SBE’s Evolve Program is designed to provide founders with the knowledge, skills, and networks needed to accelerate business growth and successfully scale their business. Over the course of 8 weeks, these founders will gain the knowledge and networks needed to build a scalable business.
Our first National Evolve Cohort of 2023 includes 10 outstanding businesses, run by women who are passionate about making a difference to their communities and sharing their innovation.
Robyn Cowie, Revisit
Robyn Cowie has had a career focused on consumer behaviour and analytics with more than ten years of experience in startups in the Retail and Financial industries, where she founded a funded retail analytics business and built market-first virtual debit products. Before starting Revisit, she spent the last ten years in corporate Product and Strategy roles in the Financial and Intelligent Transport Industries, delivering the first analytics-led credit card portfolio and building a wearable payment device.
Revisit is effortless information management. Revisit helps you find what you want when you need it by automatically curating your information and making it easier to find. We collect the resources you view and make them searchable in your existing tools. Revisit reduces your mental load by simplifying context changes without any learning curve.
Autonomy, Amanda Lintott
Amanda Lintott is a lawyer and experienced automotive executive and business woman. Her career to date could be divided into three main chapters. 1. Dealer Principal of Australia’s largest Porsche Dealership, Porsche Centre Sydney South. 2. Founder and CEO of specialist automotive recruitment agency, Career Driven (which she later sold) and 3. General Manager - People, Culture and Strategy at Australia’s largest prestige and luxury dealership group, Autosports Group Limited, employing 1,400 people nationally. In these roles, Amanda has helped launch the careers of countless people, including many women who have gone on to develop incredible careers of their own. She has a wide network of contacts and unique insights into opportunities within this large and unique sector.
Autonomy is an Australian brand of car products, accessories and solutions. The first products are lifestyle products but there are more technical products planned for 2023. These products are designed for drivers and bring a design quality that does not exist on the market at present.
Emerging Tech Talent, Karen Cohen
Karen Cohen aka “blockmum” is the Founder and Director of Emerging Tech Talent, a company that helps humans connect to Emerging Technology. She is the Founder of Women in Emerging Tech and Previous Deputy Chair for Blockchain Australia. She is Community Champion for Algorand Foundation and Program Manager for AlgoHUB, the virtual Blockchain Developers Hub. She is the 2021 winner of the Lift Off Awards for Diversity and Inclusion Tech Leader and blockchain community leader in 2022.
Karen is the previous program manager for Inspiring Rare Birds where she ran the Prime Minister and Cabinet Office for Women mentoring scholarship program. She also ran females in Fintech program for stone and chalk sponsored by LaunchVic.
Emerging TechTalent is an outsourced HR consultancy helping to future proof your business. We combine HR Strategy and knowledge of the start up tech space to help grow businesses.
VisSci, Sally McFadden
Professor Sally McFadden runs Vision Sciences at The University of Newcastle. She wishes to establish a spinout company which will commercialise treatments for Shortsight (Myopia). Myopia currently affects 1/3 of the global population which will increase to half the world population by 2050. High myopia is a leading cause of profound blindness impacting 1B people by 2050 and there is no treatment. McFadden is a world-renowned expert in this area and an inventor on associated Patents. She completed the Bridge Program (QUT and MTPConnect) and was a pitch award winner, won a University Pitch NSW Health Pearcy Award, and was awarded and completed courses run by Cicada Innovations and ON Accelerate Bootcamp. Prof McFadden aims to establish an appropriate company structure and raise funding with appropriate partners to complete the regulatory framework necessary to commercialise pharmaceutical treatments for myopia.
Spend With Us, Sarah Britz & Jenn Donovan
Sarah Britz is a social change-maker, author and Web Designer specialising in e-commerce for small businesses. Jenn Donovan is a marketing thought leader, change-maker, coach for small businesses, International keynote speaker, author and podcaster. They are the co-founders of Spend With Us, an online shopping marketplace and community supporting hundreds of Australian rural and regional small businesses to sell online.
Spend With Us is a unique online platform that brings together small and micro businesses from rural and regional areas that bushfires, floods, and the pandemic have impacted. By shopping on Spend With Us, consumers can support these businesses and, in turn, positively impact the local economy.
The platform today has a huge audience with 368,000+ members in its Buy From A Bush Business Facebook group community, where small businesses can promote their brands and products, and consumers can find and purchase unique items from rural Australia.
