Page 14 - Paulisms: Gold Nuggets for Small Business

How it all Started
If we go back to how this journey really began, we need to probe into my background.
I come from a very large family. There were eight of us living in a 1,200- square-foot box. There wasn’t that much money going around. My father was a painter, and there were only so many hours in a day in which he could use his hands. He worked 24/7, and that probably flowed on to me (which is both good and bad). From an early age – when I was around 7 years old – he started to take me to his painting jobs in some of the school holidays and weekends.
My entrepreneurial spirit goes back to when I was around 10 years of age when I had saved enough money working for Dad and bought what was probably the best bike in Lower Hutt. It was a banana bike – the new era in bikes. I used to ride this bike down to Belmont Memorial Hall to catch a bus to Hutt Intermediate School. While waiting for the bus, I used to charge kids five cents for riding my bike around the roundabout. This was the start of my entrepreneurial career, although I didn’t realise it at the time. Interestingly enough, when I was pitching to be a finalist in the EY New Zealand Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2016, the bike story was mentioned in my presentation video that EY created. John Key (ex-prime minister of NZ) was impressed, and in his speech at the finalist presentation night said the government could make some money by renting out the government limos!
By the time I had left school at 17, I was painting entire Railway New Zealand houses in the holidays and weekends. This enabled me to have bought and sold three cars and make good money by then.