Rebecca McCash (00:00)
The whole of FutureTech is a giant And I very much see life as an experiment. It’s constantly evolving, changing, and that’s actually what keeps it really It’s like this amazing problem that will never be

But there’s always new things to try and I think it’s the best and I love walking alongside them, learn from them, and learn with and support get where they will ultimately go.

Craig Minter (00:48)
Hello everybody and welcome to the Healthy Business Lab podcast where we interview allied health and related business owners to get their learnings and gold nuggets in what they’ve done in building, growing their businesses and the like. Today, I’m super excited to have Rebecca McCash from FutureTech Australia on our episode today. Rebecca, welcome to the podcast.

Rebecca McCash (01:10)
Thanks so much Craig, I’m really really happy to be here.

Craig Minter (01:12)
Yeah, and obviously when I saw your business and what you were doing, I was just super excited to have a chat. I’d love for you to introduce yourself to our community because you’re going to do a better job of it than what I will, but I’d love for you to share your background and what you’ve created there at FutureTech.

Rebecca McCash (01:33)
Sure, thanks Craig. So my name is Rebecca. I am a late diagnosed autistic and ADHD woman and had a lot of history of mental health challenges and things like this while was growing up. I think as a result largely of the fact that I was an undiagnosed neurodivergent person, I was very lucky to receive my diagnosis at 26 and at that point I was really able to start thinking about

how I structured my life differently, how I approach work differently, how I approach well-being differently. And so that diagnosis really kind of opened up that ability for me to apply a framework that really worked for my life instead of this never-ending cycle of intense productivity followed by intense burnout, recovery and repeat. So I started FutureTech

as a result of watching my younger brother Sam growing up and coming through the education system. So Sam was diagnosed as a small child as neurodivergent and he really struggled through that school system that just didn’t make space for him to flourish. I think oftentimes he was either seen

like a distraction to be managed or to be completely removed. I didn’t see him this way. I really thought that young people like Sam, like his brain was just incredible the way that he thinks still about things. His kindness and his empathy and his love for humans, for animals, for everything and the solutions that he came up with were so unique. I just thought, gosh, it’s going to

children and young people like him that will grow up to one day make really really big changes in the world and solve some of these really complex challenges that we currently face and that you know the world is going to be facing in the future as well. So FutureTech was really kind of born of this idea. How do we ensure that neurodivergent young people

grow up and have learning and education experiences that fill them up and fulfill them instead of taking away? Many young people,

very sadly are not finding that in their places of learning. About 97 % of autistic young people report facing difficulty in school, which is insane. And this really leads to this compounding effect of having bad mental health, bad wellbeing, bad self-esteem, and young people are leaving school with these almost trauma responses to learning, which is just so

Craig Minter (03:55)
Yeah.

Rebecca McCash (04:11)
dangerous for neurodivergent people because we need to learn, we need to be able to deep dive into our special interests so that we can recover and feel well and feel good about ourselves.

So FutureTech really started as a program for neurodivergent young people and our focus was very much on STEAM, so Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math. And that was because my younger brother Sam, he was a budding technologist, a tinkerer, and experimenter from as early as he possibly could. So focusing on some of those areas was

a result of observing him and seeing the kinds of things that he was interested in.

When we started FutureTech, I wasn’t actually diagnosed yet. So that came later after we actually launched FutureTech. And when that came, that was when we looked at the program again and said, well, actually, maybe we should be a bit more deliberate bringing some of the arts, the more creative topics into the program, because those were my areas of interest and recognising that

young girls, young boys, young people in general also have interest in those areas.

Over time, the program has really evolved and responded to our young people. And our mission really is just to inspire them, inspire the neurodivergent minds of the future to build a better world for everyone. And so, yes, we do that through programs, but we also do that through community capacity building. So going out and working with community, working with schools, working with workplaces to try and upskill the rest of the world as well. Just recognising that

while we can create this beautiful space for them to come once a week for a few hours and get to be their amazing authentic selves, they unfortunately still have to go back into the world that is not as accommodating. What can we do as a society to bring everyone’s skill level up so that we don’t have to try so hard all of the time just to exist?

