Episode 314: Jane Marx of The Beautiful Bunch
In this inspiring episode, Fiona chats with Jane Marx, the founder of The Beautiful Bunch, a flower delivery and event installation service that supports young women from refugee backgrounds. They talk about the challenges and rewards of running a social enterprise, highlighting the stunning flower arrangements and the positive impact customers can make by supporting this business. Tune in!
Topics discussed in this episode:
Introduction
The background and start of Jane's business, The Beautiful Bunch
The impact of the pandemic and lockdown on the business
The administrative burden and financial challenges of running a social enterprise
The potential for accessing funding and scaling after the initial stages
Jane's journey and experiences that led her to social entrepreneurship
The influence of volunteering and working with immigrant communities on Jane's decision
The combination of passion for business and helping others in Jane's motivation
Providing employment and support for young women from refugee backgrounds
Grant applications and the challenges of applying for grants
The importance of aligning job opportunities with individuals' interests
Encouraging businesses to offer positions to individuals facing barriers
Overcoming challenges and persisting in building The Beautiful Bunch
Next steps for The Beautiful Bunch, including corporate collaborations, donations, and employment opportunities
Providing funeral flowers with a social impact and repurposing arrangements as gifts
Conclusion
Get in touch with My Daily Business Coach
Resources and Recommendations mentioned in this episode:
“I would like to say that if there is somebody reading this who has experience running a small business, who understands what a profit and loss is, who has respect for Excel's spreadsheets, and who has had to make decisions in a business that has consequences for the people who work in that business, I would say that you are certainly well positioned to start a social enterprise or for purpose business. I would encourage anyone to do so if you have a sound understanding of business and you're confident that you can run something profitable and then you can direct those profits elsewhere into your social or environmental mission, and it is certainly something that can be done.”
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Welcome to episode 314 of the My Daily Business Podcast. This is an interview with an incredible small business owner that is going to inspire you, I know it did me when I was talking to her. I'm excited about bringing this particular episode out. Before I get stuck into that, I want to acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of this land on which I get to meet these people and chat and that is the Wurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation. I pay my respects to their elders, past and present, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded.
The other thing I wanted to mention is that we are getting close to group coaching being open for enrollment. We will kick this off in August or early September 2023, depending on the group and when they want to start, and that carries on for twelve months. The twelve-month group coaching program is all about sidestepping the hustle, and learning how to create a business that is going to support you financially as well as emotionally align with your values and beliefs and give you something that you feel proud of.
In this program, we go through all the different elements of business from finance to legal, to advertising on social media, content plans, marketing, and all of it. In addition to all of that, as well as having this group that you stay accountable to because you're meeting every single fortnight for a year, you also have access to all of our courses. You have one-on-one access to myself and you get to be part of the business book club, which is where we come up with six amazing books to read and we meet together for extra Zoom sessions. Sometimes the authors join us, which is fantastic.
If you're interested in that, make sure you get on over and put yourself on the waitlist, you can do that at MyDailyBusiness.com/groupcoaching. If you're on the waitlist and then you do go forward with being in the group coaching program, you'll get extra goodies. It's always good to be on the waitlist to put yourself in that position to get those extra things.
Lastly, I'll mention that we do also hold one scholarship position per group for somebody from a background where perhaps they have not been given the same access and opportunity as other people. That could be somebody First Nations, BIPOK, someone from the LGBTQIA community, or if you are a single parent.
If that is you, please feel free to apply for that scholarship position, you can fill in the form just as you would on standard. Put in the notes that you would like to apply for that scholarship position, and you'll go through all the same interview process as we do for non-scholarship people in the program as well. The address for that is MyDailyBusiness.com/podcast. You can also apply for that no matter where you are in the world as long as you have good internet access. We often have people from overseas, outside of Australia joining that group. Let's get into our interview episode.
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I have mentioned many times that we get pitched a lot for this podcast. We get a lot of crappy pitches, to be honest, but we also get a lot from interesting small business owners. It is always a joy when you receive a pitch from a brand that you are already aware of and you're like, “Yes, I would love to talk to you.” That is exactly what happened with our guest, the wonderful Jane Marx, Founder of The Beautiful Bunch. The tagline is, “Beautiful flowers by beautiful people.”
It is a flower delivery service and flower event installation service, any sort of floral arrangements that you need, whether it's for a wedding, a funeral, corporate arrangements, or subscriptions that you want to send to yourself or as a corporate or a business to have subscriptions to flowers or a one-off flower arrangement that you are sending over to somebody. That is what they do. What makes it quite different is that this is a social enterprise supporting young women from refugee backgrounds to fulfill their dreams through training and then employment in The Beautiful Bunch.
When we read the pitch, it was an absolute no-brainer. What Jane has created with The Beautiful Bunch is exceptional. It is a model of business that you think, “Goodness me, I hope that this inspires many other people to think outside the box and to at themselves and think, ‘Yes, one person can make a difference.’” Jane has proven that not just with this but with previous social enterprises that she has run. This is her third business.
In addition to running this, she's also a mom of two young children, a partner, and a member of her community creating something that is powerful. In this interview, we talk about the challenges associated with that as well as the deep work that is necessary to create a social enterprise that gives back to the community and does all the things, and has all of the statistics to back it up and get funding and get the grants but is also a successful business on its own right. Many people will follow @The.BeautifulBunch on Instagram and you can also find them online at TheBeautifulBunch.com.
