Lessons learned

Growth: Kenelm Tonkin is looking to expand overseas.

Kenelm Tonkin has had the single vital experience that marks a true entrepreneur. His first business – a training organisation for local government called Ascential Consulting that he set up in 1996 – failed. It fell over, he says, simply because “I didn’t have sufficient capital. It was my first major lesson in business.”

That lesson, among others, spurred Tonkin on to future success. The Australian now spends his days networking around Manhattan, working towards making Tonkin Corporation, a business best known for hosting corporate conferences, more global.

The business has already made BRW’s Fast 100 three times in seven years - it’s an achievement to make the list just once and a rarity to make it three times.

When Tonkin Corporation first made its debut in 2004, turnover was $1.3 million. By the time it turned up in the 2010 Fast 100, its revenue had reached $6.3 million.

Today, the corporation hosts about 160 conferences a year in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia and India and the business is on target to reach turnover of $8.4 million.

“We attract the top executives in big companies to discuss topical issues of the day,” Tonkin says, pointing out that they have covered everything from the dot com bust, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and swine flu, to more industry-specific matters such as property finance and insolvency.

The company has also begun branching into new areas. It markets itself as a “B2B media group of nine employee-managed entities” that are between them responsible for distance education, conferences, training, subscription databases, data management services, publishing, software development, property services and, most recently, a boutique private equity fund.

“I’m currently talking to people in Dubai and New York, looking to build our business portfolio and trying to unleash other entrepreneurs,” Tonkin says. “My hope is that five years from now, you’ll see Tonkin Corporation pop up all over the place, that we’ll be bigger than the multinationals.”

Even in his early years Tonkin wanted to outperform. At 17 he secured a cadetship at Shoey’s Supermarkets in Newcastle (which was later taken over by the then Coles Myer-owned supermarket chain Bi-Lo).

He rotated every six weeks between different areas of the store, from the storeroom to the butchery to the check-out. By 20, he was store manager and was doing so well the company offered to pay his university fees.

He worked and studied part-time, majoring in law and entrepreneurship as part of a bachelor of commerce at the University of Newcastle. “The supermarket cadetship was invaluable,” he says. “It was a hard-fought early business experience that offered a structured rotation through the head-office functions of a rapidly expanding business – competitive intelligence, communications, pricing, information technology, accounting, buying, merchandising, line implementation.”

He also spent the early 1980s developing his public speaking at Toastmasters International, a not-for-profit training organisation that focuses on communication and leadership development. He also became politically active, building the largest Young Liberal branch in Australia while running recruitment for the NSW Young Liberals and being appointed the NSW Young Liberals vice-president.

He has also had stints as a lawyer, first at the NSW Crime Commission and then for a private practice that handled workers’ compensation claims for insurers – what he describes as “soul-destroying work, but a role that taught me a great deal about the commercial side of law”.

After the failure of his first venture, he started work in the conference industry with big names such as IIR Conferences, before starting Tonkin Corp (back then Law & Finance) more than a decade ago.

He attributes his ability to succeed to a tragedy he overcame early in his life. “When I was 14, my father had a stroke,” he says. “I was the eldest of four. Mum worked the night shift as a nurse and so I had to hold the family together. You just learn to survive and you learn your own strengths and weaknesses. It gives you a hunger that’s unusual.”

BRW

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