Report #4

Team

We’ve continued to put a focus on building an open and empowering culture while challenging each other to keep growing as people and doers by grasping and maximising learning opportunities. We’ve refined our values, formalised policies and procedures and put plans in place for moderate growth.

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All smiles in the team meeting!

An environment that welcomes different perspectives and general weirdness

“I loved working at Harvey. I learned about big ideas that are changing the world for the better. It made me a smarter, more interesting dinner guest. I made some real friendships too. Beck and Simon have created an environment that welcomes different perspectives and general weirdness. I’ll be cheering them on forever. Go Harvey go!” - Ashe Davenport (worked at Harvey May - Oct 2023 before making a big career shift to disability support worker)

In this page

We’ve continued to put a focus on building an open and empowering culture while challenging each other to keep growing as people and doers by grasping and maximising learning opportunities. We’ve refined our values, formalised policies and procedures and put plans in place for moderate growth.

May 2, 2023: Productive brainstorming session at The Hub Flinders Street cafe

The core team has remained the same this year (Becky, Simon, Sarah and Rachel one temporary addition - Ashe who came on as our talented copywriter and content producer and has since moved on to pursue a whole new career in disability support work!). 

Gillian Pereira continued to drive The Business Pickle. In addition to the strong and lean crew we’ve continued to collaborate with a bunch of quality humans joining our growing list of expert freelancers.

 We've since started improving how we recruit and expand the team with a content producer and designer joining the team. Check out our careers page for openings if that might be you.

Special shout out to legends who were almost part of the team – looking at you James Cook, Julia Chua, Lisa O'Sullivan, Celine Tan, Wesley Rodricks, Marnie Hawson.

How we live our Harvey values

Staying true to our values 💪
“It’s not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are” - Roy E. Disney of Walt Disney Co

We live, breathe and believe in the impact of business for good. But what does this look like? 

Over the last 12 months, we got to questioning and crafting our 6 defining values that guide our team behaviours and how we work with clients and partners. 

Callout: These were formed from the whole team’s input but especially Ashe Davenport who consolidated all of our thoughts and feelings and brought her own perspective of what was distinct about Harvey.

Care squared

We care about our client’s mission because it matches ours: make the world a better place. We dig deep to do our life’s best work so we can create as much positive impact as possible.

Listen, act

We listen intently to our people’s needs and create meaningful, tangible action. We don’t spin our wheels. We connect with the work first, then focus on the solutions. 

Point of view

We have a thoughtful, sometimes nerdy POV, which may not always be the most popular one. We offer best practice recommendations while being flexible enough to adjust things as needed. 

Fluff free

Our approach is lean and efficient, ensuring we deliver the best value while keeping the approach light and fresh. We take quality ingredients (great people, research, tech, etc) and cook them just right. 

Yesness

We have a crack and discover our hidden talents. We own our learning and self-development. We say ‘yes’ to new opportunities, and bring in specialists when we need to.  

Heart sleeves

We ask for help and keep it real. We admit when we get it wrong. By sharing our feelings in a thoughtful, vulnerable way we help others feel safe enough to do the same. 

Building an open, understanding and empowering culture

May 2, 2023: Gill's storytelling skills made Simon and Bec more comfortable in front of the camera - seriously

When it comes to how we operate as a team, we try to be as egalitarian as we can by openly setting our work priorities and impact areas. Being too collaborative about this has proven, at times, to be confusing or the team feels like we’re spinning our wheels - we’ve acknowledged this so are choosing when to open things vs. set directives and move forward.

Weekly wraps and reflection sessions

In which we share what we're grateful for, a personal achievement, acknowledge someone for anything, and other highlights.

Margie (Simon and Becky’s daughter) telling us about how her week went.

Daily virtual stand-ups on Slack

Where we check in on one another, and go through our challenges, priorities and focuses for the week. 

Monthly Impact Updates 

Where we provide a transparent overview of how we’re tracking financially, review our clients and pipeline of new clients coming in, highlight a client project and share and celebrate each person’s ‘greatest hits’ for the month.

