livemygoals Editor Blog - October 2008 Entries

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October 2008 Entries

Rich Henry : Goal Focussed -Never Gives Up

Rich Henry was a frustrated twenty two year old bloke, except he wasn’t frustrated by the issues most guys his age face; like “where can I find a cold beer or does that girl in the corner have an Adam’s apple?” No, his goals were not that shallow.

“I was looking at setting up an importing and distribution business and couldn’t find any decent New Zealand advertising channels that were targeted to male professionals. So I decide to do something about it”, says Richard, founder and managing director of getfrank.co.nz.

During Rich Henry’s time at Otago University, he was continually searching for and attempting to start up his own business: from lawn mowing, through to owning exclusive rights to import & distribute a top-end male grooming range in his final year.

“The two years from initially conceiving the idea were amazingly lonely, working around the clock and killing myself in exhaustion, frustration, and fear for an idea that no one else really either understood or appreciated, but myself, knowing full well that if I did cave in, I’d be left to carry the regret and burden of ‘what if ’.”

Richard is now 25 and the magazine attracts more than 50,000 readers per month. He describes it as a website for intelligent, professional men. "There's a bit of love and lust, a growing collection of videos and online games, as well as articles about business, politics and fatherhood. Rich

My companies:

Getfrank.co.nz, and RDH Concepts

My interests:

Business, Scuba Diving, Paintball & the edge of anything

The roles that I play:

Entrepreneur, Mentor / Big Brother for “ I have A dream” Foundation

List a few of your recent accomplishments that you are proud of:

Getting getfrank.co.nz into profit
Buying out our competition – bigfella.co.nz
Stepping get frank. into the Australian market
Organising the Getfrank Winter Experience

Did you celebrate them?

Nine days in Queenstown. Need I say more.

I am busy at the moment doing:

Blue Skiing for another round of investment to take the brand up another level.
Living in a caravan down in Takapuna Holiday Park – cheapest beach front property in Auckland!
2 months into Cross Fit training regime, getting the body back up to its peak. (Used to be an international rep in double mini trampoline – 20th World championships, 4th Teams)

My big hairy audacious goal this year is to:

In the middle of a refocus on a new set of goals. Next is to take the site into the Australian Market

I knew I was onto something when:

Searching for an effective way to connect with a professional male market - crazy lightbulb moment, a common sense solution. Win-win-win-win-win for all involved.
Took a pen and paper, and wandered around Otago University until the sun came up sketching out a ‘catch 22’ path to build the business from nothing.

My secret for getting things done is to:

Post it notes, once something is on the list I won’t leave until it’s done.
Self discipline – I get up at 5.30 every morning so I can work without distractions.
Watching the sun rise over Rangitoto from the caravan window every morning makes it worth it.

My darkest hour was when:

I launched the site, with 40k of personal loans and 60k of my parents money to see no one visiting and only a couple of months liquidity left.

I came through it by:

Dropping out of fulltime work at PricewaterhouseCoopers to work on the venture fulltime to try and save it. I was very lucky to secure Shane Bradley as an Angel Investor, and three years since the light bulb moment the ventures finally cash flow positive.

I came up with the idea for:

Experiential marketing - when I was trying to create a highly geared and brand intensive campaign to promote the website.

How old were you when you first had the idea?

How many businesses have you tried before this one?

At least half a dozen. Used my course related costs to fly to Bali to open an importing business, sushi stall, lawn mowing business, tutoring service. Seven times as many business ideas and plans in my scrap book.

What do you do to cope with stress?

Work harder and longer – a dog out hunting doesn’t notice it’s fleas

How many hours do you work each week?

It’s a lifestyle choice, I’m either working, socializing, or sleeping – working, always over 60 hours at the moment, up at 5.30 each morning to nail down the content, spend the days networking and building new relationships, and the evenings out or preparing for the next day.

What do you do when things aren’t going your way?

Go back to sitting on the cliff and review my strategies.

What is the most important piece of advice you’d give to people who are struggling to create a positive change in their lives?

