Episode Description
Richard Turner, an award-winning entrepreneur, discusses his 40-year journey in business on the Troubleshooters podcast. Turner, who has been South Australian Entrepreneur of the Year twice and Australian Entrepreneur of the Year in 2010, emphasises the importance of risk-taking, mentorship, and planning in entrepreneurship. He highlights his successes with companies like Holbrook Meats, Regency Food Services, and Zen Energy, which pioneered the solar industry in Australia. Turner also stresses the need for consistency, customer focus, and adapting to market changes, including the impact of AI on productivity.
About Richard:
Richard is the author of The Essential Entrepreneur: What it Takes to Start, Scale and Sell a Successful Business, Australia’s leading guide for entrepreneurs.
Richard’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rhturner/
Australian Centre for Business Growth website: https://centreforbusinessgrowth.com/people/richard-turner/
Coraggio: https://coraggio.com.au/coraggio-team/richard-turner/
Points of interest:
- [0:01:19 – 0:02:08] Entrepreneurship Definition
- [0:12:21 – 0:17:01] Early Business Experience
- [0:22:22 – 0:28:19] Food Distribution Innovation
- [0:40:10 – 0:44:39] Zen Energy Origin Story
- [0:47:49 – 0:54:28] Solar Industry Challenges
- [0:55:14 – 0:56:33] Entrepreneurial Growth Advice
- [0:58:51 – 1:03:50] Business
Note: This has been automatically transcribed so is likely to have errors! It may however help you navigate the points of interest.
Michael McGrath 00:00
Welcome to the troubleshooters podcast with me, your host. Mike McGrath, so here we are, episode one of season three. We are back after a short break, and back by popular demand. That’s both my mom and my niece that asked when the next one was coming out. So today’s guest is Richard Turner. He’s an experienced entrepreneur with a wonderful track record of starting and scaling businesses. Sit back as I get Richard to unpack his 40 year journey in business. So Richard Turner, welcome to the troubleshooters podcast. Yep. Thanks, Mike. Looking forward to it now. You are the entrepreneurs. Entrepreneur, if you don’t mind me saying, in fact, not only are you an entrepreneur, but you’re an award winning entrepreneur. And my understanding is you’re Entrepreneur of the Year, not just once, but twice. Is that the case?
Richard Turner 00:57
Well, South Australian entrepreneur of the year, twice, 14 years apart, for two different companies. But Australian entrepreneur of the year in 2010 Richard.
Michael McGrath 01:05
That’s very impressive. Now, the French came up with the word entrepreneur, right? Like to complicate things, I think the French, but, but what do you how do you describe an entrepreneur?
Richard Turner 01:19
I think someone who’s missing that risk gene, someone who’s just willing to give something a crack and make a better life for themselves? Yes, yeah, that’s something I’ve done all my life. You know, I’ve probably never had a real job. It’s
Michael McGrath 01:34
Interesting that, isn’t it? That sort of risk profile, there’s a higher, higher risk tolerance, I think in an entrepreneur Absolutely,
Richard Turner 01:43
Absolutely, it’s all about taking a risk, and it’s about trying to get a better return for yourself than what you would get elsewhere if you’re working for someone or investing or doing something. It’s about backing yourself in with an idea that you validate against a potential market. You know, there’s some demand. The timing is right, and you rally the courage to give it a go.
Michael McGrath 02:08
Yes. So, I mean, on that point right, are entrepreneurs born, or can we make them?
Richard Turner 02:17
Look I think there’s a bit of both. You know, we see tremendous entrepreneurs that come from the most unlikely backgrounds, immigrants coming into the country, that are very poor, that are just so determined to make a better life for themselves and their families. They find mentors. It’s about largely, it’s about having mentors. You know, whether it’s inside the family, if you’ve come from a business family, quite often, you have mentors inside the family. You sort of seen businesses start and grow, or you haven’t. And then if you haven’t had that experience, you’ve got to find those mentors and and it’s amazing how giving people are. When you go and approach people, you find someone in an industry that you’re interested in, and you somehow contact their Office or Office, or get through to them and ask if you can have a coffee or a talk with them. And it’s amazing how giving a lot of people are. I mean, you’ll always find those who aren’t, but it’s just a matter of persistence, and you get a chance to go and have a coffee with someone, ask them. You might find someone who’s willing to be a bit of a mentor for you and guide you through. Or maybe it’s a it’s a group of people with different skills that help guide you through, but people find ways and means of doing it. As I said, there’s entrepreneurs that come from the most unlikely backgrounds that are now millionaires or billionaires that just yeah, just determine people Yeah. I mean in terms of the being born, yes, a lot of entrepreneurs are probably on the spectrum. They’re very focused people who who can apply themselves. So there’s certainly genes. I mean, you look at the most well known entrepreneurs around the world, the Mark Zuckerbergs, the Elon Musk, the Bill Gates. I mean, they’re obviously very well, they’re on the spectrum, and and most are. And I would, I’m sure I am too, but it’s just that ability to focus and be determined and probably not be so scared of the risk involved. But that all comes down to planning as well, making sure you’re taking educated risks, not just doing something that there’s no plan or no research done. I mean, I see so many companies develop products out there that they think is a good idea themselves, and they take it to market only to five there’s no customer for that product. And I’ve seen people spend hundreds of 1000s of dollars developing things that there’s no market for. So you’ve got to do the practical things. You’ve got to have the fundamentals in place, which we can talk about today.
Michael McGrath 04:40
Look, I mean, I think you’re right. There’s something about our backgrounds. Perhaps there’s something about what happened when we grew up, who was around, maybe who inspired us, maybe what we read. But certainly, there are some fundamentals that we can apply to that. So you’re not born an entrepreneur insofar as. Know, you know everything about business. There’s, there’s some fundamentals you’ve got to come in touch with. You’re either going to come in touch with them the hard way or the easy way, but you are going to come in touch with them, that’s for sure. I mean, we came of age at a similar time. I left school in 1980 and I think you graduated with a BA in business in 84is that right?
Richard Turner 05:20
Yeah, yeah. I did my year 12 and 81 so I’m just okay.
