Queensland
The Gold Coast: where Adrian Campbell started his first company
Queensland's second city, 60 kilometres of beach and a hinterland of rainforest and new estates. For Adrian Campbell it was the proving ground: the place he started, failed, and came back to.
The place
The Gold Coast runs south from Brisbane to the New South Wales border, a line of surf beaches backed by high-rise towers at Surfers Paradise and Broadbeach, canal estates behind them, and a green hinterland that climbs to Tamborine Mountain and the Lamington plateau. It is Queensland's second-largest city and one of the fastest-growing regions in Australia. New suburbs push west every year, which means new roofs, new house sites and new buyers.
What happened here
Adrian Campbell came north as a young plumber and worked on commercial sites in the hinterland, including Mount Tamborine Hospital. In 2008, aged 19, he started International Solar Solutions as Queensland's Solar Bonus Scheme began paying households for the power they fed back to the grid. The Gold Coast was ideal solar country: sun, new estates and homeowners who wanted the payback explained. The company grew to around 40 staff and more than 300 systems before it was run down by outside managers while he was in Bali, and he closed it and refunded customers. It is the first of the two failures on the record.
The second also happened here. Eco Boss distributed cleaning products and tobacco smoke detectors from a Gold Coast warehouse, with a branded trailer and launch days for its licence holders, until a dispute with its UK supplier ended the business model.
What he still does here
He has not left. Since 2020 he has been Managing Director of Prestige Pinnacle Realty, a prestige residential agency, and since 2021 a Director of Earthcon Civil, the civil contractor that cuts and levels house sites in the new estates. The Gold Coast is also where many of Kinnara's Australian buyers live. People who holiday in Bali and Lombok tend to live in places like this.
Why it matters
The Gold Coast taught him to sell, to hire, to manage a payroll and to fail in public. The rules he runs companies by, two signatories, lawyers before money, never own what you cannot supervise, were all written here. They are collected on how he runs companies.