Search and read about Admiral Stockdale, and the Stockdale Paradox

What is the hardest lesson you’ve had to learn in life/business?

It’s hard work.

What separates successful people from unsuccessful people?

Perseverance, working smarter not harder, actively learning and pursuing new opportunities.

Do you have any daily rituals that help you keep focused and in the right mental state to succeed?

Weekly I sit on a cliff with a pen & paper and map out what I want to achieve in the coming week, and strategies on how best to do that

What was your working background before you started what you are doing now?

Finance & Accounting Graduate, Auditor at PricewaterhouseCoopers

Do you have any school/study qualifications?

Bachelor of Commerce, Finance & Accounting + a diploma for Graduates

2 years more work needed to become a Chartered Accountant

Do you have any other business interests at the moment?

Helping out other up and coming young entrepreneurs.

What are the three most important personal qualities you’ve had to develop to become a successful business person?

Vision
Tenacity
A Drive to learn

How do you know when you’ve found a good idea?

It makes logical sense, and all those involved will walk away with significant value, really significant value - otherwise people won't provide the time and effort to see their part through.

Do you have a formal goal setting process?

Yearly, Monthly, Weekly, Post it notes. My walls are covered in quotes, ideas and goals so it’s always around me.

Have you ever been scared in your role/business? What did you do about it?

Back when I was working fulltime and leveraged up to the hills, just backed myself.

“I’d rather regret something I did, than something I didn’t”

What comes first...success or confidence?

Confidence / Belief

How do you build confidence if you’re not a confident person?

Start small and then keep raising that bar.

The Parting Shot: When I feel frustrated that things are not coming together as I wish, I proceed to:

Go back to sitting on the cliff and review my strategies.

ps. Here is that view that Rich was talking about where he plans how he will achieve his next personal and professional goals

Where do you go to be inspired and create action?

posted @ Monday, October 20, 2008 11:57 AM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ Goals ]

Tom Bowden: Doing Something You Believe In to Achieve Big Goals

Tom Bowden is an achiever. He does not do anything in half measures. He and his wife have five children aged from 17 years to five-year-old twins. His other ‘baby’ is HealthLink, a long-standing public-private partnership with the New Zealand Ministry of Health. Not surprisingly, this doesn’t leave much time for anything else. After setting up his own business at the age of 21, Tom has been a committed entrepreneur ever since, stopping only to do an MBA which helped him become even more fascinated with the transition from paper-based processes to electronic ones and how to use the changes to achieve his own goals.

Tom Bowden is the founder and CEO of HealthLink which has been the electronic heart of the New Zealand health system since 1993. Facilitating the transfer of one million pieces of patient information per week between general practitioners and other health service providers (including laboratories, hospitals and specialists), the company operates throughout New Zealand and in much of Australia.

Healthcare is a very contentious area. From the outside it looks like an environment with kind people in white coats looking after others. In reality it is just a massive scramble for resources. It is, as someone said recently, a series of warring tribes, each with their own religious beliefs.

Right now the health sector is fairly combative. There are all kinds of agendas, and the challenge for government is to align those agendas as much as possible, to minimize conflict and get everyone heading down the same road.

When you have 50 staff to look after it is hugely important to know where you stand with government. We have a million items of medical information a week, and we answer 150 fault calls a day, so it’s an important piece of the health sector. That’s a lot of paper removed and it is an awful lot of complicated systems.

The good news is that GPs are strong and are generally in good heart. Ninety-five percent of New Zealanders are enrolled with a GP, and GPs are doing better financially, are happier and have a major influence over the direction of the health system.

If we see a change in government in November, GPs will probably get more autonomy. That will be good, because the health bureaucracy has blown out due to a desire at all levels to micromanage. GPs are highly qualified professionals and you have to be able to trust them to get on with the job, so you should set the broad parameters and let them go for it.

HealthLink is to a large extent the electronic glue of the health system. It allows GPs to exchange all sorts of information with other parts of the health sector and it provides the security needed to secure medical information. Every piece of information we send is encrypted (or scrambled) and electronically signed. We don’t really support the formation of central repositories of information – there are potentially major privacy issues with those. That’s why it’s important, in my view, to make the GP responsible for ‘stewardship’ of his or her patients’ information.

