Don McKenzie knows a thing or two about building a business. He also knows why most businesses fail.
Mr McKenzie’s experiences include turning a $750,000 acquisition into nearly $55m in under seven years and acquiring a $45m company only to place it into liquidation two years later.
Now he is bringing his insights to Ipswich as part of a series of presentations at innovation hub Fire Station 101.
Mr McKenzie’s presentation called ‘Avoiding the founders trap‘ is on January 23.
Ipswich First caught up with Mr McKenzie ahead of his visit to Ipswich.
1. You’re talking at Ipswich’s innovation hub Fire Station 101. How important do you think it is for cities to promote innovation and entrepreneurship among their community?
Incredibly important and Ipswich has done a fantastic job with Fire Station 101. People in capital cities are not smarter or have better ideas, but they do have greater access to resources and supportive environments. Places like Fire Station 101 help level the playing field.
2. Who is someone in the business world who inspires you, and why?
While somewhat stereotypical, Elon Musk is first to mind. He is clearly a genius who works hard. Achieving success once or even twice isn’t that uncommon, but if you read Elon’s back story he has managed to do it time and time again.
Time will tell how his current ventures pan out but he seems to have a deep knack in getting the sequence right.
3. What’s something you wish you knew when you were younger?
Success doesn’t come from the greatest intelligence or greatest access to resources. Success is actually a layer cake of lots of different factors that can include intelligence and resources, but mostly is timing, personality temperament, mindset, perspective and sequencing activities in the correct order.
For every success there are 100 times more failures from people who were just as smart and probably had more access to resources but didn’t have a supportive mindset, didn’t do things in the right sequence, had a temperament that drove the wrong behaviours and didn’t get the timing right.
4. What projects are you currently working on?
My main focus is as Global Marketing Director and Australian Managing Director for the Adizes Institute, an organisation that has helped businesses, not-for-profits and governments for more than 45 years in 74 countries.
I also work with start-ups and established businesses to help them create the layer cake of ingredients to achieve success.
5. What can people who attend your talk at Fire Station 101 expect?
This is the first of three workshops at Fire Station 101, dealing with the phenomenon of “the founders trap”. If you think about it, very few companies last decades or generations despite becoming successful for a period of time.
So, why can a company, organisation or even country be successful for a period of time only to lose this ability? If you’re a business owner or executive you can expect to get a new perspective on why this happens and how to ensure it doesn’t happen to you.
Subsequent workshops will discuss how to accelerate the success of an existing business or reverse performance issues in an aging business.
6. You don’t shy away from discussing your failures, why is failing just as important as succeeding?
My problem was I achieved success too early and naively thought success taught you all you needed to know. It turns out success teaches you very little, maybe 15 to 20 per cent. Eighty per cent of learning comes from failure, in my view, so when my future failures started to manifest I was ill equipped to resolve them.
When you have ridden both sides of the curve, you get the combined knowledge of both and can see things more clearly. My goal now is to transfer my learning to others so they still get the benefits without having to walk the same painful and landmine sodden path.
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