It is not living that matters, but living rightly.

Socrates

I live life by the rules of karma (most of the time anyway). It helps me see the best in people and provides a nice reason for having hope when things don't go so well. My definition of karma is doing the right thing, no matter what.

Do the right thing

They say a good liar needs a good memory to keep track of all the lies they tell. Why not just tell the truth? That way you don't need to remember a thing, and it frees up your brain to focus on more productive endeavours. Then you can move forward with vigour and not be looking in the rear-view mirror all the time, hoping and praying that someone, somewhere, doesn't catch up with you.

Doing the right thing all the time is not for the faint hearted. It can be tiring, inconvenient, expensive and there's certainly no guarantee that your efforts or actions will be rewarded. But just because you don't get an immediate reward doesn't mean you shouldn't do it; knowing you made a difference to someone else's life is reward enough. Yeah, I know I sound like Mother Teresa, but I've had enough experiences with karma to know that if you do the right thing, you'll be rewarded for it  —  if not materially, at least emotionally. (Although I do smile a little when karma pays a visit to someone who deserves it.) But all jokes aside, the reward is knowing that you can lay your head on your pillow at night without fearing what the next phone call or email may deliver, knowing you did the right thing and that you (possibly) made a difference to someone else's life.

Karma comes back

I've had first-hand experience with karma. It was in 1997 and I was running my first pub, The Thurles Castle in Sydney. It was a tough gig, especially for a first-time pub licensee, as the pub was located in Chippendale, a rough inner-city suburb, smack bang (forgive the pun) in the middle of a heroin hot spot and home to a haven of homeless souls who had fallen on hard times. Unsurprisingly, it was well known for having the highest rate of crime in the country. So, to say that something interesting was always happening there was an understatement. For a first-time licensee like me, it was a baptism by fire.

Despite all that, or maybe because of it, the area had a terrific sense of community so when something bad happened, my locals told me who the culprits were and we could sort it out without getting the authorities involved every time.

The environment wasn't all bad. I met my wife while I was working there and have since had five children with her, so some good has come of it. I guess. Just kidding! And the friendships that were forged in those early years are still as strong today as they were then. Those days were never, ever dull.

But there was one incident that sticks with me which reinforced that doing the right thing is the right thing to do, even if it's uncomfortable, impractical or financially deleterious to do so.

It was around midnight on a wet and cold Saturday night. One of my lovely locals, an older lady called Cath, was leaving the pub. Just as she was pulling out of the car park, a man in a balaclava took out a hammer and bashed through her window, leaned in, pulled out the keys from the ignition, reached across and grabbed her handbag from the passenger seat.

We heard this almighty scream outside and raced out to the car park. When we got to Cath's car, I saw this figure in black flee across the intersection and onto the other side of the street. I didn't think twice. I raced after him, dodging in and out of traffic, trying to pin him down, weaving my way in between hordes of bumper-to-bumper cars. He ran down an alley between two buildings. I chased after him, not even cognisant of where I was going or how far I had run. I stopped running to get my bearings and took a look around me. I was surrounded by derelict houses, warehouses with the windows shot out and burned-out cars hoisted on bricks. It was not a nice neighbourhood. I poked around some of the empty warehouses to see if I could find him, but he was gone.

After I got my breath back, I realised, as they say, I was not in Kansas anymore. What's more, I was without my wallet and phone, and I started to feel decidedly unsafe. I hightailed it out of there and got back to the bar before this violent criminal decided to take that hammer of his and have a go at me as well to punish me for making him run.

When I got back to the bar, Cath was inside being looked after by my trusty staff. She was still shaking and had a nasty gash on her cheek from where the shattered glass had cut her. I went out to the car park, found her keys lying in the bushes and moved the car into the pub garage to keep it safe over the weekend until Cath was in a fit state to drive.

On Monday, Cath arrived at the pub to take her car to the crash repairers. She was still distraught from the events of Saturday night, red eyed from crying and in pain from the cut cheek.

‘Cath, what's wrong? Your car is here, it's going to be all right,' I said.

‘I know Steve but …'

‘What is it Cath?'

She could barely speak for the tears coursing down her cheeks.

‘Steve, I don't have insurance. I don't have any savings. I can't afford to get my car fixed. It's going to cost me a fortune. How am I going to get to work?' And the tears started to flow again.

