Wear­ing bright pink pants, white T-shirt and green sash, I stood look­ing through the barbed wire and plague locusts at the trees filled, for the first time in Bendigo’s his­tory, with a smelly and squawk­ing colony of fruit bats. The sound of Mancini’s Pink Pan­ther theme was a stark coun­ter­point to the apo­ca­lyptic feel of the mar­shalling area and was an odd but pleas­ing reminder that, out there, were the fest­iv­it­ies of the 140^th Bendigo Easter Fest­ival. My strange out­fit matched that of the other sixty men, whose job it was to spread out over the length of Sun Loong – the forty year old, one hun­dred metre long imper­ial dragon – and carry him through the crowd; the grand finale of the Festival’s Easter Monday street parade. When I hois­ted the bam­boo and silk dragon’s mid­sec­tion above my head, the one thing I least expec­ted to receive was a motiv­at­ing insight into entrepreneurship.

After being swept the 500 metres toward the parade start­ing area, each of the dragon-bearers had an hour to wait. This is when I met Ewan.

Ewan was a fifty-something with close-cropped hair and a no-nonsense atti­tude. We talked about our kids and he men­tioned how he enjoyed the time he could spend with his chil­dren because he works from home – some­thing he has done for a great many years. Ewan explained he could do this because he has a pas­sion for start­ing up busi­nesses and grow­ing them. He also men­tioned the many and var­ied indus­tries in which he’d worked: pay-TV, repos­ses­sions, logist­ics, tele­com­mu­nic­a­tions; to name a few. Though I have no idea what level of suc­cess he’d achieved in any of the busi­nesses in fin­an­cial terms, it was clear that he had thor­oughly enjoyed start­ing each busi­ness, each industry (with the excep­tion of tele­com­mu­nic­a­tions) and he really loved the life­style his choices afforded him.

Through­out our dis­cus­sion he gen­er­ously offered a lot of advice about how to “avoid work­ing for someone else … there’s only one way to do some­thing: your own way.” Some of Ewan’s views were:

• Start small and build up – that way you avoid get­ting trapped if the idea doesn’t work
• Seek out a niche – some­thing that no-one has thought of or bothered with
• Avoid employ­ing people – where pos­sible use subcontractors
• You don’t need train­ing to be an entrepreneur
• Treat oth­ers the way you expect to be treated: with hon­esty and integrity
• Avoid the tele­com­mu­nic­a­tions industry – no one is mak­ing money in telecoms.

The shout went up that it was time for the dragon to march its way through the streets lined with fam­il­ies from all over Vic­toria. As I watched Ewan’s feet shuffle ahead of mine, I thought about what it is that really makes him or any other entre­pren­eur suc­cess­ful. It’s an indefin­able mix of self-confidence, energy, clev­erness and determ­in­a­tion that pre­dis­poses them to succeed.

After 4,237 steps over 2.1 kilo­metres, I helped Sun Loong rest in his Museum home to reluct­antly sleep for another year. I returned to my reg­u­lar cloth­ing, none of which is pink, and walked out into the sun­light and away from the barbed wire enclos­ure, the bats and the locusts.

I don’t believe in signs, omens, or ‘mes­sages from the uni­verse’ and hav­ing walked through an appar­ent apo­ca­lypse, I left with a much bet­ter sense of what it is to have a real love of busi­ness – some­thing I never expec­ted when I entered the dragon.