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Successful CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs are unanimous on one thing - there is no success without failure. Failure is to be embraced as it teaches us much more than success ever can.
The Anti-Failure Podcast shares the stories of Australian small businesses and the people behind them, who have faced and embraced failure in order to succeed. Enduring not only despite failure, but because of it. We will unpack the tools, tactics and traits that helped them to emerge victorious, paving the way for other Aussie small businesses.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to our very first Anti Failure podcast. My name is Chris Kendall, and I'll be your host for bringing these stories of small business to life in a way that we hope will resonate to you, our listeners. Over my career, I've worn many hats, the accountant, the entrepreneur, the CFO, the CEO. And over that time, I've developed a huge advocacy for small business. And I believe they're the backbone of the economy that we all live in and appreciate.
Chris Kendall:It takes tremendous courage to venture out and build something from scratch, backing yourself to get up and build a business that is profitable and sustainable and provides opportunities for others to do the same. Small business owners bear massive risk. They persevere through failures and setbacks and eventually succeed or not. I think that generally founders and small business owners are not given the amount of credit that they deserve, particularly when you consider the burden that they shoulder, the things that they do for not only their employees but their families, the families of employees, and the communities that they serve. This podcast aims to share the story of those businesses and the people behind them, the people who have laid awake at night fretting over how to get to payroll, where do I get the cash from, how do I meet my debt covenants, how do I meet the repayments, where's the cash going to come from, And how do they embrace the story of failure in order to succeed, enduring not only despite failure but because of it?
Chris Kendall:We will unpack the tools, tactics and traits that help them emerge victorious. With interviews from founders, managers, owners, and entrepreneurs of businesses both big and small, and they'll be sharing with us the journey to success. We'll
Andrew Bursill:look
Chris Kendall:to bring you an episode every three to four weeks. Make sure you subscribe on whatever platform you prefer so you never miss an episode. Finally, if you think you've got a story worth sharing or know someone who does, head over to our website and fill out the guest request form. It only takes a minute, and we'd certainly love to hear your story. Now let's dive into the first episode.
Chris Kendall:It's my pleasure to welcome our first guest to the Anti Failure Podcast, a close friend of mine, cofounder of Aretex, and successful business person, mister Andrew Bursle. Andrew's believed in me when perhaps I haven't believed in myself. He's been there to pick me up when things are challenging, and here we are. We get an opportunity to talk about that journey. Andrew, why don't you share a little bit of your background with our audience today and give us some perspective on antifailure?
Andrew Bursill:Thanks, Chris. It's fantastic to be here. I'm really excited to see this come to fruition. It's something we've talked about for a while. I know there's some pretty amazing people in the pipeline, and your passion combined with their stories is gonna make for a really interesting listen.
Andrew Bursill:So I'm looking forward to that. So as you know, I started in insolvency. You and I are sitting across the desk from each other, which is how we met with a phone book over the wall back in the days when you used to have phone books.
Chris Kendall:Phone books. Yes. Wow.
Andrew Bursill:It's a long time ago.
Chris Kendall:Age now.
Andrew Bursill:Indeed. So I have loved business ever since I can remember. And insolvency for me was a natural place to start because I got to see what not to do. And that's not necessarily in a bad way. It wasn't looking at these businesses going, oh, here are all the things you need to avoid.
Andrew Bursill:It was really trying to pull apart the business and say, well, I can see why this has been successful to date because quite often they work because banks don't lend businesses money that unsuccessful, and something's possibly changed in that business. Quite often, it's debt that causes the problem, it's growth, working capital, many, many reasons. But what interests me was what really makes a business tick. The business decisions, how to get involved, and what goes on. So that's that's really what attracted me to the insolvency path.
Andrew Bursill:So fast forward a few years, I wanted to run my own business. So after qualifying as an accountant, I left insolvency game, and then I started work as an outsourced CFO. And as you alluded to, I worked for a lot of companies in a lot of different industries. And, again, that was really about getting involved in business. So whilst I was an outsourced accountant, a lot of my work was involved in the strategy with the businesses.
