Shark Tank’s Steve Baxter on ‘training’ entrepreneurs

IT’S all well and good to encourage our kids to be sports stars. But Shark Tank’s Steve Baxter thinks it could be letting them down.

GROWING up as an Aussie kid probably meant getting signed up to every sport under the sun as your parents tried to figure out if you had the potential to be a little athletic star.

Years of training and skill building would follow and sure, you’d lose a few races along the way, but when you’re standing on that Olympic or Commonwealth podium, you’d realise all the painful failures were worth it.

Shark Tank’s Steve Baxter, who was recently on the Gold Coast to speak at the city’s Trade 2018 festival, told news.com.au it’s that exact mentality we should be using to produce more entrepreneurs.

Baxter, who fell into business when he launched his first start-up at the age of 23, said kids should be “trained” to be entrepreneurs.

“Sport stars at their peak are exceptionally competitive people, as are entrepreneurs — but they start differently,” he said.

The Shark Tank judge said the only thing separating entrepreneurs from athletes is the way they start their career.

“The average sport star here probably started at eight or nine years old as a swim star, gymnastics or whatever it might be and they’ve striven to be at the top of their sport the entire time. They probably get to 25 or 30 and that’s the end of their career,” he said.

“With entrepreneurs, we tend to luck into it. We tend to bumble through life, we find a problem and go, ‘Wow, I can solve that and I can make some money doing it’.

“So we don’t train to be entrepreneurs and I think that’s the one thing we can learn from the sporting event as an entrepreneurial community.”

Shark Tank’s Steve Baxter thinks more kids should be learning to be entrepreneurs.

Baxter put $11,000 of his life savings into SE Net, an internet service provider, when he was 23.

The company was eventually acquired by Ozemail/UUNet — the company Malcolm Turnbull founded.

While Baxter “lucked” into his first business venture, he said people need to be thinking about business more “deliberately” rather than just falling into it.

“The way we enter sport is very deliberate but how we enter business is very random and tends to be accidental,” he said.

The Shark Tank judge is well-known for taking a keen interest in emerging start-ups and young entrepreneurs.

In 2012, Baxter launched River City Labs in Brisbane, a leading co-working community to encourage entrepreneurs to work in Queensland.

But he said there could be more kids working at places like River City Labs if the mentality changed.

“You should strive towards being an entrepreneur, we don’t do that, we mostly bumble into these things. I think in a lot of cases, most people in this space just need the permission to start. They need someone to say it’s okay to start a business,” he said.

Baxter said living in the “lucky country” and the social system we’re a part of means everyone should have a crack at becoming an entrepreneur.

“We live in this amazing social net so if you don’t go so well or fail, you’re not immediately destitute.

“It could take maybe one or two years to pick yourself up again but you get on with life. You’re probably highly skilled in the school of life and much more employable to be honest.

“Sport stars work for those goals for years but entrepreneurs fall into it. I mean, look at me, I was a regular soldier that thought ‘oh there’s a problem, I’ll have a go at that’ and then I had to scramble to make up for it.

“Why don’t we sort of say to people at a very young age, you can be an entrepreneur, you can change the world. You can be the world’s best entrepreneur at X, Y and Z, whatever it is, We should be telling kids that,” he said.