From Startup Struggles to Smart Leadership: Insights with Barry Money

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Welcome everyone to the very first episode of Strugbits Unplugged. I'm Faisal and I'm the founder and CEO of Strugbits. I'm thrilled to kick off this exciting new journey with all of you.

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Here at Strugbits, we believe in the power of stories. Stories of success, innovation and entrepreneurship. That's why we have launched this series to bring you all closer to the incredible journey of our favorite clients.

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Our goal with this show is simple. To inspire, to educate and to share the lessons learned from those who have been in the trenches, made bold moves and emerged stronger and wiser. Whether you're an entrepreneur, a seasoned professional or just someone who loves a good success story, we have got something here for you.

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And to start things off with a bang today. We are honored to have a very special guest and a very good friend of mine, Barry. He's a co-founder of Bain Enterprises.

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Barry's career is a proof of resilience and innovation. Starting as a consultant on franchise standards for global giants like Toyota, Barry has since built an impressive portfolio, leading across various sectors such as sales, marketing and customer service and all while maintaining full accountability for profit and loss. In 2023, Barry co-founded Bain Enterprises alongside Nida with a mission to change the Australian franchising industry by providing ethical and effective services.

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Bain Enterprises is not just a name. It represents Barry and Nida's commitment to bring a positive disruptor in an industry that they felt needed change. With a very unique surname, Money, he can easily be found online or on LinkedIn.

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Barry Money is also fluent in multiple languages including Japanese, French, German and some Spanish and even as far as I remember, Russian too, which is very impressive. So, let's jump into Barry Money's incredible journey and uncover the wisdom he has to share with us all today. Thank you for joining in, Barry.

How are you? It's great to see you again, Faisal. I always love our chats. Same here, same here.

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Okay, I have so many questions for you. But before starting, I have one question which I have always wanted to ask you since we met. I'm worried.

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Don't be worried about it. But it's a question I'm very sure a lot of people want to ask you and I don't know why. Or maybe someone has asked you before.

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Who was that marketing specialist who named you Money when you were born? Well, that was my father. And can you believe that my father worked in a bank? Oh, really? Yeah, Mr. Money worked in a bank. And I started my career as a trainee in a bank in Paris.

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So, yeah, Mr. Money carried on the heritage of working in a bank. So technically, Mr. Money's father was the marketing strategist, not Mr. Money himself. Yeah, that's right.

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Amazing, amazing. All right. So, Barry, first question for you.

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You have had a diverse cross multiple industry. Can you sum up your professional journey in one simple sentence for us? It's always hard to sum up in one sentence, but I think if I were to sum up in one word, my career would be eclectic, which means it's been extremely varied. And I think if I were to sum it up in a sentence, I would say that I have embraced every single opportunity, every single occasion as a learning opportunity.

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And, you know, during a career, you have ups and downs, you have promotions and trauma, but they've all been great learning experiences. Amazing, amazing. All right, Barry, coming to your own startup, which is BAN Enterprises, what motivated you to co-found BAN Enterprises? And how did your experience in the franchising industry shape that decision? So, let's go back a little bit.

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When I was 22, I moved to Japan and one of my first roles was in a major franchised organization. Now, I didn't know anything about franchising at the time, but fundamentally, I worked in a franchised organization. And I traveled the world consulting to franchise standards, transforming businesses to franchise standards.

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And all of those businesses where I worked were franchisees. So, I've fundamentally been in a franchised environment for a very long time. In 2017, I started work at the biggest franchise system in Australia.

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And in fact, in terms of the number of franchisees, it's the biggest in the Southern Hemisphere. And that company is called Jim's Group. Jim's Group.

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And a Jim's Group. So, in Australia, we have Jim's Mowing, Jim's Cleaning, Jim's Pool Cleaning, Jim's Everything. You know, Jim's Healthcare.

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So, it's an enormous business. And I worked at that business and I met my current business partner. And her name is Nedda Whelan.

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And she was the general counsel. She was the in-house lawyer for the largest franchisor in the Southern Hemisphere. She was absolutely amazing and still is absolutely amazing.

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And we got on like a house on fire. We were, you know, we had such a great laugh together, but we just enjoyed working with each other. And we were quite productive together.

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So, when I left after a year, she continued. And then we reconnected in 2022. I became the group CEO of a consulting company and a law firm and a marketing agency providing services to the franchising industry.

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And Nedda was there. And we decided that we really enjoyed working together. And what happened was I was due to get equity at that company.

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Didn't happen. So, we decided to join forces. And because we both had such a bad experience at that company, we decided that we would define our values and we would try to disrupt the franchising industry.

