The Purpose Effect

Reuse, Reduce, Repurpose is the ethos at the centre of Tea Bird Tea. This is because founder Ashleigh Cotterill believes that sustainability is not a buzzword, it’s a mandate. And it’s key to how she is scaling her product business. Even something as simple as a cup of tea has the power to do good and we speak to Ashleigh about how she is doing this through her partnership strategy.

In this episode we talk about:

• How Tea Bird Tea was born in the markets of Bondi Beach and the Gold Coast Australia;
• The importance of product differentiation and how Ashleigh achieves this;
• How to scale a product business;
• What it means to be a truly sustainable business;
• What Ashleigh looks for in a partnership;
• How Tea Bird Tea partnerships do good by supporting refugee education in Malaysia.

Want delicious, beautifully packaged tea that makes an impact? You can get 20% your purchase of Tea Bird Tea with the code HUGINAMUG20.

Follow The Purpose Effect on Instagram, or send us an email at [email protected] we'd love hearing from you!

We've been talking a lot about partnerships this season, so in this episode, host Elena Kersey takes you through 5 ways partnerships can grow your business based on the lessons we've learned so far.

1. Partnerships for Reach - with Sasibai Kimis, founder of Earth Heir
2. Partnerships for Positioning - with Helen Neal, founder of HN Communications
3. Partnerships for Innovation - with Jenny Au, founder of Fund Fluent
4. Partnerships for Resilience - with Becky Fox, sustainable business mentor and founder of susMBA
5. Partnerships for Value - with Abbey Pantano, founder of Impact Collab

Want delicious, beautifully packaged tea that makes an impact? Check out our season partner Tea Bird Tea. You can get 20% off your purchase with the code HUGINAMUG20.

Follow The Purpose Effect on Instagram, or send us an email at [email protected] we'd love hearing from you!

If diversity is key to innovation, then a diverse investor pool is key to a healthy startup eco-system. Maaike Doyer left a career in management consulting for entrepreneurship - first by co-founding Business Models Inc, the producer of the Business Model Generator book and most recently through co-founding Epic Angels, an all women angel investment collective investing in Asia-Pacific startups.

In this episode we talk about:

• Maaike's journey from consulting to entrepreneurship;
• Why she wanted to make investing in startups more accessible to women;
• Why the funding gap exists - is this bias against female founders, or is this about misunderstanding and uncertainty?
• Why she looks for founders who refuse to die and who favour agility over ego;
• The advice she always gives founders

Interested to join Epic Angels? Find out more here.

If you are a startup founder and you want to pitch your startup to Epic Angels, make sure you mention this podcast in your submission!

Want delicious, beautifully packaged tea that makes an impact? Check out our season partner Tea Bird Tea. You can get 20% off your purchase with the code HUGINAMUG20.

Follow The Purpose Effect on Instagram, or send us an email at [email protected] we'd love hearing from you!

How we communicate on sustainability has never been more important than right now. But crafting the right message so that you can bring your consumers, your team and your industry along for the ride is crucial to making real change.

In this episode, we're talking to Helen Neal, the founder of HN Communications; an award winning sustainability communications agency. Helen is also the founder of Leaders Live, an events business that helps deliver global events on sustainability and decarbonisation. 

In this episode, we talk about:

• What great speakers have in common (6:05)
• The challenges of coming back into the corporate workplace after having children (11:54)
• Why businesses need to be willing to share the good and the bad in their sustainability journeys (18:26)
• The DNA of businesses that create impact and why NGOs are fantastic at nailing a purpose-led campaign (23:54)
• How senior leadership teams should be communicating on sustainability (36:14)
• What good communications look like (41:24)

Want delicious, beautifully packaged tea that makes an impact? Check out our season partner Tea Bird Tea. You can get 20% off your purchase with the code HUGINAMUG20.

Follow The Purpose Effect on Instagram, or send us an email at [email protected] we'd love hearing from you!

Abbey Pantano is a community architect and the founder of Impact Collab, a digital community for impact businesses based in Sydney / Gadigal Country.

Abbey started her journey into impact business because she wanted to be part of the solution for plastic waste. This led her to start The Raw Straw, a business that sold wheat stem drinking straws. The Raw Straw has been wound up, but Abbey talks candidly about the failures and learnings that led her to discover that social impact entrepreneurs were her people. And that she could help them by creating a community that would allow them to make more impact. So, Impact Collab was born.

In this episode we talk about:

• The importance of community in business building;
• Getting comfortable with failure and how to build up tolerance to failure;
• How partnerships can help you grow faster, more cheaply. Partnerships are 25% less expensive than digital marketing;
• The business case for partnerships;
• Successful partnership case studies.

Interested in joining Impact Collab? Book a call with Abbey

Learn more about the women and businesses Abbey talks about in this episode:

• Anna Sheppard, founder of Bambuddha
• Teresa Romanovsky, founder of Careers for Purpose
• Tiff Ng, founder of The Social Story
• Demi Kotsoris, founder of The Millennial Crisis
• Patricia Kaziro, founder of Impact Business School

Want delicious, beautifully packaged tea that makes an impact? Check out our season partner Tea Bird Tea. You can get 20% off your purchase with the code HUGINAMUG20.

Follow The Purpose Effect on Instagram, or send us an email at [email protected] we'd love hearing from you!

It's no surprise that Gen Z is the generation most engaged with climate issues. However, you might be surprised by the extent to which the climate is shaping the way Gen Z works. 59% of Gen Zs between the ages of 18 and 22 will stay longer with employers who are socially and environmentally responsible. And in Australia, young workers are leaving businesses which are not doing enough to respond to climate change.

