'What three attributes do you think you require to succeed in todays competitive world of business.'

 

'The first is you have to be able to work hard and prepared to work hard. The second one is you need to have a job that you have a passion for, because when you are working those sort of hours you need to enjoy what you are doing. In my instance the third one is that you have the right advice from your accountants and your legal team.'

 

'What one piece of advice would you give to a young person embarking upon a new career path?'

 

'I think having a real passion for what you do is really important because you are working long hours and if you don’t like what you are doing it will be pretty hard to keep going.'

 

'At what age did you decide you wanted to be a business man, and why?'

 

'I wanted to be my own boss from an early age because my dad had his own business, he had a bakery and he worked very, very hard and he always said to me as a kid be your own boss and it’s not until I became my own boss I understood what he meant by it. I think I’m unemployable now being your own boss is scary but also it’s different, because being your own boss makes you do things you want to do, when you want to do them, it’s good.' 

 

'How important have your friends and family been in terms of realising your dreams?'

 

'Well Like I said before my Dad said to me always, always if you can be your own boss and I often looked at my father and looked up to my father and thought I want to make sure he’s proud of me. So I worked hard and when the opportunity came for me to start my own business I thought yep. So what I also did then was make sure I talked to my dad at night. He lived in the South Island and I was here in Auckland and I would ring him up and he would go, ‘How’s work going and I would tell him about the different things and he would advise me on different things as well. So it was good to be able to bounce those ideas of my dad, so yeah I think my Dad was my biggest influence.'

 

'Who has been the biggest influence professionally on your business career, and why?'

 

'My Dad, definitely My Dad has had a huge impact but I think also when you are by yourself and not married with any children you don’t think too much about consequences but when you have a family to look after I think then all of a sudden there is a new perspective you look at it and think how can I best look after my family and taking some risks, calculated risks and working very hard and having your own business allows me to look after my family a little bit better than I would If I was working for someone else. So I also think that has had an influence as well to be able to look after your own and do as best job you can, so that has certainly been another driving force as well.'

 

'Can you describe the most defining moment of your business career?'

 

'At my previous job before I had my own business, the company was going through a restructuring and one of the things that happened was all of the manufacturing sites throughout the world, I belonged to a company called IMI Cornelius and IMI Cornelius is a very, very large international company and they had manufacturing plants all over the world and then what IMI decided to do was get out of manufacturing apart from their main centres, the UK, China and the states, so all the other factories around the world in: Australia, New Zealand Argentina and the Philippines all around there, they shut all those factories down. So what happened is I then was I had to make a decision whether I started my own business and contracted to do that same work for IMI under are own steam and I suppose the defining moment was going through a business plan and saying to ourselves is this something we want to do and the question I had to ask myself was if I do this here is our business plan, this is how we think this is going to work. But if I don’t do it, I would go to my grave saying I wonder if I had and I thought I couldn’t do that. I would have to at least give it a go. So to me I think that is probably the defining moment, making the decision to go.'

 

'What does an average week of work consist of and how many hours do you put in a week?'

 

'As my business has grown a little bit I’m not so much hands on. So before I used to do some work in the factory helped do welding, sheet metal work and things like that because when we were smaller we didn’t have as many staff and there was all hands to the pump, you know everyone did their bit now a lot of my day is spent working on new business, talking to customers, doing some quoting for them. Now I’m not so much hands on the tools anymore I step back from the production I kind of look at what other opportunities are out there for us to get into to keep the guys on the shop floor busy because we have thirty people now on the shop floor that’s a lot of people to keep busy so we have to step back and look on the business and work on the business rather than in it. Hours, I’m still working long hours, I probably have twelve-hour days, and it is pretty much the norm and at least one day on the weekends as well. I’m probably getting 75-70 hours a week, but I enjoy it!'

 

'What have you had to sacrifice for your business career to survive?'

 

'Family time, a bit of family time because I am often at work. Sometimes when things weren’t going so well I didn’t bring a lot of money home. So sometimes there wasn’t much money to spend, but eventually it’s come right. I think a lot of my friends would have nice motorbikes or a nice boat or something like that. I’ve basically put everything I’ve got back into my business, because in the long term. I want the business to be a good model for my kids that come through and take over from me. I think those things sometimes you have to do without. The bigger picture is downstream.'

 

 'How important has your team been in ensuring the success of your business ventures?'

 

'I have an incredible partner his name is Mike that’s what MAG stands for, Mike and Gary. He runs the factory and he is brilliant. He’s a real clever tradesman, he has such good ideas, his determination to make sure that everything that goes out of our factory is at the highest possible quality and that’s what built us a good name. It was the building quality of products and that’s predominately due to Mike’s approach on how the signs should be made, He’s a very hard worker.'

 

Gary later went on to say that trust is imperative for business partners as any error could take a serious effect on the business.

 

'What difficulties have you overcome in order to succeed.'

 

'We have had to deal with companies going under that owed us lots of money. I think in the first ten years of business I had $753 of bad debt. In the last four and a half years we have probably had bad debts of $300,000, and that’s straight of the bottom line, that’s a double-edged sword…Luckily we had a bit of money in the bank so we were able to withstand the bad debt.'   

 

Gary also said that business going into receivership was a big challenge that he faced as he was never paid back.

 

'In your own words, what is the key to success?'

 

'Hard work, passion for what you do, good advice and a good business partner.'

 

'What is the biggest challenge you have faced and how did you overcome this?'
 

'We had an unexpected tax bill come to us one year and our old accountants we used to have were not quite on to it and all of a sudden they rung me up one day and said, “There’s a seventy-five thousand dollar tax bill that is due, it needs to be paid next month”. I had no idea it was coming. So we had to pay some of it  obviously, we had some money in the bank  then we put the rest of it onto a payment scheme but it took a long time because unfortunately money doesn’t come rolling in. You have to work hard to get it. It took a wee while for us to get through that and one of the things that happened was that we were paying it off in a payment scheme to inland revenue and paying pretty high interest rates on it obviously as it was overdue tax, but what happened is we then got rid of that accountant, got a new one, a very good one. He went to Inland Revenue. This was just before we started the Z contract, which was a very, very big contract. It was the largest signage contract in New Zealand history. He said the guys are really struggling at the moment, if you want to force this tax bill on them you will put them under, but if you give them some grace they have got a big contract coming up and you will get a lot of tax pay out of that contract, which is what happened.

Gary said that getting the right advice got them through the struggle as John the accountant had good ingenuity which saved them of $40,000.'