Andrew Bursill:So I got involved in helping them achieve their goals, setting up responses to potential disruptions, failures, those sorts of things.
Chris Kendall:One of the best things about my job is that I get to talk with small business owners every single day. And we talk about the things that they're facing, the challenges. Talk a little bit about the journey of of how you've got here leveraging failure into success.
Andrew Bursill:So my life has always been about what business is, what makes it tick, what makes it go. So I'm really excited about being involved in other people's business. My business is learning as much about other people's business as I can and then helping them be the best they can at what they do. What I found was in working through the insolvency part of the business and before I went out on my own, I really got to see what made people successful, what drove them, what kept them going. And it really wasn't the business that failed.
Andrew Bursill:There was usually a single point of failure. There was something they'd done wrong. And the ones that bounced back, the ones that learned from it, they're the ones that became ultimately successful. There's nobody you'll ever meet that says, oh, I've never failed in my life. Everyone has.
Andrew Bursill:So what I was trying to find in business was, what is it what is that key element? And it seems to be that failure is the thing that leads to success. So that sort of made me think about what failure meant. And then later in life, I came across a book called antifragile. Antifragile is a book written by Ness and Nicholas Talib, who or black swan fame, who I think probably most of the listeners would have heard of.
Andrew Bursill:Everyone talks about black swans. So he also wrote antifragile.
Chris Kendall:So let's talk about that a little bit more and dive into this concept of antifragility, which you've brought to my attention and the books written on it, and how perhaps there's a common theme in business, not only antifragility, but antifailure.
Andrew Bursill:Antifragile is a concept about things that get stronger from disruption rather than weaker. So if you think about a teacup, a teacup's very fragile. You put a force to it, you bang it on the table, it'll break. Antifragile is the opposite of that. You put a force on it and it gets stronger, which is an interesting concept in itself.
Andrew Bursill:And so I thought about that and how how do we apply that in terms of antifailure to businesses? Is there a shock you can put to a business that makes a business stronger? So I did some more research on what antifragile meant. And it's interesting that it's not resilience and it's not robustness. Antifragile is above that.
Andrew Bursill:So if you think about resilience, resilience is where systems can return to their original state, their original equilibrium. So the easiest thing to think about is probably rub. You squash it, it comes back. In terms of a business, think about COVID and Qantas. Qantas got absolutely flattened during COVID.
Andrew Bursill:That was the shock that was applied, but it came back. So that business is resilient. Robust is something that just doesn't change. So concrete, You apply pressure to it, it doesn't move. It's very robust.
Andrew Bursill:In terms of using the COVID shock, I thought professional services lawyers. Lawyers didn't really change. They could move their business pretty quickly. They just went offline or online rather at home, and they started working from home without dealing with the same issues with the same clients working the same hours. So that business was pretty robust.
Andrew Bursill:Neither of them are antifragile. An example of an antifragile business is schooling. So you think about how classrooms used to operate and what they used to do was the teacher at the front talking to the students, little bit of interactivity, suddenly COVID hits, everyone's at home. How does this work? Schools had to redesign the way they educate their kids, how they educate, how the system works.
Andrew Bursill:But they've gone and adopted that post COVID and kept it in the classroom. So you've got effectively what is an antifragile system in schooling, in that they've learned about how do we make our system better because of the shock of COVID. So schooling for me, what came out of it was an antifragile system. Antifailure and where that sits amongst that is it's a part of being antifragile. So failure leads to success.
Andrew Bursill:And I think it was best summed up by Michael Jordan said, I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times I've been trusted to take a game winning shot and missed. I'll fail over and over and over again in my life, and that's why I succeed.
Chris Kendall:So let's take that concept of antifailure, and let's talk about how that applies to small business and how you've had some examples in your career of antifailure that has resulted in ultimate success.
