014 - SOMETIMES EVERYTHING HAS TO BURN

Sometimes everything has to burn down in order to be built right back up again. So you could take this as a philosophical statement and absolutely, that's correct, right? Sometimes you need to sort of destroy what you've built in order to build it back better. And you've seen that in lots of businesses that have changed their business model or have moved from one particular sort of sector to another.  And you know, a great example of that is something like Flicker, which started off as a video upload business for gamers, and turned out into a photo share sharing website. But I'm also talking from really hard experience here. So back in Papua New Guinea, about a decade ago one of the businesses I was running was a plastics manufacturer.  And sadly, one day that business literally burnt to the ground. We had a massive fire as a result of an electrical issue caused by the poor power supply from the local provider.  and what happened was we then struggled for the next three or four months trying to build that business right back up from the ground.  But we took the really difficult decision to not go back into manufacturing and actually just change our entire business model over to trading. So we went from being a manufacturing business that relied on raw materials coming from overseas equipment that was constantly breaking down, and talent that was really hard to secure.  To a trading business that allowed us to be much more capital efficient and grow I in in a way that allowed us to utilize our cash much, much better. So the reality is that whilst you wouldn't want it to happen, sometimes everything really does have to burn down to be built right back up again.