Growing up with BRW

These entrepreneurs were just born when BRW first hit the news-stands but they have come a long way since. They caught up with some vintage copies of the magazine.

Jot Lynas

Business: Unleashed Travel

Founded: 2007

Industry: Travel

Did the industry exist in 1981? Yes

Jot Lynas: Unleased Travel

What did you want to be when you were a kid? I always wanted to have my own business ... that and be a racing car driver.

Greatest business influence: Adam Steinhardt, founder of Next Byte computer resellers. I sat next to him as he founded his business.

What’s the best advice from BRW? Personal stories about how people came to build businesses, their successes and challenges.

What you’ll be doing in 30 years’ time: I will be retired but investing in other businesses as an angel investor, enjoying life with my family and great friends, travelling the world, going grey, balding – oh, and racing cars.

It was while working in the travel industry in 2006 that Jot Lynas did the numbers on the rapidly expanding holiday market for young people finishing school and realised he could put together a safe overseas jaunt for school-leavers that would cost what they were already spending on a trip to the Gold Coast.

“The first year we chartered an island called Beachcomber in Fiji, hired it for three weeks and took more than 500 young people,” Lynas says.

“We promoted the trips through social media and we had a Facebook page from early on, which was perfect because that’s where our demographic are.”

By its second year of operations, Unleashed Travel had to rent a second island in Fiji to keep up with demand. Its annual trips now take recent school-leavers to four islands in Fiji, four locations in Bali and to Vanuatu, and tickets are booked out at least a year in advance.

“We created a product which is more secure than most schoolies trips, as well as offering the chance to experience a different culture and country,” Lynas says.

“It’s always been a very satisfactory business and I was overwhelmed in that initial year by the response from the kids, because they’re just so excited to be there.”

The ongoing value of Unleashed Travel, however, lies in the relationships it’s developed with customers at a very formative age and the opportunity it now has to offer them products that cater to their interests as they get older.

“We’re going to continue to grow the range of our destinations and the number of resorts and trips we offer,” Lynas says.

“We’ll grow with our customers as well and we’re looking at other areas such as gap-year experiences, volunteering and language trips.”

Ash Aryal

Business: QuantumLinx

Founded: 2008

Industry: Internet search engine optimisation

Did the industry exist in 1981? No

Ash Aryal: QuantumLinx

What did you want to be when you were a kid? A pilot. I used to travel internationally every year and I was in awe of pilots.

Greatest business influence: US investors Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger and Chinese business magnate Li Ka-Shing.

What is the best advice from BRW? The Rich Lists, articles on Harry Triguboff, Gina Rinehart and Frank Lowy all gave the same lessons: dedication, hard work, perseverance, a real belief and certainty in creating real value in their markets through what they were doing, no matter how tough times get.

What will you be doing in 30 years’ time: Utilising surplus capital from my holding company to buy wonderful businesses that are leaders in their markets.

Having almost made his first million on property investments and a raft of businesses by his early 20s, Ash Aryal found himself broke and looking around for opportunities when he decided to put more effort into a company his brother Anish had founded, which provided web-based marketing.

“We looked into what was making the money, spent about $300,000 on consultants who didn’t really seem to understand the business and finally we realised for ourselves that search engine optimisation was a really effective marketing mechanism,” Aryal says. “Then we did a campaign for a client who ran a clothing shop and cafe, and she was so impressed with the response she convinced us to focus on providing our services to other small businesses.”

Wanting to differentiate the business from existing web marketing consultants, the Aryal boys spent months combing through the PhD thesis Larry Page and Sergey Brin were working on when they founded Google in 1998 and used this to build search engine optimisation software on the same principles.

“There was a lot of stuff being offered as search engine optimisation but it didn’t actually work,” Aryal says. “It took us a few months but by the end of 2007 we had built a new system and we started trialling it for friends.”

The result was startling, and throughout 2008, the young entrepreneurs found themselves working 17-hour days to keep up with demand.

The marketing approach was simple: use your own web-marketing techniques and treat customers with great integrity so they keep coming back.

