Nicole jumps ship to join Cole
NICOLE Bricknell has jumped ship — leaving Amir Mian to go with Nick Cole’s recently launched agency.
It comes after the ex-wife of disgraced former Billabong tycoon Matthew Perrin put her multimillion-dollar Gold Coast property on the market.
Ms Bricknell is now a sales specialist at Cole Residential Isle of Capri, which Mr Cole launched after leaving his mum’s agency — Lucy Cole Prestige Properties — recently.
She appears to be his first recruit as she is listed as the sole sales representative at the agency. This is Ms Bricknell’s third job in real estate with her first at Knobel & Davis. THIS week marked the end of the long-running series of Griffith University-Gold Coast Bulletin Business Confidence Polls, which has gauged the opinions of business leaders along the Coast for well over a decade.
It also marked the end of a far longer association with our pages – that of retiring public relations boss/editor/ journalist Rod Spence, who has undertaken the poll for Griffith since its inception.
But Spence’s work first appeared on these pages in 1978 when he arrived as a news editor and chief of staff.
It was the halcyon “rivers of real estate gold” days, which later saw the Bulletin explode to a hefty seven-day publication.
Under then-editor John Burton, Spence would often write the daily editorial and had a daily column on page 4 titled Sentinel.
“The Bulletin in my day was totally reliant on local news – of course there was no internet, we still used typewriters and we didn’t have state and national news services either – the paper swallowed 50 to 60 local stories a day,” he told us earlier this year.
“The biggest was a Saturday edition of 420 pages produced by an editorial staff of around 60.”
As is the way with booms and busts, the seven-day-aweek endeavour of 1983 only lasted three months and 26 journos were handed their marching orders – but Spence was having none of it.
“At that time I was in, let’s say, a challenging position as I was (then-Australian Journalists Association) branch president as well as being chief of staff and had to negotiate on behalf of members while being pressured by management to help with putting out papers,” he said
“The result was a strike – the Printing and Kindred Industries Union joined us and the paper was stopped for two weeks.
“The outcome, however, was positive, resulting in the first voluntary redundancy agreement in Australian media history.
“I was at the head of the queue of 31 journos who took the redundancy package.”
The 26 journos who’d initially been turfed stayed on and Spence ventured into public relations, launching Promedia and then Spence Consulting.
Spence’s nose for a good story carried through to his career in PR. “I hate ‘spin’ and for my 35 years in PR I have always lived by the principle that ‘if its not news it doesn’t go out’,” he said.
We hope he enjoys his well-earned retirement.