The Accidental Entrepreneur. Allis Janine
kid. My passion was netball and I spent as much time as possible outside throwing a ball at the brick wall in our garden. After leaving technical college, my first job was in advertising – during the 1980s (think shoulder pads, big hair and liquid lunches) – and I even gave modelling a go. Sensing there was more to life, I worked three jobs to save for a travelling adventure. Telling my mother I would be away for three months, I set off – returning six years later with a two year old.
Just a simple girl from a simple world
I once read a book that suggested we actually ‘pick' our parents. If that's the case, I picked the quintessential ‘Aussie Mum and Dad'. Mum stayed home and Dad made the bacon. Dad worked for Fibremakers, a carpet-making company, in a middle management position. His aim was to move up the corporate ladder during the week and enjoy his time off on the weekends.
I'm the youngest of their four kids, born in Knoxfield, about 30 kilometres east of the Melbourne CBD. Back in the 1970s, the suburb was semirural. Our home was a tiny green weatherboard house – only 10 squares – but it was set on a quarter-acre block of land that had previously been an orchard. It was full of fruit trees, with an abundance of fruit every year (which could have something to do with my brother needing to manually pump the septic tank every day). Uhmm … perhaps the love of fruit started here? We were outside children by necessity. Weekends were spent at the football oval for my brother, Greg, or the netball courts for my sisters and me. Our family was obsessed with sport. Netball was the one thing I was truly interested in during those years. I played and trained six days a week (even as an adult, I played netball until I stumbled into yoga at 41). Okay – healthy living and a bit of obsessiveness started to shine through during my childhood, but the availability of fruit and overachieving netball skills do not a businesswoman make.
My childhood was relatively uneventful; my siblings and I were much loved, and it was a stable upbringing. Life was simple, with not too much money being left over after the expenses were paid, so everything we did have was appreciated. I remember as a child the joy of seeing black and white television for the first time. I also remember going to the movies and watching that huge man on a horse, telling everyone how good for you it was to smoke Alpine cigarettes – as opposed to the other horrible, unhealthy cigarettes. I wasn't sold on the habit of smoking but, on the big movie screen, I did notice the vibrant green of the grass, so when I returned to the black and white television, I made a point of telling my whole family what colours we were missing.
Holidays were eight-hour road trips to Robe in South Australia, in a car without air conditioning or seatbelts. For Christmas one year, I got a bike that was second-hand with a damaged seat. (Mum told me Santa had damaged it on the way down the chimney and, of course, I believed every word because I knew Santa existed.) Looking back at my childhood, my memories are happy ones; my parents ensured we never felt like we missed out.
Even though my parents were encouraging of anything and everything we did, their aspirations for my siblings and me were minimal. Neither thought that someday we would own our own business, become a lawyer or even a doctor. This had nothing to do with not believing in us, and everything to do with expectations and our environment. My parents sent me to Knox Secondary College for two reasons: it was close to home and it had a business course. Okay, it was more of a typing course … In our neighbourhood, you completed your Leaving Certificate and then you got a really good job as a secretary, preferably in a bank. My school only went to year 11; my parents had no expectations that I would go to university. In fact, it was never discussed. Being the youngest, I could slip through the cracks. I was never the class clown or class dunce; I was smack in the middle – Miss Average. I never pushed myself too hard and rarely did my homework. How is that for dormant entrepreneurial DNA? I seemed to be always thinking, What is the point to all of this? In contrast, my older sisters, Rae and Lisa, were diligent, smart students. Not seeming to match them in potential or politeness, I was a bitter disappointment to the teachers who had taught my sisters prior to me.
My school was a technical college, focusing on practical skills like woodwork, typing, basic bookkeeping, graphics and metal work. As a result, I can type, build a solid birdhouse and do basic drafting, and I'm very handy with a soldering iron. But don't ask me the capital of Azerbaijan or where the country is located on a map!
At the age of sixteen years and ten months, I left tech school and could type 100 words per minute. At the time, I didn't realise that this was probably the most useful skill I had learned; everyone on earth was about to switch to computers. I could also handle very basic bookkeeping, which would serve me well later when Boost was without a CFO. The technical drawing class came in handy when building the birdhouse, but also when designing the first Boost Juice stores. You never know what subjects are going to be helpful in the future.
When I left school, my mother made me sit for the Commonwealth Bank test so I could get a job at the bank. She thought working in a bank would be the perfect job for me; I could think of nothing worse. My parents' plan for me was to finish school, get a good stable job, marry well, have lots of babies and live happily ever after. God forbid you not having a child by the time you were 21 (this was Mum's expiration date for starting a family). All I wanted was an adventure. But, to please Mum, I attended the Commonwealth Bank test to see if I could get a job. I doodled my way through the test and I didn't get the job (surprise, surprise).
I would like to be able to say that it was during this time that a wise teacher saw the flicker of an entrepreneurial spirit in me and encouraged me to think higher, but I would be making it up. My childhood was loving, yet simple. I was happy, but somewhere buried deep within, I knew there was a bigger point to this, that there was more to life. I just needed to figure out where and what more was.
First job, bad hair and many lessons
After turning my back on a safe bank job, I managed to get a job in advertising. My sister Rae was working for a huge ad agency at the time and she recommended I go to the employment agency she used to get her job. So, in I went, even though I had absolutely no experience. The woman I met with told me she thought she had the perfect job, and with a quick phone call she'd arranged an interview (telling my future boss I was a ‘freebie' for him and that she thought I would be perfect, even though I was a bit green). After a ten-minute interview, and answering the question on whether I made good coffee (‘Absolutely!'), I got my first job.
I was a very junior, junior (did I mention I was junior?) media assistant at an advertising agency. Advertising in the 1980s was all about short skirts, bad hair and long boozy lunches. Each Friday, lunch started at noon and ended at 5 pm. For a while, the fun in advertising significantly outweighed the boredom of my first job. (And it was a very dull job, mostly just typing little numbers into little squares, which, to be honest, after many liquid lunches, was a challenge.)
The ad agency was very advanced and had some nifty devices to help me out. They had these boxlike things called ‘Apple computers' that allowed me to do a spell check (after coming from Knox Secondary College, I thought all my dreams had come true). Three months after I started, they also purchased a brand-new machine where you could insert a photo (or whatever) in one end, and it would print out on a similar machine somewhere else. (If it was a photo, it would print out a bit grainy, but if you looked really hard you could see what it was.) They called this machine a ‘fax'. Still, the spirit within wanted more.
One of the many terrific things my mother did was to continually tell her daughters how beautiful they were. Personally, I think a degree of rose-coloured glasses was involved when she looked at us, but it was always nice to hear. While I was at school, I completed a Suzan Johnston modelling course, like my sisters had before me. Twelve months into my new job at the agency, the people who ran the course called and asked if I wanted to audition for a job promoting Australian-made products. The promotion was to be government-funded and they wanted one girl from every state. Never one to die wondering, I went to the audition – and, to my surprise, was given the role of the Victorian model. So I handed in my resignation and off I went to Brisbane to start my very short-lived stab at modelling. After settling in to Brisbane and meeting all the girls from each state, we started our ‘training'. Unfortunately, however, after about three weeks we heard the government had decided not to go ahead with