EPISODE 25 FINAL
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Kim Yabsley: [00:00:00] But the truth is this week alone, there's 74 billion worth of public funding available, just under 4, 000 grants. And there are grants for almost every kind of industry and almost every kind of activity. So there's plenty of money out there, but it's about being flexible. How can we make sure that we're well positioned for this grant and that we're taking the time to I guess craft the perfect pitch.
Chris Hughes: Welcome to How to Build a Profitable Nutrition Business. If you love nutrition and you love helping people and you want to be in the game long enough to keep doing that. Then this is the podcast for you. Let's get into it.
Chris Hughes: Thinking back on our business journey when we owned our dietitian business, there was a point in time where we just took off and we grew beyond what other businesses in that space were doing at that time. And that moment in time was actually when I met today's guest. That guest is Kim Yabsley from [00:01:00] Growology and Kim is a grant specialist and she helped us get over 120, 000 in grants, which allowed us to expand from a very small team to a team of 18 in a very short amount of time.
Chris Hughes: So if you're a small health business and you want to learn about the bucket of money out there that the government will provide you to help grow your business, then this is the episode for you. Let's get into it. Welcome back to another episode of How to Build a Profitable Nutrition Business. Today, I'm with a lady who is fairly responsible for blowing up our business when we had our dietician business and she done that by helping us with grants.
Chris Hughes: So it really helped transform our business with money that was available out there that I had no idea that it even existed. So I will hand over to Kim from Growology. Kim Yardsley. How are you, Kim?
Kim Yabsley: Yes, good, thank you, and I think you should qualify, blew it up in a good way.
Chris Hughes: Yes, blew it up in a good way.
Chris Hughes: Yes, of course, of course, it's how to grow a profitable nutrition business. Uh, [00:02:00] Kim, tell us, how did you get into grants? Because it's often, when we had our business, and I've said on this podcast multiple times, that Stacey was the brains behind our, the business brains behind our business, and without her I would certainly have failed multiple times over.
Chris Hughes: And it was through Stacy connecting with you that we sort of learned that these grants existed. How did you get into this business?
Kim Yabsley: Yeah, it's a good question because I was actually in a totally different business. They seem very different from the outside. I've got 20 years experience as a business growth strategist, but that was mostly targeted towards helping Corporate and government clients to build better culture.
Kim Yabsley: And then what happened was I wanted to build a technology piece of technology myself to benchmark culture for these clients. And I didn't have the money to bootstrap it. So I got myself a small grant. Initially it was like a 10, 000 grant and I built out the prototype. Tested it with some clients. They love it.
Kim Yabsley: And then I went back and got another bigger grant to build out a full SAS product. And over two years, I used seven different types of grants together. And we scaled that business from 250, 000 to 2 [00:03:00] million. And then everyone I knew in business, every business owner mate I had was like, which grants did you use?
Kim Yabsley: Which, how can I use them? And so that's when I kind of realized, I think there's a real gap here for people helping small business owners understand how to leverage the potential of grants as a growth strategy for your business.
Chris Hughes: Yeah, it's amazing what we learnt is there's so much money out there the government are willing to spend and that took me a bit to wrap my head around, it's like Why are the government wanting to throw so much money?
Chris Hughes: But obviously it's about then business grow, they employ more people and that generates tax revenue or whatever, but I was blown away just the amount of money that's out there for small business.
Kim Yabsley: Yeah, I think it is actually an important point to touch on is, and a lot of people kind of miss this in their knowledge about grants, is that Grants are always going to follow demographic trends, so they're always about, what is the census data telling us, what are the problems that people are having.
Kim Yabsley: So it could be a problem in a regional area, it could be a problem with a certain level of business growth, could be a [00:04:00] societal problem, like a community problem. So it's always about trying to solve a problem. And the ultimate Aim of solving any problems from the government's perspective is to create a robust and sustainable economy.
Kim Yabsley: But along the way, they're trying to fix these specific problems.
