From chasing big waves to running World Surf League’s operations Gold Coaster Andrew Stark is driven by one thing
Gold Coaster Andrew Stark is a surfing executive who likes to “get shit done” which is a trait forged by the death of his father.
QBM
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Andrew Stark practices what he preaches, and then some. Stark, the World Surf League’s Gold Coast-based Asia Pacific boss, is what surfers colloquially call a ‘charger’.
When he’s not running the WSL’s regional operations from his beach front office at Coolangatta, he will often be found tackling mammoth waves in Hawaii, Fiji, Indonesia or - when a cyclone swell hits southeast Queensland as one did last month - the famed barrels of Kirra Point.
Stark’s big-wave bravery could easily be a metaphor for his bold approach as one of Australia’s leading sports administrators: an executive who likes to ‘have a crack, get s..t done and have fun doing it’.
It’s central to a deep inner drive forged in what he calls his life-shaping ‘crucible’: the suicide of his father and hero, Dave - a Brisbane advertising big-wig, Vietnam War veteran and mad-keen surfer - when Stark was just 12.
Stark was born in 1976 in Brisbane, where his father and colleague Barrie Dye ran one of the city’s major advertising agencies of the time, Dye & Stark.
“Dad was a highly successful businessman and a man about town,” he tells QBM over smashed avo and eggs at a Coolangatta cafe.
“The agency was in Paddington and had about 30 staff. They had high-profile clients like Castlemaine Perkins, the Brisbane Broncos and Caxton Hotel.
“Even to this day, people will come up to me at functions and say ‘oh, you’re David Stark’s son, aren’t you?’ I grew up in the world of advertising and media - my grandfather on my mum’s side, Clarence Manning, was a Queensland Provincial Newspapers editor and chairman.
“I spent a lot of time at the agency back in the day and soaked it all up.”
Stark also soaked up the surfing lifestyle from an early age.
While he and his family lived in Brisbane, they had a beach house at Caloundra where Stark would spend ‘every weekend and every school holidays’.
“My dad was a super-keen surfer and one of the original Moffateers (Moffat Beach Boardriders),” he says.
“We were just that family who were at the beach every weekend and every school holidays.”
Stark’s father would take him out in heaving swells, pushing him onto waves that would whet his appetite for the big stuff.
But in January 1989, a week before Andrew was about to start high school at Brisbane Boys College, Dave Stark took his own life.
He’d come home from Vietnam a little quieter and more reserved, but it was after taking part in the belated national Welcome Home Parade for veterans of the unpopular war in Sydney in 1987 that the ravages of post-traumatic stress hit hard.
‘He went from being this high-profile, amazing, funny, successful guy with the beautiful home in Kenmore and the beach house at Caloundra to basically a shell of the man he’d been,” Stark says.
“He was my best mate, my surfing buddy, the manager of my rugby team. We were extremely connected. For that to happen when it did … you’re sort of thrown into the lion’s den and you have to step up.
“I’m a big believer that the crucibles in your life - the moments that have a big impact on you - really shape you as a person. My crucible was certainly losing my dad at that age and the circumstances of it.
“I found happiness and fulfilment in surfing. That’s what saved me, really.”
Among the messages Dave Stark left was one for Barrie Dye, asking him to guide young Andrew’s career. On Dye’s advice, Andrew opted not to follow in his father’s footsteps directly into advertising but to do a broader business management degree at Queensland University of Technology.
He became president of QUT Boardriders, growing the membership from about 30 members to 300. It was his first success at running a surfing organisation. “We raised a lot of money and most of it went on surf trips, beer and having a good time,” he chuckles.
After finishing uni, Stark had a brief stint in the Brisbane office of national ad agency Mojo before the lure of the surf took him to the Gold Coast where he went to work for entrepreneur Terry Morris, whose businesses included Sirromet Wines, Carrara Markets and Morris Motorsport.
His time at Morris International gave him an excellent grounding in business but he left after three years to chase his dream of a world surfing adventure, beginning in Western Australia where he and a mate roamed the rugged coastline in a troop carrier hunting for big waves.
From there, his ‘surfari’ took him to New Zealand, Tahiti, Easter Island, South America, Europe and Mexico.
But what was meant to be a year-long trip was cut short when he snapped his wrist snowboarding in Canada. The compound fracture resulted in six operations, including a bone graft from his hip, and has left Stark still needing to wax the rails of his surfboard so he can get to his feet.
It also brought him back to the Gold Coast, where during his recuperation, he chanced upon a newspaper ad for a job as operations manager at Surfing Queensland.
He duly landed the position and after five years, became CEO - growing turnover from $200,000 to about $2.5 million, doubling staff and negotiating major sponsorship deals.
“All it was, was applying business acumen and principles to a (sporting) association,” he says.
Stark was then head-hunted by Surfing Australia chairman, former Quiksilver executive Norm Innis (who would go on to become one of his business mentors), and was appointed CEO in 2009.
“Surfing Australia at the time was tiny - well under $1 million turnover, about seven staff, no real assets and operating out of this shitty little demountable (at Casuarina on the Tweed Coast),” Stark says.
All that changed thanks to another future mentor (and now good mate and surfing comrade) in Casuarina developer Don O’Rorke, of Consolidated Properties. O’Rorke, who was on the Surfing Australia board, had gifted the organisation the land for its headquarters seven years earlier and basically told Stark to use it or lose it.
