youtube interview - From Services to Products: Sahra Dixon’s Business Evolution

I've recently launched a YouTube series featuring interviews with fascinating women in business, exploring topics that frequently arise in my DMs and everyday conversations.

The first interview feature an inspiring conversation with Sahra, a dynamic entrepreneur balancing two thriving businesses in rural New South Wales. In this candid chat, we dive into Sahra's journey from city life to running a cattle farm, while simultaneously managing The Wool Shed, a picturesque venue for long table lunches, and Le Sac, an innovative gardening belt business.

Sahra's story is one of courage, creativity, and relentless drive. She shares valuable insights on juggling multiple ventures, transitioning from service-based to product-based businesses, and the realities of rural entrepreneurship. Whether you're a budding business owner, a creative soul, or simply curious about life on an Australian farm, this conversation offers a wealth of inspiration and practical advice.

Join us as we explore the challenges and triumphs of building businesses from scratch, the importance of just starting somewhere, and how to balance family life with entrepreneurial ambitions. Sahra's infectious enthusiasm and 'can-do' attitude shine through, making this a must-watch for anyone dreaming of turning their passions into successful ventures.

Thanks for turning in, Honey x

You can check out my bio here.

Video Transcript:

Honey: Hey there everyone. I'm having a chat today with my friend and work colleague, Sarah. She has two businesses. One is a product-based business, La Sac, which is a gardening belt I use in the garden. Her other one is the Wool Shed, which is long table lunches and this incredible sprawling storybook-style scene on the far south coast of New South Wales. I met Sarah via Instagram. She reached out and said hi. Then we met in person at her property and hit it off straight away. It was manic laughter and just crazy, fast talking creative, lots of creative shares. After that, it was ranting back and forth with kids chats, business ideas, and I feel like it was an instant friendship. So Sarah, welcome. Thank you for coming on.

Sahra: Thanks for having me, honey. We're just now going to share our wild chats with your followers, so that's cool.

Honey: Yeah, I know they get a bit out of hand, don't they? Especially at five o'clock in the morning.

Sahra: Try to keep it PG.

Honey: My main reason to have you on, Sarah, was to talk about how you have two businesses going at the one time. For most people, having one business is a pretty hardcore venture, and you've got two. One is a service-based business, the Wool Shed for the long table lunches. The other is the product-based business, La Sac. I want to chat about how those two work together and give other people ideas on whether it's worth doing and if they've got something else in the pipeline, can they support one another? Is it as easy as it looks from the outside? Can you give me a brief rundown? Your setup and how you ended up, I know from your backstory that you were more of a city dweller before and then you moved to the country. Your life changed from working with government organizations and being employed by someone in a city situation to moving to the country and now having two businesses and two kids.

Sahra: Sure. So I'll take you way back. I met my husband Hamish in Sydney in 2012. I'm from Sydney originally. Lived a bit in Queensland with my mom, but came back to Sydney in my teens and met Hamish when I was quite young in Sydney. After the birth of our firstborn, our son, we were looking to buy a place, but we couldn't work out where to go, what to do. Hamish said, "Let's go back to the country." He's from Kuma originally, a fifth-generation farmer. I said, "Yeah, let's give it a go." So we bought a property in 2020 on the far south coast of New South Wales. For me, it was the first time living on a farm, being on a farm. It was learning a whole new language. But I loved it. I really loved it. I romanticized the idea and I still believe it's as romantic. Haven't gone through a huge drought yet, so maybe that'll shift my view. But I just fell in love with the place we bought when I saw it online, and I had all these ideas of this lifestyle I would live and lead on this property. While it has been challenging, it's been pretty good, I'd say.

Sahra: We predominantly run cattle between the Monaro just outside of Kuma and here. We manage a family farm and then we farm here on this property as well. So Hamish is often back and forth between the two. Because we mainly run cattle, there was an old shed on the property, and I started, my creative juices were flowing, and that's how I came up with the idea for the Wool Shed.

Honey: That big shift to the country, I resonate with that same story, having a romanticised idea of how it was going to be. Yes, there are hard days. We don't run cattle like you do. We'd say we're definitely hobby farmers. But everything has turned out to be just as beautiful as I had expected, just probably harder and more tiring work than I could ever have imagined. But it's nice that both of our creative over-the-top visions for how things go actually turned out.

Sahra: It's wild, isn't it? It's so funny. My friends who are not from the country are fascinated. They're like, "What? You're chopping wood? You're carting two wheelbarrows of wood each day down to the house." They're like, "What?" And I'm like, I know it's hard, but it's actually amazing. I love it. And I wouldn't change it for anything.