My heart went out to her. She was a pensioner on limited income and every penny she made was hard fought for. She wasn't my mum, or my relative, but she was my customer and she'd become a mate too, so I said, ‘Cath, don't worry about it. I'll take care of it. Leave it with me'.

She resisted but I insisted, and she eventually relented.

‘Fix me up when you're flush,' I said, knowing that would be next to never. But I didn't care. I wanted to look after her. If it was my mum, I hoped that someone would do the same and respond in a similar fashion.

What goes around comes around

Seven months later, St Patrick's Day was upon us. Our Chippendale community was overwhelmingly Irish, so we wanted to use the day to honour them, thank them and provide them with a memory of what it would be like if they were back in the Old Country and give them a great day.

We opened at 7 am, put on a cracking breakfast of stew, soda bread and black pudding, and hired a stack of Irish bands to play out the front of the pub, in the beer garden and down a side street. We decorated the pub in every shade of green you can imagine, and flew the Irish flag high. It was all happening. Even Brendan Gleeson, the wonderful Irish actor from the Harry Potter film came in to see what all the fuss was about.

A few kilometres down the road at a local park, a massive Irish festival was underway. It was an official event sponsored by the Irish Consulate and The Irish Echo, a magazine for the expatriate community. Unlucky for them, it started to rain, and with our bar just around the corner, the festival patrons took shelter in our pub. We had four bar staff (including Kris, a trusted staff member who started with me back then and is still with me today — and is also godfather to my son Rory), which was the most we ever needed, even on our busiest nights as it was quite a small pub and we only had one bar area that served the entire pub.

As the rain came down, the crowd came in. To put it mildly, we were getting smashed. There were queues out the door. People were lining up five deep trying to get a drink. The patrons weren't angry — they could see we were working as fast as we could go — but it was painful not having the space or staff available to sell as many drinks as we could have.

It wasn't just the bar staff getting smashed either. The empties on tables were stacking up, the dishwasher was running at full tilt and the kegs were being tapped as quickly as we could muster. I rallied around to get more staff to come in but at such short notice, no-one was available. It got so busy my bar staff would pour three beers at once, put them in front of the locals who were lining up, and say ‘pay me later' so that they could move on to the next customer. And you know what? Every single one of them came in the next day and paid their tab. To the cent. How's that for honesty?

It gets better.

One of the locals said to his mate, ‘Steve needs a hand,' and without asking for thanks or permission, he stood up, walked over to the tables and started stacking the empty glasses and taking them to the kitchen. The stack got so high, it nearly hit the 13-foot ceiling. That's how many glasses they were collecting. And despite him not being a trained bar professional, he did not drop a glass.

His mate then got up off the stool, walked behind the bar and started pouring beers for the customers. Two others headed down to the cellar to grab more glasses and brought them up and proceeded to stack the glass tray so the bartenders had a fresh supply of glasses coming through.

These three guys, Donal, Chris and Nick, didn't just help out for a minute or two: they worked 10 hours straight, without taking a break, and without asking for money. With their help, and just four bar staff, we served over 11 000 drinks that day. In today's terms, that's the equivalent of taking $80 000 in one day, which for a tiny pub on a suburban street is a great achievement, and one I couldn't even contemplate achieving without the help of my loyal community. (Incidentally, those three men became lifelong buddies and have all gone on to have highly successful business careers. It's not surprising. The values they showed that day are the values that will take anyone to the top of their chosen field.)

It touched me greatly to see my locals — people I knew, but didn't really know well — stand up, pitch in and help in such a generous and selfless way. They worked their arses off, for no pay, just because they wanted to help me in my hour of need.

I learned a valuable lesson that day. Community is everything. I knew that to be true anyway, but I had never seen it in action the way I did that day. I also learned that community is a two-way street. When I think back to how we helped Cath that night when she was in her hour of need, we too were helped by people who owed us nothing in our hour of need. What goes around comes around.

Want free marketing? Find your community

Facebook is everything in our business. Instagram's important too, but Facebook is the king when it comes to quickly getting the word out about something. During COVID-19, we often put out posts promoting half-priced take-away meals. We knew that our community were doing it tough in lockdown (both psychologically and financially), so we wanted to do something to help them. Within minutes of the post going up, we had 100 orders.