Many people will see that in addition to being a social enterprise, they also create absolutely stunning flower arrangements. It makes sense that if you are in the market for any floral arrangement, you would go to somewhere like The Beautiful Bunch because you're not only going to get these incredible flowers, but you are also going to be giving back to others by supporting a business that is supporting young women from refugee backgrounds. In this chat, we talk about all the things, all the hard work, and all of the effort that goes into creating a business like this. It was an eye-opening chat, it's an inspiring chat, and I know that you'll take so much away from this. Here is my chat with Jane Marx, Founder of The Beautiful Bunch.
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Jane, welcome to the podcast. How are you feeling about your life and your business right now?
Fiona, thank you for having me. It's lovely to be speaking with you. I'm feeling good about life right now. We had a bit of a big win. We received a grant to fund something important for the growth of the business. The girls and I had a lovely lunch to celebrate and I'm feeling good.
I love that. Massive congratulations.
Thank you.
I have family members, one in particular, that works a lot in the grant space. I know how stressful that can be and the application and everything else and not knowing if you're going to get it. Massive congrats on getting it.
Thank you very much. It's a lot of work so, yes, thank you.
Tell us about this amazing business that you've got the new grant, The Beautiful Bunch. How, when, and why did you start it?
The Beautiful Bunch is my third business. I had run two social enterprises prior to this. I sold the first one and then I pivoted the second to become this business. I feel like although I'm probably relatively young, I have learned hard and fast in my first two businesses. Whilst I certainly don't have all of the answers, I've been able to take much of what I learned in the first two businesses and use that to my advantage in building this one.
Before launching The Beautiful Bunch, it's worth noting that it came from a previous event social enterprise that I ran. We worked with the same group that we work with now, young women from refugee backgrounds experiencing barriers to entering the Australian workforce. That was an event social enterprise. We focused on hospitality skills, training, and also more broadly on skills for events, and that included a crash course in floristry as well. Most of our clients would book corporate functions or private parties with us and they'd also ask for floral arrangements on the bar or table flowers. We started doing that internally.
By the second half of 2019, we probably were about three years in. We had some good results in terms of our social impact and we also secured a large amount of funding that enabled us to formalize our training program and to scale quite significantly. Towards the end of that year, we entered into discussions with the church here in Fitzroy North in Melbourne. We went to them with a proposal to occupy the studio space in the back of the building that I have completely fallen in love with. We wanted that space for client meetings and our training program.
By way of an exchange, we would then take on part management of their 250-seated venue that's attached to that space. We'd book up corporate events and weddings and gatherings and the like. Our tenure commenced in January 2020 and Melbourne went into lockdown in March not long after. It wasn't the year for advance, Fiona.
For us, it essentially meant that we lost everything overnight. There's no other way of saying it. I had to cancel tens of thousands of dollars worth of booked events. I had to tell six young women at the time who'd just started with us all from refugee backgrounds with little if any prior work experience in the country that we didn't have any work for them. That was difficult. Also, I was pregnant at the time. I appreciate everyone, and I feel like everyone lost something during that time. People have lost loved ones. It's good to keep that in perspective. I felt the loss of that business deeply.
I also felt a great sense of vulnerability around how was I going to support my family. It was quite crushing at the time. I was due to have my daughter in July of that year and I spent the time between March and when she was born in July reflecting deeply on what it was that I wanted to do with my life. I grew up in the country and I've always had a lot of conflicting feelings about living in the city, away from nature. I've always been drawn to flowers and creating beautiful arrangements had become one of my favorite parts of the event work that we'd done.
I delved quite deeply into all of the feedback forms from the years that we'd run in my previous social enterprise. We found that the floristry component, which I already knew but it brought it to the forefront that the floristry side of the work that we did was by far their favorite. They went to into serving wine and food. we did amazing things with that business. Looking at the floristry training, that was certainly more aligned with that interest.
I started thinking, planning, and doing a lot of research into what a pivot would look like. I swept the market and I found that online flower sales had grown by more than 500% in Victoria during the pandemic. I was also receiving a lot of flowers at the time from friends and family because I had a baby and I'd lost a business. I looked around and felt that with the work that we'd done and with the resources that we still had at our disposal that the girls and I could do better than what was out there. We launched when my daughter was about three months old in October 2020.
Thank you for giving us the context and the background and all of this because sometimes people don't realize how much goes into creating a business. Also, you said, “I already had two prior to this.” Sometimes people can see things and think, “I should be able to go from A to X straight away.” You're telling me, “I've had this experience. I was drawing on things. I was doing the research. I was understanding. Also, you had become a mother. Is that your first child?
No, it was my second. My first was only 4 at the time. I did already have one child. It was quite a ride.
I had a child in 2019 and it was going through all of the lockdowns with a small child and another one at school so I totally hear. It's nice to have that context to see how did this come about. Having a 3-month-old when you launched, as soon as you said that, I was like, “My gosh.” I love also that you went back and you had a look at what was working, “What does the data tell us?” There's so much in that.
I've worked in lots of places where we had PR teams and we were constantly sending out flowers to models or campaign managers or media or whatever. I understand that part of the business. I'm wondering and I'm sure people reading this are also wondering, “How did this not exist before?” It's such a simple but incredible story as well about this business coming to fruition.
