Meet Jen: A Look into Property Management

Interviewer Can you introduce yourself and what you do?

Jen I’m Jen Clark. I run Ranges Escapes. So, we are a short term accommodation property management business based here in the Macedon Ranges. And yeah, we’re about a year old, so we’re still very much in Start-Up phase, but got some big plans for the next year ahead.

Interviewer What did you do before this and what were the drawbacks that led to a career change?

Jen Yeah. So, I was a graphic designer. I still am. So, I’ve had a design practice for 10 years and before that, I worked for a number of different organisations in the corporate sector and so forth. So, as a designer and design manager, so in my or my background prior to this was in design We moved out to would end with my family in like 2018. And after the move, I still had my design practice at that point and was focused on that. But after the move I sort of just felt a bit of an itch to do something else. Twenty years in design will do that to you. Because yeah, you’re at a desk, you know, eight, nine more hours a day. And obviously that takes a bit of a toll on you physically and mentally, I think.

So, you do tend to get quite stale. So, once I moved out here, there’s obviously a lot more green space and yeah, there was some it just seemed like a lot more scope to do something different. And I’d done a little bit of Airbnb management. About five years ago before I had my son Max and I rented out a spare bedroom in my house and really loved doing that and met some really interesting people. And so, I sort of thought, well, now I’m out here. We’ve got access to a whole lot of, you know, really great towns and tourist destinations and that sort of thing. And so, yeah. So I kind of decided to try and get into the property management space. And yeah, we’re now at the point where nearly a year into the business, where we’ve got five properties at the moment and we’re looking to take on another two to three in the next couple of months. So it’s very busy, but great.

Interviewer Did you enjoy it? Were you satisfied with graphic design?

Jen Yeah, for a long time I was. I think, as I said, I got a little bit stale in the last few years. I just sort of I guess, yeah. I just kind of fell out of love with it a bit. It was a lot of that kind of static time at the desk too.

Like I just felt like all I was doing was getting up in the morning and going to a desk and doing my thing and then packing up at night and going to bed and doing the same thing over and over again.

And yeah, that was fine for a while and I do enjoy the creative sort of aspects of that career. I loved it, but yeah, I felt like I needed something that I was that was more varied in terms of what I was doing throughout my day.

And so yeah, hence the change. I wasn’t quite sure what that change was going to be, to be honest. Like when we moved out, I just felt like I needed a change of some sort. And I sort of thought, well, hopefully, you know, that’ll come to me somewhere in some way. And it did. So, yeah, I was kind of just opened myself to the possibilities and it happened.

Interviewer Did you try anything else before you did this? Did you try to do another doing it in a different type of career?

Jen I thought about it. I know I’ve always been quite interested in maybe doing some kind of hospitality job or get something that involved people to more of a degree than design, because design does involve people. But it’s very it’s a very solitary career.

So you are sort of, you know, stuck at a desk or on email or whatever the case may be. It’s a lot of, you know, hands-on technology sort of role. But I really craved being around people a bit more, not all the time, but having a bit more of a balance between the two.

So I sort of briefly thought when I came out here, actually saw an ad for the local wine bar looking for someone to work there. And I thought, well, could I do that? And I I did think about it. But then I thought no, with a young child and that sort of thing, you just you’d be working pretty crazy hours. And I think it was learning too much in the people direction. So I was looking for something that I could do from home and was flexible.

And yeah, that kind of allowed me to balance those two things a bit better. So hence, yeah, it’s sort of just ended up happening.

So, it was a good point to get to. The reason for starting my property management business, believe it or not, was because I love a podcast that I listen to one morning just completely sort of unintentionally.

I was driving to Melbourne for a meeting for my design business and I listened to this podcast by a woman named Bernadette Jansen and she has a business called ‘The School of Renovating’. So she teaches people how to flip houses and renovate for profit and all that sort of stuff. And she works with a lot of women.

So I’m you know, I’m just at that point where it’s like, you know, I’m not a spring chicken anymore. I still want to be quite active. And she was talking about this building an Airbnb business basically in her podcast. And it just kind of clicked like I thought that’s what I should do.

You know, I just had that sort of moment where I thought I could definitely do that. I’ve got the marketing skills. I’ve got the hospitality. I want to be around people more. All those things. And so listening to that podcast that morning turned to be a very fortuitous move, because it was the sort of reason for deciding to take the plunge into that space.

