EP 56: Grant funding in Australia: Kim Yabsley on Playing the Long Game (With Free Money)

Description:

Ever wonder if you could grow smarter and faster without draining your bank account? In this episode of Meaningful Marketing, host Chantal Gerardy dives into the world of government funding with small business strategist Kim Yabsley from Growology.

Kim doesn’t just chase grants, she transforms them into high-impact growth strategies. Together, you’ll discover how leveraging funding can be ethical, powerful, and downright game-changing—and definitely not a boring bureaucracy.

🎧 What You’ll Hear:

• Why free money isn’t magic, but a growth tactic
• How to use grants as a client-acquisition superpower, one strategy Kim walks every business through
• The real talk on success rates (hint: only 17%—unless you go strategic)
• Stitch the story: aligning your business goals with government priorities
• Bonus tips: wage-reimbursement grants, R&D for health or tech, council creativity funds, and more

🔗 Learn More from Kim Yabsley & Growology:

• Visit Growology.com.au to explore Kim’s grant strategy services, success stories, and offerings: growology.com.au
• Join the Grow With Grants Academy for monthly tools, templates, expert workshops, and support for business owners: growology.com.au/academy
• Download the Ultimate Grants Guide to see current, open grants across Australia and learn how to prepare for them: Get the guide
• Follow Kim on Instagram for clever tips, behind-the-scenes updates, and quick grant wins: @grantsbygrowology

🎯 Meaningful Marketing Resources for You:

• Download our FREE Marketing Guide to simplify your strategy and get results: chantalgerardy.com.au/free-downloads
• Listen to more episodes of the podcast here: themeaningfulmarketingpodcast.com
• Visit our main website for marketing support and services: onlinebusinessmarketing.com.au

 

Transcript:

 

This podcast is brought to you by Pod Pro Australia,

 

social media, Google, email, marketing systems, website traffic, and the endless content creation that comes with marketing. It’s overwhelming, right? Say goodbye to endless stress and hello to Clarity with the Meaningful Marketing podcast. In this podcast, I will share with you fast and free practical methods to help you manage, monetize, and market your business, all infused with a healthy dose of motivation.

 

Let’s do this.

 

Hey, this is Chantel Gerardy from The Meaningful Marketing Podcast, and today I’m here with Kim Yabsley. Hope I don’t butcher that. From Growology. Growology, thanks so much for joining us today. I am so super excited for you to be here. Because you’re gonna be talking about government grants today and getting government grant funding here in Australia, I would imagine.

 

Yep. Yeah. Awesome. So I’m so super excited to talk about it, mostly because you know, the business Basics Grant round six has just dropped and luckily many of our quotes have been approved. So we’ve got a whole bunch of business owners signing up with us at the moment and now getting funding with our quotes.

 

So it is such an amazing thing, and for me, coming from South Africa where. You get nothing. Mm. You get no support. You get no help. There is no funding. I think that how awesome and amazing is it that we live in a country where we do have access to these types of things. 

 

Oh, yeah. Like I, I just love it and I stumbled across grants as a growth strategy for small business, but once I realized the power and potential of it, I was just blown away with how much.

 

More quickly, you can scale your business. And I love that you’re doing the business basics because one of the things we are often talking to clients about is the potential of grants as a client acquisition strategy. And it’s so win-win, right? You help someone win the money and then they get to use services that they may not have been able to afford before.

 

Yeah, a hundred percent. And I’m, I think the only reason that we are fortunate enough to be able to be in this position is because we are constantly, you know, generating leads and qualifying people and getting them into our database, but we continue to build that relationship with. Them. So when a government grant comes out and we now say, Hey, if you are this business owner and you qualify, you can work with us, and they’re like, oh my gosh, this is amazing.

 

I didn’t have the funding to do that, but now I do. You know, there is this opportunity, but because we’ve built that know, like, and trust, because we deliver on what we do. Talk about delivering on and on top of it, our quotes previously have been approved over the years, multiple times. We are in a great position to be able to deliver that.

 

Mm. So talk a little bit about the grants that are available for business owners here in Australia. 

 

Yeah, sure. So there’s really grants for everything and like this week alone, there’s $78 billion worth of funding available. There are grants available for almost every industry and almost every activity type.