Why do you think more businesses haven't been created like this as a social enterprise? There's obviously a profitable financial reason to build a business like this. Also, on the other side, you were saying you were working with these young women from refugee backgrounds and then you had to let them go because of the pandemic and then bring them back in to create a solution for them. I'm wondering why you think this doesn't happen more often. Does that make sense?
It does. It's a good question. I would preface that with, firstly, it should. I'm a huge advocate for both B Corp social enterprises and charities with some trade element. The short answer is that it is hard. The Beautiful Bunch is a registered charity. We have full DGR status. We're registered with the ACNC. We have a board of directors. We're audited every year. The administrative burden of that is huge.
Whilst you don't need to do all of that in order to have some kind of social or environmental impact that's meaningful in order to get access to a lot of the grant funding that you oftentimes need, you do need to have that administrative framework established. It took me a lot of money and accounting fees and a lot of time. I started this and I ran it like a small business. Unlike a conventional small business, I can't sell this and I have no assets. I'm certainly the boss, I'm the founding CEO, but I report to a board and the public owns The Beautiful Bunch, which is partly what makes it so special.
I can see why there might need to be some hybrid model in order to entice people to start maybe similar entities. Also, in part, the social enterprise for-purpose industry is a privileged space. A study came out that estimated if you have a social enterprise that measures your social impact to wages paid to people marginalized from the mainstream workforce, that on average costs 30% more than what it would be for a conventional business. It needs to run from the outset like a successful small business in order to be able to finance that additional wage cost or whatever measures you are taking to have a positive environmental impact or whatever it may be.
One of the barriers is that there is not enough funding in the early stages. It's quite difficult. A lot of social enterprises are founded by people who've worked for international aid and development organizations, people who have experience in executive leadership for large Australian-based not-for-profits. That is simply because you do need access to financial and human resources to bring something like this to life. It's not the only way of doing it but it's difficult if you're not independently wealthy to start and run a successful small business and that's what this is.
I would like to say that if there is somebody reading this who has experience running a small business, who understands what a profit and loss is, who has respect for Excel's spreadsheets, and who has had to make decisions in a business that has consequences for the people who work in that business, I would say that you are certainly well positioned to start a social enterprise or for purpose business. I would encourage anyone to do so if you have a sound understanding of business and you're confident that you can run something that is profitable and then you can direct those profits elsewhere into your social or environmental mission, and it is certainly something that can be done.”
Thank you. We could just stop the podcast now. There’s so much knowledge. Thanks for coming on, Jane. It's interesting because you bring up so much there. One of my clients, who has done brilliantly, created a social enterprise that had to get charity status. Yes, it is completely independently wealthy from the career that they had prior to starting this.
I worked with this person when they had an idea and then helped them with some basic backend stuff. It took years to go through the process. In that respect, you have to understand that it's going to work and it is going to be profitable. it would be so easy to give up and be like, “It's too hard. Put it in the too-hard basket. I'll give back to the community in some other way.”
I am mindful of everybody's concept or initiative. It does depend on the circumstances surrounding your business. There's a point if you can make it past that two-year mark and you can show philanthropists if you can show potential donors, “This has been difficult and we've started small but this is the social impact you've been able to achieve,” you can access funding that can help you scale. In a way, it is more difficult for conventional business structures to do that. If you can hang tight and make it through the first two and a bit years, a whole new world opens up to you.
When you mentioned you already had worked on two social enterprises, you're still young, you're having a young family, and all of that, did you come from a family that had experience in this space? Did you have some influence like a mentor or somebody else that allowed you that idea to even start your first business as a social enterprise? Is that something you looked around at the community and was like, “I want to give back. I want to do something else.” How did you get into social enterprises?
I started when I was studying at university. In addition to volunteering, I was still studying and I worked as a volunteer English language teacher to new arrivals to mostly mothers who didn't feel confident leaving the house. That was important because it involved a lot of listening and a lot of learning. It's hard to be a good listener, it's something I'm still working on. The women would cook for me and we'd just chat.
I'm not a good teacher, to be honest. I often leave materials to one side and read English books that I loved. I love reading and writing. After doing that for nearly two years, a clear pattern emerged, and that was a lot of the women I met with who were anxious about their children's future, their employment, and their education. I suppose that led me to begin a process of reflection on why my parents were never worried about those things for me and how I got to the point of having been employed. I did a lot of research.
It's pretty clear in most people's minds why someone may have to flee their country and seek safety here. In terms of speaking about the barriers to building a meaningful life once they or their parents arrived here, it's a more nuanced conversation. It's something that involves us looking inward as a society and I don't think that's something that a lot of people are comfortable with. I would say that I figured out that I wanted to do something in the social enterprise because I wanted to combine what I had learned from speaking with those women and that namely that there are not enough opportunities for their young children starting out here, particularly their daughters.
Secondly, I had had a lot of experience in small business. My parents, even though they love working for wages and they think I'm a little bit mad with a lot of what I do, they're very proud, but they're certainly not entrepreneurial in the conventional sense. My parents instilled in me a deep work ethic. Also, they encouraged me to start work quite young at 14 and 9 months and encourage the independence that having a paycheck brings.
I've been working hard my whole life and I've had a lot of varied experiences in working for small businesses and learning very much on the job. Starting the social enterprise was a combination of my passions for business and for making business work because that's a huge challenge in and of itself and for helping people in a tangible and meaningful way.
