Late nights, early mornings, and endless repetition. That’s the life for many small business and startup founders attempting to launch their ventures. It’s also the process used by athletes preparing for top-level competition, providing significant overlap between the world of elite sport and entrepreneurship.
Luke Trickett knows both worlds very well.
The former Australian national team swimmer, and husband of quadruple Olympic gold medallist Libby Trickett, is the founder of fund manager Blue Stamp Company, group payments platform Backpocket, and invoice payments startup Marmalade, which secured a $16 million in funding in March.
SmartCompany recently caught up with Trickett to discuss the crossover between his professional swimming career, his stockbroking days, and his startup leadership. At the same time, he also outlined the invaluable support provided by his partner, on top of her own sporting and professional successes.
An edited version of the conversation can be found below.
Q: Looking back at your swimming career, and now looking at the world of venture capital and startups, what do these worlds have in common?
A: Well, I think there’s a couple of consistencies and transferable aspects, and there’s some big differences.
Definitely the most fundamental aspect to being both an elite athlete and starting a business is the need to get in and do what is probably considered very unglamorous work. Repeated work, where it’s hard to connect the dots between something that’s so seemingly trivial or granular, to a greater goal, like representing Australia or winning a gold medal. Building a business, achieving a valuation, or X revenue, it all boils down to taking very small steps.
It’s easy to think of success, or think of achievements being generated in these ‘big’ moments, but it’s actually the very last thing that occurs … it’s less than a minute, once every four years to actually win a medal. The moment of realising value in your business, it could be a meeting worth two hours of your time, versus five, ten years of real, painstaking work to actually build that business. It’s about doing all the small things that roll up into the big moment, but it’s not actually about the big moment.
I think being an elite athlete is a really good foundation for anyone going into a professional career; if you can focus on doing a really good job, on really small pieces of work daily, and repeating that over and over again, then you’re going to be building up into something really successful, in whatever way that may be, over time.
Q: A lot of founders and business operators can relate to the idea of early mornings and late nights that people don’t see, or understand, until there’s a headline capital raise, or a sporting achievement. What approaches did you employ in your sporting career that didn’t directly translate to your professional career?
A: I think like the biggest thing for me is swimming is very much an individual sport. You’re training, you’re in a squad, but you’re the one doing the work. You’re the one that has to do the work, when you go home from training, to do more work. Because ultimately, you’re the one that stands behind the blocks, that has to swim between the two lane ropes, and get up and back as fast as you can and touch the wall first. There’s no ambiguity about swimming; it’s a very objective sport … Obviously there’s relays, but it is ultimately an individual sport. So that’s something that I really enjoyed when I was swimming, because I would have a capacity to work that was probably not replicated by or shown by many other people.
Then if you go into the business world. Whilst in the very early stages of starting a business it’s true that you’re driving it, and you’re up late at night, and the business is moving forward based on that … as it grows, that changes quite quickly. If want your business to keep scaling and growing, in a manner that you probably hope it to, it then shifts away from being an individual pursuit.
As I talk, what occurs to me — it sounds very abstract, but come with me — is that you go from being the athlete, where you’re in the pool, you’re the one doing the work, to then be the coach, where you’re kind of out of the pool, and you’re looking at all the people in the pool now during the training. ‘They need to do this better. You need to do that better’. And you actually have to lift up, and hopefully empower your team to get the result that you want.
It shifts from being that individual pursuit to then being a pursuit with a collection of people, that when you all are pulling together in the same way, then you’re going to really do something special.
Q: I’m curious to hear from you about the outline of your career trajectory from swimming through to stockbroking, through to running a fund, and involvement in things like Marmalade. What did that transition look like?
A: Well, it’s a question that is summarising the last 17, almost 20 years of my life, so I’m trying to try to give you the abridged version. But the way I would characterise it is ‘organic’.
I always had an interest in having my own business. I was always interested in investing, and was really kind of fascinated by the idea of time and money. When I was a kid, I collected notes and coins and stamps and phone cards. I actually think the best investment I ever made was when I was six years old, when I got my hands on a bicentennial $10 note, which I still have to this day. It’s not in perfect condition, but I was six, and I had $10, so it was a pretty big achievement, let alone a bicentennial note. I saw about 10 years ago, one of them sold for $5,000. That’s an average rate of return of over 20%. And I think as a six-year-old, I did pretty well.
I was always kind of fascinated with that. It initially led me to stock broking, the idea of collecting companies, buying their shares, and holding them for a long period of time was one that really resonated with me. Then, events occurred in my life revealed opportunities. I started stockbroking in 2007, the GFC really started to rattle markets in 2008. I was looking at businesses to invest in, and they were just falling precipitously. But I was looking at these businesses, going, ‘Wow, this is a really great opportunity to buy that one, and that one’.