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So positive was born of negative. Positive was born of negative. I like this sentence.

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Oh, you can have that. You can have that. Thank you.

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I have noticed, being very honest, since ever we have met and we started working together, it's been, I think, more than a year now. And I have personally learned a lot from you. A lot.

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And my father always used to say, no matter how much qualified you get, no matter how much your skill set grows, you cannot compete with the person who has more experience than you. Because you can never beat that person. Because let's suppose if that person has 10 years of experience and when you come at 10 years, that person has 20 now.

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So, when you come at 20, he has the 30 now. So, he's always up ahead. So, experience is something which is, I think, no one can beat it.

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And you have that. I think you can beat experience. And the reason I say that is I have done a lot of hiring in my time.

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I've hired a lot of people, a lot of employees. And I don't hire first and foremost for experience. I hire first and foremost for attitude.

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And attitude beats experience every time. Because you can quickly, with a good attitude, catch up to someone with a lot of experience who maybe has bad attitude. So, attitude, experience, and then qualifications.

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That's the sort of approach I've taken with hiring in my career. I think that's the right approach. Coming from this experience thing, as someone with experience in various leadership roles, what do you believe is the most critical quality a leader should possess today? I don't think there is one critical quality.

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I think a leader, regardless of title, and we'll come back to that, but a leader needs to have a whole suitcase full of qualities. Tenacity, courage, immunity to failure. Because when you fail, it can affect you from a motivation point of view.

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You've got to have a learning attitude, positivity, optimism. You've got to bring vision to the table. A whole raft of things.

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But if you're asking me for one and one only, I would say that it's passion. Because with passion, you can achieve the impossible. If you truly believe in what you're doing, and you truly believe that you will succeed, I think you will more likely succeed than someone without passion.

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As a leader, I think you need to bring passion, and that passion needs to be contagious. You need to translate that to your whole team, and you need to give that passion. You need to infuse that passion in every touchpoint, in every conversation, with every client, with every business partner, and with every employee.

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I have a similar question to this one, and that is, how does your approach to leadership and strategy differ between startups and established corporations? Yeah. A great question, because when you look at the differences, the differences are relatively obvious in terms of, in a corporation, you have greater financial and human resources to apply to strategies. But I think the similarities are interesting.

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When you look at the similarities, whether it's a startup or a corporation, you need to define a vision. You need to translate that vision to strategies, and then you need to apply those strategies via other human beings. So, whether you're in a startup or whether you're in a corporation, the key thing I actually think there is translating your passionate application of the strategy through human beings.

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I think that's one key thing. The other thing I think is the leadership capabilities are, to a certain extent, similar in corporations. Often in startups, you're leading a smaller team, but leadership skills are actually quite different in corporations.

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And the reason is corporations often have huge bureaucracies, and those bureaucracies are actually progress prevention departments. And what I mean by that is the job of a corporation is too often to grow gradually and incrementally and to mitigate risk and to minimize failure. And therefore, you have a number of structures in place, which are risk mitigation structures, corporate services, HR, government affairs, PR mechanisms, things like that.

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So, your leadership in that space needs to take into account the bureaucracy, but in a startup where it's you and maybe a few co-founders or a few employees, the risk is not as great in terms of losing a corporate reputation or losing millions of dollars. There's maybe a few hundred thousand dollars or even a million dollars on the line in terms of risk, but it's not as great as a corporation, so you have a greater permission to attack that risk. And therefore, your appetite for risk and your approach is really quite different in a startup.

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And therefore, your leadership needs to be one that is quite innovative. You know, in corporate, in Japanese corporate, certainly we talk about incremental improvement versus huge transformation. And often corporates approach the one percenter, the continuous improvement.

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But in startups, often you're looking for the huge disruption. And I think that comes through when you're leading those different teams. You have to focus either on the one percent and work within the bureaucracy or you can attack the risk and be more innovative.

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Okay, Barry, I think you have worked on both sides. So, what do you think? Which one is your favorite side? If you would like to be a leader, would you like to be for a startup? You have been for both sides, but which one is the most interesting one for you? And which one is the most difficult one, you think? It's difficult to be a leader of startup because I know myself, I've started up four years ago. I started Strugbits.

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So, I know what are the hardships and what. But I have not been a CEO of a very big corporation yet. So, I don't know about that side.

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So, tell me about it. Which one is more interesting for you and which one is more difficult? Startup is absolutely more difficult from the point of view of you have to self-motivate. You don't have organizations and budgets around you to bring in, you know, motivational speakers and things like that.

