EY’s professional advice helped small businesss on the ground

BCA’s Biggies Awards finalist: EY launched one of Australia’s most successful private sector bushfire relief initiatives, and it all started with a round of drinks.

A home destroyed by fire in Kangaroo Valley. Picture: Getty Images

The Business Council of Australia’s Biggies Awards finalist: EY

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One of Australia’s most successful private sector bushfire relief initiatives, which assisted more than 500 small business owners, started with a round of drinks.

When fire tore through Kangaroo Valley, a community of 800 people on NSW’s south coast, local resident and EY partner Andi Csontos leapt into action. She posted an offer on the local community Facebook group to shout beers to the Rural Fire Service in the local pub.

It started a chain reaction that led to the creation of a grassroots emergency response network, connecting neighbour to neighbour like never before.

Csontos, who has lived in the town for three years, was inundated online with requests for help as shell-shocked residents searched for the essentials to restart their lives.

“It was just an emergency response at that point,” says Csontos, who works in the Climate Change and Sustainability Services section of EY.

“We had people needing homes, water, power generators.

“We were dealing with people who were distressed, people who had lost everything. They would ask, ‘I don’t have a licence, how do I get a licence?

“We don’t have food. We don’t have a kitchen’.”

Csontos began collecting details of those who had lost homes and businesses along with others willing to offer what they could. But as donations increased and the number of people needing assistance ballooned, she realised she needed back-up.

Her firm answered the call and a team led by fellow EY partner Kerri Turner was assigned to help establish a business-focused support service to help with grant applications, logistics, and cutting red tape.

The support group was designed to run alongside Csontos’s community operation. The team set up drop-in centres to offer business-focused support in Eurobodalla, Bega Valley and Snowy Monaro, as well as Kangaroo Valley.

“This model Andi had implemented in Kangaroo Valley — we thought, what if we could take a similar kind of model but help specifically small businesses?” Turner says.

“We were helping everyone from the local general store to oyster farmers to some really interesting Indigenous businesses. Hairdressers, trades­people, mostly it was everything on the high street of these towns.”

EY helped 536 small businesses, secure $1.381m in COVID-19 and bushfire grants and helped 409 businesses access JobKeeper and other schemes through its drop-in centres.

Turner says missing records and inadequate payments from insurers were among the challenges people faced each day. She says that the firm continued to assist small business owners in regional NSW long after the immediate bushfire crisis passed.

In fact, it wrapped up its program just this month after more than a year of activity supported by the Department of Regional NSW. 

Turner says that while the professional service firm usually deals with far bigger companies, small business was really the lifeline in many Australian communities. 

“We obviously have resources and skills that we feel can add real value when they are passed on through applying a local lens to problems,” she says. “And we are really very humble when we engage with small business owners — they know their own business. But we have skills and knowledge and we can often, for example, help an owner access grants and support. The model we developed in 2020 works very effectively and we hope to continue this sort of work in local communities.”