It is: “That my kids like me.”

“That after all the ups and downs and the ins and outs, that we have this really, really great, phenomenal family and we love hanging out. We have fun together,” says the mother of four, who has been married for almost 30 years to Jeff Allis, 59.

“The key thing I love about my family is that they’re all so different. When you talk about success or your greatest achievements, to sit at a family dinner and everyone’s laughing and happy to be there, and no one’s offended about anything, you just go, ‘Yep, that’s success’.”

The 58-year-old’s respect and appreciation for her loving and cohesive family unit is perhaps because her children’s upbringing wasn’t always the smoothest.

In a situation she describes as a “whoopsie”, Allis had her first son, Samuel, while travelling the world for seven years in her youth.

After leaving the quiet, working-class suburb of Boronia in Melbourne to head overseas with just a backpack at age 21, she worked as a camp counsellor for Girl Scouts in San Francisco, as a nanny in France and sold timeshare in Portugal, before landing a job as a stewardess on David Bowie’s luxury yacht in the Caribbean, where she would regularly serve the musician’s guests including Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger.

Then at 25 she found herself accidentally pregnant to a “nice guy, but he wasn’t my forever guy”, and becoming a single mum. She continued to travel the world and work with her infant on her hip, before finally returning home to Australia where she met Jeff. He was a senior radio programmer for Austereo, while she was a publicist at United International Pictures.

The pair married when Allis was 29 and had two children, Oliver and Riley, and it was while on maternity leave from her publicity job with Riley she decided she didn’t want to go back to working for someone else.

Wanting to be “in control of my own destiny”, she decided to explore the business world, using some of that problem-solving, perseverance and heuristic attitude she learnt while navigating life overseas.

She and Jeff initially trialled touring international comedians. But the business was short-lived as, Allis says, the first comedian they brought to Australia only had “one good joke”. The couple then tried publishing, but after quickly realising the industry was tough and the financial returns minuscule, they decided to start a juice business, Sejuiced, with partners including their then-accountant and lawyer.

Allis sourced the equipment, created all the recipes, headed the operation and launched the first store on Chapel St in Melbourne.

But during a discussion about how to grow the business and who would run the company going forward, things quickly turned pear shaped. “One of the other partners went, ‘Well, Janine has been doing it, so you know …’, and the lawyer and the accountant laughed,” she recalls.

“It was that whole, ‘As if she could do it, as if that woman could do it.’ So we walked out of that meeting, and I went, ‘That’s it, we’re out of here.’ So we sold our shares. We gave them everything, gave them all the IP, but what they couldn’t get was what was in my head.”

Then, in what can only be described as the greatest vindication, Allis started Boost.

With Jeff by her side as the marketing and leasing agent and about $300,000 in investment money from some of his big business mates including Flight Centre co-founder Geoff Harris, and the sale of the couple’s family home, they launched their first store in Adelaide.

Within four years they had 100 stores across the country and the growth wasn’t slowing down. “Jeff would sign these 20 store deals with Westfield and I’d have to work out a way of building them, funding them, franchising them and just doing it,” she says.

All this while managing three young children and working sometimes until 4 o’clock in the morning.

“My children would go out with one shoe or they wouldn’t wear the right uniform and, you know, it was hectic,” she says.

“There were times where I completely stuffed up and I thought my mum was picking up the kids and actually it was me and they couldn’t get a hold of me because my phone went dead. But you know what, I look at the grown humans now and I think they’re okay. They’ve got good resilience and grit. I’ve given them resilience and grit. They survived.”

While she makes the comment jovially, the truth is, not only have they survived, but they are thriving. Her eldest son Samuel, 32, owns a bookstore in Woodburn, NSW, near Lismore, and has seven kids; Oliver, 27, is following in his mum’s footsteps with the hugely successful frozen yoghurt chain Yo-Chi, which he runs with his father, while Riley, 25, is a star on YouTube with a whopping 580,000 subscribers to his gaming channel Majorkill, which he has turned into a business with merchandise. As for her youngest, Tahlia, 15, who Allis describes as her “midlife crisis child” after suddenly wanting another baby at 39 and needing three years and the help of IVF to achieve it, is a straight-A student and a “great chick”.

She’s also responsible for helping “relax” her fiercely driven, highly motivated, workaholic mother. “She’ll say, ‘I did well … can I have the day off (school)?’ and I’ll go ‘Sure.’ And if she was my oldest child I would have said, ‘No, you have to do this and conform’,” Allis says, revealing when this happened recently, she cancelled all her meetings and simply “hung out” with her daughter for the day.

The entrepreneur, who admits to being “shockingly competitive” after playing netball from the age of eight to about 40, also credits her family for ensuring she never takes anything too seriously. That includes taking on tyrannical, tear-inducing, British TV chef Gordon Ramsay on his latest TV series, Gordon Ramsay’s Food Stars, in which she and Ramsay captain teams of budding business owners as they compete for the chance to win a $250,000 investment.

