Tim Gentle

“I just found that inner strength and resilience to stand up and deliver.”

Tim Gentle spent his entire school life at Yarra and has very fond memories. He is still good mates with students he met in prep. He still has the burgundy blazer he wore in Junior School and remembers the blazer being worn with a grey shirt, shorts and long socks.

“I was a prefect in Year 12 and one of my roles was to ask students to pull up their socks – not something I enjoyed very much!” he recalls.

Sport was something Tim did enjoy and he represented Yarra in cross country, athletics and swimming. He also made the Victorian State Swimming team and remembers spending a lot of time training in the pool that chlorine gave his hair a green tinge, earning Tim the nickname ‘The Hulk’.

“I was in the pool by 5am three mornings a week, swam until 7am and then rode home to shower and have breakfast before school. I trained after school and competed on weekends it instilled good work ethic, mum played a big role in that” he says.

Yarra also taught Tim resilience, mental toughness and independence. Halfway through Year 10, at the age of only 15, he embarked on a student exchange program to the USA and went to a high school in Kansas for a year.

“I travelled around, went to school prom and studied subjects like oceanology and public speaking. I also studied in Canada for a year while I was at University and I would encourage students to leave the safety of the harbour to build confidence,” says Tim.

Business and computing dominated Tim’s interests and are foundations of his career. But he has faced challenges and thrived.

The first business he built created websites for companies in regional, rural and remote areas. With 1,000 clients on his books, a major company bought him out, but the deal went south when that parent company suddenly faced tax evasion issues. Tim lost his company, job and home and was never paid for the sale.

“On the day I found out that the parent company was been forced to close, I had to deliver a keynote presentation on how to build your business online. I had to pick myself up, stand on stage and turn things around. In life, you must have another crack because there will always be stuff that can take you down,” he says.

His determination and optimism paid off when he ‘won’ a bus in a competition. He converted it into a mobile classroom that travels across regional, rural, and remote Australia educating people using virtual reality. This year, with his son and father who helped convert the bus, will cross the Nullarbor and head to the Perth Show to help educate children how their food is grown using virtual reality.

“It’s going to be special to have Dad and Patch join me on that trip and along the way we’ll welcome 4,000 people on board to experience the virtual reality” says Tim.