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CEO Interviews: Business Champions Series
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Tony Cassar, Victory Curtains & Blinds
At 32, Tony Cassar risked it all. He mortgaged his house and used his hard-earned savings to buy a flailing company, Victory Blinds. It was a Herculean task: to turn around a company so flush with debt that no one would deal with it ... |
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Carolyn Creswell, Carman's Fine Foods
In 1992 Carolyn Creswell was an arts student working part-time at a company that made muesli. Then she learned the company was about to be sold. Rather than become unemployed, Carolyn offered her boss her life savings - $1,000 - to buy the business. And that $1,000 investment has grown into a $10-million dollar company ... |
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Andrew Dalziel, The CEO Institute
After finishing school, Andrew Dalziel decided to go back to school as a secondary level teacher, eventually becoming a deputy principal. But there he reached what he calls a "satisfaction plateau". So after 18 years he took the leap and left behind the security of teaching. The move was a disaster... |
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David Efron, Davids Timber
David Efron's business career has been a real journey of struggle, of survival and, ultimately, of success. His life and career hold lessons for anyone who is facing the challenges of either failure or success ... |
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Bex Gold, Cinderella Products
Bex Gold came up with a new business idea: high-end, organic cleaning products. The day before the cleaning product was due to be delivered to designer homewares shops, the supplier's factory went up in flames ... |
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Frank Guerra, Melbourne City Hyundai 
It was 1985 and 28-year-old, Frank Guerra seemed to have it all: a wife, a house and a secure job as State Manager at Mayne Nickless' air-freight division. But he says he had a fire of ambition in his belly that couldn't be quelled ... |
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Jan Jacklin, Jigsaw Strategies
It seemed to Jan Jacklin that her worst career nightmare had come true in Autumn 1997. She found herself walking home from the city centre without enough money in her pocket to pay the $1.60 tram fare ... |
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Garry Johnson, Burson Auto Parts
Garry Johnson has created the market-leading Burson Auto Parts from scratch. This is a classic backyard-shed-to-national-business story, although in Garry's case his first warehouse was under his house in the Melbourne suburb of Doncaster. It has been a big gamble ... |
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Glenyce Johnson, Peregrine Adventures
Glenyce Johnson has done a lot of travelling, both around the world and along the extraordinary arc of her life and career. Shortly after starting as finance manager at Peregrine, she faced the vast challenges caused by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. People simply stopped flying. Glenyce had to take hard decisions to save the business. In 2006, Glenyce was named as one of the Telstra Business Women's award winners ... |
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Jenny Lamattina, Beautiful Accommodation
For all those who sit behind their desks each day doing jobs that bore them and daydreaming about what they really want to do ... this is a story for you. After six years as a top-flight commercial lawyer for a prestigious Melbourne-based law firm, Jenny Lamattina took the leap of faith in herself ... |
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Grant Lee, Reality Group
After almost 20 years of working for multinational advertising agencies, Grant Lee was confident he could do it differently and better. So in 1999, with a wife and two young children to support, Grant dared to leave his high-salary job to create Reality Group ... |
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Maria Mercurio, RSPCA Victoria
Maria Mercurio arrived as a young woman in Australia in 1970, fresh from the steel and flour mill city of Buffalo, New York, where she grew up as a second-generation Italian-American. Thirty-seven years later, it doesn't look like Maria is moving back to Buffalo. She relishes her role as CEO of the RSPCA in Victoria and working with the Society's high-profile President, Hugh Wirth, has helped make big leaps in productivity, service delivery and donation income ... |
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Alistair Murray, Ronstan International
For the past 30 years, Alistair Murray has raced yachts and had a sensationally successful career developing the sailboat hardware and architectural rigging business Ronstan into a world brand. When he left school in 1973, a natural first job was to work at a boating chandlery — a retailer of marine equipment and supplies. And then luck played her hand ... |
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Julien O'Connell, BW Corporation
BW Corporation has navigated the tricky shoals of increased regulation and a seemingly endless round of mergers, acquisitions and industry consolidation. Despite all this, Julien O'Connell has always placed a high value on community and philanthropy ... |
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Kerry Osborne, CityWide Service Solutions
Kerry Osborne has had a stellar career by any measure. He landed his first role as CEO at the tender age of 33 and has kept making small organisations big ever since. In 1995, he moved from Auckland to Australia to set up ... |
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Sharon Pearson, The Coaching Institute
It took Sharon Pearson 37 years to find her passion - and she hasn’t looked back since. But Sharon’s path to success has been a rocky one. She spent years trying on different careers. For 10 years, she sat behind a computer at home doggedly pursuing the dream of being a crime-fiction writer. After writing five books and receiving about 600 rejections from publishers she finally gave up. No one can say she didn't try. At that point she had a desperate realisation ... |
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Brett Reaby, Phasefale
When Brett Reaby joined his father's refrigeration business in 1980, about 15% of its income came from making fridge-control switches. Five years later, the young electronics engineer had turned that figure around, with 75% of revenue coming from switches and the rest from what had been the core business ... |
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Robert Saunders, TriMas Corporation
Many people would call Robert Saunders' early life poverty-struck: one of three boys growing up on a tiny dairy farm in central Victoria in the 1940s and 50s. His father was dead, and his mum held the family together with little more than love and hope. But Robert doesn't call it poverty. He remembers a tight-knit community and a family in which each boy nursed ambitions far beyond their meagre surrounds. And they achieved their goals. For Robert that meant ... |
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Mannie Stub, Altshul Group
Mannie Stub has travelled a long journey to the chief executive's desk at the Altshul Group, a national printing and graphics business that was co-founded back in 1944 by his father Emil. Now, after almost two decades at the helm of Altshul, he is helping to bring a third generation of his family into the business ... |
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Amy Sznicer
Amy Sznicer has packed what many would consider a lifetime of achievement into her short working career. Her career achievements were recognised in 2006 when she was named as Telstra's Young Business Woman of the Year... |
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Ryan Trainor, Movers and Shapers
At 32, Ryan Trainor has packed more entrepreneurial success into his life than most people manage in a lifetime. By the time he was 30, his businesses had turned over more than $20 million - and two had been sold to much larger companies ... |
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Brian Wright, Jubatus
CEOTV has featured many extraordinary life stories and Bright Wright's is one of the most compelling. It is a journey that takes us from a small dusty town 200kms north of Calcutta in the 1950s to the uplands of corporate power in Australia ... |
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