The corner office: Vaughan Rowsell

Vaughan Rowsell, chief executive of Vend and EY Technology and Emerging Industries category winner for Entrepreneur of the Year.

What is your personal business philosophy or business focus?

My philosophy is that if you get the right people on the right mission, and you have this culture of trust - where everyone is trusted to make their own decisions and try new things, and not be penalised if they make mistakes - then that sets the foundation to do really amazing things.

What was the best business decision you made for the company?

Probably early on, deciding to go and raise capital for the business, it enabled us to get scale.

We could have bootstrapped the business and grown organically but we wouldn't have grown nearly as quickly.

It's always a tough decision, especially at the beginning, and raising capital can feel very painful, giving away large chunks of your company, but for us, hopefully we're demonstrating the benefits of raising capital and allowing the business to grow more quickly.

What was the hardest or worst business decision you made and what did you take away from it?

I probably make bad decisions all the time, but it's about being able to identify when you make a bad decision and move on from it really quickly.

And hopefully by making some little bad decisions that you learn from and change, that stops you from making a huge bad decision. That's kind of our philosophy at Vend, try little things, make little calls if you can to experiment and then if it doesn't work, there's no shame in that, we move on.

What do you think are some of the top fundamental things businesses need to do to be successful?

Be prepared for constant change. Constant experimentation and trying stuff out, but doing stuff in a way that means you don't get fatigued as well because it is tiring moving at pace. Being innovative and agile.

Do you have a golden rule you follow or a business motto?

Do the impossible stuff. Quite often, the things we think are impossible aren't.There is no greater feeling than achieving an impossible task that at one point you thought, "there's no way we could do this, it's just too hard", and then going and doing it. That's an amazing experience.

What do you think are some of the most common mistakes businesses make?

I think businesses focusing too much on their backyard, domestically, that's always a bad decision. You can be a global software company from New Zealand, you don't have to focus just on the New Zealand market, especially as it's such a small market.

Do you have a business mentor or leader you admire or aspire to emulate?

I don't really have one. I think the best approach is to borrow inspiration and ideas from wherever you can find them - business mentors, people, other companies, fiction, wherever. Get your dreams, and then back yourself without feeling that you need to lean on anyone else to show you the way.