You have nothing to lose and a lot to gain. There is always something to learn every day of your life and if you want to achieve your dream, planning and persistence is probably the main key to its success.

Kate Schwager, her husband Billy and their three boys run a successful cotton and wheat share farming enterprise near Wee Waa, which they started Six years ago. Wee Waa is a small western NSW town with 2000 people. Overcoming many challenges Kate set up the weewaa.com website in 1998 as a way of promoting her community and exploring an off-farm income opportunity. After some initial setbacks, Kate relaunched the website in 2004. Within three months of the second launch Kate attracted over 80 advertisers and was able to provide free pages to community groups. She has been featured in the city press. With 32,000 hits to the site in the first three months, Kate was already on her way to reaching her goals and showing that an internet-focused business such as this can be run successfully from a farm. She is also the publicity office for WINCOTT, an organisation for Australian women involved in the cotton industry. Kate recently won the RIRDC Rural Women’s Award 2006 for NSW with her Rural Small Towns Web Package.

What gave you the motivation/inspiration to follow your dream?

I have come to know my community and love living near Wee Waa. It is a great town, and one of my most memorable achievements to date was getting media personality Alan Jones to be guest speaker at a local dinner in 2002. Despite being in the middle of drought, 360 people helped raise $30,000 to finish our new state-of-the-art Medical Centre. Despite this obvious community spirit, I felt we needed to promote the town better and show people what we have here. The website idea grew from there. I set myself a first-year goal and achieved it after only six months. Those visiting the website, including people who actually live in the town, told me they didn’t realise Wee Waa had so much going for it.

At what point did you realise that your dream was actually possible and what was it that made you think you could really do it?

I tried a number of website packages but found they were all too complicated and expensive. I got frustrated every time I’d go and learn a package because by the time I got back to it I’d forgotten what I’d taught myself. I then met Ruth Quigly (Webteam Australia), another WINCOTT member and web aficionado, who put me in touch with Christian Torvnes (Ligante). Christian lives in Brazil and has developed a user-friendly package for building websites and it started to fly from there. I am now able to do things like draft advertisements with clients in a word-processing program before simply cutting and pasting straight onto the website. When my first $5000 from advertising was in the bank I realised I was going to make it happen.

When you were a child, what did you want to ‘be’ when you grew up?

I can’t remember specifically wanting to do anything in particular as a young girl, but being the daughter of a retired stock and station agent may have had something to do with it. Dad bought some land when I was at boarding school so it was probably while riding the hills on my horse during the holidays that I thought about owning land one day. After school, I spent 10 years in the city, travelled overseas, returned to Sydney and met my husband. In less than two years, we both decided we’d had enough of city life and made the move back to the bush to farm near Billy’s home town.

How did your childhood influence you in later life? Who are your role models?

I grew up in a large community-minded family in Blayney, another small town in the Central West of NSW. Dad always showed determination to get jobs finished and taught me to keep trying in spite of setbacks until I got to where I wanted to be. Mum belonged to volunteer organisations and regularly worked for the community. She and Dad now live in the elderly people’s village, which Mum helped to set up. Their early influences have shaped my values. When my boys say to me, ‘Mum why do you always do all this stuff for nothing’, I try to help them understand how rewarding contributing to the community can be and hope they too will take on some of the values shown to me by my parents.

What does success mean to you?

Achieving goals is very important to me. I would like to see Wee Waa continue to prosper through tourism and see similar websites up and running in other towns. Because we are share farmers, the ability to bring in other income is important but money doesn’t get you everything. I try to keep the web work to one day a week as I have other roles such as WINCOTT and also want to ensure I keep a balance including spending time with our boys.

What has been one of the biggest barriers you have had to face, what happened, and how did you overcome it?

My husband had a major operation and donated a kidney to his brother, which was a traumatic time for us all. While he was recovering, we bought a computer thinking it would be a good diversion for us. I had planned to teach Billy to use it, but loved it so much it became my all-consuming passion.

I began to think there should be no reason why I couldn’t run some kind of business from home using the internet. I had worked as a secretary for a large bank when we lived in the city so I had good administrative skills. At that time I was on a local committee called Wee Waa Inc. and was asked to translate my regular newsletter into a web page. It really progressed from there. However, I struck quite a few technical problems, lost all the data and had to redo everything. It was a frustrating time. I met Ruth Quigley, asked for her help and just started it all over again.

Where do you see yourself in 10 years time? What is your vision for the future?

We will have educated our three boys and successfully marketed the web package throughout Australia. I hope other towns and businesses will take it on as an accessible and easy-to-use promotional tool. I am just at the beginning, but I enjoy what I am doing and of course hope it will provide a good ongoing income stream in the future. I would like to hear from other women who might be interested in setting up their own town website.

What would you like to say to other women who may be just starting out on a ‘Daring to Dream’ journey?

You have nothing to lose and a lot to gain. There is always something to learn every day of your life and if you want to achieve your dream, planning and persistence is probably the main key to its success.