“Don’t be afraid to be the first. Don’t be afraid to fail. By removing the fear of failure, people can find the freedom to be truly creative.”
- Kieran Lahey, CEO, Vida Glow
When Jeremy Fleming attended a couple of major pop festivals in Germany several years ago, it wasn’t the music that impressed him the most, it was the stages. They were towering edifices of electrical engineering and carpentry that rose up almost overnight in muddy fields to entertain tens of thousands of fans.
There was nothing like this on such a scale in Australia, so in 2015 he formed Stagekings, and the business in Caringbah, New South Wales was soon booming. He built sets for Australian Ninja Warrior, Miley Cyrus, the 2018 Commonwealth Games opening ceremony on the Gold Coast, the Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne, and Edinburgh Castle at the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo in Sydney.
However, when the pandemic rendered every single speaker silent, he faced ruin. Overheads, wages and equipment costs were high, and there was no prospect of revenue for months or even years.
So, to ward off inevitable bankruptcy, he performed one of the most spectacular pivots of any Australian business. Instead of constructing mighty platforms for rock superstars, he’d make flat-pack desks. Admittedly, it wasn’t quite as sexy, but with millions of office workers forced to stay at home, he figured a few of them might need one.
Fleming set himself an ambitious target of selling A$1 million worth of desks in the first year and got his team to work. When he smashed through that barrier in just 50 days, he knew he was onto something. In less than 12 months, he shifted more than 35,000 desks and made an extraordinary A$3.6 million. Soon he’d diversified into wine racks, hat stands and beds, and was employing an additional 70 out-of-work events staff.
“Stagekings had been steadily expanding for six years, but with this pure entrepreneurial decision to turn the business on its head overnight – and go from business-to-business production to business-to-consumer retail – our growth went off the dial,” he tells The CEO Magazine. “It was a rapid strategic move based on pure survival as our entire industry had been completely decimated.”
TAKING CONTROL
Kieran Lahey co-founded ingestible beauty brand Vida Glow with his wife Anna in North Sydney seven years ago. In 2020, he made the most important decision in the company’s history, with some staggering results.
“When Vida Glow first launched, the ingestible beauty space was relatively non-existent. We take this first-movers approach to everything we do.
“Just over 12 months ago, I made the decision to take full control of our product development and formulations instead of relying on third-party suppliers. I resourced an internal technical and new product development department so that going forward, we own all our intellectual property and formulations. This cemented our position as industry leaders and provided an opportunity to bring competitive and highly profitable innovations to market.
“Vida Glow is going through a major growth phase, with profits more than doubling in a year, so we’re investing into the company to make sure our growth is sustainable. This includes increasing staff numbers from 15 to 50, deepening our skill set and opening an in-house creative studio and development lab for our teams to be creative.”
