Letting consumers 'subscribe' for their eggs with Sarah Sivyer
To describe Sarah Sivyer as worldly and business savvy would be absolutely under-selling her. Sarah describes herself as a ‘serious data nerd’ and a ‘serious business model nerd’. After sitting down with her to record the podcast, we believe it and love it!
“I'm going to sound a bit wacky, I just love excellent businesses.”
Sarah has some incredible experiences and habits that have led to this appetite for continual growth and data-driven success.
Just to name a few:
Combined Chemical Engineering and Commerce degree from Sydney University
Four years being mentored at College following High School - there’s people from these formative years who are still having an impact on Sarah’s life
Masters of Business Administration (MBA) from Oxford University in London
Working for BHP in continual business improvement projects in Western Australia
Work for Syngenta in Switzerland in food security
Nuffield Scholarship in 2018
Avid podcast listener - “How I Built This” with Guy Raz is one of her favourites!
As life would have it, it’s of course never quite that linear progression. However, all of these incredible parts of her journey eventually led Sarah to returning home to Australia.
After her MBA, Sarah was looking to return to her roots in agriculture. She grew up with parents she says were pretty progressive in the farming world for their time. With not many of her peers were following the pathway into agriculture, but she could see the opportunity.
“I think I knew I wanted to be part of a business that I would have a little bit more control over and was a little bit more agile. And yes, it's lovely coming back to the farm…
But I think what I was actually coming back to was a business that I could influence.”
At the time, the business was mostly a dairy enterprise and some beef cattle. But Sarah saw more of an opportunity and took the time to explore different business models before moving back.
She even considered starting a ginger beer business which stems from her University work experience at Carlton United Breweries - there’s so much to this story we can’t do it justice, but luckily Sarah was able to in the podcast episode!
“I could have quite easily stepped back into dairy farming with the process piece, that would have been very attractive to me. Because a lot of those businesses I feel you can make a tweak and that incremental improvement and you can see the results of that or the change of that very quickly.”
“The beef business, which we still run here, we run somewhere between 250 and 300 cows and their calves, but I felt that was a slower moving business. And it's also obviously commodity driven whereas I wanted to start a business that I could have a strong control over the price of the product.”
“It was like, is there an opportunity to use some skills especially around the process improvement piece? And that's probably why I ended up in pasteurised eggs.”
Images provided by Sarah Sivyer.
And it doesn’t stop there. Sarah had done a lot of research into potential customers and decided that she didn’t want her eggs to go down the traditional path.
“For me, it was never going to be about producing eggs that were going to sit in a supermarket or a grocery store or something like that… It was always going to be about direct to the consumer.”
Sarah settled on a subscription model and describes it like a gym membership where the money is deducted from the customer's account every week. In the spirit of supporting local businesses, Sarah has people collect eggs from cafes and shops, many of whom also use the eggs in their kitchens, and hopes the subscribers also stop for a coffee and cake!
Around 250,000 eggs go out every week just to subscribers which accounts for around 30-40% of the business. The rest go to the cafe’s that jointly act as collection points.
Even more impressive is the businesses social impact in food waste and food security… If a person decides not to pick up their eggs as they have enough at home, then they’ll redirect them straight to Aus Harvest or Rescue Kitchen. So far they have donated almost a quarter of a million eggs this way!
“The business model needed to have some sort of social impact.”
“As you can imagine, it's a different type of customer behaviour, to pay for something in advance, turn up each week and pick up these eggs and then all of a sudden you've paid but my eggs aren't there because I'm actually here on the eighth day rather than the seventh day.”
“And so you really want to manage that expectation that your eggs aren't going to be there if you don't pick them up in those first seven days. I think there is a little bit of a feelgood factor… That was a no-brainer for us to include that in the business model.”
Image supplied by Nuffield Australia.
Sarah’s Nuffield scholarship has had a huge influence on her last five years. She was actually reading a book about companies that choose to be ‘great instead of big’ which kick-started her research around the globe with Nuffield Australia.
“There's so many businesses out there that are just absolutely fabulous at what they do, and resist the urge to scale or multiply or whatever, and still are extraordinarily successful financially.”
“These businesses were really close, and not geographically close, but close to their customers, they understood their customers. They at times were almost able to predict what their customers would want or need.”
“When it was classifying that as a level of customer intimacy, they would also choose their customers and choose who they didn't want as customers, they were really specific around that.”
“And I think the other piece was they had this emotional connection, or their customers had an emotional connection with the product or business. And it was really cool.”
There’s so much more to Sarah’s story, from raising a toddler while running the business, marketing strategies and her most recent endeavours in agritourism.
Sarah still holds tight all of these experiences and fondly remembers a mentor at College telling her,
“You can have it all, just not all at once.”
The more Sarah lives, the more that has rung true.
This episode is part of our partnership with Nuffield Australia. Over 12 months, we'll be sharing a variety of stories from different scholars, understanding their journeys, pathways and how their Nuffield Scholarship has helped shape their careers.
Nuffield Australia awards scholarships each year to farmers in Australia. The objective is to increase practical farming knowledge and management skills and techniques generally. These scholarships give Australian citizens the opportunity to study farming practices in New Zealand, Europe, Asia and the Americas and those countries best suited to the scholar. They will also promote a closer understanding between farmers in the countries visited.
Since 1951, Nuffield have been building capacity for producers, their businesses, industry and rural community. It's a learning opportunity, with business friendships formed with our approachable, global network. There are over 500 Nuffield Scholars in Australia and almost 2,000 worldwide.