Does an eyebrow-raising or giggle-inducing name boost a business’ profile or increase its clientele? Why not ask Men Behaving Handy, Great Lay Tiling, Getting to Mow You or Bzzzt Electrical Services.
John Eales has applied the lessons he learnt in the scrums to a life in business. Here, Eales shares what he has learnt (the hard way).
To listen to Paul Ryan’s podcast interview with Domenic Carosa, “What I’ve Learnt the Hard Way”
Domenic Carosa founded destra Corporation (then called Sprint) with his sister Anna in 1993. By 1998, destra ran a number of the leading entertainment websites in Australia. In 2000, the company reverse-listed on the ASX a matter of hours before the tech crash on Wall Street. After diversifying into web hosting to survive the dot-com recession, Carosa took the company back to its digital media roots in 2005 and built it into a $100m company with 300 staff nationally. Earlier this year, Carosa became a casualty of the Opes Prime collapse, which resulted in him losing his equity in destra and his departure from the company he built and loved.
Chicago-bred Christopher Witt spends plenty of time on faculty at the University of New South Wales, but he’s quick to point out that he’s no academic. Having spent his early career at big corporations such as AT&T, Telstra and Motorola, Witt is now doing his bit to help bridge the commercialisation gap as Director of the Centre for Innovation & Entrepreneurship at the Australian School of Business. He also puts his wisdom to good use at his investment practice, The Kalori Group.
Robyn Archer AO, 59, has achieved what many attempt: a life less ordinary. By marching to the beat of her own drum, Archer’s distinguished resume reads singer, writer, artistic director and public advocate of the arts. She can now add ‘Program Curator, 2008 Alfred Deakin Lectures’ to that list. Not bad for a sickly child…
The timing was bad, but the growth was fast. In March 2000, with many internet start-ups disappearing off the radar, 25-year-old Leigh Jasper quit his job at McKinsey & Company and threw his hat into the dot-com ring. With business partner Rob Phillpot, Jasper managed to raise capital for Aconex, an online information management solution…
A little understanding goes a long way. When I came back to jail, I was lost, angry, disappointed, frustrated. I was placed in the Youth Unit and one of the mentor prisoners introduced himself. He asked if I was okay, did I need anything. It was good to have someone acknowledge I was doing it…
As Australian basketball icon and long-time Melbourne Tigers player, Andrew Gaze learnt a lot about the business of basketball. But that didn’t stop him experiencing the odd balls up in his own retail ventures. Sometimes the numbers just don’t add up. The biggest issues the Melbourne Tigers faced were financial. A lot of…
Four years ago, John Anderson was working in business development for a logistics company when he got bored “not doing things my way”. With his business partner, Anderson started Yeahpoint, offering clients unique ‘point of product’ retail marketing opportunities using interactive in-store media. Recently Yeahpoint was among a handful of Australian businesses to be short-listed…
Jennifer Goddard may be dyslexic, but that doesn’t stop her reading 800 words a minute. Her personal success in using mental literacy techniques to avoid flunking out of university led her to become Australia’s most accredited consultant in lateral thinking, mind mapping and memory enhancement. Here, Goddard tells us what she learnt on the journey…
At the age of 81, Dr Bill Miller has spent much of his career inside the ever-evolving success story that is Silicon Valley. He has been Provost and Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, specialising in fields as various as engineering, computer science, international studies, neuroscience and nanotechnology. He has also founded prominent venture funds and…
Like most people, Amanda Stevens, 32, knows men and women are different. Her big idea, however, was to use this knowledge for competitive advantage. As founder and Managing Director of Splash Consulting Group, Stevens studies gender differences in the brain and conducts ongoing research to find out what women want. The 2001 launch of her…
For Anne-Marie Birkill, CEO of i.lab technology incubator, life has been rather serendipitous. Graduating with a science degree, she fell into plant biotechnology, where a short-term secondment to Brisbane transformed her into General Manager and 25 percent shareholder within two years. So began a twenty year career spanning management, consulting, lecturing and new technology incubation.
Discovering that you just don’t cut it as a stand-up comedian must be one of life’s tougher lessons. Wil Anderson is thankful this never happened to him, but he has learnt a trick or two on his journey from the Canberra Press Gallery to a theatre near you.
Dr Don Fry’s ultimate objective in life is to see every home on Earth powered by sun and water. As owner and director of AIMTEK, Fry has designed and built 225 ships and trained 1,000 apprentices. Now he wants to fly from Sydney to London in two hours and unleash the sun’s nuclear power.
Pete Thomond spent the past four and a half years working out the secrets of successful innovation. The British academic and business consultant was co-manager of the “Disrupt-it” project, a €3 million European Commission co-sponsored programme of research and business tool development. Now he’s spreading the word downunder, as a Research Fellow and innovation consultant at the Brisbane Graduate School of Business. At 29, he’s young, but how many people do you know with a PhD in disruptive innovation?
Highly acclaimed marketing expert Tony Surtees prefers to avoid labels. If he had to nominate one for himself, it would be ‘enterprise creator’. His particular ability is to assess changing market places and pick future trends, uncovering opportunities. He lets us in on some tricks learnt so far in his glittering global career.
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