Chris Hughes: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, we were, um, regional, which gave us more grants or access to grants, I guess. So they were always trying to invest and still are trying to invest in regional Queensland or Australia. And so we were really lucky. So I'll just go through some of the grants that you sort of helped us with that transformed our business.
Chris Hughes: And we had grants for back to work grants to employ people or traineeship grants. Our admin staff for our business for a lot of the time that we own the business, we're virtually cost neutral. Now, as a dietician business, anyone listening to this can certainly relate that when you start out, it's very admin heavy.
Chris Hughes: It's very admin heavy the whole way, whether you start out or not. And so having someone at the front desk [00:05:00] is really beneficial, but it's a big jump to then employ someone to have someone at the front. But when you can do it with grants. We used to get young people traineeships and then it's virtually covering the cost of that.
Chris Hughes: That was a no brainer for us. And so we we had 4 or 5 locations where we had admin there that were so beneficial for our business. And then we got, I forget the names of the grants, you might remember them but our regional grants. For employing, um, people and we would get about 20, 000 per employee. And so we would set up an office, say in a new location and then have a 20, 000 grant.
Chris Hughes: Now, often we would employ new graduates. So that was quite. You know, there's a learning curve. They're not hitting the ground running. They've got to build up momentum. And so having that 20 grand was a real cushion to allow us to set up the business, allow them time to find their feet and then start to generate revenue for us.
Chris Hughes: And so we ended up, I think with about five or six of those grants, which I don't think we could have expanded the [00:06:00] way we did without those grants. Like they, they were transformational for us.
Kim Yabsley: Yeah, and that's one of the, I mean, wage reimbursement grants are something that people often overlook because they're like, oh, that, that's not in my plan.
Kim Yabsley: That's not really my expansion plan. I'm waiting till I make the revenue. But how much faster could we grow or scale if we had more quality people on the ground? And most of us as small business owners, can't afford the kind of resource that we know we need, or we've got a gap with. So yeah, the wage reimbursements are a super way just to supercharge that expansion and get quality team in place.
Chris Hughes: Yeah. And I mean, even MEALZEE, like we, we got a grant, had a prototype, I'd built like our own clinical software and had a little bit of meal planning stuff built into it, but it was very clunky. And then you helped us with the grant to get this thing off the ground. And we got turned it into a web app, web application.
Chris Hughes: And that sort of got the ball. Moving for us where we can, obviously we put a lot into it now and I've since been to startup incubator programs and there's a lot more growth out there and I'm looking at applying [00:07:00] for grants mid year, which could completely flip where we're at. So, yeah, there's a lot there.
Chris Hughes: I
Kim Yabsley: think a lot of people don't realize that they're doing genuinely innovative things and the Australian government does want to incentivize us to do things in a new and novel way, not just with the intent of streamlining our own efficiencies inside our businesses. But in terms of being able to bring new knowledge to the market and which is very much what Nielsey is, right, doesn't exist before and, and then it's about kind of stacking those opportunities over time to keep going.
Chris Hughes: Yeah, that's right. So what, like for health businesses, nutrition and fitness businesses, what kind of grants out there would you suggest that they look into or what's even available for them?
Kim Yabsley: Yeah, look, I think the first thing to look at is as a small business, what's going on in your region or state. So it's always good to look at what are your regions for you guys, Central Queensland or North Queensland or wherever you might be.
Kim Yabsley: What is, what are the priorities of the state [00:08:00] government in your area? And then what are the priorities of your state? And then what are the priorities of the federal government? So the federal government has five priority sectors, which are largely about big business and the things that make massive economic contribution to Australia.
Kim Yabsley: But every state has its own kind of strategic plan, and that's what our grant funding is going to be centred around. So. For health businesses, it could be the small business funding in your state, and every state has a local page, every time it'll be www. business. qld. gov. au or insert appropriate state, they're all the same, so you can check out what small business kind of priorities and offerings your state government has at the moment, and then you want to look kind of niche specific into your industry, so you want to be looking at your business.
Kim Yabsley: Are we developing technology? Are we, are we in private practice? Are we looking to employ more people? And so you would look specifically by either the niche that you're working in or what it is that you want to do. So I think of that. What if someone gave you a hundred [00:09:00] thousand dollars, what would you do in your business?
