By age 24, Tania was inspired to start a new, deeply rewarding side to Jelli Beanz.

 
For the past eight years, I have devoted myself to improving the standards and services of childcare available to parents in Australia.

Launching my own childcare business Jelli Beanz at the age of 19 was a personal and professional challenge.

But today I lead a flagship of qualified childcare workers who not only provide high quality babysitting, nannying, au pair and respite care services throughout New South Wales and Western Australia, but also a not-for-profit arm to assist parents undergoing treatment for cancer.

Starting my own business was not an easy path

 After volunteering in orphanages and schools in Thailand in my late teens, my return to Australia filled me with a new passion and understanding about what it was that gave me satisfaction as well as ideas about how I could have a positive impact through my childcare endeavours on home soil.

Though I had much expertise working in the childcare industry, I’d had none as a small business owner and as great an accomplishment as it was, setting up my business Jelli Beanz proved no easy feat.

I am the first to admit that running your own business isn’t always the easiest of career paths but my passion and motivation for providing quality child care is unwavering.

All business plans were put on hold

However in 2007, I faced a professional and personal challenge.  We had been in negotiations to set up Jelli Beanz in Melbourne with my Godmother as my business partner.  My Godmother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and all business plans got put on hold.

While accompanying my Godmother to the hospital for her cancer treatments, I saw firsthand the need for parents undergoing cancer treatment to have access to compassionate child care services.

Encouraged and inspired by my Godmother, I founded the Jelli Beanz Community Volunteers and the Caring For Kids During Cancer service to provide free child care services and assistance for children of parents undergoing active cancer treatment. The service has been funded by the Cancer Council for the past two years and we are now actively seeking sponsorship in order to continue this vital service to the community.

My advice to all young, professional women: when you get lemons – make lemonade!

Pictured: Tania Menzies and her Godmother, Donna Goudie

Her decision to go Carbon Neutral is an Australian business environmental first.

My business, Daily Essence, is now the only beauty and lifestyle brand in Australia to be awarded CarbonNeutral® certification by reducing its carbon footprint to net zero. This means that our consumers can feel good in the knowledge that Daily Essence is leaving a significantly minimal carbon footprint.

I wanted to make a difference in my own way and where better to start than with my own business, Daily Essence? I knew it was going to be a personal and business challenge but it was also going to be rewarding in the knowledge that I had achieved something no other Australian beauty brand had done.

To achieve the CarbonNeutral® status, Daily Essence had to prove the positive action it is taking to tackle climate change by completing an assessment with The CarbonNeutral Company.

Our Green House emissions were measured

The Green House Gas emissions that were measured included: how staff travelled to and from work, the electricity used both in production of the goods and in the offices, the amount of waste, the amount of printing, and suppliers that were used, such as freight.

As you can imagine this was difficult and time-consuming but well worth the effort. Daily Essence was then accredited CarbonNeutral® status when the CO2 emissions had been reduced to net zero in accordance with an international standard, known as the CarbonNeutral® Protocol. This was a long process but one we all worked hard to achieve. I knew that if we could do it then it would help encourage other Australian businesses to do the same.

The latest scientific opinion is that to achieve a positive level of environmental sustainability, global Green House Gases reductions of 80% are necessary within the next 50 years. This is a very significant challenge, especially in the context of growing emissions from developing countries and the affect this has on the environment.

Around the world, people and businesses are taking voluntary steps to cut their Carbon Dioxide (CO2) gas emissions. To emphasise the importance of a reduction in CO2, state, national and international governments have set and agreed on binding Green House Gas reduction targets at numerous levels.

Simone tells how the recession ended up in their agency extending into a new and exciting direction!

We had been running a full service Public Relations agency for a number of years called Handle Communications. 

We had a range of clients but our ‘bread and butter’ clients were predominantly small business people launching new products and services in Australia.  When the recession started to hit, these clients started to really hurt financially.  They felt they needed to spend less money.

We decided to create a DIY PR business to allow people to do their own PR on a much smaller budget. The theory was that when they had grown the business to a certain point they would come back to us for ‘full service’ again.

We knew PR wasn’t difficult it just needed some time to be allocated to it. The site is www.handleyourownpr.com and it offers small business owners all the advice they need to run their own campaign. 
We also sell qualified media contact lists and offer a press release writing service to these customers. 
Our clients are getting amazing responses for themselves and the feedback has been very positive.  Word of mouth is now spreading and we are in the process of offering this service overseas. 

