New Collaborative Opportunities

With our office move becoming public, I was excited to be asked to do an interview with Leisa from Dot Dash Events, as part of their Tide Talks series.
It gave me another opportunity to let more people know where we are heading off to, and what services I will be able to spend my time offering once we move.

All of us who are moving into the Mt Carmel Centre are looking forward to see what new collaborative opportunities it will create for all of our businesses.

Check out the full interview here on their website, have a read of the previous blogs and chats. Maybe even see if you’d like to feature in their future interviews!

Balance the Grind is on a mission to create a work-life balance hub focused on conversations, ideas and community.

Publishing conversations with people from different careers and lifestyles; from startup founders to CEOs, entrepreneurs to independent musicians, designers to software developers, and plenty more.
Work-life balance, work-life integration, work-life harmony; whatever you want to call it, Balance the Grind believes that work should (mostly) be calm, healthy and sustainable over the long-term.

Our Community Manager, Celia Newlands, featured alongside the many inspirational stories on their website.
Read Celia’s interview in full below, and check out some of the other amazing stories of those making flexible work a reality around the world!

https://www.balancethegrind.com.au/interviews/celia-newlands-community-manager-at-central-business-associates/

19th January 2015..
I don’t really remember that first day. Bit of an exhausted, excited blur..

Probably have little memory of the first year actually – it just flew by, with all it’s newness and excitement and my heart beating out of my chest, and some things going very wrong, and some things going very right…!

And here we are, half a decade later.

Central Business Associates – we are celebrating five years in business, and I wanted to do a little ‘check in the rear view mirror’.


Starting a business like this, making ‘flexibility’ the core concept – if I’d known what that would actually involve, I wonder if I’d ever have agreed to do it!
But I’m so glad I did – making flexibility my key offering has opened up so many more doors, meetings and opportunities that never would have happened if I’d stuck firmly to a plan.
So my version of a ‘plan’ has really been around ideas – and values.

Flexibility, Community & Collaboration – those have been the core values that have helped me make big decisions along the way.

  • We’ve had businesses move in, flourish, grow and then move into their own spaces,
  • we’ve seen businesses collaborate on hundreds of projects, and
  • we’ve made lots and lots of friends – lifelong friends, that we might never have met if this business didn’t exist.

We’ve held events, hosted workshops, created membership programmes. We’ve laughed, and cried, been angry and ecstatic.

We have consistently looked for new ways to help local businesses connect, collaborate and grow.
I am grateful for every person who came through these doors, and thankful for all the lessons that I have had to learn along the way.

Whilst I can’t predict the future, and what the next 5 years have in store for us, I do know that if I learn as much as I have in the last 5 years, things will definitely be flexible, fun and phenomenally interesting! 😁

Hi Lorraine – Thanks for taking time out of your busy day to talk to me!
Delighted to have you as one of our first Associate Members after your company did some amazing work designing our logo, and also creating the Central Business Associates website! I am keen to find out more about your business, and let people know what motivates you. So let’s start by asking some questions about your business –

Q1: Business Name?
LORRAINE: Tinson IT Business Solutions

Q2: Your name, and position in the business?
LORRAINE: Lorraine Tinson, Director

Q3: Describe your product or service.
LORRAINE: We’re all about websites! As an online marketing and web design agency, we focus on helping businesses with commercial clients to be found by THEIR ideal clients so that they can rapidly grow their revenue.

Q4: If you had to describe your business in 3 words, what would they be?
LORRAINE: Websites and SEO

Q5: What’s new in your business at the moment?
LORRAINE: Things move fast in the digital world, and it seems to be moving faster all the time. Website designs are big and bold. Tiles are in – think Windows 8 – which also inspires another design trend – flat. Flat is minimalistic, clean and 2 dimensional – say goodbye to drop shadows. In SEO, it’s all about content and things have been very busy with ‘Mobilegeddon’.

Q6: Why do you do what you do? What made you start, and motivates you to continue with, your business?
LORRAINE: We love helping businesses navigate the world of website design and SEO. The technical side of websites and SEO can seem like rocket science, we love working with businesses to understand what they want from their website and then develop a solution that will help them meet their goals.

Q7: Where’s your favourite local place for coffee, tea, or your favourite tipple?
LORRAINE: We are so lucky to have some really great coffee shops around, it’s hard to choose. Jimbo’s and Manly Cafe are always high on my list.

Q8: You’ve forgotten your partners/mothers/BFFs birthday – where’s your ‘go-to’ place that you can guarantee a successful purchase?
LORRAINE: Jenny McNamara Furlong @ Jmac-art, my go-to lady more and more. Jenny has some wonderful ideas, buying artwork doesn’t need to cost a fortune.

Q9: What was your main reason for signing up with Central Business Associates? What does it mean to you?
LORRAINE: There is a great sense of community in our area and there are so many small businesses, it’s great to be part of something that brings these businesses together.

Lorraine, thank you so much for chatting to me today – it’s great to find out some more about your business, and I look forward to finding ways we can collaborate and help each other out in the future!

And so begins my foray into Blogging….

This is all new to me. My expertise is in Customer Service, Staff Management, Office Management, CRM systems etc.

Social Media, Website Administration, Blogging – all new to me, but I’m very excited about the learning opportunity this presents me with. I have always loved learning; but conversely have never been any good at studying! I’m all about ‘doing’ things to learn – so here I am – ‘doing’ things I have little or no experience of, but will learn as I go along.

Such is the journey of an entrepreneur I think.

Unless you have already completed all the studying beforehand, the entrepreneurial story is one that writes itself as it unfolds!

I have been working on creating this business for a number of years now, but in the last 2 years, as it began to become more defined and closer to completion, I realised that for all my relevant experience in my intended area of work, I had very little experience in Commercial Real Estate or setting up a Company – to name but two new areas of learning for me!

One thing I learned very early in my career in Management was to ask questions – I have never considered it to be a weakness to admit I don’t know it all – in fact, I consider the ability to ask the right questions in order to improve/ learn/ move forward, as a strength.    

And so I follow this belief, and I ask questions of all the ‘experts’ I meet, about things I know little or nothing of, and I slowly build up a small amount of knowledge about a huge amount of subjects. I remain an ‘expert’ in my main field of work, but I suppose I am now a ‘General Practitioner’ in Entrepreneurship – so Mum – maybe you get a daughter that’s a GP after all!!

So I suppose that constitutes the topic for my first Blog post – ASK QUESTIONS to improve and grow your knowledge base, and never, EVER stop learning!

Celia