Built To Lead

Three multimillion-dollar businesses. One very expensive lesson in letting go. Lisa Jones is a best-selling author, keynote speaker and founder of SHE-com, a powerhouse community of 40,000 women backing female founders of product-based businesses. She's built, scaled and exited multiple companies, and she is currently in hypergrowth mode with one goal: a major exit.  In this episode Lisa spills ev...

Most brands don’t survive one trend cycle, let alone 20+ years. But Nikita Sernack has built Nookie through the pre-social media days, the rise of founder-led brands, international stockists, COVID, AND the launch of a second label (Rumer). In this episode, I’m sitting down with Nikita to chat about what actually keeps a brand relevant for that long. From building a cult customer base, to knowing...

Some business owners seem to always know the right person. The person with the answer, the intro, the opportunity, the client, or the advice you didn’t even know you needed. That’s what happens when you stop treating networking like awkward small talk and start building a real network. In this episode, I’m sitting down with Daniel Hakim, CEO of CUB and co-founder of BOA, and Kirsten Scott, co-foun...

Betts have just had a rebrand and chances are, you’ve seen it pop up on your social media. Behind that rebrand is Michael Breckler, the fifth-generation CEO of the 133-year-old Australian footwear brand, who has spent the last few years making some huge calls about where the business needed to go next. In this episode, Michael is sharing with me what really happened behind the scenes - from cuttin...

What does it actually take to build a brand people trust, talk about and buy from before you have a huge team behind you? Steve Chapman is the founder of Hyro, the Australian electrolyte brand growing fast with high-profile investors including Sarah’s Day, Quade Cooper and Daly Cherry-Evans.  Before Hyro, he scaled Shine to more than $60 million in retail sales across 7,000 stores, so he’s not gue...

Build the product. Find the team. Then go to market. That's the playbook everyone follows. Frank Greef did it completely differently when building Kinso AI. After founding Real Hub, merging with his biggest competitor Campaign Track and exiting Real Base with a team of over 400 across multiple countries, Frank came back with one unconventional bet. Forget the product launch. Build the audience fir...

What if using AI in your business gets to be easier than it looks online? Luke Heka has built over 4,000 automations across 250+ businesses through his agency Sellr, and in this episode, he’s breaking down what actually works when it comes to implementing AI inside a real company.  And the best part is that Luke is a huge advocate for keeping it simple so that you can get AI off the ground and run...

Making decisions on gut feel and hoping something sticks? There's a word for that…. It's called guessing. And it could be costing you more than you think. Grace Miller is the Head of Experimentation and Failure at Diary of a CEO and Flight Story, the team behind one of the fastest growing podcasts in the world, scaling from 100,000 to over 16 million subscribers. And none of that happened by accid...

Are you saving AI posts and prompts on IG? Are you using Chat GPT here and there but have no idea what it could look like to actually incorporate it into your business? Or even wondering if you should ditch the team and buy a Mac Mini to build your business with Open Claw? Take a deep breath and listen to this episode. The AI landscape is moving FAST and it can feel very hard to keep up with (and...

If you’re running a business and you don’t have a personal brand, you’re already behind.  But for most founders they’re already time-poor as it is … creating content and starting a personal brand feels difficult, exhausting and like just another thing to add to their to-do list. Today I sit down with Dain Walker who is the founder and CEO of Rivyl, Host of Agency Podcast and Author of The 90 Day B...

Usually you have to choose between scaling and building an epic culture, but TFM Digital is the exception to this.  They were named as one of the best places to work in Australia and landed on the AFR 100 two years in a row.  Today I speak with Taylor Fielding about how he attracts a-players, the biggest mistakes he’s made scaling so quickly and how he’s built a business that allows him to travel...

Some founders are firing their whole team and replacing them with AI…or pretending it’s not happening at all. But Joe Stolte thinks differently.  Joe Stolte has built 6 companies, exited 4 (including Lottery.com which went public at $526 million), worked at Microsoft and generated over $100 million in sales. He now helps businesses to deploy and integrate AI agents and knows exactly what separates...