But there's something that's equally important, much cheaper (free actually) and exponentially more powerful than social media marketing — and that's community marketing. In other words, do the right thing by your community, look after them, treat them well (before you need to and without any expectation of that goodwill being returned) and you may discover that your community do your social media marketing for you as well.

The world's obsession with social media has obscured how important it is to connect in person with the people in your community. Your local community is a rich, untapped vein of new business, yet is often overlooked in favour of advertising on social media, radio or elsewhere. Irrespective of what business you have, or what you sell, it pays to place yourself and your business at the heart of your community. What does this even mean? For a start, look at where you're located.

As a starting point, jump onto Google Maps, and draw a circle around the map with a radius of 3 kilometres with your business in the centre. Then analyse all the businesses within that 3-kilometre radius. Who's there? Who can you help? How can you serve them? What collaborations can you create with them?

Do the same with the people who reside within that area. Go to the Australian Bureau of Statistics website, or your local council website, and review the demographics of the residential area. Are they young families? Singles? Well-off professionals? Senior citizens? Middle-aged mums? Whatever it is, brainstorm what your business has in common with them, work out what they need that you could offer and create a win–win for you both.

Match your purpose to the concept

When creating the ‘concept' for your business, it needs to be a combination of what you can provide for the local community and what your strengths are. If there's no overlap, then find the right people who can help you plug the gaps. For example, when it comes to hiring staff, even if you don't personally love sport but your business is surrounded by sports stadiums, hire staff who live and breathe sport so they can pick up the slack for whatever you can't, or don't, want to get involved with.

Obviously, I can't be at the coal face of every pub every day, so I hire the local footy and netball players as our wait staff. Not only am I giving the local kids a job, who do you think is going to come in and visit those kids when they're working? Their friends, and lots of them. Not only do they all drink, eat and party up a storm, but when we need new staff, who do you think does our recruitment? Our staff. We pay them a recruitment fee if the person works out and everyone wins.

Another side benefit of hiring the locals is that if one or another of them can't make a shift, they do a ring-around and find one of their mates to do it for them, taking that headache off our plates for us. And the community reciprocation cycle just keeps giving back. Where do you think those bar staff are going to come when they have a night off? To the pub where they work because their friends are working that night.

We also make a point of hiring local bands to play at our pubs. We do it for the same reasons, but also because we love to think that we're giving a local kid a shot and we love the thought that when they become a big name we can say, ‘They got their start at the Sea Breeze Hotel', or wherever they were playing. We love helping our community like this and we certainly gain more back than we could ever give.

If you treat your community right, you'll find your community will treat you right as well. What's important here is intention. Of course, we have our marketing hats on when we do this, hoping to see a commercial return. But we do it anyway because it's the right thing to do. If you're part of a community, and you want it to support you, you need to give back to it and place yourself at the centre of your community.

Put yourself in the right room

I constantly seek to improve myself and my business, and am always alert to situations or experiences that can help me achieve that. A few years back, I was at a certain stage of my business journey when I felt I wasn't growing my network or expanding my mind. I wanted to take myself and my business to the next level, so I did what I always do when I have a knowledge gap and enrolled in a course.

The first one I took was a short course on entrepreneurship, which was so rewarding I went further and enrolled in a Masters of Business (MBA). I enjoyed that so much I wanted to enrol in an executive course for leaders. But where? What was the best one? I did my research and decided that if I was going to be away from the family, and invest time and money on myself and my business, then I may as well aim high. And what's the best business school in the world? Harvard. That's where I was going to go. I completed the entrance and aptitude tests, provided them with a glowing reference (written by my superstar PA Wendy!), booked my tickets, said goodbye to my wife and babies and hightailed it to Harvard, Boston, the alma mater of legends like Bill Gates, Matt Damon and a host of American presidents. I couldn't have been more excited.

