Top 100 CEO Interviews
Issue No. 49 - October/November 2009
Entrepreneur making poverty history
“I don’t remember my parents. I was brought up in an orphanage where the emphasis was on survival… you would come up with different approaches to solving life’s problems.”
This quote from David Bussau’s biography, Don’t Look Back, demonstrates how the Senior Australian of the Year for 2008 learned how to be an entrepreneur in a literal school of hard knocks.
David was the feature speaker at this year’s Top 100 Luncheon, which celebrates the on-going achievement of South Australia’s biggest locally owned and operated enterprises.
What he had to say went to the core of entrepreneurial culture and how to foster it in any organisation.
Being an entrepreneur means accepting risk. David learned to do that in the orphanage in Wellington NZ where he grew up with institutional culture and bullying, learning to assess risk and reward.
He developed a succession of enterprises from a hot dog stand to a bakery and, after moving to Australia, he developed more than a dozen businesses in 20 years. By the age of 35 he owned several construction companies and was a multi-millionaire.
One would expect a young, self-made man to continue on that path but David had “enough” - enough wealth to be comfortable.
He had recently returned from Darwin, after the Methodist Church asked him to coordinate emergency repairs in the wake of Cyclone Tracy in 1974; 15 months later a church in Bali asked him to help rebuild after an earthquake. David and his wife, Carol, took their young family there in 1976.
David was motivated by a unique mix of business sense, as sense of his entrepreneurial gift, and his
blunt faith. The Bussaus lived for three years in
primitive conditions, building a bridge, school, clinic, dam and roads.
“We saw people in poverty and they weren’t getting out of it because they were in a debt cycle, borrowing from loan sharks to survive,” he says. “We started making loans to peopl...
