The Accidental Entrepreneur

by Janine Allis

  If you believe that someone has let you down, step into the other person's shoes for a minute. Could this person believe that you have let them down? Perception changes everything.

  We all have different energy levels. Find people who share yours and avoid high-maintenance types who will drain you of your life force.

  Protégés

  Your job as a business owner or an executive in a business is to continue to grow strong people so that, eventually, you are out of a job. So start training your next-in-line now. Insecure businesspeople hire below them so they have control. This never works. Hiring the right people and training those people so that they can one day take over your role is critical to your success.

  How do you identify a protégé? The right person will have core values that reflect your own. They will have a willingness to follow your philosophies, even if their way of doing it is different from yours. Learn to recognise leaders among your staff. In my case, it's not necessarily about actively hiring the right person — rather, candidates for the job emerge and evolve. Don't be threatened by an up-and-coming talent. I once worked for someone who made sure he hired incompetent people because he wanted to run things his own way and didn't want to be outshone. That's stupid! The smarter the people around you, the smarter and better you are.

  Encourage your protégés with training and counselling. Challenge them by occasionally throwing them in the deep end — this will help them to discover their own strengths and weaknesses, enabling them to work on their shortcomings. It will also allow you to examine their potential. Remember, however, that giving your protégé opportunities is very different from setting them up to fail.

  A piece of coal placed under the right amount of pressure for the right period of time will transform into a diamond. Of course, it doesn't always work out. There have been times when I've felt very confident about an employee and it hasn't worked out. As a business grows, some employees can be left behind, unable to evolve with the changing business. In those situations, you have to consider your options and, sometimes, no matter how hard it is, parting company may be best for both of you.

  Pro tips

  Start recognising and building protégés with the following:

  Don't be afraid to replace yourself. It's your only opportunity to grow. By beginning early and training someone thoroughly, you will be placing your company in a better position for the long term.

  Identify and nurture your protégés; harness their enthusiasm to help them achieve great things.

  Good leaders surround themselves with smart go-getters. Bad managers choose inferior employees in an effort to bolster their own position or ego — which never works!

  Leaders

  Leaders may be born, but leadership is learned. What type of leader do you want to be?

  My style of leadership has evolved through learning from my strengths and weaknesses. My business has evolved the same way. All leaderships must evolve, but the fundamental philosophy should remain the same.

  The role of a leader is to inspire extraordinary performances from ordinary people. If you're the boss, your level of enthusiasm will be reflected throughout your company. The more people you can influence daily, the more power you will gain.

  How are you going to do this? Study how to be a greater leader. Define yourself, your values and your attributes. Play up your strong points and work on your weaker areas. Importantly, you must avoid the need to be liked. If you have a great personal life and feel secure within yourself, why should you desire affection from everyone? This need makes you vulnerable and weakens your decision-making ability; it has no place in building a successful business empire. Instead, you should aim to gain your employees' respect; you want them to respect you more than like you.

  It's also essential to recognise leadership qualities in others, and these won't always be immediately apparent. That timid worker whom you've always perceived as slightly introverted may roar like the king of the jungle when put to the test. In the same way, someone who comes across as self-assured and competent may buckle under pressure.

  People may try to tell you that one person cannot change the world. The reality is great leaders can — the great and evil things that have been done in the world always start with one person.

  Just think about all the great leaders out there, such as Mahatma Gandhi, President Kennedy, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr, Abraham Lincoln and the Dalai Lama — as well as leaders who people followed but who were far from great, such as Adolf Hitler, Attila the Hun and Joseph Stalin. What they all have in common is the passion and drive for what they believed in; their personalities are addictive, and people want to be them and be with them. They all had a very clear vision and would commit everything to achieve their vision.

  The leader dictates the culture and, ultimately, the profit and growth of any business.

  Pro tips

  Boost your leadership skills with the following:

  Leadership is usually an innate ability, but your style of leadership can be chosen.

  Don't be the kind of leader you think you ought to be — be the best leader you can be. If you choose a style that's natural to who you are, you will be successful.

  Are you creating a winning team?

  Are you surrounding yourself with people who will help ensure you succeed? Ask yourself the following:

  Does your partner complement you?

  Have you established a positive team culture?

  Do you prioritise passion and engagement when choosing your team?

  Does your team feel empowered and motivated to SOAR?

  PART III

  GETTING YOUR SYSTEMS IN PLACE

  The first days of starting Boost were so exciting — this was our baby and we were about to see what other people thought of our juice and smoothie concept.

  Having just opened a juice bar with our previous business partners, opening our first Boost store was not as daunting. I'd learned a lot along the way and knew what I wanted to do differently — so now it was time to put all that knowledge into Boost.