There's so much in there. Even the volunteering and doing that at uni, was that something that somebody came to your uni and was like, “Does anyone want to get involved?” Was it through a friend that was doing that? Even that, I find it interesting. My parents, we all came out from overseas, were very big on volunteering and we volunteered our whole lives and it was drummed into us to give back. I noticed that whenever I felt a bit, “Ugh,” in my life, it has also been in parallel when I have not been volunteering.
That's interesting.
I have friends in their 40s who have never volunteered. It's not a judgment call. Nobody suggested that they should volunteer or it didn't occur to them. Even now, there's a homeless shelter near us that my husband and I are looking at volunteering in and people are like, “There's a homeless shelter out here? I didn't think there would be.” It's that thing. I'm going right back but did somebody suggest that to you or was it through your parents they had volunteered? I also think that people reading this will be like, “I would love to even start with that volunteering,” but they have no idea where to start.
I don’t think selfish is the right word but it was pretty self-centered. I wanted to do something that was meaningful. I also wanted to do something that I enjoy doing. I have a lifelong love of reading and writing. When one of my friends told me that you could go and teach English, she was doing something kind of similar and that she would just be reading books to new arrivals and chatting about stories. It was very much an exchange, she would read to them in English and they’d read to her in their language. That sounds to me like the most beautiful thing to do with my time.
I enrolled in Ames. I'm not sure if it's still an active program. I enrolled in a six-week crash course but it was brilliant. I'm not a good teacher at all but it was a good crash course in how to teach English to somebody who has limited English language skills. After that six weeks, they then allocated me. It was 2 or 3 women that I would go to and sit with them for an hour. The idea was that I'd be teaching them English from all of the modules they had but I mostly read my books and chat with them. They fed me and they always cooked for me, which was so nice. I wanted to share my love of reading and writing with someone in a way that would be beneficial to them.
You mentioned before you had been working from 14 years and 9 months and you were working with all these different small businesses and you were gaining all of that experience and knowledge of I'm sure how to do things well and how to not do things so well. How did you go from understanding that this was an issue and also having that self-awareness to be like, “Did my parents have to worry about XYZ?” how did you then go into engaging a community of young women from refugee backgrounds to come into a place of work? Was it through these women originally that you were teaching English to and so it was their children essentially that was coming? How did you find those people?
For the first business that we ran, it was a cafe and we had good partnerships with community settlement service organizations. Your readers might know, for example, the Asylum Seeker Resource Center, the Brotherhood of St. Lawrence, and the Red Cross. What we're doing is providing a place of employment. There's a whole host of other things that are needed to ensure that somebody is well-supported through that process.
Also, administrative things in terms of making sure that they have the right to work and that they have a safe place to live and that they're able to travel independently to work. Youth workers or case workers do a lot of work around that for us. That was how we started and that's still the model that we have today. When we have positions available, we write to the Brotherhood of St. Lawrence and we send through an updated position description and we let them know how many people we're looking to take on.
They have been brilliant in terms of identifying the young women who desperately need this opportunity but who are also able to take it on. For example, they make sure that their English language is good enough to be able to take simple directions and that they are in a place where mentally they can concentrate on a task for six hours and things like that. It's important to us that when we are providing employment to these young women, they do have other people in our lives other than us that are checking in on them and making sure that they are okay and that this is working for both parties. It's crucial.
Thinking about the business more broadly, it is important for us as a small team that the administrative burden of looking at the visas and things like that and helping people set up a bank account and what is superannuation. We do a little bit of that but a lot of that groundwork is already done by the settlement service organizations.
There's so much to it, isn't there? Also, it's fantastic to hear you talking about the Brotherhood of St. Lawrence or these other avenues that sometimes people forget or maybe have never come into contact with for any particular reason. There are so many places out there to seek education and support. Maybe even if your business isn't set up right now, it could be just talking to somebody like this that allows you to go, “That's possible down the track.”
Especially the Brotherhood, they have huge employment programs for a lot of different people who are experiencing various forms of disadvantage to entering the workforce. They work with big corporates and it isn't just social enterprises. If you have a conventional business and you would like to offer somebody a life-changing opportunity to work for you or have a job that is meaningful and they're able to build their skills and self-confidence, you don't need to be a social enterprise or a charity or a B Corp to make that happen. You can email the Brotherhood of St. Lawrence and their employment program and let them know that you have a position and take it from there.
You got the grant that you were going after. I have a close family member who a huge part of their job and everything else is applying for grants and it can be incredibly stressful. I've seen firsthand how much work goes into it. It could be nine months to go into one grant application. Many people and many parts of statistics and stuff that needs to go in and you may not even get it. Grants are part of your business.
I know other small business owners who would like to apply for grants. Not necessarily say a social enterprise grant but maybe a grant for the creative arts community or something that is relevant to them. That in itself is quite a big job. How do you do that whilst also running the day-to-day part of it, juggling your family, and all the sorts of things? Have you had to engage grant writers? Are you proficient in this now that you can pump them out? How does that work?
This is such a good question. No one ever asks me this. It’s relevant to understand how a business like this works. I would preface what I'm about to say with we are quite different in the social enterprise space and that in the financial year, less than 80% of our revenue came through grant funding.
It means that your business is doing well.
It's hard to maintain. Thank you. It was something with starting the business feeling a great overwhelming sense of vulnerability and insecurity. I made a promise to myself that I would never have to get rid of six people again. That was quite a challenging thing for me. I wanted to ensure that if the funders' priorities change, there were staff changes, or they weren't interested in young women from refugee backgrounds and flowers that year, I would still be able to keep people employed and also support my family as well.
