Dominique Grubisa

The highest legal qualifications and a solid property portfolio weren’t enough to stop Dominique Grubisa from being forced to peer into the abyss of bankruptcy. Stepping back from the brink, she developed her own watertight protection, and now she shares that innovative approach so other Australian families can safely protect their hard-earned assets and secure their futures.

If you want to sound really smart, but don’t have a clue, just keep this phrase in mind; ‘je ne sais quoi’.

That phrase was directed at Dominique Grubisa many years ago, when she was auditioning for NIDA, the world-famous Sydney acting school and nursery for some of Australia’s most recognised actors.

Like many people, Dominique had her heart set on becoming a movie star, and thought she had a good chance of being successful, until the director of NIDA looked her in the eye and, in his best French accent, mumbled ‘je ne sais quoi’.

Dominique recalls, “I nailed my audition. Honestly, I was just magnificent and I thought okay, we’re done and dusted here.”

She remembers the audition process being very systematic and being asked to present a piece from Shakespeare, a comedy piece and a drama piece. She felt she “was totally focused” at the time.

As the Director was explaining the reasons why some made it and others didn’t, Dominique felt so confident she was looking around the room feeling sorry for the others. In particular the unkempt, hippy-looking, skinny girl sitting next to her.

“I thought ‘you poor pet, he’s talking about you’. He was saying there’s a certain star quality that shines out of people and you either have it or you don’t.” Dominique was sure she had it, but this ‘poor pet’ sitting next her didn’t. On that day, “she’d even stuffed up her Shakespeare lines.”

Translated literally, ‘je ne sais quoi’ means ‘I don’t know what’, but one dictionary’s explanation puts it this way; ‘you can use the phrase ‘je ne sais quoi’ when you’re describing something hard to put into words. If you say something has a certain ‘je ne sais quoi’, you’ll sound fancy instead of inarticulate.’

Hence the NIDA director sounded fancy when telling Dominique she lacked that certain star quality, but to the skinny, hippy-looking girl, who ‘stuffed up’ Shakespeare, he was quite articulate, because he deemed she had it. Dominique adds, “You’re not going to believe who that girl was; it was Cate Blanchett.”

Maybe the director with a penchant for sounding French thought her surname was pronounced ‘Blonchay’ and that was enough to overlook her clumsiness with Shakespeare, but either way Cate got in, Dominique didn’t and the rest, as they say, is history.

At the time Dominique remembers,“I was really, really angry because I thought I was better than her, and now she’s out there now living my life. So, I went back to the drawing board and I thought, ‘don’t give me ‘je ne sais quoi’ – I just want black and white’.

“So I went to law because it was a clear body of rules and regulations.”

But the acting bug wasn’t quite out of her system. Dominique still had the desire to be on stage, and while watching TV one night she realised there was a way to combine her love of acting with the law.

At that time there was a show on television called ‘LA Law’. Dominique’s view was that “they did litigation and I thought although it’s not actually acting, it’s a kind of acting. There’s a judge, the jury, you do a presentation, you talk and people listen.”

Dominique decided to start at the top. “I want to be a top litigator, so which firms do that? What degree do you need to have, what marks, what subjects do you have to do to get those jobs with those firms? Working my way backwards then I went through Sydney University, came out the other end doing everything right, and ticking all the boxes.”

This time though it wasn’t a snappy French quote which stalled her career, but a recession. No-one was hiring – at least they weren’t hiring Dominique, which was another lesson learned the hard way.

Looking back, Dominique comments, “you couldn’t get a job for love or money, but a few people did. What annoyed me even more was that some of them were people who’d failed subjects, but their dad was a judge and there was just no rhyme or reason.

“It was an old boys’ network so I ended up taking a job in debt collection as a solicitor. Day in, day out, all I did was debt recovery or bankruptcy work on repossessed motor vehicles. Just hundreds and hundreds of production line cases, shaking people down for money, five or ten thousand dollars, or a shortfall on car payments. I hated it.”

Two years of that was all she could stand. “I slapped myself around the face and said ‘what are you doing, woman?’”

There was a sense of needing a bit of payback after both the acting and litigation lawyer avenues seemed to have turned against her.

After feeling she had missed out on both those careers, Dominique thought “one step better than all that is a barrister, because they’re like a gun for hire.”

She compares it to the difference between a GP and a specialist. The solicitor is like the GP, who can help with the basics, but when you have more serious issues you go to a specialist, or in Dominique’s case, a barrister.

By that stage, Dominique “had a healthy respect for the law and I had a gold Law Society MasterCard. They give you one when you graduate from law. You’re a lawyer now, you’re going to be rich, so here’s some credit – knock yourself out.

“Mine had a ten thousand dollar limit and all the gear you needed to look like a barrister costs ten thousand. That’s the horse hair wig and the silk robes. So I whacked it all on the card and paraded up and down Philip Street in Sydney, looking for all intents and purposes like a successful barrister.”

Dominique did more than walk the streets though; she would sit in on cases for hours at a time, watching and learning from those who were really good at their craft.

“I soaked it all up. Sometimes they’d throw me a bone, and if I had to work eight hours, but could only charge for one, that didn’t matter, I’d do it.”

It was the first time she was able to truly focus on her career and not be affected by outside influences. Finally, Dominique was in control of her success and she was focused.

