If you’ve ever heard a biz refer to their staff roster as their family, chances are they haven’t meant it literally. But for the Keating clan – the family behind Keating & Co. Condiments, DARCY Smells Good and Leaf Candle Co. – they’re dead serious. Below, the small-biz-owning network shares what it’s like going into business with folk from the same family.

KEATING & CO. CONDIMENTS – DOMINIC KEATING, CO-FOUNDERTell us about Keating & Co. Condiments. Growing up in North East Victoria in a large extended family and within a huge network of friends, there was no shortage of big gatherings – and with that, lots of great meals too. Amid all of this was our dad's famous relish. Dad's relish recipe was passed down to Declan and the tradition returned with a new batch of relish each year. Around the same time, I was busy trying to grow as many chilli plants in the garden as possible, and we ended up with an insane amount of produce. The only thing that made sense was to make hot sauce! Using what we learnt from Dad, we came up with our very first hot sauce, Cap'n Cayenne – which is still a favourite today.

What’s the best thing about running a biz with your brother? We know each other well, and we can trust each other. Every win is celebrated together – we were a team before this even started. You wouldn't find that with a non-related business partner. The relationship in that case may only be business related, and not built on decades of strengthening the bond that ultimately led to Keating & Co. Condiments.

What’s the most difficult thing? In saying that, we are brothers and we do know how to get under each other's skin and push each other's buttons more than anyone else. We know what could drive each other mad. But we had all of our arguments and beefs with each other when we were young – that's all out of our system. The positive of this is that we know each other's strengths and weaknesses, and we use them to our advantage. We are both very different people, and because of this Dec and I know how to tackle situations before they even arise.What does your creativity look like when you work together?  I think our business has really unlocked areas of creativity we didn't know we had. The majority of our flavours and products have come from Dec's mind – the way he is able to come up with something so unique that works every time is phenomenal. Our branding is a nod to our childhood and all of the things we enjoyed growing up as ’90s kids –  coming up with a flavour, a character and a name that all works together may be the most enjoyable part for me. There are some crazy ideas that only work because we have come up with them together.

⁠How has running a business based on the way that food brings people together guided you in how you run the brand? From our family gatherings early on to the twice a year catch-ups we now have with our childhood friends and their growing families, we have always been around good people and good food, which creates a great atmosphere and great memories. This is exactly how we run our business. The “Co.” in Keating & Co. is literally the company we keep: the friends, family and any other food lovers we meet along the way. It’s so important to us to be around people who enhance each other’s lives and we hope that’s reflected in the association that people have with our condiments and their food.

LEAF CANDLE CO. – TRACY KEATING, CANDLEMAKER (AND EVERYTHING ELSE)Image courtesy of The Sydney Opera House

Tell us about Leaf Candle Co. I have always been a creative, hands-on person and also love to have a candle burning in my home. One year for my birthday, my husband Dec bought me a voucher to attend a candle-making workshop. I immediately fell in love with the process and started experimenting with different scents, vessels and label designs. Somewhere early in this process, I started experimenting with upcycled vessels – I've always been eco-conscious, and this just felt right. After a few years of candle-making as a side hustle, in mid-2021 while on maternity leave, I was made redundant from my full-time position in marketing. I decided that this was the moment: the little push from the universe that I needed to jump head-first into Leaf Candle Co. I set myself a two-month timeline to build and launch my website, and it has been by full-time gig since.

How do you practice sustainability at Leaf Candle Co.? Before the first little seeds of Leaf Candle Co. were sprouting, it was always important to me to prioritise the eco-friendly option, both as a consumer and a maker. As an avid candle lover, I had purchased and collected many candles in glass jars, which once the candles have been burnt cannot be recycled. This had never sat right with me, and I was determined to create candles that could be refilled, repurposed or recycled at the end of their life. From the very beginning, I wanted to create a business that created something beautiful without creating unnecessary waste.L: Image courtesy of The Sydney Opera House

How do you go about testing your products? I'm a strong believer that scent and memory go hand in hand. Experimenting with blending different scents is one of my favourite parts of making candles. Sometimes a fleeting thought might spark an idea or new concept; sometimes a customer might make a suggestion for a product or scent they love. I generally work my way through things organically, letting them fall into place in their own time. An example of this is our Reed Diffusers, which are made using repurposed piccolo wine bottles. This was a product I wanted to add to my range for many years but hadn't found the right fit for the brand – purchasing new vessels was the simple option but did not feel true to our core principles, so finding and partnering with Just A Glass Australia has been wonderful.

