Actively managing your personal brand is critical if you want to make a significant impact in the areas of your life important to you. What you say and what you do influences how people perceive you, so take note that your personal branding will determine how successfully you’ll be able to make an impact in life.
Welcome to the fifth episode of The Personal Brand Catalyst. Today we are joined by Tony Nash who started his first internet business in 1996. In 2004, Tony founded Booktopia, an online bookstore with an allocated budget of $10 a day.
The company's first book sold in three days. Fast track 17 years and Booktopia now sells one book every 3.9 seconds, with an annual turnover of over $220 million a year.
It was listed in the AFR BRW Fast 100, eight times, the only company to achieve this feat and was voted book retailer of the year for the third time in 2019 at the Australian Books Industry Awards.
One of the defining aspects of the business is its philanthropic program. So far, Booktopia has donated well over a million dollars in books and cash to literacy-based projects in Australia, including indigenous literacy, writers' festivals, readers' conferences, library fundraising projects, and book industry awards.
In 2020, Booktopia was listed on the Australian Stock Exchange with a market capitalisation of 315 million.
Tony is an entrepreneur, founder and CEO in online retail with a background in recruitment, programming, business development, selling, SEO, and internet marketing
Tony has developed outstanding negotiation and leadership skills with a thorough understanding of sales and managing an outstanding executive team; has involved himself in capital raising, and listing now on the Australian Stock Exchange.
Self Identity As A Brand
Tony considered “Tony Nash” as his brand and not Booktopia because same with any CEO or founder, he wants his business to have longevity beyond him.
It’s a role that when he steps down or resigns, Booktopia would continue to go on and therefore, he’s leaving it in trusted hands. That thinking is super helpful for him in terms of its growth over the years.
Perception of Others
For Tony, others might perceive him as a success story because he’s done something that very few have done despite books being written off, bookshops closing, and Amazon’s going to annihilate you.
But it’s not just him or Booktopia employees or now shareholders, but also publishers, authors, and customers who participated in that success.
The most appealing and exciting part of the whole Booktopia journey for Tony is that there’s very little expectation of what they were going to get to where they are today. It’s basically like achieving the impossible.
How Business Affected Tony's Reputation
According to Tony, his career with Booktopia is like being an athlete or being on the field where people yell at you, yell at the referee, or yell at the competition. “Everything is just noise, so there’s an aspect of understanding what your purpose is and where you’re heading.”
He can only imagine playing the State of Origin, with so much crowd involvement even beyond those that are at the ground, to have the eyes of the eastern seaboard of Australia watching a specific game and then to be impacted by what people are saying and what social media are saying these days more than ever before. Those things didn’t ruffle Tony.
When asked about the speedbumps he encountered over the years, Tony mentioned that he’s getting speed bumps all the time even right now. In 2022, Booktopia’s share price has gone from just under $3 to $1.30, that’s a massive drop even lower than before.
The way Tony looked at it is, that everyone’s on the slide at the moment, so it’s not specifically about Booktopia. Ecommerce businesses are being repriced at the moment so he doesn’t feel like it’s a reflection on him or the business so his advice is that you need to be resilient and you got to be able to separate yourself from the speedbumps you encounter.
Building Credibility and Reputation in The Early Years
When Tony was around 30 years old, he had been approached by a financial planner to invest in an Australian film scheme that enabled them to invest as he films and then get a tax break. The tax break was really beneficial to do and you could borrow money to pay for it. Tony thought it was a good idea, so he got involved.
Then seven years later, the Australian Tax Office decided to stop that and retrospectively go back seven years and nullify all of the schemes. So in the end, Tony had worked out that he owed the Australian Tax Office $250,000.
At that time, he had sold his house and put all the money into his company and since the scheme was a personal and not a business thing, Tony found himself with a fair amount of debt.
He was trying to pay it off but he got to a point in the early 2000s where he decided to just go bankrupt. He’s heard enough times that if you’re an entrepreneur, you’re going to go bankrupt at least once in your life and Tony saw that as liberating not because he no longer had to pay the Australian Tax Office $250,000.
Personally, Tony didn’t think of himself as a failure or that he was going to have to hide his experience in the closet.
He has many instances where he could think he’s hopeless or worthless because he got so many reference points to think that he’s worth nothing, but that’s not how he went about his daily work.
Keeping The Reputation
Tony always felt that destiny was in his own hands. Only five years ago, his son was diagnosed with ADHD and he went on medication. His life transformed at school and socially with his friends, particularly with teachers that he was working with on a daily basis.
His wife was pretty sure Tony had it as well, so he went to an adult psychiatrist and they spoke about all the things that he’s accomplished in sport and Booktopia. A week later, the psychiatrist also had a conversation with his wife and then after that, it was confirmed that he definitely has ADHD.
