By Casey Neill
Chyka Keebaugh turned a passion passed on from her grandmothers into an internationally-renowned events business.
SEBN and the Greater Dandenong Chamber of Commerce hosted the Women in Business lunch at Atura Dandenong in Eumemmerring on Friday 28 July.
“Today is about inspiration and empowerment by hearing from a very successful woman in business,” SEBN manager Sandra George said.
Chyka is a wife, mother and owner of The Big Group.
“There’s nothing I love more than hearing a room full of women talking because it usually means something wonderful is happening,” she said.
She told the lunch that her parents travelled for 10 months of the year so her chalk and cheese grandmothers filled the gap.
“My grandmothers were my most amazing influence,” she said.
Chyka followed her love for food into a cadetship at the now-defunct Australia Hotel in Melbourne.
She tackled every task and when it folded was offered a job in London.
With encouragement from her parents, who didn’t like the boy she was dating, she made the leap overseas – into what turned out to be a secretarial position.
She’d never typed.
She left and signed up for a course at Le Cordon Bleu. It was in French and she didn’t know a word.
Chyka loved every minute of working in the decoration department at Laura Ashley.
She moved home and onto Rowlands for two years, catering parties for magnates the likes of Alan Bond and Christopher Skase.
“It was truly an extraordinary time,” she said.
“People were entertaining like they never had before.”
She met her husband Bruce during this time. They together started a company called Big and Small.
Their first big job was catering the opening of Melbourne precinct Southgate for 6500 people.
They were 23 years old and roped in family and friends armed with business cards and company aprons to lend a hand.
“The next day the phone started ringing,” she said.
The Keebaughs branched out into retail and expanded their decorating offerings.
Channel 10 offered the pair a cooking show but Bruce “became a robot” while filming a test run.
Instead they offered Chyka a weekly segment on Channel 10’s Good Morning Australia with Bert Newton.
“I loved it, it was so much fun,” she said.
She’d never envisaged herself working in television.
“When opportunity arises it’s up to you to decide to walk through that door or to close it,” she said.
But don’t regret whichever call you make, she told guests.
Chyka does, however, carry some guilt about putting her two children into day care.
“Having your own business and having children is so hard,” she said.
“Bruce certainly didn’t have the same guilt I did.”
But they’re now both “independent human beings”.
Chyka’s most recent television foray was on reality show The Real Housewives of Melbourne.
It was pitched to her as a show about seven successful business women.
“I gullibly believed that,” she said.
“It was a doorway that I went through. No regrets.”
She did quickly leave the popular series.
“I didn’t believe you should bring a woman down for the sake of a storyline,” she said.
But it’s given her a “second career at age 48”. Chyka started a blog four years ago and is focused on her individual brand.
A coffee table book, a homewares range and more are on the cards and she and Bruce are regularly managing extravagant parties in the Middle East.
“Who knows how long it will last?” she said.
She urged guests to take risks and be brave, and to get online and make even a “boring” business appear interesting.
“You just need to embrace it because it’s the way of the future,” she said.
“Who would have thought someone would pay someone to do shout-outs on social media?”
Chyka also told guests to be honest leaders, to empower young people to share their ideas and advice, and to make their personal relationships a priority.
“Don’t let other people judge you because it’s not their place,” she said.