What’s something about running a small biz that you wish you knew earlier? Starting and running a small, handmade business has meant that aside from being the candlemaker at Leaf Candle Co., my job also includes everything else. Having a passion for your craft is really important, but it’s not the be all and end all of running a business. In fact, it’s just a very small part of keeping a business functioning.

How does being a part of a small-biz owning family help you run your business? The great part of having a husband who also runs a business is that he understands the unique pressure points and needs that a small business has. Although our businesses look very different from the outside, a lot of the operational and administrative aspects are the same. We can offer support to each other in a way that we wouldn’t be able to in the traditional nine-to-five jobs of our past.

DARCY SMELLS GOOD – DECLAN KEATING, CO-FOUNDERTell us about DARCY Smells Good. I think I always wanted to do a beard oil, having had a beard for all of my adult life (and teenage years). My brother Dom and I would discuss the idea often, always occurring midway through a discussion about Keating and Co. There was a lot of “going back to the drawing board” with DARCY, lots of different ideas thrown into the mix. We love working within family networks, so utilising my wife Tracy’s dad as our logo designer was a no-brainer. Lionel is an amazing calligrapher and drew up lots of different styles of our logo based on lots of different briefs we put forward. It’s an interesting business – although the idea and concept were born from my head, the business ultimately uses all of Tracy’s expertise to bring it to life.

What have you learnt from running a condiments business that has been helpful for running DARCY Smells Good? We are still always learning how to run our businesses – coming from varying career backgrounds, and sharing ideas and lessons help us along the way. I think the biggest key to running a business, especially a family business (or businesses), is communication. We all have different roles to play within the businesses but if we don’t communicate where things are up to, it is going to collapse. We have a huge Google Calendar shared between the three of us for our business activities, financial due dates and everything business related. We also have task lists, group email chains, a WhatsApp group and informal meetings all of the time (Tracy and I have business meetings at least 20 times a day). I think communication is definitely the most important thing we learnt early on with Keating and Co.How did Tracy come into the mix? It was natural to involve Tracy, by utilising her expertise in scent development, and translating her knowledge of bath-and-body products and soap manufacturing to beard-oil manufacturing. Including body wash and hand soap allowed us to expand DARCY into more personal hygiene categories quite easily (again, using Tracy’s knowledge). I remember I wrote a recipe for the beard oil, hand soap and body wash and after showing Tracy, she pretty quickly told me we need to rethink them. We then collaborated on the recipes to get them to a point where they worked. Tracy and I often joke that it feels like we are in a heist movie because we have so many different moving parts – three businesses between the three of us, as well as Tracy and I having two children. We are always planning our days to look at what is happening for us as a family, who needs to be where and when, and then always incorporating the business needs into the day.

Any advice for a family that is thinking of starting a business (or businesses!) together? I think the biggest piece of advice for anyone starting a family business would be to look at communication. I can’t express enough how important communication is, and not just day-to-day functional communication, but understanding each other’s communication styles – how each other interprets information and how you as a person relay information. It’s easy for someone to misinterpret information and take things too personally in any situation – throw family into the mix and it almost becomes a given. Having open lines of communication allows for these things to be talked about and stops the misunderstanding of what is business-related as opposed to a personal hurdle. I think we have worked through our communication styles pretty well, but it is an interesting dynamic between the three of us – two brothers having a particular communication style, a husband and wife with our own communication style, a brother and sister-in-law with their communication style, and then the three of us. Communication is definitely key.

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