My SME Origin Story

Some people know my story but most don’t. I wanted to kick off with an introduction to me. Who am I, what do I do? How did I get here? What experiences drove me to think and behave the way I do and what I want to achieve in the future.

Here’s the thing. I am not one of those fearsomely driven and focused people who tumble out of Mum’s tum knowing exactly what they are going to do with their lives. In fact, I spent many years being pretty ambivalent about what I wanted to “do” for a living.

What Dad said…

My priority and thinking was driven significantly by something Dad said to me and my three elder brothers when we were very young – “I don’t care what you want to do with your life. If you want to be a rubbish truck driver, all I ask is that you be a happy and contented rubbish truck driver”.

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I’m outta here…

I tried to leave school the day I turned 15. It was September of my School Certificate year, but I had calculated wrongly. Although it was legal to leave school at 15 in 1977, it had to be with a parent’s permission. Permission – NOT GRANTED! Humiliatingly, I was dragged back to school by my ear and made to complete School Certificate. 4 passes and a fail. Maths was a fail mostly because of the difficulty passing a subject after seldom turning up to class and doing none of the homework.

SME Tip - success seldom comes without effort and application

Exactly 12 months later I walked out again on my 16th birthday and there was nothing to be done about it. My first job was as wine steward and courtesy coach driver at the old Mandalay Ballroom and I will never forget the Sunday night Mix And Mingle that we used to refer to as The Dance of the Desperates. That was the dating scene in the late 1970’s. I then moved on to become Short Order Cook at a Cobb & Co which required me to fry eggs and saute mushrooms and onions.

This is where I had my first experience of something approaching self-employment. I can’t believe I’m owning up to this, but the story has a beginning a middle and at some point there will be an end, so this is very much part of the origin story.

SME Tip - You can put yourself in almost any situation you want in life. Question is, is that where you want to be?

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So now I’m a women’s clothing seller…?

I met some sketchy bloke somewhere I can’t quite recall where, but he sold me on the glamour and lucrative nature of selling women’s and children’s clothing door to door. OK, so imagine a spotty faced 17 year old lugging three huge suitcases around the mean streets of South Auckland knocking on doors and trying to convince women to try on my wares.

Without detail, I had some experiences that broadened my knowledge of life but never sold a single item except to a small girl who wanted the teddy bear that was amongst the collection. If memory serves me, I didn’t have the heart to charge her. No sales. No income. No point.

SME Tip - Some of the most profound lessons to learn about yourself come at the lowest times.

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You thought that was bad? Now I’m selling worthless insurance…

As if things couldn’t get any grimmer, I then fell into what must be one of life’s great grifts. If you haven’t heard of the Combined Insurance Company of America, you haven’t lived. Here’s their game. Door to door, always the premiere way to sell insurance, I was assigned the Manawatu as my patch and once again traipsed the streets trying to flog two different policies. Both were whole of like so carried no residual value before death. Once was for a death cover of $1,200.00 and the other for $2,400.00 and as the sales pitch went “for only a few cents a day, you can have full peace of mind”. It didn’t cross my mind at the time that those sums don’t actually bring a lot of peace of mind.

SME Tip - Working hard with a terrible product and no income should be seen as very short term and quickly recognised as a wrong direction.

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Finding myself in old timber…

Maybe it was feeling disgusted with myself for having been involved in such low rent activities, but next came a sea change. My Dad had a mad old Dalmatian mate who had an antique shop in Ponsonby called The Kauri House and Mark Urlich and I hit it off.

Mark was very patient and taught me the ancient and exacting art and science of traditional French polishing, something I grew to adore and take great pride in. A painstaking process of carefully stripping the surface coating off old furniture without damaging the timber underneath and slowly and delicately building up a new finish using shellac. What the hell is shellac? Would you believe that it is made from the secretions of the lac beetle. You dissolve the flakes in alcohol. I guess you could use Remy Martin but we used methylated spirits. Thinned to barely more than just the spirits, you carefully apply, in my case, with a pure silk pad stuffed with cotton.

SME Tip - Finding your passion can be totally liberating and deeply satisfying, but whether it can pay the bills marks the difference between a hobby and a potential business.

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Learning craft…

I could go on about French polishing forever because it is such an immensely satisfying thing to master. It is also character building because you can take shortcuts that many people would never notice. For instance, you could use a much more intense solution and thereby get several coat thicknesses on in a single swipe, but to the purist this is immediately evident. You could even use a brush just like painting. To the French polisher, either of these actions would qualify you to a special corner of antique restoration hell.

The discipline is in being faced with a piece of furniture you’ve carefully stripped of its surface without disturbing the natural flaws and blemishes furniture acquires over time. Preparation is all about patience and attention to detail. Sanding the raw timber in my workshop ended with 1200 grit wet and dry paper. If you consider the finest sandpaper anyone would normally use is 280 grit, this is like sanding a baby’s bottom. You can barely tell the difference between the front and the back.

