Maxwell Nee | No Straight Lines in Success

The QUT Alumni Team sat down with Maxwell to chat about his career, engaging with business coaching and the entrepreneurial mindset.

You really made your mark as a business coach, building a seven-figure empire and have been profiled in publications including Forbes and Wealth Insider. Can you tell us what business coaching involves and when should someone engage one?

Great question! There are always two parts to achieving goals in business (and in life) and the first part is strategy—this is the easy part. It's basically the simple actions you need to take to achieve your goal. The second part is mindset—this is the hard part. It's the mental resilience you need to achieve your goal because success is rarely linear.

Business coaching involves someone helping you with taking both your strategy and mindset to the next level so you can achieve your next business goal.

I personally believe that every entrepreneur should have a business coach. Most people do, they just refer to them as mentors or role models. Basically, if you want to take anything to the next level, get a coach! Professional athletes and businesspeople all around the world have had coaches at some stages in their lives, and there is a good reason for that.

What is one goal you'd like to achieve professionally or personally in 2024?

Personally, I'd like to get my business and investments to such a comfortable point where I can help retire my mum and dad. Helping them diversify their investments as they are moving into retirement age is key.

Do you believe that people are born with an entrepreneurial mindset, or do you think that it can be trained?

I think an entrepreneurial mindset is simply the ability to always question, not settle and always seek a better way. It's essentially life-problem-solving and solving such incredibly useful problems that people will pay you for it. I think this can be trained, because the majority of people have been trained and conditioned the complete opposite way. Which is, study hard, get good grades, get a job and work your way up the ladder until you retire.

Over the years you have returned to QUT to mentor. What does mentoring mean to you?

It's a chance to pay something forward so the next person can learn faster and achieve more. Selfishly, its also very fulfilling to pour into someone's cup and watch them grow.

After a number of years training and developing other business coaches in the industry you sold the company and moved into the world of wine and whiskey investment. Can you tell us more about your role at Oeno Group?

I've always enjoyed investing and learning about new investments, so when I found wine and whiskey investing, I invested almost immediately. 15% returns that are non-correlated to the traditional markets. A few years later, when my property, tech, stocks and crypto investments were either down or stuck, I noticed that my wine and whiskey was up around 40% in less than two years. That's when I knew I wanted to expand the business into Asia Pacific and to larger investors with our Investment Fund based out of Delaware. I'm responsible for building these two new parts of the business as the core business is in London.

One of your strengths is having a keen understanding of the customers' why. Can you explain what this means to an entrepreneur and the part it plays in gaining insight into your customer?

If you don't know your customer, you don't know your business. When I use to actively coach, I would always say that a product and a business are just a vanity and an idea without someone willing to buy it. A product only exists when it's been bought and used by a customer. Until then, it's just a thing, a nice idea. If you don't know why your customer is buying from you and your business and therefore you will have zero control over your life and only a lot of stress to show.

You recently presented at SCALE Global a conference in Las Vegas which included speakers such as Hillary Clinton, Steve Wozniak and Martin Luther King III. I think it would be fair to say a percentage of our readership would be intimidated. Can you share your top three tips for networking?

1. Don't frame it in your mind as networking. This will put you in the state of mind to 'take' instead of 'give' to people. Think of it as making friends and genuinely connecting with people. No one wakes up and thinks 'I want someone to network with me'. No one wants to be 'networked'.

2. Talk to the person, not to the job title. Forget any agenda as this will distract you from listening and being present with the person, and they will sense it.

3. The real 'networking' happens in the follow-up as relationships are built over time, not over coffee. So don't let your new connections fizzle out. I'm still following up with phone calls from that day, three months later.

What is one skill you couldn't live without and why?

Self-awareness. I really believe that the biggest road-blocks to entrepreneurial success is a lack of self-awareness. Without being self-aware to the mistakes you're making you're opening yourself to endless cycle of mistakes. An extremely self-aware person will catch a mistake as they are making it and be prepared to put aside their ego to fix it.

Do you have a question for Maxwell? Connect with him on LinkedIn.