Wizard At Work

"The business has been running without me for many years, back to about 2002," he says. "There’s no difference in the business from then to now except that it’s gotten so big there are executives all over the joint, and it needs less and less of my input."

Bouris does a bit of mental kicking over his decision to sell the business when he did. Not that he didn’t do well out of the sale (it was in excess of $400 million—he took his share in GE stock, the Packers took theirs in cash), and he doesn’t regret selling but he realises how much it would be worth today. "I probably wouldn’t have sold out," he says, if he had his time again. "I probably could have sold it for double today!" That said, he recognises the timing was right. "If you asked me what was best for me, I would have been better holding out. If you asked me what was best for the business, it was for me to sell out and for it to have a big owner."

Since the sale, Bouris has remained in a chairman role, signing a joint venture with GE Money to build the business into emerging markets, and this is where the Indian expansion comes in. Called GE Money Wizard, the Indian business is basically the same offering, with some minor changes to suit the new market.

A bit of his magic has followed the move into India, with rapid growth since launching earlier this year. He attributes this to India’s rising market, which is a similar sort of market to where Australia was 10 or 15 years ago. It’s also been made easier by India’s similar legal system, the fact that English is widely spoken, and that India has a mortgage market, which Bouris says is not the same the world over. "And there’s no competition there for the incumbent banks," he adds. "My role is to build out the market as quickly as possible, hopefully two a year at least." There are also other emerging markets to consider, the details of which he remains somewhat tight-lipped about.

If not for Wizard, Bouris would be in the property game. "That’s what I was doing, and still am to an extent. We do property developments, land subdivisions, I would just be in it in a bigger way. It’s a tough game, too!"

Rather than labelling himself as an entrepreneur, Bouris prefers the term investor. "I’m like a private equity investor, which is what I was at Wizard. I was the first investor, then I brought the other investors in, then I sold all the investors out. We sold out to GE, and GE chose to keep me on as chairman, which gave me the opportunity to run established businesses for them overseas."

Even now, he has many fingers in many pies. There’s a property business, overseas businesses, internet business, financial planning business, small investment banking business. "I’m a business builder, building business to maturity until it is run by someone else." From startup to more established small businesses.

Although he’s not influenced by others before him, he draws inspiration from a variety of leaders, including Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama for their courage and their struggle, and philanthropic businessman, Warren Buffett, because he keeps things simple, and Bill Gates for all he has achieved with Microsoft. "I try to emulate as many good qualities from these kinds of people as often as possible," he says. "The common theme [to their success] is a bit of imagination and sheer hard work to start with—it’s all about execution, at the end of the day, and how often you attend to that execution."

Tips from the Wizard

• There comes a point when you have to stop spending capital to grow the business. Use partners to grow the business, whether it’s staff buying a percentage or big partners investing. And you should only expand the business if it’s going to yield more income and profits.

• Always involve your most senior people in equity of the business. Don’t charge them, give it to them, because they’ll think far differently as proprietors than they do as employees, and you’ll get a far better result. You don’t have to give them half the business, just proprietorship.

• Don’t try and run and control every part of the business yourself. You can employ people smarter than you are and just give them guidance, rather than tell them what to do all the time. If you really want to make your business more valuable, you need to replicate it, and employ people you can trust to run the other offices. Which means you need to have more of a mentoring type of personality. Take some people risks, and back your judgment. This requires capital and you’re better off using someone else’s.