When Cairns student Jodie Mlikota was given a university assignment to build a start-up business that would solve a problem, she had no idea that five years later she would be the CEO of a multinational company.
Ms Mlikota grew up in and around the sugarcane fields of Freshwater, attended Cairns State High School and studied at Central Queensland University's (CQU) Cairns campus. Her first job out of university was working at the Taste Port Douglas Food and Drink Festival.
While studying at CQU, Ms Mlikota was given an assignment based on entrepreneurship and thanks to the encouragement of her lecturer, the Gathar app was born.
"The assignment was to come up with a scalable concept or start-up solving a problem that you had experienced before," she said.
"I always had this idea in my head that it's easy to book a car and book accommodation, but to get someone to come and cook for you, there wasn't an app for that and that's where the idea came from.
"My university lecturer said this is a really good idea and it could have legs, so that night I went home and registered the business and domain name."
In early 2018, Ms Mlikota flew to Brisbane to take part in a start-up workshop where she pitched the Gathar idea.
That weekend she won a prize to present at a global women's start-up weekend in Paris.
The start of an idea
After presenting in Paris, Ms Mlikota came back to Cairns, quit her job and devoted herself to starting her business.
"I knew there were private chefs and cooks out there who wanted to cook for people in their own home but didn't have the money for marketing or the business skills to be able to go out there and set up a business and find customers," she said.
"So, we created a community of awesome chefs and cooks and introduced them to people wanting them to cater for their small events."
The first chefs to be recruited were all based in Cairns and Port Douglas.
"When we launched in 2018, we only had a handful of chefs," Ms Mlikota said.
"One of the prerequisites of joining was that you had to be passionate about food.
"You don't need to be a chef. We wanted to enable passionate cooks as well, which is what set us apart."
Cairns resident and French-trained chef Cat Lohues was one of the first to sign up to Gathar and has catered for hundreds of functions since joining.
"It's like an Uber for chefs," Ms Lohues said.
"Everything that I lack in my business they do for me, they find the customers, they deal with the invoicing, all I have to do is turn up, cook and deal with the customer on the day."
Branching out overseas
Since launching, Gathar has served up more than 25,000 meals from 32 locations across Australia and has now launched in America.
"We did a lot of research into overseas markets and discovered that nobody is doing what we are doing in the US," Ms Mlikota said.
"We started in the US in June. We are only live in California at this stage as we didn't want to launch into lots of locations at once.
"Once we have learnt how everything works, we can expand from there."
Despite being the CEO of a company employing people across the globe, Ms Mlikota said she had no plans to leave Cairns.
"I love Cairns and I believe I can be the best leader I can be working from here," she said.
"I received a lot of support from the local business community and from my family and friends and I think it's the best place in the world to live."
