Simon Webster, 23 January, 2025 | Kate Williams (pictured), founder of Nodo, turned her love of gluten-free baking into a thriving empire.

If you want to run your own business, you need to be armed with more than just theories in textbooks. At the QUT Business School, the focus is on the real world as much as the academic one.

It’s an approach that gave these three business founders the confidence and skills to turn ideas into reality.

Proof in the pudding

Being diagnosed with coeliac disease in her 20s was devastating for Kate Williams. “I started to get really depressed,” she says. “It just took away all of the fun when I was dining out.”

But she found a way to put the fun back into food, by experimenting obsessively, and eventually perfecting a recipe for gluten-free doughnuts. After starting out as a market stall in 2014, her business Nodo now has eight cafes across Brisbane, supported by a centralised bakery, and offers baking blends so people can create their own gluten-free goodies at home.

Her business likely wouldn’t have been such a success without QUT. After initially studying for a degree part-time in Sydney while working as a marketing executive, Williams bit the bullet and moved to Brisbane in 2007 to study a Bachelor of Business, majoring in Marketing.

“It was a real gamechanger for me. I just really thrived in that interactive face-to-face learning environment,” she says. “The skills I learned – such as understanding consumer behaviour, how to build a brand, and effective communication ­– helped me position Nodo as a unique brand.”

QUT’s emphasis on applying knowledge to real-world situations gave Williams the confidence to take risks, she says, as well as tools that she could use to establish and expand her business.

“The real-world approach was incredibly helpful. It taught me how to think critically and strategically, and how to solve problems and work with other people – skills I still use every day as a business owner.

“By working on case studies and live projects, I gained a hands-on understanding of what it takes to turn ideas into action.”

Active engagement

Chris Raleigh had been a lawyer for 10 years when he decided on a change of direction, and co-founded Earthletica Activewear, alongside Olympic swimming champion Bronte Campbell and fitness trainer Libby Babet.

There was one problem: “I needed to further develop my skill set to run a company,” Raleigh says. So he enrolled in a Master of Business Administration (MBA).

He chose to do this at QUT, due to a number of factors, including his previous experience there (he’d studied a graduate certificate in future law technologies), the business school’s triple crown accreditation, its close ties with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and its practical approach.

QUT’s focus on preChris Raleighparing students for the real world seemed like the best fit for Raleigh as he was establishing his business. And it hasn’t disappointed.

“You can tailor the MBA to what you want to get out of it,” he says. “For me, it has been about making sure everything I do is tailored to growing my company.”

Raleigh, who is due to complete his MBA next year, was selected to attend a QUT-supported entrepreneurship course at MIT in 2023, which he describes as a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity”. And business is good.

Since Earthletica’s high-performance, sustainable activewear was launched 18 months ago (following two years of product development), it has enjoyed “awesome customer growth”, Raleigh says. The brand is starting to gain recognition in the industry, having recently completed the prestigious Techstars accelerator program.

A real QUT success story in the making: Campbell and Babet also studied there.

Marginal gains

Gaj Panagoda’s career in paediatric rehabilitation has taken him from Far North Queensland to the Kimberley as he has pursued a passion for helping vulnerable and marginalised people.

But as he increasingly found himself performing management roles – for his own clinic, Superkid Rehab, as well as other organisations – Panagoda realised that being a clinician and a business decision-maker were two very different things.

So, in 2021 he enrolled in an MBA at QUT. And two years later, he launched Xstitch Health, a Brisbane-based startup that helps marginalised communities connect with the health system.

It’s currently in the middle of its first big project, and Panagoda is applying what he learnt at QUT in everything from the business’s financial model to its workforce management.

Gaj Panagoda

He says the QUT Business School staff’s strong industry experience made it easy to discuss not just business theory, but reality.

“It’s a different kind of conversation, because it makes it easier to jump from, ‘OK, here’s the research, here’s the evidence’, to ‘what does that actually look like in practice?’”

Sharing problems with staff and students from across different industries was eye-opening, Panagoda says, providing practical ideas and solutions that helped him start his business, and which would have been much harder to find had he stayed within the silo of the medical profession.

“It was incredibly helpful, because there’s people that have tackled these problems in great ways,” he says. “But you only know if you’re in the room with those people, and you build the trust to have those conversations.”

Explore the courses mentioned in this article or discover the full suite of QUT business courses here.

As seen on Brisbane Times. Read the original article here.

Author

Simon Webster

Brisbane Times Journalist

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