Successful, courageous business women of the Gold Coast came together on February 22nd. They developed a network by listening to each other’s experiences at the inaugural Brunch Like A Boss Female Founders Club, organised by the Gold Coast Innovation Hub.
The beautiful venue, Third Base Coffee at Palm Beach, hosted the last event.
Business women from all over the Gold Coast attended the event, alongside the founder of Third Base Coffee, Marie Phillips.
After introducing themselves and their brand, the first speaker was Rachel Whitworth, CEO of House of Eden Studio, who shared her founder story with the attendees. Her career, which she started as a Gold Coast Innovation Hub entrepreneur, is now continuing on self-sustained. She has a social enterprise marketing agency dedicated to leading the way for better businesses. They help entrepreneurs with a social or environmental purpose navigate their marketing, communications, and storytelling. They deliver a marketing strategy and implementation services and reinvest over 51% of their profits into mentoring programs to help early-stage social entrepreneurs grow.
After Whitworth, who answered questions after her speech, the Co-Founder of Parkway Robina and Third Base Palm Beach, Marie Phillips, talked about her life and how she came about her business career.
Having arrived in Australia from England as a 21-year-old backpacker, Maire’s career started in IT when she became the receptionist for a software business in Sydney. Fast forward 30 years and Marie has designed, sold, and implemented complex software across all spheres of Government in Australia and New Zealand.
In 2008, Marie became the CEO and Co-Founder of ICON software. ICON has been the market leader for eGovernment software for 7 years and in 2015, the ICON software was acquired by TechnologyOne for $10M.
After a few months off, Marie built Third Base Coffee with her best friend Kelly Singh. With no experience in the hospitality industry, it was a steep learning curve, but the same business principles applied – have well-trained staff, high customer focus, and excellence across all aspects of the business.
In August 2020, in the middle of a global pandemic, the second venue was started. Parkway Coffee in Robina emerged and was as successful as Third Base from the get-go.
Not wanting to ever sit still, this year Marie started her own consulting business ‘LG Know How’ assisting Local Governments to develop robust, long-term strategies around IT systems and business processes. Her first client, Central Coast Council in NSW, kicked off in January 2021.
After listening to these two excellent, challenging, and inspiring careers, the audience asked their questions whilst experiencing the delicious recipes and cocktails of Third Base Coffee.
Thank you to our two speakers for sharing their experiences and founder stories and a special thanks to Marie Phillips for graciously allowing us to host our first Brunch Like A Boss Champagne Brunch at Third Base Coffee.
We hope to see you at our next Female Founders event, coming up in May!
Written by Elif Tanrıkulu