Michael McGrath 05:23
So it was a very different world back then. And maybe we can, we can give the listeners today a little bit of the perspective around the fact we’ve had four decades between us
Richard Turner 05:33
It’s interesting looking back on that experience, because Yes, times are different, but the fundamentals don’t change. I mean, I chair two boards of CEOs. I’ve mentored hundreds of people. I’ve been the entrepreneur in residence at UniSA recently. So I’ve mentored and seen hundreds of recent companies coming through, and the things that caused them to succeed and the things that caused them to fail are the same fundamentals. They don’t change. In business, no matter how much technology progresses and things progress, the fundamentals don’t change
Michael McGrath 06:08
No, no, you’re right. I mean, essentially, businesses is an attempt to solve a problem, whether it’s a product or a service or both. Fundamentally, what’s the problem with addressing and you know, is the, is there an economic, viable solution to bring that to the market, and will people pay for that, that problem being solved? And I think that, I mean, it’s rarely couched in those terms, but effectively, we’re, we’re solving problems really, yeah, so look, on that subject, I want to mention your book. So you’ve written a book called The essential entrepreneur, which I’m, as I mentioned earlier, I’m a third of the way through, and it’s terrific. I really think it’s, it’s great. And I’m a bit of a reader. And effectively, I mean, you went to university. I went to University of life, I’m afraid. And the only thing that set me apart and enabled me to get the education I didn’t really get at school in a secondary modern comprehensive system in the 70s was reading. So somehow, for some inexplicable reason, at age 18, why I didn’t read at school is still a mystery to me. I mean, I got a Grade B in English Literature having left Huckleberry Finn halfway down the Mississippi not not knowing what, how that story ended, because I hated reading. But for some reason, 18, I started to read mostly non fiction, lots of autobiographies. Because what became clear to me is that in the space of a week, I could get distilled 20 or 30 years of experience, and that just seemed like a really good use of time to me. So your book, which I’m enjoying a lot, talks about how you start a business, how you scale a business, and ultimately, how you sell a business. And what I really like about it is, right off the bat, you started talking about other entrepreneurs outside. I mean, you’ve got great experience yourself. You’ve started and scaled and exited four pretty large enterprises, which is pretty unusual in itself, but you also tapped into some of the entrepreneurs, some other very successful entrepreneurs that you knew. So tell us about the book and the genesis of that, and what you know who it’s aimed at, because I really do. I really do many when I say I’m enjoying it.
Richard Turner 08:31
So yeah, well, I’ve written, written it in very basic language, because I really wanted to be to be read by anyone in anyone who’s had no education, who’s just got an idea or a good idea, we all stand around the barbecue on weekends and talk about how we’re going to solve the world’s problems, but very few people wake up the next morning and do anything about it. So this is really for everyone to read and understand. I’ve got rid of all the jargon out of the book. And the other reason I wrote it is there’s very little entrepreneurial books that come out of Australia. Most of the stuff we get comes from the US or other cultures where the legal frameworks different, the accounting principles are different, the whole culture of doing business is different. I see a lot of young companies coming through, and young people coming through that have read literature or read books on entrepreneurship out of different countries. And I have to sit them down and say, Look, unfortunately, you cannot do that in Australia. It’s actually illegal. So yeah, or the market won’t accept it. It won’t Yeah, these things don’t work here. You need to, you need to understand how the Australian market works, and that’s really a big reason as to why I wrote this book.
Michael McGrath 09:50
Yeah. I mean that that cultural variance is important, isn’t it? I’ve done business in a few places around the world. For the more discerning listener, you’ll realize I wasn’t from Australia originally. Yeah, but I did business in China. I had a wholly owned foreign enterprise there with another couple of guys, and I literally spent two years getting my ass kicked in China because I just thought that, you know, we could write contracts, write agreements, shake hands and get on with it. And I realized that there’s a completely different legal system there, and there probably isn’t really much of a commercial legal system, as we would recognize. So I was signing these wonderful agreements, sticking in a drawer, thinking that that I’d done a good job, but actually with largely unenforceable. And I mean, that’s one of a number of cultural own goals that you know I was I was engaged, and eventually I realized that I was going to have to do things differently, and I was going to have to slow down. It was much more personal relationship stuff. What would have taken me three hours in London was was going to take three days, and it was a dance that I had to do. Is just one example of the cultural variance. And it is a big mistake to think that the US is, again, I’ve done business in the US, and they’re extremely entrepreneurial as a as a country. It’s not an accident. They’re the number one. But what’s interesting to me about the Americans is they’re so bloody optimistic. So you come away from a conversation American businessman, you think that that you know you’re going to do business together, everything is going to be great. They’re going to buy, what, you’ve got to sell, and then you never hear from them again.
Richard Turner 11:24
No, yeah. I mean, still, and you can liken it to humor. You know, we’re an English colony. We understand the English humor probably a lot better than we do the American humor. So you can, and there’s very slapstick over there. We’re just a different culture in that way. So you can liken that to business. We’re just different and and where you say they’re very bullish and very optimistic in the US, and you get very excited coming away from conversations in the US. And I’ve spoken to many companies that have done that, and same experience that really you walk away thinking, I’ve got this I’ve got this contract, and you know this is going to work, and you never hear from them again. It’s just, they’re very positive, optimistic people. But it’s, it’s the culture is different, the Connect is different.
Michael McGrath 12:07
So coming back to that, your journey for a minute. So you came from a pretty entrepreneurial family. Your father was in business in in a in the kind of meat processing world. Tell us a little bit about what that was like growing up with that, yeah.
Richard Turner 12:21
So I was the youngest of three boys. And look, growing up in a business family, so dad had this company called Holbrook Meats back in the, probably the late 60s, early 70s. That was, was very successful, started pretty much from the dining room table. So I remember that from the very early days. And during primary school, I’d, you know, we would all be sent in there, and, you know, washing the walls and cleaning the drains and packing the offal, doing all the great jobs. But as much as you look back on that, and you think, Geez, that was like child slave labor, like most family businesses, but you think, wow, I learned the value of hard work. I learned the value of money. And as you could imagine, in a workplace like that, the melting pot of cultures that that would be there. I learned at a very young age how to have a conversation with pretty much everyone, and playing table tennis at lunchtime. And it was, it was such a tremendous opportunity to grow up in a business like that. And then so I was, as I said, the youngest of three boys, but I was also the first luckily enough to have the chance to go to university. So my two older brothers got, you know, sucked into the business at a younger age, and they went straight into into work, but I had the chance to go and do a bachelor of business back in the early 80s at University of South Australia, or even before it was the University of South Australia was the Institute of Technology. But technology back then, and I was one of the first to go through, one of the first, first cohorts to go through to actually learn computer coding, which was quite remarkable. And yeah, after, after doing that on punch cards at school, to start coding on a on a screen and keyboard, and at work at that time, this company was sort of in the early 80s, growing rapidly. And back in those days, for those listeners who were old enough to remember, we had an Old Wang computer with a five inch floppy drive that just did our accounts payable and accounts receivable, and we’d just purchased this big Hewlett Packard 3000 that was in a full room, air conditioned room, and people will just be awestruck with this now, but the CPU was the size of a washing machine. We had two, 256 megabyte disk drives that were the size of suitcases. You know, the tape big reel to reel tape drives, the long printers and my job we it was to come in and take control of this machine and start automating all the big processes within the business. And at a young age, just, you know, in university, learning, coding, completing that course and coming into the business, I thought, Okay, I’ve got to make this machine work for the business. Business. So I need to find what are the biggest, most complex processes we do in this business that I can automate. And our livestock buying process or system was, you know, that drove our cost of goods for the business. And the way that worked at that point was completely manual. We had lots of cattle buyers all around the country buying 1000s of head of cattle a week, writing all the cost information and where they were from, the breeds and who bought them all on scrappy bits of paper that ended up in the office that had to be manually tallied up, that took sometimes weeks, and yet, that was our cost of goods. So our sales people often were working in the dark. So I thought, Okay, I need to try and develop a system here where our cattle buyers could key in that information directly, and we could have it available almost immediately. But you could imagine the cultural change that had to happen to get our cattle buyers around the country to start using computers and keying this information in was a huge challenge, but I persisted with it, developed the system, got it happening, and what I remember is just the impact it had, not only on the company, but on the industry. It completely disrupted the industry. It catapulted the business to the top of the tree. And as a young lad, still thinking this, this is quite remarkable. You know, it really lit a fire inside of me that what I had done, I had actually disrupted an industry. And I thought, wow, you know, that’s what I want to do for the rest of my life, is go into industries and change the way those industries work. And anyway, that company became a public company in 1986 and and then two of our cattle buyers bought the export division out of the public company. Continued it on, and that company is now known as Thomas foods International. It’s a multi billion dollar business here in Australia and but to see that come from, again, pretty much the dining room table, through to a public company through to what now?