Dominique has a saying; “FOCUS stands for Follow One Course Until Successful. So I was fully-focused on being a successful barrister.

“It’s like holding a magnifying glass really, really still; the rays of the sun are going to converge and start a fire. So I was the best barrister I could be, and shot my way to the top of my game and from there I reached the glass ceiling.”

This ceiling was not from being female, but “just because I was trading time for money and there were only so many hours in the day. I was working eighteen hour days.”

Realising she had gone as far as she could as a barrister, and looking at the success she and her husband had achieved with their property investments, Dominique decided to put everything into building a property portfolio.

She realised “I could leverage other people’s time, other people’s money and we’d done really well in property.

“That was in the late 1990s, and banks were throwing money at you. We’d never seen a bad market. All you had to do was buy, prices only ever went up, and then you had more equity. Then you pull more money out and buy more and more and more, and it was just a dream come true.”

The dream turned quickly into a nightmare when the 2008 Global Financial Crisis hit. Dominique and her husband went from millions of dollars in wealth to millions of dollars in debt, virtually overnight.

Looking back, Dominique reveals “we had to liquidate everything; we moved in with my parents-in-law; we hit rock bottom. We were literally homeless and I beat myself up massively.

“I just felt like a complete failure. I felt I’d failed on all levels: as a wife, a mother, a businesswoman, as an entrepreneur. I just felt so totally disgraced.”

Dominique bore the responsibility for what had happened to her family, and it took her to the darkest place she had ever been. She reflected that, “as the risk-taker, I was the driver and I took too many risks and they were all paying the price.

“I remember we had the kids in kindergarten and pre-school and I used to have to drop them off at the gate because I didn’t want to walk past the bookkeeper. I knew she came every Tuesday and Thursday and I knew she was going to chase me for money, and if she did, I was commando rolling out of there.

“If she chased me saying ‘oh, well you haven’t paid’, I’d come back with ‘didn’t Kevin pay? I thought he’d paid’. I just had to keep robbing Peter to pay Paul.”

After a period of time sitting around in her pyjamas, crying in the lounge room of her parents-in-law’s home, Dominique slapped herself around the face for the second and last time in her life.

A classic paradigm shift ensued. This didn’t just mean looking at the glass half full, but called for a total transformation in the way she looked at life.

The realisation at the time was that “it took me twenty years to build up millions in wealth, and in the blink of an eye I lost it all. I had to become quite strategic about rebuilding that wealth because I didn’t have another twenty years to do it.”

Without realising it at the time, the DG Institute was born in the lounge room of her parents-in-law’s home, while Dominique was wearing her pyjamas.

Dominique realised one very important thing in that time. “While they can take all my wealth, my pride, my dignity and self-esteem, the one thing no-one can ever take from me is my knowledge.

“There’s an acceptance in our society that if you don’t have money, you can’t access the legal system. There are massive barriers to having your day in Court.

“If you can’t pay an expert who speaks the language, then it’s never going to happen. And it’s probably quite rare for someone to reach the level of legal heights and acknowledge I had, to then fail as spectacularly as I did.”

She then discovered that “there are no high-priced experts in the legal game who focus solely on helping people in debt. I was one of the first, and I had that laser focus and the motivation to hold my magnifying glass really, really still over a very narrow but very deep area of the law: helping people in debt.”

Once Dominique took responsibility for her position and stopped blaming others, she took control of her life. Even the decision not to accept bankruptcy was taken from a position of control.

Dominique was motivated to fight back and “I simply used the system to trade my way through it. It’s kind of empowering being in debt too. Donald Trump once said ‘if I owe you five hundred dollars and I don’t have it, I’m in trouble, but if I owe you five hundred thousand dollars and I don’t have it, you’re in trouble’. And it was the same thing… I owed millions.”

From quoting Trump to quoting Darwin, the change in Dominique’s thinking was clear – she was focused.

“Darwin said ‘it’s not those who are the strongest or the smartest who survive, it’s those who are most responsive to change’. So now I look at what I can do, and I’m always on the front foot when it comes to being in control.”

Part of that change for Dominique was looking at the top two percent of people who control ninety-eight percent of the world’s wealth, and what they do. She realised they do what others aren’t prepared do.

At rock bottom, Dominique made a promise to herself that “I will never, ever be disempowered again. From now on, every cent I earn, everything I do, every risk I take that pays off, I will make sure that I can’t ever lose that. I want it to be bullet-proof.

“Most people are like corks on the ocean, they rise and fall with the tide. We make money and then we lose it. The successful two percent focus on building and building and never, ever losing.

“I researched case law. I had to go back over a hundred years to find my model of being absolutely impenetrable and building a force-field around everything, and that’s what I came up with, and did for myself.”

Because Dominique was so focused on achieving her goal, she saw things from a different perspective. Even watching TV was a new experience. No longer was it about the acting.

While watching A Current Affair one night, as Dominique listened to the hard luck stories of people in debt and people who’d been ripped off, “because I was now goal-driven, I thought ‘how can I then share my knowledge and reach thousands of people’?

“So I contacted A Current Affair and offered to help someone who was living in debt to prove myself, and I did. I was on national television and reduced someone’s debt down from twenty thousand dollars a month to six hundred and forty dollars a month.

“From there I had thousands of people contacting me and that’s how I started doing what I’m doing now, but it was definitely setting the goal and the focus, and then the opportunities just brought themselves to me.”