Tom McPherson is the Australian entrepreneur who is probably best known as the founder of Motor Culture Australia, a hugely popular auto membership site that routinely gives away supercars and motorbikes. McPherson founded Motor Culture in 2020 in an effort to create a safe, supportive community for car lovers across the country, something that at the time was sadly lacking. The platform took off faster than McPherson ever imagined, and is now rapidly expanding in a multitude of directions with new and exciting programs.
This is not to say that McPherson has been successful in all of his ventures. Far from it, in fact. He started his first business when he was 19, but it didn’t make a positive return on investment so he closed it down. Over the following year he tried his hand at four more different businesses, none of which made a sustainable income and all of which he eventually closed down. Now 20 years old at this point, McPherson invested 50% of his savings into the stock market. A few months later, the market crashed due to the onset of COVD, and he lost his entire investment.
It is the learning when you fail that deserves celebration, not the failure itself. Failure without lessons learned is a failure. When you fail forward, you learn in the process of failure, which means you’ll inevitably get closer to succeeding.
Failure is not a joke; it can be expensive, embarrassing, or heart-breaking. However, the truth is that people who shun failure deny themselves the opportunity to reinvent and innovate. We all fail at some point in life, but we get to choose whether we stay down or fail forward. But this determined young man was not to be deterred by setbacks such as these.
It was during this time of exploring his newfound passion of investing that McPherson founded Motor Culture Australia with his trusted friend Tom Fu, with whom he had been in business before. Motor Culture has been so successful that McPherson has increased his original investment portfolio twenty times over. And, not surprisingly, things don’t stop there as he continues to diversify and look for new opportunities.
“I have continued to diversify my portfolio by acting as an angel investor in another company, and now have a multi 7-figure portfolio. I am always looking for ways to diversify my investments and business ventures he said