My SME Origin Story

Week 2 -

Finding who we are…

So how did four brothers all end up doing things with our hands when we were seemingly raised for something else? Simple really. It was always the subtext of our upbringing.

Let me introduce our father – Wallace. Born in 1927, the son of dairy farmers from Awakeri who went on to farm for many years himself.

Meet our mother – Beverley. Born in 1932, the daughter of a Jewish tailor and a very uptight mother who called her husband Daddy.

Dad was educated at New Plymouth Boys High where he was Head Prefect and under his “control” was a young David Levene who anyone who knows the story of NZ retail in the 80’s and 90’s will recognise as an absolute icon in the New Zealand business history.

Mum and David had what might be called “a situationship” going but when David asked Mum if he could bring a mate (Dad) up to Auckland for a party, he sealed his own fate. Beverley met Wallace and that was that for fifty-something years.

What’s all this got to do with SMEs? Well, you’ve seen that all four boys got involved in doing creative and practical things. What you don’t yet know is about Mum and Dad and their peculiar life choices.

When I was still in kindy, Mum decided that she wanted to be a potter. It was the early sixties and still a bit off that a “housewife” would want to do something other than housewife. But Dad was all in and excavated a couple of tons of clay from under the house and soon Mum had a studio with a foot kick wheel. From the moment we were all dispatched to kindy or school, she would put a percolator of coffee on the stove and head to her studio. ?

Things were a bit agricultural at first but she developed a real talent. Soon she was spending time at the Auckland Studio Potters in Onehunga and was then invited to join the Twelve Potters Collective who had a cooperative shop in Remuera. Now she mixing with the finest ceramicists in the country and we had many dubious social events at home with the many and varied “characters” in those circles.

SME Tip - No matter who you think you are or what you think you should be, you can be anything if you’re determined enough.

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So this is who my family is…

So there we are. A Remuera Jewish Princess now a SME operator with her arms up to her elbows in clay. Over time, she developed a passion for exquisitely fine and delicate Japanese inspired lustre-ware and began producing world class work, culminating in winning the prestigious Fletcher Brownbuilt Award in 1981, as judged by an esteemed international judge.

So to Dad. After injuring himself in a tractor accident, he couldn’t farm any more and using the education he had received during an unfinished degree in Pharmacy, worked as a technical specialist for BALM Paints (later Dulux). It was never his dream, but he watched his wife go from strength to strength in her ceramics and wondered..

His pièce de resistance was building Mum a giant, roaring oil-fired kiln in our back yard that growled and spat and hissed viciously all through the night. Opening it the following day to see if it was a triumph or a tragedy became a totem in our lives. So much work went in and sometimes nothing but collapsed, mis-fired rubble came out. Sound a bit SME to you?

Of all the wonderful things I can say about my Dad, being an artiste would not be one of them. He was a problem solver. On the farm and for decades after, there were very few things he couldn’t repair with bits of old inner-tube, a trait my brothers and I have retained, sometimes to the consternation of our wives and children.

So Dad was never going to be creative in the way Mum was, but he hatched a plan. He quit his job and built from scratch a set of equipment that he could use to manufacture dinnerware. He built molds, jigs and all kinds of innertube related kit and taught himself to make plates and bowls and platters that were uniform but with a bit of individuality to each piece.

He bought himself an Austin Maxi and with his old mate and their golf clubs, set off around New Zealand selling dinner sets to gift shops large and small. Ironically he made more money from his machined dinnerware than Mum ever did from her exquisite award winning work but they remained totally devoted to each other’s projects.

So, if the question is when did I get my first taste of SME life, the answer would be when I was 4.

SME Tip - Notice how things can look and sound a certain way from the outside (and even from the inside) but often the unexpected happens and that’s ok.

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Things get tough.

?I loved what I was doing as a French Polisher, but I knew that it only nurtured one aspect of who I was. My parents had always tut-tutted most about my singular failure to engage in school since they thought I was the one who should have been the academic.

Unfortunately they failed to factor in that I had inherited Mum’s gritty determination and Dad’s sense of adventure and anti-establishment. Even so, my thoughts turned to what next?

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A realisation…

Here’s what I know. I am in and out of the sort of beautiful homes where people have rare and expensive things and the discretionary money to do whatever they want. So, my thinking was “if I already have this client base for antiques, what else could I do for them?” Trust me, at that stage I hadn’t heard of the notion “share of wallet”, but what I was unconsciously thinking about was exactly that.

I teamed up with a grizzled old Irish/Mancunian painting & decorating contractor and learned how to decorate. Never happy with common, garden painting and decorating, I focused on learning how to hang wide format fabrics. Silks, Suedes, Foils and? Fabric of all kinds. When you get into that area you’re operating at a level above the man in a van and this soon took off.

I had found the secret to having multiple services I could offer a client and as pleased as I was with all that, it wasn’t enough. So I thought “what about bigger?”

SME Tip - Being an SME owner is always about looking relentlessly towards “what next” – bigger, better, different.

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What does bigger look like…

In the end, bigger got quite big. I was now into my first management of people. To this day I remain bewildered by how I managed this, but I secured significant contracts to refurbish the Hyatt Kingsgate Hotel in Rotorua, the Park Royal Hotel in Queenstown and complete all the wallcoverings in the (then new) High Court building in Wellington. What came with this was the need for running crews on sites.