So and funnily enough, I got in touch with Bernadette, the woman who runs this podcast. And she was a wealth of knowledge. She actually gave me a call and we had a big chat over the phone. And she was the person who introduced me to the idea of, you know, renting a property and then subletting it, which I’d never thought of before, because I just thought most property owners would say, no way am I doing that.

But when you approach it from a particular angle and you can reinforce the benefits of that sort of arrangement to a property owner, then it’s a win-win. So but it’s just all about how you approach it. You go up to someone and say, oh, can I Airbnb your house? They’ll immediately think that you’re gonna have massive parties and trash it and whatnot. So, yeah, it’s a delicate negotiation.

But fortunately, the property owner here at the Fox house in content, she was just totally receptive to the idea. And she could say that her house was gonna be taken care of and maintained, whereas with a long term tenant, you don’t necessarily have that security. So, yeah. So she saw the benefits. It was because we found a landlord that was willing to pay a bit more open-minded and take us on.

The second property that we took on we had was a local real estate agent that I’d touched base with before and she contacted me about this property in Mount Macedon and said, look, these owners actually specifically want someone who’s going to manage it as a short term rental. And funnily enough, we went up and inspected it. And originally I said, you know, we’d spent a lot of money sitting this first property up.

Originally, I said all, you know, it’s a beautiful property, but I don’t think we can afford to kind of take it on just yet because we’ve just obviously had a huge financial outlay with this place. And basically, I ended up getting in touch with the owner directly to cut a long story short. And the owner was willing to pay for the place to be furnished. So they actually engaged me as a designer and said, look, we trust your skills and abilities.

Here’s you know, here’s the capital that you need.

Go ahead and furnish it and sort it all out. And yes. Which was, you know, not only did it help us get our second property, but it also allowed me to kind of indulge my design skills. So that was great. That was kind of like a bit of a dream scenario, really.

We also had a good idea of what budget would realistically be needed after we’d done this place. So that property was set up quite a bit more cost-effectively than this house. Because we went all out, this being the first house that we set up, we went completely, you know, all out in terms of the furnishings and so forth. And we paid it back a bit for the second place. So yeah, good learning curve.

Interviewer Did you have any reservations or worries about changing careers?

Jen Oh yeah. Tons. Because. And particularly with a young child to support. There was no guarantee that this was going to work. And particularly that what money we had put away in savings. We took a big risk and a big gamble to set this place up. And so not only did we not know whether this was going to generate income, but we also didn’t have it.

We don’t have anything else to sort of fall back on. So it was a huge risk. Pretty crazy, really, in retrospect. So that was yeah, there’s I had I’ve had a lot of sleepless nights. Like, I won’t lie about that because, you know, you do sort of lie awake at night and think, am I completely crazy to be doing this? But I also the flip side of that was I also had the business skills, so I knew what was involved in building up a small business from scratch.

And I’ve gotten to know the ebbs and flows of running a small business. And so, you know, I think had I have gone into this completely cold and never having run a business before, would have been a totally different predicament.

But because I had that business background, I think that gave me some peace of mind that, yeah, I can make this work if I really try hard enough.

So a lot of the things you did before really prepped you for it?

Yeah. Yeah. And I think with small business you’ve got to be a kind of a fly by the seat of your pants kind of person I think. Because if you aren’t, you’re in for a bit of a rude awakening. And I think that in any business. I don’t think that’s exclusive to working design or property management. I think any small business, you know, it’s these ebbs and flows and there are some weeks where you’ve just got to basically have blind faith that your bills are gonna be able to be paid by the end of that week. And that’s really hard. It’s okay when it’s just you that you’ve got to look after.

But once you’ve got a child in the mix, then it’s a different proposition.

I’ve had so many you know, I’ve been up like messaging people, messaging guests late at night and I’ve had a lot of sleepless nights thinking, okay, is this actually going to enable me to scale up and start to build a reasonable income again.

Because I had gotten to the point with the design practice that I was actually starting to earn a reasonably good income.

So, yeah. So lots of risks. But hopefully it’ll all pay off in the end.

Fingers crossed.

Interviewer Sounds like it’s already starting to – all signs are pointing to good!

Jen Yeah! Well hopefully I mean interestingly enough we just had some other friends moved to the area and we had no idea that they were moving to the area.

