When Gemma Leslie started her food poster small business Food For Everyone, she had no idea it would become a business at all. The concept began during the depths of the Melbourne COVID lockdowns in 2020, when the former marketing manager had an idea to gather recipes from various cooks and chefs and illustrate them. Her plan was to turn the artwork into posters and donate the proceeds to meal relief charity FareShare Australia to help them get food to under-served communities who were isolating in their homes.
Tentatively, she posted about her idea on Instagram calling for pre-orders and was shocked when she ended up raising $33,000 in two weeks. “It was crazy. I realised suddenly I had to make this work,” says Gemma.
A big printer purchase from Officeworks (“I bought a really good one, I didn’t want to stuff around!”), a lucky find with an ethical paper tube supplier who had a policy of hiring and upskilling new migrants and many hours spent rolling posters at the kitchen table, and Gemma realised she had a hit business on her hands.
More than three years later, Food For Everyone has two employees, its own studio space and has worked with 41 chefs and 20 artists. “We don’t donate 100 per cent of our profits any more, but we do donate 10 meals per poster to our charity partner Second Bite. We’ve now donated $163,500 in four years,” says Gemma. “I love that I’m giving back, but I also get to do art every day and work with cool chefs and other artists. It’s a bit of a dream.”
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A Day in the Life of Gemma Leslie
Starting the Morning Inspired
“I walk my son to school. It’s a 20-minute walk there and back, so I’ll listen to a business podcast on the way back and then in the car on the way to work. I like being inspired by many different sorts of businesses. It makes you want to go back to your own business and do better.”
Managing Admin in the AM
“Our days start at 8am and end at 4pm. I think that’s a better working day. We are a fairly unstructured business and I like to keep it that way. Our main team meeting happens on Monday mornings. We go over the financials and the week that was – ‘Why did this work?’, ‘Why did that not work?’. Then we talk about the things that must happen this week and the longer term projects. The team likes to see my work, so if I’m working on a painting I’ll print it out and put it on the pinboard.
“Then I usually spend the morning doing emails or anything that might be urgent. But I know if I haven’t started painting by 11am, then it’s not going to happen. So I try to get all the other stuff out of the way by 11 so I can do creative tasks. Because if I don’t do the creative stuff, the business is really boring.”
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Prioritising Self-Care at Lunchtime
“With a young child – he’s three – I don’t get any time to myself at home or at work. So my goal is to try to do Pilates twice a week. I go during the day, usually around 11am or 1pm, which is one of the benefits of working for yourself.”
Getting Creative with Clients in the Afternoon
“Often we’ll have offsite shoots. For example, a couple of months ago we were working with a bakery in Collingwood so we went there for a shoot and then visited the artist in their studio. If we’re leaving our workplace, it’s to visit the people who are doing our posters. All other business tends to be on Zoom.”
Tips for Small Business Success
Give Back Sustainably
“When we started, I was giving away 100 per cent of our profits. That wasn’t sustainable. Then we moved to 50 per cent. That also wasn’t sustainable. So now we give back a sustainable amount. Give what is possible for you. And it doesn’t have to be money. Sometimes doing a day of volunteering can be a really nice thing to do.”
Embrace Automation
“I [used to type] 600 names and addresses onto labels for every postal run. Then I found an app that does it automatically, so now I can get that work done in a day rather than two weeks. We also send an automated email to our customers the day after they order thanking them. It’s written by me, but I don’t [have to] handwrite each one. We get so many replies from that email, thanking us for starting the business, or that they really like the art, or can’t wait to put it up in their house. The most beautiful emails come from that one bit of automation.”
Goal Setting is Important
“We have two categories for goals: financial and aspirational. The financial [goal] is what we need to make to pay employees and contractors, and the longer term goals are about where we want to be next year or in five years.
“The aspirational goals are things like who we want to work with. Some of the big names we ticked off this year were [chefs] Nigella Lawson and Rick Stein. They had been on my list for a while and I never thought we’d get there. We have this big pinboard with our goals on it to remind us of where we’re going. They’re all big goals but they’re all [achievable].”
Essentials for Running the Office
- Penrite Premium Corkboard 1500 x 900mm: “Our giant pinboard where we put everything up is from Officeworks, with Post-it notes we can move around. I’m a creative, so I need visuals. If it’s all on a spreadsheet on a computer, I won’t look at it.”
- Dymo LabelWriter 5XL Wide Format Label Printer & Dymo 5XL DHL Labels 102x210: “Our Dymo 5XL label printer gets used daily at Food For Everyone to print all our shipping labels for each order. It’s a crucial piece of equipment to get all of our orders out to our customers.”
- Otto Tripod with Bluetooth Remote: “We always keep a smartphone tripod handy in the studio for ad hoc content creation, from shooting recipe videos to timelapse videos of me painting in the studio for social media.”
- Epson Workforce Pro WF-3820 Printer & Reflex A4 Copy Paper 500 sheet ream: “When my first collection of posters sold out, I soon realised I had a lot of printing ahead of me so I made sure I had a reliable and compact wireless printer.”
- Eco Bin 60 L Recycled Waste Bin Yellow, Eco Paper Waste Bin 60L Blue & Eco Landfill Waste Bin 60L Red: “For our studio, we purchased three Eco Bins so we can be more conscious of rubbish sorting across landfill, paper recycling and mixed recycling. Most of our waste is recyclable paper waste from packaging materials so we want to ensure that it is sorted correctly so that it can be properly recycled. The different coloured bins make it easy to know what goes in which bin, plus they sit together neatly.”
- Sony WHCH720N Noise Cancelling Headphones Blue: “Investing in noise-cancelling headphones has been a game changer for me when I need to get into the zone and focus on the task ahead of me. I find that headphones that go over my ears are more comfortable to wear for long periods.”
- 3M Command Narrow Picture Hanging Strip White 4 Pack: “We are big fans of the 3M hooks because, as you can imagine, we are always putting up frames and we don’t want to make huge holes in the walls.”
