Sounds of Eclat

After more than 20 years and 18 different roles within one multinational beauty business, Aurelie De Cremiers knows a thing or two about leadership.

She joins Nick and Lauren to reflect on a career spanning France, Australia and New Zealand, including the challenge of turning around a struggling business and discovering that its biggest problems weren’t strategic, but cultural.

Aurélie shares why trust is fundamental to a successful team, the difficult feedback that changed her leadership style and why getting results means little if you can’t bring people with you. Now an advisor and board...

Performance coach, consultant and bestselling author of Better, Andrew Horsfield joins Nick and Loz to talk about the messy, uncertain space between where we are and where we want to be.

After 18 years working as a live, in-the-room facilitator, Andrew opens up about the vulnerability of putting his ideas into a book, and what years inside executive teams have taught him about leadership, self-awareness and creating meaningful change. Sometimes, he says, the problem a business thinks it has isn’t the real problem at all. And sometimes, telling a CEO the problem is them is exactly what ne...

On this episode of The Sounds of Eclat, we sit down with Jarryd Roughead 283-game Hawthorn premiership player, Coleman medalist, multiple All-Australian, former club captain and now list manager at the Adelaide Crows. From a country kid in Leongatha drafted at 17 alongside Buddy Franklin and Jordan Lewis, to captaining four premiership sides, Jarryd takes us through the highs of a golden era at Hawthorn and the moment everything changed: a melanoma diagnosis on his lip in 2015 that returned a year later, having spread to his lungs. He opens up about the fear he never let himself feel, the immunotherapy...

Mandy Loftus-Hills, Partnerships Director at The Local Project, joins Nick and Lauren to unpack a career that didn’t exactly follow a plan.

From starting out in a cabling company to finding her way into real estate, publishing and eventually The Local Project, Mandy reflects on the people and setbacks that shaped her along the way, including a career-defining mentor, being unexpectedly fired and navigating the “champagne and razor blades” reality of sales.

She shares what she’s learned about the loneliness of leadership, becoming a better listener, going back to your technique when the results...

On this episode of The Sounds of Eclat, we sit down with Michael Voss Brisbane Lions triple-premiership captain and former Carlton coach and Rita Cincotta, author, leadership expert and executive coach, to unpack what real leadership looks like when the cameras aren't rolling.

They trace their own leadership journeys (from a migrant household at age seven to being handed the captaincy at 21), get honest about their toughest moments a brutal first round of 360 feedback, losing a 22-year role at his boyhood club and share the frameworks they now use to develop the next generation of...

What makes us feel safe isn’t always what actually keeps us safe. Criminologist Dr Lucy Maxwell on offenders, gendered violence and the psychology of fear.

Criminologist, lecturer and Nick’s sister, Dr Lucy Maxwell joins Sounds of Eclat to unpack what her research into offender behaviour can teach us about public safety, gendered violence and the psychology of feeling safe.

Drawing on years of research and interviews with offenders, Lucy explores how offenders choose targets, why psychological comfort often drives our behaviour more than objective safety and the small ways men can help reduce wome...

“I didn’t enjoy football. The stress, the anxiety, I struggled.”

Newly appointed Carlton coach Josh Fraser joins Nick and Lauren in front of a live Eclat audience for this special episode of The Sounds of Eclat.

Josh opens up about the pressure of being an AFL number one draft pick, watching his Collingwood teammates win a premiership but missing out on selection himself, and the experiences that ultimately shaped the coach he is today.

He takes us inside his commitment to the Northern Bullants and their fight for survival, before unpacking an extrao...

The founder of Shift HR. A one-man show, why leadership problems are often clarity problems, and the uncomfortable questions AI is about to force the industry to answer.

Founder of Shift HR, a strategic HR advisory and consulting business, Nick Gearen has built a career helping organisations commercialise their people function, from remuneration strategy to employee relations, workforce planning to culture. He shares what it's really like being a one-man show in a broad and reactive industry. Why most leadership problems come down to clarity rather than generation, and why AI is about to ask...

Two senior lawyers. One employer. Left on the same day. Built something of their own.

Sarah and Beck didn't rush into this. The conversation about leaving corporate legal started almost as a joke, took years to get serious, and eventually became the only obvious next move. They left on good terms, split roles without having to negotiate them, and built a specialist employment law firm that now handles some of the most sensitive and complex people challenges in the market. What makes their story interesting is the partnership how naturally it functions, how clearly they...

A candid conversation with Eclat CEO & COO. Why experiences, routines and traditions matter more than ever.

In this special Spitball edition, ECLAT CEO Nick Maxwell and COO Lauren Blackwood pull back the curtain on running the business themselves. From the observations they've made watching members grow together, to the challenges of wearing too many hats, navigating HR as a former teacher, and the debate around work from home, Nick and Loz share what they've learned running a startup — and why experiences, routines and traditions matter more than ever.

Broke in Canada. Knocking on doors for a local rec centre. Thirty years later, still at it.

Shane Ward spotted something in a door-knocking gig in Canada that most people would have dismissed as a summer job. He saw a model, a mindset, and eventually a business the Finn Agency, an outsourced sales force he's been running for over 30 years, with key staff who have been with him for much of that journey. He's a straight shooter and a deep thinker on leadership, people and the long game. His advice for business owners navigating a difficult 2026 is...