  5

  GROWING LIKE A WEED

  At the opening of our first Boost store, all I felt was excitement. It happened on King William Street in Adelaide at 11.15 am and, to my great delight and shock, over 50 people were waiting to come in. We had queues going out the door! With no marketing! (That was planned for later.) I could not get the smile off my face. I couldn't believe the number of people so I asked one of the customers how she'd heard about Boost and its grand opening.

  She asked, ‘What opening?' and then explained that there was a bomb scare next door and the building was evacuated, and ours was the only cafe on the street not affected!

  I laughed so hard. A bomb scare is no laughing matter, but we had one of the strongest launches ever in our very first store!

  Vision to fruition

  Launching Boost was that little bit easier because I could build on my previous experience. I used most of the same suppliers, so I simply got the same terms I had already spent hours negotiating. I was having fun, doing the business the way I wanted to do it and not having to go through committees to get decisions made. Because of this, every process was so much easier, from designing uniforms to choosing product names to the creation of the products themselves.

  We still made some mistakes in those very early days. We worked at the logo and deciding on the look and feel of the first store — but, I can admit, we got this terribly wrong. The colours we chose were not what you see today — the store looked more like something the Adelaide Crows might choose instead of a vibrant juice bar. (This colour scheme was mostly Jeff's doing — but more on that later!) Jeff's negotiating of our first site was also a bit flawed. The store had no air conditioning in a state that regularly has days over 40 degrees. And because the building was heritage-listed, we couldn't make any structural changes. So we spent the first summer running around getting portable air-conditioning units so that the smoothies and staff w
ouldn't melt.

  For the next 12 months, I was forever on a plane to Adelaide (with three little kids at home, the youngest being one). I visited Adelaide once a week, then less frequently as the business got up and running. Nine times out of ten, I took one of my children with me, while Jeff was at home with the others. I was very fortunate that my mum was also there to help out — she would come over to our house to look after the children. Without her consistent help, I just would not have been able to cope. I wanted it all — kids and a career. I made sure I got it, but had to work hard for it.

  We were also extremely lucky to find a great manager for that first store. A real diamond in the rough, Sharryn did not have any retail experience, but she had the passion and drive we needed and this was clear even when we interviewed her. When looking for a store manager, most people hire someone with an enormous amount of retail experience, and so I was often questioned why on earth I hired a person who had never worked a day in retail in her life — not to mention while I was living in another state. My reason was simple: she had that fire in her stomach that we needed. She had determination and she understood what we wanted to achieve, and, like us, she did not have a history of bad retail habits. A sign of her determination emerged when she told us she was a champion speed water skier. You need enormous mental resilience and courage to be successful in her sport, and these were just the skills I was looking for. At 6 am, Sharryn and I were up promoting smoothies and wheatgrass at SAFM, the leading radio station in the state. We also collected email addresses to use to increase our brand awareness, and called members of this email list The Boost Club. Back then, this approach wasn't used that much so it was powerful, because people did not get a hundred marketing emails each day like they do now.

  Young businesses are usually hungry for funds so cash is usually in short supply — and this was certainly true for us. This meant we were always looking for the most cost-effective option for everything. We needed to look at what resources we had available that might help, and that did not cost the earth. We were lucky that at Austereo Jeff used to get free CDs from the music companies, and these ended up becoming our prizes for joining The Boost Club.

  We did everything we could to get our brand out into the marketplace. But we also wanted to use The Boost Club to create a sense of community around the brand. Every month, we would have great offers and competitions, as well as providing health and fitness tips, and this continued as our brand expanded. And I was involved at every level — I personally typed our first 10 000 Boost Club names into the database.

  When you're starting something from thin air, you have to oversee every little detail: from the distance the blenders should be apart (so they don't blow up) to making certain the managers have a checklist. This kind of attention to detail was not Jeff's strength — it was mine. I was in my element but I still felt a tremendous amount of pressure at a very micro level to get everything perfect.

  My biggest mission was ‘the customer experience' and nothing was too much trouble. If the customers did not like a drink, we would change it. I wanted Boost to be the business other businesses strived to be regarding customer service. My dilemma was how to find out if we were not delivering on the customer experience, so we could then change what we were doing. We needed the right mechanisms in place, so we started with the idea of detailing on every store wall the experience the customer should have. We called this the Boost Guarantee — every store still has one, and it covers everything from the kind of ingredients we use, and our focus on friendly service and healthy living, to giving people a reason to smile.

