When she graduated from a degree in Environmental Management and Tourism at a Sydney university, Shonelle Gleeson-Willey wondered if she’d made the right choice. Jobs in National Parks or regeneration and rehabilitation were scarce, and she “just couldn't get a foot in the door at all”.
“It was very, very niche back in the early 2000s, and at the time I felt very isolated from any sort of industry. I had no idea where I fitted,” she says.
Shonelle fell into contaminated land management, the “browner side of environmental science”. “It's chemistry-based, soil science - very interesting, but dealing with sites that are stinky, brown, black, and dirty,” she says. “I found working in a fast-paced Sydney-based consultancy extremely stressful as a junior scientist, but the actual topic, I really loved.” This experience would pay dividends year later, but at the time she felt out of her depth.
Listen to Shonelle's brand-new podcast, Beyond the Green Line.
Shonelle realised she would need to specialise. “I wanted a flexible degree where I could pick and choose the subjects, so that I could try and figure out what it was I wanted to specialise in,” she says. She chose a Master of Environmental Management at UNE, as an online student living in Narrabri.
Armed with her post-graduate qualifications, Shonelle was sought-after by large, prestigious companies, and signed up as an environmental manager with construction company John Holland. “I absolutely loved construction,” she says. “I just loved building something and being a part of a team.” She stayed in the industry for seven years, working for two large companies and even spending a year as a FIFO worker in Western Australia.
Then her second child was born, and Shonelle took two years off. “It was a significant amount of time off that I'd never, ever had before,” she says. “I had literally worked up until the day my first child was born, and after six months I really needed to get back to work, because I was worried about losing my job and my career. This time, it was nice to just slow down, stop and think, and have some space for me.”
Shonelle Gleeson-Willey.
It gave her the chance to think about what she wanted out of life, and how she could combine a career with a young family.
“I went for a job with the council, and I was told that I was overqualified. But in hindsight, missing out on that position was good, because it gave me the shove that I needed to start my own business. My husband had been telling me for about six months that I should, to which I would just reply that I couldn't do that; I'm not a business owner; that’s not me. But after I missed out on that job, I was like, ‘What's the worst that could happen?’ So I just jumped in and started. I decided to go into consulting, so I didn't need a lot of capital behind me. It was just me, a laptop and a desk at home.”
And so in 2015, Moss Environmental was born. “Having a Master’s really gives you an edge in the industry, and it opened up so many doors for me,” Shonelle says. “It also gave me a lot of confidence that I could run a business where sometimes the projects that come in aren't exactly right in my skillset. But because I have done my Master’s, I can research and learn as I go, so it's not a problem.”
That’s also where contaminated land management comes back in. While doing her Masters, in one unit Shonelle chose to do a project on the topic. The work she put in, and the feedback she received, gave her much greater confidence.
“Now, circling back 15 years later, as a business owner and principal consultant, I do a fair amount of contaminated land project work. I find that being much more mature and much more across that speciality area, the short timeframes on projects are not a problem, and it’s also much more pleasant working in rural and regional Australia.”
I don't think there are many small companies that offer the amount of flexibility that we offer here.
Shonelle applied to the UNE SMART Region Incubator in Tamworth six months after starting her business. She had watched two friends grow a successful enterprise with the SRI’s help, so knew she could also benefit from the insights on offer there. The SRI helped her understand and develop the characteristics of her business that were important to her, and it has thrived. She now has three staff members and a personal assistant.
Shonelle says Moss Environmental’s culture of flexibility, and the understanding she has for other mums with young children, has been key. “Some women are perfectly happy to be working after the kids go to bed, but might not be able to be here part of the day - and that's fine. I don't think there are many small companies that offer the amount of flexibility that we offer here.”
Shonelle says she loves the freedom and excitement of building her own business.
“I’ve worked so hard at growing my team and putting in place the right foundations, to make it a good business, a good team and able to be scaled, and it's exciting,” she says.
“I think people underestimate what goes on behind the scenes in a business. As you start to grow with more people, it gets busier and busier, there's more and more to manage, and you have to find more efficient ways to do things.
“Being a consulting business, there are so many diverse projects we get asked to do, and it's exciting. There’s always somebody else to collaborate with and learn from. That's what keeps me going.”
