Big Thinker Mentor as Altitude Reset

"Eric’s influence definitely made me more audacious. It’s amazing what people can do that they think they can’t. Most people don’t test themselves, especially in a business sense. Sure, we might challenge ourselves physically, but rarely do we push ourselves intellectually or commercially in the way we ought to. Failure is somewhat expected in the gym, for example, but not really accepted in business or when you put a big idea out there. It doesn’t help that business culture in New Zealand is pretty unforgiving. If you make a mess of something, you’re often written off. And everyone seems to know everyone, so negative opinions tend to travel fast and far. In the US, if you haven’t gone broke at least once, you’re not seen as trying hard enough. The difference in attitude is stark. Here, if you fail, you’re a failure forever. And even if you succeed, they’ll hate you anyway. That mindset is something I had to overcome to keep pushing forward over the years. I was largely subscribing to the saying that I had grown up with, some variation of, ‘If you believe you can, you’re right – and if you believe you can’t, you’re also right.’ Belief was a big part of what kept me going. But in that moment, the threat of permanent damage from failure was very real. Our strategy revolved around acquisitions and consolidating the office supply area. Until that time, corner stores had been the model across the world, until OfficeMax had gone out across the States and hoovered up the smaller players into its megastores. That was the idea that we were trying to emulate here in New Zealand."

"‘What do you mean you don’t need twenty million?’ We both had next to no money – certainly nothing worth singing about – at that point. That’s what I was busy lamenting when I’d started the conversation in the first place by saying that I wanted to be a multimillionaire. I wanted to be worth $100 million. Paul conceded that ‘a hundred million dollars might be a bit hard’, but I guess that’s where his $20 million came from. He had no specific scheme in mind to get him there; he just thought it was a more attainable number. ‘A bit of money would be good,’ I mused. And I somehow got Paul to agree with that notion too. From there, we latched onto it. I’ve always liked a big goal and here we were daring to dream big. It’s funny, because when you put something out there like that as a possibility, it starts you thinking: How would we actually do that? It forces you to think differently, and to act differently, too, because you can’t keep doing the same thing you’re already doing to get you to somewhere so vastly different."

"A New Zealand–made spirit was just unusual enough. It had scalability, and it was something we could grow with input from a seasoned sales team. Geoff had told me that he thought cocktail culture and, therefore, spirits were making a comeback and there was evidence of this offshore. Three new brands of vodka had hit the US market in the mid- to late-1990s, also sensing – or perhaps fuelling – the trend. We couldn’t get there first, but there was an opportunity to be part of the wave, and to serve a potentially massive addressable market, if we moved quickly. We did well for wine, as a country, but I was to learn that manufacturing spirits was actually easier: Ferment sugars, distil, filter as needed, and you were done. Overheads were relatively low, and it could be made much more quickly. Further to that, vodka doesn’t perish, and it ships well. I could see the upsides, but I needed to know that we could get it to be something big. I had seen what was possible by this point. Eric had been a really big goal-setter. When we’d worked together in a $10 million company – which was sizeable in the 90s in New Zealand – he would exclaim that ‘This is all boring! How can we be a $100 million company?’ I’d seen the power of having a huge goal and the way that that filters down. How it forces you to have to think differently day-to-day. I wanted to know if we could do something audacious here – drive again to outrageous outcomes. That’s what I was prodding for. Our talks continued, but the courtship certainly still took its time. Eventually, we joined forces and took a controlling share of 42 Below. In many ways, we both got much more than we bargained for. Geoff and I are extremely different people, and we would…"