Project Description
Straight Talk – Tom Waterhouse
Tom Waterhouse is an Australian entrepreneur who most people recognise. A fourth-generation member of the Waterhouse racing family, his career has been intertwined with racing and betting.
In his mid-20s, Tom became Australia’s biggest-on-track bookmaker, following in the footsteps of his grandfather. Launching an online betting business in 2010, Tom grew the company to over 100 employees and 250,000 clients before selling the website to William Hill, where he continued in an executive role, eventually overseeing $2 billion in turnover across 3 countries.
At 38, Tom has seen it all from startup to the boardroom, and he joins Mark Bouris on the latest Straight Talk to get into why he loves being an entrepreneur, how he’s dealt with some negative press and criticism, and the balance he’s found between family and business. They also discuss Tom’s new business direction with his app ‘Tomwaterhouse.com” and how he has learnt from past ventures.
Mark said, “For those quick to judge, I challenge you to tune in and really analyse this guy’s mindset and approach to business. You’ll learn a lot.”
Dealing with negativity and criticism
Mark and Tom opened up about their experiences of dealing with negative press, and their approach to being able to overcome the negativity that can come by being a public figure.
Tom said that his passion for being in business is what matters: “when the business is going great, it doesn’t matter what people who I don’t know say about me.”
Tom says this stems from his Mother, “who always said when I was kid, ‘I don’t care what you do, as long as you’re working hard I’ll be happy.'”
“If you’re prepared to take the upside and the benefit of having a brand and having a name and doing it as an individual, well then you can’t really say ‘Oh I don’t like that but I want this.’ You’ve got to be able to suck it up.”
“There’s such a power as promoting as an individual… if you can be an individual and say ‘look this is what I’m about, this is what I believe in, this is what I’m trying to do’, then it’s more authentic.”
“There’s good and bad bits with it. But I say I can always go with the bad if I think it’s the right decision for the business.
For Mark, it’s about rolling with the punches and “taking the sweets with the sour.”
Be careful what you wish for
Those words “scale” and “growth” are thrown around quite a lot these days.
Mark Bouris says that you have be careful what you wish for because it is possible to let the business get too big for you to handle: “You want to be really big as a business, but when you get to that point you have to then make a decision – ‘how do I continue on? Do I bring in partners? Do I sell out completely?’ And those processes, I believe you need to be thinking about at the beginning and prepare yourself.”
“Maybe you don’t need to grow at a faster rate? Maybe you can control things a bit better?”