Kavita Hebert, Backbone
After spending nearly 2 decades in the SaaS industry working in the founding teams of brands like LinkedIn, Dropbox & UberEats, Kavita Herbert decided to set up her own consulting business – K-Factor Advisory, which exposed her to some key challenges faced by fellow small business leaders. It troubled her to see so many small businesses struggle and 1 in 3 fail in their first year.
This inspired her to build a solution to enable small businesses to find trusted business partners, be found by their customers and created a trusted space where business leaders could mutually benefit through collaborative projects. This is how BackBone was born!
Our vision is to be a global connector of businesses! Our mission is to make our business members more successful by scaling their networks!
Nokori, Helen Leith
Helen has over 15 years of experience in the healthcare industry, working alongside countless surgeons & medical professionals worldwide, many of which specialise in plastic and reconstructive procedures here in Australia.
Throughout her time in the medical field, Helen has observed many patients undergoing surgery and has seen first-hand the physical and mental strain that can accompany it. Witnessing this and her passion for personal health inspired Helen to create Nokori. Nokori will focus on products and digital solutions that support patients throughout their surgical procedures, helping them to achieve better scarring and giving them access to holistic approaches to recovery that encompasses all physical and mental aspects of their healing journey.
Tech Diversity Lab, Michelle Gleeson & Gretchen Scott
Tech Diversity Lab is the only platform with technology focused career growth frameworks designed to help you implement best practice, retain key staff and drive engagement.
Michelle is a cofounder of Tech Diversity Lab. Before this, she was a software developer and engineering leader for several decades and has passionately worked coaching good engineer and leadership practices. She is also a well known and respected public speaker in the tech conference space. Michelle is on a mission to bridge the gender gap in tech leadership. In 2018, she founded the community group Tech Leading Ladies, which works to get women into leadership roles and ensure they thrive. More recently, Michelle has consolidated all she knows of building diverse and high-performing technical teams into the Tech Diversity Lab SaaS platform. The platform helps provide technicians with the tools, skills and support they need to advance in their careers.
Prior to co-founding Tech Diversity Lab, Gretchen was the Community Manager at Cloudflare which acquired Linc.sh where Gretchen was the Chief Operating Officer, a startup that built a CI/CD tool especially designed for frontend development. Starting out studying optimisation modelling, which she then used to running one of the Southern Hemisphere’s largest trade shows, she fell in love with software development after graduating from a web development bootcamp. Gretchen’s passion is bringing more diversity to tech in all its forms such as gender, race, social economic and professional backgrounds. Over the years she has been involved in training more than 250 bootcamp graduates through Coder Academy, is currently a Director at Women Who Code Melbourne and on the Churchill Club Committee.
Mud Organics, Imogen van Haagen & Courtney Thornton
With more than a decade of combined experience in the health & wellness industry, Imogen & Courtney founded Mud Organics in the midst of the global pandemic in August 2021. Many people close to them became chronically ill in 2021, amongst many others who were worrying about their own health and uncertainty during Covid. Imogen & Courtney wanted to help people take back what was in their control, with natural supplementation to help boost immunity & gut health. After months of R&D, the product range developed into products that could be ingested and applied to the skin. Today a successful subscription based Skin Care & Supplementation Brand with products that help prolong the effects of aging from the inside out.
Elle Hartley, Flossie
Elle is the founder and owner of Flossie; an unapologetically female-focused razor subscription service that offers high-performing shaving supplies and premium body care products tailored to suit consumers’ needs.
Here at Flossie, we choose to do things differently. We want to relieve all women from the societal pressures that being a woman or looking like a woman entails. We design products for the parts of our routines that don’t get a lot of primetime attention. Self-care and self-love should be simple but super effective! Our recipe for making feel-good body products is ensuring all our ingredients are vegan and cruelty-free, including our razor moisturising strip. We believe a positive relationship to body care starts with quality products and that when we show up for ourselves in private, we’re able to show up as ourselves in public. Sustainability is our present and future. Our non-negotiable when creating a good-for-you brand starts and ends with packaging and reducing our environmental waste and carbon footprint. For every purchase made at Flossie, we set aside 1% of sales to support non-profit organisations working to ensure women build healthy, positive relationships with themselves. We’re on a mission to end gender-based pricing discrimination and warmly welcome consumers into our community which values inclusivity, individuality & sustainability.