Andrew Bursill:So, really, I can apply that to our own journey at Aritex, I think. If you think about where we came from and where we started, it really came out of, from my side, the genesis of our actual CFO business needed a bookkeeper. We had a bookkeeper, but the bookkeeper would be sick. And I very clearly remember one Christmas, the bookkeeper was sick the week before Christmas, and then she was on holidays, and then she had three weeks of holiday. So we So
Chris Kendall:there's an example of a single point of failure that gave you the opportunity to think differently. How do we solve this problem with redundancy? So in our experience of Aritex, can you think of ways that we have applied this concept of anti failure to where we end up now?
Andrew Bursill:Yeah. For sure. Do you remember, we're in the early days when we were trying to teach the team that they didn't have to do everything. The only way this business becomes scalable is when you can add more people doing the same job, and it becomes repeatable. And we were pulling our hair out because people wouldn't let go of their job, and they did it their own way.
Andrew Bursill:And then we sat down and worked out, well, hang on a sec. 80% of what we do is the same. It's the same across every client. And we we came up with this solution, the a way. Well, I say wait.
Andrew Bursill:I'm always happy to take credit for the wait.
Chris Kendall:But we It's probably Chris Corpus who came up with it. Indeed. That's because we kept saying, Chris, we need to find a solution that allows us to leverage the 80% of what we do. It's a financial transaction. We record it the same way, consistently, accurately with the supporting information attached that gives the business then the information.
Chris Kendall:So Away was created that gave us an opportunity to document and train and teach people what we expected them to do day to day.
Andrew Bursill:Yeah. And the Away is at the core of everything there, isn't it? And so for me, that's, you know, our failure. What what I would term an anti failure was we would have clients complaining that the work wasn't being done to the standard it should because we were trying to work across so many industries and stretching ourselves so thin and growing and growing and growing. And so we changed that.
Andrew Bursill:We changed it by using the AI WAY, and then you become the anti failure. So for me, that's the probably the most concrete example I've got of something we've done in terms of it could have been a disaster, it could have been a failure, but we made it anti failure. So that was definitely a challenge that led to the success of where we're at.
Chris Kendall:And if we extend that thinking a little bit further, we all fail. We all have moments of falling short of our own expectations of what we want from ourselves and from the team. So this concept of taking that failure and turning it into a learning that is on the journey to success applies not only to a small professional services firm like ours, but to small businesses across the spectrum and the economy within which we work.
Andrew Bursill:So it's interesting. I think that the key element in antifaited for me is experience. Mhmm. You mentioned learnings, and I think that sort of sits at the core of everything we're looking at here is that you learn that's an old wind blows no good. You learn from those things.
Andrew Bursill:You develop the experience. Along the way, you have the optionality, so you're not putting yourself in a place where if this doesn't work, it's death. Doesn't necessarily need to be human death. Business death is enough, but it's death. So it's having the ability to look at what you're doing and saying, okay.
Andrew Bursill:Is this business I'm creating, is it antifragile? Does it have antifaited built into it? Because that's what you need to be successful. Am I learning? Am I getting the experience?
Andrew Bursill:I've been lucky enough to have worked in so many different industries with so many different people that you can see what people do that works. And as I mentioned right at the beginning, debt is one of the things that's really tough. When you've got a business that is reliant on debt and then we've got the interest rates going up like they are now, that is very hard to get out of. Can't magically create cash flow and pay the interest some other way. You've just gotta live with it.
Andrew Bursill:So when you look at your business and how you're setting it up, you've gotta make sure, okay, how am I gonna get out of this? How am I gonna make sure that if something is a hiccup along the way, how can I keep going?
Chris Kendall:And I think something that we've done at Aritex to try and help this concept of anti failure is not only build an opportunity to learn from mistakes, but also build a culture that is all about helping each other be better. So by coming together as a group of people who are like minded professionals to leverage our skills and experience in a way that supports each other when we make mistakes. It's not a case of bringing out the big stick, it's a case of, okay, so what went wrong? Where did the process break? And how do we fix that?
Chris Kendall:It's turning those failures or those failure points into something that gives us the ability to leverage that into making sure we don't do it again.
