I've called it a manager's checklist because I was hoping to target the managers and the middle managers, or even the executives in a big business. And I've published that, oh, it must be eight years ago now, I suppose. And it's the most downloaded thing that I have. And, the people who are downloading it are from all around the world. And I haven't done much to promote it actually, and that's something that you and I have been going to talk about is how we might better raise awareness of that checklist that's clearly a unique product and of great help to anybody who's trying to get their heads around how to do product safety.

We've been talking about doing some little video or slideshows, that sort of thing, just to complement the checklist, show that it's not just a static document, but something that's a little bit more alive.

Nigel Rawlins: Well, the reason I wanted to bring that up is because this is an issue for any professional working for themselves is to attract people to their websites. And one way of doing it is to have some downloadable documents or something that's helpful to their particular client group that they'd like to work with.

And obviously they're supposed to capture emails and put them onto their email list and that sort of stuff, which is quite helpful. And you've done that, and I've seen the stats, so I know how successful that is for you. And I have seen who downloads it, and, these are major manufacturing companies across the world.

Not just China, Sweden, I've noticed Germany and, fairly big companies. So they obviously see something in there. So that's the message to anyone who's running their own business. Okay, so can you tell us something about how you actually go about your work? And then I want to talk about some of the other projects you've taken on, because, one of the issues is that life's not all about business when you're a bit older. How do you go about tackling the jobs you've got to do? So, somebody wants you to do a job, so you take that on. How do you sort of balance everything?

Gail Greatorex: I'm not sure I've got a good answer on that, Nigel. I'm an infinitely distractible person. And, the, good thing is that I enjoy what I'm doing. So, if there's a task that's in front of me that I know needs doing, then I'll just sit down and do it basically. And. It's a case of just keeping an eye on what else is in the background, needs doing. Not many of my projects involve more than a day or a week's work. They're all pretty short. And so, it's easy to strike a balance with different things that come in.

Nigel Rawlins: In terms of projects, do you take all projects on, or are you a bit selective with the projects

gail_1_08-28-2024_144737: Well, in terms of requests that come in from businesses, I quite often we'll refer those to one of my associates, either because I don't feel as though I have quite the necessary expertise, or, I just want to do something else. A lot of the other project work, you might call it, might be advocating for certain policy changes, including regulatory policy.

So, for example, the toppling furniture issue has been one that I voluntarily took on and worked with the National Retail Association. And more recently, the ACCC has introduced a mandatory standard, but there were some practical considerations that needed fixing. And I then organized a working group meeting and then I put together a submission in order to hopefully get some better guidance happening on how to comply.

Nigel Rawlins: And the secret there is you know what you're doing, and this doesn't sound like it's too complicated to do. Obviously, because you do work for yourself and you have some choices, what are some of the other things you've taken on, not so much to do with your business, that you find interesting to do?

Gail Greatorex: I realized I had a real pleasure in writing, and I do a bit of business writing with my blogs and my advocacy, but I tried my hand at creative writing a little while ago and ended up self publishing a novel. At the time it was the only bit of creative writing I had done, and I didn't expect to write a novel. And I deliberately chose not to do any study on how to write, because I simply didn't want to put any pressure on myself about while I was doing it, am I doing this the correct way? So it started off as actually a stress release project, and it was straight from head to keyboard and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The book that I wrote is a travel narrative, a little fictionalized travel story, with a bit of romance thrown in and it's an engaging read without being a challenging one. I decided not to approach a publisher, but I've had a limited amount of success in actually selling the book through Amazon and other means. The novel is called Cherry Blossom Footsteps, and I use the pseudonym, Nom de Plume, if you will of Gail Holloway, just to keep my writing separate from professional life. So this was just a hobby really, I'm only counting it as a hobby, and it actually cost me quite a bit to publish it, but that's the price I was happy to pay. I've said my next book would be something more meaty, and now, having written about 25, 000 words, I realized I can't just wing it like I did with the first one. And, I sat down to do the writing, I thought, Oh, I don't know where this is going, what the plot line is. So I found a book about how to plan a novel. It's actually a local published author called Graeme Simsion, who wrote The Rosie Project, and he's actually a screenwriter. And so he's got a particular approach to planning, and so I'm trying to follow everything that he's got in his book, but he's basically said the planning has to take place completely before the novel gets going, and if you don't do that then you'll have a much poorer result. So, much as I like to just sit down and, and type and write, uh, I'm trying to work out how I can actually get enjoyment out of the planning process. And it does take a bit of free headspace in which to do that. And I've just taken two weeks off and gone interstate to try and allow that space to be created and then continue where I've picked up and get it going.

