Alan Gibbs

"The faces of New Zealanders such as Alan Gibbs, Trevor Farmer, David Richwhite, Michael Fay, Bruce Judge, Bob Jones, Gary Lane and Allan Hawkins were, for a time, as familiar as our biggest sports stars."

"At Sky, John Fellet regrets that Heatley and other entrepreneurs like him, including Alan Gibbs, Trevor Farmer, Sir Michael Fay and David Richwhite, created thousands of jobs ‘then almost as quickly, they packed up and left or went underground’. Partly, he thinks that tall poppy syndrome, which as an American he had never heard of before arriving in New Zealand, played a part. ‘They were similar in not wanting attention drawn to themselves and maybe that’s just the Kiwi way, but in the US, Craig Heatley and Trevor Farmer would be actively involved in major corporations. They would be more like the Warren Buffets, adding shareholder value and, yes, enriching themselves, but also enriching the New Zealand economy. Now I am sure that they have investments that do enrich the economy but they all seem to be off on their islands, Craig on Moturua, Richwhite on Mercury Island, and it’s a pity because that kind of brain power is a huge driver of economic growth and to have it sitting on the sideline at too young an age, especially in Craig’s case, is a shame.’"

"business world’s high-flyers, including Ron Brierley, Frank Renouf, Allan Hawkins, Alan Gibbs, Bob Jones, Michael Fay, David Richwhite, Colin Reynolds and Bruce Judge."

"It was a time of absurdly easy credit, particularly for companies that had a track record and strong personal relationships with bankers. ‘The Bank of New Zealand would lend us anything,’ George wryly observes. ‘The bankers almost became personal friends.’ Businessman Alan Gibbs, who would become an investor in Heatley’s next project, Sky Television, describes the mid-eighties as a crazy, speculative period. ‘Between the drop in the exchange rate [after the 1984 election] and the sharemarket crash in October ’87, New Zealand had the biggest boom in its history and one of the biggest booms anywhere,’ Gibbs says. ‘Everybody’s share price went through the roof. You could make dough out of anything.’ Some companies that had depended on import licensing for their monopolies proved to be unprofitable once genuine competition appeared. As they faltered they were picked up cheaply by the new corporates. The behemoth Brierley Investments Ltd (BIL) was expert in that field. Atlas Majestic, the first stock that Heatley had purchased as a boy, was one of the companies that Gibbs took over."

"‘Rainbow would have completely crashed and gone like the others because it was a bubble company and the share price was totally in bubble territory and he’d paid big prices for all those stakes in the companies he had,’ Alan Gibbs says. ‘The clever thing he did was to sell out to Brierley before the crash so he must have had some presentiment of it. If he’d stayed five more minutes, he’d have been on his belly. He was lucky.’ Sir Bob Jones recalls Ken Wikeley saying to him, ‘You know, Craig has an almost animal intuition to know when to jump out of something.’"

"Alan Gibbs thinks that his first conversation with Heatley about buying into Sky might have occurred when they bumped into each other on a plane. Sky did not fit Gibbs’s investment strategy. With the notable exception of the amphibious Aquada vehicles that Gibbs is developing, ‘and on which I’ve lost more money than Craig’s ever spent’, Gibbs’s business strategy has been to take over other people’s companies. Also, where possible, he tries not to invest his own money. ‘I basically never put money into anything. I make people give it to me,’ he says. But this time Gibbs and his business partner Trevor Farmer did put money in. They liked Heatley and he was persuasive."

"One Sunday night, the day before a board meeting, Heatley’s phone rang at home. It was Gibbs. ‘Craig? Alan here. You told me we were going to put a little bit of money in this TV company of yours, and that we were going to have a lot of fun. Well, bugger me, we’re putting a lot of money in this TV company of yours and it’s no fucking fun at all.’ Gibbs was angry—not at Heatley personally but at the situation. This was not what Heatley had promised. Heatley was embarrassed. He was trying hard but subscriber numbers were not rising fast enough. In theory Sky should have been a success. In practice it was not."

"There is a final factor in his thinking about investing which neither he nor anyone else can do much about. It is the significant part played by luck. Good luck has made some investors rich, and bad luck has broken others. Heatley says he is living proof of the maxim ‘It’s better to be lucky than smart.’ His own first lucky break, he reckons, was that spell of good weather in Easter 1980 when he and John Sheffield opened Lilliputt in Taupō. Heatley was lucky again that overseas investment in the media had just been permitted, enabling Alan Gibbs to approach the Americans to invest in Sky, in 1991. It was third time lucky when rugby union turned professional in 1995, when Sky was in a better position than its competitors to sign up the live broadcast rights."

"The idea that Gibbs could create one of the world’s great sculpture parks on a farm overlooking the Kaipara Harbour, a neglected and unvisited backwater north of Auckland, is outrageous. But no more outrageous than many of Alan Gibbs’ big ideas over the years: that in his mid-twenties he could build the first genuine New Zealand car, the Anziel Nova; that normal business disciplines and practices could be applied to the nation’s public health system; that the best way to make money in business is to persuade other people to give it to you; that he could double the utility of a car, extend human freedom and transform transport patterns around the world by creating the world’s first high-speed amphibious vehicles."

