Huon Valley Guessing Games “So, how did it go????” inquires ‘Blow-in’ at comment #13 to (Sirolli breaks the silence, here). Another urger (#14), ‘emkaydubbya’, asks “Do tell! How did it go?”
My reading of the second Sirolli public meeting in Huonville last Wednesday (October 31) is that it went just about as well as its host, the recently incorporated Huon Sirolli Network (HSN) could have hoped.
The jury may still be out on whether this State Government-commissioned Sirolli Institute project can indeed infuse life into the valley’s small-business world, but the buzz in the room after the meeting was enough to suggest there are the makings of something that could be of great value to the valley, even far beyond the project’s two-year life.
No doubt about it, Dr Ernesto Sirolli — Gusto ought to be his middle name — has the gift of being able to connect with hearts and minds, even with those initially reluctant to listen. He’s great entertainment, too. With flare, he leaps around verbally, unafraid to step on influential toes and ready to take pot shots at sacred cows. He talks of dealing with “government crap”; of the need for ruthlessness in hiring and firing; even to the extent of helping people to promote good ideas that might be frustrated by legal constraints.
Sirolli’s straight talking in Huonville on June 4 wowed a public meeting of about 150. There was more straight talking on October 31 when he explained to a gathering, this time, just short of 50, how he and the HSN management board would be tackling their task.
By the time HSN board members and Sirolli’s wife Martha were counted, this amounted to fewer than 40 members of the public. It was an audience that might have been so much bigger had the Sirolli team kept in email touch with all those at the June 4 meeting who indicated their willingness to help.
Among the audience were Scott Dufty of the Huon Valley Business Enterprise Centre (BEC) and three councillors — Peter Pepper, Liz Smith and Rosalie Woodruff. None of Mayor Robert Armstrong’s council-controlling Futures Team was present. That’s a bit of a puzzle. Surely they aren’t miffed that none has a role in the project’s management!
Sirolli, early in his address, tackled a sore point that most valley people are aware of but few are willing to broach. He had discovered that the Huon Valley was “one of the most divided communities” he had ever come across, emphasising his point by observing that he had “worked in Belfast”.
Over the top? Yes, probably by quite a bit. But his observation evoked guffaws from the gathering, someone interjecting with, “At least we don’t shoot ’em here!”
Sirolli also said that, in bringing together the HSN management team, he had never run into so many knock-backs when he approached people for help.
Nevertheless, with the ice broken at the meeting on October 31, Sirolli pressed on with a rundown of how he believed his approach to energising a small-business upsurge in the valley would succeed. His description of small business: “hell — on a bicycle”.
To my ears, Sirolli’s message sounded something like this: success will come only if the project’s strategy and method can harness enthusiasm, commitment, skills and ideas from the community and then meld them into a machine able to show existing small businesses, and people with potentially viable business ideas, how to make and keep their ventures profitable.
Everybody was welcome to play a role, he said, the starting point being the establishment of a “resource board” of up to 50 volunteers, who, he stressed, would have to commit to total confidentiality. From there, expertise to help individual ventures would be found through a variety of referrals, via resource-board members, that would bring the skills and wisdom into play needed to make good ideas and schemes more efficient and profitable.
And there is a Sirolli golden rule: no one under any circumstance will be allowed to criticise any idea put up, no matter how vacuous it might seem. Although this appears to be a rule that applies to every Sirolli Institute project, it has special Huon Valley relevance given Sirolli’s view about divisions in the community. This no-criticism approach might prove to be the only way any municipality-wide team could operate harmoniously if the community is even half as divided as Sirolli says he has found it to be. And the implication is that those who find they cannot tolerate such a happy-families atmosphere will be welcome to bow out.
President Ambrose Coad introduced Lesley Kirby as the newly hired HSN “enterprise facilitator”, upon whose shoulders a huge amount of the work will fall. Kirby told the meeting she was about to come to the end of her term as director of the Royal Botanical Gardens in Hobart; she has a background in local government; she has lived for the past six years in Huonville after coming to Tasmania from New South Wales 28 years ago; and she has experience in building and construction, tourism and as an arborist.
