Building world-class businesses from an island at the edge of the world.
Some businesses are built because someone sees a gap in the market. Others grow because someone is willing to bet that a place often seen as small, regional or remote might actually be the commercial advantage hidden in plain sight.
Across Tasmania, Tasmanian Leaders graduates have been doing that for two decades. They have taken cheese, cider, games, construction, hospitality, farming, tourism, brewing, design and digital technology and asked a larger question: what becomes possible when business is deeply of this place, but not limited by it?
Nick Haddow TLP5 knew how to make cheese when he founded Bruny Island Cheese Co. What he was still learning was how to lead a fast-growing business with a strong sense of identity, place and possibility. His reflection on the Tasmanian Leaders Program was that the formal sessions mattered, but so did the conversations around them: the car rides, the offline chats, the human moments where ideas were tested and confidence grew. In 2013, Bruny Island Cheese won Telstra Australian Business of the Year, a recognition that reflected not only the quality of the product, but the emergence of an iconic Tasmanian brand with an international reach.
For Guy Robertson, from the same TLP cohort as Nick, Mount Gnomon Farm began as an enormous vision: sustainable farming, production, hospitality and regional economic development held together in one living system. Through the program, he found the networks, confidence and complementary skills to back his judgement and build a team around the dream. His commitment was never simply to grow a business, but to contribute to the North West, choosing regional Tasmania as a place where ambition and community could strengthen each other. Like Nick and Bruny Island Cheese, the plans that began the business had many twists and turns, but as they learned in their program, horizons of a successful future have many simultaneous potentials.
On the East Coast, Tim Bishop and Jason Unwin’s – both from TLP1 – Easy Tiger Cinema story carries another version of the same pattern. With Bishop bringing brewing expertise from James Boags and Unwin recognising the potential of adventure tourism and mountain biking in the region along with a bunch of motivated partners, the venture speaks to a broader Tasmanian instinct: to create businesses that are not imported onto a place, but drawn from its momentum. This isn’t a play for scalability, it is a proud declaration of the big impact small projects can have as a destination and a local hangout.
That momentum travels well beyond food and tourism. Hobart-based Secret Lab has taken Tasmanian digital capability into international creative industries, working across games, tools and interactive technologies from an island many global clients may never visit, but whose talent they can still experience on screens and learning platforms in nearly every country. Not so secret now with TLP12 graduate Dr Paris Buttfield-Addison having published over twenty technical books on AI, machine learning and software development as well as being an in demand keynote speaker and thought leader.
Degree C’s Tim Jordan TLP12 captured another part of this story in his 2018 valedictory speech, describing the shift from worksite to boardroom without losing the credibility of either world.
His lesson was that leadership is not a costume change.
For Tim it was then, and is now as CEO of Degree C, learning to listen across difference, respect people wherever they stand and carry your identity into larger rooms without shrinking it to fit, while still enjoying a sausage roll and an ice coffee milk in a suit or a hi-viz jacket.
Together, these stories show business leadership as more than commercial success. It is human infrastructure at work: confidence, networks, mentoring, courage, identity, place attachment and the ability to turn local knowledge into something the world wants. Tasmania has never needed to be bigger to be world-class.
Leadership here has needed people prepared to build from here with enough care, ambition and imagination that the work and the echoes of their leadership could travel anywhere.
