Fitness entrepreneur and award-winning personal trainer Kayla Itsines has been named the wealthiest female in the prestigious ‘2018 Financial Review Young Rich List’ aged 40 and under.
The Greek Australian came in at #5 together with her fiancé Tobias Pearce (#6), who jumped up the list from number 40 last year with a joint wealth of $486 million. They are the wealthiest self-made 20-somethings in Australia after enjoying enormous success with their fitness app ‘Sweat’. Their company is now on track to turn over $100 million this year alone.
“Designed as a personal trainer on your smartphone, Itsines and Pearce have evolved what was a Bikini Body Guide e-book into Apple’s largest grossing health and fitness app,” writes the AFR.
“The app, which promotes 28-minute workouts, has expanded to offer training guides from US-based Kelsey Wells and yoga sessions with Sjana Elise Earp. With a combined social media reach of more than 35 million people, Sweat is available in seven languages in 155 countries. More than 30 million users have created an account. The subscription based app generated $90 million in revenue in 2017-18.”
The dynamic duo who were engaged earlier in the year, have built a fitness empire with more than 10 million followers on Instagram and Facebook, which includes models and Hollywood celebrities delivering an inspirational success story with phenomenal revenue and profit growth in a short space of time.
Based in Adelaide, the 27-year-old Greek Australian personal trainer started her journey towards fame eight years ago when she launched her own training and nutrition guide #BBG (BikiniBodyGuides) after completing a personal training course at the Australian Institute of Fitness.
Soon after, she developed a 28-minute high intensity workout targeting the whole body, and in 2015 her first e-book and #sweatwithkayla application were released.
Within a few years, Kayla created a global community while travelling around Europe, the US and Australia, hosting boot camps and meeting her followers, transforming the bodies of thousands of women all over the globe, inspiring them to achieve their ultimate goal; a healthy lifestyle and body confidence.
Kayla and Tobi’s Bikini Body Training Company also won the national prize as Australia’s emerging business of 2015 at the prestigious Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year Awards.
Reflecting on her success, Itsines, who has no intention of leaving South Australia told the AFR that she wished she knew earlier that anything was possible.
“In Adelaide you are not told you have the opportunity to be a superstar. If I was to grow up somewhere like New York, everyone there is very confident, and everyone wants to make it,” she says.
“If I could change anything, I would talk about the opportunity of being an entrepreneur in schools. I didn’t even know what that word meant in school. I was [like], ‘what is that word?’ ‘Oh, you know, someone who goes off and does their own thing’. I was [like], ‘what?’,” said Itsines who together with Pearce owns more than 12 investment properties in SA.
The famous trainer celebrates her Greek heritage through her social media and particularly enjoys posting random videos of her Greek grandparents who seem to be part of her everyday life. She is an advocate for the Mediterranean diet, indulges in Greek coffee and admits that one of her biggest weaknesses is her grandmother’s traditional Greek cooking.
Meanwhile fellow Greek Australian entrepreneur Scott Stavretis also made AFR‘s prestigious list, ranking number 36 with his outsourcing and call centre business, Acquire BPO.
A serial entrepreneur, he started at the age of 16 by establishing the first internet service provider on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula 22 years ago in 1996. Now at 38, Stavretis is at the helm of or owns significant stakes in five technology-focused companies.
The chief executive of Acquire BPO, made his debut on BRW Young Rich in 2016 with an estimated $46 million fortune. Today he sits at $69 million.
The dynamic entrepreneur also operates Degunt, a cloud-based bookkeeping company and SHORE Solutions, a Philippines-based sister company to Acquire BPO that was bought in 2014.
However, according to AFR, Stavretis’ biggest asset is Acquire BPO, which turns over more than $100 million annually, providing call centre support for companies in Australia, such as Flexigroup, Vocus Communications and Europcar, and in the US for the likes of cloud-based phone system company RingCentral, a New York Stock Exchange-listed company with market capitalisation of more than $2 billion.
For a record seventh year, Atlassian co-founders Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar (joint #1 & #2) top the combined 2018 Financial Review Young Rich List with a record $14.2 billion.
Interestingly, only 10 women made the cut in this year’s list overall, just one up from the nine that made the list in 2017 and eight in 2016, showing a serious gap in the number of self-made, super-wealthy Australian women.