Mastering a small business

Lauren Baldasso and her husband Mark are partners in life, their studies and business. Together they completed a Master of Business Administration (Executive) at ACU before launching their very own board game, transforming a small side hustle into a successful business that has only just begun.

Lauren and Mark were both working for Catholic Education Melbourne when they were offered the chance to come to ACU as part of a sponsorship program to study the MBA (Executive) at the Melbourne Campus. 

Career opportunities

“Being supported to get my MBA was a great opportunity that aligned with what I wanted to do with my career at the time,” Lauren said. “I’d already completed a master’s degree in publishing and editing but I was looking for a new professional challenge. Mark was a little more hesitant, and I was the one who encouraged him to do it. I knew it would be a good chance for him to build on his skills.”

Unlike Lauren, Mark was already working in finance so was more familiar with the course content.

“While I don’t have a business background, I was still quite comfortable with the units and I was exposed to a lot of new areas that I hadn’t studied before.

“It helped that there was a lot of scope to picking your own topics for essays so you could explore different interests. I ended up really enjoying the essay writing side of it, which Mark found a little more challenging shall we say!

“Also, we both studied it as a face-to-face intensive, so we’d be studying for a week and then we’d get time off, which helped us not get too burnt out.

“One difficult part was that we got engaged about two months into the course. So then I was planning a wedding on top of working full-time and studying. We got married about 12 months later and then I was pregnant with my son Oskar by the time I graduated.”

Starting a business

It was during their MBA that Lauren and Mark first came upon the idea of creating a board game and building it into a small business. 

“We studied a unit called Entrepreneurship and it got the cogs turning a bit for us.

"As part of the subject we had to come up with a business concept relevant to our real jobs.

“Mark came up with a business called Finance Over Frothies, which was about offering budgeting guidelines for young people just out of uni. He actually transformed the assignment into a real business that he ran for about 12 months. It was very time consuming, but that process of starting and growing something from scratch got him thinking about what else we could do as a little side business that might one day become something more.

“At the time, we were playing a lot of board games with friends and both of us grew up playing lots of games with our families. When we were driving home from a weekend away, Mark turned to me and said that he wanted to create his own game, to which I just responded sarcastically, ‘Yeah, ok sure’.

“But I ended up thinking about it and we wound up mulling the idea over for a good six months. We thought trains would be interesting for kids in particular, because really, who doesn’t love trains?

"We thought more about the mechanics of it and realised a board game has a lot of parts and could be quite expensive to produce, which is why we settled on a card game.

“It became The Train Game. We made up some rules and tested it out with friends, adapting it as we went along, which turned out to be quite a lengthy process. We were cutting pieces of coloured paper up to represent different cards, so it was all very basic in the beginning.

“But fast forward another six months and I’m 34 weeks pregnant and 1,000 copies of this game lands on the front doorstep of our two-bedroom apartment.

"We launched a website and started selling it pretty much straight away. 

 

"As we’d workshopped it with a lot of friends, many of them bought copies and then told their friends and then in another six months’ time we’d sold out of our first print run. It just took off.

“Admittedly, it wasn’t easy as I gave birth right after that initial shipment so we were sort of learning parenting and how to run a small business at the same time, and Mark was working full-time too.

“It’s been almost two years since we first launched and we’ve now sold 10,000 copies of The Train Game which is huge for us!

"We’ve now got two versions – Melbourne and Sydney – and we’ve got it selling in a few stores as well as the website. We hope to launch the Brisbane Train Game version soon, and then New York and London. I’m also pregnant again, so it’s been a crazy year for both of us.”

Making it work

“Sometimes I’m not really sure how we make it all work,” Lauren admits. “It’s a lot of give and take – Mark does this, so I do that, and our son Oskar is right in the middle of it all too.

“I do all of the graphic design work for the different editions. So when we’re working towards launching a new edition, Mark will take a step back and take over with Oskar a bit more, and then I do the same when he is working on the finances and liaising with the manufacturers. We share the load with customer service, but it’s still a lot of late nights.

"You have to take time out and figure out exactly what needs to get done straight away and what you can leave till tomorrow.

“It does surprise me a bit that we’re running our own business as it wasn’t like this was the specific plan. I hadn’t really thought much about it. I think everyone’s dream is to get out of the nine to five and have your side hustle turn into an empire! But the truth is we both love our jobs, so who knows? We’ll see where it takes us.”

Find out how an MBA at ACU can accelerate your career.