Pitch Absolutely in one sentence?
Get Absolutely simplifies hosts and property managers ability to better manage their guests problems.
How did you get your idea or concept for the business?
I own properties all over the world and after we sold our last business for over $300 million dollars, I developed my own approach to manage how problems get fixed in my properties with my property managers.
Once I started showing my friends how I managed property service and maintenance issues, many wanted to give it a go, thus Absolutely was born.
What was your journey like to get where you are?
Difficult, there were a lot of ups and downs, as every entrepreneur knows, but it those that made me and the company what it is today. The journey of an entrepreneur is a real roller coaster.
If you had one piece of advice to someone just starting out, what would it be?
Learn to love failure. Nobody’s perfect. In fact, the lucky people are the ones who fail early and often, setting the stage for recovering from missteps and learning from their mistakes. Remember, behind every mogul, scientist, inventor and artist lies a string of failures. It’s usually on the 3rd try that you succeed. Mark Zuckerberg, as an example, failed with CourseMatch and FaceMash before succeeding with Facebook.
Learn to love failure.
When it's all over, how do you want to be remembered?
An advocate for what it’s truly like to be an entrepreneur. At present young people are only seeing the amazing ‘ups’ from the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and don’t understand the trials you go through to make a successful business, let alone become a Billionaire. This has caused an increase in people becoming entrepreneurs for a quick ‘buck’, which isn’t reality and has seen suicides in new entrepreneur’s surge.
Which company (other than your own) do you admire and why?
Microsoft, they made a lot of mistakes with the Zune and Windows Mobile, however even missing two of the biggest revolutions they continued to grow, dominate and re-engineer themselves. I especially like the CEO Satya Nadella and his philosophy of empathy within the organisation. It’s domination of the cloud, alongside Amazon, shows how forward thinking they were when others were thinking about the here and now.
In my spare time I like to…
Travel the world visiting some of the world’s top restaurants.
What is your favourite quote?
“The two most important days of our lives is the day we were born and the day we find out why we were born.” – Mark Twain