Craig Minter (06:15)
I love that. Thank you so much for such a great summary. And again, the backstory of lived experience in the neurodiversion space for yourself and your brother. Being very intentional. So the big thing I’d written down as I was taking some notes there was from the outset, the whole

intentional design of what you’re doing and how you’ve gone about it. I think I’d love to unpack that a little bit more,

the feedback loops. You’ve talked about some things and your original was down a lot of your brother’s interests and it’s sort of brought in some of your interests and the likes. How has that process been for you evolving, the offerings and the services that you provide your clients?

Rebecca McCash (07:00)
Yeah, I think it was something that we were very deliberate in terms of having those feedback loops, not in terms of the programming necessarily, because we don’t know what they’re going to want or need at any given point in time. And so it was more important to us to have a strong feedback loop and the ability to adapt and be responsive to them rather than have this really, really

structured linear program that they just had to fit into.

We do this through multiple different ways. A lot of it’s informal conversations with our young people. What’s working, what’s not working, but we also have technology built in so that they get alerts after sessions and they can give us feedback that way. We also have a more comprehensive impact measurement framework, which is really, really helpful too. But really it’s those informal discussions that are the gold because oftentimes

it’s not a straight question, hey what did you think? It’s looking for the little patterns or looking for opportunities to get their ideas that are perhaps a less formal.

I think one of these things is that it’s sort of lends itself to this broader idea of autistic entrepreneurship and, how we tend to go about business. We get really attached to a problem rather than getting attached to a very specific solution. And because of that, we are less inclined to be very rigid in how we actually solve that problem.

Because we don’t know what we don’t know and problems change over time. So The whole of FutureTech is a giant experiment. And I very much see life as an experiment. It’s constantly evolving, changing, and that’s actually what keeps it really fun. It’s like this amazing problem that will never be solved.

But there’s always new things to try and I think it’s the best and I love walking alongside them, learn from them, learn with them, and support them to get to where they will ultimately go.

Craig Minter (09:04)
Yeah, so cool. Our conversations could go anywhere along a myriad of paths. Because as you’re talking about three different core areas and even myself being self-realised, autistic via family diagnosis.

I think of a book that I read a little while ago, Fall in Love with a Problem, Not the Solution, and bringing that into it. And if you’ve got that at the heart of managing a business, it’s a great way to be. I would love to go back to the technology piece. In your name of the business there. No doubt you’ve experimented with a few different ways of

communicating with your young people and technology is what you just touched on there. How have you gone experimenting with technology for yourself as the owner, also with your young people?

Rebecca McCash (09:48)
Yes, it’s so funny because everyone assumes that I am a technologist because of FutureTech and I am the founder and CEO, which is quite funny because I’m pretty hopeless with technology, although I’m improving with time and with learning from our team.

Our tech is very much kind of overseen by an incredible mind. Our very own resident tech expert, we call him Jack, and he is autistic himself. I think the way that he thinks about technology within FutureTech is very aligned to what our young people would need. So when we first started FutureTech,

we actually launched in the middle of the last COVID lockdown here in Sydney and we launched with a fully online program. We knew that they needed something. We knew our young people were very disconnected and they absolutely needed something to stay connected. And so we worked on building out a platform where we could run our online programs in an autism-friendly

way.

We decided to look at Discord as opposed to looking at like a Zoom, Teams or some of the classic video conferencing platforms. And the reason for that is because Discord is a lot more adaptable. So we could build things into it that helped to make the platform a little bit more autism friendly and fit for purpose. But also a lot of our young people through COVID developed quite negative

Craig Minter (11:10)
Yeah.

Rebecca McCash (11:21)
associations with some of those classic video conferencing platforms because they were doing a lot of their school through those. We also chose Discord because it’s a gamers platform and many of our young people are already gamers so while I had to learn it from scratch they already knew this platform they’re using it so it just made sense.

In terms of other kinds of technology, we use bots that will automatically send through messages to the young people through our Discord platform and give them reminders about the workshops that are up and coming or provide an opportunity for them to share memes with one another. And I guess the other benefit of Discord is that it’s free. So it was a platform that we could use that would be

if not cost neutral and we could adapt it over time. So that’s our main piece of technology. Outside of that we use Google Suite, we use Monday which is a really really cool platform.

Craig Minter (12:14)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, and that’s cool. And I think what I’m hearing from you is across both the technology, the design going back to the intentional design part is what’s flexible, what can be adapted, what can be molded in a way that’s going to work for us, which you can tie in with the wider ethos of, hey, it’s an experiment and it may not last one day, one week, one year, who knows? So let’s make sure we’re built in

flexibility to everything and that includes the technology and the whole structure. You get a fair comment?

