If you want money to boost your bank balance, expand your operations, or increase profitability, you might be better off looking at business loans. However, if you have a project idea that you can prove creates outcomes beyond your financial benefit, you might well have a grant opportunity.
Let me show you four of our client’s grant successes that demonstrate exactly how this works.
A Gascoyne-based plumbing company needed new equipment. Framed as a business investment – “We want to buy equipment to take on more work and increase profits” – this would be a clear loan scenario. But when we repositioned it as a project with measurable community outcomes, everything changed.
The project became that the plumber’s additional service capacity will create four new full-time positions, generate income for local services such as equipment suppliers, stickering companies, and mechanics, and it would allow more people requiring plumbing and water in the community to be serviced more efficiently. Same equipment purchase, same financial benefit to the company, but now it’s a job creation project which won $103,090 in grant funding.
We won an agricultural company $5 million to expand their facility so they could make oat milk. A business case that simply focused on market opportunity and profit potential was venture capital or loan territory. But we positioned it as an economic diversification project that created local employment whilst helping towards a greener future thus supporting the state’s strategic objectives. Now that is a project that goes from loan territory to a grant funding win.
The pattern becomes even clearer with housing projects. Builders can’t usually get grants to build new housing because investment to create rental income or property sales would make it a commercial development requiring traditional financing. But when a local government – with our help – framed it as a workforce retention project specifically addressing care worker shortages, the same houses, with the same construction costs now became a community service project that secured full grant funding.
We also have a huge number of sports facility improvement success stories because we’re skilled in seeing what the community need is. “We want to upgrade our facilities to attract more members and increase revenue” is a business loan conversation. However, “We want to implement a community health project that increases physical activity participation, with particular focus on women’s and youth sports” is a truly grant-worthy project.
In every case above, even if bank balance is the true private motivation, the public benefit must be the focused compelling reason for funding. When you can articulate clear project outcomes that extend beyond your financial gain you become eligible for a grant opportunity.
It can be a struggle to identify outcomes beyond your own organisational benefit, but Whitney Consulting’s team are experts in it. Contact us today and we’ll help you see beyond the balance sheet.
