Wizard At Work

From the beginning, the business model involved the branches being run as individual small businesses, with principals signing up to licensing agreements. That has recently changed, with Wizard rolling out a new franchise system earlier this year. Bouris and his team recognised that the business had matured, and was ready to take on a franchise system, where the branch operators have the right to sell the business. "These things happen in stages—it’s just another development in the evolution of the business."

It’s also helped aid growth in a slowing market. "Growth is relative to your base and we’ve got a big base now, so it’s hard to grow at the same rate as before." That said, Bouris says they’re not far off St George and some of the major banks in terms of branch size, which means they are growing to target. "And the franchise system, to some extent, is there to assist the growth as well."

And profits close to $100 million a year contribute to attracting both new customers and new franchisees. Both marketing and distribution teams are assigned budgets and targets, which are established from the ground up, to achieve growth in both areas. They weren’t always so well off, though, as Bouris admits. In the early days, it used to be "going hard" in one area, and "playing catch up" in the other.

Branding & Marketing

Although his has been compared with Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin brand, Bouris says the brands have little in common. He and his partners chose the name (after scouring the dictionary) because it was a similar sounding name to Virgin, but this was more about representing "iconic Australian values" of sport and financial wizardry. "It was also a name that was ‘out there’ enough that people might take notice," he says. "You had to have a name that people were going to ask: what the hell does that mean? That’s why we chose the name Wizard."

While he is the face of Wizard, as Branson is for Virgin, Bouris says that was more from accident than design. When an advertising agency budgeted $40,000 for ‘talent’ in commercials, a cost they couldn’t afford, Bouris stepped in, becoming the man behind the brand. "We did everything off the smell of an oily rag in the early stages," he says. This included helping to write the TV ad scripts up until 2004. "It just shows that when you’ve got nothing to lose, you’re fearless."

What has been the real marketing boon, though, is the strategy to become heavily involved in sporting sponsorships, pouring millions of dollars into rugby league and AFL. There are also community and arts sponsorships that keep the Wizard brand in front of a wide community.

He admits everything hasn’t always happened according to plan, especially in the early days, with one of the most frustrating mistakes involving the wrong phone number being printed in a newspaper ad. Despite the glitches, he maintains much of the Mark Bouris–Wizard success story comes down to a lot of luck. It was luck and instinct that he got into the business at the right time. It was luck that he put together a marketing strategy that worked for the business, and it was luck that he became the face of the brand.

Part of that luck was in the timing, and in the opportunity that Bouris says doesn’t exist now. In fact, the lending market has become tighter and increasingly more competitive since Wizard threw its hat in the ring, with fewer competitors in the lending space. He admits the downturn in the property market has resulted in a reduction of profit margins, so there’s an increasing pressure to grow the business, and watch costs more closely. Another spot of luck, he says, was the brand achieving critical mass before the downturn, so now the focus is on maintenance of critical mass rather than growth. He even goes so far as predicting there isn’t enough growth or margin for new players to enter the market for some time. "From my point of view, it’s good, because I’m an incumbent now. If I tried to break into this market now, well, you just wouldn’t make it."

Although it wasn’t part of the planned succession strategy, Bouris sold the business in 2004 to GE Money. Being retained as chairman, he is still the face of the brand. Although he didn’t have a plan to sell the business from the outset, he made sure the role he created for himself meant he didn’t need a successor, always looking to "much smarter" people to run the business day-to-day. "They understood the business from the ground up. They’d grown up on mortgage markets since their 20s, and I didn’t. There were parts where I had a greater strategic input—such as wholesale funding of the business—and they were more focused on expansion and building out new products.