Management Today article

June 2006: Cover story

Secrets of Success

Meet five female entrepreneurs whose businesses are booming, courtesy of their focus on money management and marketing. By Cameron Cooper.

Suzi Dafnis
Pow Wow Events

Merely being a good people manager just doesn't cut it with education marketing phenomenon Suzi Dafnis.

Her managers also have to be able to generate money for the business.

"When you're a business owner, you'd better make sure that whoever you hire knows how to bring money in the door," says Dafnis, a Founder and Director of Pow Wow Events, a distributor of learning products and the organiser of market-leading business and investment seminars.

What Dafnis wants is someone who can woo a dynamic seminar speaker who will, in turn, lure paying customers. Or a lateral thinker who creates a new line of business.

And how do you spot that talent?

"It doesn't take long for the results, or lack of results, to show up," she says.

Dafnis admits she struggled to meet her own exacting standards in the early phase of her business career. Her solution was to become a pre-eminent marketeer: "I'd put the marketing out and people would call me."

The phones have been ringing off the hook at Pow Wow since its launch in 1994, and it is part of an expanding portfolio of interests for Dafnis and her business partner Peter Johnston.

After starting her working life in music marketing, Dafnis fell in love with the concept of learning and empowering others through education, and soon tapped into a huge market.

Like many entrepreneurs, she is demanding of her staff.

"And I think that's why I'm respected in my organisation. I very rarely let ‘no' be an answer to a problem unless we really look at it thoroughly."

Along the way she has learnt that size is not everything in business. With a core staff of 15 and a clever outsourcing strategy, Dafnis says Pow Wow is more profitable now than when it had twice as many workers.

"At some point I thought, I cannot manage all these people," she says.

Despite the triumphs, there have been inevitable challenges. Two years ago, a spate of property investment spruikers created negative headlines for the industry. It taught Dafnis that external influences can make or break a business.

"The marketplace changes," she says. "For a long time I didn't see that that could happen in our industry."

However, through business relationships with the likes of US entrepreneurs Donald Trump and Robert Kiyosaki, and her role in the Australian Businesswomen's Network, Dafnis has powerful players in her corner. "We are not dealing with fly-by-nighters," she says.

All her business interests leave precious little time for work/life balance. Dafnis is unfazed. Some days she works around the clock, and on others she gets to walk her dog.

"You don't have a lot of balance," she says. "For me it's not like I have a work life and a personal life; I have one life. I work really hard but I love it."

Joanne Mercer
Joanne Mercer Footwear

If she had to start all over again in business, Joanne Mercer would get serious financial advice early.

Founder of the eponymous Joanne Mercer Footwear, a thriving brand with 32 stores across the country, Mercer reflects that the business was "all a bit blue sky" in the start-up phase in the late 1990s.

"It would have been useful to have a hard-nosed person who was just numbers," she says.

Based on her own experiences, Mercer advises start-ups not to be overly optimistic and to get an independent adviser who is not emotional about the business.

Mercer knows shoes and how to buy from suppliers, but she has added an MBA to her resume to round out her credentials. It took five years, but it has paid off.

As a teenager, English-born Mercer could be found in trendy Portobello Road in London. When she later moved to Melbourne, a dream started to unfold: a traineeship with Myer in the late 1980s led to Mercer running her own department with a turnover of $5 million.

In 1998, Mercer and two partners secured venture capital funding to buy an existing retail business of more than 20 shoe stores in Melbourne. Today, Joanne Mercer Footwear has annual sales of more than $22 million.

The picture has not always been so bright. Two years after the launch of the label, the business struck trouble – what the boss calls a "long dark tunnel". She puts the recovery down to determination, some luck and fear.

"It was that fear of failing," she explains. "I didn't want to go out owing anyone any money and feeling like I'd done the wrong thing by the investors."

Mercer has always had a great work ethic. She attributes that trait – plus an entrepreneurial streak – to her success.

"It really is a combination of both," she says. "I can tell you now I wasn't a good student at school, so it's not that I'm committed to everything. But if I'm interested I can throw myself into something with an enormous amount of energy."

The absence of a large ego – "...which, for our industry, is probably not the norm" – is also indicative of her management style. She is willing to take advice from fashion houses, suppliers and, most of all, customers.

"I'm very prepared to listen to people. I don't consider myself to be a guru of shoes."

Mercer attributes the brand's continuing success in a fickle market to "team effort". Away from the office, she turns to skiing and running and warns business owners that the considerable pressures of corporate life can put pressure on a marriage and family.

"It takes its toll," she says. "I'm separated. I think that would be a typical story for entrepreneurs because your personal life does suffer."

Sue Ismiel
Nad's Natural Hair Removal Gel

Sue Ismiel is proof that necessity is the mother of invention.

Working as a medical records keeper in a Sydney hospital just over a decade ago, this mother of three experimented at home in her kitchen with hair removal formulas for an embarrassed daughter who wanted to get rid of dark hairs on her arms.

The result, Nad's Natural Hair Removal Gel, has since generated hundreds of millions of dollars in sales to markets including Australia, the UK and the US.

After starting out with just a few business skills – but plenty of determination to make up for it – Ismiel now heads a business that distributes an ever-growing range of personal care products.

Born in Syria in the late 1950s, Ismiel migrated to Sydney with her family in the 1970s as a teenager. She remembers getting beaten up on a bus.

"I was attacked on a school bus by a group of girls because I couldn't speak English," she recalls. "However, that really turned me into a very strong person and I devoted a lot of time and attention to learning the language."

The anecdote is typical of Ismiel's approach to life and business: a problem is inevitably turned into a positive.

