My experience on The Apprentice Australia was absolutely phenomenal, I had the honor of meeting some of Australia’s brightest up and coming industry leaders. So I thought I would share some insight on some of these amazing contestants with you. Let me introduce you to Lynton Pipkorn:

Lynton Pipkorn - B.Comm (Hons)

For the last 10 years I’ve been working with brands in strategy, analytics and planning. I’ve worked for some great clients and agencies. I have even written the Australian Best Brands report in 2009 (read more here: http://tiny.cc/1WDPB). I believe I’ve been quite successful. I think the reason for that is I have a clear idea of what the role of a strategist is and that is to simplify things, then add value by making brands, brand experiences and communications more effective. I think that planning is about relevance, but also creativity, points of view and assertiveness in order to help people feel inspired and engaged by brands.

In the same way, deeply understanding the business of clients is something I excel at. What drives demand? How do they generate revenues? What’s their relationship with the trade? What is the role of brand in the purchase process? How do consumers make decisions in this category? What are their stakeholders’ values? Agencies so often preach that clients must take risks, but don’t understand what their clients’ businesses are built upon in the first place. Creativity must meet business reality if it is to hit the streets and the sell.

As a director of Internet social networking start up My Property Partner (http://www.mypropertypartner.com.au), I have also expanded my digital skills to help save brands from irrelevance.

Previously Associate Director at the world’s leading corporate brand and design consultancy Interbrand, Lynton now consults direct to business and agencies. Lynton has also lectured on brands at Monash University, spoken at numerous Intellectual Property and Marketing conferences and authored numerous papers on brands and brand management. Lynton has experience in various industries such as airlines, telecommunications, not-for-profit, financial services, the arts, property, FMCG, utilities, automotive and IT.

Who are your greatest role model(s) and why?

What gets me up in the morning is thinking about the great pioneers that have tread their own path in business and life. People like Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Ray Kroc, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. These people had that irrepressible spirit of entrepreneurship to challenge conventional wisdom and also took huge risks before they forged their success. They are truly inspirational leaders.

Locally I have huge admiration for people like Bill Moss from Macquarie Bank, John Singleton, Gerry Harvey, Frank Lowy and Andrew Forrest of Fortescue Metals.

What is the ultimate outcome for your career, what is that you aspire to be?

Ultimately I want to be able to have a diverse number of business interests, and to borrow from Robert Kiyosaki, ‘have money work for me instead of me working for money’. I have one under way called http://www.mypropertypartner.com.au)a new social network for property investors. I really love the challenge of starting up something new to meet a market need, and then making it work.

Still only 30, I want to continue working with businesses and helping them to become more insightful in the decisions they make to solve their brand and communications problems. I am very passionate about that, so besides building businesses, I also look forward to a long career working in advertising and communications ahead.

How has your experience on The Apprentice  Australia shaped you moving forward? What were the lessons you took away with you?

It was an amazing experience to be selected for the show and to actually work constructively with a random bunch of very committed but unbelievably diverse people on what proved to be some very tough challenges. I really thought that it was unrealistic that we would get the work done to any sort of standard when faced with these ridiculous time and task pressures. I actually discovered I was able to make some intuitive but tough decisions under pressure, and combine with my team to do whatever it takes to produce what I thought were some great results.

But the real outcome was being able to see yourself the way others see you. In the real world you don’t get that opportunity to self actualise like you do when know you are going to be on TV, so you really do become quite self aware and conscious of your image and how you are portraying yourself and your relationships with team mates that you actually don’t know very well. Would I do it again? Probably, but I now understand a lot more about the TV production businesses. Let me assure your readers that what the producers needed to make what they think is good TV is nothing like how the real business world operates!

What has been the highlight of your career to date?

A highlight for me was reaching Associate Director level at management consultancy Interbrand at 28, and going over to the United States to learn and train with from some of the best strategists and brightest thinkers from across the world in the company at the time, people such as strategy legend Leslie Butterfield and analytics practice head Greg Silverman.

Also analysing and writing about Australia’s leading business brands in producing the Australian Best Brands report was also clearly a huge highlight for me.

What are you reading right now?

I am very much into understanding people’s stories and how they got to attain their own levels of success, no matter in what area be it politics, entertainment, sport or business, so I love autobiographies and biographies. For fun right now I am reading a Biography on rock’ ‘n’ roll icon Iggy Pop by Paul Trynka, and when that is done I will start on Losing my virginity by Richard Branson. I am also reading the classic business book The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham, which is the perfect book to be reading right now as we emerge from the global financial crisis.

I hope you have enjoyed getting to know a little more about Lynton Pipkorn, I will be interviewing other contestants from The Apprentice Australia over the next few weeks.

Super Carmen