Build It. They'll Come.

When Alex Vynokur emigrated to Australia from Ukraine as a 16 year old, he was struck by the choice and opportunity offered by his new home, compared with the deprivations growing up in Soviet Ukraine. Even though the teen spoke no English when he arrived here he set about taking full advantage of what was on offer. After completing university, he moved into financial services, working in funds ma...

The hip, all Australian-made Ultra Violette sunscreen had only been going a short while when the Covid pandemic struck. After initial panic and quickly testing disaster scenarios, Bec and Ava realised they needed to junk them, and step back on the accelerator! Fast-growing online sales in skin and suncare showed these founders they would flourish through Covid if they could stay nimble and lean. T...

So why do two young women, both with great jobs in the beauty industry, toss all that certainty & stability away, and put everything on the line (including re-mortgaging the house!) to back themselves into a startup? Particularly when the all Aussie-made sunscreen product they create will have to compete in a super crowded sector, where mass-market products fly off supermarket and chemist shel...

The investing landscape has changed so dramatically in just the past few years, where discussion and action around ESG now dominates all boardroom and company leadership discussions. Ethical Partners Funds Management founders Matt Nacard and Nathan Parkin were ahead of the game on this trend, having built their Ethical Partners Funds Management boutique firm, from scratch 3 and a half years ago, t...

How Ethical Partners’ founders Matt Nacard and Nathan Parkin built their funds management business on the laudable twin foundations of achieving above-market returns for their investors, but equally important, making genuine ethical investing decisions – be they around climate change mitigation, modern slavery elimination in supply chains, products that don’t harm. After family t...

Dr Ben Hurst loved the huge numbers of younger people who increasingly engaged with HotDoc online, at the height of the Covid testing & booking vaccinations. But madly chasing new patients is not his core motivation. Improving the patient experience is! And being a former practicing doctor means Ben Hurst puts patients front and centre of HotDoc’s culture and growth. How the online platf...

Working as a young medico in a Melbourne maximum security prison, Dr Ben Hurst realised that perhaps one-on-one healthcare doesn’t necessarily help the most people manage their health problems, nor did it give him the creativity he desired. But it wasn’t until he was sitting with friends in a bar in New York city, that his lightbulb idea struck him: he heard about a novel business in t...

2 decades ago Mark Kelly thought globally, but acted locally, creating then building up his Global Surf Industries by appealing to the mass market of beginner & intermediate surfers rather than world champs; and offering customers certainty of supply and consistently good quality brand surf and paddle boards. GSI flourished to become a major supplier of boards in some 74 countries around the w...

Mark Kelly only learned to surf on a board at the age of 30, but that cemented his lifelong love of the ocean, first sparked when his dad took him scuba diving as a teen. Kelly came to adore surfing and its calming connection with the sea and nature. Having learned the international sales, marketing and distribution ropes working as a senior exec with massive global brands Adidas and Bausch + Lomb...

Barry Lambert has built not 1, but 3 business empires over the past 4 decades, but he doesn’t consider himself an entrepreneur! Starting out as a 16 year old, who began work at the Commonwealth Bank Taree branch, Lambert went on to create and build Count Financial, a grouping of accountants which he expanded into a large franchise operation. After listing Count Financial on the stock exchang...

How do you maintain your momentum, your optimism, your entrepreneurial spirit in the face of devastating bushfires that torched one of the jewels in your business crown, not to mention Covid-enforced lockdowns & border closures’ uncertainty? Hayley & James Baillie’s biz empire - and their leadership - have been sorely tested in the past 2 years. Bushfire ripped through their So...

Part 1 – As thoughts of travel escape to exotic locales starts to take shape as we open up from COVID-19 lockdowns and border closures, you might dream about the luxury lodges, or “luxury redefined” as they describe it, that married couple Hayley and James Baillie have created & developed in their Baillie Lodges portfolio. In some of Australia’s most spectacular, but of...

When Katherine McConnell was a Macquarie banker specializing in asset finance she knew there was a genuine & untapped opportunity that no big bank could take advantage of. And that was to provide new ways to help ordinary householders invest hefty upfront charges in renewable energy in their homes, be it rooftop solar, battery or blinds. So she mortgaged her family’s home, scrimped and s...

Adapting Aspen Medical’s outsourced healthcare hospitals, clinics and highly-trained medical personnel to suddenly and expertly deal with the COVID-19 pandemic was an extraordinary challenge for the company. But one it executed highly effectively. Not only did Aspen Medical operate strict infection control protocols on some of the early repatriation flights out of Wuhan into Australia, and s...

When Glenn Keys AO spent his boyhood living above his parents shop in regional NSW, little did he know that he was soaking up his folks' entrepreneurial spirit. That childhood revolving around the family small business, instilled in Glenn an ability to take calculated risks and back himself. And that combined with his adult training as an engineer, and work in the military, equipped him to bet big...

As Apple iPods, then iPhones, Music streaming services like Spotify and now COVID-19 have all seriously disrupted the music industry over recent decades, how has Michael Chugg navigated these potential minefields, and turned the internet from a disrupter into an opportunity for musicians? And is there a future for the live music scene, when life and borders open back up post-COVID? Well for an ent...

How 15 year old Michael Chugg transformed his love of music, and particularly Aussie rock music, into a major business empire, that ended up bringing to Australia, promoting, staging concerts and touring many of THE biggest music stars & bands in the world. Stars like Elton John, Robbie Williams, Bob Dylan, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, the Police, Dixie Chicks, Madonna and so many more. Michael Chu...

After great success in the UK with her hand-made, artisanal, ethically sourced chocolate company, Coco Chocolate, with 2 stores in Edinburgh and a successful contract supplying Harvey Nichols' signature chocolates, Rebecca Knights returned to Australia, with small children, and was thrown what she calls a few curve-balls. But in Part 2, Rebecca reveals how start-up entrepreneurs must be resilient...

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...

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...

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 ga...

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 somewh...

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...

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...

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...