Darren Bourke

Darren Bourke is a consultant, coach, and mentor to small and medium-sized business owners.

With twenty-five years’ experience in the business arena successfully navigating his own personal journey to success, Darren has a keen eye for identifying what makes successful entrepreneurs and businesses tick. Darren has a passion for work-life balance, and an innate ability to communicate his elusive formula for success to the business owners he coaches and mentors.

Darren’s first forays into the world of entrepreneurship came as a 6-year-old gathering windfall apples from a neighbouring orchard. Paid a fixed price for each fruit crate filled, the young boy rapidly developed a taste for commerce.Lawn mowing, car washing and can recycling businesses followed. Each business venture played its part in setting Darren on the pathway that would ultimately see him coaching and mentoring entrepreneurs to business success.

Having earned a Bachelor of Commerce degree at the prestigious Melbourne University, and a post-graduate Chartered Accountant qualification, Darren’s introduction to the corporate world came first as an accountant with major international accountancy firm Deloitte, then later as a Business Services Manager with leading firm Pitcher Partners.

After a decade honing his business skills as an accountant, working in situ with publicly listed and private companies, Darren left the world of accounting to pursue his dream of running his own business, entering a partnership in start-up Melbourne-based recruitment agency, Caden Consulting.

Caden’s fanatical focus on both best-practice operating systems and maintaining exceptional customer service earned the consultancy one of Seek’s Australian Recruitment Agency of the Year Awards in 2003 and saw it featured in Business Review Weekly (BRW Magazine). That same year saw Darren sample his first experience of the publishing world, writing articles for Better Business Magazine, Chartered Magazine, and his first forays into the media arena, as an interviewee on business audio programs for Michael Schildberger’s Business Essentials.

In 2003, Darren then embarked on a new journey; establishing Business Influence, a consultancy dedicated to dramatically improving the performance of small and medium businesses through consulting, coaching & mentoring.

Expounding his four tried and tested universal elements of business success — Strategy, Implementation, Maintenance, and Leverage - as outlined in his book The Fourth Moon, Darren has worked with close to 1000 businesses to develop clear strategic direction, improve productivity, build leading teams, significantly increase profit and business value; all while enhancing the work-life balance of the entrepreneurs behind those businesses.

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