Rebecca Knights built a boutique chocolate company and the Sydney Chocolate School by sticking to her dream of producing all hand-made, artisanal chocolates, tempered on marble, using the finest ethically sourced ingredients from both here and overseas. After leaving home at the tender age of 16, she knew she would have to build a life, and she hoped a business, for herself. While she was neither a trained chef, nor a food technician, she put in the hard yards washing dishes and then waiting on ...
Aug 29, 2021•47 min•Season 3Ep. 24
High school dropout Luke Anear didn’t set out to build a global technology company that was recently valued at over $2billion, but that’s exactly what happened when he saw a problem in the workplace – namely accidents that didn’t have to happen – and started to help solve it. Luke created his mobile safety and quality checklist app that became SafetyCulture. Now, Luke’s vision is expanding, with grand designs to build a global e-marketplace for any consumables used in a workplace, from work boot...
Aug 22, 2021•22 min•Season 3Ep. 23
When Luke Anear worked as a private investigator investigating workplace mishaps and chasing workers' compo cheats, he realised he wanted to turn that negative into a positive. So he set about helping companies vastly improve their safety procedures in the workplace, to try and prevent workers having accidents in the first place. His little startup took shape in the proverbial garage of his suburban Townsville home, and he began slowly, selling safety checklists delivered on Word documents. But ...
Aug 15, 2021•47 min•Season 3Ep. 22
Kim McKay doesn’t really consider herself an entrepreneur. But that’s exactly what she is, having built not 1, but 2, impressive “empires”. The non-science trained marketing guru is transforming the Aust Museum – yes, the one Sydney-siders all remember going to on school excursions, a natural history museum and Australia’s oldest museum – from being somewhat faded-around-the-edges to now bringing it firmly into the 21st century digital age, as a world-class cultural institution. How is she doing...
Aug 01, 2021•57 min•Season 3Ep. 21
Managing the rapid scale-up of fast-growing Zip Co meant co-founder & CEO Larry Diamond instigated a culture of Building and Flying at the exact same time; find out how such a high-wire act meant Diamond and his team often came close to falling over, thinking they might have to close their doors. In the early days, surprisingly they had no retail expert on their team. Yet by putting 1 foot in front of the other, taking 1 step at a time, they grew from signing on 1 small suburban bike shop to...
Jul 18, 2021•30 min•Season 3Ep. 20
Part 1 -When Larry Diamond came up with his idea for a new payment method he wanted with a passion to disrupt existing payment systems, particularly credit cards, that had a stranglehold on the online space, but were clunky and un-user friendly in his view. Pitching his idea to would-be investors, they sort of metaphorically patted him on the head and shooed him away, saying, nice idea Larry, but you don’t know what you’re talking about! Rather than drop his idea for a Buy Now Pay Later digital ...
Jul 11, 2021•42 min•Season 3Ep. 19
Richard Sattler’s entrepreneurial journey from Tassy farmer to owner of world-class golf courses was far from straightforward… there were lots of bunkers and bogeys (to go with the golfing metaphor) thrown up in his path. After creating the almost instantly successful Barnbougle links course – attracting golf enthusiasts from the mainland as well as overseas -- how Sattler went on to battle and eventually win a legal stoush with former partners, when he came to build his 2nd links course, Lost F...
Jul 04, 2021•33 min•Season 3Ep. 18
How non-golf player Richard Sattler saw the potential & seized the opportunity to transform his cattle & potato farm into one of the best champion links golf courses in the world. The former shearer, who’d never played golf before, took a massive risk on backing the idea of developing a top-quality links course amongst the pristine sand dunes of his coastal stretch of North-East Tasmania, and ended up having to underwrite the 2-year building project of Barnbougle Links course, The Dunes....
Jun 27, 2021•45 min•Season 3Ep. 17
When Liz Ann Macgregor was lured from the UK to take on the job of turning around & re-building the moribund Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in 1999, she knew it would be a massive financial challenge. As a kid growing up in remote Orkney Islands in northern Scotland she had experience on the margins, so she figured how hard could a museum be, at the other ends of the earth in Sydney, despite seeing newspaper headlines emblazoned “Gallery no-one goes to” and “Money for Wankers”. But on arri...
Jun 20, 2021•57 min•Season 3Ep. 16
Tony Nash’s school & uni life didn’t work out the way he had planned. While he knew he wasn’t studious, didn’t concentrate, he equally understood he had enormous stores of passion, energy and enthusiasm when it came to a project he wanted to pursue. When it came to creating e-commerce bookselling site, Booktopia, initially from a tiny office in suburban Sydney, Tony’s unbridled energy and enthusiasm helped he and his co-founders to build it into one of Australia’s truly homegrown digital suc...