The way Sirolli tells it, Kirby is the project’s lynchpin. As well as bringing together the resource team, an equally important task will be to attract small-business clients in need of help. The hiring and firing, he said, would be the job of the management committee, each member of which had experience in both.
With president Ambrose Coad, of Huon Valley Seafoods, on the HSN management team are Tricia Reardon (background in human resources and executive recruitment, now secretary and formerly president of the Rotary Club of the Huon Valley) as vice president; David de Burgh (a recently retired financial industry worker who grows olives at Castle Forbes Bay) as treasurer and public officer; and board members Scott McKibben (self-employed since he was 22, a former Huon Valley councillor and an inaugural director of the Bendigo Bank in the Huon), Rosemary Bennett (born in Franklin, married to a Ranelagh man, she runs, with her husband, daughter and son, the Home Hill Winery Restaurant at Ranelagh, and she is president of the Huon Taste festival), and Debbie Owens (who has always lived in the valley and now runs fashion boutique Makers on Church Street in Geeveston).
McKibben, like Coad, seemed happy to reveal, as a long-time business operator, that he has seen both good and bad times. “I know what it is to face the wall,” he said.
No one I spoke to after the meeting expressed pessimism about the Sirolli approach, and, by the time the organisers had packed up, the resource board had 25 volunteers for resource-team service — more than half the meeting’s public attendance. Said one observer, who put his name down for resource team duty, “it is a project that has no downsides” for the valley.
Sirolli acknowledged that another, similar, public meeting might probably be necessary to get the resource board numbers up. He said there had been more than 20 apologies submitted by people who had expressed strong enthusiasm for the project but had been unable to attend at such short notice.
Obviously impressed, Maureen Oates, editor of Huon Valley News, at the end of the meeting, offered to publish anything HSN had to say. It was an invitation that HSN should waste no time in taking up. Give the hiatus and dearth of information between that stirring June 4 meeting and the October 31 meeting, HSN should work vigorously to get back in touch with the community, using any medium available to it.
It can do this by preparing a succinct, clearly written statement that spells out, first, the objectives of its project; second, precisely how, with the Sirolli Institute’s guidance, it intends to achieve them; and, third, how it believes members of the valley community, municipality-wide, can help HSN to achieve those objectives. Such a statement should be published in all local media and be on a website.
HSN vice-president Reardon filled in many of the gaps this week by doing what should have been done months ago: communicating with all those people who showed their interest at the June 4 meeting.
In her November 5 email, Reardon wrote: “One of the main purposes of the [October 31] forum was to encourage people to join the resource team that will support both [enterprise facilitator] Lesley [Kirby] in her role and the clients she will represent.
“A free service, enterprise facilitation, helps take an idea from a passionate dream to practical reality through proper management and use of local resources. This is where the resource team comes into its own. A minimum of 20 to 30 committed local citizens with an interest in enterprise facilitation are needed to form the resource team.
“Their role is to meet once a month, and, in a highly confidential forum, hear from the enterprise facilitator about clients who wish to either start or expand a business in the Huon Valley, and the support they may require around the product or service offering, marketing or financial management.
“The resource team then assists by using its networks to provide that support. The immediate goal of the resource team is to introduce the enterprise facilitator to the community at large and assist with finding new and appropriate additional volunteers for the resource team until sufficient numbers are reached.
“The broader the representation on the resource team, the broader introductions will be and the wider the network to support clients. A position on the resource team is purely voluntary and individuals are under no obligation to attend all meetings, but they are required to maintain a high level of confidentiality and, in fact, are required to sign a confidentiality document”
Reardon said the Sirolli Institute would be providing training for resource team members on November 20 and 22. Members need only attend one of the sessions.
She said more people had expressed interest in joining the resource team since the October 31 meeting but more volunteers were needed to ensure a broad representation and a strong network of support for Kirby and project clients. (Contacts: [email protected]; [email protected]; 0418 500 108.
The October 31 meeting and subsequent statement by Reardon are a good start by the Huon Sirolli Network. Interested observers of this intriguing project are now better placed to assess just how much potential there is in Premier Lara Giddings’ million-dollar punt on Ernesto Sirolli’s capacity to help three economically struggling regions of the state — the northwest, the northeast and the Huon Valley. — Bob Hawkins