Fast forward three years and QuantumLinx employs 25 staff in Sydney, New York and Los Angeles, although they’ve never been in the same office at the same time, staff keep in touch using web-based video conferencing and unified communications systems, and Aryal is confident the business will continue to grow apace.

As for their first client, Diane, who ran the cafe and clothing shop, she married Ash after the insane first year of rapid growth and is still very much involved in what has become a family business.

David Easton

Business: Reborn

Founded: 2008

Industry: Digital design services

Did the industry exist in 1981? No

David Easton: Reborn

What did you want to be when you were a kid? I was pretty keen to be an air force pilot, but once Mum explained to me that this would involve drill sergeants yelling at me and having to get up at 5am, the dream was quashed.

Greatest business influence: My uncle is a great man who always seemed to have it together. He worked very hard and often would be away for months at a time, but he really made his time count when he was with his family.

What is the best advice from BRW? The collection of stories from other people in the business. There is so much value in reading about the lessons other people have learned.

What you will be doing in 30 years’ time: I’ll be a very rich, active and hip 60 year old, within my family, my household and my company. David Easton’s is a classic tale of the accidental entrepreneur. Self-taught as the digital marketing and design industry grew around him, Easton spent the early years of his career working with a digital agency before launching his own digital design company Lighthouse Interactive.

As demand for his services expanded he came into contact with Sabir Samtani, who ran a similar agency, The V Project. The pair began by swapping work back and forth, then jointly pitching for projects before deciding to go the whole way and combine their companies under the one banner in 2008.

“It was a case of being in the right place at the right time, I was doing a lot of work as a freelancer when I was introduced to Sabir,” Easton says. “We began working on a couple of projects together and within a year or so we were doing so much work together it just made more sense to combine our businesses.”

Started as a full digital services agency in 2008, Reborn now employs 30 full-time staff and has begun taking on senior staff to enter a new phase of growth and sophistication.

“Over the last couple of years we have expanded through referrals and word-of-mouth recommendations, which is great because it means our customers are happy enough to pass us on,” Easton says. “Now we’re looking at hiring people with more experience so we can take the agency to the next level and be a bit more strategic about what we’re doing.”

Neil Singh

Business: Fidarsi Furniture

Founded: 2008

Industry: Furniture retailing

Did the industry exist in 1981? Custom-made furniture, yes; online retailing, no

Neil Singh: Fidarsi Furniture

What did you want to be when you were a kid?

I wanted to be a member of The A-Team or Knight Riders’ David Hasselhoff.

Greatest business influence: Richard Branson, because it’s not about financial gain, it’s about growth and energy and creating something amazing.

What is the best advice from BRW? A lot of business success seems to come from doing something you enjoy, that way you don’t need to work because you get up every day and do something you enjoy.

What you will be doing in 30 years’ time: Something; I’m not sure what but I’ll be working on projects and creating companies. I’m not going to be one of those 60 year olds who sits around and thinks about retirement.

It was a desire to get his hands on beautifully designed furniture that was way out of his price range that drove Neil Singh to start his online retailer for bespoke and customer-made furniture.

“I wanted some really modern furniture for my apartment but all the stuff was way out of my budget,” Singh says. “I didn’t want mum and dad furniture, I wanted something really modern but at the same time I didn’t want to spend $20,000 on a sofa, so I went back to the drawing board and decided to find another way to get what I wanted.”

Singh spent a few months thinking through his plan, and organising designs and processes, took a week and built a website, resigned from his job in advertising and 48 hours later launched the Fidarsi Furniture website.

“It was a steep learning curve to go from the advertising world into furniture retail,” Singh says. “What makes us really good at what we do is that we are constantly designing and innovating with the website, keeping delivery times low and costs low.”

Fidarsi Furniture is part of a wider group of retail websites offering high levels of customisation, while keeping overheads and prices way below what is offered by traditional retailers and it’s a trend Singh believes will continue to expand in coming years.

