By Tessa Mapstone
She has forged a unique path, spent three years travelling around Australia in a caravan with her family, created a sharing economy, and now an online community to empower women in business.
Kym Foster does not let anything hold her back, but it took the death of a friend and her mother’s cancer diagnosis to make her realise life was too short to be a passenger on the merry-go-round of corporate work and daily chores.
By the time Kym turned 30 she was a busy mum with an 18-month-old son, working full time as a lawyer.
She and her husband Andrew had been at a friend’s funeral the day she decided things had to change.
“It was like I had an epiphany,” Kym said.
“I thought, life’s too short, we’ve got a son in childcare full time, the weekends are just slipping away and we’re busy just food shopping and cleaning and stuff like that.
“I was working long hours and bringing work home, and my husband was too, and I just thought ‘this sort of sucks really, this is going to be the rest of our lives, why do people do this?’”
Kym said she used to think she valued having the beautiful house and new cars, until she realised she would have to keep living a life that made her unhappy in order to have them.
“That’s the compromise where you say ‘look, I know we need certain things in our life but I’m not going to die for them, I’m not going to put myself through this sort of lifestyle in order to have them’,” she said.
So Kym and Andrew quit their jobs, sold their Wellington Point home, bought a caravan and hit the road with two-year-old Hunter in tow.
Their planned year-long lap around Australia turned into a three-year odyssey that has changed the course of Kym’s life.
On the road the family felt a sense of freedom they could not have found within the daily grind at home.
“The freedom of where you go and how long you spend there, the freedom of being able to leave, freedom in relation to time, freedom in relation to expectations and judgment,” she said.
“When you’re travelling a lot you can just get up because you’ve woken up and it’s a beautiful morning and you get out and go for a walk and it doesn’t matter what time you get back, and then you’ll do what we need to do next.
“There’s a multitude of amazing experiences that you would not have any other way, and it’s those daily experiences – the littlest thing you might see that day, even the people you meet – that make it so special.
Kym and Andrew went into their trip with a range of skills under their belts and a willingness to do anything from legal services to tiling and cleaning toilets to top up their kitty along the way.
They had no trouble finding work, and it was that openness to using whatever tradable skills she had that later inspired Kym to create Shareshop.
The family set up home in Sunshine Beach at the end of their trip, Kym gave birth to their second child, Amity, and launched Shareshop.
Shareshop became an online community hub allowing members to trade their skills, talents, goods and services using points instead of money.
“The idea for Shareshop would not have come up without the trip, I don’t think,” Kym said
“I would have just gone back to being a lawyer, I wouldn’t have had the time to think about what I was missing. I’d be back at work earning good money with two children in day care this time.
“To me that was sacrificing a lot of things that we had then made part of our lifestyle.”
Seven years after Shareshop’s creation, Kym has made the decision to shift the focus to the needs of its core members – women in business.
And so Shebux was born.
After its launch in mid-September, Shebux – a private economy for women in business – will replace Shareshop and offer more to its members.
“Fundamentally it’s a membership-based community for women in business to connect, then using our online marketplace they promote their product or service and buy and see from each other using our own currency of Shebux,” Kym said.
“The benefits of a closed community and a private economy can provide you can not be found elsewhere, and I know that from having seven years’ experience in the same situation.
“Now I have honed that model so it can really boom and provide future benefits.”
As well as creating an exclusive online marketplace, Shebux will be a place where entrepreneurs can find support and insights to empower them and drive their own business success.
“We’re building a sisterhood here,” Kym said.
“It’s a big ugly world out there with competition in business, and businesses are suffering.
“They’re having to multitask in areas of social media and marketing that are perhaps not the crux of their business and not their forte, and they’re spending lots of time on that.
“So this is a sisterhood with heart, that we actually care but we’re savvy. We want to succeed in business too, so hey, we’ll have the best of both worlds.”
A second lap
Ten years after Kym, Andrew and Hunter (now 12 years old) set off on their round-Australia adventure, the family is preparing to hit the road again, this time with Amity, 7, and Archie, 2.
“For us the key is the quality of time that our kids get to spend with both parents,” Kim said.
Things will be a little bit different this time around.
Kym plans run her online business from the road and promote it around the country, leaving Andrew free to take time out from work.
“I’m really looking forward to bringing Shebux to some communities where they really need this too, especially in rural and remote places,” she said.
“There’s people there that have awesome skills and talents, they might just not fit the mould.
“I’m so appreciative that Andrew is supporting me in this new venture, and that he hasn’t said ‘look love you’re a lawyer, I think you should go back and earn some money’.”
It has been the unwavering support of her husband that has allowed Kym the chance to support other women in business through their journey, and to run Shareshop for seven years.
“He’s just like ‘yeah I believe in you, I believe in what you’re doing, you’re trying to make the planet a better place, so that’s more important than money,” she said.
“I’m very blessed, I think I am a risk taker because of the support I have around me.”
Packing up a life and taking a family on the road, and starting unconventional ventures have some things in common: they both involve risks, thinking outside the box and require determination.
“It’s definitely been challenging,” Kym said.
“But if I believe in it enough I will find a way to make it work.
“There were 100 excuses why not to do it but I just kept working and working until I found the answers.
“I just believe that in a way we can be whatever we want to be and do whatever we want to do, we’ve just got to find the way.
“You’ve got to have the desire – it’s got to be stronger than those opposing forces.”
It’s that drive and open-mindedness that has led Kym to where she is today.
“I never would have envisaged being here,” she said.
“When I left school, when I left uni, and became a lawyer, I never would have thought I’d be travelling around Australia and starting some online community for women in business.
“It was not in my plan. I was going to be a barrister.”
Now she wants to make Shebux and Australia-wide exclusive network that supports women in business, and maybe one day even go global.
“I want women in business know that they’re not alone and that there is an easier way. I want to really create this community to be reckoned with,” she said.
