Shane Yeend: Using his Imagination

While there are many arms to the Imagination business, its biggest seller is DVD games with the company owning some IP in games they created themselves—Fact or Crap and Battle of the Sexes—as well as the licence to distribute brands such as Deal or No Deal and Family Feud. Deal or No Deal was the number one game in America last year, and Yeend is proud of having such brands in his stable. Imagination products can now be found in 85,000 retail stores worldwide.

Pushing Boundaries

Describing Yeend’s day job is like rolling a dice. “There’s no typical day for me, my job keeps changing,” he says. “I’m a creative guy, I started off as an art photographer and cinematographer, and now I’ve just come out of a meeting with KPMG dealing with five-year cash flow and governance. I spend six months a year in America, three months in Australia, and three months on planes.”

Yeend and McLean still share an office and the load of running the business, but they’re happy to be handing over most of the day-to-day to their new CEO this year. “We’ll start looking at consolidation plays and possible listings, possible sales. I’ve got three or four different businesses we’re building.

“I think I can turn anything into a business. The hard ones are more challenging and sometimes it doesn’t always work, sometimes you can’t get them cash-flow positive and you go ‘I just blew half a million bucks trying to set that up’.

“You run a portfolio approach and you win more than you lose, you can’t expect everything to work. We do try a lot of things and we’re constantly pushing the boundaries of things that haven’t been done before, which is always hard.

“I understand why people buy businesses rather than starting them because they’re not easy, but we know there’s always a solution to problems.”

Yeend also likes to give back, with a whole division of Imagination dedicated to charity work, which has raised about $4 million over the last few years, and he also mentors young entrepreneurs, taking them from Australia to the US to set up and run million-dollar businesses.

For Yeend, winning in business isn’t about making loads of money. “It’s about paradigm smashing ideas and being able to look deep into businesses and understand where they’re going creatively, where the trends are, where the opportunities are, and if you can map those. It’s a sport, it’s fun,” he says.

And while Yeend estimates Imagination to be worth around $150 million now (on a poor day), “there’s lots more growth to go yet”. With many more global markets to infiltrate with such a broad range of media, perhaps it is beyond ‘imagination’ what this dynamic entrepreneur will achieve next.

Did You Know?

Imagination’s first board game, Battle of the Sexes, outsold Monopoly in Australia in just 90 days.