Karen Lebsanft

Even as a child Karen Lebsanft felt compelled to take on responsibility for others around her. That role carried over to her work, community and family life to such a degree that it’s only been very recently that she’s realised – after twenty-five years – that she needs to make time for herself. So she made up for lost time, setting a personal challenge of running the New York Marathon.

When is a biscuit not a biscuit? When it’s lavosh!

If you ask Karen Lebsanft, the co-founder and CEO of Kurrajong Kitchen, ‘am I allowed to call it a biscuit?’ you get a very terse reply: “no you are not.”

According to Karen lavosh is a flat bread; technically it is bread made without yeast and historically goes back to Armenia, where every village had their special lavosh recipe.

Karen and her husband Ben perfected their particular technique in the kitchen of Clifford’s restaurant in the New South Wales village of Kurrajong.

“We began serving lavosh to the customers of our restaurant; we would serve it up on cheese platters with dips and salsa and they loved it. In fact they loved it so much customers began asking if they could take some home.”

In a short space of time Karen and Ben were making thirty packets a week to give to their restaurant customers. Fast forward that twenty-five years and they’re now making over seven hundred and fifty thousand pieces of lavosh a day.

“And it’s still made with the same love as it was back in the restaurant. I believe it’s really important that as we’ve grown the quality has stayed the same, just as if I was standing there serving it in the restaurant.”

You can now find Kurrajong Kitchen lavosh, along with other products in the range, on the shelves of all the major supermarkets, which is an amazing success story especially when you consider this was never their plan.

“We fell into manufacturing by accident; this wasn’t a planned journey. Initially it was just about dipping your toe in the water, but it grew very quickly. From a business perspective we were behind the eight-ball from the outset; we were under-capitalised and times were really tough at the beginning.

“But we had started something and it was too late to pull back. The desire to succeed with something that we had created ourselves became very strong.”

There’s a degree of resilience which is essential for success in business and in hindsight Karen believes she inherited hers from her mother.

“We lost our Dad when I was just eleven months old, and it was only later in life we learnt he died from an overdose. But that left Mum with three children under three years old: an older sister and me and my twin sister, so Mum had a really tough time.

“Looking back I think she became very resilient; she had to just to survive and I think it made my sisters and I tougher as well. It becomes part of who you are and how you do things. You almost put an expectation on yourself that you can’t give up.”

Karen believes she developed ‘middle child syndrome’ during those early years.

“I was the first of the twins to be born and I was bigger and stronger than my sister, in fact she was quite ill as a baby so as we grew there was an expectation that I looked out for her. That sense of responsibility also carried over to my relationship with my older sister and I developed this attitude of ‘I will look after them; I will care for these girls’, even though I wasn’t the eldest.

“So on reflection I learnt to be resilient and I believe it’s something I got from my Mum, who is still with us.”

That resilience has been tested many times throughout her adult life, from being a teenage bride, to not having her first child until well into her thirties, chasing a career she never really had a passion for and dealing with a loved one’s depression. Karen confesses there were many times when the pressure felt overbearing.

“I was married for the first time three days before my nineteenth birthday and I remember thinking, ‘I can do this, I’m capable, this is what I can do’. I was working for a credit union at the time and very career driven, but I hit a glass ceiling and that made me rethink. We hadn’t had any children and I realised it wasn’t the right relationship.

“Then when I did finally have a child, I was thirty-five, married to Ben and it was in the early stages of Kurrajong Kitchen. So I was a new mum, trying to grow a new business and build a brand and I was determined not to fail.

“The drive to reach my own standards kept me going, but there were some really tough moments. I was working from home with a six-week old baby in my arms keeping the business and the family afloat. Ben would come home from baking Lavosh, see the baby wasn’t settling and take her from me and go out into the garden and smell the roses.

“That was upsetting: I wanted to be the mum who takes her daughter into the garden and share those type of moments, smelling the roses with her, but I never got that opportunity.”

It’s obvious this is a very unsettling memory for Karen. The emotions are quite raw as she ponders the example she’s set her children.

“I think they’ve caught some of my resilience, but I really hope they find a better balance in their lives. I was always the mum who was running out of business meetings to pick up the kids from school; I was pushing them in a pram to those initial meetings with the supermarkets.

“I was also the Mum who was the Spring Fair organiser. I was even elected President of the Chamber of Commerce the week before my second child was born.”

Her children are now young adults, and while they have some interest in the business, Karen believes it’s more important for them to find their own calling.

“My daughter has a degree in criminology and justice and did some work with day release prisoners, and the joy she got from that was overwhelming for me. She’d ring me at the end of each day and couldn’t stop talking about it.

“She has spoken about staying in the business, but I’ve sort of set a date for her to be kicked out so she can actually pursue her dreams, not the dreams of the Kurrajong Kitchen.

“My son on the other hand is the emotional stabiliser in the family. There was a time when he was seven and I asked him what part of the business he’d like to look after when he grew up and he said, ‘Mum, I’m only seven and I don’t have to make that decision yet’.