Nigel Rawlins: That's an interesting way of looking at things, is that you have to allow yourself headspace to do this sort of stuff, and that's one of the biggest things about being an older self employed person, I'm going on about this a little bit, is that, you know, there's other things we want to do apart from just running a business, you know, but there are some projects we want to do.

All right, do you think by having done some fiction writing that it changes how you do your non fiction writing, say your blog articles.

gail_1_08-28-2024_144737: I'd say so. Yes, I've got a little bit more thought about how I set up an opinion piece, especially if I'm doing some advocacy, I, I need to factor in how to engage people early on with, with the topic. And then run my argument. Yeah, so it's, it's about being a little bit creative in, in how you're putting things together.

I know that I used to, having worked with government for so long, I used to have a relatively bureaucratic style. And I think I've moved away from that, so it's, I can give some credit to my creative writing on that front.

Nigel Rawlins: That's a positive, isn't it? Now, you've also had a major project that I have been involved in, in the back end sort of thing, on Climate Wise. So tell us, how did that come about?

Gail Greatorex: Okay, so back in the beginning of 2020, Australia was experiencing the severe bushfires that made news all around the world. We had Sydney shrouded in smoke, and we had those massive bushfires down in eastern Victoria, where they had to evacuate a town by getting people onto naval ships. And it went for weeks, and the whole country was very unsettled by all of that. And my good friend, Helen Millicer, a climate advocate and sustainability expert, called a few people around to her house of just a few friends and said, what could we as a group of random professionals do to contribute to managing climate change? So that was the first time I'd really had any involvement in doing anything apart from sorting my recycling. And, after doing a little bit of work on lobbying local council to some good effect, we thought, well, what else can we do? And, because I work with associations in product safety and know them to be drivers of good action. I thought, well, let's see if any climate programs have been targeting associations. And it turned out that we couldn't find any, certainly not in Australia and hardly any elsewhere. And so we recognized that associations have got enormous influence with their members, but also up the line to government as well.

And some of them lobby government and they also work with their fellow associations in their own general sector. So we set about developing some ways in which we could help associations become more proactive because the other advantage of associations is that they are, experts in their own little sector or field. Nobody knows furniture manufacturing like the Furniture Manufacturing Association and nobody knows electrical products like the Electrical Products Association. So they have got their own expertise and what they can do is sit down and look at, well, where are the risks being imposed by climate change and what are the opportunities? So opportunities might be shifting to a cheaper energy source that's renewable. Opportunities might be shifting their finances to companies that make sustainability a priority. Some of the risks actually evolved and became apparent during COVID, which happened from that same time. Supply chain disruption. What happens if a major storm or other kind of disruption affects the supply of your products or the spare parts for your products. And that means that your whole business has to go on hold. So doing some planning to identify what the risks are and how you can manage those seemed like something that associations could do together with their members and, you know, we know that a lot of associations are run on a shoestring, but we took that into account by saying, put the message out to your members and chances are you'll probably find that there's a handful of members who are already thinking about these issues, may be willing to share that information with their fellow members, may be willing to lead a working group on how to usefully manage all of those things within your sector and how to identify what the risks and opportunities are.

