You've spent years being the one people look up to. The one who's fine. The one with it handled. You can't let your team see you wobble. You can't tell your friends what you actually earn without watching something shift in their face.
So you hold it. All of it. Alone.
Eight-ish people, one room, ten times a year. Same eight every time, so the trust compounds. Each of them has cleared the same bar you have, and none of them will flinch at your real numbers or resent you for them.
One month you run the room. The next month someone else does. Sometimes it's a founder. Nobody's on stage. Nobody's selling. Nobody's teaching from the front. The Australian reflex to cut down anyone doing well doesn't make it through the door, because everyone in here is doing well and tired of pretending they're not.
Each room is single-gender, so the conversation goes where it needs to go without anyone holding back. The room successful Australians can't find anywhere else. So we built it.
You can't talk about the money honestly with friends who haven't made it. You can't talk about the doubt with a team that needs you to be sure. You can't tell your partner you're tired of being the one who holds it all.
You answer "how's business?" with "yeah, busy, you know how it is," because the real answer makes people uncomfortable. You stop saying the true thing. You wonder if anyone in the room is.
That's tall poppy syndrome at the dinner-party level. It's the most Australian thing there is, and it's the reason this country exports its most successful people instead of building rooms for them. Same person, different country, different version of themselves. The Australian version was performing. The other version was free.
Hastings is the room where the Australian version doesn't have to perform anymore. Say the real number. Name the real fear. Want more out loud, in front of people who want more too.
The stuff you can't bring up anywhere else:
No one's keeping score. Everyone's already cleared the bar. So the conversation starts where it usually stops.
Three of us read every application. Three of us watch every interview. Three of us sign off on every single member, by hand. There's no committee. No outsourced gatekeeper. Just Melissa, Nick and James.
We turn down more revenue every month than most clubs make in a year. We've said no to people we like, to people who could afford it ten times over, to people other clubs would chase. Not because they're not impressive. Because they're not right for the room.
This is what makes the room safe enough to be honest in. What goes in the room stays in the room. That's not a slogan, it's the only reason any of this works, and it works because of who we keep out.
This is the part of the job nobody else wants to do. It's why the room works.
Two of us met on a beach in Mexico. We'd both flown halfway around the world to be at the same event, because the room we wanted didn't exist closer to home. We left the country to find our people.
James was asleep on a sunbed, going a colour that doesn't occur in nature. Nick woke him up before he turned fully into a lobster. That's the start of it. Two of us became best friends because one of us was about to need a skin graft.
The point isn't the sunburn. The point is that you don't plan the people who end up mattering most. You just have to be in the room where they are. We had to cross an ocean to find ours. You shouldn't have to.
The third of us came along over the years that followed, and somewhere in there two of us got married. We'll let you guess which two.
We've spent the last decade in rooms with successful Australians. Founders running 8-figure businesses out of Bondi. Women building category-defining brands out of Byron Bay. Operators in Perth and Adelaide doing work that would be on the cover of Forbes if they were American. And we've watched the same thing happen over and over.
You hit a certain level here and something quietly closes. Not the doors. The conversations. You stop saying the true thing because no one around you can hold it. You answer "how's business?" with the easy lie. You wonder, sometimes, if anyone in any room is actually telling the truth.
Some of us have considered leaving. One of us already has.
We've watched friends move their families to LA, Singapore, Austin because they finally wanted to be in rooms where success wasn't a dirty word. We've sat across from Australian founders who quietly relocated and watched them visibly relax when they realised they were finally in rooms with peers who weren't going to take a swing at them for doing well. Same person, different country, different version of themselves. The Australian version was performing. The other version was free.
The talent isn't the gap. The talent here is extraordinary. The gap is cultural. In rooms where success can be spoken about openly, it compounds. In rooms where it can't, it leaks out the side, in resentment, in quiet moves overseas, in friends disappearing to Bali.
Then there's the tax conversation. Every successful Australian has had it by now. The whispered question at a dinner party. The mate who set up a structure in Dubai. The friends who moved the whole family because the maths finally made sense. We get it. We've sat at our own kitchen tables running the numbers, more than once. One of us is living the other side of it right now.
The deeper truth almost no one says out loud is that it's not really about minimising tax. It's about doing the work, building the connections, and growing the income to a place where tax stops being the conversation. Where you're not chasing structures, you're building wealth at a pace that makes the line item a line item, not the headline.
One conversation with someone five years ahead of you can save you five years of figuring it out alone. One introduction can rewrite the next decade. That's the math of the right room.
You don't reach the next level by being told what to do. You reach it by doing life with the people who've already been there, are there now, or are on the same climb. It's not about advice. It's about who's close enough to tell you the truth.
Between us we've run a US publicly listed company as CEO, started and sold multiple companies, built brands that reached tens of millions, written bestselling books, made films that ended up on Netflix, performed in front of tens of thousands. We're not listing it to impress you. We're listing it so you know that when we say we understand the particular loneliness of doing well in this country, we're not guessing.
Hastings is us building the room we kept leaving the country to find. The members run the rooms. We set the standard, sit in our own room, and step in when it helps. We pay our own way in and answer the same questions everyone else does.
We're not here to coach you. You're past that. We're here to put you in a room with seven people who'll meet you where you are, and then refuse to let you stay there. You'll leave with sharper thinking and bigger plans. You might just leave with a best friend. Two of us did.
If you've been quietly looking for this, you'll know.
Join the waitlist when you're ready. Rooms open in cycles. When a seat closes in your city, it's closed until the next cycle opens.
Either of these gets you considered:
Clear one and the rest is up to the interview. We're in our founding round now, so the first members in are paying founding rates, locked in for life.
A private members club for Australia's most successful entrepreneurs and operators. The heart of it is your room: eight-ish peers in your city who meet ten times a year to talk, in real confidence, about the things success makes harder to say. Each room is single-gender, so the conversation goes where it needs to go without anyone holding back.
The inaugural Room is always run by a founder. Members then take turns. With eight of you and ten meetings a year, your turn comes around once, maybe twice. Sometimes a founder runs it again instead. No paid facilitator at the front, by design.
Yes. Members sign real confidentiality, and the no-selling rule is enforced. But the deeper answer is that the vetting is what protects the room. We don't let anyone in who we don't trust to hold what's said. What goes in the room stays in the room.
Membership is an annual investment, and most members treat it as a business expense. We're in our founding round now, so the first members in get founding pricing, locked in for as long as they stay. The price goes up when the founding round closes. The discount isn't a sale, it's a thank-you for being early, while we get every detail of the Room right.
We'll talk specific numbers once you're through to the interview.
Sixty-day money-back guarantee from your first Room session, activated by your Commitment Call with a founder. If we didn't deliver what we promised, you don't pay for it.