I mean so our friends, are husband and wife – one of them is a psychologist and one of them is a builder and an architect.

So one of the things they’re doing up here is actually they’ve got some land up in Heathcote and they’ve got land and Kyneton and they’re looking at building some properties specifically to list on the short term market. So we’ve recently caught up with them and they’ve been like, you know, can you guys manage these for us?

And I’m like, of course we can! Yeah. So it’s been through a whole lot of different serendipitous events that have got us to this point.

I’ve spent the last three months with my head down writing a really solid business plan. And I didn’t ever do that for the design practice like I was, you know, just a fly by the seat. Yep. I’m gonna go out on my own and do this. There wasn’t much rhyme or reason to it.

But with this, there really has to be because you need to know, I guess, the impact of adding a property on and how that’s going to impact on your time and your bottom line and all those sorts of things. And so I wanted the ability to really flesh that out neatly. Yeah.

I think having that business plan now, it’s kind of like a framework to scale the business. And I’m really glad it was boring as all hell in some respects. It was really quite gruelling writing that stuff. And I’m not really a detailed person. I’m a much more of a big picture sort of a person.

So, yeah, it was quite a process getting that finished, but I’m glad I did.

Interviewer I tried to write a business plan once – I lasted about half an hour and threw it on the ground.

Jen Yeah, well, there’s a lot of people who do what’s now called just a one-page business plan, which is actually much more sensible. I found in order to write the one-page business plan, I had to write a 37-page business plan first to condense that down.

But now we’ve got because we’ve got that in place now I can say. Okay.

So if we take on this property, it’s this size, it’s likely to probably, you know, attract this nightly rate. With this much occupancy. What’s that gonna do to our bottom line. So yeah. So now we can see that funnel of what’s how that’s going to impact on our revenue and profit and so forth. So hat’s good. I think when we set this up, it was just a case of, let’s say what happens. And if you’re going to build a business long term, that’s not really good enough.

Interviewer Coming from a creative background and creative mindset, did you struggle to think of all of these business things that you didn’t have to with graphic design? Was there a learning curve?

Jen Yeah. To a degree. There was.

It’s interesting because I think, yes, some of the some of the dry business stuff doesn’t come naturally to me because a lot of the accounting and tax obligations and all that sort of stuff. It actually confuses me a lot. But I also find it quite a headache.

But I think now that I’ve got a good grasp of mainn concepts around that.

And to this day, there are still some terms that like accounting terms and so forth that do baffle me. Like I’m like, what does that actually mean? But I try and sort of make sure that I at least understand the fundamentals and can then, you know, make decisions based on those.

So it’s been a learning curve to answer your question, because even now at 42 and having run a business for ten years already and actually before I ran my design practice, I ran another business with a partner for five years in the publishing space.

So it was a design publishing business. But my business partner in that business had all those skills.

So I was purely doing the creative stuff. She was doing the day to day marketing finance stuff. And so there was never really a huge need for me to know. I mean, as I said, I knew the basics, but there was never a massive need for me to develop a knowledge much beyond that.

Interviewer Yeah, I can imagine that would be a deterrent for a lot of people if they got to that point and were struggling with the business terminology.

Jen I think a lot of people are, and probably rightly so, a little bit scared by that stuff.

Like launching a bass and all that sort of stuff.

Like it’s you know, it can be quite intimidating.

But one thing that I’ve really learned is that it’s about finding partners and collaborators and so forth that you can really rely on that are subject matter experts.

So make sure that you’ve got a really good accountant. If that’s not your forte. Or make sure that, you know, a really good financial adviser or a marketing person or whatever. If you start to know what your strengths are, then you can play to that by engaging other people who are better at other stuff than you are. Yeah. So and that’s really important with this business too, because it’s a lot of juggling different balls in the air, and I can’t do them all.

Interviewer I guess the first instinct for a lot of us is just trying to do everything yourself and trying to be self-sufficient. Because you feel that you can’t invest in other people until it starts to be profitable but you need all of these other people to get to that point.

Jen That’s the catch. That’s the massive catch. And so many people struggle with that. And also to know at what point do you can you justify engaging or spending money on engaging someone else. And I still struggle with that now. I feel like, particularly with things like our social media. I think that if we had more of a kind of consistent social media presence, the business would grow and we probably attract more property owners and that sort of thing.