Honey: Once you moved there and then you've seen that you've got this amazing location for the Wool Shed, how did that come about to starting to do long table lunches and then further on to La Sac?

Sahra: I'm the type of person that "just do it" is my mantra. Done is better than perfect. So I just give things a go and often they fail and I fall flat on my face. But oftentimes it works and then you realize what works better and you just keep doing it and growing things. So I thought, why not have lunches in the Wool Shed? Everybody went, "Yeah, kind of, but you're not really a chef or have you ever done that before?" And I was like, no, but could it be that hard, really? And so I just honestly, one foot in front of the other, I was like, okay, well firstly, this place needs some work. What do I got to do? So I'd strap the baby in the baby carrier and I'd go down there and I'd rip off plywood off the old wool stands, and then it was just one foot in front of the other. And I think it's my creative kind of brain in how I actually get is building things as in the idea of it. And so it was just, and then I set a date and I said, well, I'm going to launch in October, so now I have to launch in October. So what do I need to do to launch? I need a website, I need photos, I need this, I need that. And I just work through those steps.

Honey: I love how brave you are. I think that's our initial meeting, almost warm my hands on your bravery and ability just to take action when I'm still stuck there, paralysis over worrying about perfection. So I think for you, it feels really normal, but it's something that I notice is that so many people lack and often don't execute anything because they're so busy thinking about all the things that they have to do. So then it stops you from doing it because you think, oh, that all seems too hard. But you just go roll your sleeves up and go, let's go. So the fact that you get joy in that kind of building phase of a business and excited over it, that propels you further and most people feel burdened by it, is just, it's really fascinating for me.

Sahra: I think I do get stuck in it. I do definitely get stuck sometimes, especially with everything that we're running here with our farm business, not necessarily always in the cattle yards, but on the admin and all of the behind the scenes things that happen between that, the two young kids, the product based business, the Wool Shed, I do sometimes sit down and go far out. Where do I prioritize my hour? Where do I kind of, there's urgent things left, right, and center. So I do get overwhelmed with it, but also I just know from the way that I work. And the best thing for me is just do something. Just start somewhere. Just push that ahead, book a meeting, organize, log into Squarespace and buy a domain. Just do something. And that always kind of pushes me forward. But also the thing that you said before about my go, I think I'm inspired by, I have two, I have a mother-in-law and a mom who are both goers. I don't think either of them have ever said, I can't do that. They just both just give things a go. And I think for women, we're often told to be in our place and don't be brave and don't be ambitious, and don't be like, oh yeah, I could do that. So I think we just have to, why not?

Honey: Exactly. So your examples are of not someone who can't, that it's all can, which is great. It's amazing being surrounded by that.

Sahra: Absolutely. And I feel like the more that you see other people doing it, it gives you more confidence to go, well, that person wasn't born with that. They actually just walk through the steps and learn things. So it's like, well, why couldn't you learn that? Or why couldn't you do that? So I hope it doesn't come off as arrogant or overconfidence, but it's just like I just know that it's never going to be perfect when I do it. But if I like it and I enjoy it and I do, then I'll just keep getting better at it. Maybe.

Honey: I don't think it seems arrogant at all. I think it just seems very inspiring. I've said to you before, I'm like, you've got a battery in your back. Do you sleep?

Sahra: Honestly? Do you get excited by things? I just get so excited by possibilities. I think we share that. And there's people out there that are like us that are like, "Ooh, shiny object. Ooh, let's go have fun."

Honey: Totally. And I think that's why there was that instant connection. It's that energy of just like, oh, there's so much stuff to do, so many possibilities that there's almost not enough time of the day. Just like the excitement propels you to keep taking on these new kind of crazy from the outside ideas, but you've managed to execute them as well. So I would love to have some kind of insight when obviously I run a service-based business, I don't have a product. So from my perspective, I'm thinking I should... There you go. Sorry, I was going to convince saying what I can sell. I'd love to know if someone's got a service-based business or a product one that it's sort of hard to imagine having both. And so if you give me a bit of a rundown on how you started up. So you started with a service-based business, which from my perspective, which might be different for someone else, I kind of look at it as being a bit of an easier in to a product. I feel like a product especially, you're creating something from scratch like you did, and you're not just reselling something else that someone's created. There's the design, there's the backing yourself with having some money to spend on making the product and then the selling it. And I feel like there's a lot more backing yourself compared to a service-based business. What do you think?