Michael McGrath 17:01
Yeah, it’s interesting. I mean that. I mean you just articulated, really, the start of the digital revolution. I mean that, yes, yeah, that early 80s period. I mean, I got into business in 86 that period was PC started turning up on desks. Well,
Richard Turner 17:18
We had the very first Macintoshes doing word processing. Yeah, back then in the early 80s,
Michael McGrath 17:24
I remember when we got our first computer, we got it from all football club because they’d bought it and that no one knew how to work it. So my uncle at the time, stuck it in his car and drove it to us. And then we got Tony, one of the lads in accounts, and said, Can you see what you can do with that, and away you went.
Richard Turner 17:43
I remember going into the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney a few years ago, and some of the early computers we used to use are in the museum. And I’d say to my wife, I can’t believe that I’m going to the museum to see stuff that I grew up with
Speaker 1 17:54
I mean, but that 40 year journey has been incredible, and in terms of the transformation that digital revolution, which is, I mean, for those Gen Z is among us, who we probably put to sleep by now, let’s, let’s just chat about AI for a second. I mean, that we’ve now got a new frontier opening up, effectively,
Richard Turner 18:15
Unbelievable. Yeah, the opportunity for AI in terms of assisting the productivity of our people. You know, it shouldn’t be a threat to jobs, but what it should enable our businesses to do is be five to 10 times more productive. You know, every individual within that business can do their research in an instant, get jobs done in an instant. You know whether it’s presentations or any form of information gathering. You’ve got it at your fingertips, and you can use it immediately, and you can even go to the point of preparing those presentations or or whatever you need to do. So the the application of AI coming up is extraordinary, something we certainly didn’t have the benefit of, yeah, any more than a few years ago,
Michael McGrath 19:04
There’s certainly a lot of fear. And, you know, I mean, the media love a bad news story. I mean, you know, if they can make it catastrophic, they will, but effectively, I’m definitely on the half glass, half full side of the equation around AI, we’re beginning to see some great utility units. And, you know, we don’t see it taking over the world, frankly, and but we do see it being able to do lots of things that we just couldn’t do. I mean, the whole language model, the ability to interrogate information in a in a much more meaningful way than than we were bound effectively by, you know, objects and and, you know, the way information was stored. Now, all of a sudden, we can start through the language models just interrogating our own data and getting more intelligence from it.
Richard Turner 19:58
Yeah, well, in terms of fund. Fundamentals we were talking about before. You know the big fundamental, once you get past starting a business and validating a business and validating your products, and you’ve got demand, and your business starts to grow, and if you’ve got something that is hot in the market, like with my last company, Zen energy, we basically pioneered the solar industry in Australia back in the early 2000s and we knew we had a hot product, we had to create a platform for rapid growth, which I learned how to do in my previous company, Regency food, which we’re sort of getting a bit out of order, but developing that platform for growth. Because if someone asked me, What’s the key to success in business, it’s consistency. You’ve got to be consistent in everything you do, so the customer experience is the same, no matter who they engage with or what channel they engage with, with your company. And to be able to create a platform for growth that is consistent, you need to create processes and procedures and utilizing a quality management system, training your staff. But the application of AI to assist in that process is tremendous, you know. But in terms of training, like all our customer facing staff is in energy, one of the biggest recruits I made for that company was nothing to do with energy. He was the franchise manager for Baker’s delight, you know, but I he came into the business, and for hours after work each day, we would role play with all our customer facing staff, the conversations we’d have, the terminology they’d use, the language they would use. So the customer conversation was the same with every customer that connected with the company, so that that consistency in terms of what you expect from a company is is absolutely critical.
Michael McGrath 21:47
You know, I look at your sort of background and I go, wow, you know, you skip past that. But to get into that energy disruptive area so early, I mean, if I look what’s happened since then with the carbon credit schemes and goodness knows what, and, yeah, I mean that that was, that was very early in that area, and, and, you know, to make a success of that. And did you get your timing right? Were you too early? What? What? What enabled you to see that when you saw it.
