Starting and running a business can be a most rewarding, but complex and demanding, part of your life. It can give you the independence, lifestyle and financial status you crave, but if it's unsuccessful it can also take away your independence and you are suddenly in damage control trying to protect all that is valuable to you.

It may seem strange to be writing a book on ‘the rules’ of entrepreneurship, as entrepreneurs, by definition, all do things differently. However, there are fundamentals you need to get right to give yourself the best chance of success when starting a business. Disruption and reinvention are part of those fundamental rules and part of the everyday life of being a successful entrepreneur. This is not a step-by-step ‘how to’ book, but rather a book of fundamental principles that will be applied differently by different people and different business concepts. But they are fundamentals that must be covered off to give you the best chance of success.

My father always said, ‘A good business makes money from day one' — a statement that still carries a lot of merit today. A simple business model that people understand and that works well is often the best, so don't unnecessarily overcomplicate the process. In these days of burning cash before your business plan predicts you will make a profit, and potentially running the risk of your plan failing in the process — leaving large debts behind — keeping it simple is often the best solution.

I was fortunate to have grown up in a business family with my two brothers, and we experienced all that came with that. My father founded what has become one of the largest meat wholesaling and further meat processing businesses in the country.

Every school holidays it was an expectation that I would work at the factory washing walls and cleaning drains to earn some sought-after money. I learned what it took to earn money, and the value of it, and took great satisfaction in saving every week to eventually buy what every teenager in the 1980s wanted: a hi-fi stereo sound system with turntable, amplifier, quality speakers and the latest vinyl records!

In my secondary school years, I was promoted to the production line, packing the offal, and was eventually put in charge of the trimming machine, trimming the meat off the bones that the boners missed with their big knives. At the end of the day the production crew took great joy in throwing me into the boning bin (and I can tell you that's a pretty humbling experience, but it taught me humility, what hard work was about and the real value of money) and as you could imagine the melting pot of cultures that worked in that type of environment was incredibly diverse and taught me a huge amount about how to get on well with virtually anyone I met, an enormously valuable lesson in life.

I was never the brightest kid at school, but I carried that work ethic and humility into the classroom and through sheer determination I managed to scrape into the bottom end of the A-stream classes and then had to continually work hard to stay there. Finding a way (sometimes creatively) to get things done really underpinned the rest of my life as an entrepreneur.

I achieved a high enough score in year 12 to gain entry to the Bachelor of Business degree at the University of South Australia. I was the youngest of three boys but the first to have the opportunity to go to university so I didn't want to waste that gift, and there were expectations of applying what I learned to the family business. It was a time of rapid technological advancement, with our business moving from a Wang computer with a 5" floppy disk that had a simple accounting package to an HP 3000 computer system that took up an entire room. It was specifically climate controlled, with a washing machine-sized CPU, enormous twin 250MB hard drives, reel-to-reel tape drive and twin very loud line printers with ribbons that continually jammed up.

The programming and operation of this system was outsourced to specialists at the time but really took my interest, and learning early BASIC language software coding was part of my degree course. In fact, I was one of the first cohorts to go through the degree to actually learn coding on a keyboard and screen instead of on punch cards. I spent many hours under the guise of my university study sitting with the programmers at the family business as they were defining the core business processes that could be managed by a software program at the time. The initial suite of programs continually needed debugging and I became very good at this and at maintaining and evolving the system until it eventually became my job when I graduated from university in 1984.

This gave the innovator in me the chance to evolve as I loved being the systems analyst and finding any manual task that I could design a program for to automate the process. The big challenge was our livestock trading operation as we needed to track large numbers of cattle purchased, individual live weights and costs, and then the yields after processing, which translated into our true product costs. It was a unique system that was used up to 15 years after I first designed it. It suddenly gave us rapid insight into the most productive buyers, the cattle markets and the cattle breeds that provided the best yields, which in turn provided the business with a significant market advantage. It was my first taste of disrupting an industry to an extent and I remember thinking that was pretty cool at the time.

In 1986 the company went public and, soon after, in 1987, my brothers and I decided to launch into our first business rather than staying with the public entity, preferring to maintain our independence and exploit our industry knowledge and ideas.

This book showcases the key lessons I learned from my four enterprises over the past 35 years across different sectors, together with my more recent work as Entrepreneur in Residence at the University of South Australia and what I call the Fundamental Rules of Successful Entrepreneurship. (I'll use my own businesses, plus a number of others, as working examples where relevant in the chapters of this book.)

As an entrepreneur, you'll make mistakes along the way, and you must learn from those experiences and learn how others have navigated the same issues. In the end you need to simply make more good decisions than bad to survive and be successful. If I can help you avoid some of the fundamental mistakes along the way, I've done my job!

