Andrew Denton dropped out of high school and fell into plumbing. Today, he is the director of Hillscorp Developments. They develop land, roads, infrastructure, and more across Australia.
For a guy that failed maths in high school, he’s now making decisions worth tens and hundreds of millions of dollars!
From humble beginnings, he has stayed humble – even in his success.
Andrew went from being a plumber, to what he describes as being “a plumber in clean clothes”. Today, he is now one of the most significant land developers in Australia. He’s an author of the book, ‘Kingdom Builders‘ , which has been published in numerous languages and is an elder at Hillsong Church.
He is one of Pete’s dear friends and mentors. In this episode of the podcast, they discuss big dreams, practical vision, wisdom and living a life of risk, led by faith.
This article draws from this podcast episode to explain 8 tips for living a life of risk with wisdom:
1. IT STARTS WITH A MINDSET SHIFT
Andrew says the success he has experienced in both his business and personal life has come from a mindset shift.
“The mindset shift, actually was the trust. It was a trust issue. I had read the Bible from front to back and I believed it was true. I just didn’t believe it was true for me”, says Andrew.
He had to take a step of faith and say “Okay, God. I’m reading all these promises. I’m reading all these things. Is it really true?”.
Andrew says that what blew him away is when he actually chose to take that step of faith and put his trust in God – He actually turned up.
“I realised that had nothing to do with my level of intelligence. It had nothing to do with my career. It had nothing to do with how much money I had in the bank. It had nothing to do with even my desire. It was really just putting my trust in God – that His promises were actually for me. It really was as simple as that.”
Looking back, Andrew says his dreaming and what he believed he could accomplish was so small. “I was 31 then … it all revolved around how much effort – just effort – I could put in. My dreams were tiny. So that had to change.”
What motivated Andrew back then, and what continues to motivate him today is financing the Kingdom of God. But before he could take any steps, he had to start really trusting in God.
“I actually had to start to believe that some of these things that were way back in the deep recesses could actually happen”.
Andrew believes that what stops people is fear. This shows up in our lives as unbelief and a lack of trust.
“I can take those steps with a real confidence, because I’ve been doing it for so long. I just know God is gonna turn up. I don’t know how he’s going to turn up. Very often it’s different to how I had planned – you’ve still got to have a plan – but you’ve got to be open to God guiding you on those things”, he says.
“It really is that mindset shift that says, ‘I’m no longer relying on Andrew, I’m just going to rely on God, I’m going to trust him. I’m going to believe the promises for me. I’m going to dream big’.”
2. WRITE DOWN YOUR VISION
Having a dream is vital. Andrew encourages us to write down all the things we want to see achieved in our lives, through whatever we are putting our hands, heads and hearts to. Those are the things that will sustain you if you really believe them.
Andrew wrote his vision down when he began his business and he continues to write it down.
He remembers that at one point, he had an office with glass doors everywhere. He made it so they could be used as whiteboards and there was stuff written everywhere – all over the walls.
“When you are sitting at my desk, and the challenges were on us, and the devil was kicking us, and it was all getting a bit hard, I literally could just look around the walls and see all these things.”
As time progressed, Andrew could get up and erase dreams and visions off the wall because they had become reality.
“With faith steps, dreams and goals, we often see the big goal. And maybe that big goal might be writing a million-dollar check. But there are 20,30,40 other steps along the way”.
We tend to sometimes focus on the big steps but these can freak us out a bit and make things too seem too hard. Andrew advises us to break things down.
“Do it in chunks. Do it in small things. Take small steps. But write it down. This is how you’re going to do it.”
3. MAKE THE VISION PRACTICAL
Once you’ve written down your vision, it’s important to actually put practical steps to it. It’s not as difficult as you think.
We can get bogged down in the details; making sure our ducks are all lined up. If we aren’t careful, this can be a form of procrastination because we are afraid of taking the next step.
Andrew says, “There’s no such thing as a wrong step. I know that sounds counterintuitive.”
He explains that when you aren’t taking any steps, no faith is required.
When you take a step, God says “Fantastic! I can now work with that guy”.
In his early days, Andrews ‘next steps’ were phone calls, door knocks and taking people out for coffee.
God has a plan for us. It’s a really good plan and if he told you, it would blow your mind! But he is waiting for us to take that next step.
