In this episode of Executive with a Cause, host Tammy Ven Dange chats with Simon Rowe, founder of sleepbus.
Simon Rowe is actively ‘plotting the demise’ of his charity, sleepbus. Despite hoping he wouldn’t need to create another charity in a crowded landscape, he realised the issue of providing a safe place to sleep had to be addressed with a new approach. So, Simon used his business problem skills to create a simple solution: convert old buses into mobile sleeping pods.
In this week’s episode, Tammy chats with Simon about his unusual approach to starting and running a charity, from embedding his core mission into sleepbus’ constitution, avoiding government funding, his 100% rule, valuing volunteers and his goal of ultimately being redundant.
sleepbus is unique within the Not for Profit sector in that they don’t rely on government funding for its operations. Instead, Simon has implemented the ‘100% rule’, where all public donations go towards building new buses, and operating costs are covered by corporate sponsorship.
After a consultancy review, Simon had to pivot to run off the ‘smell of an oily rag’ to reduce the costs of servicing his buses to below half of his initial estimate. By reconfiguring these buses, he was able to reduce running costs which allowed sleepbus to provide greater support to their volunteers.
Another unique element to this financial transparency was Simon’s use of social media, including TikTok and YouTube. These videos aim to show donors where their funds go, engage viewers in the organisation’s journey and spark potential volunteer interest. Creating this face and personality for the brand keeps sleepbus refreshingly honest while the organisation is relatively simplistic in its operations. It has also helped create a culture that includes high volunteer engagement and retention.
Simon discusses his stipulation that any sleepbus venture must involve a bus, ensuring the brand retains its place in the ecosystem without competing with existing overstretched ‘bricks and mortar’ services. Finally, Simon shares sleepbus’ goal to be reliant on donations whilst remaining independent of government funds as well. This includes the introduction of the sleepbus Dreamliner raffle. It’s a ‘home lottery’ of sorts, but with a sleepbus twist.
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IT in Plain English
Do you find your staff too often forgetting their passwords or using ones that are “simple to guess”? Then perhaps your organisation should consider using a password locker or manager. In this episode, Tammy discusses how apps such as 1Password and LastPass can enhance your IT security. This is particularly relevant for teams who share passwords, such as social media accounts, or who may be increasing their risk by relying on a single staff member for multiple passwords. Some lockers offer free trials or subscriptions, so you can test them to see if it benefits your organisation.
And to understand the relationship and difference with Single Sign-On, check out this episode.
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Topics from this episode:
- 0.00 | Introduction
- 2.18 | The concept of sleepbus
- 7.16 | Steering away from government funding
- 9.26 | What is a sleepbus?
- 12.55 | The 100% rule
- 15.10 | Funding sustainability
- 19.00 | YouTube
- 22.06 | Future planning
- 23.33 | Involving family
- 24.13 | The sleepbus fleet
- 26.19 | Sleepbus health
- 26.00 | Recognising volunteers
- 28.22 | Managing teams
- 30.40 | Building a self-managing culture
- 33.56 | Automation
- 37.30 | Two bank accounts
- 43.00 | Revenue from sponsorship and donations
- 45.30 | Entering the raffle and sleepbus’ constitution
- 50.08 | IT in Plain English
Quotes from Simon in this episode:
“I actually thought that the last thing we needed was another charity, and so I had no intention of starting one. But the more I researched and went down the rabbit hole of what was happening in Australia and the world, it just kept coming back to there not being enough safe places to sleep, even temporarily.”
“I knew affordable housing was the solution. And I dabbled in that, and it was just very difficult with the red tape from government agencies. I like to call them the ‘roundtables of death’. Just meeting after meeting and my business brain decided to start at the foundation.”
“I stumbled across a Japanese pod hotel, and I had a bit of an architecture background and I loved the design, loved the simplicity of it. It had everything you’d need, so where am I going to put it? So I fiddled around with building sleep pods in my garage and sleeping in them for weeks and months at a time to get the right size. And then I was flicking through a photo album with my boys and came across an old Bedford bus that I’d converted as a 20-year-old into a motorhome. And I went, there you go, I’m going to stick it in there, and Sleepbus was born. For me it ticked a couple of boxes, it was unique, and no one was doing anything like it anywhere in the world at the time. And from a sponsorship perspective, which was important with my corporate background, I could hit up my corporate mates and get sponsorship to make sure the service could run and also scalability. And then also the fact it was a bus, it’s a physical thing but it can go where people need us, rather than a bricks and mortar thing where we drag people to come to us.”