 

And I think one of the, one of the pitfalls or. You know, things that people misinterpret about grants is like that. They’re all the same sort of scheme and they all operate very differently, which is why, you know, you kind of need a grant strategist to help you figure out what is the overarching strategy to use to work with grants.

 

But yeah, almost every activity is out there every week in Australia, 30 new grants open and 10 close. So it’s a. Constantly evolving landscape and that’s, you know, probably the biggest part of the work is just staying on top of what is opening up and what’s the angle for how different businesses could access that.

 

Oh, look, I absolutely love that. There’s so much goodness in that because like you said, the reality is that there is this funding available. Those who take action on it, and I have got their nose to the ground and know what is out there and is available will have access to it. The only thing for me is a case of.

 

And I think this is why I love strategists, but I mean, I’m a strategist. That’s why I love strategists. ’cause they do have the nose to the ground. But also you’ve gotta work an angle because I’d imagine like there is this funding, right? They’re not just gonna give you the funding. The funding has a purpose.

 

It has, there’s an intention in mind. So I would imagine that when you writing the grant application process, you’ve gotta make sure that you’re speaking to the overall outcome of what that money’s intention is. A 

 

hundred percent. Like grants always follow. Demographic or economic trends. So. Any specific fund is really trying to address an identified problem, and so that could be, we know that business owners between three and 600,000 in revenue have trouble investing in automation and AI implementation.

 

It could be, we know that people that live in regional areas don’t get big city access to marketing opportunities, so it’s always trying to address a need, and I think that. What’s really important before you start drafting a grant is to really thoroughly understand what the guidelines are saying and what is the problem that this fund has been set up to solve.

 

Yeah, 

 

great. 

 

And then, you know, we were talking earlier about as well, is that a grant isn’t gonna fix a broken business. So talk a bit about that for us. 

 

Yeah, well, I think one of the reasons why people are often not successful, and it is important to remember that on average grants are only 17% successful, so our success rate is 49%, and that’s because we are very strategic about what grant opportunities you stack together and in which order you apply for them.

 

So if you are like a business that’s like a hundred thousand dollars and you’ve never had a grant before and you’ve been stable at a hundred thousand dollars for the last five years, you are not gonna suddenly get a half a million dollar grant. So you really gotta think about how do you demonstrate your capacity to administer public funds wisely.

 

Now this is taxpayer’s money, so none of us want the government to just go giving this money out to someone ’cause they’ve got a good idea. But all of us think that our business is the best idea since sliced bread. So it’s about kind of recognizing, okay, well how is what I’m doing a fit for what this fund is looking for?

 

How can I deliver outcomes that will be measurable and tangible and deliver on what the funder is out to solve? And also that means being realistic about the stage of, uh, growth that you’re at and what is likely to be achievable. 

 

Yeah, I have, you know. With this grant, let’s just talk about the last grant that happened.

 

You know, they go, this is what we are able to cover. We can cover these, you know, strategic areas. And marketing was part of that, which was absolutely fantastic for us. But then we have business owners coming to us and they’re going, can we get the grant and quotes on that? But can you give me this instead?

 

So for example, they might go, oh, can you, can it cover the software charge? Or can it rather, can you actually do done first content? And I’m like, no, these are the guidelines of the grant. Mm-hmm This is what actually it is meant to cover. For, you know, and, and it’s really hard sometimes to get it across to the business owner that what you think you need inside your business is not necessarily the thing that you probably need inside your business.

 

Yeah. And that’s also really important because when you are non-compliant with grant money, the government can absolutely come and ask for it back. And that can be really significant with some of the larger scale grants. Like we have clients who are getting back over half a million dollars a year or who, who were securing over half a million dollars a year for in grant funding.

 

You don’t wanna be asked for that money back in 12 months time. 

 

Yeah, I think so. There is a level of responsibility as business owners when it comes to this as well. Like how are they gonna spend that money and which provider are they gonna choose as well? Because I think with the grants that you’re doing as well, I think you’ve also gotta supply different various quotes.

 

And I think it’s really important that you do your due diligence. A lot of people go out there and you know, even the people that have been on our email list, they’ll go, Chantel, we’ve actually chosen another marketing agency. And I go, well, have you looked at their reviews? Have you looked at their case studies?

