I was introduced to Jenn by Joyce who does a lot of our social media content as she had connected with Jenn and thought we needed to meet.

We had a great zoom (as you do these days) and it was really interesting to hear not only her story about setting ‘Buy from a Bush Business’ and ‘Spend with us’ up but all the amazing stories of the regional businesses her initiative is supporting.

I can’t wait for Jenn to share some of them with you.

Renae Hanvin
In this episode, I’m talking with Jenn Donovan from Buy From a Bush Business and Spend With Us. We’re talking about getting Australians to support regional businesses. Now a little bit about Jenn. Jenn is a social media and marketing mentor and business coach, a change maker, and a social entrepreneur. Jenn has two businesses. The first is Social Media and Marketing Australia that support small businesses with marketing education and inspiration. The second is Spend with Us or Buy From a Bush Business marketplace that supports rural and regional small businesses with sales and brand awareness. Think Amazon but only for rural and regional small businesses. Now I like to start with where we met. I was introduced to Jenn by Joyce, who does a lot of our social media content. She connected with Jenn and thought we absolutely needed to meet. We had a really great zoom meeting as you do these days. It was really interesting to hear not only her story about setting up Buy From a Bush Business Marketplace and Spend With Us but also about the amazing stories of the regional businesses that her initiative is supporting. I can’t wait for Jenn to share some of them with you. Jenn thanks so much for joining me today.

Jenn Donovan
I’m so excited to be here. Thanks so much.

Renae Hanvin
Now let’s start.

1. Tell me all about Buy From a Bush Business and Spend With Us. So where did the ideas come from? And how has it evolved?

Jenn Donovan
They’re similar but different concepts. Bifocals Business was basically my other life. I’m a social media marketing coach, and mentor. Pre-pandemic I used to travel around quite a lot to the Riverina of New South Wales and Northeast Victoria and all that sort of thing. In this week it was the end of October 2019. If you can remember back that far we were ravaged by drought back then. It’s hard to believe now looking at the green crops two years on. We were really ravaged by drought and Buy from the Bush was a trending hashtag on Instagram. But there’s one thing; a lot of small business owners, especially in rural areas, they really don’t get Instagram and they didn’t quite know how to use a hashtag or what it meant. These were the questions I heard all week. I was doing this tour around I was going to Miranda, Hay, and Leeton, a few classic outback towns. So, on the way home I thought to myself “I could start a Facebook group, because everyone knows how to use Facebook, everyone knows how to post into a Facebook group”. I came home on the Friday I opened up a Facebook group and called it Buy From a Bush Business and invited my friends and my clients. It just took off. I would have really loved to have taken more notice back then. But because I just did it as a whim and off the cuff, I really didn’t take much notice as to what I was building or have any strategy as far as the business went. I think the community aspect was the part that really took hold of people. It just grew and it grew organically. For example; I will invite you, you will invite your friends, your friends invite their friends. Before I knew it before Christmas, which was just under two months, there was 100,000 people in there buying and selling. It was just amazing. Now that has just ticked over two years old and I think it’s got 350,000 people in it and about 500 transactions a day go through there. It’s just an enormous moving beast.
Sara and Lauren started Spend With Us. They started that through the bushfires of 2019 and 2020. It was basically an online marketplace to try and help the people that were going through the bushfires that could no longer have visitors or foot traffic into their towns. It wasn’t just for business where the fires were burning. Even when we’re an hour and a half away from the fires we could barely see. So goodness knows what it looks like when you were actually up in the fires. They started Spend With Us and helped several hundred small businesses that way. The one thing about my group was that it was so busy. I thought I really need to help these small business owners who are falling to the bottom really quickly because there are just so many posts. I actually considered starting a marketplace of my own. I have another business which is a very big business. I thought I just can’t handle it. So I reached out to them with the question of are you interested in doing a collaboration or working together. So we actually started the company together but we’ve never met. We’ve only ever met over zoom. We’ve only met once in two years and that was in March this year. We were lucky enough to sneak in a meeting in Melbourne when they weren’t in lockdown. That’s what you see today; we’ve got a marketplace. It’s kind of like Amazon but it only supports rural and regional Australian small businesses. We also have the Facebook group.