“Oh my god, Gordon is a pussycat compared to what happens in my family,” she laughs.

She declares nothing is too far when it comes to jokes with her kids, and lines are almost permanently crossed – something she finds outrageously entertaining.

In fact, sitting in the living room of her national park-bordered Noosa holiday home where the family regularly gathers for vacations, she retells a story of when she was once recognised by a waiter at a restaurant while dining with her children.

“Riley, he’s always cracking jokes, and … this waiter came up and said (to me), ‘I’m sorry but I think I know you. Where do you think I know you from?’ So Riley, with a straight face, he turned around and looked at her and said, ‘Did you watch porn in the ’80s?’,” Allis laughs.

“I gave him 10 points for quickness because I thought it was actually very funny.”

Alongside her family, also keeping Allis in high spirits is her daily addiction to surfing and regular yoga. Both are responsible for her visibly impressive strong and fit physique, which she shows off in a pair of short hessian shorts she slips into for our photo shoot.

“I don’t think you can beat a yoga mat for a holistic experience,” she says.

“It’s muscle building on every single muscle of your body, but equally it’s about breathwork.”

Allis practises Ashtanga yoga, which is one of the original and most dynamic and athletic forms of yoga, with a strong focus on the mind, self-discipline, concentration and breath control.

She believes it helps her perform mentally at her best in business, and says it assisted her in reaching Day 44 on the 2019 TV series Australian Survivor: Champions v Contenders, in which she finished in sixth place.

It is also her form of meditation for her busy mind and active body.

“That’s completely acceptable and completely as good as normal meditation because I’m not designed to sit,” she says.

But perhaps what brings her the most mental clarity and pure joy is surfing.

Her Noosa home has two racks of boards behind the garage, with a longboard Allis’s pick for tackling Noosa’s great breaks and those in Sydney, where she lives the majority of the year.

Every morning, without fail, she and best friend Em are up at 5am, checking the tide and wind reports to find the best spot to head into the ocean.

“I’m obsessed with it. If there was an addiction, I’m addicted to it,” she says.

“The endorphins of just being in the water and watching the sunrise … you don’t get any better than that; and then you tie in the fact you are learning something which is really difficult.

“The day that you get the perfect wave, you literally leave joyous. I don’t think I’ve ever felt anything like it.”

While this new, balanced approach to life incorporating regular surfing and yoga is a far cry from the manic days of starting Boost, in which she says she didn’t come up for air for about a decade as they looked to “grow quick, but safely”; the always dynamic, ambitious Allis isn’t taking her finger off the pulse.

Despite selling 70 per cent of her and Jeff’s shares of Retail Zoo for $70m to US investors The Riverside Company in 2010, she is still a shareholder and involved in the business as the chair.

“I’m involved without being management, which I think, to be honest, is probably the right place to be,” she says.

“The business has grown to a point where it has experts in all fields. I’m definitely there to help and give advice and guidance and expertise and understand the DNA, but I also don’t want to be in the weeds anymore.”

She says being out of the minutiae of the everyday running of the operation allows her to make better decisions and have greater clarity on its direction and future to ensure it’s a long and successful one, with Boost celebrating 25 years next year.

There’s the potential to open new businesses, though she is playing coy on what they could be, simply saying her “curious mind” is open to anything that might pop up that she considers in her wheelhouse.

Allis is also enjoying being in front of the camera and reveals she would love to start a female-fronted chat show similar to American TV’s The View alongside good friend and Looking for Alibrandi actor Pia Miranda, who she met on Survivor.

“Something like that would be awesome, to do a panel show of some sort with some really great women,” she says.

She is, as well, hoping for a second season of Gordon Ramsay’s Food Stars, which concludes this Wednesday, April 24, with the season finale in which she will become an investor in the winner’s business and provide them with a year of mentorship.

Mentorship is also behind the pragmatic and tough but extremely likeable founder’s newest company, The Business Academy, in which she offers budding entrepreneurs all the tools and information she wishes she knew when she started Boost.

“The Business Academy is a real calling,” she says. “I didn’t have any sort of clue when I started and I had to kind of work it out, and I’m finding a lot of people on a daily basis will reach out to me for help, and so I did a course of what I would have loved to have known.”

But rather than just being another business program on the market, she wants it to be a “game changer”, helping prevent some of the 60 per cent of businesses in Australia that fail in the first three years.

And to do that, she is regularly picking the brains of her sons: Riley, with how to boost her presence on social media given his enormous YouTube following; Oliver, who she credits with having a “great marketing brain” and Samuel, “an incredible customer-service expert”.

“I’m a firm believer that just because you’re older doesn’t mean you know everything,” she says humbly.

This sharing of ideas and experiences is another reason for the proud mum of four
to bring the family together – that and for the laughter, love and relentlessly inappropriate jokes. ■