 

Um, have you looked at, you know, have they got skin in the dame credibility? No. I did a really good sales call with them. The salesperson was really good and I’m like, I am the salesperson and I suck ’cause I’m too honest. 

 

So it’s, so, yeah, I think it’s really unreasonable when people do that because all of us as service providers, we spend a lot of time giving away our ideas for free.

 

In exchange for the chance to quote on something, and when it comes to a grant, you’ve had to put together something in a really specific way, and they’re actually not supposed to work that way. The only reason you should be allowed to change a provider once your grant’s been approved is if there was a problem, like that provider was no longer able to deliver or something.

 

So it’s really not in keeping with the spirit of what the schemes are about. 

 

Yeah, I do find it completely unethical in that and it’s good for us ’cause I always go the trash take care of itself, so, yeah. Yeah, yeah. You know, possibly didn’t wanna work with those clients anyway, you know, because we work really hard and we don’t charge like a, we don’t charge for these smaller schemes.

 

We don’t charge to quote, but there’s a lot of time of sitting down talking to them, finding out about a. Their business, looking at the gap, identifying what the grant’s for, and then, you know, trying to fill that. Like we don’t get paid for that. And we might do that for 20 different businesses. We might get a, we might get five across the line.

 

Yeah, a 

 

hundred percent. And I think that’s a problem for small business, like across the board, you know, and we often think about, oh well what’s a low ticket offer I can add to my office suite so that I can make some money from doing that work. But I mean, for us, we only sell high ticket, so we. We like to spend time getting to know our clients and researching for them and putting together the best possible strategy before we sort of invite them into the fold.

 

So yeah, so talk to 

 

me a little bit about that. So let’s talk about like the last week. If you look at the last week and the people that you sort of helped describe those people and the process so people can have a better understanding of how that works. 

 

Yeah. Well, at the moment we’re heavily focused on the r and d grant because it’s about to open for this year, and this is one that incentivizes Australian business owners to continue.

 

Doing things that are new and novel. So it’s like a new invention, building software, creating a prototype of a piece of equipment. So we’ve been heavily focused on that one at the moment, but we really work with anyone who’s half a mill or above is the right kind of client for us. Most of our. Perfect fit.

 

Clients are already well in excess of a million dollars revenue a year because these are the people who are innovating. They’re building new staff, they’re setting up new premises, they’re buying new equipment, they’re automating their processes. So we know that these people move quickly and we know that they’re up to stuff in the world, and so they’re the people that we can best support.

 

So, because this is a meaningful marketing podcast, what are some of the meaningful marketing strategies that you apply in your own business in order to be able to attract those people and then communicate what it is that you do? What are some of the things that you do in your business? 

 

Well, actually, a newish strategy that we’ve been trying is paid leads.

 

Which is awesome because previously we spent a lot of time trying to qualify people and trying to become ad specialists and then, you know, taking a million different free strategy calls to only sell to a small percentage. And we’ve been using SCORE app for years to try and qualify people, but I’ve never worked out really how to master that.

 

So now we just started working with a digital marketing agency who do the lead capture and we just pay for the leads, but we know that they’re the perfect fit client for us. That has been a bit of a game changer for us because conversion’s gone up and it’s given me time back as well. 

 

Yeah. Awesome. So if you had to look at like your content plan or your key messages, what are some of the things that, that you would be using in your marketing all the time?

 

We talk about the amount of money raised, so we’ve secured over $50 million in the last three years for our clients. We talk about that. We talk about the amount of grant funding that’s out there, like the 78 billion this week. We talk about the number of grants. This week it’s just under 4,000. Uh, and we talk about different types of grants because I think most people who come to us say that they just don’t even know where to start.

 

They’re like, where do I even start looking for grants? There’s so many available. I don’t want to spend hours trawling through red tape. So yeah, we try to, and I’m just starting to play around now with more reels and stuff like that. And the other thing I think that’s been meaningful for me has been like, invest in people who are experts in their niche rather than trying to become the master of everything, like any of us.

 

Can learn lots of different things and apply them, but that’s when life becomes a bit boring or we feel a bit chained to the desk. So I really like paying professionals who are good at what they do to do good with their own skill for my business. And I like to stay focused on the things I’m good at.