A marketing strategy targeting half-hour infomercials has paid off here and in the mammoth US market for Nad's. Yet such success has also been a management and logistical test for the company; in the early days of its expansion in the US, Nad's had to produce 30,000 units of the gel a day and airfreight them to meet demand. It taught Ismiel the value of business alliances.

"I was working with a US distributor who had the knowledge and experience in the US market. The negotiation was that he would fund the advertising campaign and that worked very well. I have never knocked on the door of a bank or financial institution to date."

Ismiel plans further expansion into the UK and Europe. The campaign will be meticulously planned.

"You've got to do your maths – you've got to enter the market at a pace that you're comfortable with," she says.

Ismiel employs a small team of people, including her husband Sam and daughters Natalie and Nadine, who can learn from their mother's tough negotiating style.

"I guess not [being] willing to take no for an answer – which was the strategy that I used and will continue to use – has helped me greatly along the way."

Inside the business, she tries to be clear and fair.

"I treat every individual in this organisation equally, be it my daughter or the receptionist. Everyone receives equal opportunities for growth."

Away from work, yoga and meditation are important to Ismiel.

"It's a way of life for me… Meditation is a necessity for someone in my position, where you're bombarded with so much information both in your private and your business life."

Sue Whyte
Intimo Lingerie

The jump from a cute children's fashion label to glamorous lingerie seems a leap of faith.

For Sue Whyte, however, it has been a logical extension of her business philosophy: find a strong market niche and go for it.

Now CEO of Intimo Lingerie, Melbourne-born Whyte inherited from her grandmother a love of fabrics and fashion, which has been put to good use in the past decade.

Starting with a staff of five, Intimo filled a niche for a brand of lingerie in extended sizes. Today it is a multi-million-dollar company with 50 staff and more than 1000 consultants.

As a manager, Whyte has the entrepreneurial spirit of her mother's side of the family (they fled Europe and the war in the 1940s and set up coffee plantations in Cuba and diamond houses in Houston and Paris).

"I've always been surrounded by business and I've always been surrounded by risk takers," she says, adding that those early lessons were more powerful than anything she could have learned at university.

"I understood from a very early age that if you fail then you just try, try again ... I never set out to do any courses. I'm a self-taught businesswoman. I've always listened and observed."

Central to her management philosophy is empowering other women through consultancies that cost as little as $500 to $1000 to launch. Intimo Consultants run their own business, receive training, motivation and recognition from head office and develop cohesive supportive teams. They are in business for themselves but not by themselves so have the best of both worlds.

While Whyte runs a business with a heart, she rules with a firm hand.

"Intimo is not just my business," explains Whyte. "It is the sum of all our individual consultants' businesses. I am very conscious of this, so every decision made must be done for the benefit of the organisation as a whole."

The major challenge, according to Whyte, has been growing Intimo from a family-style "little corporation" into a major business. She advises others to get a skilled accountant and pays tribute to her business partner, former Deloitte chartered accountant David Fountain, who has helped raise turnover from $8 million to about $22 million in less than five years at Intimo.

If a business gets just one thing right, according to Whyte, it must be financial planning.

"Without good financial planning no business will succeed. Intimo would not be where it is today without a solid financial base."

And her final message: start with a strong business plan as a foundation.

Whyte explains: "As long as the plans are there and the foundations are strong, you can take it where you want to."

Sonia Amoroso
Cat Media

You may not recognise the name Sonia Amoroso, but it is tough to ignore the brands that have sealed her success. Take FatBlaster, VeinAway and Horny Goat Weed, for instance.

With business partner Peter Nicholas, co-founder Amoroso has turned Cat Media into one of Australia's most successful health and beauty companies, boasting an annual turnover of more than $35 million.

Through two major brands, Naturopathica and Skin Doctors Dermaceuticals, they market almost 40 sub-brands including the aforementioned products and others such as Menoeze, Perfect Pout and the skin cream Relaxaderm.

Amoroso has a hands-on approach to managing more than 100 staff, and says businesses must understand their core strength.

"Know what you are really good at and then keep the focus there," she says. "I think a very common trap many companies that experience fast growth fall into is to expand their operations too quickly and try to do everything themselves. It's very easy to lose focus."

Since setting up Cat Media in 1998, marketing has been the key management tool for Amoroso and Nicholas. They employ an attention-grabbing "hybrid" style of marketing that combines direct response marketing and more traditional branding.

Amoroso says the beauty of direct response advertising is that it is 100 per cent accountable.

"You place an ad and you know within a very short period of time whether the ad will be a success because you are reliant on consumers buying direct from that ad," Amoroso says.

A pitfall, however, is that it can limit sales to a small subset of consumers, hence the need for brand advertising. Amoroso says traditional brand marketing needs the repetition of ad campaigns in order to build momentum.

"So we took the best of both advertising philosophies... Put simply, we brand our products using direct response marketing techniques."

The formula is now paying off.

With offices in Sydney, Melbourne, New York and London, and exports to more than 30 countries, the company is turning heads internationally.

Amoroso believes her job is to inspire staff.

"Any management school can teach you how to manage people. But to inspire the greatness in people – to inspire them to implement your vision – that's great management."

The hardest management lesson has been learning to take emotion out of the business equation, particularly when dealing with people.

"There are decisions you make in business that can literally torture your soul, but I've had to learn to view the business as a living organism, an organism that is at the top of the food chain. Anything that threatens that organism needs to be dealt with without emotion. It's a hard thing to do and I'm still learning."

Suzi Dafnis, Joanne Mercer, Sue Ismiel, Sue Whyte and Sonia Amoroso are featured in the new book Secrets of Female Entrepreneurs Exposed! by Dale Beaumont. It is available through all good bookshops. Contact the AIM bookshop in your state on 13 16 48 or visit www.secretsexposed.com.au.

Cameron Cooper is a Brisbane-based freelance writer.

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