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You're bootstrapping in a startup unless you're getting external capital invested. So, the challenge for a startup is often a human challenge. And when I when I talk about a human challenge, I mean a self-motivation challenge, a challenge to convert sales, a challenge to motivate your co-founders and your employees.

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In a corporation, it's easier to be unaccountable. It's easier to be lazy. It's easier to deflect blame and responsibility.

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And I must admit, I never enjoyed that in the large corporations where I worked. I didn't enjoy that kind of culture. And I was always a frustrated entrepreneur.

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So, you know, I would take risks in corporate that frankly weren't of a corporate style. So, I think when I look at it on the balance, I enjoy the startup because it challenges me more. Amazing.

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What's the best piece of advice you have ever received? Which you think is the biggest, like the best advice? Which means don't think to a point in time, think to a continuum. So, we work in a dynamic environment. We work in a dynamic marketplace with even at a micro level with our colleagues changing all the time.

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You can't just think to a point. You have to think about multiple and multidimensional scenarios. So, you constantly have to think of what would happen if or if this strategy occurred, what would I do next? So, I think the best advice I ever learnt and to kind of translate it into different words is always be thinking about what the next move is going to be, depending on the scenario you find yourself in.

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And I let me just tell you, I had I was so lucky when I was 23. I entered a huge Japanese corporation and I had the best boss. He was really strict, but he taught me everything about leadership.

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He was a middle manager and eventually got promoted to slightly higher middle management. But he taught me everything about leadership and many of his sayings in Japanese I translate to English. And that's one of my favorites.

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Could you say that Japanese sentence again? It's ten de kangaeru na sen de kangaeru Which means? Can I repeat it after you? Please. Ten Ten T E N Ten de kangaeru na Ten Ten De De Kangaeru Kangaeru Na Na Sen de Sen de Kangaeru Kangaeru Yeah. And it means? It means don't think to a point in time.

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Think of a continuum. And there was a great Japanese business book written with that title. Amazing.

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Now, can I say that I can speak Japanese as well in my portfolio? You can speak Japanese fluently. Thank you for that. It's amazing advice though.

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And especially the Japanese part made it more special for me. Okay. Barry, which leadership book had the most impact on you? I know you must have read a lot of books, but which one was related to leadership and it impacted you? Like it had an impact on you.

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I read a lot of books and I can't name one book that stands out as the only one. But there are multiple books. I read a lot of biographies and autobiographies by leaders.

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You know, Walter Isaacson's book on Steve Jobs is one of my favorites. I read a lot about Winston Churchill, who was the British Prime Minister during the Second World War. I read a lot of books about business transformation, the tipping point, the e-myth.

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There are these types of books that I read regularly. I think one of my favorite books, however, is a book by a coach called Bob Proctor. And it's called It's Not About the Money.

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And his book is fundamentally about believing in your vision and not chasing the money. The money will come. Believe in your vision to do good and make a difference.

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And if you believe in that vision, money will become a byproduct and it would eventually go. Exactly right. Yeah, exactly right.

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So, look, to answer your question, Faisal, I read a lot of books. But, you know, I love I love the book Jobs by Walter Isaacson because it shows a genius who was a flawed human. He wasn't a brilliant human.

He was he was flawed in many respects, like many of us. But he had this ability to remove the noise and focus on the simplicity of a transformative idea. And that's something that I really like.

That's amazing thing. That's amazing thing. The way you said that remove the noise and focus on transforming a transformative idea.

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That's very interesting because as a as a leader, when you you're in startup or anywhere, I feel like there's a lot of noise around you and it's upon you on which side you want to focus. If you want to focus on the noise, you waste your time. And if you focus on the right thing to make a progress, then you make a progress.

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It might be slow, but you do. Yeah. I have to separate myself from the business once a fortnight for maybe half a day to be able to shut out the noise and focus on the creative aspects of leading a startup.

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You know, thinking of the next transformative mechanism to move the business forward. And you can't do that when the phone's ringing or people are knocking on the door trying to get in the office. You just have to exclude all of that noise and think about what's the vision and how can you deliver that more productively? And I do that once a fortnight.

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That's very good. That's very good. I do sometimes something like this as well.

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Especially I feel like whenever I'm in the office. I'm not doing my job, which I really need to do. I feel like I'm focusing on more on noise and I'm handling things which I'm not supposed to handle, but they're just coming up and I have to do.

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And when I go home at night after dinner, I open my laptop and then I do the things which I really need to do. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, it happens with me.

