18 REAL-LEADERS.COM / SPRING 2022 CHANGEMAKERS AS ONE OF AUSTRALIA’S MOST SUCCESSFUL SERIAL ENTREPRENEURS, Jo Burston has witnessed firsthand the power of entrepreneurship in driving economic growth. However, the founder and CEO of Inspiring Rare Birds, founder and managing director of Job Capital, and cofounder of Startup Business, also recognized early in her career the missed opportunity and loss of not having more women participate in Australia’s male-dominated entrepreneurial culture. Since 2014, she has used Inspiring Rare Birds as a platform to challenge the view of what is possible for women and leading young girls and women executives into new terrain by changing the way they see themselves as entrepreneurs. During an acceptance speech for a business award in 2011, Burston recognized the need to increase women’s participation in entrepreneurship. “As I stood on stage at Parliament House in New South Wales, I looked at the sea of faces and realized that there were hardly any women in the room,” says Burston. “I got curious and took a film crew, with the permission of the Department of Education, back to my school in Southwest Sydney to interview 30 young women between the ages of eight and 17. I asked them who they wanted to become?” Her findings showed that most girls still did not know what they wanted to do after high school. When Burston asked what an entrepreneur was, the majority said it was a man in business or a man who has a company. She says, “I found that they had no idea — no concept at all — that entrepreneurship was open to them as a pathway to a successful and fulfilling life. I realized that girls cannot become what they cannot see. I thought, ‘Here is our social environment reflected in the thoughts of these young women.’ My mission there and then was to give every woman the opportunity to become an entrepreneur.” As she started building Inspiring Rare Birds, Burston gathered insights from leading entrepreneurs to publish her first book, Australia’s 50 Influential Women Entrepreneurs, a first-of-itskind in Australia, which generated the interest of academia, government, and industry leaders like EY. Based on the book’s success, Burston invested in what she believed to be an essential tool to help women launch their careers and grow their businesses: a world-class mentoring program. “From my personal journey, I recognized the importance of having a mentor,” she explains. “One of the reasons I was successful in my career was because I had a mentor of 16 years who was also a serial entrepreneur and who became my first investor.” Jo Burston: CoachingWomen Entrepreneurs to ChallengeWhat’s Possible By Rola Tassabehji Rola Tassabehji is a journalist and content marketing specialist with a background in global brand management experience at Unilever and higher education at INSEAD. YPO is a global leadership community of more than 30,000 chief executives in 142 countries driven by the belief that the world needs better leaders. Jo Burston has been a member since 2017.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjY3Mjcw