Taking the time to do proper preparation is so worth it, because everything you build on a sub-standard base will be flawed and the flaw will become more pronounced the more you build the surface.

Believe it or not, when polishing a fine piece of furniture, you may have applied 30 coats of very thin shellac, having sanded carefully between each one. If working on a piano, that might extend to 100 coats. Imagine what 100 coats of anything might look like, especially when each is only microns thick. The end result is a surface that not only glows warmly, but it has depth as though you can see right into it.

SME Tip - Knowing exactly where to start and stop is one of the greatest balancing skills of the SME owner.

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Discovering passion for inanimate objects…

Anyway, I had found my love and passion and over the next years I restored antiques for private customers and antique shops alike. I can truly say that I loved what I did. I loved the work, the solitude in my workshop, the interaction with customers and the look on their faces when they received their finished item.

Just a note on being a purist. A purist would never sully the shellac finish with anything else. I looked at the practicality of using an ancient finishing technique in the modern environment and took steps to protect restored furniture by applying a fine wax to provide some waterproofing.

SME Tip - Think of the customer. What’s going to make the biggest difference to them? Being a purist producing easily damaged products or being practical and giving them durability as well.

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My bad – Mk.1

I have one painful admission to make here and I don’t have a leg to stand on. I was given a lounge suite to refurbish. You probably know the model. Mahogany arms and legs and a double skin of wicker in the armrests. I did a great job with the timber. It shimmered lustrously, just as it should. But, I had no idea what to do with the wicker. There were things in between. Crayons, pencils, dust and years of detritus. My solution? I very carefully cut holes in the inner skin and vacuumed out the gunk. Not knowing what to do next, I simply put the cushions back which hid the damage. My client – NOT HAPPY! My response – “what’s the problem?”

I still hate myself for this. The right thing to have done would have been to apologise and work out how to make good and probably offer a generous discount or refund. But no. In my embarrassment and defensiveness, I went quiet and we ended up in the Small Claims Tribunal where astonishingly their claim was halved. I can’t remember what I had to pay them, but it was far less than it should have been. I had no case other than stupidity and the cost to my conscience in the decades since has been very expensive.

SME Tip - One of the hardest lessons to learn and relearn at any stage in life or business. Own your mistakes and be gracious and prompt in putting them right.

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Private school – why, why, why…?

All this craft nonsense seemed counter-intuitive since Mum and Dad (Beverley & Wallace) had to dig really deep to pay for my brothers and I to attend St. Kentigern’s College in Auckland. That kind of suggested that in fact they were highly focused on us having the best education, move in the right circles and “become something”.

I’m here to tell you now that if that were the purpose of attending private school, four out of four Brothers Luxton were a bitter disappointment. None of us showed any genuine interest in academia and certainly wanted nothing to do with the clique-ridden social structures that can so advantage private school boys (and girls) out in the world.

SME Tip - There is no direct line between what your intentions are for you and your business and the expected result.

My eldest brother Stephen ended up building houses, much of his career in and around Wanaka, living a life of freedom from anything remotely resembling the constraints of corporate life.

My next brother Kent was the driven one in most senses. He developed an early passion for sailing and got an informal apprenticeship with one of the icons of the sailing world – Tom Schnackenberg from North Sails and spent many years on the racing circuit – America’s Cup, Admirals’ Cup and all the others I can’t think of the names of.

Phillip, the second youngest tried to follow a “business” path and duly became a management cadet at Yates Seeds. Without going into too much detail, it was not seen as appropriate to be spreading cannabis seeds into the flower and vegetable seed packets and that was business done. However, he had a real passion for art, craft and the joys of creating.

Phillip began by hand throwing ceramics. Very avant-garde teapots and cups and bowls. He sold at markets at first. Something I will never forget is when he created his first thing that had wide appeal. Eclectic, colourfully polka dotted things called happy cups. Everyone wanted them. The effect this had on my brother? He immediately stopped making them. Saw it as crass commercialisation and wanted no part of it.

Phillip went on to considerable acclaim as a large form garden sculptor and gained commissions from the great and the good. After wearing out his body with such massive things, he stopped sculpting and began making exquisite furniture, intricately carved detailing and inlay. Once again, commissioned works only. I’d just make the point that he never lost his taste for not making money and to this day will gain commissions for furniture and once he has reached the level of completion that his clients would be delighted with, he feels compelled to keep working until all profit has evaporated.

SME Tip - The law of unintended consequences. You may set a particular course and end up somewhere very different. That’s neither good not bad. It just is what it is.

Next week - ?Finding who we are…