The Investment We Couldn't Afford to Make

"The Investment We Couldn't Afford to Make" is an article by Sarah Hyland and Rory Chapman, Directors of Together Academy. It reflects on a peer learning project aimed at a specific group of Aboriginal businesses: for-profit, founder-led, and approaching or just past $1 million in turnover.

The authors set out what happened when they tried to convene this group. Every founder they approached wanted to take part, yet the project could not go ahead because neither the founders nor the convenors had the time, even for a lightly designed format. The article treats this outcome itself as a finding, and uses the conversations that led to it as the basis for the piece.

From there, the authors describe what this cohort experiences day to day. Demand for their businesses outstrips what they can supply, and growth is limited by internal capacity rather than the market. Founders carry constant, unresolved tension between commercial sustainability and community obligation, often alone and without precedent, and no one in the cohort could name a business that had broken through to genuine scale without cost to culture, equity or wellbeing. The piece also names the human toll of this stage of growth, including burnout, strain on families, and uneven pressures on women founders, and it critiques funding models that add administrative load rather than easing it.

The article closes with a set of proposed shifts, including working capital for wages, funding criteria that accommodate loss years, less reliance on equity and intermediaries, and support for founders navigating trade-offs between quality and scale. Readers gain a grounded picture of what this cohort of Aboriginal businesses faces and what kind of support would genuinely help rather than add strain.