Tony Goodwin

07 July 2010

The entrepreneurial bug bit Tony Goodwin early. “I think I’ve had it all my life,” he reckons. “Even at the age of eight, when I got a blow-up dinghy, I was selling rides on the dinghy on the River Darent in Sevenoaks in Kent.”

Fast forward several decades, and Goodwin is in his element, an entrepreneur among entrepreneurs in the recruitment industry as founder and chief executive of Antal International, a recruitment business that has most definitively put its stamp on emerging markets. Now his immersion into the world of creating and building businesses has taken him onto new ground: turning author, he examines the dark side of contemporary entrepreneurship in a new book, How They Blew It.

Co-written with business writer Jamie Oliver, Goodwin’s book scrutinises the downfalls of 16 entrepreneurs who hit the heights of wealth, only to experience financial and personal losses of staggering depth. In fact, six of those profiled spent time in prison, one died before his trial and two committed suicide.

Launched on 3 July, How They Blew It is the antidote to the crush of self-congratulatory ’How I Made It’ books by the likes of Richard Branson,

Sir Alan Sugar, the Saatchi Brothers and other self-made millionaires that have dominated airport bookshop shelves over the past 20 years. Goodwin had read many of those books.

“I had also noticed a lot of people’s names disappearing from the headlines that you never hear about again and I wondered what had happened to them, and why did they disappear from the headlines, and why did they fail in what they did,” Goodwin says during an exclusive interview with Recruiter. “So that intrigued me.”

Continuing, he says: “The other thing that intrigued me was, having read those books, I was never quite sure how the people were successful. I started to doubt that they had actually written those books themselves or that they hadn’t been airbrushed to the fact that they weren’t quite sure how they were successful.

“The other major point is, I think you learn more from your failures than you do your successes. This book is actually an examination of success from the point of view of failure. So in other words, there but for the grace of God go I, and what can we all learn from these mistakes that we don’t make them ourselves,” Goodwin says.

If those reasons weren’t enough to inspire Goodwin to get going on the project, more fodder presented itself as the credit crunch unfolded. “You started to see some monumental failures, and some tragedy, personal tragedy - in particular [British entrepreneur] Christopher Foster, who very sadly wiped out his whole family. Then the final push for me came from a tragic episode with Adolf Merckle, the German billionaire who threw himself in front of a train in early January 2009,” Goodwin says. “I just thought, this is very sad, but it is also very interesting and I thought, let’s try and do something on this, to try to examine why those people are either very poor again or in even worse situations.

“So it was almost cathartic to write this, to think about learning from those mistakes.”

Then, in Goodwin’s experience, is it as possible to learn from success as it is from failure? Is there a moment, perhaps an event that turns out to be a catalyst for success? “That is a really good question,” Goodwin responds. “I think they both have similar inflection points, but there is no one thing that will make you successful or make you unsuccessful - it’s a series of events, a series of learned experience. It’s a combination of personal characteristics that make you successful.”

He carefully weighs up his thoughts. “I think there is a big element of luck or bad luck in the failure concept. But the inflection points of both success and failure are very similar and indeed the personal characteristics that drive one to be successful sometimes also are synonymous with failure.

“It’s almost inevitable that the business guru or the entrepreneur is going to be like Icarus and fly too close to the sun as those are the very characteristics that can lead to the failure: the determination, the stimulation of business, the desire to be continuously successful, the desire to keep going.”

Ideally, an entrepreneur would get the balance between manageable and unmanageable risks and be equipped with a set of brakes with which to pull back when entering the too-much-danger zone. But Goodwin, who is no stranger to danger, knows that’s not how players in this game are made. “Often an entrepreneur isn’t that balanced in the first place in terms of wanting success beyond their wildest dreams,” he concedes. “The problem is, their wants keep changing and getting ever bigger so they have climbed [Mount] Everest but seem to find another Everest and so on.”

If a mischievous author wanted to feature Goodwin himself in a sequel to How They Blew It, would there be a story of gigantic mistakes to tell? Absolutely - two things, says Goodwin. One was making a bad choice for a second-in-command some years ago. Then: “Opening too many offices too quickly, which we did in 1998-2001. That said,” he adds, “I have probably made more mistakes than most people. I’ve made them all! But those were the two howlers.”

Elaborating, he says: “I had a very difficult period in my business life as an entrepreneur between 2001 and 2003 when I had 22 businesses in 18 countries in three continents, and we were just too thinly spread, among other things. It was a terrible time for me personally and business wise, but we got through it. I don’t want to go there again, so reflecting upon it, what were the things that I could control, what were the things out of my control, and what to do and not do going forward?

“So yes, I don’t think there is a day that goes past when I don’t think about the difference between success and failure in some form.”

Antal’s unprepossessing head office in London’s Baker Street has meeting rooms named after cities which form the core of its operations. Goodwin savours the good life he has earned from his own entrepreneurial adventure - later in the week in which we speak, he jets off to South Africa to watch the World Cup. He appreciates fine dining, Cipriani’s being a favourite spot to take his wife, the mother of his seven children, for a meal. He spends significant sums on his children’s education. And half of his profits from How They Blew It will go towards financing the education and personal growth of other children through the Antal Charitable Foundation.

Last year, the foundation chose three children’s charities to focus on: The Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme, Chance UK which provides one-to-one mentoring for children with behavioural difficulties, and the Switzerland-based Smiling Children which aims to provide access to education for young girls in Morocco, Afghanistan, the West Bank and Israel.

Part of his motivation, Goodwin says, is “I think you should give back what you can to society.” He is also intrigued by what he calls “the irony of capitalism versus communism”. He explains: “Having made a fortune in an ex-communist country, I found it paradoxical and interesting that under communism, we are all supposed to look after each other, and we don’t. Under capitalism, we are all supposed to look after ourselves, which we do, but we end up wanting to look after everybody else - because what is the point of being wealthy in a society where if I am financially wealthy and my children walk out the door and are mugged and attacked? There is no point in that kind of existence.

“So once you are well off yourself, you end up being concerned about community, and that’s the irony of capitalism, in my view. I am now more concerned about the community than I was as an individual capitalist and certainly more concerned, I believe, than most communists.”

The examples of entrepreneurs/philanthropists Warren Buffett and Bill Gates inspire him. So do his own children. “I spend most of my waking hours thinking about my own children, so why not try and help other children?” he says.

With How They Blew It chosen as bookseller WH Smith’s Non-Fiction Book of the Month for July, Goodwin’s project appears set to become as ubiquitous as the books by Branson, Sugar and fellow recruitment mogul James Caan. At the same time, Goodwin continues his march along the entrepreneurial highway. Antal’s acquisitions and joint ventures arm, Antal Ventures, has recently invested in products as diverse as Russian luxury shopping site Collection Privee, the Table Top Cooking Company and its Rondue indoor/outdoor grill, UK internet software company 10CMS.com, a property loading company, and an internet publishing company.

More is ahead, he promises. “However successful people think you are, you as an entrepreneur will always think you’re not successful,” he says wryly. “There is a lot more to be done, a lot more.”