Richard Turner 22:22
Yeah, well, the timing is everything in business, and I’ll just lead into the Zen energy story. I’ll just quickly give a quick overview of the second business, because after the meat processing business, Holbrook Meats, which became Thomas foods, my brother and I went and set up a food distribution company called Regency food services, which was a journey of if you had a restaurant or a caterer or a hotel or a hospitality outlet, in those days, you had probably 20 or 30 suppliers coming in the back door from all over the place, largely based on temperature zones of the products required. So you had frozen food suppliers, you had grocery suppliers, you had packaging suppliers, you had confectionery, chilled goods, small goods, you know, you had supplies for everything. The big trend that we saw coming in from overseas was from the US in particular, was around being able to provide all of that from one supplier. So a bit like Coles or Woolworths are now, but in food service, wholesale size quantities, and being able to set up a complex multi temperature warehouse and have vehicles that were multi temperature zone that we could deliver this product. So we started this company. We grew this company very rapidly, we did about five big innovations and disruptions in the industry, which I’ll get to later in the conversation, but completely disrupted that industry to the point where by 1998 and 1999 we’d won Australian food service distributor of the year twice in a row. And when? When Bidvest, and you’ll see the bid food trucks driving around all capital cities. Now, when Bidvest, the parent company, which is a South African company, went to the UK in the 90s, they basically rationalized the food service distribution business in the UK, bought the biggest food distributors, and then created the first national company, and then brought that model to Australia. So when they came to Australia, they were looking for a company that was who they deem to be like the model business they wanted to base their Australian business on. And saw our company, and we even had the same phone number as what they had in the UK. It was like one three food or one 300 food or something. And they said, You’re the company that made no secret about it. You’re the company we want to buy in Australia. And then they approached us five times in 1999 to buy our company. And my brother, Greg and I said, Well, look, we’re both pretty young. Still. We’re not really ready to sell. And they just kept coming back. And you know, it got to a got to a silly. Account, and we said, okay, maybe it’s time to go surfing or do something else. So, so we sold that business, but, but the young, and I will say, the young girl I employed as my receptionist when she was 20, is now the CEO of that multi billion dollar business. And a very good lesson there in employing people, that when you employ people. You should always envisage them. Could they be part of my leadership team? Can they go two or three levels up?
Michael McGrath 25:27
She’s a CEO of Australia, isn’t she? For bidves. That’s a 2.7
Richard Turner 25:31
It has been for 10 or 15 years now, and is a real gun. But yeah, it started as a receptionist.
Michael McGrath 25:38
I mean, I mean, just to put that in context, bidves are $2.7 billion organization in Australia now. I mean, it’s, that’s pretty impressive, isn’t it? Yeah,
Richard Turner 25:46
Yep. Well, that’s that started, you know. And, I mean, I can take you through some of the innovations we did there that might be good for your listeners to hear. Because, you know, a lot of people think of innovation or disruption as being technology based. It it doesn’t always come from technology. And, in fact, none of our innovations in that industry came through technology. So the second thing we did there was, I said to my brother one day, you know, we’re a hospitality business. We’re supplying hospitality outlets, you know, restaurants and caterers and hotels, and we were working almost opposite hours of the clock. So we started off that business running traditional warehouse hours from sort of early morning, four or five in the morning through till sort of early afternoon, mid afternoon, and we’d shut down, but our but our customers were working from lunchtime through till 10 or 11 o’clock at night. And and the chefs who would order the food would just pick up the phone and they get an answering machine. Chefs are grumpy people at the best of times, and they they would say, You know what I freaking want, and let’s slam the phone down. And of course, we’d get the order wrong, and and we have to send out couriers the next day, and that would cost us money, and that would blow the profit on the orders. And we thought, well, this we need to think of how we can do things differently here to match the operating times of our customers. So we embarked on setting up the first 24 hour distribution center in Australia, and also we commenced that with running three tele sales teams from early morning right through to about 10 or 11 o’clock at night so we could talk to our customers in the takeaways, in the restaurants, in the in the hotels, talk to our chefs who order the food. We’ve developed a relationship with them. We confirmed, confirmed the orders with them. Through our quality management system, we got the orders right. Warehouse staff came in at midnight, our computer systems, we were all always on the leading edge of technology, or probably bleeding edge of technology, but we printed the picking sheets per vehicle, where they could do one lap of the warehouse pick the stock. They went into a staging area. Big telescopic loaders went into the truck. We had the trucks loaded and out the door by four o’clock. So we were last to take orders. We spoke to our customers, we built a relationship. We got the orders right. We were first on the road in the morning and first to deliver. So who do you think got the business and the company like that? And I remember that year getting the Qantas business, getting the Olympic Dam business. You know, all the big accounts in Australia were starting to come to us.
Michael McGrath 28:19
I mean, it sounds like common sense, doesn’t it? But I suppose that’s the trouble with common sense. It’s not that common often.
Richard Turner 28:25
It’s just intensely listening to your customer. What are we not doing? What are the latent needs that you need? How we can how can we make your business better? And you know, so by having one key delivery coming in the back door rather than 20 made a huge difference to their business and the convenience, so the business took off. The next thing you have to do is always ask yourself, What business Am I in? And again, these are the fundamentals. Like, when you get a business to that sort of size, often you’re running multiple businesses within a business. So when I say that we were running we’re very good at sales. We were very good at purchasing. We were very good at managing this complex warehouse. But one of the big problems, and was always a distraction for us, was managing this big fleet of by that time, we had about 14 trucks on the road. Drivers would be sick. Trucks would break down. Air conditioning units had broke down. The trucks had to be cleaned and maintained and and as employees, these drivers only seem to be able to do about 20 or 25 deliveries a day. Yep. But there was always a problem, something going on that would take my brother and I away from where we added the most value to the business, to do stuff that didn’t add value to the business. We were just fixing up problems that should, you know, you shouldn’t need to keep doing. But these things kept happening. So we asked ourselves, okay, how can we fix this? Is there a way maybe the owner, the drivers, could take ownership of their rounds? You know? How would that work? So we, we looked at the value of product on average. Which they’d take out. We calculated that as a percentage of what the drivers would cost us in salary, plus their own costs and insurance cost to the trucks, etc. And I remember this figure because it was burned into my head. It was 4.75% was what we had to pay them to give them a good salary, and all the the extra cost they needed to run their trucks. And of course, if you’re going to have that conversation with your staff, you know you’re going to get a very wary response from them. And of course we did, but you’ve only got to get one or two to say, yeah, we’ll give that a go, as long as we can go back to the old way. And we did that. We got a couple to say, yep, we’ll give it a go. And these guys turned into Supermen overnight. They were doing 50 deliveries a day. They were rotating the stock in the customers freezers. They were upselling the customers on new stock lines. Our customers basically became their customers. Their trucks were always the best looking trucks on the road. We’d have customers ring us up saying what the hell’s got into your drivers. They are incredible. And of course, the company just took off. So, you know, always ask yourself, What business Am I in? Where am I adding the most value to this business? What am I doing that I shouldn’t be doing? And make those clear cut decisions coming back to fundamentals.
