The new director of UniSA’s Centre for Business Growth sees virtue in scaling up

Australian businesses should lift their aspirations, UniSA’s Australian Centre for Business Growth head Ryan Williams says.

Ryan Williams, director of the Australian Centre for Business Growth. Picture: Supplied

Creating a great ecosystem for the start-up community is all well and good, Ryan Williams says, but you also need a framework to help companies “grow up” and “stay up”.

Mr Williams is playing his part in that regard, with the business transformation expert, who cut his teeth in private equity after realising a career as a guitarist was probably not going to pay the bills, now heading up the University of South Australia’s Australian Centre for Business Growth.

The Centre, established in mid-2014 by Dr Jana Matthews, delivers programs aimed at chief executives and managing directors who are aiming to rapidly grow their businesses.

Mr Williams’ goal is to build on the good work of Dr Matthews’ team, and take the program to the next phase, in part by expanding its reach through digital means.

Part of Mr William’s motivation for taking on the role was a belief that business owners and managers, himself included, had almost a moral obligation to develop their good ideas beyond the “lifestyle business” phase, and into high growth organisations, thereby employing more people, increasing prosperity and adding to the greater good.

Mr Williams himself could have easily stayed in the private equity world, in which, not to be too cynical, the end result is often an incremental wealth gain for already wealthy institutions and individuals.

But he sees a greater good in using his expertise to help numerous entities scale up through the centre.

Mr Williams, originally from South Africa, studied psychology after realising that classical guitar was likely not going to be a lucrative career path.

He carved out a career in the advertising industry and ran marketing and strategy consultancy Nota Bene which did well, and was sold to WPP.

One of their customers happened to be on the board of a theatre company - Ster-Kinekor Theatres - owned by a private equity group which was looking for someone to come in and set the ship right.

“That was my first foray and we did an OK job there,’’ Mr Williams said.

That rolled into setting up a radio station asset for listing, “and there’s his other asset that we’ve got, we’re not sure whether it’s whether it’s viable. Can you kick the tires and figure out what to do there?”

“And then they moved me across to – I hesitate to call them an incubator because it’s private equity-backed. You had a cluster of companies ... (they were) investing majority stakes into start-ups and small firms.’’

The group, Primedia Unlimited, had diverse interests from a signage business to pharmacy software and a technology business doing navigation in shopping precincts.

“That was a great ride,’’ Mr Williams said.

“So the brief there was to help exit some of the mature assets and help build a pipeline for new assets’’.

While he hesitates to call himself a turnaround specialist, Mr Williams said often the businesses were distressed assets or what they’d call “special circumstances’’ and he excelled at using the balance sheet heft which being part of a larger group affords to get them back up and firing more often that not.

But there was eventually a sense of weariness that came with jumping from one crisis scenario to the next, and Mr Williams said he never really got to work in “the nice side” of the businesses, how they performed once they were on a sure footing again.

Mr Williams said he is now motivated to pass on the lessons he has learned to as many companies as possible, rather than doing it on a case-by-case basis.

To this end, he describes joining the Australian Centre for Business Growth as a “purpose match’’.

Part of the new mission involves ensuring the long term sustainability of the Centre, securing ongoing funding outside of government sources.

“And then the big opportunity, I think, is to digitalise on what we have,’’ Mr Williams said.

“That means more companies, more impact.

“The other thing is that at the moment, we’re making discretionary choices about who gets into the program because it’s difficult to have, let’s say, a sole trader or micro enterprise in the same room as somebody with let’s say 50 or 70 staff.

“Some of their scaling challenges will be different and they don’t learn effectively from each other.

“But if we make content more widely, potentially there’s access points for anyone that wants to get in.”

This doesn’t necessarily mean a diminution in the important face-to-face work the Centre does, but might evolve, for example, into clusters of small, micro and larger businesses working together.

Digitalisation would also allow the program to be delivered more effectively in regional areas.

And underlying all of this, is Mr Williams’ belief that business owners in a sense have a duty to try to excel and grow their businesses.

He said he it was “not good enough” to have a “she’ll be right” attitude.

Australian business owners needed to aim higher he said, and see growing their business as a part of contributing to the societal good.

In the start-up field, Mr Williams said there had been great capacity building around helping businesses launch and sustain themselves early on.

He sees the Centre as key to helping with the next steps.

“Big firms, they don’t just arrive,’’ he said.

“All the capacity behind the start-up ecosystem - that’s a great set of policy levers, a great set of investments nationally, but if I take the helicopter view there’s another part of me that says, great to do start-ups but somewhere you need grows up and stays up, otherwise, there’s no maturity cycle.

“Governments around the world already do a good job of putting gas in the tank and changing the tires, building amazing roads, but they don’t teach anybody how to drive.’’

This next phase, Mr Williams says, is where the centre will continue to work, and scale up its influence.

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