Ideally our goal is to increase in the efficiency and effectiveness of patient care. One day we want you to be able to move right through the health system and allow anybody that is helping you to find all the relevant information about you that they need, without compromising your privacy by inadvertently accessing information that you wish to remain private.

I set up a business early, at 21 – I suppose I like being in charge of whatever I am doing. My first venture was a design and print company. After seven years I undertook an MBA part-time and I became fascinated with the transition from paper-based processes to electronic ones. This was 1984 to 1987, pre-deregulation and Telecom.

I had been in printing when it was becoming more and more IT-based. I observed the changes keenly. From 1978 to 1987, when I was doing it, there was huge technology development, with creations like the Apple Macintosh which revolutionised the printing industry, almost overnight.

Aware of impending changes I decided that telecommunications was the place to be, so I became an employee again in a specialist subsidiary of Telecom. Among the areas that clearly could benefit from electronic communications was healthcare, so we talked to the Ministry of Health which, in the early 1990s, wanted to have partners because it didn’t want to get into running computer networks.

As long we were good boys and girls and played by the rules and did good things for the sector, the Ministry was quite happy with whatever we did.

The Ministry was very encouraging, but not very keen on giving us funding to do anything. We had to go and turn it into a business, which is when we founded HealthLink. I persuaded my Telecom bosses to invest in a joint venture, and a year later we set the company up as a stand-alone specialist business and bought services from Telecom.

One catalyst for us was the 1992 health reforms. Simon Upton totally changed the whole New Zealand health system, and fortuitously, what we provide supported the newly reformed health sector very well. If you devolve responsibility for day-to-day healthcare delivery to GPs that is good, but if you still have a largely paper-based system all you do is create an administrative nightmare.

On day one, 15 years ago we had no clients, and the health sector didn’t exchange information electronically at all. Now we exchange a million items of information a week.

We have raised the level of information movement around the health sector to a very high level, by international standards. Two years ago a Commonwealth Fund (www.commonwealthfund.org) report on IT put New Zealand at the top of the 10 OECD countries it had measured. It happened to measure all the things we do at HealthLink.

We can only improve health information at the rate at which people trust the integrity of the health system. If people start to lose trust, as they have in the UK, the whole health system is affected. If they do not trust the confidentiality of the health system, people won’t be frank with their doctor.

The main thing driving me is a desire to improve the health system. Having got into the system more by chance than design, I now know how important information is. We have a very clear policy and strategy – to enable primary care to communicate easily, dependably, and safely. That is our entire focus.

What seems to work best around the world is a primary care-led health system, which is what New Zealand has. That means, effectively, that your GP organizes how your personal healthcare is delivered. This approach has been almost conclusively shown to be better value for the taxpayer and better-quality care for patients.

We are also in Australia. There we spent a long time trying to change the health system before we realized that it was like trying to turn around an oil tanker. We’re now biding our time, doing what we can while we wait for the system to realize it needs to change. The recent change in government seems to signal a commitment to fundamental healthcare reform and a desire to implement a primary care-led strategy.

There is no question that the health systems of all western economies must change. Our population as a whole is ageing and the baby-boom generation is going to put a big burden on the health system. As a consequence there is a real skills shortage and an international market for skilled professionals. This is not working in our favour at present.

We are targeting British-style health systems, because of the way in which they are organized. A health system like India’s, which is not organized and has little automation, is impossible for us to work with. The fact that the New Zealand system is automated makes a huge difference to patients. Here, people go to hospital, get treated effectively and then go home. In Australia, without a good communications system, their health sector is somewhat less efficient.

We have identified Australia and Canada as being the first markets we will pursue. Once they are under our belt we will look at others. In Canada we are looking at forming a joint venture, while in Australasia we are operating on our own.

My purpose is to lead a worthwhile and fulfilling life – to have enough money to feed and clothe the family, and to do useful and interesting things.

