Build It. They'll Come.

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 Tasm...

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...

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 Sydn...

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 hi...

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 t...

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...

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 crack...

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...

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 servi...

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 Airtas...

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 th...

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...

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,...

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 a...

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 Jam...

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 wor...

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-l...

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 cou...

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 mak...

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 mar...

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 br...

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 pa...

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...

When Gabby Leibovich migrated to Melbourne from strife-torn Israel in the mid-1980s as a teenager, he had no idea what he wanted to do, besides being obsessed with soccer, having fun and trying to master English. After university he worked in his father’s electronics store and the sales bug bit him. Last Episode Gabby explained how he graduated from working the bricks and mortar shop floor t...

When Melbourne-based Gabby Leibovich, and his brother Hezi stumbled across the internet, they were already experienced salesmen, Gabby had worked for years on the floor of his father’s single electronics shop In the Melbourne suburb of Brighton, interacting with customers and selling product. The brothers had also branched out and sold products at suburban market stalls around Melbourne. The...