Sahra: I don't think so. I just think that they're different with the service-based business. You are putting a lot of time, I think with business, it's either you have a lot of money or you have a lot of time. You're either learning the skill yourself or you are investing that in an expert to do it for you. So it's like, for me, I don't have a lot of money, so I just do most of it myself. So it's like with a service-based business, I had to do a lot of it myself or set it up. And a lot of time goes, a lot of labor goes into a service-based business.Certainly. Here's the rest of the transcript:

Honey: That's a good perspective.

Sahra: So to me, why I jumped to a product-based business, and mind you, I run it with my mother-in-law. So there's the two of us, but I can only, I looked at down to the stats and analytics, which is something that I love doing, and I was like, I can't do more than two of these a month with the current way my life is set up with children and a farmer.

Honey: So two long table lunches, you mean a month?

Sahra: Yeah, I could grow it, but then I need to get more staff. So I looked at, I guess the data, the output, the input, the figures in the figures out. So in any good business you're looking at that, right? And can't you do to scale it and grow it because it's a business and we're all trying to make an income off things. I guess some people might be in the privileged few that are like, oh, it's just frivolous and fun, but I guess it's a business. And so how do you scale it? That's where I went to a product and it was a product that my mother-in-law and I had spoken about a lot that we felt needed to be made. But when I was thinking about, okay, do I scale this or do I look at another thing? That's where the idea for a product came in, because you can sell a product however many a day, but with a service-based business, you have to have a certain amount of, I don't know in other ones, but for me it's seats that you sell to make it profitable. So to me, it was an obvious decision that might be naive, but then it was just like, okay, well anything takes effort and time or money. So yeah, I'll just go through the steps here on that side of it, if that makes sense.

Honey: It totally does, and that's a really good insight into that kind of stepping from one to another. The situation that I'm in at the moment when I'm only service-based business and I go through weeks of shooting and shooting so much, and then I'm exhausted, so tired, and then editing. Exactly, and then editing, and then I look back and go, oh, cool, that was a good innings, but then I'm shattered for two weeks and just don't want to even pick up my camera. And then I'm like, well, how do I keep making money? It's not like I'm not 21 anymore, so I have to think about that. So that's why, yeah, I'm really interested by your sort of thought process into going there. And when you talk about it in that way, that it's basically, once you've made that product and you put the effort into coming up with it, then you're just working on the sales. And rather than having to give your time over and over and over every day physically of making more food for the long table lunch, selling tickets, getting wine, cleaning up again,

Sahra: And then also with scale with the long table lunches, that means staff and staff are my biggest costs. So it's like, how do I grow something, which I love it, so it's never going to stop, but how do you look at other streams of income that maybe don't take as much of my physical labor? But the thing is, is that while that's the case, I think I was naive and you have to be start things, but I think I was a little bit naive in the sense of it is ongoing. Any other business, there's all the backend that you have to do and it's constant. And I'm only six months in, so it does take a lot to keep growing and scaling it.

Honey: Great. So can you tell me about the rough process of coming up with the idea, the design of La Sac and then I guess the marketing of it and how you went about it? Guessing it was a slightly different approach, the marketing of it than what it was for the Wool Shed.

[The conversation continues with Sahra explaining the process of creating and marketing La Sac, discussing business strategies, and future plans for both businesses.]

Honey: Great. Well, it was amazing chatting, Sahra. I'd love to know what's next for you. Can you reveal anything? Do you think you'll make any more products or add any more interesting things for the Wool Shed? You don't have to tell me what they're, but are you thinking already?

Sahra: The Wool Shed, we are going to do hopefully more than one lunch a month from next season. So spring and La Sac working on a second kind of colour collection, so that should be in November. That's exciting to add a couple more colours to the mix.

Honey: I can't wait. I can add a few more to mine. We've got three in our household, and they're all incredibly filthy. We should wash them, but then I've got to go without them.

Sahra: Yes. Wash they. Well,

Honey: Yeah, I need to have another one that's a show one. I often look down and go, Ooh, Sahra would like a picture of my La Sac belt right now. But it's so disgusting and I'm not willing to give it up. So there's always stuff in it that I need.

Sahra: Well, I'll send you a show one.

Honey: Okay. How about that? Yeah. Well, thank you. And how can we find you? What's the best way for people to buy a La Sac or come to your wonderful lunch or just observe it from afar because they're too far away?

Sahra: Instagram, the The Wool Shed is our Instagram, or La Sac is our other Instagram. Or you can find us on our website www.thewoolshednsw.com or shoplasac.com.

Honey: Amazing. Thank you. And I'll include all those links at the bottom. Yeah. Thank you for your time, Sahra. Thanks.