Veteran business coach and entrepreneur Rebecca Saunders is no stranger to the feelings of loneliness, isolation and disconnection that befalls businesswomen trying to start or run a business in regional Australia.
After moving to Mudgee, a town in the Central West of New South Wales, in September 2022, Saunders swiftly realised how hard it can be to make friends as an adult and the loneliness that can set in when you’re running your own business and don’t have a team to go and work with.
So, five months later in February 2023, the editor and publisher of Mudgee’s Mid-Western Living Magazine launched The Champagne Lounge, a virtual membership community for regional businesswomen and entrepreneurs.
The Champagne Lounge now has 103 active members spanning all states across Australia, with Saunders hoping to connect with and support more than 1000 regional businesswomen through the digital community by the end of 2025.
Speaking with SmartCompany, Saunders says she realised she couldn’t be the only person who was feeling isolated and wanting to have conversations about building businesses, doing business, and all the highs and lows in between.
“I founded The Champagne Lounge as an online community that regional businesswomen across the country could join to have those conversations,” she says.
“That’s where it started and it sort of grew from that to be more.
“The Champagne Lounge is that cafe or that bar around the corner (where) you go and meet your friends for a drink or a coffee and have those conversations, except we do it virtually.”
Saunders says the magic in The Champagne Lounge’s community membership is its virtual meetups, with members encouraged to join meetups when they can and for as long as they can.
“It’s all around conversation, connection and celebration because I believe that we don’t celebrate our achievements enough as women in business, and we’re always striving for the next thing,” she says.
“So the celebration is a key pillar there.”
While many business networks are bound by geography, The Champagne Lounge has members from all over the country.
“If I look at the industries we’ve got on the regular, we’ve got digital marketers, people that work in content creation, cafe owners, store owners, different retail outlets and retail stores and consultants,” says Saunders.
“We’ve got people building big businesses. We’ve got people starting out with little startups. We’ve got not-for-profits and charities as well.
“We’ve got a whole gamut, and a mix, and the joy of that is there’s women in there that have been in business 20-odd years. There’s people that have been in business for 15 years, closed something down, or sold something off, and have started something new.
“Then you’ve got women that are just starting out, or have just taken that step from leaving their full-time job into doing their side hustle, full-time. So the breadth of it is actually quite impressive.”
Members of The Champagne Lounge currently meet multiple times a week, with a total of 10 hours of virtual meetups a month, which allows the community to reach the time zones of all its different members across the country.
The meetups include weekly events such as Power Up Monday and Wine Wednesday, with the virtual community also hosting monthly online meetups including Coffee & Connection and Business & Bubbles.
An annual membership for The Champagne Lounge costs $497 and includes access to the online community portal and meetups, as well as access to a member Facebook Group and a “Little Pink Book” of online courses and business resources.
Members are also profiled in the Lounge’s Member Directory, have “Accountability Buddies” to support them, gain access to educational videos and templates, and are invited to in-person events.
For Saunders, part of the motivation behind establishing the community lies in her mission to stand up to tall poppy syndrome.
“It’s not uncommon to know that tall poppy syndrome is a big thing in Australia and across the country; it’s amplified in regional towns,” she says.
“So it’s all about ensuring that women can have those conversations, to celebrate their successes, bring them forward, tell them they can do it.
“We are that virtual cheer squad, so that they’re not feeling alone in trying to do something different, or build a business from scratch, or trying to do something completely different to maybe the norm.”
Members of the community get the chance to chat and connect with like-minded women doing similar things in very different ways, says Saunders.
“That support there shows to them and tells them that they’re not alone. I think that’s a really big thing right now in the epidemic of mental health,” she says.
“The feeling of being alone and ‘I’m not good enough’ is really rife, and we want to combat that.
“So we do that through the power of conversation and connection.”
When asked what she believes draws women to The Champagne Lounge, Saunders confirms the biggest factor is loneliness.
“The majority of them are solopreneurs, so they don’t have a team,” she says.
“They’re running their businesses by themselves from wherever they are in the country and that loneliness factor there is that they just genuinely want to chat with someone that is like-minded as them.
“So it’s those genuine connections, those really deep, real conversations that you really crave to have, but you don’t necessarily find, you know, at the school pickup or on the side of the soccer field at the kids’ game.
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