So it's an idea that has, we think, has got great potential and I'm pleased to say that we've got a really good website now that is essentially a self help website. So any association or any member of an association can go on and find resources on that website. It's Climate Wise Associations and the, URL is climatewise. org. au. We deliberately made it at no cost at all to any participant to download and use any of the materials that we've provided. We've got all sorts of guidelines, checklists, a self rating benchmarking tool. Lots and lots of information to get you started and in fact we've organized it for some in terms of if you're just starting out, here are these five things that you can do. So it's very much available. We were hoping to hand this over to an NGO or some other organization to work with, with a bit more engagement and promotion. Because Helen and I have both been doing this as a side project, with no funding and we still hopeful that we might get some funding.

So if anybody listening to this podcast thinks, Oh, there's a good idea. It wouldn't take a lot of funding to put it together. And it can build from there, and we've got a range of business models where there is a fee for service involved. And we would Be happy to have a conversation with anybody if they're interested.

Nigel Rawlins: So what I'm hearing is the projects you're involved in and your website is all trying to be helpful and trying to inform and help people. And, that's a wonderful thing. So you've been actually giving a lot of your energy and a lot of your time, plus working, which is good. So, is there any advice you would give to somebody who is working and considering whether they want to become self employed or become an independent professional.

Gail Greatorex: Well, I guess if you can find something that you enjoy doing and or are passionate about, it makes all the difference. I do it because I like the challenge and I know that I'm doing good work for the benefit of the broader community. And it's an opportunity to work with some really good people who I enjoy their company.

I enjoy getting together to try and work through some issues. I'm not very good at sitting down doing nothing. So, I do it because I enjoy doing it. And, you know, that makes all the difference in terms of your motivation to get the work done and to achieve something meaningful.

nigel-rawlins_1_08-28-2024_144737: Yeah, but I think the other thing you've been commenting on is you went off to Brisbane for a couple of weeks so you could focus on your writing. So you're, you've got a balance in there. So you're, you're choosing to not work all the time. So that's an important thing. I mean, I think when you're older and I'll just be clear here when I'm talking about older, I'm older than you, so I'm not saying you're old or anything like that, is that it's not all about work.

It's, it's about having a life because you've spent a lifetime getting the expertise. It's just being focused with that expertise that you've got.

Gail Greatorex: I've spent relatively a lifetime working full time for an employer. And it's nice not to have to do that. And you know, the, it's not only the flexibility, but the autonomy, you can make your own decisions. You're not answerable to people if you don't want to be and that's important.

That's important to me. And I certainly, it's a very flexible arrangement that I have in terms of how much time I spend working and, uh, which days I work and that sort of thing.

Nigel Rawlins: I totally agree with that because, I don't think I can actually start a morning before 10 o'clock.

gail_1_08-28-2024_144737: No, but it's not, you don't, you

don't get up at like 9. 30 and say, okay, I can start at 10. You're, you're up early, and you're doing exercise and you're probably, gathering some eggs from your garden or something.

Nigel Rawlins: No, the chickens

Gail Greatorex: Ah, ah,

Nigel Rawlins: No, those little rotters, they were controlling me.

So anyone who's got chickens will know what I mean. They've got a tiny little brain but they totally control you. Now I do get up fairly early and I go for walks and I do my exercise and then I have my coffee, waste a bit of time on Twitter and then I start and then I have a nice lunch.

But that's the whole idea of working. I don't even know what we call ourselves anymore. Wise Elders, as Meredith Fuller keeps calling us. But at the same time, we're still wanting to do some work that we love to do. All right. So, how would you like people to find you?

Gail Greatorex: Well, product safety solutions. Uh.com au is the website for my product safety business. Also see my face pop up on the Climate Wise Associations website. There is a website for Gail Holloway author. But maybe it's easiest just via LinkedIn. I do some regular posts there and it's an easy way to engage with people.

Nigel Rawlins: I will put all of those in the show notes, so these will be able to be found. So thank you Gail for being guest 61, 60 episodes later. It was fabulous talking to you again.

 Gail Greatorex: Thanks, Nigel. I enjoyed it.

​