Build It. They'll Come.

In this episode of Build It They'll Come. host Helen Dalley sits down with David Paradice AO, the founder and driving force behind Paradice Investment Management.
Starting 26 years ago with just a single client and $30 million under management, Paradice has built a boutique investing powerhouse that now manages and invests around $20 billion for major super funds, large institutions, and retail investors.
Paradice describes his deeply focused approach to stock picking, emphasising the importance of fundamental investing and maintaining face-to-face relationships with company management. He opens up about the immense pressure and sleepless nights that come with managing retirement savings, how he navigates volatile markets, and his core business philosophy: consistency over time equals returns.
Paradice discusses his passion for polo, his dedicated philanthropic work, and how a champion team will always outperform a team of champions. He even shares the unexpected business and life lessons hidden inside a favourite children’s book series kept at his office reception (listen to the end to learn which one!)
It is a candid look at the human touch behind a genuine home-grown Australian financial empire.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When he took over the family wine business in 1994 at the tender age of 33, Darren De Bortoli continued a legacy his father Deen had built on that was De Bortoli Wines, centred around the vineyard his grandfather planted in the NSW Riverina.
Darren was a young superstar, having created as a newly qualified winemaker in 1982, the acclaimed Noble One Botrytis Semillon – to this day a globally renowned, medal-winning sticky wine, and a wine that quickly catapulted De Bortoli Wines into massive growth.
The company moved into other wine districts like the Yarra Valley, King Valley and more recently Rutherglen in Victoria, and also the Hunter Valley. Under Darren’s leadership they pioneered environmentally sustainable winemaking practices and today they grow wheat, barley and oat crops using eco-friendly waste water from the wineries.
Today De Bortoli Wines is the 6th largest wine company in Australia by revenue, yet still Australian and family owned and run. But as he reflects on the great legacy he’s helped build, Darren De Bortoli is candid about the considerable challenges he and others face: namely water access and climate change, a global wine glut and a downturn in wine consumption. Hope you enjoy Darren De Bortoli.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

After years as an art critic writing about art, art consultant Michael Reid decided to take the plunge into the business side of the market and become a gallerist. He had his university degrees, but Michael Reid knew his strongest foundation actually came from his time spent honing expertise and his business sense inside Christie’s, the massive global art world juggernaut. Based in London, Michael discovered that exposure to art and auctions and the business of art on the international stage was the best qualification he could possibly have.
This self described boy from country NSW, who describes himself as super ambitious, who is building and growing his “world” as he calls it, who has built physical galleries, online platforms, food destinations, a current pop-up gallery in Los Angeles with plans for a permanent exhibition space there, who loves to drop names and sells to some of the finest collectors in Australia, operates his global business from his quiet, peaceful home in a tiny town, yes … back in country NSW. And he’s not finished yet.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

David Tudehope left the finance world in the early 1990’s with a dream to service small to medium business who complained of poor service and overcharging by the monopolist at the time, Telstra. Tudehope wasn’t a digital expert nor a highly trained computer engineer. But he understood numbers, and that customers wanted good service, not delays and obfuscation. So he had his brother Aidan started a small business they called Macquarie Telecom, back in 1992, with only the savings the pair could scrounge up, and forged headlong into the ultimately capital-intensive telco space. This is long before the internet and smart mobile phones. But they took on the slow-to-change Telstra and stuck to their mission of offering better customer service and cheaper prices to the business customer. In just over 3 decades they’ve built (now named) Macquarie Technology Group into one of the Top 300 listed companies in Australia, with a market capitalisation of over $1.5 billon, offering major clients like the ATO, Officeworks and PayPal still telecom, but now cloud-based, cyber security services as well as massive investments in data centres to support the boom in AI. David appeared on the Australian Financial Review’s Rich List 2024 alongside brother Aidan with an estimated net worth of over $900 million.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Since Dr Sarah Crowe had her lightbulb idea, and invented her completely mobile, vision testing and glasses kit, then ran a trial in remote Papua New Guinea and started to show the impact her OOXii Vision Kit could have, to medical professionals in India and Vanuatu, she was inundated with positive reaction. Here was a complete system not only offering mobile eye testing, but also durable glasses frames, with prescription lenses in them, were then dispensed on the spot to people in remote or under-served communities, thereby improving their vision right there and then, in their home communities. It was life-changing. A fantastic entrepreneurial idea to fix a massive global problem.
But Sarah’s journey with OOXii Global and her mission to help fix the world’s vision has not been without its challenges and significant hurdles along the way.
Listen to Dr Sarah Crowe take up the story.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.