Business Owners' Wisdom. Brett Kelly
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them to share a story with me that would change my thinking or challenge my assumptions.
The result is a collection of profoundly moving and inspiring stories. Here are a few examples:
Brett Blundy built retailers Sanity, HMV, diva, Bras N Things, and Dusk with a relentless focus on doing the best for the customer;
Collette Dinnigan and Lorna Jane Clarkson both started completely different fashion companies but started from the same place – other people wanted what they made for themselves;
In contrast, Mike Cannon-Brookes is a young man who in the space of eight short years has, together with his co-founder Scott Farquhar, built a company that employs more than five hundred people and attracted this accolade from Fortune: ‘Atlassian is to software what Apple is to design’;
Then we have Mark Carnegie, a successful man who’s made millions of dollars and thinks deeply about how to improve society; and
John Cutler, a fourth generation bespoke tailor who operates a family business in Sydney that’s continued for more than a hundred and twenty-five years.
I’ll let you discover all the other stories in this book for yourself, but if there’s a common thread that’s captured me it’s that these are people who have found what they love and dedicated their life to being the best they can be at that endeavour.
To me, there’s nothing more inspiring than spending time with entrepreneurs, game changers, deep thinkers, and people who never stop dreaming about a better tomorrow.
I found myself walking out on the street after meeting these business owners and feeling completely overwhelmed, literally on a high. I’ve been challenged to constantly raise my standards, to think of new ways to innovate and help my own clients achieve their goals.
I’ve come to realise that for me, there’s no excuse for living an unconscious life. I want to live consciously and very deliberately. In my travels I constantly talk with business owners such as these and wider afield, addressing audiences of business people at conferences and private events. It’s taught me the value of constantly seeking to grow in wisdom and understanding.
In my mind, there are few things worse than turning fifty and realising you still don’t know much more about life than when you were twenty.
Brett Kelly
The Stories
Brett Blundy
Retailer – BB Retail Capital (BBRC)
‘If it’s worth doing, do it well, do the best you can. If you can do it, you ought to do it.’
Brett Blundy’s story started with a small record store in Pakenham, outer Melbourne, in 1980. His private investment company, BB Retail Capital (BBRC), is currently one of Australia’s biggest retail groups, investing in a variety of concept enterprises and properties. Some of the retail ventures along this colourful journey have included Adairs, Bras N Things, diva, Dusk, Lovisa, Sanity, HMV, Virgin and even BridgeClimb on the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
www.bbretailcapital.com.au
Interview
BRETT KELLY: Brett, you’ve built an amazing business while managing to keep a low profile. Tell me, where did you grow up and how did you get started?
BRETT BLUNDY: I’m a country boy, I grew up in South Gippsland, Victoria. My father was a farmer – carrots, cabbages and potatoes. At the age of twenty, I decided it would be a great idea to get into business. I didn’t really know what business I wanted, but I liked people. A friend of mine at school had found a couple of record stores called Disco Duck that weren’t running very well, and essentially, we thought that would be a great business to get into. We bought both of the stores, closed one, combined the stock and opened our very first store in Pakenham in country Victoria.
BK: Did you like records or did you just like business?
BB: To be truthful, I’d have to say my lifelong ambition since I was about twelve was to be in business. So, first and foremost it was business. At the time, records were really just the vehicle to achieve that.
BK: I know you went on to get more stores, how did that happen?
BB: Well, first, I’ve got to tell you the truth. That first store in Pakenham was a disaster, financially. It didn’t work. It lost money from day one. Both my partner and I thought we were going to work in the store but we had to go back to work. I went back to piecework, which was basically doing any job I could find –unloading semi-trailers of hay, bunching carrots, etc. Then we found the cheapest person we thought we could trust to put in the store. Her name was Debbie Dolan. She was sixteen and my partner’s next-door neighbour, so we knew her.
Really, that was the start of my journey. I just started learning. That was before mobile phones. I was in a rural environment so I’d have to find a phone at lunchtime. I’d ring up and say, ‘How are you going? What’s going on?’ We’d go down in the evenings and do the bookwork, the ordering, run the business side of it. We really learned a lot, even though we were losing money.
To this day, I still think it was the best lesson that I ever learned. It was really hard to work to fund the store and run the business outside of hours. The hours were crazy, but I was twenty and thought we could do it all – no risk, nothing to lose, what the hell? The worst we could do was keep working until we’d paid off the rent.
I really enjoyed it. I discovered that customer service was something that was very special if you delivered it properly. That’s the deal. We worked at making sure we had the right product. We would do anything. I would deliver music in the middle of the night. I would take customer orders. People began to know that they could trust us. Debbie would take the orders and then Jeff or I would deliver them in the evening, which was–
BK: unheard of?
BB: We didn’t know it back then, but it was a pretty special service. We were doing it because we wanted the $12 sale so desperately. I started to understand the right service, the right approach, the ways in which you could really endear yourself to lots of customers. It was a country town, so it was easy. There weren’t enough customers, but the ones you had knew you and trusted you.
Then, I did the boldest thing, but it turned out to be very successful. I figured that we were really good at what we did and we’d learned a lot, but it was the location that was wrong – both the town and the location of the store. I saw a music store for sale in Parkmore, Keysborough, which was a proper shopping centre in the suburbs of Dandenong in Victoria. I walked into the store and there, smoking away with his silly cat was a bored retailer. He owned the store but had lost total interest. It was dirty, grungy, smelly and unstocked. The guy had lost the love of what it was about. He’d lost the love of music. He’d lost the love of serving people. He was a classic story of, ‘you’re interrupting me and I hate you all. The reason I’m failing is because you’re all too hard on price. You don’t buy enough.’
So we bought that store. It was a big decision. We were losing money like no tomorrow. I needed to keep working to fund the losses on the store we already had and here I was making a decision to buy another one, leave my piecework and work full-time in the record store. But again, I was twenty-one and didn’t have a lot to lose. So, that’s what we did. That store was turning over $2 000a week when we bought it, which was terrible. Six months later, we were doing $15 000 a week. I still have that graph somewhere.