Andrew remembers a time when he was walking through the shops with his brother, who is also his business partner. He rattled off some figures they had made that year.
These numbers blew Andrew’s mind so much that he had to sit down on the nearest bench seat. “I remember saying to him, ‘can you just repeat that? What was that number?’ … I was 10 years into this. And I still would pinch myself and think ‘am I dreaming? Am I going to wake up from this’.”
Now, Andrew has been doing it for 27 years. He says if God can do it for him, he can do it for you!
4. LEARN FROM MISTAKES
Andrew learned a $10 million lesson in his business. “I’ve only ever learnt lessons that have cost me and my hip pocket. When something really, really cost you, you stand up and listen.”
Andrew is in business with his youngest brother. In the early days of the business, they had a third partner also, who they eventually found out was ripping them off. They had to pay him out and it cost $10 million to get rid of him!
Andrew came to the conclusion that it wasn’t the partner’s fautl, but his fault. He accepts responsibility for this happening because he hadn’t put things in place to ensure he couldn’t be ripped off.
“That was just his nature. I hadn’t realised that. But money just magnifies who you already are. If you’re a greedy son of a gun, when you’ve only got a little bit of money, you become a very big greedy son of a gun when there’s lots of money. If you’re generous when you’ve got a little bit of money, you become very generous when you’ve got a lot of money.”
Once Andrew and his brother had paid the third partner out, they were determined to never let that happen again. They had to educate themselves.
“My problem was that I am the plumber – terrible at maths. I’m still terrible at maths. My brother was good at maths, and the other guy, I thought was good at maths, but he was dealing the figures, and we didn’t realise that whole thing.”
Andrew then got a mentor and worked with him every month for three years. “I paid him a lot of money for three, four hours and he taught me to read a spreadsheet. He taught me to read a P&L. He taught me how to how to build a cash flow. He taught me all this stuff that I thought I didn’t need to know – that I needed someone else to do”.
Andrew accepted responsibility. He realised if he was going to be the owner of a large, successful company. He had to understand the figures and not be reliant on someone else’s thoughts.
Today, he still has other people who do all of that for him. But he is all over it. He can read more than just the bottom line.
“I used to just go straight to the bottom line. And I’d miss all the bits in between”.
He has made the decision to be proactive, rather than living reactively.
“For most of my life, I’d lived reactively to that point. I obviously changed some areas. But I had to keep changing. I think that’s the point … to remain teachable is so important. We need to always understand that we’ve got something else to learn. If you get to a point where you think you know it all, that’s probably when you’re most in trouble. Because something’s going to happen to you that you weren’t expecting”.
Andrew says learning from this mistake was a humbling experience but it opened his eyes to understand he needs to be reliant on God.
“So I’ve got to get some wisdom on my life. Then, I’ve got to get some understanding. I have no excuse, but to learn to do these things to run my business better.”
Never let a good crisis go to waste.
5. KNOW YOUR NUMBERS
A mentor of Pete’s once said to him “Look, if you don’t want to get deep with the numbers, that’s okay. But just strike off your ambition to be a great CEO. And find something else.”
The technical role you play in the business might be sales, it might be operational execution. But the skills you’re going to need to grow an organisation will be this: entrepreneurship.
if you’re just selling and getting helpers, you’re going to have an ‘operational ceiling’ that limits your growth.
Pete challenges us with the question: what’s the one thing you know you need to change to add to your quiver of entrepreneurship?
For many of us. That will be understanding our numbers.
“I hear so many people going, ‘I’m not built that way’. It’s probably fair to say at that time, you wouldn’t have called yourself a numbers guy?”, Pete asks Andrew.
Andrew says that to this day, he is still not a numbers guy but there is no excuse. “As the business owner, the buck stops with you. It really does. We can’t be blaming staff, contractors or consultants. I got ripped off, because I didn’t have things in place properly”.
6. DON’T GET TOO COMFORTABLE
It’s so easy to get too comfortable. The devil wants to keep you comfortable. “When you’re comfortable, you’re relaxed, you sit back, and everything just happens around you again”.
We’ve got to become comfortable in being uncomfortable and realise that when things are going great, our next step has ended. It then comes back down to having a bigger vision and continually looking at your dreams.
If you’ve got to the point where you’re just comfortable, that means that you’re happy where you’re at. Andrew recalls a description of success, which says “to be content with where you are, in pursuit of where you want to be”.
