Her jellybean jar overfloweth
If somebody writes a book about Linda Jenkinson, it could well start with the three months before she became the second New Zealander to list a company on the Nasdaq.
Things were not going well. Her backer had pulled out, her credit card provider was demanding a huge repayment, and she’d broken her back after being hit by a taxi in London.
Laid up in hospital, it was a lightbulb moment as she realised her life had not been in sync.
Ten years earlier, as a young financial consultant, she had met American businessman Greg Kidd in New Zealand and between them and three others, invented a company which would become a world-beater in on-demand courier logistics.
Dispatch Management Services was born after the pair spent months searching for a New Zealand industry which had an edge on the rest of the world.
DMS had merged and improved a host of courier companies in the US since then. It was about to go public.
All her hard work was paying off. But things were not going to plan.
‘‘Supposedly I was successful. I’d IPO’d, I had a penthouse on central park south, I had a ski place, I had a six-bedroom place in San Franscisco looking out over the bay, I had the Porsche.
‘‘But my body was screwed, I didn’t have any kids, I hadn’t seen my family in years, I hadn’t seen my friends, and I thought, if this is what success if going to be like, I was so close to not making it. So I thought bugger living like this.’’
Jenkinson vowed to do everything on her bucket list. After DMS, she started two more companies, a social enterprise in Africa, cut her working day to no more than eight hours, and had two kids. ‘‘And I never missed another family thing.’’
‘‘Because I can tell you this, if you get to a point where suddenly you’ve got it all [but] you don’t have a relationship with your kids, your body starts decaying and you don’t have the rich relationships, it’s completely meaningless.’’
Jenkinson told an audience at NurtureChange, a business retreat in Fiji last month, how after her accident in 1997 she flew around the US on crutches looking for a new backer for DMS. The company later floated for US$230m.
A dab hand at poker, Jenkinson says her strength is to create businesses that solves a problem, and scale it up.
One of her next businesses was an online wine concierge business called Porthos, which later benefited from a wine glut amid the GFC.
The other was LesConcierges, a loyalty service for staff and customers of client companies. It was recently sold to Accor for US$150m.
She also founded WOW Investments, which helps build women-led small businesses in West Africa.
No doubt a footnote in Jenkinson’s book would relate to Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter who was hired by DMS as a teenager after he found flaws in their system.
Greg Kidd became a mentor to Dorsey and early Twitter investor.
Back in New Zealand to reconnect with her roots, Jenkinson said she was also doing a bit of a ‘‘tour of gratitude’’. She had developed 12 points for growing businesses and hoped to share them with selected local entrepreneurs.
‘‘If I had had the sort of mentorship and development that people in Silicon Valley get every day, I would have been 10 times more successful 20 years earlier.
‘‘It’s all the things that people don’t talk about that actually the real things that make or break companies. It’s about how do you work with different business partners.
‘‘More companies fail because the business partners break up than because the business is no good.’’
Scale was important. Kidd had challenged her to join him in building a billion dollar business, and that ‘‘changes the whole way you think of things. Changing the way you relate to things changes what the outcome is.’’
When she started a business, her first question was usually ‘‘what am I going to build and then work backwards,’’ talking to lots of people along the way.
For DMS, ‘‘New Zealand wasn’t big enough so we had to decide where we were going to build it. We said if we want to have a billion dollar business, the US is the market because they’ve got 4500 $2m courier companies in America. Cause none of them could figure out to grow. In 18 months we had a $25m courier business in San Franscisco.’’
Another was adapting to a different business culture .While she considered herself a passionate Kiwi, Jenkinson said she’d been an ‘‘abject failure’’ in helping many New Zealanders in the US, because they tended to be transactional, liked to do it all themselves and didn’t always follow through.
In the US, people followed what she called the ‘‘jellybean jar’’ system. People would do things for you and expected you to thank them and pay it forward with someone else.
‘‘In New Zealand if you’re in an elevator and you ask somebody how big is their business or how much money do they make, will they answer that question?
‘‘If you’re in America, will they answer that question? Right. Why, because the Americans are thinking how to exchange jellybeans, how can you help me with that? Maybe you’ll be a customer? How do we work together? ‘‘
‘‘In big countries like China and America, there’s so many people, I’ve got to trust that you’re going to deliver for me and the way you earn my trust is by following through. And so, once you’ve built that relationship of trust, then you get things.
‘‘If you don’t have that relationship of trust, you don’t. So for example, when I go and meet someone, I might not pitch them an idea till the third meeting, because I’m sussing them out, I’m sharing jellybeans with them, I’m helping them, I’m building our jellybean jars.
‘‘Kiwis think when they get the first yes, it’s yes. The first yes is yes, I will start a conversation with you and we’ll start exchanging jellybeans, and there will be a dance till the 20th yes when there’s actual money in the bank.’’
Part of the difference in business cultures, she thinks, comes from our pioneering roots. ‘‘When we first all came to New Zealand, we had to survive. So we’re naturally survivalistic, versus creating. And that is the shift that we’re going through as a country, to becoming creators and innovators.’’
For Kiwis who cracked this code, the world was their oyster.
]’’We are so reserved, when we have an entire world on a plate.’’
Catherine Harris attended the NurtureChange retreat as a guest of Nurturechange.com.
''Changing the way you relate to things changes what the outcome is.'' Linda Jenkinson