Never Not Building by Andrew Raso
Never Not Building by Andrew Raso
Podcast Description
If you're addicted to growth, obsessed with digital strategy and constantly building; this podcast is for you.
Join Andrew Raso, Founder and Global CEO of Online Marketing Gurus, Australia's #1 digital marketing agency, as he deep dives into the minds of entrepreneurs, marketers, and business builders who are never not building.
From scaling startups to mastering digital marketing, decoding SEO trends to leading high-performance teams, each episode brings you real talk, sharp insights, and no-fluff strategies to grow faster and smarter.
Whether you're scaling your first venture or lea
Podcast Insights
Content Themes
The podcast focuses on themes such as entrepreneurial growth, digital marketing strategies, and high-performance team management. Episodes discuss topics like scaling startups, SEO trends, and the emotional aspects of business leadership, with specific examples including interviews with founders who overcame significant challenges and insights into how AI is changing hiring practices.
What does it really take to scale a business?
Hosted by entrepreneur and Online Marketing Gurus founder Andrew Raso, ‘Never Not Building’ dives into the raw, behind-the-scenes moments that shape brands, businesses, and the people building them. From early risks and team struggles to reinvention and profitability, Andrew sits down with Australia’s top founders and operators to unpack what it really takes to build a successful business. Whether you’re in marketing, operations, or leadership, this is where founders and builders get real about scaling smarter.
What does it take to go from an eleven-year-old kid in a Bosnian war zone with no electricity for eight months, to the Sydney Olympics, to the World Barista Championship title, to building one of Australia's most influential coffee empires?
In this episode of Never Not Building, I sit down with Sasa Sestic, founder of Ona Coffee.
Sasa's family fled three wars before landing in Australia in 1997. He grew up moving house twenty times in seven years, dodging tanks and sleeping through nights with no power. Handball got him to the Sydney 2000 Olympics, and when sport ended at twenty-three, he was lost.
What came next was seven straight years of losing the Australian Barista Championship, with judges telling him his English was too poor, his accent too thick, that he didn't belong. He kept going. On the seventh attempt he won Australia, then he won the world.
Today, Ona Coffee employs 160 people and Sasa owns three coffee farms across Central America. He pioneered a fermentation technique borrowed from wine that changed how coffee is processed globally, and through Project Origin he works with more than 200 farmers, funding wells that give over 7,000 people clean drinking water every day.
This is a story about refusing to quit when everyone tells you to, about building a team that stays for a decade, and about what happens when you stop chasing the perfect cup and start chasing something bigger.
What we get into:
– How a war-zone childhood built the resilience that carried him through the #Olympics and running a business
– Why he never once thought about quitting after six championship losses
– The 2006 night his own team walked out on him, and how he sold every cafe he owned except one
– Why he bought a coffee farm by accident on a trip meant to buy beans, and named it after his wife
– The ”bus analogy” that lets him keep World Champions on staff for years
– Why the most expensive coffee on his menu earns the smallest margin, and why that's the point
– Whether Australia still has the best coffee in the world, and where the crown is going next
– The truth about the $5.50 flat white and why so many cafes are closing
– How AI is changing coffee operations without touching the craft
If you've ever been told to quit, watched people around you win while you kept losing, or wondered whether obsession alone is enough to build something that lasts, this one's for you.
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