But at the moment, I just don’t have the time to be able to to give that what it deserves. And I’m not actually that sure as to how to go about engaging that sort of support, too. So you kind of just got a feel your way through these kinds of intermediary times, I guess, because we’re only a year old. So saying to someone this morning it’s hard to know whether to just take the plunge and recruit like a social media manager or a marketing person or whatever the case is, or whether to just hold tight for a bit longer until we’ve got a few more properties under our belt and then to get someone on board.

Until then, it’s so, so difficult to know when that right time is. But I guess you’ve just got to keep an open mind and trust the fact that you’ll know. You’ll know when the time is right to make that investment. But I think a lot of business owners struggle with that.

Interviewer It’s definitely a common challenge.

Jen It is. And also, I mean in this in this business too, because we live in this review-centric culture and this business is basically only as good as the reviews that we’re getting. So making sure that the house is like pristinely clean, for instance, and met and managed really well.

So it was about the very first thing I did actually when I started this business was to put an ad on Facebook and said, ‘we’re looking for a housekeeper extraordinaire’.

So I got quite a big response, which was great.

And I met up with a few different people just for coffee, just to sort of canvass their interests and so forth.

And anyway, I ended up meeting our still now still-now head housekeeper who has just been nothing short of amazing.

And she’s so critical to this business. And so without her, you know, we’d probably be well, we wouldn’t have a business. To be honest. So it’s not just a matter of nurturing that relationship now, but also making sure that she’s training other staff. Now that we’re growing to do what she does as well as she does it hopefully.

Yes. So that’s been a real process to make sure that you’re really capitalising on that. Yeah, knowing who are the most important players in the business and making sure you nurture the life out of them. Yeah.

So I like, you know, with her, for instance, we do pay a little bit higher than the standard hourly rate. But I think it’s, you know, worth every cent. You want those people to be really incentivised to come to work and do a good job. And that’s paid off because with this property I think we’ve had what, 45, 46 reviews now on Airbnb and we have only ever received one 4-star review. So we’ve had 45 or 46 five star reviews and one 4-star review.

And the time we got that 4- star review was because a guest had left the place in an absolute mess and I had pulled her up on that and said look, the place was left in a real mess and she obviously retaliated by giving us a slightly lower score, which was a real shame.

But, you know, that’s the nature of the beast, I guess. When you’re dealing with people, that stuff’s gonna happen from time to time. But I stand by that. So, yeah.

So it’s joining all the dots, I guess, and realising that treating our housekeeping staff well is a critical part of the business. And nurturing that relationship that we have with them and then, you know, the rest sort of takes care of itself because if the house is always clean, then people will give us good reviews, which is a quarter the business’s success.

I mean the thing with this sort of business is that every single time a guest arrives it has to look like no one was ever here before.

So there has to be almost no evidence of anyone else’s existence or presence in this house, which can be really hard because if they find so much as, you know, a single hair or it can be even a fingerprint on the window or anything, then, you know, it can really piss some people off. So it’s a different ballgame to just say cleaning a residential house for someone like the housekeeping staff here have to check cupboards to make sure things haven’t been left behind.  And they have to make sure that I mean, what we are delivering at the end of the day is a product. And sorry, people book our property based on the photos and the photos of the property on our specific website. And when they get here, they expect to see something that directly resembles those photos.

So every single time we have to make sure that it’s spot on. Yeah. Which can be tricky.

So we’re currently putting together a processes manual for housekeeping staff that might have a picture of a particular room and like this is how the bed should be made.

This is how, you know, the lock should be on if it’s winter. So that was someone else checking it night. You know, they’re coming into a nice, well-lit house or the heater should be on or whatever the case may be.

So, yeah, but they make a massive difference like it gets freezing cold up here in winter. If someone comes in in the heating’s on and the lights are on, they just think, oh, you know, this is great.

Sort of like an emotional first-impression?

That’s right. In this industry, we’ve got a saying about the first 10 minutes are paramount. So it’s about you know, how clean is the doormat? Is the door clean? Is you know, a lot of the time people are coming here after work on a Friday night. They might want to just crack open a bottle of wine.

They’ll probably go to the toilet straight away. So you wanna make sure the toilet’s nice and clean. You’ve got to kind of walk through what the guests are likely to do when they arrive and then set things up in response to that.

