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“Until the business moves into the next phase, we still have members to serve at our flagship event ‘Movers and Breakers’ and that’s where my focus will be for my final weeks.”
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Business Chicks is moving ahead with its eight annual “Movers and Breakers” conference to be held in a Gold Coast resort scheduled to start on Wednesday and finish on Saturday.
The company’s website advertised the event at $950 for Business Chicks members and $1150 for non-members, including two days of conference sessions and meals. Offers including accommodation at the conference, which will be held at Intercontinental Sanctuary Cove, started at $4450.
“‘Movers and Breakers’ is not your average conference. Each year we bring together 140 of our members for three days of extraordinary connection, learning, fun [a lot of fun!] and to hold space for you to be yourself,” the event page states.
“We’re pulling out all the stops to make this ‘Movers and Breakers’ an extraordinary three days for you all, with lots of really special moments and surprises built in too.”
The event page lists Gold Coast Business Events, Endota Spa, and Champagne Tsarine as partners. Destination Gold Coast’s head of business events, Selina Sinclair, said: “Business Chicks has confirmed the event will proceed on the Gold Coast as planned and they will continue to meet all their obligations.” Endota declined to comment.
Owner of Business Chicks, Australia’s business women’s community, Emma Isaacs.Credit:Damian Bennett. Isaacs wears Bianca Spender shirt, available at David Jones.
High-profile women entrepreneurs including OzHarvest chief executive Ronni Kahn and fashion journalist Laura Brown left comments of support on Isaacs’ Instagram post about the need to lay off staff.
“You and the world you have created are so brilliant, Em. Proud to be a part of it always,” Brown, who spoke at a Business Chicks event earlier this year, said.
“Em how painful to have to go through this. You are a tower of resilience and embody guts, passion and strength. This too shall pass,” Kahn said on the post.
Former Business Chicks employees, who spoke to this masthead on condition of anonymity, spoke of a “toxic” workplace culture at Business Chicks in which staff were expected to work long hours for low pay and that senior executives turned a blind eye to the pressure staff were under.
Ex-employees also noted Isaacs was based in the US for several years and would visit the Sydney headquarters periodically.
Telstra is a former silver partner of Business Chicks, which helped promote the telecommunication giant’s former Business Women’s Awards. The partnership contract ended when the awards ceased in June 2021 and was replaced by a new program, Telstra’s Best of Business Awards.
According to Business Chicks’ event page, it will hold an online “masterclass” on November 10 and a “knowledge and study tour” in Los Angeles, California, next March, in partnership with UCLA and Disney.