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What we've learned running our own business, is you're never alone even when it feels like it. So tune in anytime to this podcast. We're always here for you celebrating resilient entrepreneurs just like you. We're Laura and Vicki from Two Four One - a marketing company for early stage business owners who want to launch, grow and be resilient.
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Welcome to Resilient Entrepreneurs! The podcast where we celebrate the inspiring stories of entrepreneurs who have overcome challenges and built successful businesses. Today we have the pleasure of speaking with Nick Steiner, the Founder of Mini Farm Project Brisbane. Nick is a passionate entrepreneur who's dedicated his life to promoting sustainable living and empowering people to grow their own food. Through Mini Farm Project Brisbane, Nick and his team have helped countless individuals and communities establish thriving mini farms, providing them with fresh organic produce and a greater sense of self sufficiency. They've also started an incredible giving circle, listen in for more on this one. Join us as we sit down with Nick to hear more about his story, his struggles, and his tips for building a resilient business. This is Resilient Entrepreneurs and we're your hosts, Laura and Vicki. Nick, thank you so much for joining us today.
Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
Nick, please, let's start off first things first! You have an incredible Giving Circle that you've just launched so we might as well just take it from the top. Tell us about that giving circle, and how can everyday people get involved with the incredible work that you're doing.
Okay, so I want to change how charities operate and be a disruptor to the charity space and one of the things that we had in Australia in 2018, we had a whole heap of bushfires, the whole country was on fire, ablaze. And a lot of charities collected a huge amount of money that still to this day, in 2023, hasn't been given to those people who needed it the most. And that's been very impactful for a lot of charities, including ours. And there's a large mistrust in the Australian population with charities.
So what we decided to do, or what I came up with an idea is to have a giving circle that provides financial transparency to the donor of where the money is spent and how much has come into that program and they then also get to vote on what farm is built next.
The idea for the Giving Circle is it’s $3.70 per month, which is less than a cup of coffee, anywhere in Australia, and the idea is that we want to attract 100,000 amazing Aussies to get behind a Fight Hunger Challenge in Australia to actually fund one of our farms a month. That will allow us then, one acre farm will allow us to produce up to 40,000 equivalent meals and the donors will be responsible for actually fully funding it, employing people, being part of the process, working with us being involved in our live operations meetings, when we talk about how we plan these, and they get to vote which is the next one. So it's inclusion and it's also transparency, which I think is probably a world first for most charities to actually involve people on those two levels inside a charity.
So 100,000 Aussies paying $3.70 a month, will fund.. how many farms?
One acre farm every single month.
Incredible.
In some cases, it might be two acres. So it just depends on where the land is, as well.
Sure, sure. And so tell us why you started this whole, this whole charity and social impact business.
Why I got into the charity space? Well, it's probably a bit of a midlife crisis but I was in hospitality, back in 2010 I thought let's do something different. And it was at the stage where you're a certain age where no one really wants to employ an older person with opinions and who’s steadfast in their ways, I thought, well, I've had my own businesses before, I'll go do something myself. And at that stage, I had a very strong diet with green living, raw foods, that kind of thing, very healthy focused and I also wanted to give back to the community, so I thought, I like gardening, I like giving back to the community, let's actually create a charity that grows food and we give that to people in need. Because I want to see people who are in a situation of need, get good quality, nutritious food. And the issue that, like us talking here now and maybe some of the listeners listening, we're actually nutrient deficient because of the food system that we have at the moment. Now people who are in a situation of survival or need, are actually more depleted than we are.
We can't fix the homeless issue, the need issue, without building up the individual to make cognitive decisions because of the depletion factor. So I wanted to make sure that they get fresh fruit and vegetables, make sure that they get fish, chicken, eggs, bush foods and wild edibles and honey, all these things, every week for free through our charity partners, so they can actually have an abundant, nutritious meal while they're in a situation of need, and hopefully that assists them moving forward into a better life.
So food for you is the answer to all of our woes, with healthy food.
Yeah it’s diet. It's our gut biome, it's our diet, it's the toxins that we're taking in and all that gut putty in the cans and stuff. I saw that when I was doing volunteer work, I'm gonna say it, these people are just getting packets of food and gut putty, and it's, there's nothing in it. These people actually need proper nutrients. A lot of mental health issues actually stem from nutrient deficiency. We’ve got a massive mental health problem across the whole planet with all the things that have happened and we're just depleted with the food, and our microbiome is being destroyed by like antibiotics, the junk foods, the wheats, how that's harvested, and the four different kinds of wheat that we have on our planet, and the GMOs, all these things factor into a chemical structure within the body that doesn't work out for most cases, and then we have these depletion events.
