Austin Lovell.

Where it started

Austin grew up in Adelaide, South Australia, a curious and active kid who loved building things: Lego, model kits and forts in the backyard. His parents split up when he was six, and by 18 he had lived in 11 different houses. He says it made him more organised and independent.

He finished school at Christian Brothers College in Adelaide, where he was top of his class from Year 7 to Year 10, finished third in Year 12 and was college captain. He played almost every sport going, toured Sri Lanka for cricket in 2014 and Spain for soccer in 2016, and was involved in volunteering and social justice work.

Changing course

School was setting Austin up to become an aerospace engineer. He had applied to join the Australian Air Force to study aerospace engineering and become an air combat officer. At the same time he was selling shoes at Foot Locker and making videos on the side.

Then he saw an Instagram ad for a course on building a social media marketing agency. He already knew he loved business. With five months of school left he changed all his subjects, withdrew his Air Force application and went all in.

2019 was his first full year in business, making videos for luxury car brands, real estate, events and weddings. Some of his earliest videos, pitching clients in Adelaide as a teenager, are still on his YouTube channel.

How he got into ecommerce

When COVID hit, his clients closed their doors and he needed government support to pay rent. A friend suggested making videos for ecommerce brands, which kept trading while everyone was at home. His first proper client was Paperlike in Germany, and most of the brands he worked with were outside Australia.

By the end of June 2022 his agency had made more than 2,000 video ads for 100 ecommerce brands. Having seen what worked for other brands, and after running stores of his own in the background, he stopped taking new clients and went all in on building customer-first brands. In 2022 one of his brands generated more than $4.2 million in sales. He passed $10 million in revenue online two years after committing to brands full time.

Along the way he moved to Bali, then to Dubai, and has travelled the world while working remotely ever since.

What he built

Austin met Will and Josh in Dubai in February 2023. They started Freedom in March 2023, and it became Freedom Club in September 2024.

Austin wrote and teaches the core program. The Freedom Formula, launched in June 2024, is version two of the training, rebuilt from everything the team learned coaching its first clients. He calls it his Mona Lisa.

What he does now

As CEO, Austin leads strategy and the systems behind every Freedom Club program, and coaches the brands we scale himself.

He runs two YouTube channels. His vlog documents his life and business week to week, from Dubai and Bali to Australia. His business channel teaches the customer-first brand model step by step, including a free course of more than six hours.

What he believes

Austin started in business because he wanted freedom: to never worry about money, to do what he wants and to live wherever he chooses. He believes customer-first brands are the most reliable way to get there, because customers who have a great experience come back again and again.

He is a big believer in starting with the end in mind and knowing exactly what your dream life looks like. He is just as clear that it does not happen without the work: "I'm a believer that you can't achieve anything without doing the work."

What he has learned

• There will be a lot of failures and a lot of wins. Both are part of it.
• You can do almost anything if you put your time, energy and focus into it.
• Some things are not just mental. He once ran a marathon in Dubai on four days' notice, thinking it was all in his head. It was not.
• The people around you matter. He now has the circle of people around him he always hoped for.