I will say that as we are looking to grow, grants are becoming a larger part of what we do. Whilst it doesn't fund the core work of what we do, it does fund the testing of new products and ideas and projects and the like. I have written all of the grant applications in their entirety aside from one that we recently submitted. I’m going way back now but my grandfather, my mother's father, was a teacher and he instilled ikn me from a young age the importance of being able to order my thoughts on a page. He encouraged my love of reading and writing and he would tutor me after school.
When I was older in high school, I would stay with him and my grandmother for short periods of time to study. That's probably the most important skill I have in starting this business. I also have a decent botanical knowledge and I know how to make things look beautiful. I'm passionate about working with flowers. The other part of what I do has proved to be important that I know how to write in a compelling way and how to communicate a vision with clarity.
I have to shout out to a friend of mine though who I called upon last minute to help complete a major grant application. I had completely underestimated the time it would take to do that. She stood up with me all night writing that. Her name is Mariana and she's all kinds of brilliant and I appreciated the support with that. Aside from that, all of the grants that we've received, I've written. It has been the single most difficult thing about this business because we often start our day at 2:30 AM and we're at the flower market at 3:15. The hours are grueling.
It's particularly hard to write with the clarity that I spoke about earlier if you have had three hours of sleep. It's a constant juggle that I am only starting to see the fruition of my labor there. I've spent the first two years very much working in the business but knowing that in order to scale, I needed to work on it, and knowing that was sharing with potential funders what we were doing through grant applications that have been grueling.
I know it's not something that you should say now because people are focused on health and wellness and work-life balance and that's a good thing. To be honest, I have pushed myself through all kinds of levels of exhaustion to get us this far. It has been difficult writing grants in the evening, getting up at 2:30, working all day, and trying to be a decent mom and all the rest of it. It's starting to all come together now because the grants that I've written recently, we've been successful for a lot of them. We do have some funding that's abled me to scale the business quite significantly and it means I'm getting more sleep so that's nice.
I can feel it when you are talking about that. I used to be a journalist and having to do things on a quick deadline that’s outside of having to get up at 2:30, I can feel when you are at your 11th-hour thinking, “Can this work?” It's great that it is working. On that note, I had a quick look at your website and I couldn't see anything. Do you take donations? As you're a charity, can people donate to the business like other business owners reading this who are like, “I want to donate something.”
They can. We have full DGR status so it's all tax deductible. We're a charity so everything goes into our state of social mission but any donations go directly to our staff wages. Something that is a wonderful thing that we do but of course, it is costly, is that we pay people for all of their training. Other social enterprises have models and it has its place too, whereas the training portion will be unpaid and then once they're considered employees, that part is paid. Our team, the young women who we work with, they are paid from their first shift when they are learning. Any donations that we receive go directly to those wages. It's an impactful thing to do. You can donate on the website or you can write to us.
On that note, you talked about scaling up. Having worked with quite a few businesses that have product delivery, you are in a delivery business delivering flowers. Great systems are essential for that to work. How have you set up the actual systems of the business and what are some of the biggest challenges with that?
There are so many. Logistically, to be honest, it is a nightmare. We take same-day deliveries so you can order at 5:00 to 12:00 and it can be at your place at 1:00 PM that day. To manage the volume that we currently have and to be sending out 60 different arrangements in a day to 60 different places is difficult. I'll be honest, this is not my favorite part of what we do but I've had to own new space and get good at it because it's on me when it doesn't work.
The first probably eighteen months were difficult because we had a website that we had some kind people built for us for free. Fiona, you are going to understand what catastrophe this was. When you ordered flowers from us, you had to consult a list of suburbs and then you had to pick from that list at the checkout. You picked how much you were going to pay for delivery. For example, Fitzroy is $10 and South Yarra is $20.
You had to go and you had to read, which people never read. You had to read the list and then select the appropriate rate at checkout. Probably 30% of people, I can't believe it wasn't more, selected the wrong delivery. We would hemorrhage money on delivery fees. I would spend so much of my time, I used to do it on a Friday, calling people and saying, “You ordered flowers on Tuesday and you only paid half of what you were supposed to. Can I have your card detail?”
I'm sure it wasn't so fun to do.
Everyone's like, “What? No.” Being able to get grant funding, I was speaking to a philanthropist who generously supported us in the early days, and I said, “If you do want to fund us, this is what I would do with that money.” He said it would be untied, which means you can spend it as you wish, which is amazing. I said I would put it into redeveloping the website because this is going to give myself and my team an entire extra day, a week.
We started the process of rebuilding the entire website from scratch and that has made that life-changing. Now, it selects the delivery rate for you. That's been difficult. We go to so much effort to make sure that the product is beautiful. We don't have a fridge. Nothing stays beyond a day or so in our studio. Everything is fresh. We work hard to maintain such a high standard in terms of the flowers that we're sending out.
We’re trying to engage a courier service and ensuring that they're not just dumping the flowers on the ground and that they're propping it up against the door if they have to leave it and then taking a photo and all of those boring but important and crucial things to make sure it's a good customer experience. We've had to work hard to get that right.
All these things that you don't necessarily think about like not having a fridge. I feel like someone from Harvey Norman or something needs to step in.
