Joanne Walters and Yarrabah Innovation and Accelerator Hub give a leg up to local business ideas
Working from the beach or in the park among the green ants, Joanne Walters quickly recognised doing business at Yarrabah was not the same as working in Cairns.
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Working from the beach or in the park among the green ants, Joanne Walters quickly recognised doing business at Yarrabah was not the same as working in Cairns.
How she came to facilitate fledgling businesses at Yarrabah is interesting enough, but the progress some of those businesses are making is also starting to turn heads.
Early in her career Ms Walters worked as a flight attendant and got an interest in business when, she said, in the small hours of trans-Pacific flights she’d be in the galley overhearing Japanese businessmen talking about shares and real estate.
Being a Japanese speaker helped with the eavesdropping.
“I was always interested in how people did business,” she said.
Her parents ran small businesses, she and her own family ran businesses, and working in a business enterprise centre in Darwin with Indigenous people there for three years was a great introduction to working at Yarrabah.
She was a natural choice to work in Yarrabah’s Innovation and Accelerator Hub, established in September 2021, which she refers to as the Business Hub.
She started with a marketing program, teaching residents how to promote business through means such as social media.
One of the more high profile clients she has worked with is Nathan Mundraby, who in 2019 toured 38 cities in 12 countries with Hugh Jackman and his one-man show The Man. The Music. The Show.
Nathan is an artist and performer, but like any artist he’d have high points, such as that tour or an exhibition in a gallery, and then find himself sitting at home in Yarrabah wondering what would come next. That’s where the business facilitator comes in.
“What are the opportunities you have as a world-recognised artist and performer, how can you sell your art at a level you deserve?” Ms Walters asked.
Next month she is accompanying Mr Mundraby to a summit in New York, so the show goes on.
Not all the Yarrabah Hub’s clients are as high profile, but they are nevertheless plugging away at their own business ideas, from lawnmowing and garden maintenance businesses to building a security firm and a food products company.
“They’re all businesses going to start in Yarrabah and they are happier to stay in their own community. To most people it’s very scary out there,” she said.
Coupling Ms Walter’s business acumen with the energy of a large community full of ideas and new possibilities does have huge potential for Cairns and further afield.
One of the incipient businesses is a keen vegetable grower who was looking for a market for his yams and sweet potatoes.
Networking through the business hub put him in touch with the Far North Queensland Food Incubator, and Ms Walters said he was excited by the possibilities of working with them.
“I took him there and it absolutely blew his mind, he was shaking with excitement,” she said.
“Up until then he was just going to grow yams or sweet potatoes, and now he is thinking, ‘what can I grow to turn into a product?’
“Now we’ll see what ideas we can come up with and grow a business out of that, and be more strategic about it.”
Networking is a strong point with the business hub, and hooking locals up with organisations such as the Food Incubator or the Chamber of Commerce is already starting to shake out new possibilities.
When a class at Yarrabah High was planning to print a series of T-shirts to raise money for a school trip, and the T-shirts failed to arrive, she improvised and had the students produce a whole new range of products for the kitchen.
“I get it now,” one of the students said.
“You just don’t give up.”
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