Michael McGrath 31:14
I mean, it’s interesting. Is it that, that empowerment, Richard, that sort of idea, that we can find some kind of win win, just that idea of, how can we both do better, right? That’s, that’s a very innovative thought, isn’t it? Really? Yeah, we’re all
Richard Turner 31:32
In business because there’s something we know that we can bring to the market personally that creates value, and if we start doing all these other things that take us away from that. We start devaluing our own business. And so that was a key one. Then another thing, another thing towards the end of the business that was very innovative was, as I said, the people who order the food are the chefs and the people in the kitchen. But back in the late 90s, there was a cafe explosion, and, you know, street dining and cafe started going everywhere and and there was a real shortage of hospitality staff, much like there is now. And food sales staff who were going into these places and selling were being approached by the managers of these venues saying, Oh, can you go and talk to the chef down the road? I want him to work for me. Or can you go and talk to that food and beer? Food and beverage manager? I want him to work for me. And so us food sales staff were being used like recruitment people by play art customers. And this came up at a sales meeting, and I remember thinking, Oh, maybe the timing’s right to provide a flexible workforce for our customers and set up a hospitality staffing agency. And we had a young woman at the time, Christy. Her name was that was helping us recruit our own staff, and I knew she had a background in hospitality, and I said to Christy one day, you know, I think there’s an opportunity for a hospitality staffing agency. What do you think? If you think it’s the timing’s right as a good idea, let’s set up Regency staffing, and you run it for us. And she came back in a couple of days and said, Yep, I think you’re right. We did it, and she ran it, and I think we did two or $3 million in staff placements that year, but also had 300 chefs working for us, including 10 shifts in a Qantas and but the thing that we didn’t actually plan on, you know, the idea was to create a flexible workforce for our customers. But who orders the food? The chefs. Now, if we owned the chefs, who were they going to order the food from? So we created this circular economy within our own industry, which was incredible. So, yeah, all these innovations just completely set us apart. And the companies, when we started the business that we aspired to be as good as we thought, Oh, we could ever be as good as them? That would be amazing. We surpassed those companies in two or three years, and we were just in clear air, doing things that no one had ever dreamt of changing the industry, making it really hard for people to catch us. And of course, we ended up being the target as Yeah, and being very public about the journey, being very public about the journey, is something I always tell young entrepreneurs, because I get people saying to me, Oh, we want to fly under the radar. We don’t want to be seen or noticed. And I said, Well, that’s great, until you fall off the radar. You try and find investors and try and find staff when no one knows who you are and what you’re doing, and that’s why most people can’t find staff. They’re not they’re not good about telling their story to the media, being public about their successes, their rewards, their recognition, and giving people and being very clear on the vision again. I come back to your Elon Musks and your Mark Zuckerbergs and your Bill Gates is, I mean, they’re half crazy people, but it’s half crazy people that change the world. And it’s, you never not know what those guys are doing. You know, they’re very they’re talking to the media all the time. They’re envisioned. What the world’s going to look like this is, this is where we’re going. People get a chance to fall in love with these businesses, and they’re just an example, yeah? I mean, no, no, I think, yeah, as a local example. You mean I, I interviewed Flavia Tata Nadi for the book, who founded fleet space, which is Australia’s leading space company. I mean, her mission is to put a fleet of satellites around the Earth, Moon and Mars for mineral exploration. So what young kid’s not going to want to be a part of that company? It’s just an attraction. And what investors are not going to want to be a part of that business going forward? And for my own companies, we’ve never had to look for staff. They’ve been knocking on our door because people want to work for us. We’ve never had to find investors because people were knocking on our doors wanting to buy the company and but you’ve got to be very public. Someone’s got to be, as I talk about these days, someone’s got to be the Mick Jagger in your business, and get out there and dance and talk to the media and talk to the public and be very clear on what, where this company is going, what we’re going what we’re going to look like in a few years time, where the market’s going, and what we’re doing.
Michael McGrath 36:04
So it’s interesting. One of the examples you use in your book was The Haigh Chocolatier company. I think they’re fifth generation, yes, yeah. So in your research there, what, what is it about a business that goes four or five generations? What? What? What was the essence and the fundamentals there that allowed that longevity.
Richard Turner 36:22
Yeah, look, with multi generational businesses, the fundamentals still don’t change. Like in talking to Simon Hague, who’s current fourth generation owner, and Simon and his brother Alistair are joint managing directors, and they’re in the process of retiring now and and and then the fifth generation. You know, there’s no one standing up looking like the next, next owner at this stage, because some of them are still quite young. But you know, their board is managing that that transition. However, going back over the previous four generations, every generation of that family has done something unique and entrepreneurial to give that company new life and grow the business. So the company, in the first couple of generations was were doing very basic, low quality chocolate for the armed forces, you know, in the early wars. And it wasn’t till the third generation, John Haig that went over to Austria, and I think did work with the Lindt family over there, and taught the children how to speak English, in exchange for learning how to make chocolate and brought and also in that process and working in the factory, learned where all the good cocoa beans were coming from, learnt the supply chain and sources, and brought that experience back to Australia and really reinvented The Hague’s chocolate making process. He also went to the US and learned from the US retailers how to retail confectionery properly and between the making of quality chocolate and developing a retail concept, that was a huge change for the business, so you know, and that was in the third generation. And then Alistair and Simon have taken it a step further, expanding that business, taking it across Australia, continuing to develop the retail storefronts, continuing to develop and scale the manufacturing and distribution process and but even Simon said himself, he read my book and he said, Oh, that distribution thing, we need to consider that, because our Special, our speciality is making chocolate and running retail distribution is something we need to think about as well, you know. So it’s what what are you good at? And what are you potentially is a distraction
Michael McGrath 38:50
That brings out an important point around took me a while, but I eventually got the hang of talking to competitors, not in an adversarial way, but just in a kind of humble what can we learn? What can we share? And I find small businesses are reluctant to do that, but it’s been such a rich source of information for me to just speak to others and tell them who I am and what we’re doing, and ask them how things they’re finding things. And there’s been an incredible explosion of insight that’s come to me, particularly when every five years I’m moving to a new area, it’s just kind of the way I’m wired. And the fastest way to get across it is to speak to others who’ve been doing it for ages. And you know, you look at what they’re doing well, and you look at perhaps, what they’re not doing so well. And you know, you mentioned that. I mean, it’s quite humbling, you know, for for the Hague family to go and spend time talking to a competitor in Switzerland, for them to go to the US and figure out what they were doing well, in retail there, that’s and then bring that back and harness it, you know, leverage it. It’s good and so. So coming out of food, then that’s a big jump in. In terms of sector to move into Zen energy. And that’s what was my question earlier, was, you know what was going on there? Because that was extremely ahead of its time.
