Why the best business growth comes from what you refuse, not what you accept
Every founder knows the feeling: A potential client asks if you can do something slightly outside your wheelhouse. Revenue is tight. You want to say yes. So you do.
And that single yes just cost you three months of development, a frustrated team, and a feature nobody else will ever use.
In the latest episode of Handpicked Season 6, host Naomi Simson sits down with serial entrepreneur Sheree Andersen—founder of both Elephant and Trove, two corporate gifting technology platforms—for a masterclass in business focus and knowing what to refuse. What emerges is a conversation about startup resilience, female founders, work-life balance, and the invisible costs of building something successful.
The Pivotal Moment: When RedBalloon Learned What to Say No To
Sheree asks Naomi the question every founder needs answered: "Was there a moment where the business almost didn't survive?"
Naomi's answer reveals a critical lesson about business growth and focus. RedBalloon's biggest challenge in its early years wasn't a cash flow crisis or a competitor. It was trying to be all things to all people.
"Every time I spoke to one of our corporate clients, they'd say, 'Are you in New Zealand? Do you do incentive programs?'" Naomi recalls. "And I'd always just say yes. That would then put the team into this real chaos. It wasn't part of a plan, it wasn't part of the strategy."
The pivotal moment for this growing business? A charity wanted an online raffle system. RedBalloon built the entire platform. The charity ran one raffle. Nobody else ever used it. Months of development. Zero return. A perfect example of why saying no matters for business success.
Define Your Business Sandbox: What Game Are You Actually Playing?
The lesson Naomi learned—and the one that transformed RedBalloon—was brutal in its simplicity: Define what business you're in. This business focus strategy transformed everything.
"What's in, what's out, and what do you say no to?" she asks. "Success comes from what you say no to, not just what you say yes to."
For RedBalloon, that meant choosing between being an activity marketplace ("What do you want to do this weekend?") or a gifting platform. They chose gifting. Everything—the language, the packaging, the customer experience—aligned around that single focus.
That business focus became their competitive advantage. It differentiated them from every other marketplace competing for attention.
The Cost to Serve Question Every Founder Must Ask
Here's the trap early-stage founders fall into: Revenue is validation. Any revenue feels good. But this mindset kills business growth.
But as Naomi points out in this entrepreneur advice, "You realize that actually the cost to serve that customer is too much. And you can't recover it."
The tools available today make customer analysis easier—understanding your TAM (total addressable market), calculating customer acquisition costs, measuring lifetime value. But the fundamental question for startup success remains: Does this customer fit the business we're actually building?
Sheree Andersen's Two Businesses: A Study in Startup Focus
Sheree's story perfectly illustrates this principle of business focus. With over 20 years in HR Tech, working alongside giants like Deloitte, PwC, and Bank of America, she spotted a gap in corporate gifting: corporates struggling to gift meaningfully at scale.
That became Elephant—a corporate gifting technology solution with a marketplace of over 1,000 brands across APAC, serving business gifting needs at scale.
But here's where focus comes in. While building Elephant, Sheree discovered a second pain point: Brands themselves couldn't gift at scale. They excelled at one-to-one consumer gifting but failed when sending to multiple people at multiple addresses. They lacked the gifting technology.
Rather than bloating Elephant, she created Trove—a white-label corporate gifting solution that empowers brands to offer business gifting directly from their own websites.
Two businesses. Two distinct pain points. Two focused solutions for the Australian business market. No feature creep. No saying yes to everything.
As Sheree reveals in the conversation about entrepreneurship, "We're at that point where we're making a very clear decision in our business about which way we want to go—moving towards Trove and really focusing on supporting brands with their gifting technology."
Female Founders Australia: Stop Labeling, Start Building
When Sheree asks about advice that no longer serves female founders in Australia, Naomi's response is characteristically direct: "Take the word female out. We're just founders."
"We will not have equality until we stop talking about it," she continues. "When we say female founders, they don't ask for enough capital. Some have asked for a lot of capital. So let's not put these stories in people's way."
The unconscious bias exists in Australian startups, yes. But the solution for women entrepreneurs isn't endless analysis—it's representation. Naomi points to her experience on Shark Tank Australia, where she insisted on having another woman on the panel. That condition gave us Janine Allis, and together they became the only Shark Tank globally to start with two women.
The result for female-founded businesses? Gender wasn't a conversation. They just evaluated businesses. And Australian Shark Tank invested in more women-founded businesses than the US version—not because of quotas, but because bias was removed from the room.
The Invisible Cost of Success: Founder Burnout and Work-Life Balance
Sheree, a mother of two living on a farm in the Macedon Ranges, asks the question that haunts every founder: "Is there an invisible cost of building a successful business that you wish we talked more openly about?"
Naomi's answer about work-life balance for entrepreneurs is painfully honest: "I was always rushing."
She recounts being present with her kids—playing Monopoly before school, being truly there for that hour—but always racing to the next thing. "I just wish that I had slowed down a bit. I was always onto the next, onto the next, onto the next."
The revelation about startup life? Starting a business is a marathon, not a sprint. But founders treat it like a sprint to an invisible finish line, leading to founder burnout.
