Pioneer at the Helm - Jack Delosa
Today’s world of business looks vastly different to 20 years ago. As baby boomers transition into retirement, millennials have risen through the ranks as the new corporate leaders and new business founders. And as the flow of veterans steadily continues to travel downstream, a tide of bright young entrepreneurs is rising all over the world. But age is not all that separates the two generations — gen Y and gen Z bring with them whole new values, working styles and education needs — and no-one sees this better than the founder of one of the most disruptive education platforms for entrepreneurs, Jack Delosa.
“Up-and-coming generations are dissatisfied with traditional education and the traditional career path. So, more and more people are starting to look to new paths; it may be ‘I want to start my own business’, or it may just be ‘I want to work with a business I find meaning ful’,” says Jack. As Founder and CEO of The Entourage, a training organisation for entrepreneurs that has racked up a community of 300,000 members worldwide, Jack sees that in many business
situations, the image must be flipped. Instead of learning on the go, Jack and all of his students want to focus on learning first, to increase the chances of business success for entrepreneurs, while also changing the role that money plays in a company.
“The main generational change with entrepreneurship today is that those who are starting their own businesses do not necessarily want to be the next Warren Buffet. This generation don’t start businesses to become billionaires; they start businesses because they want to contribute something. They want to create a meaning ful life for themselves, and they want to be in a position from a resources and financial perspective to be able to look after the people around them,” explains Jack. “Fortunately, I think the world has moved on from that Wall Street paradigm.”
As for Jack, his story starts when he was just 5 years old, when he became aware of the work his parents were doing as the heads of a not-for-profit organisation called Breaking the Cycle. “They’d take long-term unemployed youth off the street, and they’d put them through a three-month training program to give them life skills and employment skills. Then they’d place these young adults into jobs,” he points out. “They were the most successful job placement agency for long-term unemployed youth in Australia. They’d take highly at-risk kids who were on and off drugs, kids who were in and out of jail, kids who were from abusive homes.
“That was really formative for me at a young age, and it gave me an inbuilt dissatisfaction with traditional education, because it obviously didn’t serve everybody,” he says. Another takeaway Jack attained from his parents’ business was that people’s lives could transform when put in the right environment and given the right support. Some of the organisation’s successful transitioners sometimes lived with Jack and his parents, becoming like his siblings as they felt the support of a family for the first time. Sadly, the third-biggest lesson Jack learned from Breaking the Cycle came when it was unceremoniously forced to close, despite its success, following the Victorian Government’s 1995 decision to restructure the funding models of not for profits.
“Breaking The Cycle was unsuccessful under the new regime, so the organisation collapsed. Thousands of kids who could have been helped would now go back to jail, do drugs on the street, or even die, because of a lack of finance. So one of the things my father said to me afterwards was: ‘ You can’t run an organisation on love, trust, and pixie dust. It needs to be underpinned with commercial and financial sustainability’. The intent and the efforts of Breaking The Cycle really gave me quite a social DNA as a human being, but it also reiterated to me that in order for an organisation to scale, even if you are in the business of making a difference, money is the fuel that will enable it to do so.” But rather than be a road to riches, money to Jack has always represented the same thing it has to most of his students — the means to deliver a service or product they think is missing.