For entrepreneurs, past careers count

Trading places: Mad Mex founder Clovis Young.

Husayn Aly used to pull 36-hour shifts as an intern at Toowoomba Base Hospital. But he doesn’t feel like it’s the hardest he’s ever worked.

Aly considers working a day and a half straight at a public hospital equal to about one day on a construction site at Sleek Property, the developer he started up in 2006 after leaving medicine.

“After you’ve dealt with a couple of tradesmen and a couple of contractors, who can be a bit ‘challenging’ to say the least . . . it’s a close call with how I felt after 36 hours on my feet,” he says.

That said, Aly credits the four years he spent in hospitals with giving him the stamina needed to make Sleek a success. In 2009-10 its revenue grew by 250 per cent over the previous year and it turned over nearly $6 million; it ended up as No. 27 on the BRW Fast Starters list.

“Particularly in the early stages of getting it up and running, we’d be living off three or four hours’ sleep per night for weeks at a time,” he says. “I was able to cope with that because I was used to getting less.”

Aly isn’t the only Fast Starter to come from a seemingly unrelated career.

Dorry Kordahi used to cut hair, then he played in the Lebanese national basketball league before starting up the merchandising business DKM Blue, now the 10th largest in its field in Australia (and No. 20 in the Fast Starters list).

David Mills of Mills International Trading (No. 12 on the list) was a tradesman. The brains behind Appco Group Prosales (No. 21), Ty Pedersen, used to sell books and toys door to door.

Resumes don’t come any more random than that of Rickard Warnelid, founder ofCorality. Long before he knocked up his first financial model on Microsoft Excel, he was a meteorologist in the Swedish air force. Mad Mex founder Clovis Young had a no less peaceable job – as a proprietary trader on Wall Street.

Their previous lives may seem unconnected and in most cases unglamorous.

Yet, these Fast Starters credit at least something learned on their former jobs with helping build their burgeoning empires.

It’s clear in talking to Aly that his time as a doctor keeps him grounded, particularly in dealing with other property developers – few of whom would have spent a year working on a geriatric rehabilitation ward.

“Medicine taught me really well how to relate to people,” he says. “And I’m not just talking about dealing with real estate agents or engineers or architects or counsel.”

For Aly, the compassion required to be a doctor is also what prevents him burning bridges in his new world.

“When I’m dealing with distressed buyers, I don’t go in there and try and take advantage of the situation,” he says. “About two years ago, I bought a property off a lady who really needed to sell quickly. She was going through a divorce and her husband was giving her a hard time. I was able to offer her compassion through the whole process, I offered her a genuine price.”

The geriatric ward also shaped the attention to detail with which Sleek (soon to be rebranded Acentria) tries to distinguish itself.

“I enjoyed working with older people. Smaller things made them happy, which made my job more fulfilling,” Aly says.

There was nothing too fulfilling for Dorry Kordahi in his brief hairdressing career in his father’s salon in western Sydney. “I’d failed my HSC and I was literally standing still in there, visualising what I was going to do with my life.”

The young Kordahi poured his energy into basketball, making it to the top league in sports-mad Lebanon.

His sporting career contributed plenty to Kordahi’s next life in the merchandising and marketing business.

“Sport and business really have a lot in common,” he says. “The dedication you have to put towards the training, the teamwork, the mental dedication. Sport teaches you to push beyond your barriers of pain.

“It’s the same in business – you’re going to have tough months, you’re going to have tough years.”

Basketball also taught him a basic rule of human resources – diversity pays.

“You need to have role players – you can’t have 10 chief executives or 10 captains,” he says. “You need your star players and your team players.

“You can’t just go and hire 10 star sales people because who’ll do the back-end work to support those guys?”

Kordahi acknowledges that basketball looks like 48 minutes of sprinting, passes and shots. But he maintains that it holds lessons for long-term success in business.

“It’s a small court, there’s lots of small movements backward and forward but some of the guys with the longest careers have brought all those little things together with grace and imagination – think of Michael Jordan,” he says.

In taking it up to gigantic competitors such as Corporate Express, Kordahi is hoping he can take small things from across DKM Blue’s vertical operation and combine them in a way that will dazzle customers in a similar fashion.

Investment banking was to Clovis Young what hairdressing was to the young Dorry Kordahi.

Originally a proprietary trader for Wall Street hedge fund Tradescape, Young then went to business school and became inspired – too inspired, as it turned out, to stay for very long at his subsequent employer, a major investment bank.

“People might associate accountancy or law with dull jobs but have this idea that investment banking is glamorous,” he says. “Yet it can be very narrow, especially in the US where I was.

“Imagine being, like, the vice-president of currency derivatives for the Swiss franc – imagine that’s your whole life!”

Wanting to combine the “blue sky” feeling he got from business school with his passion for food, Young and his wife, Angela, started Mad Mex in November 2007. Young’s trading nous convinced him to move to Australia in the first place – he claims he could see the sub-prime crisis coming.

But Young’s Wall Street smarts also told him the fast food game held comparative advantages.

“In trading, you get to look at 20 different industries, what drives them and what will make them do well,” he says. “So in fast food, maybe there’s a few more business people than restaurateurs but on the whole it’s not business-minded. Coming in with that perspective is an advantage.”

It was a trader’s contrariness that made Young realise that what Mad Mex really needed was a good recession – a prospect he could see was becoming less remote towards the end of 2007, despite sharemarkets at record highs.

“We needed a lot of real estate but when the market’s hot you can’t find it or you can’t pay for it,” he says. “Also, we needed people to shift their dining habits from the $25 to $30 fancy meal to healthy, fresh convenience food for $10 to $15.”

Young believes his timing has helped him leapfrog major competitor in the Mexican-themed convenience food market, Guzman Y Gomez, which had started up a year earlier.

The notoriously long hours worked on Wall Street have also stood Young in good stead, in the same way that long hospital shifts did for Husayn Aly.

Living and dying by your calls on a high-pressure trading desk is also an experience that hasn’t hurt.

“If I hadn’t had three or four years of training myself to manage risk emotionally, I don’t know if I would have had the courage to do this,” Young admits.

“As a trader, you just learn to live with risk. Plus it was the guys who stayed late and did the research who could invest with confidence. They could take smarter risks.”

BRW

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