When he got that insight about how he operated in the world, he has to consider that when asked about everything he went through because he was undiagnosed, so there were certain aspects to mental health and certain conditions, but Tony sees ADHD as a superpower.
ADHD serves him because when he finds something that he’s really passionate about, he just locks in and that’s something that he wants to do. It’s one of the reasons why Booktopia actually has been successful in the early years.
So to him, it's a superpower not that he knew that he had it then, but there was always this thing about him that he believes he’s going to rise out of the ashes like a phoenix. For him, it was always this sense of hope and possibility.
When Tony thinks about his son and perhaps others, the hallmark of ADHD is that you have this element that you’re not good enough. But when it came to accomplishing things or succeeding, you think that it was always like a quest to show the rest of the world that you’re not useless or unworthy.
Identifying And Establishing Tony’s Values
Tony thinks that a lot of our values are inherited from our parents and learned from our environment mostly through demonstrating and not necessarily through birth and pre-birth. So there’s the element of unpacking that over the years and understanding if it’s really serving you or if you want to be that person.
He remembered one time when he was quite young, he was the coach of a basketball team and a lot of people were watching. Tony’s mum and dad came along to watch the tournament and he just lost it with the kids. They were just not listening to what he was saying.
Later on, when no one else was around, Tony’s mum said something like, “I’ve never been embarrassed all my life.” Taking that moment, he reflected on how he showed up in the world, if that’s the kind of person he wants to be, and if that’s how he wants to operate.
In his early 20s, Tony did something that not everyone does and that was he wrote a lot in his journals to try to understand things, do a lot of reflections, and do soul-searching.
How Tony Understands And Sees His Values And Principles
Tony remembered when he was about 14 or 15, he told his mom he was going to be famous and his mum said she couldn’t think of anything worse. It’s quite an odd thing for him to hear, given that he had an ambition at that young age.
He remembered, ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ by Dale Carnegie, was a book that he read all the way through oddly enough back then. He had worked in sales, worked in a HIFI shop, and sold computers but he wasn’t doing a very good job on those works. He ended up in recruitment and he did really well. He enjoyed selling and listening to people like Tom Hopkins and Anthony Robbins.
What he did end up doing was travelling around the world for three and a half years and living in London. He was working in a recruitment company and he was just walking through a corridor when he picked up on a conversation between two people about a course called the Landmark Forum.
Tony ended up going on that and doing that for over two weekends, and it really blew his mind in terms of the way that he operated in the world.
He did lots of different workshops and worked on himself over the years. He enjoyed challenging himself by looking at his values, his beliefs, and the way that he operated and then taking what he learned in all those workshops out into the world.
Tony’s Tested Values
Tony shared one scenario where his values were tested and it’s a good one for him that it wasn’t in the work environment. But when it was thrown at him, it really made a huge difference in his life.
So he was doing a workshop years ago and there was a process that they were doing that you had to get into teams.
Tony was really motivated and he was willing to give his 100% like he always does. When their team got five, one of the guys in the group said to him that he didn’t want Tony to be on the team and he thanked the guy for his honesty.
There was a part of the process where you had to understand and demonstrate the word ‘integrity’. Tony put up his hand when they got to that part and asked for a dictionary to read the definition of integrity because he didn’t understand what the word meant.
When he went back two months later to participate in the group that was now like the graduate of the course, the guy that said he didn't want Tony on the team, was on his current team.
Tony asked the guys in a nice way why he said he didn’t want Tony on the team prior and the guy answered because he didn’t think Tony had any integrity. Tony agreed with him because he had no idea what it was before.
So, after that, he went out and started to try and find people that had integrity. He saw videos of Martin Luther King and others who may have had it. Lo and behold, a few years later, people spontaneously said that they love Tony’s integrity. That was a value that he had no idea about, but he was able to pursue it and own it.
For Tony, it’s your choice whether you want to have integrity, whether you want to have trust, or whether you want to carry whatever it is that you have. Therefore, there are so many values that he has today that he definitely did not have all those years ago.
I think one of the big challenges of younger people today is not understanding what their values are. I talk very much about trying to get young people to document and write down what their values are because it will stand them in good stead for the future.
I would have a guess that there would be a small percentage in the population that would do what Tony has done which is to understand what integrity is because I'm not sure people can actually go and identify it.
So specifically, as Tony has articulated, which I think makes him quite unique in that regard because to go out and try and identify what integrity is and go and see working examples takes a lot of focus, attention, and time. I really applaud Tony for it and that it is a value that is not shared by the masses. It is a particular type of value that is critically important certainly in business as well.
