Sounds of Eclat

260 AFL games. Two new careers. One very clear sense of what comes next. Brad Ebert spent the better part of two decades at the elite end of Australian football West Coast, Port Adelaide, 260 games. What he's built since says as much about his character as anything that happened on the field. Hey Diddle Wines started as a pipe dream with a Port Adelaide teammate. Phillips Coaching is where his pur...

No guest. Just the two people who run this place turning the mic on themselves. This one's different. Nick and Lauren pull back the curtain on three-plus years of building Eclat what they've observed watching the community grow, what they've wrestled with as operators, and the conversations they don't always have in public. Nick on what happens when a sole trader walks into a room full of people f...

A physio. A personal health challenge. A program that has now reached 25,000 young people. Megan Dickinson co-founded the Live Life Whole Project after watching women and girls navigate serious health challenges without the right information or support. What started as workshops in secondary schools has grown into a multi-state, multi-audience preventative health education program and the turning...

A tip from Mick Turner. A quietly confident kid from Geelong. Thirty years of player management from the inside. Peter Lenton has been inside AFL player management for long enough to have watched it transform entirely and to have formed very clear views about what's been gained and what's been lost in that transformation. His current stable includes Zak Butters and Jack Ginnivan. His career starte...

A science degree. A brand agency. A personal health diagnosis. And an entirely new business born from a mobility aid store visit that left her cold. Samantha Freidon built Milkshake Creative on the somewhat unconventional foundation of a science degree nobody thought she'd ever use. The test-and-learn rigour of the scientific method, it turns out, is exactly the discipline most brand-building is m...

163 NRL games. Three season-ending injuries. One very clear sense of perspective. Christian Welch captained the Melbourne Storm, represented Queensland in State of Origin, and spent years in the company of some of the greatest players the game has produced. He sat down with us still processing the end of his career the bittersweet feeling of watching his mates in a Grand Final without him, the rel...

Andrea McKenna didn't come from accounting she came from marketing, from operations, from a belief that how a firm makes people feel matters just as much as what it delivers. That outsider perspective is exactly how she and her husband Shane turned a dining table in Hawthorn East into a 60-person professional services firm without a business plan and without a blueprint. In this conversation, Andr...

A Brit in Melbourne. A matchmaker for knowledge. And a very clear view on what time is actually worth. Toby Raper built Networks X on a simple but precise premise: the right expert for a private equity firm asking about AI today is a completely different person to the right expert six months ago. Static databases miss that. Custom sourcing doesn't. He's refreshingly honest about what the early day...

Every person has a story they've never told in public. Not the polished version from a panel. Not the LinkedIn post. The real one. The decision made at the wrong moment, the feedback that stung, the habit that held everything together when nothing else did. At Eclat, we've had the privilege of sitting alongside some of Melbourne's most interesting people for the past three years. In our spaces, ov...