Build It. They'll Come.

In Part 2 of our chat, Adore Beauty founder Kate Morris talks of the fun, if scary ride scaling up her start-up, when rapid growth starts to happen.  Find out what was the hardest part of the 20 year journey from starting her idea in a garage, to building her online website selling beauty and skincare products – now one of the largest in Australia -- to taking her business baby public and listing on the ASX. The joy was watching employees and team members grow and flourish. She also reveals what role the humble Tim Tam biscuit plays in Adore’s customer shopping experience! And she explains why internal culture is so critical to team success.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

While studying at uni, Kate Morris loved working part-time selling beauty products behind the cosmetics counter at Myer. But she quickly came to believe many women customers felt somewhat intimidated by the whole buying experience at a physical cosmetics counter. So with no business experience, barely any tech skills, the 21-year-old dropped out of uni, borrowed a $12,000 loan from her partner James’ dad, and began to disrupt bricks & mortar beauty shops with her online startup, at a time when no-one else was really blazing an e-commerce beauty trail in Australia. Kate thought she could create a better customer experience, by doing it online: giving women more easily accessible information on makeup & skincare products to empower them to make better purchases for their needs.  But it was no overnight success. In Part 1 of our chat, Kate explains what a hard slog was Adore Beauty’s first 12 years, but how that set her business up for rapid growth in the last 8 years. And in late 2020, Kate and James floated Adore Beauty Group on the ASX, described in the media as “one of the hottest listings of the year”.  Brought up in Tasmania Kate tells how her parents encouraged independence and a strong work ethic in her and her siblings; and how you need to embrace failure.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Building a successful, sustainable movement in the medical field is never easy. But Cerebral Palsy Alliance Ceo Rob White and newborn intensive care specialist Professor Nadia Badawi, Macquarie Grp Chair of CP took on that herculean task 15 years ago. They believed that by inspiring, engendering and funding best practice global research into better understand CP, that together with some of the world’s best researchers including Australia’s own Professor Iona Novak and Sarah McIntyre, who were there from the beginning, they could help find better preventions, treatments and ultimately a cure for children and babies with Cerebral Palsy. Not only did these collaborators pursue their lightbulb idea, by building a world-respected Research Foundation from the ground up, but along the way they helped decrease not only the incidence of CP in this country, but how severely it affects those CP kids and babies.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When visionary charity CEO Rob White got together with dynamic neonatal intensive care expert Professor Nadia Badawi, they set about building an entrepreneurial startup - CPA Research Foundation- within the not-for-profit Rob White was already reforming into a modern, focused charity - Cerebral Palsy Alliance. The Research Foundation, created from scratch 15 yrs ago, had the vision to fund world-leading researchers to find better prevention, treatments, and ultimately a cure for those children and babies living with cerebral palsy, a condition affecting 17 million people globally, and 1 child born with it every day in Australia. Along the way to ensuring the Foundation’s success, the pair forged a deep and enduring professional partnership, while making a remarkable difference every day to the lives and outcomes of children and their families coping with CP. Today, researchers alongside clinicians have reduced both the rate and severity of CP incidence in this country. Find out HOW they built it, and achieved success.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