"TN Gibbs had taken a piece of wisdom from the biblical King Solomon as one of his guiding principles in business: ‘Take shares in several ventures; you never know what will go wrong in this world.’[12](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477268-974936905-12) Alan Gibbs took it to heart. While the car project ground its way through the system and while he set about expanding Holmes Manufacturing’s business, he cast about for other entrepreneurial schemes. He spied an opportunity to import advanced breeding stock for chicken meat. Stiff controls over importing birds were in place and the best birds in New Zealand were bred to produce eggs rather than meat."

"*Alan Gibbs first really entered my consciousness one day during the Muldoon era, probably early 1984, when Michael Fay returned to the office after a lunch with the deputy prime minister, Jim McLay, and a few businessmen. He was fizzing. Apparently Gibbs had let rip at McLay* *about Muldoon, it was an amazing situation; he just went for it. Michael was impressed, shocked, and in awe of his courage. Then a few years later I saw it myself at an informal meeting of business heavy-hitters a couple of days after the 1987 share market crash. Chase, Equiticorp and those sorts of businesses were all going downstairs and someone, maybe Alan Hawkins, called a meeting. They wanted us to stump up $20 million each to support the market, like JP Morgan had once done in the US. I sat there listening. Then suddenly Gibbs just launched into it. ‘The notion that you can throw a few million together to support a market is just nonsense; you guys have been cowboys for your investors and you’re getting what you deserve.’ When he goes for it, he combines the precision of a scalpel with the power of a chainsaw. The delivery is brutal, but what he said was right on point. So I knew Alan Gibbs was razor sharp and terribly impressive.*[10](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477273-050103421-10)"

"*TCI didn’t believe in business class. Since this was its first venture outside the United States, it had no view on 12-hour flights. So I flew to New Zealand in an economy seat and arrived early after an uncomfortable flight and went straight to a breakfast with Alan Gibbs, Trevor Farmer and two of the American directors. After exchanging pleasantries someone said, ‘John, talk a bit about your background.’ Halfway through my story Alan cuts me off. ‘You bloody Americans had the chance to do everything perfectly after World War Two, but you didn’t have the guts to take on Russia.’ Then he launched into a tirade against America’s lack of courage. I was aghast. I mean, I was born in 1953. I fought back a little bit, as best I could when I could get a word in, which wasn’t easy. I think I said, ‘Well, I’ve just met the only guy in the globe who thinks Americans aren’t sufficiently tough.’ Afterwards I said to my colleagues, ‘Jeez, that didn’t go well’, but the Americans who knew him said, ‘Oh no, I think he likes you.’ Thereafter, when things were going OK, Trevor Farmer would be there, but if Gibbs turned up we knew we were in trouble.*[30](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477273-050103421-30)"

"After six months or so of close involvement, Gibbs eased back, knowing the company was in safe hands. But, as Deane recalls, he remained an active and intensely interested director: *Around the board table he was an agitator, which is why the Americans loved him, because he was prepared to take the flak with management. But his interventions were always crisp and incisive. What I liked the most was the fact that I knew if I stuck to my guns and my arguments were in good order, he’d listen and reason with me. Then he’d let me get on and manage the company. He never opposed me on something that he knew mattered to me. He’d have strong reservations, but at the end of day I was the CE. Best of all, he wouldn’t keep revisiting things. He was always focused on the next issue. In the same way, although he’d often give the staff a hard time, they enjoyed working with him because he was hugely stimulating, imaginative and creative, and he forced them to fight for their ideas. I used to tell them, ‘You’ll never get a more outstanding low-cost consultant than Alan Gibbs.’*[39](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477273-050103421-39)"

"[43](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-ref-note-477273-050103421-43). Bruce Jesson states, ‘The driving force behind the theoretical work of the Roundtable is Alan Gibbs, the man who backed the Centre for Independent Studies in the 1980s.’ Jesson, *Only* *Their Purpose is Mad,* Palmerston North: Dunmore Press, 1999, p. 15."

"*I knew Alan Gibbs by reputation as a rumbustious commercial gunslinger. But as I came to know him I saw how much he thought about other things, about art, philosophy, genetics and social affairs. A lot of people who have felt the sharp edge of Alan’s tongue or his commercial hand miss seeing this side to him, which is probably much bigger. In the end I realised that business was a game that he played successfully, more successfully than just about anyone in the country, but it certainly wasn’t core to him. Hence his ability to walk away from things if he chose to, to make very decisive moves in business and never look back. The essence of him lay in the other side, in the things of the mind.*[1](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477309-807254973-1)"

"With Alan everything is done with such intensity that he wears you out. You can’t make a flippant comment and not be prepared to defend it for an hour. And he has no idea how demanding he is on people — he just keeps piling new projects and ideas on top of the current ones. After a few months the stress was so much that I ended up being stuck in my bed for three days unable to move. They diagnosed stress and I knew where it was coming from. So I thought, ‘No bastard’s going to give me a bad back’ and returned with a different attitude. Later on I remember Alan seeking my advice on something, which I gave. He then said in his usual way, ‘Are you absolutely certain?’, which in the past caused me much anxiety. I said, ‘Well, if it doesn’t work out you can take it out on me.’ He said, ‘The trouble with that is it’s like water off a duck’s back.’ And I knew I was in the right space. Alan Gibbs is the guy who made me tough."