  We then invited people to tell me, personally, if we did not get it right. This gave us a chance to change a negative customer experience into a positive one. Aussies generally are not big on complaining, preferring just to walk away, but I invited them to do so and made it easy for them, thus allowing us to find out how we were measuring up. With every single complaint, it became my personal challenge to convert that customer into a raving fan. I did it, every time — by thinking as a consumer and keeping it simple. At the end of the day, people know that things can and will go wrong. What made the difference? We acknowledged any mistakes, and then fixed the problem. Right a wrong — simple. My customer experience mission gave our customers a reason to choose Boost and still keeps them coming back today.

  From the beginning, we were never going to be happy with just one Boost Juice store; we thought big from the start. Thinking bigger made us act bigger, and this influenced suppliers and landlords to believe in our vision, give us good prices and take us seriously. It turned out that starting the first store in Adelaide was brilliant. We were able to get the concept right without the eyes of the larger cities on us.

  After the first store, I took total control of the brand look and feel. I realised the first store's design was terrible because I was using other people's views, mainly Jeff's. The new look for the brand actually originated from a massive picture of sliced tomatoes I saw in a store in Singapore. I know it may seem odd, but the picture was beautiful and it really showed the life essence of this fruit. So we experimented with other fruits — I had our photographer cut oranges, lemons, watermelons and so on. He then stuck the images on glass and let sunlight come through. The effect was amazing — the simple beauty and life of the fruit was captured in the photos. We used these photos as the core of the design concept; we chose the colours from the fruit and the early stores all had 3-metre images of sliced fruit all over them. The design was a winner — and, needless to say, Jeff will now openly tell you that he is not the one to talk to about design.

  I gained many lessons from setting up our first Boost stores and over the following 12 months.

  Showing stubborn persistence and gaining confidence

  In the early days of starting Boost, Jeff describes Janine as a young woman with all the ability but no experience. Jeff says, ‘With that came a lack of confidence in some areas, but she took the “Einstein approach”, and just stayed with the problems until she figured them out. The personal confrontations with suppliers or shop fitters were difficult at first for her; I often got dragged in to make the hard phone call or appear at a face-to-face meeting. And, admittedly, being a self-obsessed radio guy, I no doubt had little knowledge of how hard the situation was for her — the obstacles she was overcoming or the day-to-day problems.

  ‘Janine was scared, but at the same time she was relishing the challenge. I knew she couldn't fail, but doing so was her biggest fear (as it is with most young, driven people). I was busy with my “high-powered” radio position and not being overly supportive, and she was starting to build her own team of young, driven, motivated women that believed in her and her dream. Eventually the inevitable happened: Janine became more confident and busy, and I became less important and received fewer phone calls; I wasn't needed half as much as I would have liked. The tables had begun to turn'.

  Making the decision to franchise

  Jeff and I decided to franchise quite early, although at the time neither of us knew much about franchising or how it worked. Our vision was always to grow the brand and we realised we had a small window to do so before bigger players came into the marketplace. We just wouldn't be able to hire enough quality managers to expand that quickly — and that's where franchising offered us the solution we were looking for.

  Through a friend of a friend we stumbled upon Rod Young, who was just opening a franchise advisory business after having worked in franchising and business his entire professional life. We were his very first clients in his new venture and he became a small shareholder in ours.

  Our first meeting with Rod was before we had completed a full year of trading. I remember this because Rod explained we would need figures for a full 12 months before we could begin franchising. Even so, we were clear on our direction. It was 2001, and this would be the road we headed down.

  Keep in mind, I was learning on the go and had three young boys at home; every day presented a new set of
problems to solve. Thank heaven for my mother! Not long after we had made the decision to start franchising, Jeff (who looked after leasing) came home one night with a smile like the Cheshire Cat. I knew that grin; it comes out when he has done something that he knows will freak me out — and he had! He had just signed an 18-store deal with Westfield, complete with a $5 million liability in our names! Like most early (okay, mid) thirtysomethings with a young family, we had no money. After a seven-second calculation, I knew the equity in our house was not worth one tenth of this figure. We needed to open 18 stores within 18 months and, at the time, we only had two stores open. This deadline didn't just give me a little kickstart; it exploded me into the world of franchising — without a parachute.

  But, despite my initial shock, franchising did work for us — massively. We had so many franchise enquiries we could barely manage the load. Fortuitously, we'd recently hired a very young head of human resources (HR), Jacinta Caithness. (At the time, we still worked out of our home and on her first day, Jacinta was greeted at the front door by Molly, our massive Great Dane. I could see in her eyes that she was wondering whether she should stick with the job or make a run for it. Thankfully she didn't run, and I immediately stopped letting Molly greet recruits.) While Jacinta started as our HR manager, she quickly became our franchise manager, and she did an amazing job recruiting the right people for our franchise businesses. On the leasing side, I also worked closely with Kristie Piniuta, a lawyer who would later come to work for Boost.