A forest burial business run by Fiona McCuaig won the Judges' Choice award and Sanchee Barnes of family planning app, CanXsee, won the People's Choice award.

Judges for the pitch competition included the Mayor of Eurobodalla Shire, Mathew Hatcher; Peter Masterson, AusIndustry; Megan Cleary, Department of Regional NSW; Nicole Fosteris, NBN Local; and iAccelerate Ecosystem Evangelist Chris Petersilge from UOW.

The Bay Post spoke to each of the six women who participated in the program about their businesses and the iAccelerate program.

Sharon Halliday is the "book Sherpa" who helps people "conquer their Everest" by coaching them to write their books.

"I'm a book coach, and my big goal is to become Australia's leading book coach by helping people write their stories and share them with the world," she said.

Ms Halliday runs an online course for budding authors of non-fiction work that can be completed on "any device".

"I've identified that 80 per cent of people want to write a book, but only six out of a thousand will publish," Ms Halliday said.

"There are a lot of people out there with a story in them, but they don't know where to start with putting a book together.

"Coaching gets to the heart of helping them become disciplined in their writing. The biggest barrier is time and commitment, but with someone to help you along, you can break it down into smaller steps."

Ms Halliday said iAccelerate taught her how to articulate her business in a very clear way.

"Being able to distil your ideas into a sentence or two is quite an incredible undertaking," she said.

"As business owners we often don't take the time to assess what we're doing, we just get on with it. iAccelerate allowed us to iterate, change, and adapt based on the information we were studying each week.

"Some of our closest friends and family members wouldn't have known what we'd been working on, so I think for the community to see there are these local entrepreneurs going after their dreams, and working on things that have the potential to build and grow the economy, is important."

Fiona McCuaig runs Bodalla Conservation Burial, a business that provides environmentally friendly burials.

Ms McCuaig said she was inspired to start the business after a life of conservation.

"I've always been involved in conservation," she said. "I've been to Antarctica with Sea Shepherd, I've been to the Faroe Islands, and I've done a lot of wildlife activism.

"I saw this wonderful documentary on how natural burial is good for the environment. We're poisoning the soil with traditional burials, and cremation releases about 200kg of carbon and some nasty chemicals into the environment.

"When I looked into our farm, one of the permissible uses was as a cemetery. My first meeting with the council was seven years ago, it took about two-and-a-half years for the idea to be approved, and we got the DA two months ago.

"People want to do something good, they want to leave a positive impact on the planet with their end of life choice."

Ms McCuaig received notification of the program from the Narooma Business Chamber the same week her new business was approved by council.

"I've done two degrees and this is the most pointed course I've ever done," she said. "Everything was so applicable.

"It really helped us all take a look at our business, interview people, do a lot of market research, and refine our differential advantage."

The course helped Ms McCuaig hone in on her 'target audience'.

"There can be a lot of different personas of your business," she said "For example, when I was doing my interviewing, my persona I thought would be older people looking for end-of-life options, but a lot of them are people aged around 40 looking for options for their parents.

"Putting yourself in their shoes to give the solution they need is what makes a business successful."

Asha Brown ran a trade business with her family in the solar and electrical sphere, but decided to start her own business 'Troublefree Tradies' in response to the complexities of administrative and ATO demands.

"Troublefree Tradies is basically a bookkeeping and advisory service for trade businesses," she said. "We offer BAS, payroll and consulting services for wherever a tradie is on their business journey.

"As I developed systems at my family's company and learned more about how to run a business, I had other tradies asking me for help, so it naturally evolved from there.

"It turned into a full-time gig, so I left the family business because there was a lot of demand for my services. I've put on a couple of team members in the past couple of years, and we're committed to fine-tuning and growing this thing."

Ms Brown moved from regional Victoria to Batemans Bay recently to set up her headquarters and take advantage of construction needs in the Shire.

"There's a high demand for construction here, so I thought it would be a great place to set up the head office and help out," she said.

"I'm quite happily based here now and got to be a part of this amazing program. It's exposed me to other business owners in the area, and it's such a fantastic community focused on growth and networking."

Ms Brown said iAccelerate had helped create a "strong business for myself".

"I've run this business since 2016, and this was a great opportunity to work with other entrepreneurs with a variety of business ideas and operational businesses," she said.

"The actual content of the course was excellent because it took me away from the day-to-day grind to looking at the business and the different personas I help.

"They broke it down to an individual level, how you're helping each person and identifying their problems.

"It helped me challenge my assumptions of what I think my clients need by asking questions and seeing whether my product is servicing those needs."

Carrie Taylor runs Tilba Coastal Retreat with her husband after a sea change from Sydney.

"We were working in Sydney, we lived in an inner-city apartment, but we'd both been interested for a few years in an accommodation business," she said.

"My parents live down here in Tilba, and it kept getting harder to go back to city life.

"The opportunity came up in 2018 with Tilba Coastal Retreat, so we made the sea change and bought the business.

"We play a big role in the community as well; we've been involved in the Tilba Chamber, I've taken on a number of voluntary roles there, and we love our Tilba community."

Mrs Taylor said the iAccelerate program helped both her and her husband "think differently" about their business.

"We've been through fires, COVID, all these ups and downs, and now that we're getting back to some normality, we need to figure out who our demographic is, who we want to market to, and how we grow sustainably," she said.

"(iAccelerate) provided those tools and frameworks to think deeper about all those things. It was really beneficial to stop, review, and have those tools in place to delve deeper into our business.

"I'd highly recommend any business people to sign up and go for it. We found it really valuable."

Bree Rosenbaum owns Specify Hub, an app developed for builders, suppliers and homeowners to "centralise the selection process" of building a home.

"We do fittings, fixtures, and finishes, stuff like that," Ms Rosenbaum said.

"I've worked in the industry for a long time from a retail setting right through to project management, and I felt there was a need for something to manage that process."

Ms Rosenbaum said the unity built between all the participants in iAccelerate was "amazing".

"It was a great way to meet other local start-up businesses and like-minded people," she said.

"The program gave me confidence in pitching my business, which can be really hard to do if you've got something a bit complicated.

"It was really successful in getting me to be succinct with what I was trying to achieve.

"I think all the participants will be friends for a very long time out of this. We worked with each other outside the core program, we got together at different times, and we were lucky in our instance that it was a small group and it was all women."

Sanchee Barnes is the owner of CanXSee, a mobile app designed to connect locals to local businesses by "finding places to go, things to do, and benefiting from discounts and promotions".

"I've been an ex-pat for a few years, and I recently came back with a child," she said. "I realised there's a huge hidden mental toll on parents in arrange schedules and finding what's on.

"The difficulties when you have to rearrange plans for things out of your control, it takes a lot of time and energy.

"CanXSee will make a lot of that simple. We're starting with families in the Shire, then it will open to all demographics. For example, if you're a senior it will show you where you can use your discount."

Ms Barnes said iAccelerate was an apt name for the program.

"It accelerates your business planning and concepts, and it fast-forwards you and propels you over the course of a few weeks in an intense way, and you come out of it with a very clear business concept and plan," she said.

"It challenged assumptions, strengthened businesses, uncovered risks, and highlighted opportunities.

"Australia is magnificent for anybody who has an idea and wants to turn it into a reality. We're so lucky, and a lot of us take that for granted."