Jun 06, 2021•35 min•Season 3Ep. 15
Despite dropping out of university, having no publishing experience and not even being a book lover, Tony Nash decided he could take a punt on the commercial possibilities he saw in online book-selling, in the internet’s infancy. Shrugging off the risks of going up against the already dominant player in that same market – Amazon – Tony convinced a few family members to support his vision, and started Booktopia, an entirely Aussie home-grown online book seller. What began as a small hustle on the...
May 30, 2021•50 min•Season 3Ep. 14
After 17 years building up their Aconex software platform into a globally renowned game-changer for construction & infrastructure process & document management, founders Leigh Jasper & Rob Phillpot knew they needed access to more capital to continue growing worldwide. But when they took Aconex public in 2014, life as a publicly-listed company dealt them plenty of downside, along with the advantages! So how did they deal with short sellers, share price roller-coaster rides and more? A...
May 23, 2021•24 min•Season 3Ep. 13
When Leigh Jasper was helping out in his dad’s car business, as a kid in north-eastern Victoria, he of course couldn’t foresee that he would create and build one of Australia’s great innovation success stories of recent years. But that’s exactly what Jasper, with co-founder and long-time mate Rob Phillpot, did when the pair came up with the idea that the project management part of what they saw as the messy, uncoordinated and document-heavy construction sector needed streamlining, to help the in...
May 09, 2021•43 min•Season 3Ep. 12
When medically trained Dr Lisa O’Brien took over The Smith Family as CEO, some 10 years ago, the venerable charity was on a fairly solid footing – it had a long history with a recognisable, highly respected brand name. But to make it in the crowded welfare charity sector, genuinely addressing the real & underlying needs of disadvantaged children at risk of falling through the cracks, The Smith Family needed transforming into a more streamlined & focused organisation. But perhaps even mor...
May 02, 2021•52 min•Season 3Ep. 11
When Olivia Humphrey decided to take on the giant and tough US market, to grow her Kanopy film streaming business into the educational and public library sectors there, she didn’t count on the often unscrupulous actions of some competitors. But armed with some private equity investment from billionaire & Phoenix Suns NBA team owner Jahm Najafi, Olivia fought to win over the large Public Library market to her film streaming service. She eventually built Kanopy into an impressive global stream...
Apr 25, 2021•25 min•Season 3Ep. 10
While Netflix, Stan and Disney streaming services are the dominant juggernauts in the on demand, online entertainment world, a young Australian entrepreneur, Olivia Humphrey has quietly built a smaller, but no less significant player that has managed to match the big guys at their own game. What she started from the front room of her house in Perth 13 years ago, as a small, arthouse film DVD service, selling to university libraries to help improve their film collections, Olivia proceeded to buil...
Apr 18, 2021•43 min•Season 3Ep. 9
After years of hard slog trying to build sales on his online services marketplace Airtasker, Tim Fung then found rapid scale-up of the business challenging once growth started to kick in ... including managing his own role as CEO, which he says completely changed every year as the company grew. But even though Airtasker is yet to make a profit, Tim Fung says he’s motivated by the jobs Airtasker has created in its 9 years of operation, which translated into $143million in total sales through the ...
Apr 11, 2021•24 min•Season 3Ep. 8
After a stint working in finance at Macquarie Bank, and then working pro bono at one of Sydney’s biggest modelling agencies, young Tim Fung got noticed by one of the agency’s owners, who gave Tim opportunities to help a small team start up a sim-only mobile virtual phone network operator, which turned into Australia’s 4th-largest mobile service provider Amaysim. Living through that successful start-up helped give Tim Fung the confidence needed when he and a friend came upon their simple idea, wh...
Mar 28, 2021•44 min•Season 3Ep. 7
Once Epic Pharmacy Group’s co-founders Cathie Reid & Stuart Giles had carefully worked through their GFC-inspired near-death business experience, they pulled back on their own risk-taking, but persevered with their bold expansion vision. But this time, with their pharmacy business profitability and growth on track, they did it with the benefit of partnerships and then later with Quadrant private equity to help guide their expansion into cancer care oncology clinics, the Icon Cancer Care grou...
Mar 21, 2021•33 min•Season 3Ep. 6
Growing up in country Victoria, Cathie Reid worked part-time, as a schoolgirl, in the local pharmacy re-stocking shelves & vacuuming floors, thinking her life trajectory would likely involve marrying her teenage sweetheart and life would be sweet and uncomplicated. Well, that plan fell apart when the sweetheart marriage fell apart! But armed with a solid work ethic from her mum and dad, and her pharmacy degree, what Cathie did next, is an inspirational tale of how uncertainty in life can be ...