Our studio space is tiny. When we do get one, we'll still ensure everything is super fresh and beautiful. It would have to be quite a large commercial one because we buy everything in bundles. I don't know how to even explain it but it's like a very large bucket. We do need a lot of space if we were to be keeping things in a fridge. We'll see.
One of the things that I wanted to ask is, and this goes for any business but perhaps maybe more so because you are working with young women from refugee backgrounds, I hear a lot of the time from different business owners and I've seen it myself in my own career that people have gone from going into a job and doing the job and going home to, “I want to work at a place where I'm accepted for who I am and also for the parts of me outside of the business and also as a whole. I want to be psychologically safe when I come to work. I want to maybe talk about my mental health challenges or other things that are going on.”
This isn’t specific to your particular business but I'm wondering because you are working with people from this background, how do you create this safe space? Even people who, regardless of what background they come from, are coming into a workplace possibly for the first time, that brings in itself its own insecurities. Also, the etiquette that you need to learn and you only learn in a job. How do you create that safe space?
That's a good question. I am definitely better at doing it now than when I was initially. I work well in chaos. Let's be honest, it's a pretty overwhelming experience stepping into the space starting work, putting on your apron, and not knowing what to do. We have gotten good at developing structures and a whole lot of rigidity around the steps that they need to take working with us and having it clearly communicated to them from the beginning what their expectations are, what support we'll provide, what they can expect the place to be, and what they can expect their experience to be in that place on the first day and then subsequent days. That is something that we do quite well.
I myself am not very good at doing that but I have staff who support that who try to clearly communicate, “This is what the trajectory of your time here is probably going to look like.” More broadly speaking, I like to keep it professional in terms of what we speak about. I do feel that we have such a tight-knit team. I'm not saying it's always going to be this way but some absent CEO blocking orders from people far away. I am present and I work hard to create a culture of collaboration and trust and warmth within the place.
It is not a space where you can bring your entire self to work because if I did that, it would be a nightmare. There has to be some element of putting on your work face or approach to life. That the girls and everyone who works for me know that if they are having a bad day, if they're feeling sad, or if something difficult happened, they're able to speak with myself or someone else in the team and give everyone a heads up. We tread gently. It just happened when someone was having a shock, some awful things had happened to her and she mentioned it to one of the girls. We made sure that we all sat down and had lunch together that day.
It wasn't like this big thing where we sat down and we were like, “Do you want to talk to us about your problems?” We made sure that we shared food with her and posted some things on our little WhatsApp group chat and things like that. The small things are big is what I'm trying to say. The small changes you make and the small things that you implement within your workplace can have big consequences in a positive sense for people when they're going through everything that they're going through be it one of our trainees or one of our professional florists who's having a hard time. It's important to know that you are cared for beyond your work as a florist with us.
I love that, small things are big things because they are. Often, people think they need to do this huge, “Let's do an offsite training excitement or a weekend away for the whole team.” No, just sharing a meal can be amazing.
Have lunch.
Who or what has helped you? You mentioned your friend, shout-out to Mariana for helping with the grants. You've had so many other people. You've talked about your grandfather and that's so beautiful about him teaching you how to put your thoughts down on paper and make sense. Who else has helped you with this brand? Are there any mentors or even books or documentaries that were like, “That has been so helpful for me.”
My mother-in-law is not here anymore, which is unfortunate and quite difficult but she was my biggest source of inspiration and an important business mentor as well. It was on a personal level. She was a single mother in South Africa and she built a business empire from absolutely nothing. She was hardworking and brave. She had a brilliant business mind and she taught me how to respect the roles of business but also to never let me stop that from taking quite big risks and following my dreams.
She was hugely influential in this. She did all of my spreadsheets, to begin with, and she'd monitor my budgets even if she was in South Africa. She was phenomenally proud of me. I miss her very much. I went to her for advice daily. It's been quite difficult and this is my first year without her so that's been hard. There's also our chairperson, John, a longtime mentor of mine. He built a business and it was successful and he sold that and he's now devoted his years of retirement to our cause.
I've worked with him for years and he has taught me so much. I have basically done an MBA with him. He has taught me what it is to produce a commercially viable product and how to ensure that the bottom line is always strong and that is the only way that you're able to support a social mission something as ambitious as this. I would say that in terms of podcasts and things that motivate me, do you know how I built this with Guy Raz?
Yes. I love Guy Raz.
When we started, I was in the lonely market mornings and the like. I'd be feeling like I was the only person in the world doing this, which I’m not. I would listen to his interviews, particularly the Melanie Perkins one from Canva and Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia. Those interviews are brilliant. He has a brilliant mind. You have to pick and choose here but do you know The Diary of a CEO with Stephen Bartlett?
Yes.
He's a talented interviewer and I love getting to the bottom of that. A lot of Americans speak with a lot more transparency around their failures and they're more comfortable with that than we are as Australians. I learn a lot from those interviews. They're probably my main go-to podcasts.
What would you like people to know who may not have considered working with or employing young women from refugee backgrounds?
I would like to say that despite taking up your time for today saying how hard and how challenging it has been, as I mentioned before, if you have a conventional business or you want to start a conventional business and you want to have some social impact element to that, you don't need to have something that looks like The Beautiful Bunch or other social enterprises. You can work with a settlement service organization to have a real meaningful impact within your organization.