"You gotta enjoy it," Naomi says. "Everybody thinks starting a business is gonna be fun, you're gonna have financial independence, control of your own time. None of these things are true. So how do you get those things into your life? It has to be scheduled. You have to whack it in the calendar."
The Framework: How Founders Can Actually Balance Work and Life
Naomi shares a personal planning framework her daughter uses that every entrepreneur should steal for better work-life balance:
1. One Big Project Per Year – A marathon, a difficult course, a significant goal. Not ten goals. One. This prevents entrepreneur overwhelm.
2. Something to Look Forward to Every Two Months – A weekend away, a special dinner, an experience. Scheduled in the calendar. Essential for avoiding founder burnout.
3. Four Habit Changes Per Year – Every quarter, add or remove one habit. Stop scrolling Instagram. Start walking daily. Small, intentional changes for sustainable business success.
Why does this work for startup founders? Because New Year's resolutions fail. Vague intentions evaporate. But structured habit formation with scheduled rewards creates sustainable change and prevents burnout.
Why Australian Small Brands Are Choosing Trove Corporate Gifting
For boutique brands in Australia, the cost of building corporate gifting technology in-house is prohibitive. Trove solves this business challenge by offering white-label gifting technology at a flat rate—no monthly fees, accessible to brands of any size.
As Naomi observes about this business growth solution, "This is a way to get incremental sales for small businesses who cannot afford to have that platform. It opens doors they probably could never open before."
Trove creates a storefront on the brand's own website, enabling them to sell thousands of gifts to multiple recipients in one transaction. Simple. Focused. Solving one problem exceptionally well for Australian businesses.
Why Female Founders Need Community: How Propeller Works
Naomi and Sheree met through Propeller, an entrepreneurial program designed specifically for women founders in Australia. The model for startup networking is elegantly simple: Founders present their businesses and make requests—not for money, but for business introductions.
"Do you know anybody who works at X company? They'd make a great client," is the typical ask at Propeller events. Business leaders, investors, and executives attend solely to help female entrepreneurs. No pitch decks. No equity discussions. Just connections.
For Sheree, presenting at Propeller in Sydney was transformative for her business growth: "The connections, the incredible people we met—it was amazing for our business."
The Business Growth Takeaway: Success Is What You Refuse
This episode of Handpicked isn't about growth hacks or funding strategies for startups. It's about something harder for entrepreneurs: discipline.
The discipline to say no to revenue that doesn't fit your business focus. The discipline to solve one pain point exceptionally for customer success. The discipline to schedule work-life balance, not just work. The discipline for female founders to stop labeling themselves and just build successful businesses.
If you're a founder struggling with focus, distracted by opportunities that don't serve your business mission, experiencing founder burnout, or racing toward an invisible finish line, this entrepreneur conversation will recalibrate your thinking about business growth and success.
Thank you to Deel.com for supporting Australian business owners through it's sponsorship of Handpicked Season 6 for more information about Anytime Pay click here
Frequently Asked Questions on What to Say No To
1. What is the fundamental strategic purpose of learning to say 'No' in a growing business?
The fundamental strategic purpose of learning to say 'No' is protecting your focus and maximizing return on time (RoT). In a growing business, energy and capital are finite resources. Saying 'No' to compelling but distracting opportunities, complex offerings that erode margins, or requests that don't align with the core strategy (the 'one-page plan') is the ultimate act of discipline that ensures you are only investing in high-leverage activities.
2. What types of opportunities should a leader be disciplined enough to say 'No' to, even if they seem profitable?
A leader should say 'No' to opportunities that introduce unnecessary complexity, dilute the core value proposition, or require significant manual effort that is not scalable. This includes custom requests that cannot be productized, market expansions that overstretch the current capacity (too fast), and attractive new product lines that fragment the team's focus and erode the business's clear, unambiguous value statement.
3. How does saying 'No' contribute to a healthier, more aligned company culture?
Saying 'No' contributes to a healthier culture by reinforcing unambiguous clarity and psychological safety. When a leader says 'No' to distractions, they clearly signal what behaviours and priorities truly matter, aligning employee effort. Furthermore, saying 'No' to requests for manual heroics and unreasonable workloads protects the team from burnout, showing the leader values their time and sustainable effort over short-term gain.
4. What is the biggest mistake founders make when struggling to say 'No' to custom work or complex client requests?
The biggest mistake is falling into the trap of the 'custom-solution fallacy', believing that saying 'Yes' to every request is the path to growth. This quickly degrades the business into an unsustainable, unscalable 'paintbrush' operation, where every client becomes a unique project. This complexity increases operational costs, erodes margins, and prevents the creation of the standardized, repeatable systems required for true 'platform' scale.
5. As an investor, what are the key signals that a founder needs to urgently start saying 'No' more often?
As an investor, the key signals are rising Cost of Customer Acquisition (CoCA), decreasing gross margins, and over-engineered processes. High CoCA/low margins suggest a lack of focus and complexity is creating unnecessary drag. The founder is clearly trying to be too many things to too many people, and the business needs urgent simplification and strategic clarity (the 'Less is More' mandate) to regain profitable control.
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