My good friend and business partner Julian Moss has been disrupting industries since he was a seven-year-old boy living in India. Born in Pakistan to a diplomat father and war journalist mother, Julian’s life was never going to follow the status quo. You could even say he had entrepreneurial DNA.
Fast forward to now and Julian is ready to help others cause trouble and disrupt their industry. From starting a bicycle repair shop on the streets of Madras as a child, to generating $600 thousand dollars in eight months at age 16, to running multi-million dollar company ASM Liquor, Julian has been living and breathing business his whole life. He has been working on the coal face, getting his hands dirty, and now he wants to share his wealth of knowledge around business at our Troublemakers Network Launch Party this September.
Julian Moss – An Entrepreneur Was Born
Recently a lot of research has been done on the entrepreneurial mindset, notably in books such as The Millionaire Mind. What this research is showing us is that entrepreneurs are fundamentally being created before the age of thirteen. For Julian Moss, he got started earlier than most!
‘You know I’ve always wanted to be an entrepreneur, aspired to be an entrepreneur, but when I was seven years old I was living in India. My step-mother at the time said to me, “I will take you down to the main bike company here, and buy you a bicycle.” She knew the manager and the manager said to me, “help yourself to any spare bicycle parts that you might want.” I thought “wow, why not?”
‘No one knew I would bring back boxes and boxes of bicycle parts that I never needed but it actually gave me my first idea, which was to start a bicycle repair shop on the street outside our house in Madras.
‘The funny thing was that I empowered so many Indians who never in their lives thought a little white boy would be repairing their punctures and pumping up their tyres and cleaning their bicycles and selling them lamps. That was at age seven and it’s funny, I made about 200 rupees back then which was probably equivalent of about 15 dollars in the old days, and I bought my first shares with that. So it was my first foray into the share market and my first earnings which didn’t encompass delivering newspapers and magazines!’
The Great Escape
At The Troublemakers we talk about someone making the ‘Great Escape’ from their job, into their own business. After running his bicycle repair shop in Madras, Julian capitalised on the punk-rocker trend in London when at age 16 he created ‘Pic with a Punk’. This was an opportunity for tourists from all over the world to have a photo taken with a real-life London punk!
However, this wasn’t Julian’s greatest escape. Leaving England to move to Australia, now that was great.
‘I think my ‘Great Escape’ was leaving England and coming to Australia to find myself and set up my first company here. I think that we all take risks in life and as they say an entrepreneur is a professional risk taker. And, I think that if you’ve got it in your D.N.A. which I have, you know that when you are taking a risk, you go “oh my God, I’m gonna just do it.” You wake up one day and you just do it.
‘When I first arrived in Australia, I had an opportunity to work for an IT recruitment company, which was probably the largest at the time. I knew very little about IT and I knew incredibly smaller amounts about recruitment but I got in there and it was all about selling. It was fantastic and I was very successful, and in my first year I billed over ten million dollars and I had a net income of over 1.5 million and this was going back over thirty odd years ago.
‘I used to earn more than the Prime Minister of Australia.’
The Disruption
At Live it Now, and all of our events, we talk about making a disruption to create an eruption of ideas and opportunities. Today there’s so many people out there talking about all of these rules around what you should do, but with The Troublemakers, our philosophy is just be you. Get out there, break the rules, but most importantly be yourself.
Julian Moss is someone who has always followed his instincts to create his own path and do things his way. This means he has disrupted every industry he has been in, especially when The Establishment would tell him it couldn’t be done.
‘Initially when we first started ASM Liquor we were told by all the major players that you can only build brands in bars. So in other words, you serve a drink, someone remembers it, asks for it again and then goes to a bottle shop or an outlet and buys that brand and takes it home and shares it with their friends.
‘We thought the other way. We couldn’t afford to get in the bars and pubs because you had to pay huge fees to be able to be poured in these bars and we said we would do it the other way around. We will go to the bottle shop, do tastings, be disruptive, get you to come and taste the product against other well-known brands, we called it ‘The Pepsi Challenge’. Very naughty.
‘So we did that and people are tasting it and going “my God, I can’t believe I’ve been drinking these alternative vodkas. This is incredible what you’ve created here.” Then they would buy a bottle, they would go home, they would go to the bar and they would tell the barman “mate, get Vodka O in here!” It was that fun disruptive manner of doing things.
‘I think, when you’re getting out there and being disruptive in the market place it’s fun. We were at the pinnacle of disruption. Everything that we did was disruptive. When you’ve got limited resources, you’ve got to be more resourceful and that’s what we did.’
Let’s Be Troublemakers
Julian Moss and I have come together with a plan to disrupt business, disrupt the industry. We believe that there is such an opportunity for people out there at the moment. People who have an idea, that are passionate, that want to be in charge of their time, they want to be in charge of their money. They want to do something that matters.
We have come together to create an experience for entrepreneurs, to support them to get to the next level with the right advice, so we have created The Troublemakers Network.
If you’re ready to be a troublemaker and disrupt your industry, join us at our Troublemakers Network Launch Party! Come along and have a drink, vodka of course, with Julian and I on Friday 23 September from 7pm.
Kindest regards,
Matt Catling