Interviewer It’s quite product-like, isn’t it?

Jen It is – it’s experience design really. So it’s knowing that in those first 10 minutes that people are going to make a judgment about your property.

So, you want to make sure that it’s as positive as it can be.

Interviewer It’s a sort of thing that you wouldn’t really think about from the outside in this kind of industry, but once you’re in it you think, ‘oh yeah, I do need to consider all of these things’.

Jen That’s right.

And it can be even things like, you know, some property hosts, they have like a rule book about: you can’t cook curries or you can’t cook such and such in the house because they don’t want the next group who gets to come in and there to be some kind of, you know, evidence of someone else being here. So. But I’m not of that school at all, I think. Come here and relax. So, you know, if there’s a someone’s cooked up in a hot curry or something like that, there’s not a lot I can do about it.

I’ll just tell the guests, look, you know, previous guests have cooked up a storm. So please forgive us if there’s a little bit of a cooking smell in the house, but most people are fine.

Interviewer Did you do any study or anything before you got started in property management?

Jen Yeah. So I did a Masters or did most of a master’s. I bowed out at the grad dip level. But back in the late 2000s at RMIT in design and that was great. I also did a six-week course in property management.

Before that I just had work experience essentially. So yeah. So I’d worked in a couple of I’ve worked for a big corporate for about four and a half years. And then after that, I worked for Monash Uni for a while and I worked also for a digital agency. Hoo hoo. High music creative director. So I worked sort of across a variety of spaces. So, yeah, so that sort of put me in pretty good stead to run my own business as well, because I’d had the digital experience as well as, you know, working in advertising and working for an educational institution as well.

So, yeah. So that was good. Yeah. Yeah, it was quite widespread. So I hadn’t just focused on the one thing.

But when I set up the business, I was offering a sort of a breadth of graphic design services. So I was able to kind of help clients with branding or print design or websites or whatever, you know, whatever they needed help with. So that was really good. I think that having that sort of cross-section of skills was probably better than having just focused on one particular thing.

I had to work with a lot of web developers and photographers and other people who would sort of plug their skills into the business. But that was also good because those collaborative projects were really enjoyable rather than just always working on my own.

As for the six-week course, one of the tasks that you’re set with is to set up your first property as part of the course. so, I was kind of researching where to do that and looking at potential properties and so forth through the course. And then obviously once we’d gotten this property, it was sort of all systems go. So we had the course of been any longer, they probably would have been difficult to juggle the two.

So no, I think was really about the right length.

Interviewer You mentioned earlier that a lot of your skills from design transferred across quite nicely, can you talk a little bit about that?

Jen So a lot of people who end up in this kind of career, managing accommodation or Airbnbs tend to get into it by accident, which is kind of what I happened with me a little bit. But I think that having a creative background makes for a really natural progression into this sort of career because you do need to think laterally. You sort of need to be open to anything happening. You need to be able to juggle a whole lot of different things at once. And yeah, obviously, as well as good housekeeping and marketing and so forth. The business is built around properties that look beautiful and people want to spend time in. And so that kind of lent itself to my design skills. So I’ve done a bit of interior design and renovating work in the past.

For a little while there, actually, I ran a sort of a second business that was a bit of an offshoot of my main design business that was just helping people with home makeovers. I think I did about 10 sort of small scale renovations and helped people manage those, but had never done one for myself.

And having that skill set was really useful when it came to doing this, because, for instance, it enabled me to kind of pull this house together in two in two weeks. So that’s going out and shopping for items and then getting everything delivered and then styling the place and choosing linen and. Yeah, so. Absolutely.

It’s really stressful because you’ve got to make sure that you’ve dotted every I, crossed every T. But it’s also like creatively really fulfilling because you can bring together, you know, you’re bringing together this property and it’s a bit like working on a graphic design project, because you’ve got to bring together all these elements to kind of come up with this final solution for a client. In this case, the client is us. So yeah. So I think up there with the best part of this job, I also think I’m someone who really enjoys just the overall management of the business and seeing how the business grows and working on the strategy and all that sort of stuff.

I really love that stuff. So yeah, having the opportunity to do that and to be less kind of on the tools all the time is really great in a way of life.

And interestingly enough, I think someone was actually sort of friend was saying to me the other day all I was telling them how many properties were managing. And they were like, oh, my God, you must be basically out of your mind.