Andrew Bursill:Yeah. So the term I think we like to use internally is not failure rather than weakness. So because failure is an absolute, whereas weakness is a relative. So that we can use that weakness, as you said, the single point of weakness is usually the one, identify how we make the structure we have more robust, more resilient, but even better antifragile. So that weakness actually creates further strength.
Chris Kendall:100%. And thinking back to the Jordan quote, the missed shot is not an opportunity to make another missed shot. It's an opportunity to make the next shot. And so what did I do that meant I missed the ring in that eight thousand nine hundredth shot that helps me get the next shot? And I think that's how we can apply that concept of antifailure to small business and in our clients.
Andrew Bursill:Yeah. Absolutely. So going back through your career, can you think of a time when you look back and said, jeez, I'm really happy that happened because at the time it was difficult, but based on where that took me on the journey, I've now created something that I didn't think was possible?
Chris Kendall:Yeah. I was living the bad bookkeeping problem. I had single point of failures as CFO of small business, relying on a single shingle bookkeeper who would come to the business on the terms or the availability that she was available, and it was often driven as compliance or catch up. There was never any concept of having real time information. It was at a time that Xero had redefined the cloud technology space, giving us the opportunity to have information every single day, updated to the previous day.
Chris Kendall:So I wanted to bring a shared services solution to that problem that would remove the single point of failure of one person who would come to my business on times that they were available. And I combined that at a time when I had moved back to Australia, brought my wife Jen with me, and we needed some income protection. I was working in a small environment so I was trying to solve the CFO problem, but also expand that into an opportunity to build a business that was helping small businesses. So I think out of a necessary reason, I was given the motivation to solve the problem differently so I could take my experiences, build out a business model, enroll other people into that vision of how we could do things differently and then start the journey of Arotechs. So a few things combined at the same time.
Chris Kendall:I'd moved countries, I was working for a small business that was resource constrained, often a common problem in small businesses, and I saw an opportunity. And I thought, how can we bring those three things together to create a business that helps small businesses? And that's where the journey of Aritek started.
Andrew Bursill:Yeah. It's been such an interesting journey. As anyone who's been in a small business will understand, growth is the challenging thing in a business, managing everything, managing people, managing cash. There's so many opportunities to file, so many opportunities. And what I love about what you've done with the team and with my help, and I'd like to say with my help, is really embrace that antifacial model.
Andrew Bursill:Even if we didn't know what it was in terms of the ethos, we hadn't named it yet. Now that we've named it, you can see it throughout the journey of there's a failure coming, how do we make this an antifacial? And, yes, as I said, we didn't think of it in those terms, it but was always the ethos. Okay, this is something that needs to be managed, how do we manage it?
Chris Kendall:And I think the concept of this podcast came from having discussions with you and with small business owners in the journey of what we've been doing to this point. And really, you know the passion that I bring to helping small business owners. I'm an advocate for small business. I want them to succeed because they've taken the step to back themselves. They've got the courage.
Chris Kendall:They get knocked down. They stand up again and they keep going and pushing for a way. And so bringing that passion to life, not only in the conversations that I can have with those business leaders and the clients that we work with, but also passing that passion on to the people who are working in our business or in their business and helping them on their journey. That's what gets me excited.
Andrew Bursill:It is very exciting. I mean, I love disruption, especially when you don't see it coming. You you think about the poor people at Kodak, and the last place they were looking was an iPhone to have their market wiped out.
Chris Kendall:And you can think of the example with Xero. NYOB was sitting back. They had what they thought was a great accounting platform, and Xero said we need to change the way we deliver financial information. We need to make it easy for business owners to get access to that information now.
Andrew Bursill:Yeah. And so there's a question for perhaps a future podcast, if you can drag someone from Xero in here, what is Xero doing in terms of anti failure? How does Xero manage that internally? Disruptors get disrupted. It happens So all the how are they making sure their business is anti fragile?
Chris Kendall:And the concept of creative destruction. Democracy is all about inventing and reinventing itself and turning failure into success. And then, as you just said, disruptors get disrupted. And so we're trying to identify the opportunities to improve and be better over time rather than someone's come in and disrupted my space and now I'm done. So using it as motivation to get to the next level of the way a business will operate.
