
Build It. They'll Come.
Candid interviews with successful Self-starters. On Build It. They'll Come, you'll hear from some amazing Australian entrepreneurs who bet big to build great businesses. Journalist Helen Dalley interviews business innovators and visionaries on how they turned their lightbulb idea into a viable, sustainable enterprise.
This podcast is about the human face behind taking a simple idea and turning it into a business or movement. It's the beating heart behind what it takes to build an empire, from concept to execution, and how they actually achieve it. Fuelled by blind faith and hard slog, how they transform their dream idea into concrete reality.
Latest episodes

Jul 19, 2020 • 30min
Online design co. Canva’s Cameron Adams focuses on fixing problems for customers, not on monetary returns Canva’s achieved; & how founders/staff try to live their stated corporate Value “to be a force for good”, through Canva philanthropy.
Canva co-founder Cameron Adams reveals how the Canva teams pulled out all stops in the past 12 months to fuel massive growth, leaping from serving individuals’ design needs, to servicing much larger corporates’ needs, and how that’s paying off. While much of Canva’s product is still free, Canva Pro team has launched a new tool giving paying customers access to some 60 million different photos and illustrations, up from just 5 million available previously. Cameron also reveals how translating their online offering into more than 100 languages has fed strong growth in non-English speaking markets, like Brazil and Russia. He talks about the lessons he learned at Google working on a secretive project with the legendary Lars Rasmussen, that he brought to Canva; and how his net worth is a “real opportunity” to help the world, going towards needy projects, rather than simply buying “more stuff”. The entrepreneurial journey of this home-grown emerging business leader is both humble and inspiring, and well worth a listen.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jul 12, 2020 • 46min
Canva Co-founder Cameron Adams on building the online design tool company, becoming a billionaire with Canva’s recent $8.7billion valuation & the extraordinary challenges growing from 3 to 1,000 employees in less than 8yrs.
Cameron Adams began mucking around with computer games as a kid, in the back room of his dad’s suburban Melbourne computer shop. After uni he parlayed that computer literacy, fuelled by a passion for graphic design, into a job at Google. But his entrepreneurial spirit serendipitously led him to meet 2 young people with a dream - Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht wanted to transform their small school year book production company into a global vision to democratise design online, allowing anyone & everyone to design anything online through the design tools platform - from lost dog flyers, to concert posters, small business brochures, websites, now even corporate online presentations. Cameron Adams shared that vision and the home-grown tech startup Canva was born. With funding from Silicon Valley and Australian venture capital investors, Canva has mushroomed. From just the 3 founders at the start, it now employs over 1,000 employees, across 5 offices around the world, with Cameron as Chief Product Officer. The Sydney-based Canva’s most recent funding round in June 2020, valued the company at over $8 billion, with Cameron Adams a billionaire. In recent years they’ve doubled both revenue and user growth. As Canva approaches it’s 8th anniversary, it celebrates over 30 million active users. How did they do it? Take a listen.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jun 28, 2020 • 31min
Flight Centre co-founder 'Skroo' Turner, on being the accidental entrepreneur, dumping his professional career at 24, to start cheap double-decker bus tours through Europe to Afghanistan, mainly to have fun. It became his 1st business empire.
Graham Skroo Turner was bitten hard by the travel bug. Twice. Creating and building not 1 but 2 business empires specialising in travel. There’s the massive, now publicly listed Flight Centre, which operates in 24 countries, and writes billions of dollars in travel sales each year. But then there is another empire he built, from scratch, with the help of a few mates back in the early 1970’s, at just 24 years of age while travelling in London: his 1st babythe cheap European bus tours group Topdeck Travel. This boy who grew up on a Queensland apple orchard, started Topdeck with just one converted double decker bus. But he transformed it into a thriving business, soon running a fleet of some 70 buses across Europe, North Africa and Asia., See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jun 21, 2020 • 41min
Flight Centre co-founder & CEO Graham "Skroo" Turner on shifting into survival mode, to battle the Covid19 crisis decimating the travel sector. How tough decisions averted a catastrophe for the global empire he built 38 yrs ago & how it survives.
Flight Centre co-founder Graham Skroo Turner witnessed bookings & sales in the giant global travel company’s leisure division plunge 97%, within just 1 week in March, as nations, Governments & states closed borders; ordered citizens & businesses into lockdown; and planes essentially stopped flying. How Skroo Turner & his leadership team went straight into survival mode to shore up capital & protect the jobs & company he’s built up, after starting with just 1 shop 38 years ago. The toughest decision? Standing down a staggering 70% of his 20,000-strong workforce. While the respected serial entrepreneur & business veteran reckons he’s faced several disasters to hit travel sector – 9/11, the GFC, 2 Gulf Wars – and come through them, in Part 1 of our interview, he says nothing NOTHING compares to the Covid19 crisis that engulfed the world in March, April & May 2020.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jun 8, 2020 • 40min
Carman's Muesli CEO and food entrepreneur Carolyn Creswell on spending $1,000 to buy 1/2share of a tiny mum & dad muesli business about to fold and building it into a global brand selling 54 different product lines.
Carolyn Creswell started her entrepreneurial journey young… she was just 18 years old, working part-time as a student mixing up small batches of muesli for a mum & dad operation. When that business was about to fold, with her job threatened, she and a pal bought it for just $1,000 each. But it was no overnight success. After several years of hard grind -- perfecting muesli recipes, sourcing quality local grains, nuts & fruits, carrying around bags full of her product to court potential supermarket customers, and mostly being constantly broke-- Carolyn Creswell prevailed. Fuelled by passion, she says, to put delight into a brekkie bowl every day, Carolyn built that tiny operation into an impressive empire now selling breakfast & snack products, across 8 different ranges, in some 34 countries. Over the last 25 years Carolyn says she’s never lost sight of her customer, nor the importance of her young family, as she pursued her foodie dream.verySee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