Renae Hanvin
What I love from that is it was just an idea that you literally had on a whim that took off. It obviously was delivering to a need. I think the most important thing to do is be needs-lead. You identified there was a need. Then the best part is that you collaborated rather than starting another thing. I get it; running a business is hard work and then running two or three others at the same time is also hard. But if something is already working, collaborating is great. It’s amazing that you’ve found these kind of partners and you’ve come together. I know all about having not met people because I’m hopefully meeting a few of my team members in New South Wales in the coming weeks with all the lockdowns. How amazing that you’ve brought all your skills together, your passion and commitment for the outcome into a successful initiative. That’s awesome Jenn.

Jenn Donovan
Thank you. I think the girls, Lauren and Sarah who are now my business partners, I think they were a little bit hesitant to start with. Because when they started Spend With Us they tried to do some collaborations with people but people were like ‘no, no, I want to do my own thing’. So when I rocked up with this enormous Facebook group going “help, would you like to do something with me?” I think they were a little bit like “wow this person wants to collaborate’. But you’re so right, it was already working for them. So why reinvent the wheel? Why not just try and collaborate with someone? Absolutely see a need solve a problem was basically how we both started even though we didn’t know each other at the time.

Renae Hanvin
Yeah. We’re collaborating with people almost every day and meeting new amazing people, like yourself, every day. I think that’s what we need to do in Australia. Not setting up that mentality of chasing the funding or resumes being the new buzzword. Let’s look at those who are doing stuff and come together to support each other. Because I tell you there’s enough in the resilience and supporting regional community pie that we can all have our piece of it but the more we can do together and support each other then it’s going to have the better outcomes. Now I’m going to talk to you about the digital literacy levels of businesses which you’ve highlighted in a minute. First, I really want you to share a few stories about how rural and regional businesses had gone from side hustles to becoming their major incomes because of connecting into your website and socials. Clearly there’s been the drought, there’s been the COVID lockdowns, there’s been the fires.

2. Can you tell me a couple of those stories?

Jenn Donovan
Yeah absolutely. When you take it back a step and think of the traditional rural people quite often the farm is the major income earner when it’s working really well. Lots of farmers wives had side hustles and they might make something and their sister might buy it, or their best friends might buy it, or they might take it to a market once a year. But when things were really severe and there were severe droughts they had to become the income earners. There was lots of people who had these; they weren’t even side hustles they were almost like a hobby. They decided that they would give it a go and put it on Buy From Bush Business Facebook group and see how it went. Then the world and Australia wanted to buy it which shocked a lot of them. One story that comes to mind is Amy who has Quintin Park alpacas. She lives up near Dubbo in a little place called Tommy Lee. I’ve managed to actually on a quick holiday go and meet her. She’s one of the very few that I’ve actually got to meet face to face so I remember her. She makes things out of alpaca fibre fibres. She calls them alpaca flowers, they are basically a ball of alpaca wool on some wire in some vases. She made these things up to try and get some income because the farm was suffering so bad. This particular week she contacted me and she said “I’ve just got to tell you this story I have earned more money than my husband did selling a trailer load of sheep this week”. That is just mind-blowing. Her business has just gone from strength to strength. In fact now Quintin Alpacas is actually a place that you can go visit and get married at. She’s opened up the gates to the farm as that second income which all started with “how can I earn some more income because the farm just isn’t doing it for us anymore”. I just think that is such a great story. I love it on so many levels but I love the fact that Australia embraced it. Australia was like “oh my goodness what are these things I need them”. She said originally they were using the river sand in the vases to put the alpaca flowers and she’s like “I’m going to use all the river sand if I’m not careful, I need a different idea”. The rivers were dry there was no water in the rivers because they’re in drought. She’s like “the river is going to be 10 foot deep if I don’t stop doing this”.

Renae Hanvin
I love that. I often use a term that Albert Einstein said that from every crisis comes opportunity. I think for some business owners the COVID pandemic and then the drought, and the bushfires has just really set them up for success. And that’s a beautiful story. I’m going to have to put them on my list and go and visit her as well. Because what you’re offering is just a glimmer of that business savvy side of it. They can just keep doing their hobbies or side hustles and have them evolved into new revenue streams. How amazing for that family in that community. That’s awesome.