We review our strategic goals, projects & reflect on what we should start, stop and continue doing. We nominate two pieces of client work the team were particularly proud of to be shared in detail. (Here’s a more recent example from October)

Equality, wellness and flexibility 

We formalised our flexible work arrangements 

  • Compressed work schedules (9 days a fortnight)  – we all take every second Friday off.
  • Remote working   – enabled team members to move to Sydney and Castlemaine, and Rachel worked from Malaysia for 4 weeks - now a formalised policy.
  • Weekly coworking – every Tuesday, we meet up at our office The Hub for some IRL human time.
  • Flexible school drop off / pick up hours.
  • However, we’ve decided we need to keep the ratio of part-time to full-time to a maximum of 30% as it becomes hard to manage and build a culture beyond that.

Understanding and supporting the transition from maternity leave

Becky and her two bubs

Becky shared what she learnt with the transition to motherhood and return to work from maternity leave in a blog. A topic that is not talked about enough with structures lacking in supporting this life changing transition for women in the workforce. “The last 3 years have been stretching with COVID, birthing two babies and running a business. Being a parent has taught me so much. It’s made me work smarter, and be a lot kinder to myself.

But returning to work was more challenging than I ever imagined and I wondered why people don't talk about it much?

I’ve finally found the time to pen down my thoughts on what I’ve learned through the experience. I hope a new parent reads this and feels less self-critical and more aware of the value they’re bringing to the world. Because we’re valuable people. Even when we forget our names at the cafe. In fact, especially then” - Becky Smallchua, CEO Harvey

Growing ourselves as people and doers

Adaptability and growth is big around here, and over the last 12 months, we’ve built a tonne of learning and development into everyday life.

  • Monthly development coaching sessions, and detailed development plans
  • Dedicated time on projects (not billed to clients) to learn everything from workshop facilitation to Webflow development
  • Daily technical and relationship skills coaching including frameworks, tips and feedback
  • Weekly Lunch-n-Learn where we get together as a team to open our minds to new areas outside of the day to day
  • Continued to up our tool nerd level across all the tools we love, see below

Tools we loved

{{tools-we-use}}

Yay! I failed again!

May 2, 2023: Guess the scene the team is acting out in the improv workshop

We had a fun improv session with the folks at Impro Melbourne to help shake off negative self-talk overthinking, embracing taking risks, positively ‘failing’ and building on each other’s ideas All principles key to Harvey and life. We shared more about this here.

Tidying our employee handbook & policies 

As we prepared for our B Corp re-certification with the inclusion of the ‘Workers’ category this time round, it pushed us to review and create a formal employee handbook and policies which will help us as we continue to grow.

We’ve openly shared them publicly in our governance section.

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  • Maintain B Corp score from 134.1 with workers included
🟢
  • We officially re-certified in November 2023, and are pleased to report we achieved the same score (to the decimal point). Wild! We shared our experience of recertification here.
  • Share templates, documents, insight into business for good
🟠
  • We haven't done this publicly, but when people have asked, we have shared. And we're sharing a series of things as part of this impact report.
  • Maintain current ownership and governance
🟢
  • Harvey is 100% owned by the Smallchua Family Trust. Rebecca Smallchua is our sole Director.
  • Re-use, recycle and manage dangerous waste
🟢
  • We continue to implement our hazardous waste policy and are on a continuous learning and improvement journey.
  • We repair damaged hardware and minimise purchasing of new equipment.
  • Personally we're all Facebook Marketplace fans.
  • Be climate positive at work and at home
🟠
  • We don't track our CO2 emissions, rather we take a much more general and high emissions view. However, this year, we didn't donate to the environment (see above) so we can't say we countered our CO2.
  • Advocate for climate change / inspire sustainable living
🟢
  • We hosted a panel event on Zero Emissions Day in September 2023, along with our friends at Portable, where we interviewed industry experts on the opportunity to engage with community and work towards a more sustainable future. Recording here.
  • Donate 5% to the environment
🔴
  • We didn't make the donation this year as we're revisiting our impact giving model - more details here
  • Invest $20k in impact businesses plus $20k of pro bono time
🔴
  • We delivered some pro bono time but dropped the ball and had no official measurements in place.
  • We also did not invest $20k in impact businesses, and are reviewing this goal going forward. In the last 12 months, our three Impact Investments all lost their value (Whole Kids, Pronto Bottle & Kester Black). While it's not great, we accept this is part of ambitious investing, and each had their own challenges that they couldn't quite overcome.
  • Buy with intention from local and discriminated groups
🟢
  • We continue to be intentional about our suppliers as outlined in our policy and report the details in the Community chapter of our report.
  • Protest and boycott important issues (Australia Day, Melbourne Cup)
🟢
  • Yes and yes!
  • 9 day fortnights, with option for 4 day weeks
🟢
  • 80% work 9 day fortnights, 40% part-time hours, 10% standard working hours.
  • Improve and increase capability across team
🟢
  • Raising our emotional health levels through a leadership development program with Global Leadership Foundation.
  • Expanding output skills: Market research, Web design, content & copywriting, strategy & development and automation strategy.
  • Targeted and clear personal growth, if we are better our clients will be
🟢
  • A new process for 360 feedback, plus personal goal setting questionnaires that ask the big questions of where we want to go and how we'll get there. Also lots of accountability check-ins.