Kim Yabsley: And then you would go search for grants around that theme.
Chris Hughes: Yeah, right, right. Okay, so first check out what the priorities are of the government, how you as a business can then feed into that and help them achieve what they want to achieve, and they're going to give you some money to help you get there.
Kim Yabsley: Yeah, because it's one of the one of the key pitfalls I see is that businesses are just not grant ready. So often small businesses, and I get it, I'm a small business owner too, we approach these things when we really need the money. But there's actually a bit of a ramp up to it. Like any funder wants to know, what are you going to do with this money?
Kim Yabsley: When are you going to do it? How are we going to be able to incrementally measure it? What results are you promising at the end of it? And how are you going to communicate those results to us and industry? Because of course the government wants a good news story, right? And we've got to think about grants are actually taxpayers money.
Kim Yabsley: The government has a responsibility to be really robust about the way they distribute public funds. And so therefore businesses need to come into the grant process really clear, like able to [00:10:00] demonstrate their successes to date and their progress so far. clearly articulate what is this project with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and how are we going to measure whether or not it was effective in achieving the thing we set out to to achieve.
Kim Yabsley: And a lot of the time businesses just aren't ready for that. One of the key mistakes I see with businesses is we all think that what we've developed is an absolute cracker of an idea, and most of us do have a really good idea, but so does everyone else. So we've got to think about when we're applying for funding, people can get really despondent.
Kim Yabsley: They're like, Oh, I applied once before I didn't get anywhere. There's no money for businesses like ours. But the truth is this week alone, there's 74 billion worth of public funding available, just under 4, 000 grants. And there are grants for almost every kind of industry and almost every kind of activity.
Kim Yabsley: So there's plenty of money out there, but it's about being flexible. How can we make sure that That we're well positioned for this grant and that we're taking the time to, I guess, craft the [00:11:00] perfect pitch so that when a funder or a team of funders are sitting around a table assessing these grants, they might be looking at 3000 grants and they've got 15 golden tickets to give out.
Kim Yabsley: So it's always about doing a really good job of synthesizing the complexity of your business, your industry and your offering and putting that together in a really simple and easy to comprehend pitch.
Chris Hughes: Yeah, I love that you said that, right, because I was going to say, what are your tips to stand out then, because if they're reading 3, 000 grant applications, I imagine that's pretty dry, how do you stand out?
Chris Hughes: So for someone that's never submitted a grant, and like, we were fortunate that we connected with you, and you were amazing, and obviously we had success with that, Let's say someone didn't want to, like, just wanted to try this themselves. What advice would you give them to stand out?
Kim Yabsley: Yeah, I'd say, first of all, you want to get grant ready.
Kim Yabsley: So have your financials in order. Any funder for any grant is going to want to see what your business has been doing over the last couple of years. So, you know, you want to have your [00:12:00] financials in order. You want to know clearly what the project is. And you want to be able to articulate how it aligns with the scope and intent of this specific grant, not just be looking and saying, Oh, this is a grant for women in business.
Kim Yabsley: And I'm a woman in business. So therefore I should get the money. You want to really be looking at what is this grant? What is the problem? This grant is trying to solve and how can I solve it? And that problem. It always exists inside the scope and intent in the guidelines of the particular grant. And then number two is perfect your pitch.
Kim Yabsley: So articulate all of that on paper with clear measurables and outcomes that you will be able to report on whether or not you were successful. Because we do understand that sometimes you get funded for something and despite your own best efforts and intent, you can't quite deliver. What you thought you were going to deliver, especially with software and tech products.
Kim Yabsley: Sometimes there just isn't the uptake we expect, despite all the information we have about and the data around market demand and stuff, because [00:13:00] research and development and commercialization are two very separate beasts, but that's a podcast for another time. So yeah, you want to make sure that you can perfect all of that on paper.
