Work-life balance overrated: How serial entrepreneur Jo Burston spends her day - Women's Agenda

Work-life balance overrated: How serial entrepreneur Jo Burston spends her day

Jo Burston knows how to take hold of life’s chances. Prior to starting her own business, Job Capital, in 2006, Burston was working in a corporate role for another company when she got the chance to fly to Melbourne on the premise of pitching her employer’s service to a potential client.

When she arrived, she ended up pitching her own idea – a business which would manage the financial affairs, including payroll packaging, of contractors.

This pitch was enough to encourage well-known entrepreneur and investor Philip Weinman to fund her venture to the tune of a couple of thousand dollars. Burston attributes her initial pitching success to her passion for her idea and this passion has stayed with her throughout her business journey.

At first, Burston’s business was incubated within one of Weinman’s companies in Melbourne. The incubator style allowed her to tap into the skills and resources of a larger business, while not having large overheads. After two years, she graduated from the firm and moved Job Capital to Sydney where she started a smaller team.

In the first financial year the business made a turnover of $500,000, but this grew rapidly, and after three years it had a turnover of $3.7 million. After six years, the business had reached $38 million and had gone from 1.5 full-time staff to 13.

So how does she manage it all? Burston breaks down her day for Women’s Agenda sister publication SmartCompany, explaining how she keeps her many ideas in check and why she believes ‘work-life balance’ is overrated.

Mornings
For Burston, there is no normal day.

“I’m very lucky to be able to design how I work and how I run my day. I work very well in the evening with my time because I’m not a morning person. It’s the mentality that I have to do what it takes and finish the task. Being a high achiever, I just work until I finish the task.

“It’s a matter of doing what it takes, it’s not just the best you can do,” she says.

Burston starts each day with a 12-minute, company-wide, “huddle” at precisely 8.48am.

“We discuss the company rocks – the company goals. We talk about how we’re tracking against the goals and which areas individuals and the company as a whole are stuck on. It’s all about overcoming barriers.”

Daily life
Burston has instilled a focus on processes within Job Capital and each day she reviews business metrics.

“I meet with my chief financial officer every day. We review the cashflow and all the analytical data of what’s happening in the business.

“We evaluate every day because we want to understand the whys and why nots; it’s basically a tool to work out what we’re doing well. The focus is on improvement though. It’s not a measure to hit people with,” she says.

Burston has also installed a “model of accountability” within the company to ensure jobs are being completed efficiently.

“Another part of the daily routine is every afternoon I receive a report on the activities for the day from the team. It lets me know which deals were closed and what’s in the pipeline.”

On a daily basis, Burston says managing the employees takes up the majority of her time.

“The company will create its own success through the delivery of services and the people in the business,” she says.

“The second focus would be on strategy and third would be the clients.”

As well as founding Job Capital, Burston has created four other companies and she says this entrepreneurial spirit stems from her problem-solving ability.

“The beauty of an entrepreneur is that we’re visionary and we can predict where problems will occur in markets. A true entrepreneurial skill is to fix those problems commercially.

“I can strategise and design solutions to fix those problems. We’ve just launched a new company called big-data.net.au, and I’ve taken the traditional recruitment process and transformed it to a cloud-based platform,” she says.

Other businesses Burston has founded or co-founded include Cleaning Maid Easy, ClaimYourTax.com.au, MyOzJob.com.au and SignEzy.com.

Managing ideas

Through experience, Burston says she’s learnt to control her idea processes “or else it gets out of hand”.

“I talk to people and think ‘OMG, I know how to solve that’. I used to run away with a lot of ideas, but now I’m a lot more controlled and centred.

“I’ve learnt too to start with the end in mind. If I’m just fixing a problem, I have to think about if it is really scalable, can I take it global, who would be the ideal customers, what the end game of the company is and if it would be an initial public offering or a trade sale.”

With this in mind, Burston says her ultimate goals are established from the beginning.

“If you have an idea which doesn’t strike a purpose, then it’s still an idea. I can’t do things unless I know I’m making a difference,” she says.

Leisure time
Burston epitomises the saying, “if you need something done, give it to a busy person”.

The day before SmartCompany spoke to Burston, she was at breakfast with Richard Branson in Adelaide as part of an Entrepreneurs Organisation event, and the next night she was hosting a dinner.

Being an entrepreneur, Burston says, gives her the flexibility to make her own schedule, while “still working very closely on the critical parts of the business”.

But she says her busy schedule can be difficult for family and friends to understand.

“I’ve distanced myself, but I make sure the time I do spend with my family is quality time.

“My partner is an entrepreneur and we have bipolar type skill sets; we’re at opposite ends of the spectrum, but very complementary. So at dinners we talk about business and what we want to do to change the world,” she says.

Burston believes the term “work-life balance” is overrated.

“I don’t think it fits in this day and age. I love what I do. Why do I have to do something else on the weekend if I love my work?

“I know how to prioritise what’s important and how to give time to the people which are important, but the rest of it I really enjoy doing,” she says.

Future
In the future, Burston hopes to have all her businesses “off the ground and have executives in place to run them”.

“I’d like to spend a certain amount of time on each business and build it to a point where someone else can run it or get it to the end game of that business,” she says.

Burston says she’s had many helping hands through her business career so far, and that she’ll always remember the people who helped her get to where she is.

“One of my great mantras in life is to give without remembering and to receive without forgetting.”

To aspiring entrepreneurs, Burston advises learning the nuts and bolts of the business by being able to read balance sheets and cashflow charts, joining an organisation which provides peer-to-peer support, and making friends and loved ones aware of the journey you’re on.

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