I guess it is true that necessity is the mother of invention.  If the recession hadn’t hit we wouldn’t have thought to create this new and exciting arm of our business!

The solution was simple, but saved a huge amount of time and frustration!

A couple of months ago our daily sales spreadsheet at Ripple Massage was playing up.

Formulas not working, data getting scrambled … a mess. And the big problem was that we couldn’t get the daily figures we needed to run our budgets and decide if we could afford that big bright new shiny massage table we all wanted.

So I did what I normally do … a search on Google for an excel whiz who could fix it. But it came back with so many options and I had no idea through all the jargon what actually knew what they were doing that I gave up.

Then the penny dropped and I asked the Twitterverse. One small tweet “Does anyone know an excel guru who can fix my spreadsheet formulae?” and the problem was solved.

Within 30 seconds I had 4 recommendations and used one from someone I followed who was pretty funny and seemed to know her stuff. By that afternoon our spreadsheet was running smoothly.

So now if I need something my first port of call is Twitter!

Alison Shaw

You are welcome to follow me @rippleali or drop into our website www.ripplemassage.com.au

Admin’s note:  Those familiar with Twitter will be used to throwing things out to the twitterverse. But there are many more business owners yet to discover the power and versatility of Twitter!

Elizabeth shares a win-win solution she came up with to gain beautiful professional photographs and exposure for her business.

I run an astrology website at It’s In The Stars which creates beautifully designed hardcover astrology reports for couples (LoveStars) and parents (BabyStars) to gain hours of fascinating insight about their relationship and their children. Most reports are bought for anniversaries, birthdays, christenings, Christmas, engagements, Mothers Day, new babies, Valentines Day and weddings.

I had no budget for a photography session let alone casting but needed some attractive images of real people interacting with my LoveStars and BabyStars reports so I could replace my simple product shots of the reports with people actually reading the reports to make it much more obvious how the products were used, to give them “life”.

I approached a local photography studio in Drummoyne – MMG Photography – to see if they’d like to work with me in a win-win-win situation.

In short, I would give couples and parents who booked studio portraits with MMG a boxed gift certificate for an $89 LoveStars or $99 BabyStars report in return for having one or two shots of them holding and reading the reports.

The studio – which is still running the promotion – has been able to increase its bookings during the quieter winter months while the customers received a valuable astrology report at no cost to them (apart from their portrait session which they’d already booked) and I created a higher level of awareness of It’s In The Stars with customers in the local community.

MMG Photography will be opening new photographic studios in the Hunter Valley and Brisbane and It’s In The Stars will provide this promotion to new customers there as well.

Elizabeth Ball

Being a single mother of three and starting up a small business, the cash flow was extremelly minimal if not non-existent.

I once heard a statement that you either need to put money into your business or time. Well the money was not an option- I was scraping the bottom of the barrel as it was, so I had to give my time… but how?

I was finding that I wasn’t get any traffic to my site, which wasn’t hard to understand. I didn’t have the money to advertise- I was like a fish in the ocean, one of a million business fighting for the top spots.

I needed to become proactive, but where to start?

On one of my very late night internet searchings of which there were many, I came accross a networking website/forum for small business in Australia http://www.skouttradefair.com. This was the start of my new business face.

I learnt how important Facebook and Twitter are to gaining a identity for your business, Blogs are also very important part of getting brand awareness. As I slowly discovered this new world of networking. I found my site traffic had not only doubled but had increased by 400% and still building.

I have been told by many how they seem to see my business everywhere now. I have met other business who have said they could not believe the difference networking has made to their turnover. So for a once sceptic, I have become a true believer. Networking, especially online makes a distinct difference.

You’d have to be silly not to put the effort in. It’s free– all it takes is your time.

Marieke Troncoso 

tatyourtot.biz sells temporary tattoos for your child:

We personalise fun and extremely cool temp tats with all your essential contact details and any other important info eg; diabetic, asthmatic, allergic to nuts. So should your little person ever wander off, they are only a phone call away.

We also personalise party temp tats, we have a really cool range of designs. If you can’t find anything to match your party theme, just contact us and we will design something just for you @ no extra charge.