While business entrepreneur Garrick Hawkins made his fortune as a young man in the more traditional fields of stockbroking, finance & investment banking, over the past 3-decades he’s been quietly creating & building his legacy in the less trodden field (pun intended) of horticulture. As a schoolboy Garrick Hawkins’ dream of one day owning a farm, & building his family a country house and garden on it, became a larger vision which has been slowly, tenaciously, beautifully realised in Oberon NSW, west of the Blue Mtns. Starting with 1 working sheep farm in 1984, Garrick Hawkins was inspired by the grand European gardens, as he set out to create and build – with the partnership & help of talented local trades and craftspeople -- a vast cool-climate garden but with a unique Australian country flavour, that now spreads across an entire valley, and is one of the largest privately- owned, cool-climate gardens in the world. How one man’s folly became a garden for all Australians to enjoy, and how that finance guy learned to slow down and enjoy watching his legacy blossom and flourish.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Business strategist Ralph Evans not only helped build a boutique consultancy that actually merged and morphed into Boston Consulting Group in Australia, one of the world’s largest & most respected management advice companies, but  Evans unwittingly turned into an entrepreneur! He went on to advise and invest in the management buyout of Aussie wine brand Orlando, which went on to make its investors a tidy bundle;  and he then turned around a rather moribund Austrade, Australia’s official booster for Australian trade, by transforming it in the 1990’s into an outward-looking, entrepreneurial organisation to help local companies seize the benefits of exports. Over the past few decades, Evans has been involved in Venture Capital and advised Venture Capital funds, and more recently he’s turned his strategic analytical skills to the vexing issue he says is so urgent -- climate change. In a new book, called Toast, Evans builds a business case to persuade the community, as well as the sceptics and deniers he says, for why we must take far greater action on climate change. How to check out Toast, by Ralph Evans:-- https://www.amazon.com.au/Toast-Climate-enormous-Australians-effects-ebook/dp/B08CGVRLCX https://www.bookdepository.com/Toast-Ralph-Evans/9780648880424 https://www.booktopia.com.au/toast-ralph-evans/book/9780648880424.html  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Entrepreneur Naomi Simson, aka the Red Shark from tv’s Shark Tank show, took her early vision for RedBalloon gifting website she’d created, and blew it sky high – the vision blossomed along with the hard goal of global sales. She and  new biz partner David Anderson built Big Red Group into a clutch of brands  all offering experiences to customers on their e-commerce marketplaces - be they extreme sport, or lifestyle and luxury experiences. Naomi and her team proudly boast they have now built RedBalloon and Big Red Group into the 3rd-largest experience provider in the world! And that means they have helped grow the small businesses of their 2,000 experience suppliers. But along with the positive side of this journey, there are always the bad days as well. In Part 2 of our chat, Naomi is candid about both, and in particular she reveals how she dealt with tough times as she was growing her business; and why Australia needs great start-ups. How to connect with Naomi Simson : Three LinkedIn Learning Courses Two books One newsletter  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

After grinding away as a freelancer creating marketing plans for household brand names, Naomi Simson decided she wanted to re-set when her own children came along. So she created an idea for an overarching brand that would help market small business operators to much wider markets and audiences. She founded and set about building, with lots of ups and downs along that way, a website around that brand she called RedBalloon. But her genius was in setting that brand around gifting. You could say Naomi Simson was a trailblazer in this space and her RedBalloon website became a mushrooming marketplace for experiences, long before the first world hunger for “experiences” became a massive worldwide trend.  How to connect with Naomi Simson : Three LinkedIn Learning Courses Two books One newsletterSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Philippa McCaffery says she was given the worst piece of advice when she worked as a hospital administrator – “learn to let go”, a former boss told her. But as it turned out, she flipped that on its head, and says that in fact, persistence has been her secret weapon in building her successful, sustainable skincare business. Through a ton of trial and error, fuelled by enormous passion for what she was offering women, plus working hard at nurturing great partnerships across 18 years growing the business, she and her partner Alarna realised their long-held dream. But they also knew that selling their beloved “baby” to a corporate partner with deep pockets, was the best way to ensure their business would flourish into the future. Was it bittersweet? Well, let’s find out. I hope you enjoy Part 2 of my chat with Philippa McCaffery and Alarna Longes.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Dr Philippa McCaffery started her entrepreneurial journey, almost by chance, after becoming just a little disillusioned working first as a GP, and then as a hospital administrator in the public & private health system in Sydney. Nonetheless that early career experience stood her in good stead when she pivoted from public medicine to buying one single suburban skincare clinic, one of the first in Sydney doing laser hair removal. That first clinic was so overwhelmed with women clients needing help with unwanted body hair, that she and her new business partner Alarna Longes, a young uni graduate who came on board initially to help boost marketing, built up their business  -  not only doing hair removal by laser, but also offering a non-surgical, non-oral drug treatment for adult female acne. It proved to be a game-changer. After years of hard work, with a few missteps along the way, the result was many many happy clients. 45 clinics later, the pair had built something substantial, and in mid-2018 they sold their cosmetic skincare clinic business to large ASX-listed company, Australian Pharmaceutical Industries for a cool $127million.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.