Rebecca McCash (12:54)
Definitely and I think it’s an interesting one because I do feel as a business grows,

there’s a pressure and a need to reduce flexibility in things because the things need to be scalable, it needs to be replicable, it needs to be structured. And I think that is something that we’re going through at the moment as a business. It’s like, okay, how do we make things very flexible, but also scalable, sustainable, and replicable as we grow? It’s a very interesting

challenge and it’s something that we’re definitely going through at the moment. The easiest models to scale are those that are always the same. Pick it up and you drop it someplace else and it’s exactly the same.

Craig Minter (13:39)
Yeah, you put them in the

box. There’s your box and then you put it there and off you go.

Rebecca McCash (13:43)
is so opposed to the way that we

behave in the way that we respond to our young people. And so trying to balance those two things is the present challenge that FutureTech’s facing. But yet again, it’s another experiment just to be tinkered with and over time, you learn and you get better and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. And you know, that’s just the nature of business and of trying to do things differently.

Craig Minter (14:04)
Yeah.

Yeah, I love that. I think, knowing that you’re right in the middle of that right now, this could be a great excuse to have you back on in six months, 12 months time to hear how that experiment specifically is going. I think it’s something in the modern world where we’re at. This whole idea of being flexible, but sustainable and scalable is, a conversation that’s on a lot of people’s lips.

That’s cool to hear that’s where you’re at, but also the way that you’re even just the language you’re using and the approach to it is really good. And coming back to my notes here that we did touch upon on our pre-call, I do want to get back to talk about experiments. And as I look across your website, FutureTech is in neurodivergent led social enterprise working to create a better world for everyone. And I do want to

go on to that social enterprise idea. I know I’ve heard the term around a bit, I’ve spoken with a people in some forms, but not really from a neurodivergent led space or conversation. And I know since our very first conversation a month or so ago, that opened up my eyes. I’d love for you to talk about

the experiment and your process for landing on being a social enterprise in itself and educate our listeners on the topic.

Rebecca McCash (15:22)
Yeah,

I think it’s still an emerging space. I think it’s a lot better established today than it was perhaps when we started out a few years ago. Essentially, social enterprise is the concept of doing business for good. So you are trading, but you’re also using profits to reinvest or to

serve the world, whether that be people or planets. I hope that one day business is just social enterprise because there’s always a way to do good as well as doing business. And so I think that the more organisations take this approach, the better.

For us, we…

started out and we were unsure about which model to take. So do we become a non-profit and position ourselves in the charity sector? Do we become a for-profit and position ourselves as be able to accept things like impact investing? Or do we look at a model that is doing business so hopefully it’s going to be sustainable but

also support people at the same time. And that just made sense to us. So we are a non-profit but we are a non-profit social enterprise.

Positioning ourselves within the social enterprise community, I think was probably one of the smartest things that I did in the early days. I think that there is a very different culture in the social enterprise community than there is perhaps in the charity sector. And I think there’s a lot more collaboration and people want to help each other out a lot more. There isn’t quite the

same scarcity mindset that you might find in some of the more classic charity realms. And I think for us and what we’re trying to do, like we don’t want to position your divergent people as

in need of charity. We believe that they are going to do incredible things and it’s not about helping as much as it’s about standing alongside. And I think that social enterprise is a little bit better positioned to do that. So we went through the process of getting certified with social traders and

people in planet for good? No, that’s not correct. I forget the actual term off the of my head. But really that then also helps us to communicate with our community about, we take this very, very seriously and we really do want to be able to show that we are reinvesting into making our programs better and supporting people better as well.

Craig Minter (18:06)
Yeah, I love the framing of it. And I think what you touched upon there, it’s that idea of just making sure that we’re being totally understanding, the community and the people aspect of that social enterprise. And I think why it resonated a bit, our business is based on financials. And, we talk about a book called Profit First, which in the health, wellness, even social enterprise sector, that can be

a bit of a dirty word, but the way we’ve always talked about it is you’ve to have profits to be sustainable so that you can achieve your purpose. We talk more about it as being purpose first rather than profit, but in many ways it’s actually interchangeable. It’s interesting to hear your framing of that because in many ways, that just helps focus the attention on the outcomes that you’re trying to achieve.