Mar 14, 2021•52 min•Season 3Ep. 5
In Part 2 of our chat, Adore Beauty founder Kate Morris talks of the fun, if scary ride scaling up her start-up, when rapid growth starts to happen. Find out what was the hardest part of the 20 year journey from starting her idea in a garage, to building her online website selling beauty and skincare products – now one of the largest in Australia -- to taking her business baby public and listing on the ASX. The joy was watching employees and team members grow and flourish. She also reveals what ...
Feb 28, 2021•37 min•Season 3Ep. 4
While studying at uni, Kate Morris loved working part-time selling beauty products behind the cosmetics counter at Myer. But she quickly came to believe many women customers felt somewhat intimidated by the whole buying experience at a physical cosmetics counter. So with no business experience, barely any tech skills, the 21-year-old dropped out of uni, borrowed a $12,000 loan from her partner James’ dad, and began to disrupt bricks & mortar beauty shops with her online startup, at a time wh...
Feb 21, 2021•43 min•Season 3Ep. 3
Building a successful, sustainable movement in the medical field is never easy. But Cerebral Palsy Alliance Ceo Rob White and newborn intensive care specialist Professor Nadia Badawi, Macquarie Grp Chair of CP took on that herculean task 15 years ago. They believed that by inspiring, engendering and funding best practice global research into better understand CP, that together with some of the world’s best researchers including Australia’s own Professor Iona Novak and Sarah McIntyre, who were th...
Feb 14, 2021•31 min•Season 3Ep. 2
When visionary charity CEO Rob White got together with dynamic neonatal intensive care expert Professor Nadia Badawi, they set about building an entrepreneurial startup - CPA Research Foundation- within the not-for-profit Rob White was already reforming into a modern, focused charity - Cerebral Palsy Alliance. The Research Foundation, created from scratch 15 yrs ago, had the vision to fund world-leading researchers to find better prevention, treatments, and ultimately a cure for those children a...
Feb 07, 2021•38 min•Season 3Ep. 1
While business entrepreneur Garrick Hawkins made his fortune as a young man in the more traditional fields of stockbroking, finance & investment banking, over the past 3-decades he’s been quietly creating & building his legacy in the less trodden field (pun intended) of horticulture. As a schoolboy Garrick Hawkins’ dream of one day owning a farm, & building his family a country house and garden on it, became a larger vision which has been slowly, tenaciously, beautifully realised in ...
Dec 13, 2020•48 min•Season 2Ep. 8
Business strategist Ralph Evans not only helped build a boutique consultancy that actually merged and morphed into Boston Consulting Group in Australia, one of the world’s largest & most respected management advice companies, but Evans unwittingly turned into an entrepreneur! He went on to advise and invest in the management buyout of Aussie wine brand Orlando, which went on to make its investors a tidy bundle; and he then turned around a rather moribund Austrade, Australia’s official booste...
Dec 06, 2020•56 min•Season 2Ep. 7
Entrepreneur Naomi Simson, aka the Red Shark from tv’s Shark Tank show, took her early vision for RedBalloon gifting website she’d created, and blew it sky high – the vision blossomed along with the hard goal of global sales. She and new biz partner David Anderson built Big Red Group into a clutch of brands all offering experiences to customers on their e-commerce marketplaces - be they extreme sport, or lifestyle and luxury experiences. Naomi and her team proudly boast they have now built RedBa...
Nov 29, 2020•30 min•Season 2Ep. 6
After grinding away as a freelancer creating marketing plans for household brand names, Naomi Simson decided she wanted to re-set when her own children came along. So she created an idea for an overarching brand that would help market small business operators to much wider markets and audiences. She founded and set about building, with lots of ups and downs along that way, a website around that brand she called RedBalloon. But her genius was in setting that brand around gifting. You could say Na...
Nov 22, 2020•32 min•Season 2Ep. 5
Philippa McCaffery says she was given the worst piece of advice when she worked as a hospital administrator – “learn to let go”, a former boss told her. But as it turned out, she flipped that on its head, and says that in fact, persistence has been her secret weapon in building her successful, sustainable skincare business. Through a ton of trial and error, fuelled by enormous passion for what she was offering women, plus working hard at nurturing great partnerships across 18 years growing the b...
Nov 08, 2020•47 min•Season 2Ep. 4
Dr Philippa McCaffery started her entrepreneurial journey, almost by chance, after becoming just a little disillusioned working first as a GP, and then as a hospital administrator in the public & private health system in Sydney. Nonetheless that early career experience stood her in good stead when she pivoted from public medicine to buying one single suburban skincare clinic, one of the first in Sydney doing laser hair removal. That first clinic was so overwhelmed with women clients needing ...
Nov 01, 2020•44 min•Season 2Ep. 3