How Tony Maintains His Relevance In Different Circles Of Life
When it comes to storytelling, Tony learned that knowing when you’ve said so much is an important part of being a CEO or a visionary. It's about a fine line between really taking them on a journey, but at the same time, not talking beyond. There were so many times this happened where he needed to be on point talking to the fund managers because their attention span is short. But it’s a little bit different with the Booktopia team because they’re investing a lot of their own personal future and their career in the company.
Having A Mentor In Life
Tony didn’t really have a specific mentor. Obviously now he’s got a chairman and other board members. But on an internal journey, he believes that the quality of your life is determined by the quality of questions you asked. So Tony has been asking questions of anyone across the industry or whether it’s in the financial markets, but there’s never been somebody he could say his counsel or his mentor.
He remembered when he was starting his own company, he decided to consult with Brian Sher since he's pretty good at marketing. He paid him $1,500 and spent lots of one hour with him but Tony realised he knew more than him.
The best thing that he got out of doing that was the confidence within him to go out there and create and manifest what he needed to do. He didn’t need to have somebody with their own experience advising and paying out money for them to do that.
What Tony got from his conversation with Brian that served him very well was his advice, “Don't worry about your profit and loss. Don't worry about your balance sheet. Just focus on your cash flow.”
It’s worth every penny for Tony. The biggest mentor he has now is his wife, his CEO at home. Of course his parents and many other people but not to the level where he says, “That’s my coach.”
Tony Being a Brand
Tony has a little story that he tells people, which he tries and gives entrepreneurs some insight into how his brand worked for him and how it served him as a leader of a company.
“Imagine you're in a Maserati, and a Maserati is an Italian sports car. Of course, as Italian sports cars are prone to do, they need to sometimes end up in the workshop with the mechanic and the mechanic on this particular day when you drop the Maserati off gives you the loaner and the loaner is a two-door 15-year-old Fiat.
So, off you go in the loaner which you're used to taking and this particular day, you've got a very important client meeting down the Double Bay or Toorak or wherever you are in which city and you've got to get to this appointment because it’s a big and important deal.
And you think to yourself, “I'm just going to park onto the back streets”. But lo and behold, on this particular day, there are no parking spots in the back of the back streets of Double Bay.
So there's only one spot in front of the restaurant where you've got to take because on time is on time and late is late and so you take that spot and you get out, get out of the car.
As you're getting out of this two-door, 15-year-old Fiat, you see your new client, they see you and they're looking at the car. You've got to be able to get out of that car as you.
Just because you're getting out of that car is no reflection on how that meeting is going to go. The fact that you can get out of that car and be present without any judgment or any kind of negative energy around that is super important.”
Tony states that you are not your spouse, you're not your kids or your kid’s academic results. You are not your company and you have got to be able to have that separation to be able to look at the business as its own organism, as its own individual thing and you are not it.
Tony recalls in the very beginning when he started Booktopia, he was in his apartment walking past the room where he’s worked on his business and he stopped dead in his tracks because all of the sudden, he heard the heartbeat of the business.
It took him by surprise when he remembered when it crawled, he remembered when it took its first steps, he remembered when it went to kinder for a day, for a week when it went to primary school and high school then to university and became its own individual self.
If Tony projected his beliefs and values onto the Booktopia business, it wouldn't be a business turning over a quarter of a billion dollars. It would be probably turning over 30 million because it would have had to stay within his own values and my belief systems.
When Tony was working in the recruitment industry in the early days he attended a course and he had 15 contractors working for him, then he dropped back down to 11, and then he got it to 15 and then dropped back down to 11 again.
It was so frustrating for him that he just couldn’t break through the 15. Tony went into one workshop called Money and You Australia. He went there because he thought it was about making money but it was actually about the “YOU”. He got some insights and some clarity of thinking that within 3 months of finishing that course, he was at 30 contractors because he’s cracked through it. He let go of some beliefs and values that weren’t serving him.
Then he got stuck at 30, but then he went back and did another course and found some more things that he got to 45, and then he got stuck there. At the end, Tony ended up with 130 contractors working for him, which as a result served Booktopia very well, all because he’s never overlaid his beliefs or his identity or who he is on the business.
He allowed it to flourish and it’s super important for entrepreneurs or any business owners or leaders of companies to understand that because that will only stymie the business.
Final Message and Outro
As I say the best way to get control is to give it up and allow the business to flourish and really develop. Tony Nash had articulated with his Maserati story, basically being able to have the courage to stand up and say who you are, not what you do and be strong enough with your own brand and I think he’s demonstrated that so succinctly.
It's a great way to end the discussion that we've had today. I just want to say thank you so much for Tony’s wonderful storytelling and his anecdotes. They’re just so insightful and I've learned a hell of a lot from him.
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