Yeah, I've been listening to a lot of other podcasts that have been talking a lot about this but you really hit the nail on it when you say about how the more difficult of a life situation we are in, in our financial situation, the more difficult it is to afford healthy food. And then it's just this vicious cycle of unhealthy eating, unhealthy living. So it's incredible what you're doing to be a part of the positive turnaround of that. And the impact it will have, I imagine is very wide ranging.
You mentioned that you were living greener and healthier. Are you vegetarian? I am, which is why I'm asking. I'm just curious.
I went through a range of diets actually, I went vegan for a while. I have got my morning smoothie here which is made out of bananas and kale and dates and a whole heap of minerals and green stuff, which is really great. I went vegan for 18 months, I was a big meat eater because we're a German family, it's always meat, meat, meat, every day! I was like, no, let's see if I can actually do this. So I took the vegan challenge, I lasted for 18 months and at the end of it, I was starting to become a little bit, a bit wobbly because of the nutrients, I wasn't paying attention to it. But I did the challenge and I was actually quite happy with myself, it was a good cleanse with the raw food juicing. There's some really amazing raw food restaurants in Vancouver and LA that we went to when we were traveling and the food quality is just sensational and you can eat quite a lot of it and feel good. And you know when you feel heavy and tired after a normal takeout or a normal restaurant meal, this kind of food was actually really delicious. So it was on a raw food run for a long time. Then I've moved back into meats again because I’ve got to listen to my body. I did vegan again a second time for one year and I was very strict and everyone in my family and friends were like, No, you've got to have some meat. I was like, No, I'm going to do it right to the last minute. And the last month, we went out to a steakhouse of all things, and my friends were having steak and I was like, I will eat you if you don't give me some of that steak, I was so hungry, my body wanted meat so bad. I was like, No, I'm just going to do the last 30 days and then we'll go to a steak restaurant and I’ll have it then. So when you're on certain health diets, you've got to monitor your own nutrients and your own body as well, because there is.. just because it's vegan, doesn't mean it's healthy and if you’re vegetarian, you're missing certain essential nutrients and vitamins and minerals as well. So I've gone now to a balanced diet where we do have meat, but not as much, but it's more plant based.
Yeah. Which is good for the environment too, right? It has so many good effects, eating a more plant based diet. Yeah, sure. But it's good, we talk to entrepreneurs a lot about habits, right? Healthy habits and morning routines and things that they have incorporated into making their lives better and more balanced. So it's interesting, we don't talk a lot about diet on this podcast but I'm always very curious and interested in about how.. how to optimise, right, because I do think that is something that entrepreneurs need to do is optimise because we're limited in ways. And we're often pulled in many different directions and doing all kinds of things, wearing many hats, and yeah, it can deplete us in lots of different ways.
Exactly. And diet is an important, diet and nutrition are fundamental to cognitive functioning especially as an entrepreneur, the level of stress that you go through and running a charity is something completely different as well. You've got to have your optimisation to be able to function.
What's your go to? Is it your morning smoothie? Is it a morning practice? What is it that really gets you across the line when you’re feeling a little depleted or the charity is running you ragged.
I actually have for the last couple of years been doing a lot of mind science research where it's more meditation, focus visualisation, working in that sort of sphere. In the mornings, I do my meditation, I do my Qigong, I can't live without my green smoothie - it cleans my whole body out. If I have a normal breakfast, I just feel really sluggish so this is very light. And then it's rowing and some exercise, basic exercises in the morning, really get the day started. It's also if you’re pre-planning your day, the night before, you get up at a certain time. Sometimes I'll wake up at 3:00 or 3:15 in the morning, my body's eager to get things done. And then I'm ready to go so I'll actually miss all my morning exercise and I'll just get smashing straight into getting work done. And by about 8:00, which is like five, four and a half hours later, I would have done half a day's worth of work straight away and then I can do my breakfast and exercise then. So it kind of depends on that sort of flow during the week, of how I sort of lay it out.
Okay, how often are you getting up at 3:30 in the morning?
About twice to three times a week.