Richard Turner 40:10
I get asked all the time, how did you go from food to distribution to energy and and it was a simple story. I was just one night playing with the kids in the backyard, in the cubby house, and the sun was going down, and they wanted to put a little light and a little radio in the cubby house, and we had no power at the back of the yard. And this was early 2000s like about 2003 and I said, Okay, jump in the jump of the car. We’ll go down the hobby shop and we’ll see what we can find. Thinking I was going to come back with a car battery, 12 volt battery or something. Can? I was just going to power it from that. And anyway, I so this is before there was any solar industry or any commercial solar installers at all. So I found this little panel in the hobby shop, and I said to the guy, what’s that do? And he said, Oh, that’s a solar panel. And I said, oh, so what does that do? And I enjoyed maths and physics at school, so I was quite intrigued. And he said that converts sunlight to electricity. And I said, Ah, that’s interesting. So I said, could that charge this battery over here, this 12 volt battery? And he said, yeah, if you matched it up. And then he wrote Ohms law on the whiteboard, or what’s equals volts times amps. And so we we started matching the solar panel to the battery, and we got this little regulator and inverter, and this the cable and the switch gear and all that had to be matched as well, because it had to be proper DC cable. And other, you know, all the switch gear had to match. And brought all this home, and had a lot of fun putting it together with the kids, and we got this cubby house system working, and the battery never went flat, and it was fantastic. And my father in law was a senior electrician, and I said to Peter, I said, Can you see any technical barriers in this powering a house? And he said, No. He said, You might there’d be a lot of regulatory barriers, but the I can’t see any actual technical barriers in scaling the components. So that was enough for me. And I thought, Okay, I’ll start just researching around the world in who’s who could potentially make these things. And there was a company in Germany called SMA that had just come out of the railway sector and made these big inverters for the railway yards. And they just started making these small inverters, though, that I could use in the home. And then I found a company in China called et solar that were an very early solar panel manufacturer had one production line started the same year. We started in 2004 and they were always lined up making these little solar panels, hand making them. So I went and met with the the chairman over there. And it was funny, we had a young, three month old baby at the time and and a Caucasian baby in the middle of China back then. Was a real novelty. You know, everyone would have their picture taken the baby. So it was like an open door to get to the get to the chairman straight away, and had this conversation with them. And I said, Look, I want to create a matching solar panel to these inverters in Germany, so and I want to brand the whole thing as a integrated system. Because the challenge we had if I was going to take this to market. And at that time, no one knew what a solar panel did, and no one knew what an inverter did. We all know that now, but back then was a different time, so I thought the only way I can take this to market where people needed to trust the brand. So the brand was really important, and they needed to trust what the system was going to do. So we took it to market on a very simple proposition, that this would power from a quarter of the average home to all of the average home. We came up with this brand called Zen. So Zen was an acronym back then for zero energy. Was about balancing generation and demand and the mission statement in those early days was to show our customers how to live free in a zero energy environment. So what we were selling weren’t bits and pieces, weren’t solar panels and converters and cables and switch gear. It was the whole concept of having energy independence at a time when no one could ever conceive you could ever be energy independent. So we introduced this whole thing of energy independence that people just fell in love with. And it was just at a time when John Howard, who was prime minister, was starting to talk about climate change. We were reading about climate change in the newspapers.
Michael McGrath 44:39
So this is 2004 Richard
Richard Turner 44:42
Yeah just Yeah. Starting to there was talk of the first subsidies for conserving energy in the home. And timing was perfect. So, but I thought, I can’t sell these solar panels and inverters and bits and pieces. So I put it all together in a. System package called a Zen home energy system. So we knew we were going to be be very disruptive in the market. And if you’re going to do something different and disrupt any market, whatever you’re doing given a new name, you know it’s the quickest and easiest way to cut through. So we coined this term home energy back then. You know, it’s quite ubiquitous. Now, you hear Home Energy mentioned a lot, but we started that terminology back in 2004 and so we released this system as the Zen home energy system. Didn’t want to call it a solar system or a business, a solar company, because we wanted to keep the door open for other forms of energy that we could, we could tap into, but we launched it as the Zen home energy system. People fell in love with it. The business went from 1 million to 5 million to 20 million to 70 million. Yeah, in the first four years, and then just kept going. And it was just a remarkable journey, and everything we learned in those previous businesses about developing a platform to enable rapid growth we put into the last business from day one. So we created all those systems, procedures, everything from day one, so we knew we could scale consistently. We developed a positive cash flow model. Cash flow is critical when you’re starting a business, so you want to be cash positive or cash neutral, at least not cash negative. So which most businesses are, by the way, so cash negative is when you incur the costs before you get the money come in. So most people have 14 days credit or 30 days credit before they get paid, but you’ve already paid your staff and paid your wages, so you have to find money to make those payments. So but because this was such a hot, hot industry, and people were prepared to pay upfront or pay a deposit for the system that could fund our supply chain, the more we sold, the more cash we had in the bank. So we were a cash positive company, and we won the fastest growing company in South Australia two years in a row, which they said was technically impossible. I don’t think anyone’s ever done it since, but we’re growing at a rate of 437% for on average over four years. We maintain that growth for four years was supposed to be impossible.
Michael McGrath 47:22
So, Richard, what were you charging? You know, back in the day early on, for those systems, what was a household paying for you for the system?
