KEY POINTS:
Imagine you're in your early 20s, a world-class triathlete supported by sponsors and looking forward to many years of international competition.
Then, one day, what was a niggling injury stops you in your tracks. There's nothing for your sponsors to support anymore and you have to start making
a living. Someone offers you a job cleaning toilets. Do you take it?
You do, if you're Scott Unsworth.
That's the choice that the founder and chief executive of top-end sportswear company Orca faced less than 20 years ago.
Accepting that job offer led directly to the success of the company that fitted out New Zealand's Olympic Games team, and is the preferred supplier for the world's top triathletes.
When Unsworth was a boy, he dreamed of growing up to be an All Black. Instead, he became a world-class triathlete.
Like many competitive teenage boys, Unsworth didn't do anything by halves. At the age of 16 he was regularly putting in 30 hours' training a week. His parents urged him to slow down. And like many teenage boys, he didn't listen.
Why should he? At 18 he was New Zealand's junior triathlon champ, and in 1990 was one of a select group that demonstrated triathlon at the Commonwealth Games.
But he also had back pain that wouldn't go away. Eventually this back pain - which he now believes was caused by going "too hard, too young" while he was still growing - got so bad he couldn't train. The dream of making a future out of being a triathlete was over.
"So I had to start seriously thinking about what I could do for a job," says Unsworth. He sought advice from entrepreneur Murray Thom.
"I said, 'To be honest I just don't know what to do with my life'. And he said, 'What are you good at?'. And I said, 'I'm good at swimming'. And he said, 'Why don't you become a swimming coach?'. And I said, 'I hadn't thought of that before'."
So he approached the manager of the Tepid Baths to see if there were any swimming coach jobs going.
There weren't, but there was a job "cleaning the toilets and the scum around the pool".
"I, without any hesitation, said yes because it was a job and because I thought it was a way in to try to get me towards having a swimming coaching position."
As it was, the day before Unsworth was due to start he got a call. One of the swimming coaches had handed in their notice. He never did get to clean those toilets.
Still, the job wasn't perfect - it was teaching small children to swim, not competitive adults. "Of course I didn't know how to coach kids, so I had to learn very quickly and did a few courses. Within a year I had my own business coaching triathletes."
While he was teaching those children how to swim, he was also watching a triathlon squad that trained at the Teps.
"I started to see there were all these opportunities to coach triathletes," he says.
"I talked to the pool and to the guy who was running the squad and said, 'Why don't we run our own business and actually hire lanes from the pool? I've got another pool where I'm coaching triathletes one-on-one; why don't we combine them and go into business?'. And he said, 'Yeah, fine'."
The pool accepted their proposal and within a year they were training 150 triathletes at three pools.
By now Unsworth had figured out he had an entrepreneurial streak. As a triathlete he had found a company that would custom-make wetsuits to his specifications. Now he had a squad of triathletes who all needed top-quality gear.
"I went to this factory and said 'I want to make my own wetsuit and sell it to all the members of my swim squad'. So within a year of starting my swimming coaching business I also had another business selling wetsuits to all my triathletes."
In 1995 he rebranded his wetsuit business as Orca and pulled off the coup of sponsoring the world cup triathlon event at the Viaduct Harbour - all this while he was still a one-man band.
"Since that day I realised, gosh, this has got huge potential to be a global brand ... before that I was playing."
In 1996 he hired his first employee. At the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, 60 per cent of the triathletes wore Orca gear. In 2001 Orca won New Zealand's best design-led business award. In 2002 it won the University of Otago small business award and outfitted eight national triathlon teams at the Manchester Commonwealth Games.
In 2003 it won a Trade New Zealand export award. In 2004 it outfitted New Zealand's Olympic Games team and 60 per cent of all the triathletes.
All because Unsworth said "yes" to a job cleaning toilets.
"Sometimes you've got to start in something you think is not what you want to do or you've got to try something that is not necessarily the ideal job," he says. What matters are the opportunities the job opens to you.
People are often employed not on the strength of how well they fit the job description, Unsworth says, but what the company thinks they can grow into.
So they get moved around jobs and offered new roles - but only if they accept the job they're offered.
Unsworth is obviously resilient - even with Orca's phenomenal growth, it hasn't been plain sailing. Take the factory in Portugal that was about to start production of a new line within the month. Unsworth had been travelling for two months and really wanted to get home.
One morning he had breakfast with the factory owner. "And he says to me, 'I've got some good news and some bad news.
"'The good news is that adidas have just signed up with us and that's going to triple our business. The bad news is that I can't work with you and you're going to have to find another factory'.
"There have been moments like that where I can say I honestly questioned if this is really what I want to do."
So what did he do? "You go to bed. And you wake up and the next morning's a new day."
He found another factory in Portugal and one in Italy. Within three weeks they were both producing.
"All these businesspeople that have done all these great things, they don't do great things until they've first had to go through some hard things. That is life, whether you work for a business or it's your own company - you've got hard decisions to make every day and things you have to work through every day.
"And it's not an easy life, but it's your outlook, it's your perspective, it's how you look at things when you're going through those times [that matters]."
Unsworth never did get to be an All Black. But he's not given up entirely on that dream - Orca could always clothe the All Blacks.
"Yes, I think Orca will. I think when we're big enough [we] will be sponsoring the All Blacks one day."