As a personality type, I am not an alpha. I find the projection of aggression and dominance to be sad, a little bit pathetic and counter-productive. My personality and values direct me towards looking for collaboration and connection between people so everyone has the opportunity to make an authentic contribution.

Over the years, I’ve had people fresh from the dole queue through to PhDs work with and for me and I have found that with an open mind and heart, you can extract value from people in ways and places that seem highly improbable. I had gang members on my crew in Rotorua and despite my initial trepidation, what I saw was their innate understanding of what teamwork is about and the power that comes from knowing the other guy always has your back. Life lessons for free.

Now, I did promise that this tale would be warts and all and I intend to remain true to that. It may come as no surprise that my gadding about the country pulling off major contracts was great for the ego and sometimes not bad for the wallet, but seriously injurious to family life.

SME Tip - The greatest gift you can give your team, your suppliers and your clients is your authentic self, without ego or deception.

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Life. Not always like you expect…

I was married to a woman, now deceased, with whom I had a baby. My daughter was the centre of my worls – when I was around. They joined me in Rotorua and we lived in a cabin in a motor camp for the duration of that project which was around 18 months. Not ideal, but doable.

From Wellington I drove home to Auckland every weekend but that was killing for me and for her it pushed her further and further into anger and depression. Following the Queenstown gig where they also joined me, I decided that if we were to succeed as a family, I needed to stop my travelling life. We agreed that we would move to Queenstown and make our permanent lives there.

SME Tip - SME owners can tend towards being tunnel-visioned and in the pursuit of business goals, can lay waste to everything around them.

My eldest brother Stephen and his small new family were up for this too so we hikoi-d our way in a series of vehicles and all our wordly possessions down the North Island and down the West Coast and through to Central Otago. I just knew this was my spiritual homeland. Big sky, big scenery, big weather. Marvellous.

My brother’s family were equally taken. My wife unfortunately did not find this to her taste at all. I was working all day and she, accustomed to spending her days hanging out with her Mother sank lower and lower and without going into detail, things became very bad. Lots of day drinking, hysterical calls to Mum and many holes kicked in walls. I had no idea how to deal with this.

My own upbringing was with two people who loved and respected each other always and when they disagreed, found ways of working things out with grace and decency. I was confronted with an explosive situation and was ill-equipped to cope.

SME Tip - At any time in life we can find ourselves in over our head. Think hard about when, where and how to ask for help.

The final straw was when we received pregnancy test results that ended up being twins. That was enough o set my wife off completely and three days later I came home from work to find wife, daughter and luggage gone. No word. No note.

Nine weeks went by in which my own desperation grew and grew. I couldn’t sleep, I could barely work. What I could do was visit a local GP who shall remain nameless but proved to be the all original Candy Man and I found myself on a cocktail of sleeping pills, anxiety and depression medications and a couple of other things I can’t (or won’t) remember. With no supervision on my consumption, I soon began to incrementally increase the doses of these drugs in a vain attempt to relive my pain.

Nine weeks with my precious daughter gone without trace. I defy anyone to deal with that better than I did, but I guess there are those of you out there who can just take such things in your stride.

SME Tip - Trying to cope with things bigger than you in isolation is amongst the stupidest and most dangerous things you can do.

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The law. Like being hit by a freight train…

Finally, a letter from a lawyer in Kerikeri stating that if I wanted to see my daughter I would sign paperwork giving full custodial rights to my wife. I declined in a less than mature manner. A further six weeks went by and then another letter from the lawyer, this time with an affidavit from my wife accusing me of unbecoming behaviour with my daughter, This was the early 90’s when the satanic child abuse stuff was at its heyday and as a tactic, pretty effective.

I realised that to fight this, I would need to go back to Auckland to fight through the Family Court. Let’s be realistic about it though. The stark truth was that I was now taking toxic levels of all kinds of prescription drugs and was clearly not at the top of my game. I consulted an eminent Psychiatrist for help and his strong recommendation was that given my level of dependence, I should go into a residential rehab. I told him that this would be a very bad look for a father trying to access his daughter and not an option for me.

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Getting a tiny break…

He agreed to help me get clean and straight without residential care and we both recognised that the importance of the outcome was likely enough motivation to succeed. This was an agonising period. Getting off prescription drugs can be shattering and the only thing worse is knowing the consequences of not doing so.

So why am I telling you this story and what does it have to do with being an SME owner? The answer to that is simple. When you helm a business and it is all down to you, sometimes things happen. Sometimes those things can be devastating and you have to make a choice – sink or swim. I’m here to tell you that those choices are binary.

You choose to stand and fight, no matter how injured you are, or you succumb to the circumstances. I’ll tell you something else for free. There is a time and a place where surrender is the right answer. It doesn’t mean you are being weak and gutless. It just means you’ve weighed all options, you’ve used up all your usable resources (financially, emotionally, intellectually) and you recognise that you can’t win.

Don’t let anyone sneer at you for having done your best and failed. As we’ll discuss time and time again here, sometimes failure is the cleansing fire that opens up a wonderful new future you couldn’t have imagined without the loss.

SME Tip - The truth is that you can do everything you know how to make something work and you can still fall flat on your face. Own it, learn the lessons and don’t repeat them

Next week - a slow climb out of hell