Richard Turner 7:30
I think some of the most popular systems were around the sort of $15,000 mark. You know, they were there. They cost a lot more, and they were a lot smaller systems, but they did the job we had. We had much bigger feed in tariffs then. So any surplus energy you got paid a lot more money for. So the economic still stacked up. You know, we’ll
Michael McGrath 47:49
So still get so these would have been early adopters. They would have these would have been people who were nuanced around environment. And, yeah, that’s interesting,
Richard Turner 47:58
Largely retirees, who are retiring who didn’t have future income and wanted to invest their superannuation in something that could make them self sufficient. So it just, it just was the perfect timing for that market to produce that product. However, that journey wasn’t without its problems, you know, and we should talk about the problems that we had, because it was, you know, we were always up against the fossil fuel companies, you know, the the old energy producers that really didn’t want to see this technology take off, who were continually lobbying the government to change subsidies and change the framework and, you know, The renewable, renewable energy certificates as part of the subsidies were a big part of it back then. So that whole framework changed completely between 2012 and 2015 because the renewable energy certificates for every system that we installed, and we had 1000s of these that we would get all the time that would offset the cost of the systems for our customers. These were valued at $60 as a set price, and then the government removed that framework and took it to an open market through a clearinghouse, and almost overnight, these things became worthless for a period of time, until the market adjusted and the normal supply and demand processes kicked in, but these were sitting on all the solar companies balance sheets, and their balance sheets just crashed, and nearly every solar company in the country went broke between 2012 and 2015 some people may remember that, yeah, yeah. And the subsidies were designed to come off, but not come off in a very clunky way. They did, because as the industry scaled, costs were coming down, so we didn’t need the same level of subsidy. But the way they took the subsidies off was just done in a terrible way, and it just destroyed the industry virtually overnight. But. But yeah, so our board did a lot of soul searching. I had some remarkable people on my board, and we decided the economic still made sense that we would pursue it. Professor Ross garno came onto our board in 2015 and I had another chap, Raymond Spencer came onto our board in 2010 Raymond had already done extremely well with his own business globally. Was he was headquartered in Chicago with a big financial services company that had gone public. He was already technically a billionaire, but he had invested in the company that was developing the first lithium ion battery management system to enable these big grid batteries that we see these days. So we were very early into the battery technology. And then Professor Ross Garneau, who is our preeminent economics professor in Australia, based out of the Melbourne University, who advised our federal government back in 2008 and 2011 what the impact of climate change was going to be on our economy. He also initiated the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. He initiated arena, the Renewable Energy Agency. He developed our first carbon pricing mechanism. He was looking to not just be the architect of change, he wanted to be part of the change. And he was looking for a company to join. And saw our company and said, Well, you’ve got the people, you’ve got the technology. Can I go on that journey with you? Just as Raymond said, he saw the company, saw what we were doing, can I go on the journey with you? That’s where I said, all these people got to see our company, heard the story, saw what we were doing, fell in love with the business. And when We said to Ross, we need you to come on board, because we to put these big batteries and solar farms and wind farms into the grid. You can’t just plug them into a grid that was designed for coal and gas, because coal and gas is a constant thermal source of energy, whereas renewables are intermittent, you know. So we needed batteries to smooth that energy supply and make make it look like big solar and gas plants in the grid, but the rules had to change on how the grid operated. So it was a very complex time. But what Ross wanted to do when he joined the company, straight away, he said, We need to own both sides of the energy meter, not just the household side. So when you put solar on your house, you reduce your house’s energy consumption on the household side, but you still have to buy in power from the street, from AGL or origin or one of the big retailers. Ross said, straight away, we need to be a retailer like AGL and origin and a generator, and own these big solar farms and wind farms and big batteries in the grid. So we transitioned to become a generator and retailer in 2015 and that’s what we’ve been doing for the last 10 years. So Zen is now about the third or fourth biggest generator and retailer in the country, after AGL and origin. You don’t hear so much about Zen because we don’t do residential energy. We only do commercial and industrial but we supply the states with their power. The lot of the councils, like half the councils in Sydney, with their power. Lot of the big all the big mining companies, the big retailers, like your Bunnings, your office works. We supply all their energy. CSIRO, even with their Deep Space Center, we supply all their energy so and also buc gasses recently, so we’re actually trying to reduce the emissions from the gas industry by all their pumping and stuff. So Zen is a very large generator and retailer, and I’m very proud of the journey that business has gone on and the challenges we’ve had to deal with and in 2015 when we transitioned from a generator, from a solar and battery company to being a generator and retailer was very confronting for me personally, because I had to say to the board, look, you know, they were talking about the journey going forward. And I said, Look, that’s understanding the complex energy markets is not my skill set. You know, I love the maths and the science behind the solar and the batteries, but where we’re going, I’m not the right person for your CEO. You know, I needed to step down. We brought in an interim CEO from AGL guy called Jeff Titus, who was fantastic. He took us through that interim period, and we now have Anthony Garneau. Ross Garneau, son is our CEO, and just doing a remarkable job and really leading the transition to clean energy in Australia. So very proud of that business. Yeah.
Michael McGrath 54:28
So do you step down? Did you? Are you not exactly?
Richard Turner 54:32
Yeah. I stepped down in 2015 as I was CEO for the first 12 years, and then stepped down to being innovation director and and did some other roles I’ve now, basically, I’m not in the business day to day at all. Haven’t been since more the last five years. So just a very happy shareholder watching what they’re doing at the moment. But, but again, very different business, right product, right time. Fundamental, fundamentals. In place,
Michael McGrath 55:00
very different. And there’s a highly regulative environment in terms of the framework and the governments involved, and that becomes very choppy. And there’s a need for lobbying. God knows what? There’s a very, you know, brings its own volatility, that doesn’t it.
Richard Turner 55:14
Yeah, so you just got to bring the right people into the company, and you’ve got to be, you know, an entrepreneurs biggest mistake, often is holding onto 100% of nothing, rather than having a small percentage of something huge. It’s about the vision, which is entrepreneurs are great at seeing an opportunity in the market, getting it going, growing, but a company and I teach CEOs how to grow companies these days, and companies are often like children growing up. You know when, when the company is young, and it’s in startup mode and initial growth mode, you’re doing everything, you’re validating the market, you’re doing all these things. But then the company gets into rapid growth mode where you’ve got to have a leadership team, and you’ve got to be able to delegate responsibility, and you’ve got to have systems and procedures, and you’ve got to start letting go of those things, because if you don’t let go, you become the bottleneck for growth in the company. And I see so many companies, particularly family businesses, get to five or 10 million in revenue and can’t grow beyond that, because they just can’t let go of the company. And that is the biggest barrier to growth. So yeah, you’ve got to create value in the company, not value in yourself. And so many people struggle with that. You know, not all entrepreneurs make it.
Michael McGrath 56:33
Yeah it’s interesting that we call them glass ceilings. So you look at any particular sector or vertical that we’re operating in, and we we see various glass ceilings that emerge. 5 million might be one, 8 million or 10 million, and a whole bunch of businesses get stuck around those levels because of some of the reasons that you’re talking about, which is the current thinking has got them to that point, and that’s often the most difficult bit of the journey, often, not always, but often. And yet, that inability to put it under management systematically and get some some bigger thinking and skills, and that’s a very it’s got to be right size that Richard, because if you bring a corporate guy in, he wants to smother it. But if you bring anyone into entrepreneur, you end up with the same problem that got you to the glass ceiling. So it’s, it’s matching those skills, isn’t it? And it sounds like you did a great job of that at Zen, by the way, was identifying those, those people that could, you know, move it, move it to the next level, yeah
Richard Turner 57:43
For that to get to where it is. Now, I just had, we just had to bring in the right people, you know, the specialists in that area. And, yeah, I mean, I played my role, got it to where it was. And we’ve built an amazing leadership team, an amazing board, and, yeah, we’ve had people from all over the world now you know coming into our board that have run massive power companies.
