[Tom] – That’s a great question, Chad. I think it comes back to one of your first questions.

One of the biggest challenges is around mental health, work-life balance and being very upfront about burnout. Having worked with quite a few people in this space, I’m working with a lot of people who are at bandwidth. They are absolutely pushing it. And that can be a huge challenge in itself. Understanding that and staying on top of your physical and mental health is very, very important. You need to know where your priorities are in terms of family.

So starting up, where do you start and where does that side hustle begin? I think it doesn’t have to start by you going, “I’m going to quit my job because I’ve got this big idea and hopefully it’ll work out. But somehow, I’ve got to pay the mortgage and bills at the same time.”

I think it is entirely possible to have this small idea and start working an hour a week at night. Just to chip away at that idea. Then go and attend a Startup Weekend and explore that idea further and see who in the community can help you.

It’s really about those small actions that I think can work towards these bigger goals and the bigger outcomes. But it is really about starting.

And from there I think you then get that support that you need, whether it be from the community or from a financial perspective. There are grants available. We know there’s investment available across a range of programs. Once you get bigger, there’s also other types of investment available. But I do think we’ve still got a finance issue, particularly in what they call the missing middle. But you’re all experts in your own right, so you are completely capable to get out there and do that.

[Chad] – From the Bee One Third perspective, I was really inspired by the whole notion of, “I know the problem. I know the change I want to affect. I don’t know bees.” And here you are seven years later with multiple customers. What was that process of starting out, and how did you go about engaging with those initial customers that are now supporting you and two other employees?

[Jack Stone] – Initially I didn’t know that I wanted to be a beekeeper. In fact, I knew only three months into researching how food is grown, and what the important aspects to food growth were, that I decided to get into bees. I wanted to grow food and I wanted to teach people how to grow food in the urban setting.

If we don’t have to rely on the farmer 400 kilometres away, then we can become a lot more connected with the supermarket food that we’re purchasing on a daily basis if we can grow a small amount of it.

Bees were something for me that were so left of field. But as I started to understand the connection that bees had to the food system, it was this little tiny, hidden part of the whole cycle that caught my fascination. I wasn’t really successful in growing food when I tried it. But when I discovered bees, when I got my first beehive, I caught a wild swarm from the base of a tree. That one beehive became the nucleus of ideas that then spawned out into a starter for the conversation.

Those first customers, though, they all denied me. For two years I was door knocking on cafes and restaurants saying, “We’re producing honey in the city. Oh, and we’d love to put a beehive on your rooftop so you can say that you’ve taken the honey from your roof and you’re serving it on the plate.”

They’d respond with, “Far too dangerous liability risk on the roof. We’re not even interested in the honey. We’re not interested in the whole aspect of it.”

We were given a great opportunity when we had our first-ever news article. That opened up the doors to start having conversations with change makers in the community that wanted to be a part of the change.

[Chad] – So that initial media played a big role in it?

[Jack Stone] – Big time. And the idea wasn’t even real. I was pretending to be a beekeeper by saying, “We’re keeping bees in the city and we’re trying to create change through educating people on food awareness.” And then all of a sudden a food writer wrote about Bee One Third, and how one-third of our global food supply is dependent on bees. And it was then that the first call came and that just became the steam roll that then turned into a hectic four years of figuring out how to keep bees.

One thing that I would say is, ‘don’t grow faster than you can handle.’ But if you do end up growing faster, then that’s when the side hustle really becomes the priority.

At 6:00pm til 12:00pm, what are you doing at night? How are you spending those important hours once the kids are in bed?

I was lucky. I started when I was 21 or 22, so I didn’t have too many responsibilities, but I’m still managing that side hustle. For me, it’s still a side hustle because my main game is keeping bees. Making money is the side hustle. My main game is keeping bees and talking to people about the importance of them.

[Chad] – I really like how you break it down into numbers. We’re talking about complex challenges here, but you say one in every three mouthfuls… I really like how you simplify things down. One other quick question. Do you keep native bees?

[Jack Stone] – We do work with native bees. We’ve got 12 native beehives and a 150 European beehives, and that’s because European beehives multiply much faster than native beehives. So we actually work with local kindergartens right here in the Logan City Council district with two kindergartens and childcare centres to educate the children about the importance of bees. We placed those native hives in the centres and open hives up every couple of months. We harvest the honey and we get kids engaged with insects because there’s a fear around insects now. But native bees are the perfect vector for low-level, low-stimuli education.

[Chad] – Excellent. Thank you. One of the things that can start a lot of this, is this thing called a Startup Weekend, which Tom referenced. What the heck is a Startup Weekend? And when is the very next one? Tony is going to help us out.

[Tony] – At Substation33 we’ve run Startup Weekends for three years now. We’ve up to our fifth Startup Weekend. It’ll be run 22-24th of November, so come along!