Introduction

I always say that I could write a book on lucky breaks – and the book would be bloody thick.

So many things have happened in my life that if even one decision had gone a different way, I probably would not be writing now. Hopefully, once you’ve read it, you’ll feel lucky that I had so many breaks. As Eleanor Roosevelt said: ‘Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.’

One of the luckiest was emigrating to Australia in 1986, with a young wife, Colleen, and an eight-month-old baby, Jarred. This clearly is the lucky country.

I arrived in Australia on Saturday 8 November and started work on Monday 10 November. Having left Price Waterhouse (which wasn’t yet PwC) as a junior clerk, when I got a job in a new country as national sales manager of a distribution company selling business software, I thought I had hit the jackpot. Boy, did I learn so much. In life and business, you don’t just learn lessons from how well people do things. Sometimes you can learn even more by observing how not to do things. It was probably the latter case that led me to start my own company nine months later – in that first job in Australia, I was paid badly, had no job satisfaction and wasn’t allowed any input into how the company should be run. That turned out to be the luckiest break of my life. If I’d loved my job and been paid a market-related salary, I would never, ever have started my own company. In fact, my mother-in-law told me to ‘get a job like any normal South African’ and not take the unnecessary risk of founding my own company when I was a new migrant with a wife and young son. Mind you, two years later she did say, ‘Why didn’t you give me any shares!?’

At the distribution company, I was on a salary of $2000 a month. One of my customers, Gary Buttsworth from Logical Solutions, offered me a job for $4000. I told Gary that I had always wanted to try something on my own and that if things didn’t work out after six months, I wouldn’t be too proud to come back to see him – and hopefully he wouldn’t be too proud to give me the job. Luckily, I never needed to go back, but I always valued the confidence and time that Gary gave me. My opportunity cost was so low, I knew that I only had to earn $2000 a month just to be where I already was. If I was ever going to become a founder, this was my opportunity.

I established Com Tech Communications in June 1987, as a one-man band distributing networking products to computer resellers. PCs were already becoming pervasive in the work environment, but it was only in about 1987 that local area networks started being installed in corporations.

I learnt from my first job in Australia that if I had left because of those three factors around poor salary, low job satisfaction and having no input, then anybody I might hire would probably feel the same if they found themselves in a similar situation. I was only 26 when I started my company and had never run a business or hired anyone in my life – maybe that was a lucky break too. Being young and naïve, I was fearless. I just ran Com Tech on common sense. But, as someone once told me, the problem with common sense is that it’s not too common. So, don’t expect to find rocket science in this book. I always say that if you put me at any table, I can guarantee that I will have the lowest IQ of anyone sitting there – and so I wrote this book: The Dumbest Guy at the Table. I often work with companies that are developing groundbreaking technology, but they just don’t get the basics of company culture right – they overcomplicate things. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Since 1987, I have hired hundreds of outstanding people, knowing that if I paid well, listened to their valuable ideas and ensured that they loved coming to work every day, I could still be part of something great, even if I was the dumbest guy at the table.

These principles have formed the basis of my management style for 35 years, and hopefully will continue to do so for many more years to come. It’s these same principles that I have applied to building our venture capital fund, OIF – after all, how can we add value to our portfolio companies without an exceptional team of people?

With experience, I have learnt that products come and go. But you will always have customers, staff and business partners. How you treat these three constituents will be the difference between building a good company, a great company, an irrelevant company or one that simply disappears. This is exactly why I have chosen to write a book two decades after I sold Com Tech. So much has changed – yet, in some ways, nothing has changed.

In sharing the experience I have gained over the past 35 years, I hope that I am able to add some value to what you do.

That’s why I get out of bed every day – I want to make a difference.

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