Michael McGrath 58:09
Yeah, look fascinating story, Richard, I’m so grateful just to let’s just wrap up talking a little bit about the role of vision and values and planning in that business mode that starts, particularly that startup early stage mode. Often, I think this is under done. The need for a clear vision, the need for values, because the values won’t change, the business will change. The people might check, but the values invariably, you know, a reflection of the management, this the ownership. And I think they can be really important, particularly if they’re embraced, I think, and and then planning, obviously, yeah, well,
Richard Turner 58:51
Let’ talk about both of those things, because the vision, as I said before, just telling the story, articulating the story, talking to the media, using public relations, which is often the dark hearts of marketing. I would spend half my marketing budget on public relations, because otherwise advertising is you talking about you. Public Relations is other credible people talking about your business and the success of your business, so much value comes in other people talking about it, but to tell the story of your company, you’ve got to have this aspirational mission statement. You’ve got to be able to tell the world how you’re going to change the world within your sector through your mission statement. That needs to be front and center of your business. Your vision statement is what your company is going to look like in three years time. So by 2028 we’re going to be doing this, and we’re going to be this company by doing these things. And yeah, so it’s the whole how and what the business is going to look like in three or four years time. And the values is the culture that you set within your company. It’s how the communications work internally. Externally. You. With all your stakeholders in and out of the company. You know that culture and that vision and that mission is not only important for your customers, it’s critical for your employees to know the journey they’re on. That’s how you get them to stay with your company. Otherwise, they’ll go and join another company that’s got a clear vision and mission and values. So your employees, your customers, your suppliers, to get the best suppliers in the industry, they need to know the journey you’re on, your financiers, your investors, stakeholders. Everyone needs to know the journey you’re on. To get people to come on board and support the vision and the mission. It is so crazy critical. And then to create the mission and the vision and the values, you’ve got to have the business plan. And this is what so many people don’t do, is take time to sit down and actually think about and I take a lot of our my growth CEOs at the moment, I take them through a process where they envision envisioning their company being 10 times the size it is now, which blows people’s minds. But if you’ve got a $3 million business, what’s it going to look like at $30 million if you’ve got a $20 million business, what’s it going to look like at $200 million and when I say that, it is okay, not not only what is the revenue going to be? You know what that is at 10 times, what is the profit you’re going to make? But what products and services are you going to be selling to? What markets? Most importantly, how are you going to be doing that? What infrastructure will you need? So in infrastructure is people, what technology, what equipment and hardware and assets, like buildings, desks, computers, warehouses, etc, and how are you going to finance it? So they’re the elements of a business plan. So we do this example. This, you know, what do you look like in 10 years times? Which people really blow their mind? Sorry, not 10 times the size in five years time. And then I get them to step it back to now. And it’s amazing how many people can then go, oh, wow, I can see how we can get there, you know? And, and I say, well, that’s extreme, you know, that’s not what you know, that sort of growth is extreme growth. Organic companies, just running a good business should be growing at about 15% per year. So I try and push companies you should be looking, when you’re doing your growth plan, to look at probably 30% plus per year on strong growth and but there is no reason you can’t grow a lot faster than that, and that’s why I take them through that process, but you should always be doing a three year business plan of those fundamental things, again, revenue, profit, what products and services to? Who am I selling it to? How am I selling it? What infrastructure do I need, and how am I going to finance it? Those elements need to be in your three year plan, and it doesn’t have to be detailed. It could be on one sheet of paper or two sides of an a four, just as long as you’ve got something written down and you know, and you can share that with your team and other people on how you’re going to get there, but then you should always do a one year operational plan, which is the same thing, but with more clarity, because next year is what’s right in front of you, is what you’ve got the most clarity over. And what milestones do we have to hit next year to enable us to be set up for year two and year three? But no, no business plans ever set in stone. It’s it’s, you know, if things don’t go quite to plan or go exceed the plan, you can always change year two and three and go throughout but has to be done, because without that, you can’t have a clear vision or a clear mission, and you can’t tell the story to all the key stakeholders in your industry and beyond.
Michael McGrath 1:03:50
I think that that ability to sit down and plan and think through in some detail and simulate on paper at least what might happen. It’s so much cheaper to do that than to to launch headlong in the direction that your instincts telling you to go and then figure out when you get there that perhaps that wasn’t great. So yeah, a little bit of that, bringing it down, you know, into three years and then one year, that sounds like great advice. Look, thanks for that input. Richard, that was phenomenal. You’ve had a fascinating career and journey and story. I know you’re helping other entrepreneurs now. You’re on the board, one of the boards there for coraggio in Melbourne. Just tell people what coraggio does and what you do there.
Richard Turner 1:04:36
Yeah. So look, I’ve been doing peer to peer learning. There’s two types of learning for entrepreneurs. So I think they need to be quite clear on that there’s peer to peer learning, which is where you get onto a board with other CEOs that are all growing their businesses in different industries. You don’t want competitive industries, because then you can’t share your financials, but, but you basically sit around the board with other CEOs and or. Founders and you just you’re sharing the experience of what you’re going through, because the challenges of what you’re going through probably the same challenges that other CEOs and founders are going through, and you share with each other how you got through those challenges, both in business and personally, because just being in business creates a lot of personal challenges. And you know, thing to be aware of is the divorce rate in entrepreneurs is about double the community divorce rate, just simply because they are so focused and often lose touch with the people that surround them, that often support them to do what they do. So need to be really careful of that. But there’s peer to peer learning, which is essential. And I founded the Entrepreneurs Organization 30 years ago now in Australia, or one of the founders, and that I couldn’t have achieved what I’ve achieved without that now, I’ve done a lot of talks for corasio. And then Corrado are a peer to peer organization, a big organization up and down the east coast, from Brisbane, Sydney, to Melbourne, and they’ve asked me, Would I chair one of their boards? And I started doing that last year. That’s been very successful. They now want me to chair a second board. So we’re setting up a second board of entrepreneurs. But separate to that, I also teach how to companies, how to grow through the Australian Center for Business Growth, which is actually teaching the theory of growth. A lot of the things we talked about today on how to grow, you know. So in in the peer to peer stuff, we sort of talk about current challenges that are in front of us, whereas with the Australian Center for Business Growth, we teach companies how to grow, you know, and all the stuff that talked about today.
Michael McGrath 1:06:41
So look, I’ll make sure that the Australian Center for Business Growth and coraggio and the details of your book are in the show notes. Richard Turner, thank you very much for joining us on The troubleshooters podcast. Until next time, I’d love to get you back on at some point. Thanks, Richard. All the best.
Richard Turner 1:06:57
Thanks, Mark.
Michael McGrath 1:07:02
You. So there you have it, how to start and scale and successfully exit a business, if you like, what Richard had to say. You can buy his book, The essential entrepreneur. Or you can look him up at coraggio, the peer to peer learning organization. Or you can find him at the Australian Center for Business Growth. All those details are in the show notes now, as ever, a shout out to our sponsors, Oasis Partners. If you see an exit on your horizon, speak to the team at Oasis. 500 plus deals and counting. And finally, if you like this sort of content, please share it with your friends and colleagues. Even one idea can make a huge difference, until next time.
Link to previous episodes: https://www.oasispartners.com.au/troubleshooters-podcast/