“Once again, it’s a mindset shift that says, ‘Okay, things are going great. What are we putting in place?’. This continues as we continue to move forward”.
It takes research, it takes more risk but Andrew says “I enjoy the risk life. I enjoy not knowing actually how it’s going to happen next month”. It heeps him reliant on God and it keeps life exciting!
Everyone loves to say “I’m vision-focused” and things like that. But are you talking yourself up, or do you actually implement what you say?
Andrew recalls a person he met. “He had been to more conferences, he had read more motivational books, he had a dream book, he had a dream board. He had everything. He knew everything. He could talk the talk. He could give a motivational speech and all of us would be cheering him along through the whole thing. But he hadn’t done much with his life. He knew it all but hadn’t done anything.”
Andrew remembers sitting down with this man and saying “You’re fat on so much knowledge, so much information. You know everything but you’re not taking a step.”
“It’s very easy to talk the talk – to know the lingo and those kinds of things. But taking the step, this is where it’s at.”
“I was so afraid of risk. I was the most fearful bloke you’d ever meet. Now, I’m not completely fearless, but I’m close to that. I love taking the step now.”
Andrew says “when you’ve met enough people, it becomes fairly clear whether they’re a talker, or whether they’re actually doing it”.
“A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week” — George Patton
“Sometimes we try and make it all neat. Just pick up your gun and shoot. Stop analysing the wind and the breeze and the humidity. Just pull the trigger”, says Pete.
7. STAY EXCITED ABOUT THE FUTURE
“I’m more excited about the future today than ever. And I have no intention of pulling back in business at all”, says Andrew.
The past few years of COVID have shown him that he doesn’t need to travel as much as he once did and that he can run his business without actually being there.
“Property development is all about taking risks, not turning up. You can have a team to turn up if I’m prepared to continue to take the risks, and I am.”
Andrew is actively putting things in place for his future and the future of Hillscorp. “I’m buying land right now that I won’t develop for five years. I’ll be 62 by then.” He stresses the importance of planning ahead and continuously putting structure in place.
Andrew says so much of property development is reinvesting into the next piece of land, so you’ve got your next property. “Now, I could take all the profits, but then it has nothing to do with the next however many years.”
In the middle of the COVID pandemic, Andrew and his brother actually looked at that. They said “if we just sold everything we have—all our land—sold everything we have now. We could just sit back and do nothing and live the rest of out lives quite comfortably”.
But they have a bigger dream. As Andrew says, “there’s still much to do on this earth”.
During the Global Financial Crisis, “we actually just sold and battered down the hatches. At the end of it, we would have been in the same position, if not better, if we just and hadn’t done anything”.
So throughout this COVID pandemic, Hillscorp have continued to buy land and invest in the future.
Success leaves clues and if you don’t do anything different, you’ll just walk the average.
The best time to invest in your next project is when you’re at the top of the wave
8. DON’T FEAR THE PUBLIC EMBARRASSMENT THAT COMES WITH FAILURE
At the end of the day, the fear of the public embarrassment that comes with failure is actually a pride issue.
“I think over the years, God’s just beat the pride out of me. And I’ve realised that it’s not about me. It’s not about me”
One of the biggest motivators for Andrew today is generational legacy. It’s about building for his children’s children.
“Being publicly embarrassed about things – I’m really not concerned too much about that anymore.”
He worked out a long time ago that with little risk comes little money. But if you take a big risk, there is the opportunity to make big money.
With bigger risk, comes a greater opportunity for public embarrassment if it fails. This doesn’t scare Andrew anymore. It just helps him to do better due diligence.
Andrew encourages us that God has got us “but in the end, we still have to be educated enough. We’ve still got to do our due diligence well enough and count the cost properly – not be stupid”.
“So many Christians take stupid risks and want to call it ‘advice’. It’s no wonder why they get embarrassed. Because they’ve done something that’s absolutely foolish! Then, they want to say, ‘Oh, well, God never turned up for me’. They even want to blame the devil … but the devil is sitting there going, ‘You did that to yourself, you idiot’.”.
Andrew encourages us to “take the steps, do the due diligence properly so that they will actually work. And put enough fat in there.”
You want to have margin and not leave too many opportunities for things to go wrong. “Do the due diligence, and you won’t be embarrassed”, says Andrew.