[VIDEO] Jack Delosa & Craig Schulze Share Real World Entreprenerial Insights- PART TWO
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Craig Schulze hooked up with Jack Delosa - one of Australia's leading entrepreneurs - on Jack's Elevate leadership retreat weekend where some of the most prominent entrepreneurs in Australia attended, covering all sorts of areas from tech to operations to lifestyle.
The retreat included an incredible Yarra Valley wine tour, high-performance mastermind sessions and to finish off the weekend Craig interviewed the man himself - Mr Jack Delosa. In Part Two we share with you some compelling messages and insights Jack gives into what it takes to be an incredible entrepreneur.
Jack Delosa is the Founder and CEO of Australia’s largest education institution for entrepreneurs, The Entourage, which has a community of 350,000 members. Under his leadership, The Entourage was awarded the 4th Best Place to Work in Australia by BRW magazine.
As one of Australia’s leading entrepreneurs, he hosts Sky Business series ‘Entrepreneurs’ and has been listed on the AFR Young Rich List since 2014.
In this two-part series, Jack and Craig share their entrepreneurial journey insights. In part two Craig asks Jack all about his incredible entrepreneurial journey, and the big lessons learnt on the way.
Jack Delosa has been in business effectively since he was around 18 years of age. Along with the journey, he's had many successes, and learned many lessons in business and now leads - as the founder - one of the most prominent education foundations in Australia called The Entourage. He's had a TV show called The Entrepreneurs, featured on Sky news every week and he's a best selling author.
Jack's story will resonate just as much with network marketing leaders as it will with traditional business leaders. The hard-won lessons are equally applicable.
Jack Delosa built an incredible business, but also had some immense challenges along the way. I'd like you to share Jack's journey so people get an understanding of what it takes to be an entrepreneur. - Craig Schulze
PART TWO: Jack's "real world" entrepreneurial success story, and the incredibly humbling lessons learnt along the way.
JACK DELOSA'S STORY
Jack Delosa's passion is educating entreprenerial business owners, and although he did go to university, he only lasted about three months. Jack says his real apprenticeship happened out in the real world.
I think that whether you go to university or TAFE or go straight into running your own business, you're going to do your apprenticeship, period! It's just that often as entrepreneurs our learning is self-driven, self-initiated. We set the curriculum. Also, it's carried out in the real world under the guise of trial and error. So, it's an incredibly effective way I think for entrepreneurs to get a foothold in whatever industry they want to excel in. - Jack Delosa
Jack has built incredibly successfull businesses, but also has had some enormous challenges along the way. One government decision left his multi million dollar business in a very tough situation - however he prevailed and navigated his way through to be where he is today.
So, yeah, I started my first business at the age of 18. The problem with me starting at the age of 18 is that I thought I knew everything. So as you progress and the further you go, the more you realise that you don't know and don't understand everything. However, that was a critical introduction to business for me. - Jack Delosa
It was discouraging, and it was stressful. It was hard. It was anything but successful.
At the age of 20, I was in over a quarter million dollars worth of debt. You know, we were spending money that we didn't have, we were going backwards. - Jack Delosa
MOST PEOPLE WOULD GIVE UP RIGHT HERE
Jack was working harder than anybody else he knew. So as things got harder, he grew to realize it was critical for him to understand - firstly what not to do, and secondly the things he had to do in business to move forward - and perhaps most importantly the emotional fortitude required to sustain and maintain and have longevity in the game.
Jack's first big win.
Fast forward a few years, I started a company called MBE Group in 2007, and we would help small to medium-sized companies raise money from investors who acquire and sell businesses. That was my first home run. So with MBE, we helped organisations transact hundreds of millions of dollars. - Jack Delosa
At the time it was one of Australia's fast-growing companies, and so that became the foundation to go back to what Jack's dream had always been, which was to start a training institution for people that make an impact in the world.
So that's what gave rise to The Entourage, who is today Australia's largest training institution serving business owners.
Growing Pains.
In 2015 we went into accredited education with the government - so it was a regulated space that comes with qualifications - such as diplomas, advanced diplomas - that also came with government funding. So we went into that space incredibly successfully. It was one of the most successful launches the country had ever seen regarding going into that space. And not just by size, or by quantity or by growth - but by student success rates, student engagement rates, student retention rates. We were able to take the muscle that we built in the independent world - or the nongovernment world - and demonstrate that capability in a regulatory environment. - Jack Delosa
After being in that space for about three months, the government started to make changes that profoundly affected Jack's business.
So if you can imagine a whole bunch of students all around Australia going for education that the government is funding, and Jack's business providing the resources to make this happen - So, with everything committed and up and running, the first change was that the government weren't going to provide the promised funds.
The government were going to withhold cash from the industry for about six months, but Jack now had a massive cohort of students moving through The Entourage - the revenue and the students were valid, but he did not yet see the cash required to operate that was promised by the goverment. So, six months became nine months, and that represented a whopping six million dollar cash flow lag.
Then in October 2016, as they started to sort of pay that money which replenished some of the financings that I needed to do along the way to bridge that gap, they announced - we found this out from the front page of the newspaper - that they were going to change the entire space. At that point I decided - right - we're coming out of this space. I can't build anything substantial or sustainable with the government, they're too unreliable, they don't care, and they're very incompetent. - Jack Delosa
Jack's business was three months away from a monthly loss of 800,000 dollars. So began the most challenging period of his life.
We restructured the organisation. We went from about 90 people down to 40. We refocused the entire institution on our nongovernment training and education - our independent training and education. - Jack Delosa
Jack needed to rescale. However, it taught hard lessons - He learned more in that year than he had in the previous ten years. It was the hardest period of his life. Because when you're a week away from commercial death at any given moment, you don't sleep very well, you don't eat very well, you don't think very well, regardless of what you're doing.
We were managing investors, banks, lawsuits, students, and while we had (and still have) a family feel culture at The Entourage, we needed to execute around 40 redundancies in a day, which was incredibly painful. - Jack Delosa
"So it's like going through hell for a period. However, I became a better CEO, a better entrepreneur, a better human being. It knocked a lot of arrogance out of me that needed to be knocked out of me."
Jack's team transcended a huge step through that period...
Where we sit today, we are undoubtedly the best version of us we've ever been. That is primarily due to my team, and secondarily due to the lessons that were thrown up from 2016. - Jack Delosa