Client survey metrics

  • 3 / 5 value for money (1 - 'could charge less' and 5 - 'could charge more')
  • 8 / 10 likely to recommend
🟢
  • 3.4 / 5 value for money
  • 9.2 / 10 likely to recommend

No destructive clients. Revenue breakdown: 17% Good, 59% Great, 24% Amazing

🟠
  • No destructive clients.
  • Revenue breakdown: 17% Good, 59% Great, 24% Amazing (A little over on Good and under on Great, but on target for Amazing - which is most important, so we're happy with that)
  • All staff spend 80%+ of their time on clients
🔴
  • Spent 64% of our time on clients (under). Due to team changes (recruitment, onboarding and offboarding) and extra investment in training, personal development and community engagement (e.g. B Local), we did not hit this target. On reflection, we will think 80% is too ambitious and we'll be revising to 70% going forward.
  • Regular, honest check-ins about how we feel
🟢
  • Stand ups, development sessions, watercooler chats, impact updates and more.

$994k revenue (Up $211k on FY2223)

🔴
  • $833,588. Revenue was up 6% YoY. Midway through the year, we adjusted down our target to $879k as team growth / services shifted. The main reasons we didn't hit target were scope creep and overruns, both of which we're trying to manage better with process improvements.
  • Maintain B Corp score from 134.1 with workers included
🟢
  • We applied for our B Corp re-certification at the end of this financial year and are pleased to report we achieved the same score (to the decimal point). Wild!
  • Share templates, documents, insight into business for good
🟠
  • We haven't actively done this publicly, but when people have asked, we have shared. And we're sharing a series of things as part of this impact report.
  • Maintain current ownership and governance
🟢
  • Harvey is 100% owned by the Smallchua Family Trust and Rebecca Smallchua is our sole Director.
  • Re-use, recycle and manage dangerous waste
🟢
  • We continue to implement our hazardous waste policy and are on a continuous learning and improvement journey.
  • We repair damaged hardware and minimise purchasing of new equipment.
  • Personally we're all Facebook Marketplace fans.
  • Donate 5% to the environment
🔴
  • We fell short here, we didn't make the donation. More details here.
  • Advocate for climate change / inspire sustainable living
🟢
  • Be climate positive at work and at home
🟠
  • We don't track our CO2 emissions, rather we take a much more general and high emissions view. However, this year, we didn't donate to the environment (see above) so we can't say we countered our CO2.
  • Protest and boycott important issues (Australia Day, Melbourne Cup)
🟢
  • Have a RAP, engaged stakeholders and implemented more change
🔴
  • Due to competing priorities and limited time (no lack in desire) we de-prioritised our Reconciliation Action Plan as we want to do it meaningfully and have the capacity to follow through. However, we took a few first steps outlined here.
  • Buy with intention from local and discriminated groups
🟢
  • We continue to be intentional about our suppliers as outlined in our policy and report the details in the Community chapter of our report. We took it one step further this year with a public call to pledge to audit suppliers in this campaign www.supplier-impact.com
  • Invest $20k in impact businesses plus $20k of 100% pro bono time
🟠
  • We delivered some pro bono time but dropped the ball and had no official measurements in place. We also did not invest $20k in impact businesses because of the reduced revenue with Becky on maternity leave.
  • Sarah personally donated her photography equipment valued at around $7,500 to empower a content and brand producer in the Solomon Islands.
  • 9 day fortnights, with option for 4 day weeks
🟠
  • 40% work 9 day fortnights, 40% part-time hours, 20% standard working hours.
  • Improve and increase capability across team
🟢
  • Elevated our tool nerd level. See here.
  • Expanding output skills: Market research, Web design, strategy & development, video editing, and automation strategy.
  • Targeted and clear personal growth, if we are better our clients will be
🟢
  • Lots of on-the-tools growth, structured learning through weekly Lunch 'n Learns and Intro to Programming at RMIT.