“We only have one rule on Sleepbus. Which is the quiet enjoyment rule. So as long as you can remain quiet and calm and let everyone else have a quiet night’s sleep, then you get a bed. We don’t ask any of your history, we’re not counsellors or anything, we’re just there to give you a safe place to sleep.”
“We have two paid staff who are bus builders, and the rest of our team are volunteers. This goes back to my research where there was a lot of negativity around charities due to misappropriation of funds and things like high wages and high costs. And the public doesn’t like overheads. And as a business, I know you can’t not have overheads. But the public doesn’t like that term because it’s possible some organisations have misused this and made it hard for everyone. So, I looked at how can I build trust. And we decided to go with the 100% rule where 100% of donations go to sleepbus projects.”
“We’ve got some plans about eventually becoming more self-sustainable. sleepbus doesn’t receive any government funding, we’re 100% donation and sponsorship based. That doesn’t sit well with me. My personality is that I don’t like taking handouts, I understand as a charity in the early days I have to, so I do. But I always knew I wanted to figure out a way that we can generate our own income so we don’t have to rely on donations. Yes, we would still get them but it just would mean we don’t have to rely on it.”
“I saw too many organisations that received government funding and would deliver these amazing programs with serious impact, and then a change in government or a change in policy and the funding would stop and so too would the program.”
“So as an example, we’ve just built a luxury motorhome, the sleepbus Dreamliner, and we’re auctioning it off. It cost $100 grand to build but it fits in well with the brand, and it’s our version of a ‘home lottery’. We have 10,000 tickets, at $100 a ticket we hope to raise a million dollars from selling all those. And with that million dollars, I’d be able to put a sleepbus in every capital city. And we can take $100,000 from that million and build another motorhome and do it all over again next year.”
“I like to be positive because I’m a positive guy. We do a serious thing but I try to have as much fun with it as possible, because that’s all I know, and I try to do that with my volunteers too. And it clearly resonates.”
“I decided early on that I was going to give this charity a face. And that ended up being me. I didn’t want to be a faceless organisation, not everybody may like me, but hopefully they back me and follow my journey. So it was very important to me to have a face and a personality.”
“So the plan was always to get sleepbus to a certain point where I could just keep replacing myself and the seven hats that I wear. And then I could just be the spruiker and tell the story and share what we’re doing and bring the money in. And I always say sleepbus is the type of charity you want to close, you don’t want to have a purpose for it anymore. So I guess in the background I am actively plotting sleepbus’ demise. Affordable housing and a better option than sleepbus needs to come to fruition in a bigger way.”
“For our volunteers that do a certain number of hours for us, they get a sleepbus BnB ticket, and they make their way down to Melbourne and can stay in our BnB for free for a weekend and enjoy the hospitality as a way to say thank you, so those little things go towards showing our volunteers how much we appreciate them.”
“There is content going out on the platforms all the time. And it’s not sugar-coated, it’s not produced. It’s just raw and people see it’s authentic and they like that. And because they’re so invested from day one.”
“We have campaigns that run for particular communities, and people can donate for that particular project. Or they can donate generally through the website and that goes towards any project. We have two bank accounts like charity: water does. All the donations go into one, and that goes towards building a sleepbus or running it. And the other bank account is the business side of things, from areas such as corporate sponsorships and that goes into corporate approaches.”
“I designed sleepbus to run on the smell of an oily rag. It just needed to be super, super efficient so we could put every cent towards getting more buses out there.”
“A lot of the sponsorship that we get is just to support the volunteers and make sure they feel appreciated and loved and share our story.”
“All builds are from donations, and at the moment, probably 50% of buses have a sponsor or are covered by sponsorship, and the rest is picked up by donations.”
Links & Resources
- Connect with Simon on Linkedin
- Visit the sleepbus website
- Enter the raffle to win a sleepbus Dreamliner
- Follow sleepbus on YouTube, Facebook and TikTok
Credits
Thanks to our Producer, Nick Whatman, and the entire team at Lonsdale St. Studio. Thanks also to our Digital Content Creator, Laura Kleinrahm.
Tammy Ven Dange is a former charity CEO, Not for Profit Board Member and IT Executive. Today she helps NFPs with strategic IT and data decisions with her business, Roundbox Consulting.