THERE were a lot of variables in play when Nev and Emily Essex (nee Eppelstun) decided it was time to change their lives and move to Grenfell.
And it wasn’t superficial, changes at the edge and keep it familiar kind of stuff they were talking about.
They were both in full-time jobs and had started a young family. The kids were probably the catalyst and the reason shaking it up made sense at the time.
But what they undertook is not for the faint-hearted.
“It sort of happened by chance,” Mrs Essex told the Next Crop forum in Grenfell on April 5.
“We’d been living in Wagga Wagga for about 10 years and both had careers of our own. I was nursing at Wagga Hospital in the emergency ward and I absolutely loved my job. Nev was truck driving at the time, but we started to have a young family.”
It was the introduction of children and seeking community values that had Nev and Emily considering outside influences that they had never really thought about before.
“Being in a larger regional community we realised the crime rate was high and there were drug problems. We started thinking about raising our family in that environment and realised that it was only going to get worse before it got any better, so we decided to look at going to a more rural community.
“We looked at buying a property out at Coolamon, but still we’d be going to a major centre for work and schools.
“And then one day Nev came home – I think he’d spent too much time in the truck thinking on his own – and he said ‘why don’t we move back to Grenfell and I can buy the butcher’s shop?
“Well, I was like ‘Oh, I don’t know’, we had a two-month-old baby and a two year old and I thought ‘golly, that’s a lot, no I don’t know about that’.
“But then I started to weigh up the pros and cons of it all, there was not many cons and there was a lot of pros. Firstly we were moving back to a really lovely country community, I’d had a beautiful upbring here, we had lots of family here, so that meant lots of support.
“Our children would have lots of opportunity with schools and sport and it’s safe.”
There were still some big issues to get over, for instance, was the butcher shop even for sale?
“We just approached the local butcher and said ‘would there be any chance of you retiring or selling up?’ And he said ‘sure’ and it all just happened by chance.
“We’d just sold our house in Wagga, I was on maternity leave, so that was another positive, because I wasn’t leaving, I’d already half left.”
So Mrs Essex didn’t feel like she was leaving her employers in the lurch, because rostering at the hospital had soaked up the fact she was not there at that time.
Then came husband Nev.
“Nev already had that skillset, he was a butcher by trade, he hadn’t butchered for a long time, but he assured me it was much like riding a bike.
“Then, we’d never owned our own business before.
“It definitely had to be something we could do ourselves, and we looked at the main street and the shop’s location and knew there would be lots of foot traffic caused by the new medical centre. And we wanted to buy the building, we didn’t want to be renting, we did want to have that hanging over our heads, that anything could have happened, the owners might have decided they wanted to occupy it themselves.
“So, Nev knew he could do the butchering and I had to have a quick crash course in how to be a meat packer, and coming from nursing that was quite the learning curve.
“We also had to be able to do the work, book keeping and the accounting.
“We were lucky enough to be able to find some good accounting software, so now I do 80 per cent of it on my phone, which suits me to the ground, and we’ve also got a really good accountant who’s quite supportive and accepts my random emails about ‘how do I do this?’
“It ended up being a really great thing that’s happened to us,” said Mrs Essex.
“The town has been unbelievably welcoming, we have huge support from the community.
“It was essentially a start-up, because it wasn’t a business that we had in mind for ourselves, but we’ve turned it into something we’re really proud of and that we’re really happy with.
“And it’s actually going really well. We’re in a position now that we’re asking ourselves ‘do we need staff?’
“It’s not really sustainable for Nev to do 18-hour days every day, and are we outgrowing our actual building?
“But, unfortunately there are a lot of empty shopfronts in Grenfell at the moment, which is becoming more and more prevalent.”
Mrs Essex explained that in Grenfell, the core of all business was small business.
“We don’t have a mine, we don’t have any huge sort of industries here, it’s all farming or small businesses in town, so it is a small business community.”
The day after the Next Crop forum, Mr Essex didn’t get to the butcher shop until about 4am, he said he was running a bit late.
As he was cutting and sorting stacks of meat that would be raffled that night in establishments around the town, he explained what made their business tick.
“Supermarkets don’t care whether you come back or not, here we have pride in our work. It’s like a good baker,” he says, gesturing across the street at the bakery, “they care whether you come back or not, so they bake a good loaf of bread”.