Suzi Cues Success

She is half the brains behind a personal development empire, but that’s only part of her multi-stranded career. Her time is divided as much geographically as by the diversity of her business roles. Camille Howard gets up close and personal with serial entrepreneur, Suzi Dafnis.

In the early 90s, Suzi Dafnis and partner, Peter Johnston, were in the mood for change. Sitting in their rented flat in Sydney’s Mosman one day, they decided their work lives needed direction and motivation, but they didn’t know how or what exactly.Dafnis attended a personal development seminar, liked the offering and volunteered to work with them until they hired her as a marketing co-ordinator. She found her calling. Next, a crash-course in running a small business, one that almost literally crashed.

Coming from sales and marketing backgrounds, neither Dafnis nor Johnston knew how to run a business, or even much about the personal development and education industry that became their niche. But, as Dafnis says, they weren’t afraid to learn on the job.

The initial offering was to present seminars, workshops, and books and tapes to help ambitious punters achieve their financial, business and life goals. She wasn’t an expert, but knew how to market those who were, and using Johnston’s limited savings they set up shop in the spare room, launching Pow Wow Events in 1994.

Rich Dad Australia was then launched three years later. The savings didn’t stretch far—they were used to pay their ‘wages’ so they could pay rent, as well as grow the business. This isn’t an unfamiliar method for start-up businesses but, unlike other start-ups, aside from the brief use of an overdraft the business growth has continued to be funded solely by cash flow. Not uncommonly, the start-up phase brought with it plenty of struggles. The pair lacked experience in financial and staff management, and this phase and the growth phase brought two of the steepest learning curves for the business. "First, it was what I didn’t know about how to run a business, then it was what I didn’t know about how to grow a business," she says.

By 2000, the business started to take off, and grew from 10 to 24 staff almost overnight. "We were going with the market growth in the area of personal finance education and personal development education, and we couldn’t make a mistake. Every [speaker] we brought to Australia was a hit."

Over the moon with their apparent success, they crashed quickly back to earth. "We weren’t ready as far as procedures and managing expenses were concerned, and we started to grow ourselves broke," Dafnis says of the rapid growth. While they could keep their fingers on the pulse of the business and bring new business in, there were suddenly too many people to watch and manage and they hadn’t created the back-end procedures, starting with job descriptions, to back up the growth. "While all that was going on, we decided to open up in the US. One of the biggest mistakes I made was that I disconnected from the Australian operation when it wasn’t ready to self-generate. People knew how to run the business but no one knew how to bring in money like we did. And as business owners, we are responsible for that. Expenses started to go crazy, we had a CEO who didn’t have the same values we had—we just made a bunch of mistakes."