May 31, 2020 • 44min
Four Pillars craft Gin entrepreneur Stuart Gregor & co-founders, sold the 1st batch of 250 bottles of their Yarra Valley-based gin on crowdfunder Pozible in 2013, selling out in 3 days. HOW they transformed it into a Gin "gold mine" within 6 years.
Four Pillars Gin entrepreneur & marketing whizz Stuart Gregor and his co-founders LOVE making craft gin, pouring heart and soul, plus the best local & exotic botanicals into their boutique Aussie brand. In just over 6 years, Four Pillars has won prestigious international awards, become a local G&T favourite, and was selling an impressive 600,000 bottles of gin a year. That is, until COVID-19 knocked them for six. Find out HOW the pandemic lockdown led to their saviour: when Gregor & co turned their beloved gin-making distillery in country Victoria into a hand sanitiser factory for hospitals and health care workers, overnight!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

May 24, 2020 • 32min
COVID-19 SPECIAL, from Piacenza, Northern Italy, one of the world's worst hit regions, young Dr Daniela Petraglia on these heart-breaking, stressful past 9 weeks trying to save patients in the grip of virus onslaught, and why Italy's official death number
Young, 3rd-Year Resident, who is yet to graduate in her Specialty training, Dr Daniela Petraglia talks candidly about the almost crushing challenges faced by frontline doctors & nurses caring for the avalanche of ill Covid-19 patients which threatened to collapse the entire hospital system of Emilia-Romagna, one the hardest hit regions of Northern Italy. The heart-breaking decisions forced on senior doctors as to who gets ICU ventilator care and who doesn’t during the crisis peak of late March, April, early May is an experience that haunts her still. Called away from General Practice to come back & work in one of Piacenza’s busiest small hospitals at Castel San Giovanni -- the first COVID19-dedicated hospital in Italy -- Dr Petraglia speaks of the distressing reality of patients crying into their ventilator helmets, fearful & isolated from loved ones for weeks & weeks. How she and her colleagues, many of whom caught the virus themselves, managed in the storm of this disease, and the lessons to learn from Italy. Courageous and incredibly dedicated during these past 2 months, a young doctor’s perspective.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

May 17, 2020 • 35min
COVID-19 SPECIAL, child infectious diseases specialist Professor David Isaacs, on the risks facing Australia as we ease lockdown, & HOW we might just avoid a major 2nd wave of infections.
Professor David Isaacs, senior Sydney pediatric specialist in respiratory virus infections and immunisations, at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead, bluntly assesses WHY Australia has managed this pandemic pretty well so far compared to many world-leading nations and HOW only minor, firmly-controlled COVID-19 infection breakouts might occur once lockdown lightens. Plus he calmly explains the evidence on whether children spread this virus; the case for schools to stay open; and is asymptomatic spread a huge danger for our community as we venture more outside our homes.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

May 10, 2020 • 38min
COVID-19 SPECIAL, Grey Innovation's Jefferson Harcourt, on the massive Aussie manufacturing effort to build right here in Australia vital Ventilators to help patients fight the Covid-19 battle, & build up our National Medical Stockpile
Melbourne-based medical device entrepreneur Jefferson Harcourt talks of the heroic collaboration going on right now between normal business competitors, to build from scratch and then deliver 2,000 invasive breathing Ventilators: new, much-needed “weapons” in the frontline fight against COVID-19, which will contribute to the Federal Government’s National Medical Stockpile. But what’s amazing about this extraordinary effort by several Aussie high-tech manufacturers, is that this entire project, from concept to complete execution, is taking just a few months! Not only will these ventilators better protect Australians, but possibly our Pacific neighbours too. Not bad for a tech innovator who started his advanced engineering company while still a uni student, 2 decades ago.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

May 3, 2020 • 46min
COVID-19 SPECIAL, from the USA, the Covid-19 global epicentre, Dr Anna O'Kelly on how young doctors like her on the frontline are experiencing the enormous challenges of working in the hastily established "surge" ICU, at one of Boston's busiest hospitals,
With less than 2 years as a practicing doctor, Internal Medicine Physician Dr Anna O’Kelly talks candidly about the heart-breaking challenges faced by frontline doctors & nurses in ICU caring for Covid-19 patients, who need to be invasively ventilated, to hopefully breathe again. Working in one of Boston’s busiest hospitals in the USA - now the global epicentre of this highly infectious, dangerous virus - Dr O’Kelly talks of the distressing reality of patients dying without families by their sides, and with only the caring doctors and nurses to stand by them, and the difficult yet touching conversations they must have with families and loved ones. Resilient, warm, highly dedicated and ultimately positive, take a listen.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.