The Success Playlist: Everyone Has A Story Podcast
John Caruso has been hosting our podcast for almost a decade. He’s learnt that success leaves clues and many guests have left trails worth following.
Success, it turns out, is a lot less about being the smartest person in the room and a lot more about how you show up in the world. Spend any time with the people who have sat opposite me on the Everyone Has A Story: Conversations from the Sunshine Coast and Noosa podcast and a pattern starts to emerge. Different industries, backstories, yet the same core ingredients rise to the surface.
Often it starts in places that are anything but glamorous. For landscaper Stuart Bain, it was his mum’s garden and a teenage realisation that he loved building and creating things more than lecture theatres or lab coats. He followed that curiosity from Burnley Horticultural College to Kew Gardens and eventually launched Earth Creation Landscapes on the Coast. For Founder’s Formula owner Ann Donnarumma, growing up in Bundaberg meant Lonely Planet guides and a restless sense of a bigger world beyond crab sandwiches and small crop farms. She washed cars for five dollars, picked snow peas for four dollars a bucket and learned early that if you wanted something, you worked for it.
There is a common moment where backing yourself moves from theory to practice. Ann walked past a tired little beauty salon near her Suncorp office in Brisbane, saw a filthy for-sale sign and thought, how hard could it be. She convinced her boss to let her go part-time, talked her mum into mortgaging the family home and started working sixty hours a week, determined her mum would not lose the house. Within two years she had grown that one salon into a chain of six.
Kristine and Todd Young looked at Bella Venezia in Mooloolaba saw not just an Italian restaurant but a stage. The trophy cabinet is bursting with awards and recognition from not just locally but on the world stage. That success has seen them open another venue in Mooloolaba, Fish House Steak & Grill, which was awarded its first Chef’s Hat in the Australian Good Food Guide (AGFG), earning an impressive 13-point score and joining the top one per cent of restaurants nationwide. It looks set to follow in the success of Bella Venezia which received its fourth consecutive Chef’s Hat.
Since Kristine’s childhood, her dream had been to perform around the world but these days her theatre is conducting the two restaurants, 364 days a year.
She describes each service as their own Super Bowl. Most of Bella’s staff have been there more than five years, in an industry where many last five weeks. The culture is built on discipline, systems and the belief that everyone in the building is either a player or a coach.
Matt Hobson from Sunshine and Sons Premium Spirits and Nil Desperandum Rum grew up on an East Gippsland farm, zigzagged through aviation around the world and eventually landed back in Australia wanting to build something of his own. The distillery at Woombye opened in March 2020, just as COVID emptied pubs and bars. What kept them alive was a retailer willing to champion a local brand when it mattered most. Their products have won accolades around the world and at home with the latest seeing the distillery crowned as Best Queensland Distillery for the second year running at the Royal Queensland Distilled Spirits Awards. Matt still talks about Sunshine and Sons not as a transactions business, but as a relationships business.
That focus on people over product runs through almost every conversation. When Stuart speaks about Earth Creation Landscapes, he doesn’t start with profit. He talks about Derick, a crew member who battled serious illness, and a team who donated sick leave so he would be looked after. He is fussy about straight screw lines and clean uniforms, but just as fussy about culture.
Kristine tells a similar story differently. The secret at Bella Venezia is not just the wine list or the hand-rolled pasta. It is the way she and Todd identify each team member’s strengths and design roles around them. The waiter with a quiet obsession for wine becomes a sommelier. The front-of-house gun becomes a mentor.
Ann’s journey arcs from Bundaberg to London, Canada and Rome, from banking to teaching English to officers in the Italian Secret Service, from salons to education and now into natural cleaning and Australian botanical skincare. She built Demi International from a tiny beauty school into a multi-campus registered training organisation with more than 700 students, sold 80 per cent to private equity, then got bored and bought two more businesses. She is clear that her job is to take something from tiny to thriving, then step aside.
Coach and author Nikki Fogden-Moore works with the people who sit in boardrooms and quietly wonder what happens next. She calls herself the ‘Mojo Maker’, a label that her clients gave her when they realised she helped them get their spark back. Her work is grounded in neuroscience but the way she explains it is about sustainable decisions rather than running on empty. Men, she says, carry a lot of weight in silence and need safe spaces to talk about self-doubt and fear without it being weaponised. That is why she runs men’s retreats, boardroom programs and a boat boardroom on the ocean, where strategy, legacy and succession are discussed between casting lures and cooking up the catch.
Publisher Deb Caruso realised the Coast was full of stories not being told well. On sabbatical from a high-powered career in PR and Corporate Communications and keen to engage meaningfully with her community, she volunteered as Vice President of Slow Food Noosa, on the social and governance boards of the Noosa Biosphere, and was hosting a community radio show when she identified the opportunity to connect the community through storytelling.
IN Noosa Magazine and Hello Sunshine Magazine grew from there and has been supporting businesses and engaging readers in a meaningful and authentic way across print, digital and in person for more than 12 years. Old-fashioned publishing in the best possible way, community connections backed by business savvy spreadsheets and a clear understanding of the audience.
Out at The Kin Kin Hotel, David Ezrine is quietly redefining what a country pub can be. He and Ellie arrived during COVID, crossed the bridge into town, took a selfie with the pub in the background and a few weeks later had it under contract. David had spent decades building Big Green Egg into a global barbecue legend. In Kin Kin he is combining that experience with design, agriculture and hospitality: a market garden across the road, fermented sourdough, whole animals broken down for charcuterie and a menu that changes daily. He wants his kids to chop wood, serve over a bar and build something real.
The more you listen, the more those common ingredients crystallise. Courage, often quiet, in saying ‘yes’ before you feel ready. A relentless insistence on quality, whether it is straight screw lines in a fence, the polish on a wine glass, the finest of ingredients or the layout of a magazine spread. An understanding that culture is not written on a wall but expressed in sick leave donations, long tenures and honest conversations. A willingness to reinvent without losing the thread of who you are.
Stuart’s prostate cancer scare and the loss of his dad forced him to reassess what life should look like. Ann now plans her exits from the start rather than waking up fourteen years in and realising she has stayed too long. Nikki has built a whole program around what she calls ‘life after awesome’. Matt wants Sunshine & Sons on home bars from Cairns to Hobart but is just as focused on the relationships and community that support that vision. Deb measures success in the way local businesses thrive and how people collect and keep issues of the magazines. For David, it is locals treating The Kin Kin Hotel as their own and his children learning through doing.
Everyone Has A Story. In this case, though, the stories of success share a spine.  Know who you are. Do the work, properly. Invest in people. Keep learning. Be brave enough to reinvent. And keep redefining what success looks like as life unfolds.
Nikki Fogden-Moore – Relationships are about amplification
Matt Hobson – We’re not a transaction business, we’re a relationships business
Stuart Bain – The Perfectionist’s GardenStuart – Earth Creation
Todd Young – Evolution of Excellence: Bella Venezia’s Secret to Longevity
Ann Donnarumma – Reinvention, Resilience & the Courage to Begin Again – Founders Formula
David Ezrine; Reviving The Kin Kin Hotel. Food, Community, and Destination Hospitality.