With the help of O’Rorke and his friend Scott Hutchinson, of Hutchinson Builders, Stark and his team developed a $11 million Surfing Australia high performance centre at Casuarina that is now being used to train the Australian team for surfing’s Olympics debut in Tokyo.
“One of the best bits of advice Don gave me was to own everything you do, so you can control your own destiny, and that’s what we did at Surfing Australia,” Stark says.
“I applied the same business philosophy, but this time I really latched hard onto mentors - I really leveraged (the expertise of) the (Surfing Australia) board.
“My biggest growth, especially in business but also as a person, came in that period. I had mentors like Norm, Don, Matt Finnis (former AFL Players Association and now St Kilda CEO), Rob Coombe (former Westpac and BT executive), Brett Chenoweth (ex-APN boss) and Carly Loder (former Fox Sports marketing director).
“I had in me this business sense, but all of a sudden I had these incredible mentors around me.”
Another major mentor was his dad’s best mate, Brisbane businessman and fellow ‘Moffateer’ Ian Dickson, who remains a father figure.
Stark was also hooked up with life coach Ben Crowe, who works with the likes of Ash Barty and Stephanie Gilmore.
“I started doing structured mentoring sessions with Ben,” he says.
“He was the one that really helped shape me. I became quite obsessive around personal growth.”
With Crowe’s encouragement, Stark completed leadership and marketing courses at Harvard and Stanford universities.
“The Harvard course, in particular, changed me a lot,” he says.
“It really taught me a lot about myself and self-awareness, and helped me understand that what happened to my dad was just part of my life and part of my story. It’s part of who I am and it’s shaped me to be who I am.
“A lot of stuff in that course was about the fact that the greatest leaders in the world have all had a massive crucible in their life that shapes them.”
During Stark’s nine-and-a-half-year tenure, Surfing Australia’s turnover grew from about $700,000 to over $10 million, with 30 staff. The organisation’s assets included an Australia-wide surf school program, Surf Groms, a national boardriders club competition, its own TV channel and the world-first high-performance centre.
“We had a lot going on, we did a lot in that nine-and-a-half years,” he says.
“I was really obsessed about taking the first-ever surfing team to the Olympics but my time at Surfing Australia got cut short.”
During the 2018 Quiksilver Pro, the event which kicks off the World Surf League championship tour on the Gold Coast, Stark was sounded out to join the sport’s peak professional body.
Tantalisngly, the role not only involved running the WSL’s key Asia Pacific region, but also the job of building Australia’s first Kelly Slater-designed ‘surf ranch’, and Stark leapt at the challenge.
“I felt as though I was starting to outgrow Surfing Australia - I’d been there almost 10 years and that’s a long stint for a CEO,” he said.
“You want to time your exit and you can definitely stay somewhere too long. I reached out to my mentors and they told me to go for it. It was hard walking away from the Olympic thing because I was really passionate about it and put a lot of energy into it.
“But the WSL role was just an opportunity that I couldn’t walk away from. It seemed like a natural progression and I’m definitely in my sweet spot.”
As well as events including the world championship season-opener the Corona Pro at Snapper Rocks (as the Quiksilver Pro was rebadged only to be postponed in March due to COVID-19), Stark will oversee development of the Kelly Slater surf ranch, earmarked for a 529ha site owned by Consolidated Properties at Coolum.
The $1 billion project, which is awaiting State Government approval, will be anchored by a wave pool - modelled on the man-made ‘perfect wave’ in inland California that Slater unleashed on a slack-jawed surfing world in 2014, and which is now owned by the WSL.
Billed as a possible 2032 Olympics venue should Queensland’s bid succeed, the development will also include a six-star eco resort, another 200 rooms of accommodation, restaurants, bars, a retail village and an environmental education centre.
Stark, who describes himself as ‘an absolute frother’ when it comes to his love of surfing, is afroth, too, about the future of the WSL under new CEO Erik Logan, previously president of the Oprah Winfrey Network.
He says there are big plans for the Santa Monica-based league, owned by billionaire Dirk Ziff - including a prime time reality surfing show on ABC in the US, co-produced by Slater and UFC president Dana White. In Australia, the WSL has done a content deal with the Seven Network.
“The WSL’s evolving from being a traditional sport rights holder into a sports media company and it’s incredibly exciting,” Stark says.
But nothing stokes Stark more than the annual trip to Hawaii he makes with wife Belinda and daughters Lily, 8, and Chloe, 4. He has been making the pilgrimage to the North Shore, surfing’s spiritual home, every December for 17 years to tackle the giant waves of Sunset and Waimea Bay.
He sees parallels between his daredevil attitude in monster surf and his approach to business.
“When you lose your dad under the circumstances like I did - and he was your best friend and he was your everything - you need courage, right? You need resilience and you need to just lean into life,” Stark says.
“With big-wave surfing, you’ve got to be courageous. It’s like ‘if you never go (for a wave), you never know’. That’s my philosophy, although the older I’ve got the more measured I’ve got, especially with a family.
“ But I love big waves and to surf them, you’ve got to be prepared to cop a few beatings. You’re going to get smashed, you’ve got to pay to play.
“It’s the same thing in business: you’ve got to be bold and be clear on what success looks like. You’ve got to have a crack.”
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