“You can’t live your life through your children but you can hope they take good lessons from it and go forward. I’ve certainly earned a degree of respect in my community through what I’ve done and given, and I would love my children to earn the same respect for whatever they choose to do. But they get to choose it, I don’t get to choose it for them.

“So my goal for them is to live their own lives but with a true sense of community, of being a giver in their community.”

The fact Karen never really pursued her own dream still haunts her: “even Kurrajong Kitchen wasn’t my dream, it was Ben’s.”

The aspect of the business Karen gets most satisfaction from is the impact it’s had on those who work for them and on the local community. It fulfils a nurturing side of her personality that’s been there ever since she took on the role of ‘big’ sister.

“Back in the days when we just had the restaurant I was actually training staff in hospitality. My main role in the restaurant was to make sure people felt comfortable and were enjoying their dining experience. So being able to pass on that experience, to teach it, was my passion.

“My dream has always been to give back, to empower people, to educate them, and education doesn’t have to come from a book. The best education comes from life experiences and I feel I have a lot to share.”

Karen believes she might have found that role if her mother hadn’t been so keen for her to get a job.

“For whatever reason I loved Maths when I was at school and I wanted to be a teacher, but Mum, and my stepfather, couldn’t afford for me to continue after Year Ten, or Fourth Form as it was then, so I was pressured into leaving school.

“I was so keen to be a teacher I made a deal with Mum that if I didn’t get a job fairly soon I could go back to school. It was a good deal, I thought.

“Three days after leaving school Mum comes in and says, ‘Karen, I’ve got a job for you’. So that was that. I never got to pursue being a teacher.”

Karen never got to teach Maths but her life is a lesson in how to make the most of opportunities, even when those opportunities are disguised. Despite being thirty-eight when she had her second child Karen always wanted a third, but sadly was denied.

“We all get cards dealt in our lives: it’s what you choose to do with them that defines you. The reason we chose not to have a third child was because Ben was actually diagnosed with depression.

Over a decade on, it became severely worse to the point where he had a serious breakdown.

“It was an extremely emotional time. We had built this great brand, had sacrificed so much along the way and now my world was crashing. I had to dig really deep, really, really deep, and that’s where my resilience kicked in. We could have lost everything.

“On the outside we were all smiles, but we managed to keep Ben’s depression within a tight, close-knit group and part of my way of coping was to go to my local gym, where I found an incredible support network. It was a female gym and it became my sanctuary.

“I needed a self-care strategy and that’s when I decided to run in the New York Marathon. I’d never been a runner, but I needed a goal to focus on and training for that marathon gave me structure and got me through to come out the other end.

“I found a space where I felt I belonged again, and it was a time for some serious self-care. The goal was making the decision and giving myself permission to do something for me. I had no idea how, I’m not into how, it was just a gut feel about something I needed to do. The how will sort itself out in the wash.”

Karen did the marathon, although not within the time she had set herself – but that didn’t matter: “I gave myself permission to say ‘you don’t have to run that time Karen, you just have to finish’, which I did.

“The decision to do it was for survival, although I’m not sure if it was survival for me or survival for Kurrajong Kitchen.”

Ben came out the other side and returned to the business: “he is in much better health now.” Karen never ran another marathon – “it’s just not my thing” – but feels she’s now in a position to use her life experiences to empower others.

“I’ve always been one of two: I’ve been a twin, then I was married early and then I became Karen and Ben, and finally Karen and Kurrajong Kitchen. I’ve needed to go through it all to be this independent person who could do it all by herself.”

ADVICE
Karen’s tip for succeeding in business is to take a closer look at her run in the New York Marathon, a journey of just over forty-two kilometres that she believes provides great insight into the success principles.

“About three-quarters of the way through the race I was feeling every step and I started to hit the wall: that wall all marathon runners talk about – well, it’s very much like business where you think you’re going okay and then suddenly a wall presents itself and if you want to succeed you have to knock it down.

“You have to find a strategy, you have to be deliberate in deciding how are you’re going to get through it. How are you going to get just one foot in front of the other?

“So I was about eight kilometres from the finish and I was struggling, the drizzle had turned to rain and, as I’m a pretty slow runner, the crowds weren’t huge anymore, so there was very little encouragement. I just remember being on this long stretch of road and thinking ‘universe give me something! I need something, anything, just give me something’.

“It was about then I came up to this lady wearing a t-shirt with her name in big bold letters across her back and the crowd – what was left of it – was going ‘go Karen, go Karen’, and I went ‘yes! Thank you universe’. That girl’s name was also Karen and her fan club became my fan club and gave me enough motivation to keep going when I badly needed it.

“And that’s just how it is in business. If you stick in there long enough, and are prepared to put just one foot in front of the other, life will deliver. Business will deliver, your life will deliver you what you need at the right time. You just have to be prepared to keep going.”