John Sheffield

"Rainbow Corporation’s prospectus proposed the issue of 12.5 million shares. Of those, five million would be sold at 50c per share to the public, and the rest would be sold for 20c per share to the founders. Hawkins would be chairman and the five board members would be Heatley, who would also be managing director, John Sheffield, Peter Coote, Margaret George and Margaret Tapper. John Sorensen and Ken Wikeley would be principal shareholders. The prospectus records that the company had agreed to issue 625,000 options ‘to a company indirectly owned by the Managing Director Mr Craig Heatley’. The options were exercisable at 50c each at any time prior to July 1989."

"John Sheffield, who had been instrumental in starting Rainbow but who had left early to try other ventures, went bankrupt, as did many others. The effects lasted years. Only Japan took longer than New Zealand to come out of the post-crash mess. Heatley himself, still on the board of Brierley’s, was then 30 years old and had not been through a crash before. Like others, he initially failed to grasp the significance of what was happening. In fact, seeing Brierley’s shares come down to $3, he bought more. ‘I was young. I had never seen a bear market and initially all I saw in the aftermath of the crash was opportunity. I had not appreciated that Brierley’s’ investments in New Zealand Insurance and in everything else had also gone way down. I did not realise the substantial nature of the diminution in the valuations of everything. I had not learned about the collateral damage and the healing time required when you have a shock like that. Think of it like the Christchurch earthquake—such a massive shift will take years of reconstruction to get back to what it was but I did not appreciate that at the time. I had only seen markets go down and come back up again.’"

"John Sheffield, who had been instrumental in starting Rainbow but who had left early to try other ventures, went bankrupt, as did many others. The effect"

"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."