Shane Yeend: Using his Imagination

Shane Yeend’s idea of a fun game is creating and building a new enterprise. The sort that is worth millions on a poor day, and millions more on a typical day.

If you play board games, watch TV or play games on your mobile phone or PC, chances are you’ve come across Imagination Entertainment. It’s a South Australian success story, headed up by co-founder and CEO Shane Yeend, who has achieved wide acclaim for his business savvy, including his latest accolade as the 2007 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year.

Imagination has become a world leader in interactive entertainment, and while best known for pioneering the DVD game, the company has interests across all media platforms.

Yeend is the creative ideas man behind Imagination, but he can just as easily start crunching the numbers required of a successful entrepreneur. Having started his first business at 15, it all comes naturally to Yeend, who likens starting a new business to a game. “Once you’ve done it a few times, even your hobbies become businesses. It doesn’t whether it’s managing property portfolios or, for example, I started an aviation company with some friends and now it’s a serious business and we’re buying $10 million businesses.”

In 1984, after completing year nine, Yeend left school and started his own production company with Kevin McLean (still his business partner today). McLean ran the business, which focused on wedding videos, corporate films and commercials, while Yeend learned the ropes behind the camera. Before long he scored a string of freelance film work, travelling the world for major TV networks. “I really learnt the power of media through those current affair-type programs,” he recalls.

Looking for a new challenge, the business partners decided they wanted to work on their own productions, not just other people’s. They explored a variety of TV concepts, as well as complementary websites so people could interact with the TV show live. “Put those things together and it’s what we do today, we’re an interactive entertainment company,” says Yeend. “From then on we created brands we own and we’ve learnt how to make money out of multiple platforms.

“We did lots of other TV shows, we brought American franchises here, we brought the E-Entertainment franchise to Australia, and in the mid-90s I started doing research into, and looking at, what people interacted with. We were fascinated with how the media was going to change back then.”

Yeend’s study revealed that in America the most popular things interacted with on radio were games. “So from games we basically went ‘well, let’s take one of the most popular games played on radio and build different platforms of revenue’. So we started off with a board game, CD-ROM, TV and internet for a game called Battle of the Sexes.”

Getting the game into retail stores was a challenge but persistence paid off. His first call to Kmart was met with rejection, but the second approach scored him a meeting with a buyer and he walked out of there with his first 10,000-unit order. “I don’t take no for an answer,” he says. But then came the challenge of funding the production, with cash flow always an issue for such a fast-growing business. “National Australia Bank wouldn’t give us $80,000 to do it, on top of a business that they’d been banking for 10 years. So my business partner and I mortgaged our houses, and we got it and did it. It’s no different today, it’s just got lots more zeros.

“In 90 days this thing outsold Monopoly in Australia. We’d never made a game in our lives so we learnt a lot about printing very quickly.”

With the number one game and website in Australia, Yeend decided to try his luck in America. “We rented an apartment, bought a $4,000 car and started dropping off games at places up and down California. We knew the US consumer machine was a monster, and we set about using innovation to break through and get ourselves noticed. It got picked up and today we’re the second or third-largest supplier of games in the US retail business.”