Maxine Horne Travels from Brisbane, QLD

Topics

C E O / M D
Change Management
Culture Change
Customer Service
Entrepreneur
Female Speaker
Leadership
Retail
Sales
Women In Business

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Maxine Horne started her own business in 1993, with an idea (that went against the trend) and just under $5,000. In 1995, the brand of Fone Zone was created with the first store opening in Pacific Fair shopping centre on the Gold Coast. Maxine grew the business to more than 160 Fone Zone stores and led the group to secure Telstra’s only Master Licence, moving on to own and operate 115 plus Telstra-branded stores for more than a decade. During this time, Maxine led the company through the numerous challenges that came with scaling a small business from a single outlet, to a major corporate, and then in 2005, a publicly-listed company – Vita Group (ASX: VTG) – all whilst operating in a fast-growing category and delivering prolific growth.

Under Maxine’s 26-year stewardship, Vita has made the most of opportunities and changing markets. With that in mind, Vita created and launched several new businesses over the years, including Vita Enterprise Solutions and Sprout Accessories in the Information and Communications Technology field, SQDAthletica – a menswear brand, and Artisan Aesthetic Clinics – a skin-health and wellness business with clinics across Australia.

In 2021, Vita’s accessory brand Sprout and the 115 Telstra stores it owned and operated were sold to Telstra. Simultaneously, SQDAthletica and Vita Enterprise Solutions were sold separately thus leaving Vita Group with Artisan Aesthetic Clinics which was sold to Sonic Healthcare in June 2022. Following the sale of Vita, Maxine stepped down from her role as Vita’s Chief Executive Officer and Executive Director of the Vita Group to focus on other business opportunities.

Maxine is in the rare position of being one of very few female founders that has taken a start-up business – requiring flexibility, tenacity and entrepreneurialism, to a publicly listed company – requiring structure, discipline, compliance, risk mitigation and governance. This combination ensures that Maxine has a unique and comprehensive skillset that covers comprehensive strategic thinking, establishing, operating and growing a business along with what is required to lead a successful corporate organisation. She understands that the attributes of a small business and a ‘founder mentality’ can, if executed well, deliver significant value to large scale businesses and corporations.

She has extensive experience and hence transferrable skills from dealing with landlords (large & small), suppliers, partnerships, both sides of M&A and the investor community as a whole. She has great commercial skills, knows how to drive a large, dispersed network, the disciplines required and is very people centric. She is very focused on delivering outcomes in everything that she does.

Maxine was named QBR Business Woman of the Year for Retail in 2006. In 2014, she received the EY Entrepreneur of the Year award for the industry category, Northern region and was inducted into the Businesswoman's Hall of Fame. In 2016, she released her biography, ‘Think Smart, Run Hard’ which talks about the lessons she learnt in starting and running her business (all profits went to ACT for Kids) and in 2019 she was honoured to receive The Courier-Mail Award for Business Person of the Year.

Maxine now focuses her time and involvement in companies where she has taken an equity stake, on other private investments, advisory boards, keynote presentations and her latest foray as a Shark, on Shark Tank Australia.

When presenting, Maxine likes to focus on the following subjects. She is, however, open to suggestions as it is important to her that her presentations are relevant to the audience and the overall message being delivered.