Trying to keep the jetlag at bay and stay awake long enough to morph into the new time zone, I hunted down Cheers, the bar made famous in the eponymous TV show. The locals were as friendly as they were on TV. My body clock was pegged at 3 am but it was 7 pm in Boston so I had to have a beer. Hey, when in Rome …

Deep down, I was super nervous about what lay ahead. When under pressure, my brain veers into a negative mindset and I start to doubt myself. I started thinking, ‘What right do I have to be here? Who did I think I was, coming to Harvard? How did I get here? Would I be able to cut it? I was just a bar-room brawler from a tiny town in the regions of New South Wales and here I was walking the hallowed turf that John F. Kennedy walked on. I needed to get out of this unhelpful headspace, so I did what I do whenever I lack confidence or I'm nervous: I drew on all my old stories of when I'd been successful. I reread my diary notes to remind me that I had accomplished worthwhile things; I recalled positive things people had said to me over the years, like when my university lecturer in accounting, Professor Rodriguez, reviewed a paper I wrote on the financing of pubs and suggested I do a PhD on it (the fact he took me seriously and considered me capable was a huge honour in my eyes). These were just some of the techniques I used to help calm my nerves and give me the confidence to step into the classroom with some semblance of self-assurance.

On day one, they paired us up to complete a group project. I disliked my partner on first sight. Great. Out of all the people in the room I could have got paired with, I get him! He was loud, brash, cocky and thought he knew everything. He was very intimidating, wouldn't listen to anyone else and talked over everyone. In that moment, I totally regretted coming. But as the course progressed, he chilled out a bit, I found my feet and we developed a really good relationship. Incidentally, he had every reason to be cocky. He was Lorenzo Delpani, the former CEO of Revlon Cosmetics, so he knew a thing or two about business. He played the game of business at a much higher level than me and had done deals that dwarfed mine many times over, but by virtue of us being in the same room at the same time, I gained access to his global network of business titans, a cohort of colleagues I would never have ordinarily met working in my regional town.

Some of those contacts became mentors and friends and opened a door to another world that has been instrumental in helping me access new ideas, funds and innovations. When it comes to business, it's not what you know, it's definitely who you know. Putting myself in that Harvard room paid off in ways that I could never have expected.

That experience reinforced how important it was for me and my staff to surround ourselves with people from our industry and attend as many events and conferences as possible. This helps us spot the latest trends, keep tabs on new legislation and regulation and meet potential investors, and increases our chances of being in the right room at the right time.

Give to get

Attending events is critical to staying connected with your industry, but I know the concept of networking strikes fear into the hearts of most people, especially introverts. The thought of turning up to a room filled with strangers, introducing yourself to someone you've never met and trying to make small talk, can make even the most extroverted networkers quake in their boots.

But I've found over the years that if you change your focus from what you can get from the event to what you can give, you're more likely to make more contacts, reduce your anxiety levels and get a better result. ‘Give to get' has always been a helpful motto for me. If I go in with a focus on how I can give assistance to someone, rather than get something from them, it takes the pressure off having to sell something or do anything or be someone I'm not. I can just be me; relaxed, open and ready to help.

How to network

Many people are turned off by networking because they attend the wrong events, which means they're mixing with the wrong people, which means they don't get a good outcome. You can increase your likelihood of success in connecting with the right people if you do some homework before you go. Take a moment to research the event online, check out the agenda, rehearse your pitch and link in with a few guests before you go so you have a few friendly faces to turn to when you arrive.

What not to do when networking

I recently attended a conference conducted by a family business association, and sat down to watch the opening keynote speaker. The man next to me introduced himself and I said, ‘What do you do?' He said, ‘I'm an accountant'. Not needing the services of an accountant, I didn't investigate much further, but had a pleasant chat all the same.

At the tea break, he handed me his card, which read, ‘Accountant — Franchise Specialist'.

Well, that got my attention. We have a bar franchise called Shoeless Jack and are always on the lookout for professional services that specialise in the sector. If he'd introduced himself with, ‘I'm an accountant and I help businesses launch their franchise operation', I would have instantly sought him out for a consultation.

Get on the stage

If you're keen to accelerate your networking efforts, don't just attend an event, speak at the event. Like most people, I'm not a natural public speaker, but I have found that one of the fastest ways to build my network, gain credibility and put myself in the right room with the right people is by being a guest speaker at an event.

If you value efficiency, being a speaker will fast track your networking efforts more than almost any other method. For example, is it more productive to schedule 10 one-hour meetings with 10 different people, or be a guest speaker in front of 100 people for one hour? You do the maths. Not only is the ‘one to many' event more efficient, it's also more effective. Why? Because your credibility has already been established before you even walk on stage or utter a word, and you get one hour of uninterrupted stage time to share your words, wit and wisdom with everyone in the room. If they didn't know who you were, or what you did before the speech, they certainly will after it.