Chris Kendall:And thinking over history, can you give us some examples of maybe something that is antifragile?
Andrew Bursill:So the one that always comes up when I talk to people about this is terrorism. And it's a bizarre concept to talk about in terms of antifragility because of what terrorism is. But the concept of terrorism is to terrify. It's in the word. It's absolute definition.
Andrew Bursill:It's to terrify a population into doing something into submission. Go through World War two. So you've got the blitzkrieg going on where the Germans have decided that the only way to break the English spirit is to bomb basically the whole of Southeast England into submission. But what happened was that they created this culture in English people of resilience and strength. And so instead of having individuals that were cowering at what was happening, they actually became stronger and more determined.
Andrew Bursill:So it had the opposite effect. So that is antifragility in a nutshell, is that they've taken a thing which was, in this case, society or culture, and by applying a force, expecting it to contract, it's actually expanded and become more robust and stronger.
Chris Kendall:And we can think of another recent example with the Ukraine and Russia war, where Ukraine was expected to be defeated in a very short period of time. And what that did was create this whole uprising of Ukrainian citizens and saying, no, we're not going away easily. So the concept of anti fragility is out there, and I'm confident that our listeners can apply this principle across many of their experiences in their own business. We've given some examples today of how we've used it in Aritex and you've talked about how the concept of turning a tragedy or a shock into a proactive outcome. And I think that's how we want to explore the concept of anti failure in small business owners and how they use failure to ultimately drive success.
Andrew Bursill:Yeah. And it's failures such a negative connotation. You know, you failed, and for me, it's never about failure. I don't think anyone necessarily has ever failed unless they've given up, completely given up. Because even if you stop doing what you're doing, you haven't failed.
Andrew Bursill:You've just learned. You've grown your experience. There's you've learned something from everything you do. It could be bad, you've learned.
Chris Kendall:And for me, what resonates is that you used the word failed versus the word failure. Failed is a definitive outcome. I have failed. Whereas failure is another opportunity to succeed. And when you combine failure with courage and back yourself to get out and keep going despite the failure, that's where I think real opportunity comes And I can think of a number of clients in my journey and a number of experiences in my journey where I've taken that failure and turned it on its head and said, no, I'm not going to let this thing defeat me and I'm going to find a way to create success.
Chris Kendall:And I think that's what we want to do in this podcast is give the opportunity to the voice that is often unspoken and allow the audience, our listeners, to learn from the mistakes that we've all made on the journey and realize that failure is just an opportunity to take one more step forward. And I think taking those learnings and applying it and understanding how business leaders use that concept to stand up again when they've been hit down. And so we'd like to explore that a lot more in the guests that we have coming along to share their stories of their journey. Well, let's wrap on the first episode of Anti Failure. I'd like to thank you, Andrew, for coming along and joining me not only on the journey nine years ago, well, fact, thirty some odd years ago when we first met.
Chris Kendall:It was something back then that we ignited in each other to help each other on our journey, and we continue to do that. Aritex has been a pleasure to run. When you say nine years, it seems like it was just yesterday we had that lunch and we created the concept on a napkin. But we trusted each other and we started on the journey.
Andrew Bursill:No worries. It's been fantastic being here. As I said right at the top, I'm really excited to hear some of these podcasts. If everybody doesn't know it, I'll tell them, but I'm sure they've heard it. Your passion for small business is unmatched, and so I'm really looking forward to hearing you talk to some of the people who got lined up and hearing some of their stories because there are some interesting stories.
Chris Kendall:I wanna also thank Pete Mumford, a good friend of ours, the founder of Stone Real Estate, for his support in helping us get this podcast up and running. Pete has been kind enough to lend us his studio where he records his own podcast, Stone Real Estate Conversations. And as it happens, Pete will be one of our guests on the show, discussing his journey from owning a single shingle real estate business to now one of the four largest real estate franchise groups in Australia. I was fascinated to hear that he began as a Qantas chef. So tune in.
Chris Kendall:You'll love to hear the stories of what he's got to share.