Jenn Donovan
Yeah absolutely. The fact that now she’s hired people who’ve helped her work the alpaca business, whether it’s like building the craft, doing the day to day, or having visitors and taking them around and showing them alpacas and talking to them. She’s putting employment back into her community. That’s what I love. That’s the thing that really lights me up. Yes I’ve got a marketplace, yes I’ve got a Facebook group, but it’s the community that I want. And it’s giving back to all the communities and one of the other little stories that I have is a CWA lady who was selling the CWA cookbooks through Buy From A Bush Business leading into Christmas 2019. She sold enough cookbooks that they got a new playground for the town. Oh, wow. That’s just incredible to think that my little thought on the way home from Hay created something that has enabled a community to get a new playground.

Renae Hanvin
I say love that. Jenn we’ve met a few times and I think we’re two peas in a pod in many ways. We’ve got that same social purpose. And we thrive on the change in the outcomes that I can deliver to others who are needing it in the disaster space. You’re obviously clearly exactly the same; and that’s the same for me. It’s those little stories and the difference that you can make by the simple things. Simple, small steps that you can introduce to a business owner that literally is life changing. Wow. Now I was going to ask on your Facebook page it says, and I love this quote, let’s put the bush back on their feet one purchase at a time. We’ve talked a little bit about this but given how tough so many communities and business communities have had it over the past two years in particular, but before that too, how have you noticed regional businesses successfully adapting? I know that was a sort of story about a pivot. But what are the other things?

3. Are they becoming a bit more digitally literate? Or what else are they doing?

Jenn Donovan
I think that COVID in particular, which is a different type of disaster to bushfires and drought, that has really forced the hand of a lot of small business owners to get online. Mind you, my best friend has an extremely successful business of bricks and mortar and she’s not online at all. So it can still be done not online. But I think a lot of people have been forced online simply because of so much of rural and regional Australia does rely on the tourism trade at different times of the year. So that hasn’t been able to happen. They’ve embraced that online presence which I guess is the purpose of Spend With Us being a marketplace is making that easy. Because the one thing I know as a marketing coach and mentor is that if you build a website they don’t come. Build it and that’s stage one. They have to market and qualified traffic that have money to spend. So that’s the pains that the marketplace can take away. We have traffic. You can set up a store in like 5 or 10 minutes and you’ve got the support of a community behind you. Not just us but the other 1000 small business owners who are just like you on the platform. I think they have had to. Australia Post put out some stats the other day to say that we have caught up to Europe and the US basically. We were 18 months behind as online spender and the pandemic has seen us catch up. As much as I think people will go back a little bit to shopping bricks and mortar, especially in rural and regional areas, I don’t think we’ll ever stop shopping online. I think more and more people do need to become a little bit more digitally literate and it’s tough. Like so many of our clients and customers technology happened to them a little bit we didn’t grow up with technology, it happened to us. We either embrace it or we can ignore it. But I don’t think we can ignore it any longer.

Jenn Donovan
Yeah, I agree. As someone who is based in Melbourne, we still have the title of the most locked down city. It was either online orders for delivery or online orders for click and collect. I think you’re right the whole way we spend is different. And absolutely there’ll be aspects that go back. In fact I couldn’t wait to get back into a shop and just take a t-shirt and then try it on before I bought it. But last year it was so different particularly for those from rural and regional areas. Now I love your background because you’re an ex-conveyancer, an ex-retailer, and now a marketing thought leader. For many small business owners, as you’ve just mentioned, the whole thought of going digital is really daunting. What are the tips that you have for those thinking about setting up a free online store with you?

Jenn Donovan
Looking at what you’re actually selling for a start. No matter what product you might have in your head you’ve probably got 100 competitors out there. So it’s looking at what you’re going to do that’s slightly different. How are you going to market yourself differently to other people to stand out from the crowd? I work in a very crowded market. I think there’s probably a social media marketing coach for every corner of every street in Australia. I’m a dime a dozen. I need to think about what makes me stand out from the crowd what makes me different from my competition. At the end of the day a lot of it comes down to you. Real human to human marketing is just so popular at the moment as it should be. If you head back 5 or 10 years there was a real push of paddock-to-plate. People wanted to know where their food came from. It’s still a thing now but I think it’s really weaved itself into small business altogether. If you’re selling candles people want to know who you are, what you look like, they want to want you to show a bit of personality because they want that community aspect. They want that connection with whom they’re buying from. Now it’s not so much mindless “I’m just going to buy that candle because it smells good” because she can’t smell it online. One of the biggest tips I can give anyone is know your ideal client, of who is going to buy your things, and understand that you need to show up. Hiding behind your product or your logo just isn’t going to help you build your business in 2021 and beyond.

