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Green Business – Small business tips to get you started. Featuring Chloe Thomson, Horticulturist and Garden Coach. Chloe is an inspirational small business pioneer, celebrated for her success with Sprout School and Bean There Dug That, and has been featured on numerous TV shows including Garden Gurus. She is also an accomplished writer, host, and presenter. You can check out all her amazing work here- http://www.beantheredugthat.com.
Question 1: Whats the one thing you would tell your younger self when starting out?
1. Oooooh so many things! – Have the confidence to say no or speak up if something doesn’t feel right (be it with a boss, colleague or a job proposal) – Use your intuition more and trust it!
– Chase your dreams, don’t wait for them to land on your desk. And to the kid and teenager me who was terrified of public speaking, when you find something you’re passionate about you’ll LOVE telling everyone about it and all the fears will dissolve away.
– And to the kid and teenager me who was terrified of public speaking, when you find something you’re passionate about you’ll LOVE telling everyone about it and all the fears will dissolve away.
Question 2: How did your business get started and was it a natural progression?
2. My business – Bean There Dug That, came about after I was made redundant when I was 30-something weeks pregnant from a role with a large fertiliser company. Once my son was born I felt the itch to get back slowly into working, so I got an ABN and started to take on random jobs some of which I’d done casually while full-time employed pre-kids; writing for a gardening magazine, horticultural industry event management, filming for The Garden Gurus.
My business probably grew the most during lockdown. At the start of lockdowns, I really noticed the need for home DIY gardeners to get more information about gardening and so I created Sprout School an online gardening course for anyone who wants to be a better and more confident gardener.
I also started to get more interest from clients wanting me to film and create content for them with their products in my garden. So they’d send me the products and we’d film them (we being hubby who’s a professional photographer, turned videographer and me). I then taught myself to edit the videos and the client base grow and evolved from there.It was just a natural progression into the extra things I do now; the MCing of gardening and horticulture events, more magazine writing, content creation for big and small gardening businesses, and my YouTube channel.
Question 3: Was there a lightbulb moment, when you thought wow! If I’d only known this before?
3. The bit above about finding your passion and finding the confidence to talk about it! And from a business perspective – reaching out to find a good accountant and bookkeeper. Remember you don’t have to do it all and you can’t. This is def the time when you need to call in the professionals!
Green Ink – Business tips to get you started
Q1: I would advise myself not to wait for the perfect moment to pursue my dreams, as such a time may never come. My dreams have evolved over the years. As a teenager, I aspired to travel the world and soak in various cultures—admittedly, with a fair bit of partying in mind. This ambition took me to more than 20 countries before I settled in the UK, where I worked and lived. Upon returning to Australia, I bought my first house in Melbourne with my wonderful husband, where we stayed for over a decade. As life changed, so did my dreams, and the desire for a family led us to Brisbane. Now, Brisbane is home, and I’m more content than ever. Green Ink, a dream I nurtured for over three years, is now a thriving reality.
Q2: I am fortunate to have an incredible friend and mentor who guided me towards landscape design. After working and studying for several years, I became qualified. Initially, I thought I would find a job easily, but the lack of experience and limited opportunities compelled me to start my own business. It was a challenging journey; I learned a lot and encountered several failures before reaching this point.
Q3. There are so many light bulb moments.
1– Outlook calendar invites. To me, this was like wow!
2– Lots of things in Xero- how to reconcile and automate bill entry, this was a game-changer.
3-Having a work-only bank account and card. This made things so much easier to keep work from personal like separate.
4-Navigating social media, including posting reels, stories, and editing highlights, felt incredibly overwhelming and stressful at first. However, everything changed once I grasped the systems involved.