Ooolalah. OK. Yeah, this morning was one of them. So I've already done a big day today with deliveries, I was at the Coolum Farm at 6 o'clock. I live in Caboolture and I had to get to Millen Farm so that was a four and a half hour round trip.
Fantastic. So tell us more about the farms and in particular, paint the picture of the entire ecosystem. You've started a charity that delivers food for free to the food insecure. You also sell coffee to help supplement that, you're also using the farms for other organisations and institutions to get benefit from. Paint that picture for us so that we have a really good understanding of what the Mini Farm Project is about and then we'll start talking about the vision for its future.
Okay, so the underlying word really is value add in our organisation. So the idea is, we want to make sure that our network of charity farms, which is what we're working to build, has enough value to get interest for donations and grants, as a primary source of income which all charities really work on as their model. So they have large gift givers, philanthropists and they have corporate sponsors, and have individuals as well. We want to be more than just a farm growing a potato or a carrot for somebody in need. We actually want to have a community program where we're building community in each area.
So the idea for the Mini Farm Project is creating a network of farms from Tweed or Brisbane all the way up to Cairns along the eastern border of Australia, where we're actually working on food insecurity on a local level, region by region. And then we have a stakeholder panel in each region which is inclusive of local business owners, individuals, community organisations like the Lion’s Club and Rotary, other organisations and schools come on board to actually facilitate and help us get into that community to build farms, because we don't know all of the communities up the coast. That provides community inclusion in what we do and a sense of ownership and openness about our organisation. Then we plan for farms, like in Samford, for example, this is the one behind me in the image - that was partnered with Meals on Wheels, so we get our charities on board as well and they helped us fundraise for that. So the idea for us is to leverage off all of these organisations' names to build value. When a business or an individual sponsors a bed for a year that actually funds our farms. So in Samford we have 70 (garden) beds, we sponsor a bed out to a business or an individual or a community group for $2,000 and that money actually goes to the operation of that farm. And then all that food is then given for free every week to our charity partners and that's the idea, it’s free food every week to charity. And then the charity creates meals with that food or they give it away in hampers.
So at the moment we're looking at Market Garden style farms which are based off the American Market Gardeners, like the Jean-Martin Fortier, Curtis Stone (author of The Urban Farmer), Creekmore market gardeners, in rows, high yield crops, short turnaround, we're just wanting to feed people, making sure that the food is coming out. We're also looking at having fish farms, chicken farms so we can get the eggs, hopefully we can get some orchards so we get the fruit and then we can put the chickens and the guinea fowl in, so we can have a combined ecosystem of the animals to the plant so we can really enrich the soil. We also want to do bushfoods as well and have a reconciliation program with traditional custodians in each of the areas that we're in, growing their kinds of food. In Australia it's only been 200 plus years that we've had European crops here to sustain the population that’s come in. Those crops are not actually used to all the major weather cycles over the last 60,000 years that are happening now and in Australia, we have some really amazing bushfoods that are 30% more nutritious, denser with protein, and have high levels of minerals and vitamins as well. So when we're looking at nutrient deficiency, when we're looking at replacement of European crops, Australia has really an abundance of natural bushfoods that we want to incorporate which also then becomes a resilience component to a changing climate situation, which we're now facing. Because all the cycles are changing and yes, you'll get the media a bit hysterical with propaganda about climate change and things like that but there is a change happening. But it's also, we come under the cycle process, so it's all cyclical for us. So we're following the cycles, making sure that we're following the patterns because we have to make sure that all of our farms function to continue to grow food. So if the European crops don't work when it's so hot here because it's actually getting quite warm in the Brisbane area, and it's fluctuating now, Logan, for example, we started planting in late January, early February, and we're getting mixed results in our crop disbursements and growth. They’re three weeks behind schedule, some have popped, some haven't, so it's about finding that right balance with the current weather conditions. But these bushfoods have been here longer, they're indigenous, and they will actually be more resilient, and they have more proteins that we need. So these are some of the exciting things that we're looking at, instead of just growing vegetables and carrots and boring radishes, we actually want to have the full plethora of a meal where we can actually give that, so free fish, free chicken eggs, fruits, vegetables, all these goodies for charities. And the reason why we do it for free is, all charities in Australia actually have to buy food. And we think we can do a better model as opposed to let's not have 10,000 people running around looking for donations so we can actually buy food, it's like, let's give it to them for free. The businesses, communities and individuals sponsoring one of our garden beds, they're the ones actually doing the growing, we become the facilitator and they're the ones making the contribution. So that's how we position ourselves in the charitable market. And then when we have all of our farms, we can then look at vertical farming using climate change technology, we have an organisation that has shipping container farms that we'd like to use, there's also solar panel water generators that we'd like to have in the rural areas or the outback where we can serve water. And there's a whole plethora of different exciting things that we’re going to work towards to actually make sure that we are making Queensland food secure by our Olympics (in 2032), and then the rest of Australia as well.
