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MBA Entrepreneurs: Female Founder Shakes Sydney’s Bottled Water Industry

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Bottle half full for female entrepreneur disrupting $700M drinks sector and enrolled in the UWA Business School MBA.

Suzanne Dodds has been a small business owner for 16 years, and was a senior manager at Appco Direct, a marketing and advertising company under the Cobra Group, known for manufacturing the McLaren GT race cars.

She enrolled in the MBA at Perth based UWA Business School, one of Australia’s finest, this year.

 

Extract from BusinessBecause:

What makes UWA a good place for entrepreneurs?

There is a lot of support at UWA for entrepreneurs. There are networking events happening regularly, such as the Mac Equity events, where potential start-ups can pitch their ideas to private equity investors, or the recent Mustard Seed event hosted at UWA, again where start-ups had the chance of [receiving] up to $800,000 in capital.

The support is phenomenal from professors such as Ray Da Silva Rosa, a finance lecturer who has been extremely helpful in putting me in contact with people in the finance world.

There is massive industry involvement throughout the course. We have access to some of the top business leaders in Perth. I am also fortunate to have Robert Elstone as my mentor, who not only sits on the board at UWA Business School but is now a non-executive director at Westpac Bank. This type of exposure to world class business leaders makes UWA fantastic for not only entrepreneurs but any individual wanting to learn from the very best.”

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Before that, Suzanne was managing her start-up, Call a Cooler Pty, in Melbourne. Call a Cooler Pty was founded in 2007. It provides water coolers under an environmentally conscious ethos. The venture has sought to shake the Australian bottled water industry, growing to become one of Sydney’s fastest growing water filtration businesses, as the nation’s start-up scene begins to warm.

The bottled water market in Australia is worth $681 million, with approximately 34 businesses operating in the sector, according to figures from IBISWorld, a market research firm.

Prior to launching the venture, entrepreneur Suzanne was a country head for Appco Direct, based in South Korea. Within a year of arriving in Seoul, she had turned over $30 million and had grown the unit from three to 160 employees.