Better Business Series: Buy From The Bush with Grace Brennan (Ep 2 of 2)
"Early on in Buy From The Bush, maybe a month in, our lives had kind of been taken over by it. Well, mine had anyway. And he [Jack, Grace’s husband] arrived in from the paddock, it was the middle of the drought, and he was miserable and literally covered in dust. And the household was a nightmare. And I kind of had to sit him down, and I said,
‘I think you're going to have to be okay with chaos. Because this thing that I've been doing has the opportunity to do something really important.
And I need to be able to do it... And I just need you to be okay with everything else being chaotic for a while.’
And he sort of said, ‘Okay, yeah, well, yeah, I'll let you do that.’ And I was like, ‘No, no no… You can't let me do it, you're not letting me do it, you’re not allowing me to do it… I need you to help me do it.’
And we kind of had a laugh afterwards, because it was one of those like ‘this could turn ugly very soon’ moments. But it was pretty important that I asked for his help in that way.
Because I think as a woman, your day job is kind of being a parent and a partner. And the work that you do outside of that, usually, it had always taken second place, in my life anyway.
So to allow it to take centre stage felt like an enormous sacrifice for the family. And it needed both of us to buy into that.
So, it may sound a bit precious, but I actually think that's an enormous contribution that he made to Buy From The Bush. And the other thing is that he has a very different personality to me, he's not somebody who is crippled by self doubt.
So in watching him work and build, move from family farming into a corporate environment, and watching him tackle that, I've just been able to learn all the lessons that he's learned, but by default.
And so I often think he's taught me to believe that even if you fail, your decision wasn't wrong, because you made that decision.
He really believes in his capacity to make the right decision at the time. So I think that’s a really valuable thing that I've absorbed from him also."
- Grace
Images supplied by Grace Brennan.
Sponsor: The Better Business series is supported by the Farm Business Resilience Program through the Australian Government's Future Drought Fund and the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries.