Rebecca McCash (18:52)
Yeah, definitely. I think I am and probably always will be guilty of prioritising purpose and not focusing as much as I should on the profit side of things. I think that’s just the way that I’m wired. I like to think about ways in which that we could generate revenue that are in alignment with our

purpose because

oftentimes we’ll see, and I think this is one of the things that makes our model quite interesting and also particularly complex. I always like to choose the hardest way. So a lot of the time, if you look at a social enterprise, there are different models, of course. So there’s a model whereby there’s a business and they will donate part

of their profits to a charity. So that is one model. There’s a model whereby people are running a business, so it may be a cafe, it may be a clothing business, it could be any kind of business, and they are hiring people who experience barriers to work. So these social enterprises are called WISE. So that stands for Work Integrated Social Enterprise. And they’re an incredible model.

And then the third kind of predominant model is providing services that otherwise are not available. So that might be providing pro or low-bono services that may be filling a gap for a community that didn’t exist before. And so we fall into a couple of those categories.

In that, we hire neurodivergent people who experience barriers to work and we also provide a service to neurodivergent young people and families that doesn’t exist otherwise. We also provide pro and low bono support to those families and to those young people and

what this means is that there’s like multiple impact streams and we’re passionate about that because I don’t want to start a new revenue stream that is very far away from supporting neurodivergent people. So when we were starting to think about revenue diversification

particularly with a lot of the changes within the NDIS landscape meaning that we really need to look at other types of revenue to ensure that we can provide support forever. We were looking at things like okay well how do we support others to understand neurodivergent people better? How can we potentially make money doing that? So selling training, selling consultants,

Craig Minter (21:13)
Yeah.

Rebecca McCash (21:26)
say to schools, to workplaces, etc. because ultimately that then makes the world better for neurodivergent people. It’s not this other kind of business model that sits way, way over here and would require very, very different skill sets. and very different knowledge. It’s looking at the knowledge that we already have and thinking, okay well how can we work with this and generate revenue through

Craig Minter (21:34)
Yeah.

Thank you.

Rebecca McCash (21:50)
sharing what we’ve learned basically.

Craig Minter (21:52)
Yeah, there’s so many things about this that I just love and what I’ve written to be circled and arrows here there, which is what’s just struck out from me. love our listeners to take away this idea of multiple impact streams. Again, I love language and I love that reframing. Yes, that impact stream can be revenue generated, revenue aligned

but impact align has greater meaning and purpose coming back to that idea of purpose that we’re talking about, taking that idea of multiple impact streams with alignment and creativity, which was from what you just started talking about a little bit earlier there, there’s just so much to love about that. And I really appreciate you sharing that. And I know our listeners are going to love percolating that in their mind.

I’d love to flow that through to with you having built a business with those things in mind. We always love to share some of the transformations in what we’ve seen with in ourselves, in the business and what we’ve done, but also, in your case, the young people you’re working with and some of impact that you’ve had there with what you’re doing at FutureTech.

Rebecca McCash (22:58)
Yeah.

So I guess one really amazing story that also lends itself to a lot of the other things that we’ve been talking about, about responding to, instead of dictating to and experimentation just generally. So we have a young person who started off with us as a participant and he was very anxious, very nervous and

he was still in school but just trying anything that he could to get out of school. So looking at different kind of pathways because school just wasn’t for him. Which it isn’t for a lot of young people and that’s completely fine. And so he ended up going and studying in game design and during this period remained a participant with us. He would come along every week.

And after a year or so, a couple of years of him coming along as a participant, he started to show interest in becoming a peer mentor himself. And so we were like, okay, well, we don’t have a program, we don’t have a structure to facilitate this, but why don’t we work it out together?

Craig Minter (24:07)
The idea is constantly, hey, this isn’t here, let’s have a pilot or an experiment, that’s how 100 % how I do a lot of things as well. And I’m hearing that come through. Yeah, tell me where this goes. This sounds great.

Rebecca McCash (24:18)
Yeah, I mean…

When we first started out, we kind of said that we would have young people up to 18 years old. But then we realised that many of our young people wanted to stick around and stay with us after 18. And so again, it’s just, okay, well, we’re responding to you. If you guys want to still hang out with us, then that’s amazing. It’s a beautiful thing to get to see young people through so many different years of their lives. It’s such a gift.

