Peter Kazacos

It is indeed an honour for me to talk to you today in this milestone in your lives. I do remember when I was sitting in the chair that you are sitting in today, and the thoughts that were going through my head – what should I do now? What should be my first job? Should I just take up the first thing that comes up, should I wait for the ideal job? Should I take a holiday? Maybe take on a career in academia? And the other thought that was going through my head was how long is this guy going to talk? Only eight minutes.

Now, when I look back at my university life, I look at the key advantages that my degree gave me, and I think I want to share some of those with you. And that was mentioned earlier – what was learnt was important, but how it was learnt became even more important to me during my career. And one thing stands out that what university taught me is how to solve problems. And it’s something I didn’t really appreciate at the time, that problem-solving techniques are things that are in grown in universities, and become your second nature, but for a lot of people who haven’t gone through a university life, they don’t solve problems the same way.

The best way for me to explain this is to give you a few examples. I’ll give you a few from my corporate life, and some from my social enterprise. As was mentioned earlier, I started KAZ in 1988. We grew it from a garage – a lot of famous businesses started in garages, so I suggest maybe you should look at that if you’re starting a business. No, not really. But it’s interesting. We grew it to 4000 people and then sold it to Telstra, and one of the things is that I look back at the key fundamentals that I learnt back at university that actually I leveraged during my career at KAZ. So let me just share a couple with you.

First thing is having the right people – I remember some of my most complex assignments that I did at university required teamwork, and if I had the right team, I got the right results. The same was at KAZ – we ensured that we hired the right staff, and hired the right staff as our managers, and they then hired the right staff and so on and so forth – it’s a key importance of building the right foundations for a business, is to have the right team behind you.

The next is having reputable references. I remember a lot of assignments, you had to provide references to prove your assertions. In KAZ, the situation was customers expected references. To give them good references, therefore they’d like to do business with you. One of the big issues was when we started the business, we didn’t have any references because we didn’t have any customers. So let me share with you a particular thing that I did during those early days: I pulled out, and I haven’t got it with me today, my first business card. And my first business card had a little KAZ logo, and a large IBM logo, because IBM was one of our key suppliers. Basically I leveraged the credibility of our suppliers to gain my initial business. As times changed, my business card changed. The KAZ logo grew larger, and the IBM logo grew smaller, to the point where the KAZ logo stands alone. And it was actually a quite fitting occasion when Telstra bought us, they continued to use the KAZ brand until they sold the business.

The next thing was selling the dream. In any business, you need to be able to sell. Selling is presenting. I remember when I had to present my thesis at university, it was one of my first presentations and it was interesting in those times, you didn’t actually do many presentations. And I dreaded having to come up and do the presentation, but I realised I actually understood the topic I was presenting. That gave me the ability to be able to present, and present well. The same was true within KAZ: we had to present our staff to hire new staff, present to our customers, our suppliers and also to our investors.

The last thing I want to share about my corporate side is providing the right solution. With all the assignments I did at university, and I can’t remember how many I did in those days, there was always a problem that you had to find the solution. At KAZ, our customers had problems. We had to provide them the best solution. If we provided the best solution, not only did we win the business, we won repeat business and referential business. Now, let me just give you a few moments about my social enterprise.

After selling KAZ to Telstra, and spending a couple of years inside Telstra, which is actually quite interesting in itself, but a topic for another day, I decided with my wife to start a charity, and that was Your Angel charity. Your Angel charity focuses on providing support to those disadvantaged in the community. We try not to do the same thing that a lot of other charities do – we’ve found our own little niche – and in one of our areas is to actually promote Indigenous enterprise, and let me give you a little example of some of the things I did there and what it led to.

I got approached by an Indigenous group and they had a particular business concept, and they asked me to support it financially. I said ‘Well, all I want is a little budget – do me a budget, show me revenue, show me costs, and we can review it.’ Well, they spent a whole weekend working on it. And I got a phone call on the Sunday night, and they said ‘Look, we’ve got no problems writing down our expenditure.’ They could itemise all the expenditure items. But when it came to revenue, revenue equated to grants – they couldn’t see the fact that revenue is actually generated from the business. I quickly learnt that there are a lot of things that I take for granted in business that a lot of people struggle with. So I realised what I really needed to do was not just give money – is to actually work inside the business. So I can tell you today, I’m actually a proud member of the Koori Culture Aboriginal Corporation – the only non-Indigenous there. I have tried all the Indigenous foods, and I’ll talk about them in a minute. And I provide mentoring services, but more importantly I provide hands-on services. We’re located in Bowral, and if you visit there, I’m there on a Thursday and Friday, and you can see me there going through, sampling some of the cuisine we have. We have a fully operational training facility which incorporates a restaurant, we provide services such as cross-cultural training, catering, team building, and we train our own staff.

And what I’ve found over the time I’ve been there, I need to train them young, so we’ve actually started with what we call the Koori Culture Junior Program. So we bring kids after school from five years old to 10 years old for the junior program. We have our youth program and they go through to 18 years old. Then we have our training employment program, which is our Koori Culture Experience Training. Through that program, and through the mentoring I provide and the people I bring in to help, we’ve been able to grow the business.

Is the business where I want it to be today? No, not yet; we’re still working on it. Building cost models can be quite complex, and I’ll give you a little bit of trivia – one of the most expensive Indigenous meats is emu – emu costs $60 a kilo. So one of the discussions I had the other day, okay, how much does it cost per emu ball that we deliver to our customers to make sure we’re making a profit? These are the sort of things we go through for our workout cost of building up product. A lot of these principles in problem solving are things that I’d learnt back in my university days.

Another example from my charity is our autism project that we’ve just commenced. A lot of people that know me personally know that I’m a technologist at heart – I’ve got an electrical engineering degree, and I’ve been fascinated with robots, and I did a bit of research and found out that robots, and particularly one robot – the now robot – has an ability to help people with autism. You see, a lot of people with autism, particularly children, have an affinity with technology, and robots can actually help them learn, and help them actually learn their emotions. So we’ve started the project – I’ve brought on a project manager, and in fact I’ve actually rolled up my sleeves and I’m writing some of the programs for the robot. He’s quite cute and we hope that the program will be rolled out nationally one day. I found that both of these programs basically focus on skills that I initially learnt at university that I then honed through my corporate life.

So what does this mean for you today? Well, some of you may find a career in social enterprise. Others may find it’s something you want to look at later in life. The thing is that a while ago, two or three years ago, I actually started a little project and it was to actually team up university students, both under and postgraduate students, with charities, to come up with new, novel ideas for fundraising. And I put up some prize money, and as a result we had a presentation and we gave our prizes for people with the most novel ideas. But what I didn’t count on, which is a really good result, is after the competition was finished, all the prizes had been given out, a number of the teams continued to work with the charities to actually roll out these ideas to actual fundraising techniques. So one of the things I’d like to leave you with is that you may want to see whether, while you’re waiting for your ideal job, you might want to volunteer some time with a social enterprise. Now, one of the things is, it’ll do a lot of good for them, it’ll put something on your resume that could be very good, but also make you feel good. It made me feel good as well. Thank you all, well done on your graduation, and I wish you all the best for your future.