Something that I have learned as well is that people work and particularly the young women from refugee backgrounds who we work with, people work better when you're able to provide the opportunities that best align with their interests. I know that sounds obvious but a lot of the time in the not-for-profit social enterprise space, we do this thing where we're like, “This is how it's done in Australia so this is a rite of passage.” For us, it was certainly, and there are a lot of people doing wonderful things in the hospitality social enterprise space. This is by no means throwing shade there.
For us, it was about trying to listen and trying to find what their interests were and saying, “You don't love serving non-halal food and working nights and serving alcohol. What do they love doing?” Once I had a good time to pause and reflect, I realized that they'd loved making beautiful floral arrangements. I would say that there are two things. Think about if you are looking at your current business and what positions you may be able to offer to a young person who's entering the workforce for the first time to ensure that it aligns with their skills and their interests. For that, you would have to be some internship or something to try it. In that process, listen to people.
As I said before, it's something I'm trying to work on actively listening to people. Secondly, despite all that I've said, it isn't that hard. For example, if you have a small supermarket or a retail operation or something like that, you could go with relative ease to one of these community settlement service organizations and say, “We'd like to offer a position to somebody who's facing barriers. This is what it is. Can we work with you and try it out?” It isn't that difficult. Once you found the right person, you would make such a meaningful change or enable them to make such a meaningful change in their own lives. I strongly encourage it.
I'm imagining that you'd have a lot on this list to answer this question but what are you most proud of from your journey with The Beautiful Bunch so far?
I'm proud of me. I backed this idea against what has felt like insurmountable odds from the beginning. I spoke to the lovely Louise Bannister from Lunch Dady about this. I'd said to her in that interview that almost every single person I consulted in the startup face told me not to do this. They're smart people. I didn't randomly crowdsource this. I spoke to people who I trusted, people who'd known me for a long time, and pretty much everyone said, “No,” and it would be better instead of focus on my baby, another career, the world had been turned upside down by a pandemic, and that I needed more security. I didn't listen.
In a world where we're increasingly seeking a sense of validation or permission from others, I'm proud that I was able to quiet the noise and I was able to focus on something that I felt intrinsically would work. There's that. Once I was able to launch it and I did so with three young women from refugee backgrounds, I built this from the ground up, and paid them with my maternity leave pay. We had nothing. It was difficult.
When something is difficult and well-meaning people told you not to do it, you feel like you can't go to them and be like, “This is hard,” because they told you not to do it. I persisted. I pushed through. I pushed beyond what I thought was possible in building this business. I've still managed to be somewhat of a decent mom. I'm an okay partner to my husband. I've been able to maintain my friendships and all of that.
I've built something that has made a positive change in a lot of people's lives. There is no other Beautiful Bunch for a lot of the young women who work with us. There simply is nowhere else for them to go. There are a lot of barriers that exist to mentoring and the workforce and a lot of barriers exist for them in engaging other social enterprises that require things that we don't. I'm proud of myself. I'm proud of myself for doing this and not quitting on me.
I'm honestly not taking away from that but it reminds me of Snoop. Have you seen the Snoop thing? I think it’s brilliant. Often, we have to feel like, “We have to thank everybody else.” No. I love how he said, “Lastly, I thank me, me who showed up, me who didn't give up, and me who worked at nights.” It's great that you are saying that. More people need to acknowledge themselves and celebrate themselves. Especially here in this country, we never want to say that. It's beautiful what you talked about. I'm sure that you are much more than a half decent okay mum.
I try. They still love me.
With your children as well. This is such a huge role model for them to be able to say, “One person can make a difference.” It's not like, “It's all so big and I can't touch it.” You can make a difference when you go out there. What is next for you and where can people connect with The Beautiful Bunch, whether they are a corporate that's looking for their next flower arrangement or they are wanting to donate or they're wanting to collaborate in some sort or they want to be employed? Where do they go?
Our beautiful website is the best place to start. If someone is reading this and they would like a position with us, they need to write to us, Hello@TheBeautifulBunch.com, and someone in our lovely team would certainly respond to them quite quickly. If you are a business wanting flowers, that is the single best way that anyone can support us other than making a donation because it provides some revenue assurance to our business.
When our daily orders are up and down, knowing that we have our weekly corporate deliveries, which are sizable but we would love to grow it still means that we can guarantee the girls' work and employment and pay training on that day. Our business subscribers are crucial to enabling us to continue to do the work that we do. We have all of the options available to you on the website. You can email us and we can talk you through that.
We have launched into doing event florals. A part of a grant that we've received a sizable grant, which is wonderful to have, this is a projection but I'm pretty confident we'll be able to get there to double our current trainee intake by adding event florals to our offering at the moment. We're a retail florist and we're open Monday to Friday, same-day orders before 12:00 PM. We have hired a couple of talented flos who have worked specifically in events.
Their remit is to train up our staff and our trainees so that we're able to start taking on more events because we get a huge number of inquiries every day. Up until this point, we have only taken on a select few. That's how we're going to grow and expand. If anyone's needing flowers for their wedding or a private gathering, corporate events, or whatever it may be, please get in touch because we'd love to do something beautiful for you.
I've been looking at your Beautiful Bunch subscriptions and they're not just for businesses but they're also for individuals. If you're reading, you can get it delivered weekly, monthly, or whatever it is. It's always nice to have fresh flowers in the house as well. It's been wonderful talking to you. I should also point out, do you do funeral flowers?
Yes, we do. We love doing them.