Lib and I sold our investment property to invest in the stock market, and then we ran out of that money, and we sold our principal place of residence and then rented, and put all of our money in the stock market. So there was that dynamic going where I wanted to continue investing money, but I ran out of ours. So I had to come up with a structure whereby I could keep doing what I love doing, but with more capital, and that was essentially starting a fund …
I started that in March 2010, after a full year of essentially reading the Corporations Act and writing to ASIC to say, you know, ‘This is why I think you should let me have an AFSL and operate Blue Stamp’.
I was driving Blue Stamp by myself from 2010 until 2019. It was really hard. It started small, and it wasn’t really providing much income for us. I was a purist, and I still am, in terms of, ‘I should only get paid when I’ve delivered value for my investors rather than a management fee’. So it just made it even harder again to provide an income for Lib and I and our young family. We were reliant on Libby’s income entirely for six years, and her income is very lumpy. It’s from large corporates that pay when they want to pay. It was a period of time that ultimately resulted in us having to sell our house again, but because of different reasons.
Reflecting back on that period, I realised we were and are a small business owner, and we’re just trying to manage our cash flow between ‘suppliers’, or our customers paying us. There’s probably a lot of other small and medium business owners out there that are experiencing exactly what we did — I didn’t want another loan, we didn’t need another loan, what we needed was our invoices, Lib’s invoices, to be paid.
There’s thousands of products out there that help with cash flow, but they’re all the same thing, which is just another loan packaged up in different ways. And so that was Marmalade. I was like, “Well I’m going to build a payment service for small and medium-sized businesses to manage their cash flow, so they can be paid when they want to and need to without dragging themselves into debt’.
Q: Many Australians are familiar with Libby Trickett’s accomplishments on the global stage, but can you tell us a little more about how her support and assistance helped ideas like Marmalade and Blue Stamp really take hold?
A: I definitely wouldn’t have had the opportunity… each one of them has been built squarely off largely unconditional support, from even when I was stockbroking. All the sentiment in the market and in the economy was very negative and I was saying to her, ‘How about we sell our apartment’. She said: ‘Yeah, okay, I trust what you’re doing and I understand that’. She was not just a passenger, and was engaged with what I was doing and supporting it, but nonetheless it was a very negative environment to make that sort of decision and take value out of real property, something that doesn’t feel it’s going to evaporate overnight, and put it into something that feels like it is kind of is evaporating overnight. And then doubling down on that with our with our home and saying, ‘Yeah, let’s rent and put our home in this very volatile environment’. That was really the beginning of forming Blue Stamp.
During that time, I was earning no money — I was not employed, I was not broking. That took 15 months, and she was just accepting of me. On reflection, it was kind of amazing. While she was out there, doing her thing, and earning the money, I think she always felt like we were building together. She felt aligned and that what we were doing was a shared journey. And I know that’s how she feels today.
It took 45 months for Blue Stamp to get $1 million of funds under management, which is incredibly small, and another 25 months to get to $2 million. So that’s 70 months of hard slog to build a small fund. She never, ever said to me, ‘Hey, when are you going to get a job and earn what you can in the markets?’, and I can’t overstate how important that has been to have that time and space to keep exploring and pushing opportunities.
My experience is about repeated, consistent work that hopefully is of the highest standard. You can’t rush that, so you do need someone who is there on the same page, feeling like they’re building with you and giving you that support.
Q: Reflecting on your sporting career and how you navigated hardship in that particular part of your life, are there any lessons for small businesses facing their own hardships?
A: It’s so important to have a process in place, particularly when things become challenging, uncomfortable, difficult, whatever it might be. If you have a really clear idea of where you’re going and what needs to be achieved, a very well-defined process that is either repeated over and over again or is something that you can progress through to get from where you are to where you need to be, is probably the most important thing an athlete or business owner can implement.
Think of an athlete at the Olympic Games. It’s all very intense. There’s a lot of pressure, a lot of expectations. The thing that will keep that athlete focused… is following a process that has been defined, has been trained over and over again, where they just know what they have to do, what their job is at that point in time.
There’s lots of unforeseen things that can happen to anyone in the world. That’s kind of the definition of life. You have to have a process in place to enable you to navigate unexpected events or really tough periods of time. Because that’s going to be the glue that keeps it together.
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Senior Business Journalist
Focused on the small business sector, David’s work covers the political, regulatory, and economic issues facing Australian entrepreneurs. Prior to joining SmartCompany, he was a reporter for Business Insider Australia. You can follow him on LinkedIn.