I have five children, aged from 17 to five-year-old twins. It’s all on at home! I am usually up at about 5.30am, and fairly early to bed. I don’t watch any TV apart from the news.

Getting good people around you who can complement your skills is very important. It’s also a matter of ploughing into it but knowing when you need to notch back a bit – not going so hard at it that you end up hitting the wall. I have learned to pull back. I have a very busy, demanding life, so some weekends I will work 20 hours and on other weekends I will do absolutely nothing work-related.

I have some good people in Australia, but there was a time when I was there every two or three weeks, and that is hard with a lot of kids. It is very hard on my wife to leave her behind coping with the rabble. Fortunately she is highly organized.

I think if you are doing something you believe is good for the country and society it encourages you, because you can look around and see the real benefits of your work. Seeing the healthcare service visibly improve through your own efforts is incredibly rewarding.

Every year in early January, my wife and I write a personal plan of what we hope to achieve. We then measure ourselves against those goals and make sure we are both committed to the same objectives – one of the biggest failings in marriage is when two partners are after different things.

Tom Bowden At A Glance

Chief Executive of HealthLink Ltd
Involved in electronic communications for 20 years
Built HealthLink from scratch, starting in 1993
HealthLink now has offices in Auckland, Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne and Perth
Responsible for the exchange of one million pieces of patient information per week
Has five children and lives in a 150-year-old historic home in Parnell, Auckland
Propagates native plants and grows old roses as a hobby

Goalgetting Tips for Today

Never, ever give up on something that makes sense, however hard it is to achieve
Understand and try to influence the main drivers that are affecting your environment - eg Government
Understand your business in great detail and respect those who can do likewise
Be very clear about your five most important strategies and pursue them relentlessly
Be a force for good in your community and in your work environment

What are you passionate about? How can you use this passion to achieve your goals?

posted @ Saturday, October 18, 2008 8:59 AM | Feedback (1) | Filed Under [ goalgetters ]

The Politics of Getting Ahead

We all have our constituents and supporters, even if we are not in politics. How do you go about managing perceptions around you in order to achieve your own goals? How do you live your own goals, while knowing that you are part of a community of others with their own needs?

As we head to elections in some key countries across the world- it becomes evident that it helps to have a clear idea of what you stand for, if you want people to support your ideas. It also helps to be able to clearly identify what value you can add to your supporters and inner circle.

How do you go about getting support for your ideas? The same ideas that help you achieve your goals?

In This Post:

Steven Joyce has had a remarkable career so far and continues to push himself to new challenges. He shows us the attitude required to move from his degree in Zoology, and then transform one little radio station into the highly successful RadioWorks group. He also lets us know of his intentions to make a big difference in the country though his upcoming role in politics.

Jo Mills informs us how to negotiate the political minefield that many people often find themselves in, at the office- preventing them from achieving their lofty goals. She talks about 'PQ' - your "political intelligence" and how to use it to get ahead, how to form alliances and be authentically visible. Jo also gives us the Ten Tips for getting out of a career rut.

Chris Wingate- who signed up to Livemygoals.com recently- is a man with a mission. Married 24 years with 4 kids, he was a self made millionaire by the age of 25. He has lived in Australia, New Zealand, Vancouver and Hawaii.

In 1997 he funded Auckland school kid Scott Dixon to race Formula Holden then the following year he set up Scott Dixon Motorsport to fund Scott's racing career. In 2003 Dixon won the Indy Racing world title in his first attempt and then in 2008 won the Indy 500 and the Indy World Title.

No stranger to adventure himself, in 1999 Chris shipped a 4wheel drive to India and drove to London with Sir Peter Tapsell and Prof. Frank Brosnahan via India,Pakistan, Iran, Syria Jordon, Lebanon,Turkey etc.

Chris shares with us some of his goals around making judges and politicians more accountable!

Enjoy taking this moment and reflecting on how other people are doing it, have done it, will do it.

posted @ Wednesday, October 01, 2008 9:20 AM | Feedback (0) | Filed Under [ goalgetters ]