Kim Yabsley: And then thirdly, it's really important to be consistent because you've got to be in it to win it. The average success rate of a grant is only 17%. Ours is 49 percent and that's because we do this all day every day, right? So you really, at 17%, you're going to have to apply five or maybe six times. on by the law of averages before you're successful.
Kim Yabsley: So don't give up on, on one or two or even three or four just to keep going. And, but just do make sure when you're getting grant ready, that you're really looking at the intent and scope and that you are a really good fit and you're positioned to apply.
Chris Hughes: Yeah. Right. So how do people find out what grants are out there?
Chris Hughes: Like I know you said, go to the business websites, but if you're pretty new to this, like, I'm just thinking of my experience. Sometimes it's a little bit like. Reading Russian, this one for me, it's a lot of government lingo.
Kim Yabsley: Um, [00:14:00]
Chris Hughes: like is there something in plain layman's terms? Yeah.
Kim Yabsley: There's a couple of ways you can do it.
Kim Yabsley: So as I mentioned earlier, every state has their own kind of schedule, but they can be a little misleading because at times you might not be a Queensland business, but you might be a business that could use Queensland grants to help your clients or could use grants in Queensland to help Queensland clients of yours.
Kim Yabsley: But I do think it's a good idea to be on the mailing list. for all states at that business. state. gov. au. There are some paid registers where you can get a list of grants, but they're pretty pricey. They're like 400 bucks a month and sort of is another product that you've got to kind of maintain and look into.
Kim Yabsley: We do produce. Four times a year we do produce a grants guide, it's called the Ultimate Grants Guide. It's the most comprehensive listing I've come across and we created it just for this reason because the biggest problem small business owners have is where do I even start? Where do I find the grants and how do I understand in layperson's terms what this grant is about?
Kim Yabsley: So we'll give you [00:15:00] the link for that one if anyone wants it. We've just updated it for this year. And then the other thing is How much
Chris Hughes: is that one?
Kim Yabsley: Oh, it's only 17. It's only 17.
Chris Hughes: 17 and other people are paying 400.
Kim Yabsley: Yeah. Look, we're doing it every week, right? Every week, 30 new grants open in Australia and 10 close.
Kim Yabsley: So a massive part of our work is just staying on top of that changing landscape. We realized a while ago, well, we're doing this research for all of our VIP clients anyway to find the next big opportunity for them. So how can we bundle this into something that saves time and energy for small business owners?
Kim Yabsley: And, and off the back of that, we have a low cost membership where people can come along and learn more each month about grants, get an update on what grants are, are happening out there and get some support with and critique of their submissions.
Chris Hughes: Yeah, so that's, I love that because like looking at sort of other grant writers out there, like it's, I've seen for a small business, it might be good if you're a big business and you can afford to pay sort of premiums, but if you're a small health business and you're [00:16:00] a one or two person run organization, having something low cost, I just feel like if I was doing that myself again, Having someone I could just say, Hey, can you run your eye over this?
Chris Hughes: What advice have you got for me?
Kim Yabsley: We just do that as a fortnightly. It's a tiny and new offer. We just introduced it this year because most of the clients we work with is we work with them in the way we work with you. So we're making them 150 grand, maybe more a year. And we just do all the work for them and bring them the opportunity when we see it.
Kim Yabsley: But there's this whole part of the market that. That can't invest at that level and probably isn't eligible to get that amount of money back, but they could pick up five 000 along the way. And so they just really want to be kept in touch with what's going on. And they want someone to answer their questions as they come up.
Kim Yabsley: So, uh, that's what we do in that program. But we do provide, it has an online program in it and a whole heap of tools and templates to help you put together a grant budget and a project timeline and those sorts of things.
Chris Hughes: Yeah. Okay. I love that. I think that would be suitable for a lot of our [00:17:00] listeners because well, I mean, even the 17 ultimate grants guide is amazing because just having that as something that we never had initially, like it's like I said, it's just something that out there that we didn't know existed and then having since learned about it, it's, I can't believe that all of this is available and most people still don't know about it.
Chris Hughes: Is that fair to say?