To help me reinforce the points I make in each chapter I have engaged the help of three leading Australian entrepreneurs: Tobi Pearce from SWEAT, Flavia Tata Nardini from Fleet Space Technologies and Simon Haigh from Haigh's Chocolates, together with Kirsten Bernhardt from Artesian Alternative Investments, who will provide an insight into what the leading venture capital funds and investors are looking for in start-up and scale-up companies and founding entrepreneurs.

These inspiring entrepreneurs have incredible stories of how they have built their businesses and will share their own experiences on how they navigated the topics I raise in the chapters of this book. Not every business and business model are the same, but often the underlying problem we are trying to solve is very similar and my experiences, combined with those of the other entrepreneurs, will help you to understand the concepts more thoroughly.

Introducing Tobi Pearce (Ex-CEO and Co-founder of SWEAT)

Tobi and co-founder Kayla Itsines built a global online fitness empire that started in 2015 with their local personal training group, turning their workout routines into a product that could be targeted to an audience and distributed globally. Tobi and Kayla completed a deal with iFIT in July 2021, selling SWEAT for a reported $400 million. The company had an annual revenue of $100 million, reaching a global community of more than 50 million women across its social media channels to help them reach their fitness goals. The app is translated into eight languages and available in 155 countries.

Tobi grew up in a small town located near the wine region of McLaren Vale just south of Adelaide in South Australia. He admits there was no degree of entrepreneurship in or around his family, and business was never really spoken about when he was a child. Business and money were only really discussed in the context that ‘we didn't have heaps’, and life was typical and frugal for Tobi while growing up. Tobi's father was passionate about wine. He worked in a local winey, both in the vineyard and doing tastings, and started a small winery tour business, working for himself. It was never really talked about as a business or even a job: it just worked for his lifestyle and was never designed to be a commercial venture.

Tobi was an avid reader and read more books than most when he was younger, although certainly not business books at the time. However, he just knew from the knowledge he gained he wanted more from life. He didn't know what he wanted, but he knew he wanted to be successful. From an upbringing of being financially limited, he knew he had to budget and save to get the things he wanted and by eight or nine years of age he started doing the maths on how long it would take him to save for his first TV.

Tobi left home at a young age while still at school and had a practical problem to solve: he needed a place to live and sleep and food to eat, all of which required money. He ended up having a few different jobs to pay his way, moving back in and out of home over that time, and eventually, after completing school, he thought, now what? Even though year 12 wasn't Tobi's best year at school, he decided he wanted to go to university with the aspiration of getting into business, so with sheer determination he decided to sit a mature-age entry exam. Tobi needed to study hard to get the required score, and he achieved enough points to embark on a double degree of Commerce and Law at Flinders University.

He made it through nearly four of the six-year double degree but found it difficult to earn income and study full time, and to complete the course part time would have taken far too long (another six years). As opportunity would have it, for two years prior Tobi had been going to the gym to lift weights as part of a recovery program for a back injury. He admits to being a skinny — but athletic — kid and enjoyed the gym experience.

His journey from this point is remarkable, and you will learn about how the SWEAT business evolved in the chapters ahead.

Introducing Flavia Tata Nardini (CEO and Co-founder of Fleet Space Technologies)

Flavia Tata Nardini and co-founder Matt Pearson have built a globally leading ‘space technology’ business literally from their garage over the past few years, bringing their idea of building small communications satellites to life. The business is changing the economics of space communications, enabling many new industry applications. Fleet made history by launching Australia's first four commercial nanosatellites in November 2018. Over the course of three weeks, Proxima 1 and 2 and Centauri 1 and 2 were launched into low Earth orbit. Fleet is continuing its work on the Centauri program, having launched its fifth and sixth satellites in 2021, and the next batch of satellites in 2022.

Flavia is a native of Italy and grew up in a family of five siblings, a family who were all high achieving engineers across different disciplines. Her grandfather had three degrees in engineering, and engineering, in various forms, was always a topic of conversation in her family — but no-one had ever done space!

Flavia admits she was born with a love for space, more so than engineering, that she can't really explain. She was obsessed with the stars from a very young age and a huge fan of space movies, which she admits most young children are — but Flavia never moved on! Her obsession with space continued throughout high school and took different forms. She first wanted to be an astronaut, then an astronomer, then she wanted to find extra-terrestrial life and then she became fascinated with stars as her interest became more sophisticated. Flavia was good with maths at school and with her family being engineers she decided to pursue becoming a space engineer.

