Using collaboration as a foundation, author, business strategist and yoga teacher Dr Polly McGee wrote about the benefits of working together in her book The Good Hustle.

“I define the good hustle as a business that has heart, which means it is set up to not only create revenue and be sustainable, but have a market it can interact with and has to be able to scale to a degree,” Dr McGee said.

“And ideally it does something that changes the lives of the people it interacts with.”

Dr McGee has collaborated with many business owners, including Kim Seagram and Monica Plunkett, with the three entrepreneurial women sharing insights about collaboration.

Kim Seagram – of Stillwater, Harvest Launceston and Abel Gin Company – came to entrepreneurship with her husband Rod Ascui after working for international hotel chains.

The couple set about looking for suitable businesses to invest in, with the aspiring entrepreneur become worried about how they would all be managed.

“I got a bit terrified in the beginning because we would look at 50 different businesses and I’m thinking how are we going to take on 50 businesses, and then I realised that you actually have to look at 50 different opportunities before you find the one you actually want to invest your time, your energy, your money in,” Ms Seagram said.

In typical business fashion, the network provided when Harvest Launceston needed a graphic designer to refresh its brand, and Monica Plunkett started collaborating with the committee.

“Through the different businesses that we’ve started up, and continue to run, I met this fabulous young designer who was doing some incredible work in that field,” Ms Seagram said.

This work led to further opportunities with Ms Seagram, which included designing for the Abel Gin brand.

Mrs Plunkett started her design business, Halibut Creative, with her husband around 10 years ago, with both seeking opportunities to “do what we love and give back to the community”.

“Collaboration is one of those key words we’ve come across time and time again,” Mrs Plunkett said.

“It opened my eyes up to what we can all do to help each other, to give each other a leg up and build a better place for all of us.”

In the true spirit of collaboration, Mrs Plunkett is now working as a senior designer with another Launceston business, S. Group.

Building ongoing relationships with like-minded people over shared business philosophies was an example of the good hustle in practice, Dr McGee said.

“The path to enlightenment [in yogic practice], I discovered, was very similar to the path that a person who is doing a start up has to take,” she said.

“Businesses that are good, sustainable businesses don’t happen overnight; they’re usually a 10-year overnight success.”