Episode 33: Close the Gap

On 16 March 2018, ASIC held a Close the Gap event featuring two leading Indigenous entrepreneurs: Liam Ridgeway, co-founder of Ngakkan Nyaagu (NGNY), an Indigenous digital enterprise Jasmin Herro, founder of Outback Global, a leading Indigenous supplier of workwear The Close the Gap campaign aims to create equality in health between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. This campaign also measures progress in economic development and employment, and these aspects were the focus of ASIC's event. Liam and Jasmin were also kind enough to speak on our podcast after the event. In the episode, you will hear from Liam and Jasmin about how and why they started their businesses and what impact they seek to have as Indigenous entrepreneurs. Transcript Host: Hello and welcome to the official podcast of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission. In today’s episode we will be talking to two outstanding Indigenous entrepreneurs who we’ve just heard from at our Close the Gap event here in Sydney today. My name is Justine Butler, and with me are Jasmin Herro, CEO of Outback Global, and Liam Ridgeway, founder of NGNY, an Indigenous digital enterprise. Thanks very much for your time today, let’s start with Liam. Liam, you started your IT career with Microsoft and were extremely successful there, what did it take to leave such a big enterprise and start out on your own? Liam Ridgeway: It was quite interesting. It took a lot of, I guess a lot of guts. In fact, there was lots of late nights, lots of thinking about whether I should pursue this or not. It sort of came off the back of an idea from a conversation that I had with a colleague of mine at Microsoft to I guess pursue a business idea and leave Microsoft, and, I think it literally took me maybe nine months to actually build up the courage to go and actually explore the opportunity to start my own business. And it was very stressful, I had to also convince my partner at the time, who is now my wife, that this was the journey that I wanted to take and that my potential was going to be far higher going on this journey and starting my own business as opposed to working just in a corporate role, and I also wanted to make more of an impact, and so that was the thing that actually helped me convince myself that by having my own business I could have more of an impact in the Indigenous community, but also across Australia and potentially across the globe as well. Host: The question, or possibility, for impact came up in the talk today and Jasmin I believe you’re very much motivated by making an impact around Indigenous culture in both Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities, perhaps you’d like to tell us a bit more about that. Jasmin Herro: Thanks Justine. Yes, I think there’s an unwritten law that Indigenous businesses must give back to community, and must show a social impact, and if not, now. And I think one of the reasons why I took time out to think about the social impact that I wanted to leave, which was not just about writing a cheque for money, but leaving a legacy for others that would outlive me and even my project. And one of the things as a parent, my children always struggled with was ‘how do I explain who I am, and where I’m from?’. And I think the other side of that was how do the teachers try to include Indigenous culture into the classroom? So as a parent myself, I thought, I was getting a little tired of teachers asking me, ‘so, um, what do you think we should do for NAIDOC Week this year?’. And I think that started me thinking about ‘how could I make it easy for my children to explain about their culture, and how could I make it easy for the teachers and the other students to understand how interesting it was?’. And so that’s why I embarked upon the Teter Mek project and indeed writing the books, and creating the workbooks and teachers’ resources to go with it. Host: That kind of leads me back to this kind of broad question that we have about, ‘how d