Stefan, Longhursts among Business Hall of Fame inductees

Hairdressing legend Stefan Ackerie has been inducted into the Queensland Business Leaders Hall of Fame for his role in building one of the state’s most iconic companies.

Stefan Ackerie with partner Rose on Thursday night. Picture: Steve Pohlner

Hairdressing legend Stefan Ackerie has been inducted into the Queensland Business Leaders Hall of Fame for his role in building one of the state’s most iconic retail brands.

Stefan joined Australia’s largest pineapple growers Piñata Farms, computer company Data#3, tourism and boating entrepreneurs the Longhurst family and indigenous and reconciliation leader Shelley Reys in being named inductees on Thursday night before a gala crowd of more than 700 people at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre.

“It’s an incredible honour, imagine a hairdresser receiving such a privilege,” he told The Courier-Mail.

“It’s surreal, this is an incredible highlight of my life.”

Stefan paid tribute to his loyal staff.

“We attract beautiful staff, and that’s been the secret of my success, is my ability to train,” he said.

“I love training staff and I was lucky to find my skill and use it.”

Hairdressing mogul Stefan Ackerie

The crowd heard that Stefan started learning the ropes as a hairdresser as a young child in Lebanon, standing on a box at age six in his father’s hair salon so he could reach customers’ hair. In 1957, aged 15, he immigrated to Adelaide working with his father until he opened his own salon aged 17.

At the time he was not old enough to run a shop because he was still an apprentice and so had to hire a senior person to be his boss.

He remembers arriving in Brisbane for the first time, driving his sky-blue MGA convertible car with the hood down, driving slowly, waving to people, and said it was “love at first sight’’. Stefan began working for major salons in 1963 before taking over a salon in Longreach in 1964 and then opening his first self-named salon in Maryborough.

He launched his first Brisbane salon in Adelaide Street in the CBD in 1967.

He later became the largest private employer in Queensland of apprentices and the longest running hairdressing company in Australia.

Stefan in his early hairdressing career

Dreaming big

Brothers Tony and Rodney Longhurst, who also were inducted into the Hall of Fame, were taught from a young age that “if you believe in yourself, you can do anything’’.

Their father, the late John Longhurst who died in 2022, was an Australian business pioneer and tourism legend who is remembered as a “man who had big dreams and the unique ability to realise them’’. He worked as a truck driver, mechanic, builder and boat manufacturer before buying 85 hectares of land in “the middle of nowhere’’ beside the Pacific Motorway at Coomera, on the Gold Coast, with the dream of building a theme park founded on similar design concepts as Disneyland. In 1981, Dreamworld opened with instant success and eight years on, the park was welcoming more than one million visitors a year.

John Longhurst with his sons Rod (left) and Tony

Not long after selling Dreamworld and Great Adventures in 1989, he bought Logan Hyperdome shopping centre with the foresight the area would become an important corridor of growth. John’s entrepreneurial spirit lives on through his sons Tony and Rodney who are also successful business owners.

Tony, a two-time winner of the Bathurst 1000, and former Australian champion water skier, is chief executive of The Boat Works at Coomera, a boatyard, superyacht yard and marina services precinct. Next door, Rodney owns and operates Riviera Australia, a state-of-the-art facility that is the largest luxury yacht building facility in the southern hemisphere.

Green thumbs

Pinata Farms was recognised in the Hall of Fame in recognition of outstanding leadership and innovation in Australia’s food production industry for over 60 years.

Starting as a small family farm at Wamuran, northwest of Caboolture, in the City of Moreton Bay, Piñata Farms has grown to become Australia’s largest pineapple growers.

The fourth-generation business employs more than 400 staff and operates farms from the Northern Territory to Tasmania, suppling pineapples, mangoes, strawberries and raspberries.

Managing director Gavin Scurr said his grandfather, who was a builder, moved to Wamuran from Brisbane in 1964 as a reprieve from a “credit squeeze’’ in the city in the early 1960s.

Gavin Scurr, managing director of Pinata Farms, with some pineapples circa 1994.