Danielle Whittaker: Inside story of 40-year-old woman who died in Surfers Paradise drug overdose

The Gold Coast woman who died of a drug overdose in a Surfers Paradise hotel room had had a successful corporate sales career for some of Australia’s biggest companies. INSIDE STORY

The Gold Coast woman who died of a drug overdose in a Surfers Paradise hotel room had had a successful corporate sales career for some of Australia’s biggest companies.

Danielle Whittaker died at the Meriton Suites in the Ocean tower on Friday just days after she turned 40.

It was a tragic end for a woman who spent years on the corporate ladder and charted a career spanning sales to creating her own fitness app.

Ms Whittaker, who described herself as “the sales queen” on LinkedIn, held several qualifications, including earning a diploma in cookery and culinary arts from New Zealand’s Victoria University of Wellington in 2002, when she was 18 years old.

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Later, in 2017 she would earn a bachelor of applied management from the Southern Institute of Technology in New Zealand’s Invercargill.

Danielle Whittaker. Picture: Facebook

Ms Whittaker’s corporate carer began in 2009 at Telecom in New Zealand before relocating to Brisbane where she worked for a range of companies, including more than two years at both Telstra and CSG Print Services.

“From (small and medium-sized enterprises) to large corporates and multinationals I have two decades of experience in high-level sales roles across six cities, two countries and multiple organisations, dealing with people of all levels. I have a great ability to build long-lasting relationships naturally; people buy off who they know, like and trust, and having a good reputation within a large network really makes selling a lot easier,” she wrote.

In June 2014 she founded her own smartphone app Fit Meet, which promised to connect “people based on their sport and location to find training partners”.

She ceased being involved in it by 2018.

Danielle Whittaker, 40, died of a drug overdose on the Gold Coast after a cardiac arrest. Picture: Supplied

By 2019, Ms Whittaker’s career was on the upswing, working as a district sales manager at Toyota covering central Queensland before moving to what would be her longest job – a four-year stint as an external sales manager at Super Steel Australia.

It only ceased in January, after which Ms Whittaker described herself as “funemployed”.

However, she wrote extensively about a book she was working on covering her knowledge of the corporate world and sales experience.

Danielle Whittaker had just turned 40 when a day of revelry with friends took a tragic twist on Good Friday, leaving her dead and two of her friends lying in hospital beds. Picture: Facebook

‘Conscious Selling’ is also the working title of my first book, which will encompass my two decades of sales knowledge, broken down step by step with all of the tools and strategies you will need to get crystal clear on your ideal client, create an entire sales plan based around this, and then how to actually implement it,” she wrote on her LinkedIn page.

Ms Whittaker in recent years wrote about becoming more spiritual.

“The journey of even more self discovery and growth that I have been on over the past couple of years has been quite simply, outrageous,” she wrote.

“And only now am I able to create a brand new offering that is something so far from what I would have picked, yet, it makes so much sense.

“I have been developing my psychic and intuitive abilities even further, rather heavily, practising tarot, oracle and more recently remembering how to read runes from some seriously ancient past lives. Shit has been wild to say the least.

“And there are certain things I can no longer ignore.”