Who is Stewart?
From a middle class Sydney background and private schooling, Stewart first expressed an interest in the restaurant industry as a sixteen year old. A vocation which was shunned by his father, who was a successful business operator and engineer. So a spirited boy at loggerheads with his father, ventured off to London to forge his way in life at the early age of seventeen.
Ten years later, through determination, dedication and persistence he was able to break into the very competitive and prestigious Brisbane restaurant industry. Within a year Stewart was the owner operator of a number of extremely successful restaurants and money was no object. When you can pay cash up front for your motor vehicles and housing, then you know you are doing something right and that business is good. What then do you do when all of that disappears? Business diversification, and a “David and Goliath” battle with large corporation leads to losing everything you have built up, business is no longer good, it is bad indeed.
This is the position Stewart found himself in, at the age of forty, facing a crossroad in life’s journey. Left with little material worth he decided to make his dream of riding his motorbike around Australia a reality, the only dilemma being how to fund the dream. In the garage as he prepared himself for his journey he happened upon the solution. It came in the form of a small industrial product that had been designed by his father. He had a number of the specialised tool manufactured, thinking to sell them along the way to cover his day to day expenses. After overnighting in a town he would spend the morning making several end user calls to local businesses before hitting the road.
There were many days, in fact weeks, where every person he presented his tool to purchased the product. What had been intended as an interim measure to fund a three month trip is now into its twenty third year. Today Stewart is exporting the same product to eleven different countries and has over 2500 distributors representing him. All of whom he has personally trained and assisted in establishing a local market for his product.
One day while visiting a Canadian auto dealership, he was approached by the president of that company to tell his story to the company’s sales force. Since that day, eight years ago, Stewart has been traveling the world speaking to different groups and businesses throughout Europe, America and Australia. His story is about how one man took a product to the world and prospered. There is no “Free Lunch”, success is the product of determination, dedication and perseverance. The highs and lows along the way are expressed with irreverent humor which can only come from an Australian.