Women’s Agenda sister publication, SmartCompany, has published its 2014 Hot 30 Under 30, a list of entrepreneurs under 30 who make up some of Australia’s fastest growing small to medium sized businesses.
Compiled by Cara Walters, Yolanda Redrup and Georgie Moore, the list showcases this country’s next generation of top entrepreneurs. All with great stories to tell regarding how and why they started their businesses.
And we’re pleased to see a number of leading women feature on the list, including 23-year-old Gen George, who takes the number one spot with her online job seeking business, OneShift.
Check out the full list of women to feature in SmartCompany’s Hot 30 Under 30 below, including their advice to other young entrepreneurs. And see the full Hot 30 Under 30 list at SmartCompany.
Gen George
Company: OneShift
Age: 23
Gen George is only 23, but already she’s a self-made, successful businesswoman who’s been running her own company for two years.
George is the founder of OneShift, a site which matches jobseekers to employers, specialising in temporary positions. What started out as a simple WordPress webpage now has over 300,000 users across Australia and has launched in New Zealand.
The business was valued at $18 million last year and in February this year its revenue was up 65% on January.
To aspiring young entrepreneurs, George has a simple message: “Give it a go.”
“Worst case scenario is you fail, but the real failure is actually not trying. You hear of so many people saying they’ve got this fantastic idea but then not doing anything about it.”
Jane Lu
Company: Showpo
Age: 27
Jane Lu is the 27-year-old founder and chief executive of fashion retailer Showpo (previously ShowPony). The retailer has over 350,000 Facebook followers, more than both Myer and David Jones, and last year turned over $2.6 million.
“Everyone told me I was an idiot for quitting my job and then my first business failed and everyone expected me to fail again. You just have to back yourself,” Lu says.
Now Showpo is looking to expand into international markets and Lu is also exploring manufacturing.
Whatever path Lu takes with Showpo, for her it is all about trial and error.
“You shouldn’t wait to get everything perfect before launching because that is a waste of time,” she says.
Nicole Kersh
Company: 4Cabling
Age: 30
Kersh cracked the cabling market in 2007, because she was fed up with the “stale business model” of traditional cable companies.
Making her own cables, Kersh became Australia’s first online cable distributor. 4Cabling now offers more than 2000 products and has moved from working with niche markets to corporations and governments.
Last year, 4Cabling began teaming up with installation companies to provide larger companies with ‘end-to-end’ installation packages. Kersh and her team are also developing a range of e-commerce sites providing customers with more cabling services.
Kersh expects 4Cabling to be turning over $10 million by the end of the financial year and she is committed to “making cables sexy”.
Priyanka Rao
Company: Luxmy
Age: 27
Priyanka Rao is busy extending and bringing new and innovative ideas into her family’s business, Luxmy.
Rao launched Luxmy’s Evolvex range, specialising in customer designed flat-pack furniture, after a disappointing furniture-shopping experience with her sister.
“We were shopping for flat-pack furniture and we couldn’t find exactly what we wanted. We had the idea of a place where you could design your own online and have control,” she told SmartCompany.
Rao now supplies major retailers and other furniture companies, both in Australia and New Zealand, with her new table and lounge range Woodmark.
“We’ve expanded from doing just tables and storage into doing designer tables, chairs, benches and stools through Woodmark.”
Isobel Crumblin
Company: Fly By Fun
Age: 23
Bored with the two-day week nature of her law degree, Isobel Crumblin started looking for work. And she found it in the form of a fairy, entertaining at children’s parties. After a few months, she started Fly By Fun, which now caters for children’s parties and corporate events – such as family fun days and Christmas parties for companies including Nestlé, AMEX, Gloria Jeans and Gumtree.
Crumblin was a finalist for the Global Entrepreneur Awards in 2010 and 2012. She says Fly By Fun has experienced 300% annual growth and she expects the company to turn over $200,000 by the end of the financial year.
Working mostly in Sydney and Melbourne, Crumblin wants to expand Fly By Fun across Australia’s capital cities over the coming years.
Taylah Hasaballah
Company: Tiger Temple and VNDR
Age: 20
Taylah Hasaballah co-founded the social media-based style hub Tiger Temple in 2012 to represent “the girls on the street, the bloggers, the ‘it girls’ and the ones who dare to push the boundaries”.
Tiger Temple integrated multimedia elements such as look books, blogs and SoundCloud ‘mix tapes’, and Hasaballah also holds events and runs competitions through Tiger Temple’s social media network.
But Hasaballah sees something bigger on the horizon, and is relaunching the style hub as VNDR – a fashion platform tailoring content to users’ tastes – mid-year.
“We found with fashion there was this huge hole in the market in terms of finding products that are of interest, for example, if you want to find a pair of black jeans, where do you look and how do you do that?’ she told SmartCompany.
VNDR will direct users to current trends, showcase emerging designers and use previous searches to tailor offerings to users’ interests.