No destructive clients. Revenue breakdown: 15% Good, 60% Great, 25% Amazing (Here's what the classifications mean)

🟢
  • No destructive clients.
  • Revenue breakdown: 10% Good, 66% Great, 25% Amazing
  • All staff spend 70%+ of their time on clients
🟢
  • Spent 71% of our time on clients (over by only 76 hours).

Client survey metrics

  • 3 /5 value for money
  • 8 / 10 likely to recommend
🟢
  • 3.4 / 5 value for money
  • 8.8 / 10 likely to recommend

Maintain current revenue

🟠
  • Revenue down 16% YoY
  • Regular, honest check-ins about how we feel
🟢
  • Stand ups, development sessions, watercooler chats, impact updates and more.

New

Returning

22 Bricks
ABCH
ATEC
Abundant Water
Anantaya Jewellery
B Lab ANZ
BZE
Bank Australia
CPSN
Certification O
Chaulk
Client Fabric
Clockwork Films
Common Ground
Compass Studio
Cyclion
Dog & Bone
Envirotecture
Evee
Farm My School
Fellten
Gewürzhaus
Global Leadership Foundation
Goodtel
Green Collar
Hagens Organics
Hey Doodle
Jasper Coffee
Jaunt
KOSI
KingPump
LVLY
Lee Christison
Lumen
MIIROKO
MK Local Foods
Marnie Hawson
Merry People
Nexa Advisory
No Lights No Lycra
North West Guadalcanal Association (NWGA)
OBG
One Small Step
Parliament of Victoria
Peninsula Hot Springs
Pixii
Portable
Possible
Prisma Legal
ReCo
Shadowboxer
Strongim Bisnis
Studio Schools Australia
Thankyou
The Next Economy
The Salvage Yard
The Sociable Weaver
Time
WIRE
Whole Kids
iDE

B Corp

Not-for-profit

Diverse ownership

22 Bricks
ABCH
ATEC
Abundant Water
Anantaya Jewellery
B Lab ANZ
BZE
Bank Australia
CPSN
Certification O
Chaulk
Client Fabric
Clockwork Films
Common Ground
Compass Studio
Cyclion
Dog & Bone
Envirotecture
Evee
Farm My School
Fellten
Gewürzhaus
Global Leadership Foundation
Goodtel
Green Collar
Hagens Organics
Hey Doodle
Jasper Coffee
Jaunt
KOSI
KingPump
LVLY
Lee Christison
Lumen
MIIROKO
MK Local Foods
Marnie Hawson
Merry People
Nexa Advisory
No Lights No Lycra
North West Guadalcanal Association (NWGA)
OBG
One Small Step
Parliament of Victoria
Peninsula Hot Springs
Pixii
Portable
Possible
Prisma Legal
ReCo
Shadowboxer
Strongim Bisnis
Studio Schools Australia
Thankyou
The Next Economy
The Salvage Yard
The Sociable Weaver
Time
WIRE
Whole Kids
iDE

No items found.

Research

Brand

Website

Marketing

Technology

Impact Strategy

22 Bricks
ABCH
ATEC
Abundant Water
Anantaya Jewellery
B Lab ANZ
BZE
Bank Australia
CPSN
Certification O
Chaulk
Client Fabric
Clockwork Films
Common Ground
Compass Studio
Cyclion
Dog & Bone
Envirotecture
Evee
Farm My School
Fellten
Gewürzhaus
Global Leadership Foundation
Goodtel
Green Collar
Hagens Organics
Hey Doodle
Jasper Coffee
Jaunt
KOSI
KingPump
LVLY
Lee Christison
Lumen
MIIROKO
MK Local Foods
Marnie Hawson
Merry People
Nexa Advisory
No Lights No Lycra
North West Guadalcanal Association (NWGA)
OBG
One Small Step
Parliament of Victoria
Peninsula Hot Springs
Pixii
Portable
Possible
Prisma Legal
ReCo
Shadowboxer
Strongim Bisnis
Studio Schools Australia
Thankyou
The Next Economy
The Salvage Yard
The Sociable Weaver
Time
WIRE
Whole Kids
iDE
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