1.1 At what business stage is Emma’s Parlour? At what stage is her web-based organic tea business? What synergies exist between the two businesses? How critical do you think those synergies are to the success of each business? Emma Lathbury’s shoulders sagged as she flipped the cardboard sign hanging in the window of her tearoom’s front door from ‘Open’ to ‘Closed’.

The normally indefatigable 52-year-old owner of Emma’s Parlour was bone-tired. Any doubts she’d harboured about the wisdom of seriously considering some major changes in her business were fast disappearing.

She hadn’t felt this weary since she’d left nursing in the late 1990s.

After years of working as an intensive care nurse – with its gruelling hours, emotionally draining work and lack of both respect and autonomy – she’d developed a bad case of burnout. At the time, she was convinced she could walk away from a secure, if difficult, profession and figure out a way of making a living that suited her high-energy, outgoing personality. Then, one day, she noticed an 1870s-vintage Gothic Revival cottage for sale in the small Western Australian farming community near where she’d grown up, and the answer to her dilemma came to her with a startling clarity. She’d get the financing, buy the house and open up a cosy Victorian tearoom. Emma was certain she could make it work.