By 2032. So for $2,000 a business, small or large, can buy a garden bed and that's what, good for a year or is it $2,000 a month?
It’s for a year. So it becomes a tax deductible donation and we recognise the donor for a 12 month period of time. So they get 12 social media posts that they can put on their social media channels going, Hey, look at what we're doing. We're actually feeding people in our community and because you're a customer, you're actually doing that as well. So it sort of goes down to the customer level. Then they get a plaque on their bed. And then we give them regular updates and shout outs as well. So that's one of the ways that we fund.
We sell the coffee, which is through Phil Di Bella’s Coffee Commune in Brisbane. It's a drop shipping service online, so we don't have to touch it, it's just automatically people can order their coffee. And it's really good quality coffee and the idea for this is we make about $10 to $15 for a bag. So we want Australians to wake up with purpose simply enjoying their coffee, they can actually fund one of our farms. And when you're looking at the numbers, if we can sell 20,000s of these bags in the Southeast Queensland or in Australia in a month, we can actually fully fund a one acre farm that produces up to 40,000 equivalent meals in a year. And if these 20,000 people come back every single month and subscribe, those 20,000 people over 12 months will have actually created up to 500,000 equivalent meals for charity, simply by enjoying coffee at home or in the workplace.
Those are incredible numbers.
They are incredible numbers when you look at it and that's why I was like, wow, this is a great opportunity. So now, the big challenge is like we got to sell this stuff! So we’ve got to get people involved in this.
You’re looking for 20,000 people to order coffee from you?
Yeah.
As they would order it from anywhere else. So why not be helping supporting a business for good?
Yeah, what's the other brand doing for the community? This is going straight into a farm. It's employing people, it's feeding people, it’s providing programs. Like, for example at Samford, we're doing a Building Community program where we've got the University of Sunshine Coast, the University of Queensland involved with a Gardening for Good program; it's a dementia caring program, so that people who are living with dementia and their carers come to our farm, the students in these universities do a psych profile over three months, and then see if there's any improvement during that time, so it's an inclusion program. And this is what the coffee pays for, it pays for the farm, it pays for the food, it pays for the farmer, the inputs, and also for the community to actually come and be involved in what we do as well. That's a big important component for us.
Yeah, I think that's really amazing how you involve so many more than just farmers and the charity that they supply to. It really is where anybody can get involved in lots of different ways and feel really good about the things you're going to do anyway, like you said about buying the coffee. Right? They're going to buy. We all buy coffee, everyone loves coffee. And it's a good, it's a good product too. How did you make the link between coffee and farming? Are you a big coffee person? Where did that come from?
Don't tell anybody but I actually don't drink coffee. But I stalked Phil Di Bella after a business breakfast meeting that I went to. He was doing a presentation. He goes, Oh, you know, if you have any questions just hit me up on LinkedIn, big mistake number one! And so I did. And then I told him about this charity, we started having a conversation, he started liking our social media a lot more and understanding what we're doing. And then I only met him formally late last year. And he says, Look, I’d love to help, there's an opportunity for you that you can actually make more money simply by selling coffee because we're doing a drop shipping service, because he runs Coffee Commune which is a really great sort of hub for coffee enthusiasts and roasters alike, to do their coffee thing. And we were like, You know what, this is a great idea. 74% of Australians love their coffee, it's a no brainer. Even if you just try it once just buy a bag, you can fund a whole farm and you're not creating one meal, you're actually creating a meal for an entire year. And that's the unique thing about that product is you’re creating food to feed somebody for a whole year, simply by having a cup of coffee, and it's great for home and also for offices. So we're hoping that businesses get behind this and go hey, we've had this many bags of coffee, get some rivalry between some businesses and things like that to sell the coffee and have it for their stuff, where they then actually are creating these farms. And then we have the whole social media thing to support that as well, which is really great.
Yeah! Of course.
