We were lucky to catch up with Linda Duncombe recently and have shared our conversation below.

Linda, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Do you think your parents have had a meaningful impact on you and your journey?

My parents made sure that living in government housing was not something that was going to hold back my brother or I in going after our dreams. My family was one rich on love and support. My parents told me I could do anything and it was better to try and learn than to live life thinking “what if?”….

When I was 9 years old, I would watch Wonder Woman and Charlie’s Angels. I would tell my parents when I grew up, I was going to live in New York. They 100% supported me.

Decades later, I joined Citi with my dream firmly in my sights and while my dad had passed, my mum remained supportive of me pursuing my dream. I moved to New York and then to Los Angeles and what I thought would be 3 years, is now 9 years and I love the USA. It is all that I dreamed and more. My career change from finance to making movies is based on the same philosophy and childhood belief that I can do anything that I put my mind to. I don’t ever want to live life and look back and wonder, “what if?”…. Life is a gift and I live every day with joy and appreciation.

My parents taught me to go for it, to be kind and to pay it forward. I am so blessed and incredibly thankful for my parents and look back and see the sacrifices they made for my brother and I with gratitude and so much love.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I was 35 years in finance and the opportunity to support someone who I have enormous respect for personally and professionally came along. I was about to go home to Australia for a few months and decided this was the universe telling me to back myself. Take my experiences and my curiosity and love for life and try something different. I went from finance to making movies! The opportunity was with an extraordinary man called Josh Friedman. He is part of my USA family and I love him like a little brother. More importantly, he is a hardworking, talented individual who had made a bunch of short films and had won over 25 awards for them. This was his play in to feature films and I was asked to be a part of that. I said yes! That was 9 months ago and it was one of the best decisions of my professional life.

This movie is about pure entertainment. The kind of movie my mum and dad would take me to as a child and we would get a chocolate covered ice cream and I would let myself be taken on the story of the film. This is a fun, adventure film for the whole family that makes no political or religious statements. We saw an opportunity to make a film that we believe people want to see. This is an independent film, we raised the money ourselves and the film has taken us to four different countries and we have not only made a great film that is almost ready for distribution, we have experienced different cultures and made some wonderful, new friends.

I am most proud of doing this with Josh and know it wont be our last movie together. That’s exciting! We want to keep making movies that people around the world want to see. Family films that we can enjoy and escape into.

The cast have told us this was one of their best experiences on a set and we want to make great movies and look after the cast, crew and local businesses where we film and work.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

There are so many examples I think we can all reflect on. This question is so important to me professionally and personally. In both cases, I didn’t listen to my “gut”, that instinct we all have and I have on more than one occasion tried to rationalize it and/or dismiss it. Don’t do that. Explore why you may feel uneasy about something.

My business example is one where we were working to a budget and it was run rating to be over. I was continually told to not worry, it was definitely coming in under budget. That was not the case. With the help of a key few stakeholders, I was able to pivot and find a way to finish the project and leverage incentives and other levers we pulled to keep the project on track. I caused a lot of unnecessary personal stress and put myself under pressure that could have been avoided. If I trusted my instincts and dug into what I sensed was not adding up, I could have saved myself a lot of angst and time.

My need to sometimes please overrides my business instincts. It is something I am aware of and actively work to make sure stays in check.

Can you open up about a time when you had a really close call with the business?

We were about to launch our first native mobile app for banking and it was during the pandemic. It was needed more than ever. I am a firm believer of “co-creating”. I build and market with my clients as part of the process. I want to be sure when I am spending money, what we are doing makes sense to the target audience and it is something they will use/need.

With this mobile app, we had built a whole new check deposit flow. The team and I absolutely loved it. Clients in our co-creation sessions were telling us it was not familiar to them and they didn’t like it. We kept moving forward thinking we could “convince them”. Two weeks before launch we could see this was not being adopted by our pilot group and we needed to pivot. We were about to launch and this was a huge feature we knew would have flow on to overall use and satisfaction with the mobile app.

We decided to go live with what we had originally developed but had already in parallel, started to build the flow more aligned to how our clients were telling us made sense to them.

When we launched we said new features were already in the build phase and would be out in a matter of weeks, which we did.

The big lesson here for me was, listen to your clients. This was not a case of we couldn’t do what they asked for, it was we thought we knew better. It was a humbling experience that I keep top of mind everyday.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://thequeensjewelsmovie.com
• Instagram: thequeensjewelsmovie.com
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/linda-duncombe/

Image Credits

I have the rights to the pics