This one’s interesting because on paper, Kiki Keysers’ built the kind of business most founders say they want.  14 stores. 130 staff. A clothing brand people recognise. But the reason I wanted to get her on wasn’t to talk about growth. It was to understand what actually changed behind the scenes to make that possible… because she’s done something most founders avoid for way too long… She stepped o...

A lot of you have probably seen Laura Higgins online. Sharing content, building her brand, talking about business, but what you don’t see is what it actually took to get there. Like the pivots, the hiring decisions that didn’t work, the pressure of going from working for yourself to leading a team of 19, working with your husband… Laura started as a solo social media manager, grew into an agency,...

Customers don’t buy for your brand because of a clever ad. They do it because of how your business runs when you’re not in the room. Bella Moro has grown mycavoodle into a seven-figure e-commerce brand with a small, values-led team and today her customers recommend her products without being asked. I wanted to get Bella on the show to talk about exactly how she’s done that, including the way she’s...

Building a business is one thing, but scaling it and then selling it for $47 million is another. Phil Di Bella started Di Bella Coffee with $5,000, built it into a national business with 11% market share, led a team of more than 130 people, and sold it to a publicly listed company for $47 million. Phil built Di Bella Coffee into the kind of business most founders say they want, so I wanted to unde...

Building a team sounds simple in theory. Hire good people. Delegate well. Free up your time. But it’s rarely as simple as that. Nick Sinclair has scaled his accounting business TOA to more than 4,500 team members across five countries, and scaled it to over $140 million dollars. A major part of that growth has come from building an offshore team that isn’t treated like cheap labour but like a core...

In every founder’s career, they’re going to go through something huge in their personal lives.  But how do you not let it affect your team? Today I’m sitting down with Em Sparrow, founder of the creative agency Sparo Studios.  2025 was a huge year for Em. Behind the scenes, Em was navigating a full business restructure, cash flow pressure, team changes, and a divorce… all while continuing to grow...

What happens when you’re working 100 hours in your business, and then one day at a cafe you start feeling pressure on your chest… and it turns out that you’re having a heart attack. You’re only 40. That’s exactly what happened to Andrew Handosa (Doza for short) and he realised he needed to change everything about how he lived his life and ran his business. He fired his clients, started going on so...

As a leader it’s not just what you say, but how you say it … and most CEOs? They get these 3 things wrong …  So today, I’m sitting down with speaking coach Annelise McCarthy to chat about what confident leadership actually looks like in practice. Annelise works with founders, C-suite leaders and executive teams around the world (from Australia to San Francisco) teaching people how to communicate w...

What happens when a founder stops following the rules… and designs a business around how their brain actually works? Taki Moore, the founder behind Million Dollar Coach (and coach to Dan Martel, Erika Cramer, Jay Wright and so many other amazing founders ) built a multi-million dollar business with a huge team… and then made the decision to strip it RIGHT back.  But not only that…  He got rid of h...

How do business owners manage hundreds of people… and most of them actually want to stay in the company in an era where people only stay 1 year? Emil Juresic is the founder of multiple businesses (including NGU Real Estate) with over 700 people across his companies. And within that, team members are staying for 5, 10 even sometimes 20 years. How has he become a leader that incredible people want t...

What actually needs to happen before a founder can step back from their business… without everything falling apart? In this episode, I’m sitting down with Jack and Amanda Delosa to talk about what it really takes to build a business that doesn’t rely on the founder for every decision, every hire and  every problem. Jack has built, scaled and exited multiple companies, and now leads The Entourage w...

 We know that the foundation of any great business is their team, but most of us are never taught how to lead them.  So I wanted to sit down with the best leaders and founders in the world and find out how they did it.  Who did they hire?  What mistakes did they make? And what do they wish someone had told them years ago? These are the stories they haven't told before and the things that made the...