And so for this young person, we started out by, hey, well, why don’t we have you volunteer for a term and just see whether or not you actually like it, whether or not it’s something that you’re really interested in pursuing and started just learning the ropes. And that worked really, really well. And so after a term, we were able to offer him employment as a mentor.

And one of the things that works really well about, and we’ve sort of stumbled upon it actually, so outside of our Saturday group-based programs, we also run or facilitate one-on-one peer support. So these are young people who may have a particular goal that they would like to work through with someone who understands, someone who’s sort of walked in their shoes.

So that might be anything from one of our young people wanted to learn how to DM Dungeons and Dragons games and so we paired him up with someone who was very experienced in that and they worked through that together. It could be I want to get more confident on public transport, it could be I want to explore my arts, it could be anything.

This young person was receiving this one-on-one support at the same time as he was learning it to become a mentor and navigating that transition.

What this meant was that a lot of the challenges that neurodivergent young people face when it comes to employment, it’s not necessarily the job itself. So he was able to show up and hang out with the young people and do really, really, really great job of mentoring the actual job, right? But the admin that comes alongside every single job is really challenging for young people

to wrap their heads around, especially their first job, especially if they’re neurodivergent and they have differences in how their executive functioning goes. So we were then able to just focus on, hey,

during your one-on-one sessions, maybe work together because the peer mentor had to complete participant notes and already knew all of these systems. So work through that together in your one-on-one time so that you’re ticking all the boxes for the admin that are harder and you’re getting support to do that. And that also alleviates some of the difficulties for an employer

to employ someone who may struggle with some of those things because ultimately if he wasn’t being supported to do that, I would be supporting him to do that and that takes time and all of these things. it’s almost like a beautiful little model that’s just come out of just experimenting, just going with it.

Craig Minter (27:28)
Yeah. Evolved.

Yeah.

Rebecca McCash (27:32)
Hearing it out as we go along. That’s probably one of our most recent most lovely stories. We also have many young people who have just been completely engaged from school, who have been able to re-engage with school after coming along and hanging out with us for a little while, which is really, really nice.

Craig Minter (27:40)
Yeah, tick right.

Rebecca McCash (27:51)
So yeah, lots and lots of very, very beautiful stories. And yeah, I feel very lucky to get to experience them and just, like, what a gift.

Craig Minter (28:01)
Yeah, what a gift indeed and some brilliant stories and evolving business that you’ve got there by the sounds of it. And that’s why we like to share these stories, have these conversations to at the end of the day, hear the impact that all our awesome business owners in the space are having and the ripple effects out into the community. And also all the

changes, evolutions, experiments that have happened to actually get there. And you’ve shared plenty there today that I know our listeners are gonna get a whole lot of value from. And so as you talked about before, I think there could be a chance that we’ll get you back for more to see how some of those experiments have gone. But there’s a few areas there that I’m sure our listeners are gonna wanna delve into a little bit more as well. So I really appreciate you sharing Rebecca on today’s call.

Again, people will want to reach out and connect, no doubt. Where’s the best place for people to check in with you, what you’re doing and the like.

Rebecca McCash (28:58)
Yeah, so for FutureTech, probably our website is just futuretechaustralia.org and for me personally, I’m on LinkedIn quite a lot. It makes me feel less guilty scrolling through LinkedIn because I feel like I’m learning something instead of doing scrolling Facebook or Instagram. And I’m just Rebecca McCash there.

Craig Minter (29:17)
Awesome. And I think we’re very aligned there. I do the same more time in LinkedIn. And that’s obviously how we got connected in the first place when LinkedIn, once you’ve been on there for a little while, it starts to throw some incredible profiles up in front of you. And that’s exactly how we got connected. And so yeah, I recommend people getting onto LinkedIn, but also making sure you reach out, connect with Rebecca to

hear what she’s up to and continue conversations. And we’ll obviously include all those details in the show notes to go along with this episode. But once again, lots of gold that you’ve shared here, Rebecca. I really appreciate the time today.

Rebecca McCash (29:50)
Thank you again for having me. It’s a pleasure chatting with you, Craig. I’m sure that we could chat forever.

Craig Minter (29:57)
Awesome. I’m sure we’re to have many more chats, whether they’re on or off podcasts, but that’s enough for this episode now. And as always for our listeners out there, make sure you like subscribe so that you can catch great conversations just like this one today. So that’s a wrap here. Thank you very much. See you later, everyone.