 

Yeah. That’s awesome. So if you talk about some of the process, like how long would the application process be for some of the grants that you actually apply for? 

 

Yeah, that’s an interesting question that people ask all the time, and it sort of depends on the level of value of the grant. So a grant that’s gonna be sort of.

 

Anything, maybe 10 up to about $20,000. It won’t be too significant. Business owner can probably do it themselves. They might want someone to cast an eye over it just for that alignment with guidelines. But pretty much you can do those kinds yourself. Anything over about $20,000, you really want some solid strategy behind it.

 

They’re gonna wanna see a project plan, they’re gonna wanna see a detailed budget. They’re gonna wanna know, you know. What’s your benchmark going in? What are the measures of success coming out? So that’s where you really need strategy and structure. And you also really need to be prepared and position yourself well.

 

So be able to think about not just how can I get some money from this fund to fund my business, but rather what’s a discreet project that I can deliver that will really help this funder to shine? ’cause of course, the funder wants to be able to go to the market and say, look what we did with this funding.

 

Yeah, a hundred percent. And a lot of the times people will say to me like, oh, we, you know, we are putting all this marketing into place and we’re doing all these things. And I’m like at the end, like, we are gonna be asked to be able to prove and show this work. You know, which is really important. And this is why when I said to you, many of them might ask, oh, can we do this instead?

 

And I’m like, that’s not the premise. That’s not what we quoted on. 

 

Yeah. Like if you think about the export market development grant, which is another good one that your clients could use to access, working with you. The intention of this is to incentivize Australian business owners to market outside Australia.

 

Now, New Zealand and North Korea are excluded, but everywhere else is in and at tier one, you don’t have to actually have clients Outside Australia, it’s about exploring the potential to export, and it can cover, I think there’s like seven or eight different activity areas, but all around marketing paid ads.

 

Marketing strategists, brand refresh, you know, any design work, traveling even to other countries to explore potential over there, attending trade shows. So. And you can receive back, that’s a 50% co-contribution grant. So you can receive back up to $40,000 a year if you spend 80 or half of whatever you do spend less than that, and that’s for someone who genuinely wants to move into another market and they genuinely wanna work with a marketing strategist like yourself.

 

That’s a great budget. You know, that’s a great budget to go, okay, now we can step back and be strategic about what we do over the next 12 months in what countries and, and how we can grow quicker. 

 

Look, there’s something that you said there that’s so good to bring up and that is the capacity of the mindset of that person.

 

Because often when something is match funded, they go, no, I don’t wanna do it because it’s match funded. I’ve gotta put the money in. And I always go like, how small minded is that? Like I said, in South Africa we have no funding at all and and I go, you have to pay 5,000 to get an extra 5,000. And people go, no, I’m not applying.

 

Yeah. The other one is when they’ve gotta pay for the GST. Now for the Business Basics grant one, seven and a half thousand was the grant. But they’ve gotta pay 750 GST. Yeah, they have to do that themselves. And I, the first thing I get is, what’s the additional seven 50? And I’m like, it was there. It was all there.

 

You have to pay the GST and they go. And I’m going, you paying 750, which you get to write off anyway. Yeah. Which was $7,500. It’s so I think it’s really important to acknowledge here as well that the type of business owners that you work with have got a growth mindset. They understand the value of investing in themselves, investing in their business.

 

They have the capacity to take risk. 

 

Yeah. I think that’s the thing like. A grant is not gonna save you if your business is struggling. It’s not an overnight thing. On average, the process is gonna take three months, maybe six months, sometimes even longer. So it’s a long range game. You’re not going to apply for a grant today and have money in the bank next week or next month, but it’s about looking at what are the sort of five to seven opportunities that I could use grants for over the next 12 months, and what sort of result would I need to see for that to be achievable.

 

And we have people doing amazing things, and they’re able to, they’re able to hire staff more quickly than they would otherwise. They’re able to start exporting, they’re able to diversify. They’re able to just move quicker by leveraging that potential of stacking grants over time. And in fact. That’s how we created this business in, uh, I was a corporate strategist for a long time in business for myself for 20 odd years now, and I was working in the corporate and government sector and I wanted to build a tech product and I didn’t have the money to bankroll it, so I got myself a small grant first, built a prototype, tested it with a couple of government departments, they loved it.