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Okay, Barry, this one is a very good one. And I really want an honest answer on this. What's one mistake you have learned the most from? I don't know how honest I can be.

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Look, I'll give you two answers Faisal and you choose to use whichever one. I think from a business perspective, my biggest weakness and my biggest failure and my biggest mistakes have come from trust. I have trusted business partners who were first and foremost friends and then we went into business together and I have done that because I like them, love them and had a deep respect for them.

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And I go in with great intentions and good faith. And my biggest mistake, I think, has been trusting those people without having the legal structure behind me. I think that's my biggest professional mistake.

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So, you know, trusting business partners without a strong legal structure, that's one thing. And I think the personal mistake is having the courage to say no to opportunities. Right.

Many opportunities come across our paths as humans, whether they're professional or personal. And if you don't know, if you don't know where you're going, it doesn't matter which destination you head for. Right.

And I think when an opportunity comes to you, you need to have a filter of values. And in my younger years, I don't think I had that filter of my own professional and personal values. I hadn't formed them well yet.

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I wasn't experienced enough. So, I said yes to opportunities that, frankly, I should have said no to. I should have been more courageous and I should have been more introspective about the types of values that I want to hold as a human being.

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And I should have used those values to say no to opportunities. I got it. I think you're still very young, Barry.

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My birth certificate doesn't say so. When I see your passion, I feel like it's, you know, you're better than many young people in the world. You know, I see a lot of young people, they're like, oh, I'm done with the life.

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We are gone. Everything is going wrong. Oh, my God.

What happened to my life? Come on, dude, you're just 20. You're just 19. Your life didn't start yet.

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I think you've just got to learn. I think that that's the one thing that, you know, we opened with and that is every single occasion is a learning opportunity. So, you've just got to learn and keep going.

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Again, I will keep this answer short. How do you keep your team motivated during tough times? You've got to focus on the vision. You've got to focus on the vision.

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You've got to use a little bit of humor. You've got to joke and have fun.

 

Neda and I, my business partner and I, we sit in meetings and just laugh and laugh and laugh at some of the most ridiculous things, even though sometimes things are tough.

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In a startup, you know, there are many things that you miss and they're tough times. So, I think you've got to laugh, but I think you've got to keep going back to your vision. If you don't go back to your vision and remember it every single time you have a tough incident, then you could stray from that vision and you could lose your way.

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You could lose your motivation. So never forget the vision and always have a laugh. Yes.

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Okay. So, what's that one thing?

I wish that I had known that it's a marathon, not a sprint, because when you start at 22, when you come out of university and you know nothing about the real world, you often apply yourself to the work with a lot of energy and a lot of stamina, but maybe you don't apply yourself to the lesson with the same amount of energy and stamina. I wish I had taken, as a younger man, a greater helicopter view rather than an in-the-trenches view, and I think the greatest lesson that you can impart to someone who is younger is just pace yourself. You know, if you're going to be working for 40, 45, 50 years, then pace yourself.

If you don't get the immediate promotion in six months' time, that's okay, because there's a lesson to be learned from it that will help you fast track further down the track.

I just took this off because my beautiful face was being hidden because of this mic thing. I had to remove it.

Your beauty is shining through now, so it's good.

Okay, I'm shy, but thank you. Okay, Barry, we are moving towards the end of our podcast, and there's one last question which I would like you to answer, and that is especially what would be your one final piece of advice you would like to give to our audience today?

I think my final words to anyone in business is to be strong, but simultaneously to be generous, and when I talk about being strong, I mean being courageous, taking the risks, being entrepreneurial, and being a disruptor, but similarly, be generous. Be generous with your mentoring. Be generous with your time for your team.

Be generous for their situation. Be generous with your trust and your loyalty to your business partners. There's enough to go around for the right businesses and the right business people who want to make an impact, so be strong and be generous, I think, are my final words.

Thank you very much. Such a good advice, Barry, and I would really like to thank you on behalf of my team and myself. You took your time out and you met us.

It was amazing to meet you. I hope we didn't make you bored. I didn't make you bored, actually.

I hope that you liked the questions, especially the games.

No, it was great. It was great, Faisal. I had a great time, and I just want to say I think Strugbits are doing a great job.

You've certainly delivered for us and our clients, and I think what you're doing through this podcast is strong and generous. You're sharing your knowledge and you're sharing your time and your expertise, not just with clients like us, but with everybody else who's going to watch this podcast. So, congratulations on what you're doing in the world as well.

Thank you very much, Barry. Thank you very much for your time. See you around.

No problem. Cheers. You don't have to figure it all out now.