I've unfortunately had to bury three of my four parents, my mom, dad, and my father-in-law. That's something that people don't think about. If you are the person helping organize it, you can go to these funeral homes and sometimes they're the most boring flower arrangements. I know both of the times with mine, I've sought out. We used North St Flowers at some point and beautiful flowers that mean something as well. I would also put that out there if anyone's unfortunately in that position, it's a nice farewell to people and celebrate their life but also giving back as well.
We're open to that. We have done a few this year. We also have a way of repurposing the flowers and wrapping them up for guests to then deconstruct. It's a beautiful little thank you for coming gift as well. Certainly, flowers with social impact, a funeral, or a memorial service. It's a beautiful thing to do.
Thank you so much. This has absolutely been such a wonderful chat and I could keep going. It's incredible what you're doing. It's also highly inspiring to think about what small changes we can all make to better the community around us. Thank you for sharing all of it, the good, the bad, the challenges, and the wins. It's wonderful. Thank you so much, Jane, for coming on.
Thank you. It's my pleasure. It's been lovely to speak with you.
Take care. Bye.
You too.
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I am sitting in my office after getting off the internet connection with Jane. This has given me so much to think about. I'm so honored and grateful that she contacted us to come onto this podcast and that we were able to record it so soon after we discuss things on email. It's a good time of year, particularly around end-of-financial-year here in Australia or even if you're not in Australia, you're halfway through the year thinking about the next 6 to 12 months in your business and how you are giving back to the community in some way.
It may well be that you are in a position to get a business subscription to The Beautiful Bunch or maybe you've got end-of-financial-year gifts that you're sending out and potentially going with The Beautiful Bunch to do those and knowing that you are also giving back to the community as well as getting these beautiful flowers and everything else.
I also love the idea of the subscription part because I know I've talked about it a lot in this podcast that subscription and recurrent revenue can be such an incredible way to stabilize an income. As Jane talked about, It's an incredible way for her to understand how much money is coming in so that she can look at her financials and project that she can afford to keep people on and give them more hours and all sorts of things.
It was such a wonderful chat and I thank Jane for making the time to do this and also to go into such deep context around decisions and challenges and paths that she has taken to get to this point. Also, talking about how bloody hard it is as well. You could feel that when it came to talking about grants or keeping everything in the air. My heart and my hat goes off to Jane. Thank you so much, Jane, for joining us from The Beautiful Bunch. I would love to know what stood out for you. There was so much. I usually narrow it down to two and it took me a while after that to think about what are the two main things I want to talk about from that chat. There were so many.
The two that stood out for me, the first Jade mentioned continuously throughout the chat and that is the importance of listening, the power of listening, and the skill of dedicating yourself to listen, to listen to your staff, to listen to what's not being said, and to listen to what is being said, to not jump in and want to do it your way but to look at what are other people saying and what are they telling me. I loved that idea, the power of listening. A huge trait opf good leaders is their ability to listen. We have all worked in places, no doubt, where you didn't feel listened to and you didn't feel valued and you didn't feel appreciated and it was hierarchical.
What Jane is creating with The Beautiful Bunch is a resource where people can come in and potentially it's their first job or maybe upscaling or coming back to work after a certain break or a period let’s say motherhood or looking after parents or whatever it is and creating that safe space where people do feel listened to and appreciated. That's beautiful and magical and I feel like so many small business owners can learn from that. Are you listening? I always think of Audrey Hepburn who said, “We have two ears and one mouth because we should listen twice as much as we talk.” That's the first thing.
The second thing, and I love this so much that, is small things can have a big impact. Jane talked about creating this safe space for people, this psychologically safe workplace, and that's such a necessary part of employment today. It should have been part of it forever but it's becoming more into the light and into what people are expecting when they take a job with a business.
I love that she talked about not necessarily having somebody to have to divulge everything that they're going through but it's about making a way where that person can feel supported. Whether that is, “Let's have lunch together. Let's have a coffee. Let's share a joke. Let's share a meme on a WhatsApp group.” Whatever it is, it's a way of supporting people and creating that beautiful community to exist in your business.
A lot of the time when I'm working with clients on creating this amazing environment for their team and to create that retention in your staff where they not just come to work because they have to but come because they want to. People think that they have to do these big things, like, “We need to go away and have a retreat,” or, “We need to give them a massive bonus,” or, “We need to send them to this huge conference.” That can all cost a lot of money. It's sometimes nice to have these ideas but putting them into action can be costly. Lots of small business owners are struggling right now with their cashflow. I love that she said small things can have a big impact.
There were so many other things that I took away from that chat but I'd love to know what you took away. You can always DM us, @MyDailyBusiness_. You can also contact Jane and The Beautiful Bunch, @The.BeautifulBunch, on Instagram. If you want to check out their website, which is quite beautiful and it also shows you all the different ways that you can work with and support and buy from The Beautiful Bunch, it's TheBeautifulBunch.com.
They have various ways to support them, whether it's buying, a one-off bunch of flowers for a friend or yourself or gifting yourself an individual subscription. If you are a business, a weekly or fortnightly or monthly subscription, or signing up for bigger, larger corporate packages, weddings, funerals, and all of those sorts of things. Thank you so much for coming on, Jane.
If you found this useful, I would love it so much if you could share it with your community, that could just be forwarding it, it could be leaving a review, or even sharing it on social media, in which case please make sure to tag us so we don't miss it, it's @MyDailyBusiness_. You can of course tag @The.BeautifulBunch as well. Thank you so much for reading and I'll see you next time.