 

I went back and got a bigger grant and built out a whole SaaS product, and then I ended up using seven grants over two years, and we really scaled that business and. Some of them were not even financial, like some of them were wage reimbursement. Some of them were access to resources and consulting and mentorship that I wouldn’t have been able to afford at the time.

 

But the result of all of that combined was what gave us this incredible growth. And then of course, every mate I have who’s a business owner was like, which grants did you use? How can I use them? And so I was like, oh, I don’t think anyone’s really teaching people how to use grants as a strategy, as a strategic growth move.

 

And so that’s why we started the business. 

 

What a great success story. And I think, I mean, you showed your drive in that you showed your intention for growth, and I feel like it’s important that even if you don’t have a grant or you don’t like you’re trying for grant, but you’re not getting a grant, I think it’s really important for you to be applying some of those growth strategies to your business anyway, to be looking at.

 

What are some of those projects that could just drastically, like if money wasn’t an option, what are some of those things that you could do inside of your business anyway? 

 

Yeah, you know, and I always say this about strategy, like it’s not, strategy is not about the piece of paper you end up with at the end of the strategy project.

 

It’s about the thinking that you have to do along the way. To, uh, reorder and reorganize your priorities within your business. And sometimes people come and they want us to help them get a $250 grant, but they don’t even know what they’re gonna spend it on. They’re just like, $250,000 would really help me expand my business.

 

Yeah. And yeah, so it’s like, well, what do you actually wanna do? If I could give you some money right now, what would you do with it? So, good question. What would you do if I had $50,000 to give you right now? What would you do in your business? Ooh, 

 

I would definitely invest in software. I’d invest in my team.

 

I definitely get a sales person to do the sales calls. ’cause I told you I suck. I’m too honest. So I’d probably, yeah, automation systems automation team, because that would be great. Great way to scale. Mm, yeah, definitely. That would be amazing to have. 

 

I think that’s some of the potential of grants. Like for me, this business is really a container for growth.

 

That’s how I see it. So I believe that if we are strategic and we stay committed and we’re flexible. Then we can really grow our businesses and ourselves. ’cause like as entrepreneurs, we have to grow ourselves personally. For every new level. There’s a new devil, right? So we gotta keep expanding ourselves and growing and that’s my highest value growth.

 

So I really just see that grants are this powerful container for growth and they really can just presence, possibility that we might not otherwise have been able to achieve. 

 

Yeah. I love that you said flexibility, and I think flexibility is so important because even when you have a strategy, even as a strategist, I can say this, we’ll have a strategy.

 

And even during the process of the strategy and the implementation of the strategy, we have to be flexible. We’ve gotta make data-driven decisions and sometimes we’ve gotta pivot and go somewhere else because no matter how much you plan and strategize or whatever, at some point it could go, hold on a sec.

 

The, you know, we’re actually going in a different direction now. And then the second thing you said there was the personal development stuff around how new level, new devil. Yes. I always say my money mindset one, every single stage. It’s like. I get this money mindset like little devil that comes in every single time, you know?

 

Yeah. So, yeah. I love that so much. Goodness in there. So have you got a free resource for everyone and how can they connect with you? Yes. 

 

I’m gonna give you guys our grants guides, and normally we charge for this. But as I said to you, happy to give it away to your people for free. And this will just give them a sense, it’s actually the most comprehensive list of Australian business grants available, and it’ll give people a sense of some of the tips, like how to get ready, what to avoid.

 

How to know when it’s the right time to apply for grants, but it’s also got a really comprehensive listing with links to many of the really popular and useful grants that people can 

 

use. Oh, that’s amazing, Kim. Thank you so much for that. So this is Chantal Gerardy with another episode of the Meaningful Marketing Podcast with Kim here today.

 

Super excited. If you haven’t already, make sure you subscribe, like, comment, rate, do all the things on all the platforms that you need to be doing, and you can find, you will be able to find Kim’s link in the comments below. Thank you for having me. Thanks for listening in. Meaningful Marketing is all about you making your marketing meaningful.

 

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