Q&A with Renew Australia’s Marcus Westbury

Eight months after his successful investment pitch, Social Traders caught up with Marcus Westbury to find out how things are progressing with the start-up of Renew Australia.  He has had a busy travel schedule around Australia and New Zealand for his award winning Renew initiative, an innovative urban renewal scheme. 

Marcus, what you have been up to since The Crunch?

We’ve been very busy setting up Renew Australia, slowly but surely. We’re implementing our business plan that we developed through The Crunch, so that we can start offering our services. We’ve just hired our General Manager, which took about a month and a bit from the time we advertised for the position. We are very excited to have found someone with industry experience and relevant skills, which we identified during business planning, and who is very attracted to working in a social enterprise. We are also setting up our office in Brunswick. And we’ve also built and launched our website www.renewaustralia.org, which involved registering a domain name, getting our design in order and building the website. We have not been actively promoting it, other than with a bit of social media. We will ramp up at the end of this year or early next year. At this time we’re just trying to get everything in order and ready to go.

What else are you doing to get Renew Australia up and running?

Firstly we had to register our company, Renew Australia. Unlike some other Crunch entities, we were not incorporated prior to The Crunch. So we had to create a company and register with ASIC, in addition to opening bank accounts etc.

What is Renew Australia’s legal structure?

We are a not-for-profit company limited by guarantee. That seems like a good structure for us, firstly because a company is federally regulated. That works for us because our aim is to be working all over Australia, not just in one state or territory.

What else have you been working on?

I have also been working to pull a board together. We have a small board at this stage, consisting of people we’ve worked with on other projects such as Renew Adelaide and Renew Newcastle. Over the medium term, we are looking to bring more people with the right expertise onto the board. It is an ongoing dialogue to try to find and convince the right people to be involved.

What’s the right board member for Renew? What are you looking for from your Board?

Someone who cares about what we do and appreciates the aims behind it is the first prerequisite. Beyond that my aim is really to look at the board as a team – so building up a group of people with a range of skills and experiences is quite critical. Probably the bigger question is what combination of people do we need rather than which individuals.

Reflecting on your social enterprise journey so far, what has been the hardest part?

I think the next stage is going to be a bit harder. To date we’ve been very fortunate to have a lot of interest in what we’re doing, so we didn’t need to develop our markets as much, unlike other Crunch enterprises.

One of the big challenges to date is building up expectations about Renew Australia that we are not yet ready to meet, as there have been many people asking us when we can start working together. Making sure that we put appropriate systems and structures in place before we actively start trading is quite important. Trying to reduce the temptation of getting too far ahead of ourselves has been a bit of a challenge.

Can you reflect upon your experience of working with organisations like Social Traders and TACSI?

The Crunch helped take the Renew Newcastle model to build and structure Renew Australia as an entity that will provide products and services. The Crunch got me to think about areas that I hadn’t really thought about, such as business planning. I have always been a person who just goes out and dives in to do it, and then figure out what I’m doing later. So it has been a really interesting process where you are thinking ahead and planning ahead, thinking in a longer time horizon, working over a period of months and years, instead of days and weeks.

The Crunch also got me to think about striking the right balance between the social and financial outcomes. We had the option of setting up as a straight-up, old school not-for-profit relying on grants, and on the other hand being 100% a business. During The Crunch, we considered all the shades of grey between those two extremes to work out how we can trade [to generate income independent from grants] and simultaneously achieve the bigger things that we’re trying to do.

On the other hand, TACSI has been really important for another set of reasons. Not only did TACSI financially support Renew Australia, it also gave me a concrete opportunity to replicate the model in Townsville and Adelaide. This gave us a chance to see how the model replicates – what they do well and don’t do well, which has been really important to inform us on what we do next. Essentially, our learning from Renew Adelaide and Renew Townsville will guide the product offering of Renew Australia.

So what’s next for Renew Australia?

The next phase is really about further developing and refining the product. What we have now is a set of strategies and thinking that we have very successfully implemented in Newcastle, but we don’t yet know how well it works if replicated in other communities. We need to figure out how we turn this “know how” from Renew Newcastle into manageable products and services, whether that’s training or consultancy or something else.

Our biggest challenge right now is developing products and services to the point where they work and meet peoples’ willingness-to-pay. We have already done some work on that through The Crunch, and we’re probably going to be doing it all the time through the next few years – refining the offering, pricing and marketing through a bit of trial and error – do it, get feedback, refine it, and get feedback over time.

What other challenges do you foresee in the next 6 to 12 months?

Scaling up. As we continue to refine the product offering and the marketing, we also need to think about how we will transition from being a small team to having more people working on more projects.

What advice would you give to those aspiring to start a social enterprise?

I guess wait until I’ve actually done it, then I’ll know! I think this might be too premature… Ultimately engaging in a good support structure is important, and I would say that The Crunch is a good example. I guess I will start to give advice when we’re up and viable, and everything is going to plan. For now, a lot of the plan still needs to be rolled out before we achieve viability.

Thanks Marcus. We look forward to catching up with you again in 12 months to find out how Renew Australia is progressing.