The Wedding Nest’s Jacqui Scruby and Site Tour’s Michael Scruby launched two businesses while unexpectedly pregnant

THERE’S never a ‘right time’ to start your own business. Jacqui and Michael Scruby quit their high-paying corporate gigs to follow their passions and then unexpectedly fell pregnant.

Jacqui and Michael Scruby took the plunge and started their own businesses. But life had a little surprise for them.

RUNNING your own business is a lot of work. Raising a child is a lot of work.

Running two businesses, launching a third, raising one child and expecting a second is a hell of a lot of work — but far from impossible if you quickly come to terms with the fact that your life is going to be absolutely crazy and unconventional.

But this could be the best thing that has happened to you — it was for me.

Before starting our own businesses, my husband and I had successful careers in the corporate world — I was a management consultant dealing with climate change and before that a lawyer.

My husband Michael was a group sales director in outdoor advertising. The money was great but we were restless. We had travelled extensively and were constantly coming up with start-up ideas without following through. Eventually we bit the bullet and decided we were going to give a start-up a real crack.

Jacqui and Michael Scruby quit their jobs and started two businesses, all the while pregnant with their first child.

Our big idea was… lollies. Well, we had two. One in outdoor advertising and one in lollies. The latter had a far lower buy-in so we went with it. During his time selling advertising in airports, Michael discovered a sweet stall at Kingsford-Smith — he knew they were doing very well financially so we looked at replicating this in the UK. We registered a business name and decided to set up at Stansted Airport. Michael quit his job and flew out first to get things going. Then I found out I was pregnant — definitely not planned.

London was out. When you’ve got a baby you want to be close to your family. So Michael spat out the sweets and came back. This is where luck plays a big part. If we had found out earlier we were expecting, Michael never would’ve quit his job. But he had, so we went hard on plan B — Site Tour, a buying and selling platform for outdoor advertising.

Michael and Jacqui Scruby with daughter Sienna.

It required huge capital and lots of professional developers. But we were so determined to do our own thing that we re-mortgaged our house and put our Bondi apartment on AirBnB to earn more money. We worked pretty much around the clock with Michael selling the idea to potential investors and using his industry expertise to get the product right, and me working on the business and legal side while holding down a full-time job.

During this hectic time we got married. We had been engaged prior to falling pregnant so went ahead with the day. It was at this time that I realised there were no wedding registries that catered for what I wanted — the ability to list all the designer homewares products featured in magazines. So I did it myself. A few friends were impressed and asked if I could do it for them too. That’s how The Wedding Nest idea came about.

Jacqui Scruby started The Wedding Nest, a bespoke gift registry service, after finding a gap in the market during her own wedding preparations.

After our daughter Sienna was born things started to roll with Site Tour. There’s nothing like a child to motivate you. We had convinced a handful of investors to come on board, including Ted Pretty. His was the most unconventional pitch. After hearing our daughter was waiting with my mother in the lobby, he asked them to come up and we pitched Site Tour to him with Sienna in tow. He very quickly invested. I think what he saw wasn’t necessarily a flawless business plan but two people who were absolutely determined to make it work.

We had no money, all of it was being reinvested into Site Tour. Michael had even gone to Ted for another investment and was considering working a part-time job on the side.

While I was on maternity leave, my friend Zoe and I ploughed all $2000 of my savings into a website for The Wedding Nest and the business was a go. Through word of mouth and some lucky media coverage it started to grow.

I took a redundancy and my business partner Zoe and I opened a shop in Mosman for The Wedding Nest.

Jacqui Scruby with daughter Sienna in front of her store in Mosman.

Most of our friends and family have no idea why we did what we did, especially while we were expecting, but for us it was easy to rationalise. Everything in life is a risk, even staying in a job someone pays you to do. You could get made redundant at any time. And if you’re not happy sitting under fluorescent lights all day, never seeing your kids, it doesn’t matter how intellectually stimulating or high brow your job is, or how much you’re getting paid — you’re not living. To both Michael and I, it would have been worse to have never tried than to have tried and failed.

If you fail what do you lose? Your investment, some time, potential earnings — just like going back to uni. But the reward can be much greater. We knew the risk, we knew what we had to do to make it work and we knew when we would have to pull the plug if we were failing. It was crazy but calculated. And we knew we wanted to try.

Site Tour now has more than 10 employees.

And now I’m unexpectedly pregnant again. I’m eight weeks off giving birth and I’m starting another business — a designer website and luxury travel business that caters for couples who want their gift registry to pay for their honeymoon. It’s called The Wishing Nest.

Some will say it’s not the ideal time, but there’s never an ideal time.

Meanwhile Site Tour has more than 10 employees and business is rolling in for The Wedding Nest. We are by no means swimming in money. Our apartment is still on AirBnB. But we are happy, and Sienna is happy, and we’re growing businesses we really love. Give us a year and we might even try for another child.

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