Learning Curve

ROD Jones is almost a cliché of entrepreneurial success.

The university dropout who preferred surfing over work; the business failure who picked himself up and started again at middle age – founding one of Australia’s most successful global companies, an education provider called Navitas.

“I was more interested in surfing than I was in working,” Mr Jones told an audience of more than 300 at a WA Business News Success and Leadership event earlier this week, offering a story of hope that every parent will want to hear.

“I got a job at the Agriculture Department, which was probably the best job I have ever had in my life,” he chuckled.

“Someone gave me a car on Monday morning to go and plant trials on research farms and they’d say ‘we’ll see you on Friday afternoon’.

“Well, I used to get that done by Monday afternoon or Tuesday morning and spend the next three days, or two and half days, wandering around the South West in their car and on their expense account surfing.

“It was a great job.

“I did that for a couple of years before my wife, or now wife, suggested that probably wasn’t going to be a long-term future.”

Ironically, the usually independent-minded Mr Jones followed not just his future wife’s advice but also that of his father to get a secure job in the public service, ultimately ending up as an administrator with the University of Western Australia.

But a good entrepreneurial spirit is not quelled so easily and a business sideline provided a costly lesson.

“As a 26-year-old I got involved with a friend in setting up a business, which I never actually worked in,” Mr Jones said.

“One of the dumbest things I ever did was sign a director’s guarantee and the outcome was when this business got into trouble in the mid 1980s, effectively it went down the tubes.

“I had built up a lot of assets around me but they lasted about five minutes in the scheme of things.

“The way I celebrated my 40th birthday was being chucked out of my house.”

While his private business life was in tatters, Mr Jones still managed to fall on his feet with a job that took him around the world marketing WA’s universities to foreign students as part of a shift in policy that started in 1986. He credits then state Labor cabinet minister, Bob Pearce, for seeing the opportunity.

It was another tough role for the future entrepreneur, flying business class, staying at five-star hotels on all-expenses-paid trips across the globe.

From this experience, Mr Jones not only made the connections for his future business but also saw a need. Too many of the students who came to Australia failed their first year; the shock of new culture, new learning environments and poor language skills often proved too great, despite the pressure and costs their families had borne to get to them here.

Mr Jones and his business partner, Peter Larsen, recognised the opportunity to provide a bridge between the raw students and the Australian universities.

It was a tough road but the first deal in the early 1990s with Edith Cowan University has spawned dozens of Navitas colleges around the world.

Mr Jones said he has only recently realised that being entrepreneurial was different.

“When I was young I could often see things, and I couldn’t understand that other people couldn’t see what I was seeing two or three steps down the track,” he said.

It was representing Australia as Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year that really opened his eyes that his own character existed elsewhere.

“I was in awe; I was concerned whether I could fit in with this group of people but I found they all thought alike, they were passionate, enthusiastic they understood how to take risks,” Mr Jones told the breakfast audience.

“Everyone with some success has to have some form of ego, but the humbleness behind that is unbelievable.

“They are just genuine nice people. They are not ruthless, they just understand what needs to be done.”