WA Leaders Podcast with Oliver Wood from PWD
In this high-stakes episode of the WA Leaders podcast, host Charlie Gunningham and Dr Paula Smith sit down with Oliver Wood, founder of PWD, to uncover the raw reality of scaling a digital agency. Oliver began with a backpacker’s "means to an end" in North Beach and grew it into a powerhouse generating $800,000 in monthly revenue. This is more than just a success story. Oliver shares......... Read More…
FEDERAL BUDGET 2026-27 -BACK TO THE FUTURE – PARTY LIKE IT’S 1999
In recent years, federal budgets have grown progressively leaner on measures affecting personal finances, but this highly anticipated budget is different. Finally, a budget one can get their teeth into. Three of the four tax policies from Labor's controversial 2019 election campaign were revived in this budget – only the abolition of cash refunds for excess franking credits has been left on the shelf. To address intergenerational fairness and housing affordability for working-aged people in the budget, the government has scaled back the CGT discount and limited negative gearing. During the 2025 election campaign, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese vowed not to touch negative gearing and capital gains tax. Read More…
WA Leaders Podcast with Dr. Paula Smith
In this episode of the WA Leaders podcast, host Charlie Gunningham interviews the "speaking lady" of Perth, Dr. Paula Smith, to discuss her 40-year career in business and the nuances of influential communication in the booming 2026 Western Australian economy. Dr. Smith, founder of the Global Institute of Training and Presenting, shares why many senior executives struggle with public speaking and offers strategic tips such as the rule of primacy and recency and the importance of using frameworks over "death by PowerPoint". Read More…
Finance Clauses Under Pressure: What Deal Makers Need to Get Right in 2026
n fast paced transactional markets, the finance clause remains one of the most failure prone elements of a deal, and often the source of the costliest disputes. A recent WA District Court decision, Wahhab v BMD Nominees, offers timely and practical guidance for anyone working with finance conditional contracts, including agents, brokers, settlement teams and legal advisers. Read More…
GET TO KNOW OUR EXPERTS - Emma Burdett from Huddle Up Creative
What is Emma's favourite weekend ritual... Read More…
The AI opportunity window is open for SMBs
For years, meaningful technology advantage required developers, large budgets, and long implementation cycles. That barrier has dropped.
Today, SMBs can use AI to improve communication, reporting, follow-up, proposal preparation, and internal decision-making without starting a
major technology project. But this window will not stay open forever.
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Mobilising Australia's missing middle
Medium-sized enterprises (MSEs) play an important role in the economy, diffusing technology downstream and connecting large and small firms.
But while they contribute significantly to the Australian economy, they are often overlooked.
Australia’s mid-sized segment represents a smaller share of Australia’s firms and workers than Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD) peers. This is sometimes called the ‘missing middle’.
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WA Leaders — Cyber Exposure Snapshot
What attackers already see when they drive past your business. Cyber Node recently ran a Cyber Exposure Snapshot across 351 WA Leaders member and member-adjacent domains. Nobody was billed, nobody was asked, and nothing was touched, no
credentials used, no internal systems accessed. We simply looked at what the public internet already says about each business, the same way
an attacker does before any real intrusion.
We’re sharing the results because Australian SMBs are sitting on easily-fixed exposure that they almost certainly don’t know about — and the
results are confronting.
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