“The web has become a place where individual consumers can seek out exactly what they want rather than being limited to buying something else,” Singh says. “We’re now looking at expanding into different markets and continuing to innovate in the way we offer our products so that people can get access to the furniture they really want without leaving their homes.”

Dean Ramler

Business: Milan Direct

Founded: 2007

Industry: Online retail

Did the industry exist in 1981? Furniture sales, yes; online retailing, no.

Dean Ramler: Milan Direct

What did you want to be when you were a kid? A taxi driver, because I thought it would be a fun way to meet interesting people and a carpenter, because I was always building things.

Greatest business influence: Donald Trump. From as young as 12 I have been devouring as much info as I could find on Trump. I have read every one of his books several times and live life by his philosophy of “Think Big!”

What is the best advice from BRW? Entrepreneurship is alive and well in Australia and nothing is impossible if you set your mind to it

What you will be doing in 30 years’ time: I will be shaking up a new market and making life tough for my competition while providing the best value for my customers. I am a competitive beast, so I am sure I will be at the top of my game.

Having grown up among the wood shavings on the workshop floor of his grandfather’s furniture business, it’s no exaggeration to say that furniture and furniture retail is in Dean Ramler’s DNA.

It wasn’t until he returned from a gap year in Italy that he began to combine the years of experience in the family business with his own approach to the trade.

“When I was in Italy, I used to spot the most incredible furniture but there was no one selling that type of furniture here in Australia,” Ramler says.

“When I got back in 2006, I caught up with a guy I went to high school with, [online retailer] Ruslan Kogan and he was telling me how he’d started selling TVs online.”

Combining Kogan’s experience in online selling with Ramler’s in furniture, within two days the pair had a website launched and a container of furniture on its way to Melbourne.

And although Ramler had studied marketing at university, he says web-based technology is so fast-moving he’s had to teach himself as he’s gone along and evolve new approaches as opportunities have changed.

“I’ve spent hours and hours figuring out the best way to use Google AdWords and how to use the free online tools to uncover the products people are looking for,” Ramler says. “We’ve got a policy that we don’t create demand, we create products that cater to existing demand, so if there is a sudden spike in searches for black wicker chairs, then that’s just what we order.”

Martin Kosasih

Business: Virtunet

Founded: 2008

Industry: IT support services

Did the industry exist in 1981? No

Martin Kosasih: Virtunet

What did you want to be when you were a kid?

I wanted to be like my dad, a dependable man, a loving husband and father, and a diligent entrepreneur.

Greatest business influence: Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have been my business idols and my mum, she’s the type of person who would jump at any opportunity without worrying much about the risk or the difficulty of the task.

What is the best advice from BRW? Great business strategies and genuinely creative business ideas.

What you will be doing in 30 years’ time: I will have built an international IT solutions company while spending more time with the family; it’s all about work-life balance.

Although he describes himself as a simple person, Martin Kosasih is a quadrilingual polyglot (yep, he speaks English, Bahasa, Cantonese and Malay) who started his first business while still an undergraduate at University of Technology Sydney because he “thought it would be fun”.

After graduating, he worked for an IT consultancy before starting another business in 2008 to take advantage of the rapidly expanding demand for a technology known as server virtualisation.

“The company I was working for wasn’t interested in selling the technology to small and medium businesses, but it’s been the perfect market,” Kosasih says.

His timing couldn’t have been better. As server virtualisation gave way to cloud computing, Kosasih was perfectly positioned to assist small and medium businesses to make the transition into a technology that is less expensive and more reliable than what they would traditionally be using.

“We don’t really sell the hardware or the IT any more; we look for ways to make the lives of our clients easier and offer a solution that reduces costs and saves money,” Kosasih says.

Not that it’s been all plain sailing. Kosasih has already had to pay out a business partner who decided to leave and has more recently realised the importance of holding onto great staff when he lost some of his team to a rival venture.

“In the past six months I’ve really learned how important it is to focus on the team and keep your staff happy, while continuing to deliver to customers,” Kosasih says. “I don’t recruit for skills, I can always train people myself. What I’m looking for are people who will be really loyal and will be happy to grow as part of the team.”

BRW

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