By Neena Bhandari

Sydney, 26.10.2010 (The Sydney Morning Herald): From making cubby houses together in a haystack, three Melbourne sisters have combined their skills to build a boutique immigration company that has grown tenfold through clever use of online marketing.

Keeping their sibling rivalry at bay, Maryanne Gruar, Joy Orosz and Carolyn Parnis have made the most of their different skill sets to form True Blue Migration, which offers Australian immigration and visa advice. Gruar specialises in legal and immigration policy, Orosz has marketing and communications expertise and Parnis excels in finance.

When Gruar, the youngest, returned home in July 2006 after working in the migration industry in South Africa and the United Kingdom, she launched True Blue Migration with the aim of doing a couple of immigration cases a month to keep her “brain active and earn some money”.

“I was pregnant with my first child and didn’t want a 9am to 5pm job,” she says.

“We settled in Rockingham, about 40 kilometres from the Perth CBD. It was great working from home as I could have a 20-minute swim between meeting clients and attending to our baby.”

Her middle sister, Orosz, moved to Western Australia around the same time and for the first time in a decade, the two sisters were living 20 minutes apart. She says: “I had young children too and was looking for a flexible re-entry to the workforce. I offered to write content for the True Blue Migration website and soon came on board”.

They would meet clients at cafes, offering the steady excuse of “our office is being renovated”. When clients rang, they played The Thriving Office CD to mask the sounds of noisy kids and the washing machine.

Soon they could afford to move into a small business centre and as the business gained momentum, Parnis, the eldest, joined the team in 2008 as finance manager.

One of nearly 3000 migration agents in the country, True Blue switched from print advertising to an aggressive online marketing campaign that rapidly grew their turnover from $100,000 in 2007-08 to $550,000 in 2008-09.

“We used E-web marketing to lift our website’s organic ranking and start Google advertisements,” says Orosz.

She said they had great results using Google AdWords, generating $11 in business for every $1 spent.

“It delivers two-and-a-half times the revenue as against print advertising,” Orosz says.

“We started with a budget of $200 a month and today it is $3500 a month. It allows us to update adverts instantaneously as immigration policy changes occur.”

The company, which offers a “no visa, no fee” guarantee, receives between 25 and 40 new enquiries a day.

“We have invested in an online centralised client management database,” says Gruar.

“It keeps the entire paper trail on track, which is vital for visas. It has helped us become a big enough player to streamline process and systems, but still small to offer personalised service.”

The sisters, who combined have seven children under the age of 10, now live five minutes apart in Melbourne’s north, sharing home and office responsibilities, along with the occasional squabble.

Growing up on a Victorian farm, where the nearest neighbour was two kilometres away, the sisters learnt early in life to deal with issues among themselves. A strategy they have applied in business too.

“We treat each other as an equal. Instead of playing the blame game, we try to fix problems, and we have always been transparent with the money”, says Parnis, who attributes their success to strong and similar work ethics instilled by their parents and supportive spouses.

Despite the sisters’ move to Melbourne, the company’s office remains in Western Australia, where they employ two migration agents who independently manage their caseloads.

“Where we are located has no bearing as most of the business is online. WA is cost-effective and we have a good presence there”, says Gruar.

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