How gellibn came to be

Voulla Fronis began her professional career as a hairdresser in one of Australia’s premier salons, climbing the ranks from stylist to salon manager, creative director and educator. From there, she would travel the world, educating salons and managing her staff at home and from afar. During her travels, Voulla discovered a revolutionary hair and beauty product and, with it, a fantastic opportunity to become a distributor within Australia.

After the success of her hair and beauty wholesale distribution company came another in the food retail industry. A totally different game, but with a similar owner-operated structure that heavily relied on staff performance. Voulla would soon realise her natural way of managing people and businesses would transpire into her latest venture, gellibn. 

What an incredible journey! Can you tell us what has made your business ventures so successful? 

“During the hair and beauty distribution company’s success, I worked closely with the businesses selling our products. And while our business was growing, our retailers would often express stress and frustration, particularly when it came to managing their staff. 

So, eventually, I switched my focus to helping these individual businesses. I began coaching them on improving their business by enhancing their relationships with staff through open, honest and consistent feedback. I would help my retailers set clear expectations for their staff, show their staff how they fit into the big picture, and then how to keep themselves accountable to follow up on those expectations. 

By instilling a culture of good work ethic, performance, and a sense of belonging, staff could genuinely see their managers were helping them improve and taking notice of their efforts. My method proved very effective because when they started seeing results in their business, I saw results in mine.”

Within 5 years, Voulla and her husband grew their distribution business from start-up to a $15m turnover.

“When my husband and I began our journey in the retail food industry, we made sure to prioritise our relationships with staff. This was a key element that made both businesses such a success - and is a strategy that was like second nature to us.” 

In their retail food business, they effectively managed close to 100 staff members.

Evidently, very powerful stuff. Can you expand on how effective, consistent and constructive feedback can be for a business?

“Absolutely. I feel like recently, feedback and staff performance have become a hot topic. Everyone’s talking about the effectiveness of feedback, but no one seems to know how to approach the conversation and actually give effective feedback. 

A lot can go wrong in business, usually because the link between the expectations of business owners and staff members is missing. It is so important that staff know what is expected of them and that business owners reinforce or correct their actions in a timely manner.

I’ve realised that myself and my husband have been providing consistent and effective feedback intuitively, without any apps or tools (or gellibn). It’s really just the way we like to manage people. We don’t just employ staff members, we invite them to become a part of our vision and culture, we help them understand where they fit into the big picture, and we invest plenty of time in them. By setting clear expectations and constantly helping them to improve, even if it’s just a five-minute conversation, each time they got better and better.

That’s really fantastic. How did your knowledge and experience then lead you to create gellibn?

“Starting out as a staff member, to becoming a manager, and eventually a business owner in wholesale and retail, and being within the service industry for so long, I’ve found that one of my biggest passions is the people side of things - helping people to achieve at whatever level or stage of their career.

In particular, having that business owner experience, I found I genuinely wanted to help business owners who are doing their best trying to run their business but just need a solution and some help with getting the best out of their staff. A lot of people don’t have the time or resources to coach their teams, so that’s when the light bulb moment happened. 

I realised business owners would benefit hugely from a simple, quick, cost-effective and time-saving method to providing consistent, open and honest feedback. I had a vision, I put it on paper and then took the steps to make it a reality. And gellibn was born.”

You can find more information about the gellibn real-time employee performance app here.

Can you tell us a bit more about the kind of impact gellibn can have on businesses? And what the future looks like for the app?

“Sure! gellibn simply makes life easy for business owners and team leaders and team members. With gellibn, team members understand what is expected of them and they are more likely to perform better when they know their efforts are being noticed. Business owners / team leaders can provide feedback and praise easily, resolve issues with ease and keep their teams informed, engaged, motivated and productive.

gellibn is an incredibly effective app for small to medium business owners working in their own business or any business that requires team leadership. It takes the frustration and weight off managers’ shoulders and staff members know where they stand. 

In terms of the future, my current focus is on creating a great experience for our users, then, I will look into adding more features that can enhance gellibn's functionality, and over the years, we may roll out new features based on user feedback and requests.

Eventually, I’d also like to add more tools to it and help passionate business owners not only with just managing their teams but also to help with the day-to-day running of their business.

I also foresee different versions of gellibn, for other aspects of life - watch this space!”