“SuREAL® was built on our passion for seeing & helping people & businesses develop, grow, and realise their dreams and potential. This is still what we continue to do today.”
‘Julienne just offers a fantastic coaching package. You can’t replace the depth of experience that she’s had across a range of businesses. There’s just so much substance and experience there.’ Scott Charlton, Director of Coaching, Slipstream Coaching.
At SuREAL, our core values actually represent the heart of our business – who we are, what we stand for, and what we’re passionate about.
The idea for SuREAL first came about when Julienne and Diana were on a walk along the Brisbane River in 2003. We were talking about our work, and what we were passionate about. Julienne already had a successful consulting business at the time, and Diana specialised in strategic planning, project management and performance reporting for a range of corporations. We both realised that together we could create something really valuable to people and their businesses, and so SuREAL was born, as captured in this poem Diana wrote when we first started out. Su stands for Success that is for REAL, which for us was truly SuREAL.
SuREAL’s core purpose is getting to the heart of what our client’s want to achieve, helping them discover how to get there and then make it happen. We love helping businesses develop a clear strategic direction and turn this into reality via their people – be this through executive coaching, leadership and team development, facilitation and mediation, or simply helping people be accountable. One of the best things we did was integrate the Instinctive Drives™ (I.D.™) System into our business. This has formed the foundation of all the work we do and has enabled our clients to fast track their success as they understand what motivates and engages their people and the way they need to operate to be at their best.
Over the past fifteen years we’ve worked with a range of small to large businesses from diverse industries, helping them to realise their success. It’s extremely rewarding.
Julienne Barton and Diana King, Co-founders
In my role as Director – Strategic Leadership of SuREAL, I bring over 35 years of business experience as a business leader, advisor, coach and mentor to my clients and their businesses. I work with business owners and leaders to help them realise the potential for themselves, their businesses and their people, and have been described as someone who ‘appears fearless’, ‘imbues positive energy’ and ‘motivates people to actually make it happen’.
Much of my early career was spent working for PwC (known then as Price Waterhouse) as a Chartered Accountant and Senior Manager in business advisory before I embarked on a ten-year journey as co-owner and Managing Director of T&C Surf Designs Australia, a wholesale and retail business. Having been successful in starting up, growing and selling this business (and learning some hard lessons along the way!), I knew that I wanted to help other business owners to do the same.
I’ve been doing this for more than 15 years now in strategic planning and execution facilitation roles, leadership and team performance engagements, as a Board Advisor and working as a business coach for organisations in a diverse range of industries. These have ranged from one-off workshops to long-term engagements, such as a six year stint with Beech Ovens as their part-time CEO. In this role, I helped Beech Ovens transform from a small family business to a market leader throughout Australasia and the Middle East, project managing the ultimate sale of the business to commercial cooking equipment leader The Middleby Corporation. If I had to best describe what I do it would be a sounding board, strategist, performance coach and someone who achieves success through people in an engaging way.
It doesn’t matter to me what industry you’re in or what the size of the business is, as long as you’re passionate about transforming yourself, your team, your business, I can help you do it. Seeing the freedom and fulfilment this provides business owners and leaders with is very rewarding.
It was through my work as a business coach that one of my clients introduced me to Link-Up International and their Instinctive Drives™ (I.D.™) System. I was astounded at how insightful it was in enabling me to understand how to get the best out of the people I was coaching and the profound impact that this awareness of self and others can have on their personal success and fulfilment as well as the success of their businesses. I immediately embarked on becoming an accredited consultant and continue to be involved with Link-up and their international clients as well as incorporating I.D. as a key ingredient to the success of our business clients.
I’m based in Brisbane, Australia but travel all over the world working for clients. I’m qualified as a Chartered Accountant with Fellowship status and have a Bachelor of Economics Degree with First Class Honours, and bring substantial “hands-on” leadership experience, built on a strong professional background. When I’m not helping to transform businesses, I love being outdoors and active, especially snow skiing and hiking, and enjoy travel, the arts and learning to speak French.
Principal Consultant - Strategic Leadership
In a business world that so often lacks a clear direction, Diana King is a business advisor that offers a rare combination of corporate and real business experience. Throughout her 30 year plus career, strategic planning has been her passion and her strength, with a rare insight for taking a longer-term view for maximising business opportunities.
Diana’s professional experience ranges a diverse spectrum of commercial, chartered accounting and business advisory including: from a chartered accountant with Coopers & Lybrand; to senior financial management and planning positions in some of Australia’s leading companies including Santos, Southcorp, Normandy Mining and Coles Myer; to business advisor, mentor and facilitator with a bigger picture approach to strategic planning and related solutions.
As a point of difference, Diana has combined the lessons learnt from her corporate background with a creative energy for thinking about things differently. Her approach is instinctive rather than prescriptive, based on fresh ideas and a desire to keep things real and simple.
Diana has a can do attitude with a passion for embracing the potential of businesses and taking them beyond their expectations. She enjoys working with people from diverse backgrounds and skills; her common sense approach to dealing with business issues and formulating recommendations, a welcome support to businesses looking to take a renewed or fresh perspective to their current focus and direction.
At SuREAL, we have a network of talented consultants that we partner with to meet our clients’ objectives. All of our consultants are successful consultants and/or business owners in their own right.
