Sarah Trotman
A super entrepreneur
Sarah Trotman’s luxury Coach handbag tells a story. It was a gift from 2degrees cellphone company founder Tex Edwards. He walked into her office one day and demanded she accompany him to the swanky store. Trotman resisted – she’s a $40 handbag kind of gal. But she’d mentored Edwards through some rough patches, and he insisted.
‘‘He said, ‘There was one moment in a bar where we were having a drink and things were really tough for me and you looked at me and you said, ‘Don’t expect your friends to understand what it’s like having to put the payroll on the credit card. Or, ringing a friend, saying, ‘Sorry I haven’t chatted to you in the last six months, but do you mind sticking the payroll on your credit card?’ He said, ‘It was at that moment that I realised I really need to gather the strength and keep going.’ ‘‘
Trotman looks like something of a corporate cliche – the coiffed blonde hair, the boss-woman workwear. But the 51-year-old is not interested in cardboard-cutout portrayals of business success. She wants to tell it how it is: businesswoman, entrepreneur, failure, good-enough mum.
She wants the world to know just how hard it can be to run a small business. And she doesn’t want to hear your excuses about why you can’t step up to lead.
Trotman’s latest venture is a charity to encourage rich Kiwis to donate their superannuation to charity. It’s called Spend My Super, and she’s convinced it’s going to transform the world of philanthropy.
That ticks one box on her ‘‘how to’’ of small business – having a courageous vision. You also need to mobilise a great team. And be able to do the basics. ‘‘It’s great that you were an excellent doctor, dentist or panelbeater, but, actually, you also need to file a GST return on time.’’
Running a small business, she says, is way more complicated than parenting. That will
probably go down about as well as the time she told a television programme about working mums that she didn’t mind if she didn’t see her child’s first steps. Whether she saw the first or the 20th, it wasn’t a reason to give up her day job, she figured. And she’s unrepentant.
‘‘I used to have people wanting to run me over with their trollies in the supermarket: ‘Oh my goodness, you neglectful mother.’ And do you know what? I’m a good-enough parent, and that’s good enough. My kids are outstanding individuals. They are good people, they have resilience and they have skills upon which to build a good life.’’
Trotman has been in – and out of – business since she was 15. Growing up as one of five kids in Silverstream, near Wellington, she was told by her mum Gillian she’d have to leave school if she failed school certificate. That terrified her, as she had no life plan. She scraped in by a few marks, then her mother said she was out anyway.
It was no great loss – she wasn’t academically gifted so hadn’t planned to go to university. So she got a job doing credit checks for her father’s credit management company. She qualified as a legal executive, got a diploma in general management and, by 26, she was running the place.
She remembers meeting a schoolfriend at a party, who asked what university she went to.
‘‘At that point I realised the real impact that small businesses actually have – on their communities, their employees, on wealth generation. I used to feel a bit embarrassed that I never went to university but at that point I actually thought I’ve got 30 staff, running a multimillion-dollar business at 26. Actually, I’m making my share of contribution.’’
Trotman eventually left the business to run free mentoring organisation Business Mentors New Zealand. It was a great job, but she was an entrepreneur at heart. She wanted to do her own thing, so she set up the country’s first small business expos.
They were a big success, until they weren’t. The 2008 global financial crisis coincided with her attempt to break into the Australian market. She’d also sunk $500,000 into an online business expo, but was let down by a supplier.
She could still put food on the table for her two teenagers, Tilly and Elliott, but the Raglan bach had to go. Then, only her accountant, her lawyer and her hairdresser knew the extent of the loss.
She won’t put a number on it even now, but says it was her most challenging personal experience ever.
‘‘Craig Heatley said you feel failure 10 times more than you feel success. I can tell you that is so true. It hurts, on every front: financially; self-esteem. As an entrepreneur, for me it was about world domination. And then suddenly that dream was over. It’s a very difficult pill to swallow.’’
Trotman bridles at the bureaucrats who say Kiwis should step out of the ‘‘Three Bs’’ mentality. ‘‘These are people that have never risked everything they own to succeed. So to criticise a business owner because they do decide to sell once they’re achieved the boat, the bach and the BMW, for me is galling, when people have never actually taken their own risk.’’
She wants to see greater government support for failed entrepreneurs, such as returning some of their tax payments as a
temporary loan to help them get back up.
Post-failure, Trotman had a safe job with Auckland University of Technology. She was lying on a sun lounger in Tuscany, when Liz Greive called, saying she’d been offered superannuation and had decided she didn’t need it. But instead of just donating it, she wanted to mobilise a movement.
So Spend My Super was born. It’s not entirely new ground for Trotman, its chief executive, who inherited a strong sense of social justice from her family.
At the credit management company, she caught a glimpse of struggle street. She helped set up the Big Sleepout, a Lifewise initiative to raise money for homelessness, after running an Auckland boarding house and forming a strong bond with one of the residents. She was in Wellington for this year’s event. She slept in a friend’s garden. The forecast was for 6 degrees Celsius.
Why not just donate your Super directly to a charity? Because Spend My Super has vetted them for you, she says. And it’s better than choosing not to draw down your entitlement, because you choose where the money goes.
With $11 billion being paid out in superannuation every year, the potential impact is significant. The game changer will be if Trotman can find patrons to match donations dollar for dollar.
Another of Trotman’s passions is getting people – especially women – to step up to leadership. The burden of leading shouldn’t fall on so few shoulders. Don’t tell anyone, because she hasn’t, but she’s eyeing up Auckland’s local body politics.
Women can’t be what they can’t see, Trotman says. But maybe they’re looking for inspiration in the wrong places.
‘‘I’m very reluctant to say it, because I used to think she just lay in the bath giving orders, but my mother who had five children and worked fulltime – she was a school principal – she would absolutely be my role model.’’
‘‘. . . for me it was about world domination. And then suddenly that dream was over.’’