Like you’re just completely stressed to the max. And it’s funny because I think it was way more stress when we still set up this initial property. But now I sort of know what to expect. And I also know that now I need to start drawing on other people to help me scale the business. So I feel almost a lot less stressed now that we’re getting bigger and hopefully things, you know, will start to get processes in place and we’ll start to have the technology in place to enable the business to grow. So, yeah, so I will be a little bit more big picture and less kind of on the, you know, really intricate things of, you know, designing Instagram posts and this, that and the other, which I’m really looking forward to.

Interviewer It sounds like a good phase at the moment.

Jen It’s kind of like a release.

It’s like, oh actually maybe I can just slowly let go. I’ve got a friend actually who’s just moved up to Kyneton, and she’s got a property styling background. So, I’m gonna have a coffee with her and say, you know, can you give me a hand like, you know, with these properties? And she’ll do a really good job, I think.

Yeah, more serendipity. Yes, that’s right. So, yeah.

And it’s funny that these people that have moved into the area have got these skills because it’s like they’re such complementary skills.

Interviewer You’ve got a nice little community going on.

Jen Yeah, I mean one of the things that’s really important to me though with this business and it’s one of the things that I’ve had trouble coming to terms with it is my own social conscience.

Because with my design practice, a lot of my clients were like not for profits or health organisations or I used to sort of have a bit of a, you know, an unsaid philosophy of really wanting to do good work for people who were doing good. So without sounding too corny, so this business, it’s a bit different because it’s there’s not such a kind of clear cut way to give back, so to speak.

And so having things like that, you know, the little foodbank donation box and like Rangers Escapes is sponsoring an event up here in a few weeks time that’s being held by an organization called the Artists Foundation, and they organise retreats for women who are going through breast cancer.

So we’ve been able to donate a few nights of accommodation for someone who’s going through that to, you know, to stay in one of our properties and doing those sorts of things. But it’s taken a bit of time for me to try and figure out ways that we can kind of give back.

But to me that’s like core to our business philosophy.

So. Yeah, whatever we can do.

Interviewer What do you think are personally some of the most important things, like attributes, skills that you’ve learnt over time that do well in this kind of industry?

Jen Look, as I said before, I think in any small business, you’ve just got to be able to be resilient. I know that word is thrown around a lot, but it’s really true. In any small business, I think you’ve got to just be able to roll with the punches because you never know what’s going to happen.

You can plan, but you still have what’s going to happen. I mean, we’ve had instances where, you know, we’ve had guests book a property and I’ve been a bit worried about if this person is going to trash the house, that sort of thing.

And they’ve been absolutely fine. So my preconceptions have been put to rest. But then we’ve had you know, we’ve had people who have come to stay at the house who might have had 20 amazing reviews on Airbnb. And I’ve just let them book the place in good faith and the place is being trashed. So, you know, you’ve just got to be able to expect the unexpected, I guess, and be able to bounce back from it really quickly. You’ve just got to go, okay. Put any anger or whatever to the side and just getting there and get it ready.

Interviewer Initially, did you struggle with being able to put everything aside?

Jen Yeah, I did. And a lot of people in this space too, they get. It’s easy to in the start it’s easy to get upset about little things like if someone you know stains a sheet or something like that. But then you get to a point where you realise this is a business and that stuff is just part of the business. You’ve just got to accept it. You’ll have to replace sheets from time to time or you’ll have to replace a vase. Or a wineglass – it’s just part of the business. So you’ve got to kind of just approach it that way rather than getting too personally sort of pent up about it. I mean, it would be lovely if people treated, you know, things as they would in their own homes. But the reality is that it’s not always the case, but that’s okay.

Interviewer Is there anything you’d change about your career journey?

Jen No, I don’t think there’s anything I would do differently. I’ve really enjoyed my career. With this business, I think I sort of went into it approaching the first year like an apprenticeship, like I thought, okay, this is gonna be my apprenticeship because I don’t know anything about running this kind of business. I’m going to learn heaps and I’m probably going to fail heaps, but that’s okay. I think having gone into it with that attitude rather than, you know, I mean I’m kind of naturally a bit of a perfectionist. And I have had moments where I’ve been really stressed out about not having something in the right place or whatever the case may be. But I think I’ve learnt to be a lot more self-forgiving and to just embrace the stuff that goes wrong as learning.