Editor's Message (2/10)

At Brisbane Business News we often profile experienced businesspeople who have seen it all and through ambition, planning and foresight have built successful empires.

But in this month’s issue we’re throwing the stereotype of older men in suits out the window with our Brisbane Business News Young Entrepreneur Awards 2009. We speak with the new breed for whom diminishing returns to scale is still a distant prospect. In other words they’re young, they’re growing and their ideas have momentum.

In their entrepreneurship, these businesspeople have jumped into the deep end of the fountain of youth and come up with rewards.

Their stories, drive, ingenuity and persistence are so impressive that choosing a winner among them was a challenge that took a multi-faceted approach based on the boldness of their pursuits, their ideas, their traits and how they made their mark on society and the world of business.

The profiles have been structured along the lines of the top three followed by the rest ordered by revenue – a factor that by no means has been used to rank the entrepreneurs themselves, but illustrates the size of their companies’ and how much they’ve grown.

In our opinion piece, Australian Institute for Company Directors (AICD) Queensland state manager Richard Moore, discusses the benefits of ‘the tireless energy of youth’ but also points out that too many start-up businesses grow too fast without adopting appropriate governance policies.

And further on the topic of entrepreneurship we speak with QUT Professor Per Davidsson and Griffith University Professor Andrew McAuley about the business environment Brisbane provides, what makes entrepreneurs great.

Here we have empires in the making.

These are the people that you’re going to need to get used to seeing if you haven’t already – vibrant, cutting edge and challenging the status quo. Brisbane’s top young entrepreneurs bringing new ideas to the table and making them work. And in the cases where they use ‘old’ ideas, they manage to diffuse them in a new way that profits.

From telco infrastructure to education, mining services to retail, finance to technology, these entrepreneurs are from such a vast array of industries that to using the ‘comparing apples with oranges’ catchphrase has a few fruits too few.

And with such high standards set this year, we look forward to seeing how the cross-section of young entrepreneurs changes between now and next year. In this edition we also cover news, property, events, new appointments and our special Christmas feature too.

It’s been a diverse and exciting year at Brisbane Business News.

We’ve covered the city’s top public and private companies, its franchises, exporters, innovators and just last month we released our groundbreaking Eco Biz feature. So just as we like to take on new ideas ourselves, it’s great to see what Brisbane’s top young entrepreneurs are doing to challenge the status quo as well. It’s been a blast Brisbane and we look forward to next year.

Camilla Westerlund