Central Business Associates fosters a supportive, community-driven environment akin to a large company, offering shared values, diverse services, and robust support tailored for micro, small, and start-up businesses.
These words have always been at the forefront of all the chapters of the Central Business Associates story. You can see these as themes running through the stories below and on our Blog page.
Achieving growth and impact through shared values and combined strengths.
Connecting you to trusted resources to help you and your business flourish.
Supporting you towards strategic goals and sustainable growth.
There are many benefits of working together: sharing costs, supporting each other, having a place to go for advice, or having a base to meet clients.
It’s about being part of something bigger, but maintaining your own individuality, goals and objectives.
Central Business Associates has always been about creating the environment of a supportive large company – with shared values, access to different services, and support for micro, small and start-up businesses.
Our community has grown and developed over the years, supporting other local businesses by looking for gaps in the market. Most recently, with so many people working from home, we made the decision to move to a larger, shared, flexible office, where we can collaborate and support many more small businesses, individually or as a team.
I’m Celia – the founder and owner of Central Business Associates. My values and strengths drive the business, including Meaningful Work, Leadership, Fairness and Perspective. Having worked in multiple diverse industries, those values have been consistent throughout my life and career, along with strong beliefs and advocacy in ethics and equality.
At the end of 2011, my husband and I moved to Wynnum in Brisbane’s Bayside from Scotland with our two young boys. I wanted to find ways to immerse myself in my new life and start to get involved in more business activities. Having worked as a sole trader in Scotland for several years as a business manager for other small businesses, I joined a local networking group to make some new connections. This led me to identify a local gap for a networking event for parents like me who struggled to get to breakfast or evening events. I suggested and created a new ‘coffee-morning’ networking event in 2013 for the organisation, which continues to be a success today!
With a strong background in Customer Service and Helpdesk Management, and considering my next career move, I began to see that there was a need locally for a place to network AND work at the same time, and the idea for a collaborative business centre began to take shape.
Central Business Associates opened in 2015 as a coworking and flexible workspace in Wynnum – offering memberships, desks, meeting rooms and private offices. A few years later, we moved to another floor in the same building, to focus more on coworking – with panoramic views out over the ocean and more potential for events and workshops.
Moving to the new space, with its community-centric environment, I wanted to offer more value to our members. In collaboration with another local business, we created a new Leadership Masterclass program, offering tailored workshops to enhance our business community’s leadership skills, including small group accountability sessions to ideate ways to create more foundation-building knowledge and sustainably grow our businesses. I continued to look for areas where I could facilitate collaboration, and consistently encouraged local businesses to work together to create economic growth and community support in our area.
Celebrating five years open in January 2020, I continued developing the Leadership and Development support. When my commercial lease came up for renewal towards the end of that year, I negotiated with a similar business centre, moving to their premises with most of our collaborative tenants. This allowed me to focus my attention on continuing to support the ongoing sustainable growth of local businesses, through offering a variety of specialised consultancy and contractor services.
Being able to focus my time on utilising my skills and strengths rather than concentrating on hosting workspaces created a new growth phase—for me and for my clients. The following year, a group of us took the opportunity to take on a long-term lease, allowing us to settle into a collaborative haven! We are now in the beautiful Manly Harbour Village, with yet another stunning view next to the water!
My clients finally have me all to themselves, as I no longer manage flexible workspaces. My core values, strengths, and service offerings allow me to help small businesses even more with their challenges.
A positive impact of so many people having to work from home during the pandemic was the worldwide acceptance of flexible working.
Having spent my whole career advocating for it, I was absolutely delighted when it became a topic finally being talked about globally. I actively encourage my clients and connections to think very clearly about whether there are any ways they can choose to work more flexibly, enhancing their experience of life and career.
As an introvert, I’m personally much more productive when I have better control over when, where and how I work. I prefer to work from our shared office, as we often work on projects together, and I enjoy the opportunity to have deeply connected conversations to identify new ways to enhance our services to our clients. Some days I only work a few hours, others I will be fully immersed in a project or task and will work a much longer than usual day. Depends on my energy, the deadlines and everyone’s schedules! I’m grateful to have created a business and to have found a team and clients with similar values that allow us to work in this flexible and sustainable way.
I’ve redefined the services I offer and am now engaged as a General Manager for small businesses. I can utilise my strengths, capabilities, experience, and qualifications to help my clients with strategy and operations and create sustainable growth. To further enhance my services, I have spent a number of years gaining additional qualifications and skills, including Strategic Management, Change Management, and Counselling, and am currently finishing a Diploma in Leadership and Management. More details of my skills and experience can be found on my LinkedIn profile.
As for the group of collaborative co-workers who have been on this journey with me – we have become ever more connected as the years go by, and we are now delighted to have created a cooperative organisation. Sage Room Ltd Co-operative launched in 2022, offering various services, including collaborative contract work, online personal development courses, workshops, and mentoring opportunities. We share many values and realise that we thrive working together as a group and supporting one another in our continuing independent entities.
I look forward to seeing how I might help you find new ways to work or more effective solutions to grow your business sustainably. If you think I can help, contact or review our services page.
If we aren’t already connected on LinkedIn, I’d love to hear from you. You can also follow our updates, ideas, and advocacy on any of our socials or blog pages.
Learn how to scale your operations effectively and sustainably. We look forward to hearing from you!
Central Business Associates, founded by Celia Newlands, offers services centred around collaboration, community and consulting. Specialist services include Small Business General Management and Small Business Surgery.
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