My goodness! I can see a cafe that’s only selling your coffee. I mean, it’d just be an incredible feel good; as Aussies, we do love our coffee and our cafes.
We're also going to have NFT's as well, if you know about digital art. We're actually just putting that onto my Shopify store now which is going to be really exciting as a different alternative to funding an entire farm as well.
Fantastic. How can people find you? What's your coffee called? How do they get a hold of it? If somebody wants to buy your coffee? How do they find it?
Yep, so it's the Mini Farm Blend and it's available on our website, which is mfp.org.au.
Just look for the coffee, there's ground and whole beans. And with the ground there's like 10 different grounds you can actually get, it's all on our Shopify store, all automated and they can choose whatever they'd like
Super cool, we’ll include the link in the description so that people can…
Yeah and it’s delivered within a couple of days and we do Australia-wide. So anybody listening Australia-wide can actually order this straight away and people are like, well, you know, I'm in Western Australia, but I want coffee, but you're not here. It's like we're going to be working towards Western Australia. We're going to be working towards Australia-wide farms but we're starting in Southeast Queensland first because obviously this is where we are.
Yeah, and you've got to start. How long has this charity been in existence? When did you first found it?
So I had the idea in 2010. We set up the first farm at the back of my house in 2014 because we built a new house here in Burpengary and it was beautiful green grass in the back and then I converted it into one of these farms out there! And then we registered the charity in 2015 once all the processes and making sure that I'm not crazy, and that this will actually work, which it did. Because I was doing full time work at the same time I was doing this. We then set up three farms in Brisbane, we had a grow bag farm in Coorparoo, which was showing that we can grow food anywhere in Brisbane because there's a lot of land that's actually toxic or contaminated in the Brisbane area because of the floods and all the industrial chemicals have been going through it, the asbestos.
We also did a raised garden bed farm industrial estate in Woolloongabba, which is in the IBC tanks, (Intermediate Bulk Containers) cut in half. And then we also used existing garden beds in a business centre in Spring Hill as well to grow food. So the idea back then was to have volunteer farms in the dead centre of the city to actually grow food that was given to charity. So we use local volunteers. On weekends, we had up to 20 people per farm which was really exciting, come along because it's two minutes away from your home. Unfortunately, COVID killed all that and 2020 and so I lost my job at the same time. So we pivoted, and then we started these larger farms around the periphery of the city. Obviously, we can grow more food but now we employ a full time farmer or a casual farmer to actually run and manage those, so I don't actually have to do that. I can work on building that network, building a community and getting more people interested in what we do.
Are you still getting your hands dirty, though? Do you still go out and pick the carrots?
I do. I don't know if it's helping, I'm probably more of a hindrance to our farmers. But on Wednesdays I go out and do all the packing for the orders. They clean them so we pack it in all of our boxes because we sell some of what we grow to wholesalers and our retail customers. So I'm the one that does all the boxes, I do most of the deliveries as well. And then sometimes I'll fumble around and help weed or plant some seedlings when one of the farmers needs me.
Yeah, nothing quite like that is there like just getting your hands dirty and getting in there. I love it!
It's an amazing office and this is one of the other exciting things with this charity is, I'm running this charity from a laptop or a mobile phone out of my kitchen, there's no buildings. When we have a farm, our team who hopefully we’ll be able to employ more people in the future, they'll be working on the farms and if we have admin staff, they can remote in or they can work at a shipping container on one of our farms. It gets them out of the house as well, it gets them out of the office and we're back into balance with nature, it's a really important thing. So if we're giving good quality food to people, we need to have good quality staff as well. So having that outdoors thing working in the soil, touching the plants, that's really important for our bio electric body.
Nick tell us where you see this organisation, your work, being in, let's say five years time, what's the bigger picture vision here?
Okay, my big, hairy audacious goal is to have over 100 charity farms from Brisbane to Cairns in the next 5 to 10 years, then extending down into New South Wales to Sydney and then moving west into the rest of Australia. And then I want an NGO and have an international organisation in other countries as well.
Doing the same thing.
Doing the same thing. It's local food, local people, climate resilience, sustainability, it's all local, and niche stuff. So we want to do domestically because a lot of charities send money overseas and there's a lot of resentment about that so we want to have that as a separate thing. But then we also want to go international where we can actually learn from other cultures, their gardening farming types, then we can incorporate that into other areas as well. So there's an exchange of knowledge but then we can also help them as well if they're depleted in their knowledge bank as well.
