Family and a successful business are two of the most important things to Joe Stimson and after some soul searching, he’s managed to successfully combine both.
As a high school student, he devoured books on business and wealth creation while dreaming of becoming of a business owner.
“I always wanted to be a business owner but never knew how to make it click in my life,” he said.
However, upon leaving high school he ended up in tourism.
“I started at an adventure park in Perth and worked my way up to managing the park,” Joe said.
He fell in love with theme parks and realised his goal was to work at Disneyland.
In 2018 he saw an advertisement for a job as a ride supervisor at Movie World and thought that could be a stepping stone to Disneyland, so he made the move to Queensland.
It was while chatting to the staff in guest services that he found an outlet for his passion for talking to people.
“I was instantly hooked and within six months I was in a leadership role and by the end of six years I was the supervisor of the guest services department for Movie World, Wet n Wild and Seaworld,” Joe revealed.
“It was a very rewarding job because I had the ability to help people. Families would travel from all over the world to visit our parks and sometimes things didn’t go to plan, and I was in a position to change the trajectory of their trip.”
The importance of family
During this time, he also became a dad and his old dream of becoming a business owner was reignited.
Keen to learn more about business, he took up a trainee position with a real estate agency on the Gold Coast.
“It taught me how to back myself and have confidence in my ability to grind it out,” Joe explained.
But it was long hours and kept him away from his precious young daughter.
“Over Christmas my two-year-old daughter, Maisie was just talking to me and I thought, I don’t know who you are. I had missed that development,” he recalled.
“It was really quite upsetting and woke me up. When my Dad was younger, he was a workaholic. When I think back to my youth, I wish I had more time with him as a child.
“I was following in my dad’s footsteps and not being present.”
Moving to the mountain
In 2024, Joe, his partner Jaidyn Ralph and Maisie as well Jaidyn’s parents, Lynette and Matt Ralph, moved to Tamborine Mountain.
“We’ve always been drawn to the mountain. We’d come up here all the time and it always felt like home,” Joe said, having grown up in a village called Kedington in the United Kingdom.
“It almost feels like I am walking through my childhood: it rains a lot, just like Kedington, it’s green and the people are very friendly.
“We didn’t even look anywhere else.”
Finally, the idea for a food truck came to him and within a week of leaving the real estate agency he began working on the idea for Wanna Smash?
“My partner, Jaidyn, is vegan and I knew I made a great vegan burger,” he explained.
“The vegan burger was like a love letter to my partner.”
Adapting
In June 2025 he drove his new trailer into the IGA carpark and was overwhelmed with the support from locals.
“It was nothing short of awesome,” he recalled smiling.
“Of course, I had no idea what I was doing but it was good to be getting back into facing people.
“When people meet me in the trailer they know I like to yack. It was filling my cup again.”
But it wasn’t all easy and Joe realised the vegan market was limited.
“After six months I had to adapt or die. I didn’t want to give up on them (vegans), but I had to change in order to keep operating,” he said.
“We made sure we had separate cooking spaces for the vegan burgers and meat.
“It was like starting a new business again, changing our marketing to let people know we were offering meat.”
In June Wanna Smash? hit their one-year anniversary and gave away 100 free burgers to locals at the IGA carpark.
“I wanted to give back to the community who had supported me. Tamborine Mountain had offered so much support to me and my family. It would have felt weird not trying to give back that we had made it through our first year,” Joe shared.
“I’m enjoying the journey and the beauty is I’m able to be a present father.
“My non-negotiable was not working Friday and Saturdays and on Sundays my daughter gets to come to work with me.
“I feel fulfilled.”
When Joe is not working his favourite activity is to take Maisie to the local parks, go for coffee, play guitar and read books.
“We love to explore. It’s a good counter to how busy I am running around,” he said.
“My biggest goal is to own my own home on the mountain.”
However, right now he’s looking forward to taking Maisie to his favourite place, Disneyland in Hong Kong in October, which will mark his fourth Disneyland adventure.
The post A love letter to his partner becomes a business hit appeared first on Tamborine Mountain News.