In this episode, I'm speaking to recent university graduate, founder of the SustainaPod podcast and sustainable food advocate Belinda Ng about the ways in which climate change has shaped her career goals. In this episode, we talk about:

• Eco Anxiety and what made her want sustainability to be part of her career trajectory;
• Her sustainable food advocacy;
• The goals behind the SustainaPod podcast;
• What Gen Z expect from brands;
• Dealing with burnout and long Covid;
• How partnerships are key to shaping conversations.

Follow and listen to Sustainapod

Support Act4Food Act4 Change

Connect with Belinda

Want delicious, beautifully packaged tea that makes an impact? Check out our season partner Tea Bird Tea. You can get 20% off your purchase with the code HUGINAMUG20.

Follow The Purpose Effect on Instagram, or send us an email at [email protected] we'd love hearing from you!

Becky Fox is the founder of the susMBA, a sustainable business mentor and a born community builder. She first learned about the power of community growing up in a community centre and went on to put what she'd learned into practice by building a surfing business with no money in her early 20s. She's gone on to work with a number of businesses in the sustainability space since then and what has united the successful ones has been the strength of the communities they lean on. In this episode we talk about:

• How Becky built her first purpose-led business with no money;
• Community and brand building;
• Going to business school and founding the susMBA;
• Common practices of purpose-led businesses;
• Why we need 'nudges' for mass adoption of sustainable practices;
• What the future of business looks like.

More reading on how B Corps are better able to weather economic storms:

• Forbes: Why Purpose-Driven Businesses are Faring Better in Covid 19
• B The Change. Christopher Marquis: B Corps Are Leading the Shift to Stakeholder Capitalism

Want delicious, beautifully packaged tea that makes an impact? Check out our season partner Tea Bird Tea. You can get 20% off your purchase with the code HUGINAMUG20.

Follow The Purpose Effect on Instagram, or send us an email at [email protected] we'd love hearing from you!

Sasibai Kimis is the founder of Earth Heir, a social enterprise that helps artisans in marginalised communities develop sustainable income streams by using their traditional craftmanship to make beautiful bags and accessories.  In doing so, Earth Heir is also preserving traditional craftsmanship and techniques in Malaysia and beyond.

The goal of Earth Heir, is to work themselves out of business.  If artisans have the skills they need to access markets for their products themselves, they are no longer reliant on intermediaries.  That’s the impact Earth Heir is creating.  They are almost like an incubator for Malaysian artisans.  They are also one of Malaysia’s first B-Corporations and are Fair Trade Certified.

In this conversation, we talk about:

• Leaving a well-paid corporate career to start a social enterprise;
• The challenges that artisans face in accessing markets for their products;
• How Earth Heir is incorporating circularity into their business model;
• How Earth Heir measures their impact;
• Balancing social entrepreneurship with other life goals like marriage and family;
• Sasibai’s next project – developing a hub for sustainable businesses in Malaysia to collaborate and learn from eachother.

Want delicious, beautifully packaged tea that makes an impact? Check out our season partner Tea Bird Tea. You can get 20% off your purchase with the code HUGINAMUG20.

Follow The Purpose Effect on Instagram, or send us an email at [email protected] we'd love hearing from you!

Jenny Au is the co-founder of Fund Fluent, a platform that helps small businesses grow by accessing loans, grants and other non-equity based sources of funding. Fund Fluent is a digital platform that connects your business to the funding options it eligible for. It also allows you to connect your data to your profile so that you can easily find and apply for grants through the system.  Fund Fluent also helps you build your funding strategy, so if you don’t know where to begin, Fund Fluent has a solution for you too. In this episode we talk about:



• How Jenny found her purpose in building and growing small businesses;
• That VC funding is best suited to certain kinds of business models and why if you have already established product market fit and are revenue generating, grants or loans might be a better fit;
• How to present your data so that lenders or grant programmes will consider you;
• Why we need people to build 'forever businesses' - smaller, profitable businesses that provide financial security even if they remain small;
• What the businesses of the future look like;
• What's next for Fund Fluent.

Want delicious, beautifully packaged tea that makes an impact? Check out our season partner Tea Bird Tea. You can get 20% off your purchase with the code HUGINAMUG20.

Follow The Purpose Effect on Instagram, or send us an email at [email protected] we'd love to hear from you!

Sonalie Figueiras is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Green Queen, an award winning climate news media business based in Hong Kong and one of the leading voices in the conversation around the impact of our food systems on the climate. We are far less in control of the food we eat than we think and we will not solve the climate crisis without addressing the way we eat and produce food. Co-hosting this episode with me is Will Cheshier, the host of the Talkin' Solutions podcast.

In this episode we discuss:

• That food accounts for 30% of all greenhouse gas emissions;
• The different types of alternative protein products in the market from plant-based meat, cultivated meat to precision fermentation;
• Alternative protein and health;
• The role of regenerative farming in climate change solutions;
• How to have difficult conversations around food and it's impact on the climate;
• Ways in which we can adopt more conscious food choices.

To find out more about Future Food or food and climate, check out the resources on Green Queen

• Get Green Queen's Zero Waste Vegan Meal Plan and Recipe e-book here

A big thank you to our friends at Tea Bird Tea! To get 20% your next purchase of Tea Bird Tea use the code HUGINAMUG20 at checkout.

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