Flavia had always worked in larger corporations and had no experience with start-ups. She openly admits that start-ups were not her thing; none of her family members had done a start-up before. When she moved to Australia, she couldn't find a job in the space industry as it just ‘wasn't a thing’ in Australia at the time. However, she wanted to keep working in space. In Australia, as a matter of chance, she met co-founder Matt Pearson, who is a true entrepreneur at heart and, as Flavia says, ‘It is his thing!’ For Matt, start-ups were his way of living and he had been founding start-ups since his twenties, including a very successful software start-up in Sydney with up to 300 employees, so when they met it was a match made in space! As a typical ‘no fear’ young entrepreneur Matt said, ‘If I can do software, I can do space!’

Together with Flavia's technical skills and leading the business as CEO, they are building an inspirational business to ‘enable the next giant leap in human civilisation’. From humble beginnings you'll learn how this business started and evolved chapter by chapter in the book.

Introducing Simon Haigh (Joint Managing Director of Haigh's Chocolates)

Simon and his brother Alister are the fourth generation of this extraordinary 107-year-old iconic business, which has produced four generations of exceptional entrepreneurs. As Australia's oldest family-owned chocolate maker, they have not only had to validate the idea, and establish and grow the business and the brand, but also to continually adapt and transition the business in a rapidly changing world over more than a century. You will hear how the original business was founded by Simon's great grandfather, Alfred E Haigh, in 1915, and how every generation of the Haigh family has tackled a different level of entrepreneurship with its own unique challenges as the company has matured and grown.

Haigh's has built a brand and product over 107 years that is close to the heart of many Australians and continues to expand nationally with its ever-growing retail and manufacturing operations — and is now even considering international markets. Every stage is like starting a new business in a new era, and as timing is everything in entrepreneurship, this requires the same process and entrepreneurial thinking every time. It's an incredible view of a multi-generational business staying relevant and maintaining market leadership over time.

Simon grew up in Adelaide but did his school years with brother Alister boarding at Geelong Grammar in Victoria, coming home during holidays in the mid 1960s to work in the business to earn some much-needed money at the time. Simon describes the work as more ‘running riot in the factory’ and ‘handing out chocolates to shoppers’. The business was still a real family affair at the time, with their mother heavily involved in designing and preparing the packaging for the Easter range and how it would all come together and be displayed.

Neither Alister nor Simon went straight into the business after school. Alister did some jackerooing up north in South Australia and both spent time in Masterton, New Zealand, at a family friend's horse stud ‘Te Parae’ learning the trade. As you will hear in the story of the earlier generations, horse studs were a big part of the Haigh's business interests, and during some tough times around the Great Depression played a strong part in supporting the chocolate business. Simon had aspirations of becoming a vet but getting into veterinary science at the time was very difficult, with only one or two colleges available in Australia. Both came back from New Zealand and after a reality check started working in the business, learning the operational side. The company had a strong operational and retail team, and working under their father, John Haigh, provided Alister and Simon with the best learning platform possible.

Simon talks about each generation of the Haigh family and how they navigated their entrepreneurial challenges in the following chapters.

Introducing Kirsten Bernhardt (Investment Manager at Artesian Alternative Investments)

Kirsten Bernhardt joined Artesian Alternative Investments in 2022 as Investment Manager of the South Australian Venture Capital Fund. Kirsten spent two years in San Francisco, where she was Investment Strategist with legal software and law firm start-up Atrium before moving to Bank of America as Assistant Vice President, Middle Market Technology Banking. She was Commercial Manager with The University of Adelaide and a consultant with both Ernst & Young and KPMG prior to her move overseas.

Her new role with Artesian — the global venture capital fund managers responsible for the $50 million South Australian Venture Capital Fund as part of their portfolio — will see her focused on investing capital into South Australian tech start-ups.

Not all businesses want to raise money and have investment partners; many will self-fund their own development from their savings (known as ‘bootstrapping’) and others will fund through the business earnings (though not everyone has that option). If the market opportunity is only available for a small window of time, or you simply don't have the financial resources to get started, then you will need other partners or investors to join you on the journey. In this instance, you need to ask yourself, Do you need skills and money or just the money? This is a fundamental question when you're starting out.

Kirsten provides us with tremendous insight on how investors look at founding entrepreneurs and their businesses, what they consider to be investible businesses and why. This is absolutely critical information to understand when you're starting a business that you want to scale quickly and you need investors to help finance that journey. Understanding how to present not only yourself, but also your team, the business and the right business model from early on and understanding what investors are looking for will get you financed and underway much faster to grow your dream.

Now that you've been personally introduced to my panel, look out for their invaluable advice and insights throughout the book. Each chapter that is relevant to some aspect of Tobi's, Flavia's, Simon's or Kirsten's expertise will include information on their experience to help reinforce the chapter's focus.

I can't wait to share this content with you and to hear your success stories later! Validating your idea and testing the market is a great place to start — so let's get cracking!