This article profiles five 40under40 winners who also won awards as the best in their respective categories.
This article profiles five 40under40 winners who also won awards as the best in their respective categories.
City of Perth Strategic Alliance Award
Co-founder
After a career overseas serving as a purser on super yachts, Leycester Cory returned to Perth to co-found Guys Grooming in 2008.
Beginning with four staff, the business has grown every year since.
It now has 26 employees servicing more than 7,000 clients a year in a custom-built Perth CBD venue equipped with 15 LCD monitors playing sport and music, 12 cutting chairs, seven treatment rooms, and one ‘man-sized’ chill out room.
Guys Grooming is recognised nationally as an industry leader, and was recently named ‘best men’s grooming business in Australia.
Mr Cory now oversees the business direction, having created manager and team leader roles to ensure a smooth operation.
He says this allows him to focus on the future direction, creative marketing, and quality control of the Guys Grooming brand.
He is looking towards future expansion interstate, and potentially overseas.
Mr Cory credits his self-employed parents and grandfathers for nurturing his strong entrepreneurial spirit from an early age.
Mr Cory and his business have raised money for the Prostate Cancer Foundation and Movember.
He also is a volunteer board member for Ros Worthington’s Community Coffee Pods initiative.
Small Business / Startup Award
Carbon Business Group
Co-founder
The name of Jamie Davison’s first business perfectly encapsulated his entrepreneurial spirit – Fortuna Bravado, which means ‘fortune favours the brave’, offers bookkeeping services with a focus on IT solutions and cloud-based services.
His new business is called Carbon Business Group, which offers small and medium enterprises a ‘one-stop shop’ for accounting and bookkeeping services. Their approach has been a success, with 77 per cent of clients using more than one Carbon service, and 32 per cent using three or more.
In two years the firm’s growth has been significant; Carbon’s head office is in Osborne Park, while other sites are located in Swan Valley, Midvale, and Bibra Lake, where five distinct and successful business service divisions have a total of 50 staff.
But it was not just bravery that led to this success. Mr Davison also credits his willingness to take on challenges others may not pursue.
“Accountants see themselves as being above bookkeepers, but to stand out from the crowd I started out by being the CPA doing bookkeeping,” Mr Davison said.
As part of this vision, the business has capitalised on the innovation of cloud accounting software Xero.
In 2015, Carbon was named Xero ‘bookkeeper of the year’ ahead of 7,000 practices nationwide. The firm is now the biggest Xero Bookkeeping Partner in Australia, and the third largest partner worldwide.
Professional Services Award
Manager, clients and markets
In 2007, Courtney Lakstins was appointed as senior investment commissioner to lead the Australian government’s foreign direct investment program for North-East Asia, the youngest person ever to be appointed to the position.
During her four years in the role, Mrs Lakstins was involved in attracting $3.5 billion of foreign investment to Australia, including Chubu Electric and Kyushu Electric’s investments in the Gorgon LNG project.
Mrs Lakstins has strong interest and expertise in Japanese culture and language, beginning with a Rotary exchange to Nagasaki as a teenager, and continuing with advanced study in the language.
She credits her language skills for allowing her to succeed in business in the region, and also to challenge the assumptions of the male-dominated Japanese corporate world.
Mrs Lakstins leads business development in Western Australia for Clayton Utz, where she continues to be an innovator in a highly conservative industry.
Last year she conceived and led the development of a critical incident app called CU SAFE, which has been downloaded by more than 2,000 clients.
Mrs Lakstins intends to pursue directorships in companies wishing to do business in Asia over the coming years.
Intrapreneur Award
Director, commercial
Within a volatile industrial environment at the Roy Hill project, Claire Negus developed and led a functional department of 70 staff to innovate and effectively manage about 800 contracts worth $10.5 billion.
She has implemented significant cost reductions, all with a team benchmarked significantly smaller than those of the competition.
Ms Negus has a vision to create ‘self-service’ functional support in resources companies through inventing and implementing new technologies, empowering line management through simplification, education, and the effective use of risk-based management.
This self-service approach taps into small elements of spare capacity across the business, which when aggregated enables effective management without the need for additional staff.
Ms Negus employed this self-service approach in her past role as projects, program risk manager, for BHP Billiton, which after successful implementation within iron ore was rolled out to projects globally.
Ms Negus is now in her fourth year of volunteering for the Women in Mining mentoring program, during which she has formally mentored five women and several more informally.
She has also spent seven years on the Young Starlight Foundation committee.
Family Business Award
Aussie Wanderer Tours
Chief executive
RichardYoung started Aussie Wanderer Tours & Safaris as a 24 year old in 2007.
Beginning as part-time, one-man, one four-wheel-drive operation run from a home office and garage, the business has since grown to now employ 18 staff and operate 10 vehicles.
Mr Young’s success comes despite a lack of any formal qualifications, and he credits his policy of leading by example, hard work, and a passion for the industry.
The family owned-and-operated adventure tour company caters primarily to the international, inbound tourist market, and currently carries about 6,000 passengers a year.
It runs tours departing from Perth, Exmouth, and Broome, with the Broome-to-Darwin product their most recent addition after Mr Young noticed a gap in the youth travel sector for tours through the Kimberley region.
In 2012, Mr Young was approached by an international travel wholesaler to join it as a Western Australian tour supplier to be distributed through Europe, North America and Asia.
Aussie Wanderer now sells though 750 stores in 30 countries across 40 brands.