And we've talked about an individual being able to buy a bag of coffee, we've talked about an organisation or a small or medium business being able to pay $2,000 for a year to support you. Do you also have significantly larger corporations backing you? Do you get government grants? Are you getting significant funding in, from those kinds of sources?
At the moment, we don't. We do get grants, we've just applied to the gaming fund for $100,000 for our new Wamuran farm. Hopefully we'll get that, fingers crossed. But it's a knife fight now with other charities because everyone is looking for the dollars because it's really hard.
We do have a program where we're looking at larger philanthropists to come behind it, larger businesses can actually fund the entire farm and then they have all the benefits involved with it. It becomes XYZ company growing food for those in need… another Mini Farm Project. So they go, here's a whole heap of money to fund the farm, develop it, we employ the staff, they get all the naming rights for it, their staff can come down and do all the volunteering and it actually becomes part of the culture of their organisation, it checks their ESB, ticks the culture, the climate initiative, ticks the boxes of inclusion, resilience, and all those processes simply by funding an entire farm as well. So we do have these larger products that we do.
What I would really like to see in the future is to have those American camps; Australians grew up on the movies where the American kids used to go to those camps for six weeks. Camp Cooganagua or something like that, with the yellow buses that take them there, and they all live in those huts and they do activities. What I'd love to do is have that here in Australia, where we actually have Australian camps, not work camps, but like farms, where the kids can actually come, like the American version but they actually work on the farm. They learn life skills, they learn sewing, they learn how to interact with one another, it's inclusion based, they drop their lives at the door, and they just give up themselves, and they learn how to participate in community and also help the less fortunate at the same time by simply working on the field, interacting with animals, and then also eating the produce has actually grown at that farm. So we break the cycle of that junk food, we're giving them nutrients and we're giving them a really good healthy start to something amazing. So I'd love to have, you know, a number of centres across Australia, where we actually do the summer camps or winter camps.
Oh, my God, as a parent of two kids, I'll tell you, that sounds incredible and something so needed. Kids these days are only on tablets and computers and technology and are so far away from nature, and from growing food and understanding that cycle, they only see food come out of the refrigerator, maybe a grocery store, but that's about it. Otherwise, they have no clue where it comes from, mom just buys it that it's there!
Yes. Lamb comes from a shopping centre, no it doesn't!
Yeah, just understanding that and getting in touch with nature, I can see that will develop a future love for that, for land, for gardening, for growing food and for helping. The impact is just phenomenal. Just phenomenal. So tell us, because not all this is easy and running a charity is very challenging. What are some major moments you've had where maybe you've said, I'm crazy, I gotta quit. This is bananas. This is.. I don't want to do this anymore. Have you had any of those?
Yeah, on a regular basis. Sometimes I'm like, What am I doing? I'm trying to get all this stuff done and I think it's because I'm a bit of an idealist. I live in a Star Trek world where everyone wants to contribute and improve themselves and it's all lovely, and fairytales. And then, you look at the reality, and I get frustrated because other people don't see it. But that's because I'm a creative mind person with being a founder, I'm living a different parallel to most people so that's my frustration. I have spat my dummy, so to say, a couple of times on farms, and one significant time was actually when we were on one of our Brisbane farms. I was like, damn, this is not working, I threw my tools out, I was done, went to the gate, locked up the farm, I'm going home because I'm angry now, so I shut down. But when I was doing that, an old gentleman came around the corner and goes, You know what, I've been walking past here for the last couple of weeks and I just wanted to let you know, you're doing a really good job. And I was like, okay, so the universe just caught me, Yeah, you needed a little pat on the back, stop crying, get back to work. So these are the kinds of things that you've got to be intuitive about. But I think it's important to dummy spit sometimes or just reflect and go, This isn't working, how do I move through this? Because sometimes you get in the way of your own creation and you’ve got to step back a bit, you’ve got to pull back quite a bit. For me hospitality was like, do the work, do the work, do the work, get it done, get it done, get it done. Now it's about, Let's actually let this flow, let the people come in, just chill back a little bit and stop getting in your own way because you're actually making this process work. And you're looking at the mind sciences and the flow and working with ether, it's all about let's get back to spirit and calm, let’s centre ourselves and let's let the thing work itself out, as opposed to you prodding and poking around and making it actually worse. So that's a good identifier that I've learned over the last 10 years doing this.
