Entrepreneurs share their biggest mistakes

With the potential for great success and acclaim comes the potential for their businesses to go right off the rails – at least temporarily.

Below, successful Australian entrepreneurs share their biggest mistake in business to date, and what they learnt from the experience. Perhaps unsurprisingly, staffing issues come up time after time.

I left my business vulnerable

When founder and Shark Tank investor Naomi Simson was in the early days of her business, an incident with one of her staff members left her reeling.

‘‘I had some absolute catastrophes when it came to people,’’ says Simson. ‘‘I remember once when I was still working at home, I had eight employees including myself – one of them was not living our values.’’

The staff member often started work late, and chose not to deal with certain customers, says Simson.

‘‘So we had to have a pretty straight conversation and she said, ‘If you sack me I will take everybody with me.’

‘‘Now that’s pretty confronting and guess what, she did. So off they went… luckily enough for me six of them came back the next day, but in that moment I said this is never, ever happening again; I will never be so vulnerable.’’

After that Simson decided the answer was to become the best employer possible – not just to engage current employees but also so they would speak well of the company, and naturally attract more good people.

‘‘We base our success on the number of unsolicited CVs we get,’’ she says.

Simson says managing staff is the biggest battle for most businesses, simply because they are human beings. ‘‘You could say I’ve got a problem with logistics, so you spend money and you fix it. People are never fixed.’’

Unless you make mistakes you're not running fast enough and you're not learning. Gen George

I forgot to celebrate the wins

He’s the exuberant co-founder of , a social enterprise that now sells 40 products including bottled water and muesli in more than 5000 outlets around Australia. The profits go to funding safe water, food and hygiene and sanitation services around the world.

But Daniel Flynn, now 27, says if he could wind back the clock, he ‘‘would be enjoying the process, celebrating the wins along the way’’.

He admits that in the early years, worries over issues in the business and his relentless drive to push things forward probably had a negative effect on some of his team.

‘‘We landed 7-Eleven which was a huge deal and that was in year three. Instead of celebrating that I said, ‘We’ve really got to focus,’’’ says Flynn.

‘‘I think in entrepreneurism and in business ownership, the great strength of that business mind is to keep on wanting the next thing and moving forward. The mistake is you burn out the people around you.

He says: ‘‘Ideas won’t be fostered when you suck all the life out of the room.’’

A business mentor helped Flynn realise that he was not celebrating the small wins along the way with his staff, or even alone.

‘‘[And] if we have a really big win as a team we’ll stop and celebrate, it could be just pizzas or whatever it is.’’

I made some horrible hiring choices

Perhaps ironically, Gen George, who started the hugely successful online job platform at 21, reckons her biggest mistake early on was hiring the wrong people in her own company.

Now 25, and running a jobs powerhouse that’s racked up 630,000 jobseekers and more than 38,000 employers, George says she ‘‘made some horrible hiring choices’’.

‘‘Not knowing what we actually needed from a skillset point of view… and not realising you’ve got to get the culture right and then you can train for skillsets.’’

Failing to realise the importance of the business’ vision and values left her with teams of people with very different goals and values.

The entrepreneur says the company’s hiring processes evolved over time, with natural attrition helping OneShift to get back on track.

However, she says mistakes are an important part of business, and often lead you along a different, better path than you had originally imagined. ‘‘Unless you make mistakes you’re not running fast enough and you’re not learning.’’

I employed my friends

When Le Ho decided to pour her energies into transforming a flailing waste management business, she figured it would be best to employ friends to help her.

‘‘I thought it was easier as I knew them and know their experiences and thought it was easier this way than employing a stranger and having to get to know them,’’ says Ho.

But Ho, who transformed Capital City Waste Services into a $10 million-a-year operation, says employing mates was one of her biggest mistakes.