Renae Hanvin
Do you know what I need to listen to that myself. Because I’ve got to be honest I find putting my words and stories out there for social media, and I’m a small business but I’m clearly out there on social media, but I find it really uncomfortable. I’ve had to almost have a conversation with myself over the past 12 months just to say it’s actually okay. The knowledge I have is the same as these products like the alpaca fibre floral arrangements. Who would have thought but people love to hear what I have to say. So you’ve got to put it out there and the power is in the storytelling. Sharing those bits of information about the why and how to come up with the business story. That’s what’s connecting people to each other, that’s the gold dust.

Jenn Donovan
It really is. Yeah

Renae Hanvin
I always end my questions the same. What would be the two things that you’d like to be done differently in the disaster space?

Jenn Donovan
I’ve had to have a bit of a think about this question. One of the reasons why I do what I do with Spend With Us and Buy From a Bush Business is because I’m sick of people only talking about rural and regional Australia when there is a disaster. We only make the news when there’s a flood or a fire or a drought. I want people to understand the absolute talent and amazing businesses that operate in rural and regional Australia. But one of the things that I would like to see done differently, and this is very much a personal thing, but again relates to why I do what I do. When we were in horrific drought, and we’re talking horrific, horrific drought heading back 2, 3, 4 years ago all over the TV they were raising millions of dollars. All the morning shows are running all these big campaigns raising 6 million, 10 million dollars. My community didn’t see any of that. I didn’t see any of that as a farmer who was in disaster at the time. I would like to see more clarity on where that goes. Where did all that money go to? Because I don’t know one farmer in my district who got it. And certainly we didn’t get any improvements in our district. The bushfire money we did through the fire brigade and things like that. We certainly saw new equipment and that sort of thing come through for our fire brigade. But that’s what I would like. Transparency is one of the things that I would like to see done differently. I don’t know is that an answer you expected? Or not? Maybe that’s a bit deep for a podcast.

Renae Hanvin
We have all sorts on the podcast so every idea is a great idea. That focus on rural and regional in the good times not just the bad is absolutely key. I think given the COVID lockdowns, no doubt about 80% of Melburnians will be moving to the country somewhere; certainly leaving the state as soon as we effectively can. But I hope and I agree that a lot of corporates and businesses look at enabling their workers to continue living rurally and regionally. To the same extent they set up shopping rural and regional towns to help them to continue to evolve. Because many of the towns were thriving a couple of decades ago and then slowly started demising. I think it’s a great time now to really re-energise and reinvest in them. The funding, to be honest with you, I could have a whole day forum seminar on funding, and where it comes from, and why it gets given out and all that kind of stuff. And we probably still wouldn’t know half the answers. I love that you’ve pointed that one out because it is important from that grassroots community level. Because so much of the funding is led by outputs, and it’s led by press releases, as opposed to necessarily needs in the communities. And I think that’s a big gap and a big area of opportunity in Australia.

Jenn Donovan
I love that work like yourself that is highlighting that and trying to do disasters differently because they’re going to happen. At the moment we’re coming out of COVID; everything’s probably too green to burn this summer but the next disaster is around the corner. We don’t know what it is but we need to be prepared and we need to do them differently.

Renae Hanvin
Thanks Jenn I agree. I have to say one of my most just bizarre experiences this year was as I was talking to a client and we were doing crisis and reputation management for them. They were concerned about an issue that might put them in the media because of COVID. Then the earthquake happened. I literally said “hang on a minute I’ll call you back”. I called her back and I was like “I can’t believe these words coming out of my mouth but it is 2020 and 2021 you’re not going to have to worry about being on the front page of the newspaper because an earthquake has just knocked you off”. Which is so surreal. But as you say we are in this new area of compound disasters and natural and other disasters, and everything has consequences. So initiatives like Spend With Us and Buy From a Bush Business is just so fundamental and key and I think there’s real longevity in it. Thank you for the amazing leadership and work that you’re doing. I’m really quite excited to have found another little kindred spirit out in the world. Thanks so much for talking to me today. We’ve been talking about getting Australians to support regional businesses and will hopefully talk to you again soon.

Jenn Donovan
Thank you so much for having me. Great chat.