Who is Cathy?

I run a real everyday-support business on Tasmania's east coast, and I built the course I wish somebody had handed me at the start.

I'm a wife and a mum to five, and I've run a household while running businesses. Before this I worked in offices and in small business, and I owned a few businesses of my own in completely different fields. Some worked. Some didn't. All of them taught me something.

I've also been a carer my whole adult life — my uncle and my dad, both right through to the end, and my mum, who's still going and still has me there for her. I'd just never once called it work.

When things were hard with Mum, she looked at me and said, "I don't know what people do if they don't have a daughter like you." I've never forgotten it. That's where this started — not with a business plan.

Eighteen months ago I started 1st 4 Care from home, with no nursing degree and no medical training, in a town where I didn't know a soul. It's a real part-time business with regular clients. These are my own figures: $47,060.52 in client revenue across six months, about 23 hours a week. Gross, not take-home — and an example, not a promise.

Why I started Cathy's Care

Because I worked it out the hard way, and I couldn't see a good reason why anyone else should have to. I found the funded rates, the insurance, the paperwork, the words that win a client's trust — and then I kept meeting people who would have been brilliant at this work and had no idea where to begin.

I couldn't sit on that. Cathy's Care exists to hand over what took me years: the honest guidance, the practical tools, and the confidence to build your own everyday-support business — so the care you already give becomes a livelihood in your own hands, and your own community keeps someone local.

Two names, and how they fit together

1st 4 Care — my business: the everyday support I deliver to people in my own community.

Cathy's Care — the course I built from it, so other people can start their own.

Same person, two halves of one thing.