Kim Yabsley: Totally, totally. And we see it as just like, it's just such an untapped growth strategy for small businesses, but it's not an overnight fix. And I think that's, most people come at it from needing money now when there's a small grant available. And I think that's why people become a bit despondent or disappointed in the results if they don't win, but it's not something that's going to put money in the bank tomorrow or even in the next month or two, but it is an amazing strategy over a 12 to 18 month period if you stay consistent.
Chris Hughes: So what about if people Is there enough grants out there that they can apply for similar grants? Because I know there'll be a limit like on, once you get a grant there's so many, I think those regional grants were only allowed up to five or six at the moment.
Kim Yabsley: Yeah, yeah. And things like in Queensland, the business basics, you can only claim that [00:18:00] once.
Kim Yabsley: But you know, there's, there's a great HR grant in Queensland for Queensland businesses to implement HR related solutions in their business. But you could be a provider of those solutions that is based in New South Wales and you could advertise to the Queensland market and get 20 Queensland businesses to become your clients by helping them understand how they can use this grant to do something that they probably wouldn't have had the cash flow for.
Kim Yabsley: So that's another untapped strategy is using grants as a client acquisition strategy.
Chris Hughes: Yeah, right. Is there local council grants or is it mostly state and federal level?
Kim Yabsley: No, there are local council grants. So every local council will have some money. If you think about the different layers of government and what they're responsible for, every local council has got funding for community activation, like getting the community engaged, keeping it active, and they'll have funding for community events.
Kim Yabsley: And then state government's going to be more about how do we. Get innovation. And how do we drive read like for Queensland? Cause we're such a [00:19:00] regionally diverse state. How do we drive regional innovation? And, and then federal government's going to have stuff that's broader. So how do we achieve our national objectives and how do we help these known minority groups like disadvantaged youth or remote regional indigenous populations?
Chris Hughes: And also, I'm not sure whether you sort of had much to do with this market, but there's, I'm just thinking in the health sphere that there would be organizational grants like the Heart Foundation and things as well, potentially, that maybe health professionals could look into.
Kim Yabsley: Yeah, totally. There are, I mean, there's a heap of medical, medical grants available.
Kim Yabsley: And I think we actually created a guide at the end of that year. If I can dig it out, I'll, I'll drop it to you to attach to the show notes. But yeah, so there's definitely like medical grants. Um, But there's also research grants, so sometimes you might be in this kind of field, but you have a particular interest in researching something.
Kim Yabsley: And then there's also community grants, which are not always just for not for profits or community [00:20:00] groups. There are things like the AMP Tomorrowmakers grant, which just incentivizes people doing great things. In fact, I think I mentioned that one to, to Stacey for you guys, just people who are doing innovative and cool stuff.
Kim Yabsley: So there are grants just for that, that aren't even specific to an industry or an outcome.
Chris Hughes: Wow. Yeah, I, I, I know why your business exists. I think it's a full time job keeping your head around all these grants. Well, Kim, I will wrap it up there today. That has been amazing. If anyone that is listening to this, they have to have got some benefit out of even understanding that this whole bucket of money exists out there.
Chris Hughes: So what we'll do is in the show notes, we'll put a link to your ultimate, um, grants guide. Is that right?
Kim Yabsley: And if
Chris Hughes: people want to connect with you, can they follow you on?
Kim Yabsley: Yeah. Follow me on Instagram. I'm just, that's my goal for this first quarter of this year is to learn how to use, uh, social media properly to build profile.
Kim Yabsley: Cause I've just got my 10 friends and family on there at the moment.
Chris Hughes: Okay. Hopefully we can add another [00:21:00] 10.
Kim Yabsley: Yeah. So it's Kim Yabsley on Instagram and certainly they can follow us Growology on Instagram or Facebook.
Chris Hughes: Okay. Brilliant. Thanks Kim. We'll put all of that in the show notes. Thanks for your time.
Kim Yabsley: Thanks so much for having me.
Chris Hughes: Do you find this podcast valuable? There may be other nutrition professionals out there will also. If you like, share and subscribe, it's going to help other nutrition professionals make an impact on the world, just like you. Thanks.
