Anthill Magazine

Starting any company in deep in the midst of the global financial nosedive is no mean feat. Spawning a business that employs 18 people and pulls in $200,000 in monthly revenue after only 17 months of existence is a jaw-dropper. Fellow Anthillians, meet 61-year old entrepreneur Peter Murphy and his first ever entrepreneurial venture, Stonebridge Systems.

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Ben Neumann prefers to measure his company’s progress by the glass. When the business started in 2005, he was fortunate to book two functions a week and serve about 200 cocktails a month. Today, his bartenders are pouring up to 5,000 cocktails a week and more than 250,000 a year.

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Sebastien Eckersley-Maslin launched a blog and announced on it that he would create a fully formed business in seven days with only $500. Then he did it. The result was AutoCarLog. Yet, Sebastien doesn’t even consider the one-business-in-seven-days caper his best buzz builder. No, that would be when he traveled to six countries in 12 days to launch a global brand, in a bid to be listed in the Guinness record book as the “smallest multinational.”

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“I dare to be different,” says Vanessa Cullen, owner of commercial interior design firm Forward Thinking Design. “I’ve been a new business owner, just like my clients, and so I service them from the standpoint of acute understanding, honesty and empathy.”

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Betty Boustani was only 26 when she started her law firm in 2007. Over time, Boustani realised her interests were leaning toward advising corporate clients. She reshaped the firm’s mission, becoming Emprise Legal & Corporate Advisory.

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Mark Ross-Smith describes SMSfun is the first Australia-based social network. The service, which offers a multitude of text-messaging plans while providing a home for chat rooms, user profiles and addictive contests, now has more than 1.2 million members linked by mobile and web.

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Andrew McKnight’s MIA is an evolution from two previous McKnight ventures — Limeworks, a website content developer and manager, and Shazam, an app that recognises the song playing on a mobile device and tells the user how to share it and buy it. When MIA finally did “emerge,” it was the continent’s leader in the mobile tech niche, he says, generating more than $15 million in annual revenue.

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Since starting Project Rockit in 2007, the Thomases have worked with more than 150,000 Melbourne-area students. The website quadrupled its daily hits over two years. Most importantly, in post-event evaluations, 96% of students saw a decline in bullying at their school.

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Naturally, McKibbin has a keen and enthusiastic eye for fashion trends. But she wouldn’t be where she is today without a fearless ability to take a leap. When she first started ddgdaily.com, she didn’t know the first thing about building a website. She Googled and taught herself. When the time required to run the site reached critical mass, she quit her regular job and took out a loan.

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Dean J. Ramler’s Milan Direct has sold more than 370,000 pieces of furniture to more than 100,000 customers. It enjoyed a turnover of $3.6 million in 2008-09, landing the company on BRW magazine’s Fast Starters list. Turnover for 2009-10 was close to $5 million. The company expanded into the UK a year ago, and is already a multimillion-pound business there.

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