Steph Hinds is an accountant but certainly not your typical pen pushing number crunching accounting nerd.
As the Founder of Growthwise Accountants she helps start-ups, tech companies and small businesses concentrate on what they do best by removing most of the admin hassles and revealing the data they really need to make the right decisions.
Steph is also the co-founder of the DiG Festival, an annual conference that aims to promote and foster modern creativity and innovation in Australia.
- Tell us about the journey that led you to start your own business.
At school I was undecided about what I wanted to do with my life. I loved numbers and I figured that an accountant’s job was super exciting and all we had to do was crunch number and help small business.
I started out as a trainee account, did that for five years, then went to work for another firm. I then really got an itch, where I wanted to only help small business owners. So I was really excited to do something that was a little bit different, but all along the lines of something I was passionate about.
- What has been your proudest moment in business?‚Ä®
It’s hard to pick one moment in time, but my proudest collection of things would have to be our L platers program that we run at Growthwise. We’ve been doing this for five years and it takes small businessowners, who don’t have a background as a businessowner from point A to point B.
It’s so exciting to see people start when it’s just a dream, to now having 10 or 20 staff, to having worldwide businesses and the growth is so great!
Developing, delivering and then getting be part of these businessowners lives makes me very proud.
- Did you always know you want to be an entrepreneur?
Definitely not! I think even today I don’t really think that I’m an entrepreneur. My role is as the partner, or the person who gets to help people, and challenge them and inspire them and motivate them to get from point A to point B.
And sometimes I forget that part of those things that I do on a daily basis are entrepreneurial, to me it’s just fun, it’s life!
- Do you think there are any key traits that entrepreneurs tend to have?
They’re very dedicated; they generally run at 100 miles an hour, so speed is everything to them. But they tend to be very motivational people, they’re very good leaders – they get people excited, which is why they can lead teams.
So there are certain traits, but every single entrepreneur I know has very different traits as well, depending on what they are trying to do.
- What local entrepreneur do you find inspiring?
This is such a tough question for me, because if you ask me this one day I will say one person, but then three days later I will meet with someone else who is just amazing.
So for me, Newcastle is, and the collection of people that are here doing amazing things, are the inspiration for me. We’ve got things like the Slingshot group, we’ve got the stuff we’re doing with DiG Festival enables me to see amazing people and my daily job allows me to see so many amazing people doing amazing things. And I think that’s what sets Newcastle apart. We don’t have to have one person to put on a pedestal to make everyone get excited, it’s that collection and that collaboration of people doing things together.