After 25 years of founding, scaling, and exiting businesses, Eskander & Partners was established to put that experience to work for leaders who are serious about building something significant.

I work with companies at a pivotal moment in their growth story — where strategy needs to sharpen, capital strategy needs to be created and executed, new markets need to be entered, or the right team needs to be built around a big vision.

What I bring to every engagement is rare to find in a single advisor: the credibility of someone who has been through it, the commercial discipline that comes from operating in high-stakes, capital-intensive environments, and a network built over decades across business, investment, and beyond.

Betstar was born from a simple conviction: that the online sports betting market was ready for a serious challenger, and that the instincts and relationships I had built over nearly a decade as one of Victoria's leading on-course bookmakers gave me a genuine edge in building one.

Founded in 2006 and licensed in the Northern Territory, Betstar entered one of Australia's most competitive consumer markets and grew rapidly across every meaningful metric. Building and scaling a digital consumer business from scratch — customer acquisition, product development, data, and user experience — at a time when the playbook for doing so was still being written gave me a grounding in digital that few founders of that era had the opportunity to develop at real scale.

In 2014, Betstar was acquired by Ladbrokes Australia — one of the world's most recognised betting brands. The sale validated not just the commercial model, but the thesis that a well-run, founder-led challenger could compete and win in a market dominated by significantly larger and better-resourced operators.

What Betstar taught me — about building culture, managing growth, navigating a rapidly evolving digital landscape, and knowing when and how to exit — sits at the foundation of everything I do today.

The relationship between punter and bookmaker has remained fundamentally the same for over 150 years — transactional, one-directional, and entirely without the social dimension that defines how people engage with sport in every other context. SportChamps was built to change that.

SportChamps was a social betting tournament platform that allowed punters to compete against each other rather than the bookmaker — combining skill, strategy, and a genuine social layer that the industry had never seen. The platform was built around genuinely innovative tournament structures that rewarded skill and knowledge over luck, real-time engagement features, and a personalised profile system.

What emerged was something that couldn't be engineered — a vibrant, engaged community of sports fans who genuinely cared about the platform. Regular users became advocates. Private tournaments became rituals among friend groups. The culture that formed around SportChamps had an energy and authenticity that is rare in any consumer product.

SportChamps was an extraordinary experience in every sense of the word — the highs of building something genuinely new, the complexity of scaling in a regulated market, and every challenge and lesson that came with it.

I applied for and was awarded my Victorian Bookmaker's licence in 1997. Within two years I had built my client base and turnover to a level that qualified me to work at all city racetracks. Not long after, Eskander Racing had grown to become the largest bookmaker operating on Victorian racetracks — a position built on relationships, integrity, and a deep understanding of risk and markets that has informed everything I have done since.