An integrated agency. A rare edge in the Chinese market. And a deep frustration with brand strategy that lives in a PDF.

Steph built Mulberry Marketing on the belief that brand is a system of belief not a logo set, not a colour palette, and definitely not a document that sits unopened in a Google Drive folder. Her edge is real: one of the only Australian agencies with genuine reach into the Chinese market through WeChat and Little Red Book. Her obsession is making sure strategy actually lives in the businesses she works with, not just in...

The Cadel Evans homecoming. The Queen's visit. Seven days notice to close St Kilda Road.

Eliza Vesey has spent over 20 years producing events that most people only ever read about. She now runs Moments Made, her own events business, and the conversation about what it takes to do that alone where the buck stops with you in a way it simply never does inside an agency or a club is refreshingly honest. Her real currency is relationships. Her real superpower is knowing exactly who to trust, paying for that trust, and building events around it. The feedback...

Thirteen years. One clear purpose. Two words: lifting potential.

Jeremy Nichols founded Composure after a career that took him from young consultant to firm owner to the executive team of an ASX-listed business. He knows what good organisations look like, and he knows what gets in the way. His view on culture change is unsentimental: the clients most ready to do the work are usually the ones already performing well who want to go further not the ones in trouble, because those leaders often created the culture they're now asking him to fix. It's an honest lens...

260 AFL games. Two new careers. One very clear sense of what comes next.

Brad Ebert spent the better part of two decades at the elite end of Australian football West Coast, Port Adelaide, 260 games. What he's built since says as much about his character as anything that happened on the field. Hey Diddle Wines started as a pipe dream with a Port Adelaide teammate. Phillips Coaching is where his purpose in the athlete transition space really comes alive. Together, they paint a picture of someone who made the most of football and was equally ready...

No guest. Just the two people who run this place turning the mic on themselves.

This one's different. Nick and Lauren pull back the curtain on three-plus years of building Eclat what they've observed watching the community grow, what they've wrestled with as operators, and the conversations they don't always have in public. Nick on what happens when a sole trader walks into a room full of people from completely different industries and someone asks a question they'd never have thought to ask themselves. Lauren on the transition from teaching into people and culture and the fine...

A physio. A personal health challenge. A program that has now reached 25,000 young people.

Megan Dickinson co-founded the Live Life Whole Project after watching women and girls navigate serious health challenges without the right information or support. What started as workshops in secondary schools has grown into a multi-state, multi-audience preventative health education program and the turning point was a piece of brutally honest feedback from a year nine girl that sent Megan home rattled, and back to the drawing board. Her response to that feedback separating herself from the work just enough to let the criticism...

A tip from Mick Turner. A quietly confident kid from Geelong. Thirty years of player management from the inside.

Peter Lenton has been inside AFL player management for long enough to have watched it transform entirely and to have formed very clear views about what's been gained and what's been lost in that transformation. His current stable includes Zak Butters and Jack Ginnivan. His career started with a referral to a kid nobody else was chasing: Nick Maxwell.

IN THIS EPISODE

How a tip from the late Mick Turner started a three-decade relationship...

A science degree. A brand agency. A personal health diagnosis. And an entirely new business born from a mobility aid store visit that left her cold.

Samantha Freidon built Milkshake Creative on the somewhat unconventional foundation of a science degree nobody thought she'd ever use. The test-and-learn rigour of the scientific method, it turns out, is exactly the discipline most brand-building is missing. But it's Wayfarer her assistive technology startup, born from a personal health diagnosis at 27 and a morning spent in a mobility aid store finding nothing that felt like her that gives this conversation its...

163 NRL games. Three season-ending injuries. One very clear sense of perspective.

Christian Welch captained the Melbourne Storm, represented Queensland in State of Origin, and spent years in the company of some of the greatest players the game has produced. He sat down with us still processing the end of his career the bittersweet feeling of watching his mates in a Grand Final without him, the relief in his body, and the slow, dawning appreciation of what he was actually part of. This is a conversation about excellence what makes it, what it costs, and what...

Andrea McKenna didn't come from accounting she came from marketing, from operations, from a belief that how a firm makes people feel matters just as much as what it delivers. That outsider perspective is exactly how she and her husband Shane turned a dining table in Hawthorn East into a 60-person professional services firm without a business plan and without a blueprint. In this conversation, Andrea is direct and thoughtful on what it actually takes to build something real: the seasons of a life that made the myth of work-life balance irrelevant, the discipline of stepping back from thought...

A Brit in Melbourne. A matchmaker for knowledge. And a very clear view on what time is actually worth.

Toby Raper built Networks X on a simple but precise premise: the right expert for a private equity firm asking about AI today is a completely different person to the right expert six months ago. Static databases miss that. Custom sourcing doesn't. He's refreshingly honest about what the early days of building a business actually feel like the cash flow shock of working with institutions that pay slowly, the unexpected anxiety that comes when things finally start going...

Every person has a story they've never told in public.

Not the polished version from a panel. Not the LinkedIn post. The real one. The decision made at the wrong moment, the feedback that stung, the habit that held everything together when nothing else did.

At Eclat, we've had the privilege of sitting alongside some of Melbourne's most interesting people for the past three years. In our spaces, over coffee, between meetings. We've heard things that deserved a wider audience.

This is us finally giving them one.

The Sounds of Eclat...