Yeah, sometimes as a CEO, you've got to step back and which can be sometimes the hardest thing, right? It can be the hardest thing to do.
Yeah, and you got to take a day off because you're just killing yourself.
That's hard to do. That is hard to do as a Founder of any organisation or business is to take actual breaks, time off, rest, to be able to reset and go again absolutely. Any advice for people out there that might like you have a big vision of a world that they want to improve on and see a niche where they can actually make an impact. But they don't know where to start? How does someone start? What do they need to know? What do you wish somebody had told you?
What I did was I came up with an idea on paper and then I spoke to somebody about it and they were like, Oh, another crazy Nick idea. And I was like, Okay, fine. Then I actually went out and did it. I just built the farm. I just did it. Here's my idea in manifest, and then they saw it and they were, wow, this is amazing. Now we see it. I find if you just do what it is that you want to do, even if it's a scale model, something tangible that people can see the shift and understand, you'll get that buy-in which then fuels you as an entrepreneur or CEO or a founder to actually move to the next step. And one important thing for me is to have somebody that's close to you, that you can confide in and go, Am I a mental patient by thinking this is going to be a good idea? And you want full hard truth from that individual that goes, Yeah, you are, it's not going to work. And then if you still want to do it, you just go and make it happen. But that person is a supporter to you. I think everyone like myself, we creative minds, we're all a little bit touched! We need grounding occasionally, where somebody goes hang on, have a look at it this way. I'm here 100% to support you. We need that tether to support us otherwise you're alone. You can't build when you're alone, you need somebody next to you to help. That's my recommendation to anyone starting out; have that one trusted friend or personal mentor for that little bit of inspiration and help. Then just do the idea. For me, I bought my first farm in my backyard, I went through the process as I told people about it. And then I burned my ships so to speak, I wasn't going back, this is where I'm going. And I told every human being that I ever met, I'm starting a charity, this is what I'm doing. If I fail, I'll fail on these merits because I'm burning the ships, I'm not going back, this is the way forward. So it's a mindset thing and if anyone's interested, have a look at the mind sciences, read about meditation and creative visualisation, that just strengthens your vision. And it also strengthens your inner self by maintaining calm, and focus and breathing to make sure that you can get through the stress into the next step as well.
I feel more peaceful just hearing you talk about it. And actually not just being silly about it, it really is a true thing, you tap into your inner wisdom and it really gets you through so much. So we'd like to ask people on this podcast, what resilience means to them. But I'm going to ask you a slightly different question. And that is, how do you build resilience in your world with everything that you have going on and this massive vision that you're achieving?
I think it's community for me. Building networks of people who buy into my vision which is a reinforcement and then they go out and talk about it to others as well and that's how we've grown organically, by me talking to people, and they're going, Hey, this crazy guy's got an idea about all these farms and all this stuff and let's get behind him. That's kind of what I do, is I involve others in what we do, I champion others. And you'll see also in our social media photos, I'm not in every photo. I do that deliberately because it's not about me, it's not about my ego. It's about others, so I champion others, and it's about having that community around me to keep me going. That's my energy. That's my fuel. Seeing people on the farm volunteering. And then when I do deliveries to charity, seeing the charities going, Wow, thank you very much. I appreciate that and seeing people eat that food really fuels me as well, it just keeps me going.
Yeah, seeing the impact. I mean, that's the great thing about what you do is you're very close to who you are impacting by what you do. Well, it's been an amazing conversation and it's so inspiring talking to you, Nick, and everything you've accomplished so far. And I see your vision, I see your vision and I manifest that for you because I think it is not even far off. And I think we'll have a conversation again, hopefully sooner than later and you'll have more to update and more great things because it makes sense and it's simple and it's impact driven. I don't see why people wouldn't get on board. So we're excited to share this podcast, your story, what you're doing with a greater audience and we'll share how to get a hold of you and how to join in this mission with Nick and the Mini Farm Project and thank you so much. We really appreciate your time.
Thank you, appreciate it.
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Thanks for joining us on Resilient Entrepreneurs, we're Laura and Vicki from Two Four One. We love supporting entrepreneurs, especially with mindset, marketing and motivation which is why we’ve built an incredible community of business founders who meet weekly in the Level-Up League. If you'd like to know more about it, look us up at www.twofouronebranding.com
