Unsentimental Exit Discipline

“He had not, for the most part, built businesses from the ground up. He was not a creator of new enterprises. Rather, he had done deals, cultivated relationships, capitalised on booms and aggregated money-earning assets. His great talent was that he could see ways of structuring a deal or a business enterprise that looked obvious in hindsight, yet which nobody had hit on before. He sensed a boom well before others. He had weaknesses, both in capacity and in emotions. Particularly, there was a lack where most of us have a sense of identity and place. He was a hoarder, a gatherer around himself of objects. He liked acquisition. Yet he also had an ability to reconfigure, and to move on when self- or business interest required. He was unlike Murdoch and Packer in that, when it came to business, he was mostly unsentimental. He saved sentiment for the art collection. Which is not to say he was unemotional. There was a chip on his shoulder, an abiding sense, despite his wealth and power, of being hard done by, and a determination to take it up to the establishment. But with all that he was good fun – laconic and outwardly even tempered. His employees liked him, and most were steadfastly loyal and well looked after. He was a dealer, rather than a manager, but he made up for any lack by the quality of the people he hired as his closest assistants, and the manner in which he kept them close.”

“At the same time, he was investing in Pacific Film Laboratories, which was giving Kodak a run for market dominance by employing what was then the latest computer-assisted processing technology, as well as giving away free film to those who took photos there for processing. In 1982, he made a takeover offer for the company. This, too, became owned by ACE, and after the takeover Stokes changed the board so it had largely common membership with Australian Capital Television. Stokes took to referring to the different interests ACE held as ‘partners’, with the relationship between them and ACE ‘not that of control but rather cooperation’. He clearly saw all kinds of potential for collaboration across media and photography. Pacific Film, however, did not last as a Stokes investment. In 1985, he sold out to Kodak, ahead of the dominance of the domestic digital camera, the minilabs for processing on each street corner, and all the changes that transformed photography forever. ‘I lost a fortune,’ he told The Bulletin in 1991.9”