IB Woman
Issue No. 23 - June/Nuly 2005
enterprising connections
Carol Haslam
by Penelope Herbert
Many successful entrepreneurs rise from the ashes of failed ventures. Carol Haslam is one such phoenix who uses her hard-won experience to help high-achieving CEOs to grow and think creatively whilst sharing their successes, and fears, with their peers.
As a single mother of four children who has dusted herself off and picked herself up after a commercial contretemps, Carol is philosophical about the effort of starting over.
"I feel very proud to have re-built my business life in parallel with the huge challenges of bringing up four children on my own," she says. "I have a greater depth of knowledge due to my experiences and I believe people learn more from hardship than they do from everything always going right. "Being solution oriented is more empowering than not making decisions, and women should realise they are not only capable but responsible for their own choices."
One of Carol’s choices was to manage a business in France where she lived from 1996-2002. The language barrier was so hard to overcome as the French fiscal system. Carol’s solution was to undertake an MBA – in French. She says this enabled her to fully understand the French accounting system and to read a French profit and loss statement.
"Believe me," she laughs, "their 30 to 40-page financial statements bear absolutely no resemblance to ours."
So here was a woman, in France, in the IT industry, up to her eyeballs in study, speaking a foreign language, running a business and looking after the younger two of her four children (the older two continuing their lives in Australia). This time, Carol didn’t have a business partner and was able to develop and grow a highly successful business importing and distributing IT products.
After six years, she returned to South Australia to run the Enterprise Workshop – a part-time educational series for budding entrepreneurs. It was through this work Carol was invited to become the first female TEC Chai...
