Streamlining the business to tackle wellbeing

Young people are invited to go out on Country for ‘horse culture healing’ and ‘bush adventure therapy’. This requires staff to have a good grasp of the local environment and animals, and how wellbeing is tied to these things.

Experience is highly valued in the BushMob team and is a preferred attribute when recruiting. That’s why when it comes to BushMob’s admin side, the directors are making great efforts to streamline everything – this way they can focus on the hands-on work and attracting the right people to deliver it. 

Priorities on the ground – admin can wait

BushMob started in 1999 as an Aboriginal community-led response to alcohol and other drugs affecting young people, especially in Alice Springs. Today, it hosts a 20-bed residential rehabilitation service for young people aged 12 to 25. 

The 5 directors are all passionate members of the local community. Bush adventure therapist Jock MacGregor explains the team has been around a long time and works together closely.

‘The management team is good at guiding us through a lot of things like the differences between skin groups and local-based knowledge,’ says Jock. ‘The CEO and I have been here 15 years. Management staff have been around for years. They’re familiar with how things work and we’ve got existing relationships with most places.’ 

In its 26 years of operation, BushMob’s focus has been on helping young people in the community. Admin had been a low priority and this was felt during audits in the past and, when their yearly audit was due in 2023, they thought it might be a good time to tidy up this side of the charity. 

Bring in the business consultant

In the lead up to the audit, the CEO and senior management thought about how they could reassess the service’s processes and functions.

‘We hired a business consultant mob because we wanted to make sure that if we go through this effort, we do the best we can do with it,’ Jock remembers.

‘They looked at the business paperwork we had and said what was good and bad and “this is what you need to have a document about” or “we can consolidate these documents”. It was good to have that intermediary rather than us copying and pasting other people’s stuff.’

The process brought BushMob’s focus onto the admin side of the business to make sure it got done. Used to doing things more casually, the board and members kept to a strict schedule set by the consultant. This kept everyone on the same page and stopped the process from dragging out.

‘If you’re a small organisation, by nature, it’s a lot more casual. You’re working with people quite closely and who you’ve known for a long time. If everybody commits to it at the start, it makes it easier,’ says Jock.

‘We always talk to people we work with, young people, staff, other directors, the general manager, the CEO and heads of funded areas in the organisation. For this we got together once a week. We needed to do this and we were paying for it with an outside organisation. So we’d sit through it, go through it, get back to them. We stuck to a schedule through it. 

‘Once we started looking at the policies and procedures, people really got into it and instead of it being a massive chore to go through hours of one document, by the end of it, you go, “alright, here's the 6 documents we're going to seal. What words do we have to check?”

‘ORIC provided notes and suggestions. This helped us to learn how to go through the audit process and become comfortable with how to do it, read it and understand it.’

The paper filing system was falling a bit behind. But through the audit-preparation process alongside the business consultant, the directors discovered how helpful it can be to stay on top of paperwork. 

‘By the time the 2023 audit happened, just one document wasn’t ticked off because we hadn’t signed it yet. That’s never happened before!’ Jock reflects. 

‘We’ve usually got this ream of stuff we have to update. It also meant the auditors pointed out some things that we could improve, like our paper filing system.’

Setting up for a digital future

Instead of having to spend time fixing problems following the audit, BushMob’s strong preparation resulted in minimal issues. This freed up the team’s time to focus on making improvements.

‘We were able to talk with our funders and we’ve got a system coming in to digitise everything,’ Jock says.

BushMob often has young people who attend the program and seek work within the corporation afterwards. With a new online system, Jock thinks this could help with recruiting young people too.

‘The online system makes it more streamlined – we can give more opportunities to people,’ Jock says. ‘We like to hire on experience with alcohol and other drugs rather than skills with paperwork, so if someone doesn’t have great literacy, it might be easier for them on the computer.

‘A lot of the time ex-clients have missed a ton of schooling. They might not be able to speak or write English very well. It just lowers the difficulty on that when their biggest tool here is their experience.’

With the admin side sorted, BushMob is more prepped for efficient work and to hire more suitable staff to support their mission: to ‘partner journeys that young people take to get the self-respect, trust, courage and skills to have a good life, because young people say that grog, sniffing, crime and violence are no good.’