MAKING HIS OWN DESTINY

Life threw Nick Alcorso a daunting challenge that turned out to be the making of the man

Nick Alcorso is taking a different path to success than many in his famous family

Gaming and geek culture came to Nick Alcorso’s rescue following a car crash about five years ago that left him with memory problems and a permanent headache. Stuck in a malaise of pain and depression following the crash, the Launceston man struggled to find the will to get up off the couch, but when the opportunity arose to buy a business specialising in board and card games and computer gaming, he found his happy place again.

Alcorso’s business, Guf Launceston, has been nominated in the Retail Entrepreneur category for the Launceston Chamber of Commerce Awards this year and while he is thrilled just to be nominated, he also sees some humour in it, as his family has a different measure for success than most.

“Entrepreneur means something very different in my family, there is a very high bar that has been set there,” he says.

“My great grandfather, when they left Italy, he owned the three biggest businesses in Rome, but they were taken by the fascist government from the Jews.

“And my grandfather, Claudio, when he came here he was in and textiles, he founded Moorilla [the site now occupied by Mona], he was one of the first creative directors of the Sydney Opera House … so you know, no pressure there!”

Nick is the grandson of Claudio Alcorso, commonly credited with starting the modern Tasmanian wine industry with Moorilla vineyard at Berriedale, the tradition continuing with Claudio’s son and Nick’s father,

Julian Alcorso.

Nick jokes he is the first Alcorso to do something that has nothing to do with wine, working in software engineering and then as a chartered accountant before buying Guf, but says his family have never held it against him.

“I have two older brothers, the eldest, Dan, is a winemaker, the next eldest, Matt, is a chef, so the joke growing up was that Dan will look after the wine, Matt will look after the restaurant and Nick will look after the business. But then we left Moorilla and I went to uni and did software engineering,” Alcorso says.

“My family was certainly never disappointed that I didn’t go into the wine industry. Even when I was an accountant, I specialised in wine industry clients because I had that specialist knowledge. And that was close enough to the wine industry for me to feel connected to it. I just never had a desire to be more involved than that. Now that I’ve found my outlet my dad is really happy for me.”

Alcorso was 16 when the family sold Moorilla and his dad, Julian, became a contract winemaker. Nick studied software engineering at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, where he met his girlfriend-now-wife Kate, and after working as a programmer, he and three friends started their own IT business, Insight 4.

Alcorso sold his share in that business so as to move to Launceston with Kate, who had completed her law degree and was taking a job in her old home town in the North.

Alcorso continued to work on software projects, borrowing office space at Kate’s father’s accountancy practice. After a while Alcorso used his experience running his own business to help run the family accounting firm and gained his own account-silk

ing qualifications as well. “I had to convert my degree, which meant sitting an exam to show I had the equivalent knowledge of someone who’d done an accounting degree. I passed that and then did the chartered accountants’ course and became an accountant,” he says. “Kate and I got married and when we had our first child I moved to a bigger accounting business where I also created new software to help the way their business operated. So I was already combining two things I was good at.”

But everything stopped five years ago when Alcorso was in a car crash on the Lake Leake Highway while travelling with his boss for work.

“We were in my boss’s Porsche when we crashed off the road and the car flipped into some trees. He was virtually unscathed but I hit my head pretty hard on the window as we flipped and got a bad head injury,” he says.

“It was hailing at the time and really cold and I remember a woman holding me to keep me warm and her kid’s teddy bear was under my head – it’s amazing the wonderful things people will do to help someone in a situation like that.

“As a result of the injury I now have memory problems and that makes it hard to get the professional indemnity insurance you need to work as a chartered accountant, so I couldn’t do my job any more.”

Unemployed and learning to live with his injury, Alcorso says he became depressed and unmotivated. He fell back on his childhood love of gaming to keep himself occupied.

“I was spending a lot of time at Guf when it was at its old location in York St, playing a lot of [trading card game] Magic the Gathering, which turned out to be really good for my memory as well as for socialisation,” he says. “With all the drugs I was on, it gave me a reason to get up in the mornings and go do stuff out of the house, it was my recovery.

“But then I’d have my accountant’s hat on, looking at the shop, watching how they ran things and when they were ordering stock. I’d been out of work maybe three years by that stage and after a while I offered to buy the place. I bought the Tasmanian half-owner out and then later bought the mainland owner out as well.

“Surprisingly, when I told my wife I wanted to buy a games shop she was amazingly supportive. It was important to me because it was something to do. It’s not an exercise in making money, it was my antidepressant.

“It was a shame to not be able to continue in accounting because I really loved it. But what I do now really is the best of all those worlds, the account keeping for the business, I get to do the software stuff, and I get to do the gaming stuff!”

Owning Guf is the fulfilment of a wish for Alcorso, who says he has “been a geek since, well, forever”. As well as running PC gaming machines and a boardgaming and card-gaming area, the retail section of the store carries many items he loved as a kid.

Magic: the Gathering, Alcorso’s gateway game, is a card game in which players each have a deck of cards representing spells or creatures that are sent into play against opponents, who deal cards to attack or counter.

Then there are tabletop games in which players roll dice to move miniature figurines on a table-size battlefield, as well as traditional board games, through to resources for pencil-and-paper adventure games like the classic Dungeons & Dragons.

“I grew up in the ‘80s, so Dungeons & Dragons was in its heyday then. And I loved painting models, I love everything Star Wars, so you see all of that here: a lot of this is just me remembering the way I used to go into these shops and ogle all this stuff as a kid, so now I stock it myself,” Alcorso says.

But it is not all business, he also prides himself on using Guf as a community space for groups like Life Without Barriers and Autism Tasmania to use as a place for carers and clients to bond or just to let kids enjoy some social time in a safe environment.

“We will have carers come in and have games days just as a way to spend some time bonding over something fun, start some conversations they might not otherwise have. Or they might come in to play PC games, and we charge the kids for their PC time but the carer plays for free so they can sit at the machine next to them and engage that way,” he explains.

“It’s quite lovely, especially groups like Autism Tasmania, when the kids come in and they’re all very focused in their own worlds, but all the PCs sit right next to each other playing something like Minecraft so over the course of the event they start looking around at what’s happening on the screen next to them and they start talking and engaging with each other.”

Alcorso relocated Guf to its George St address to give the business a fresh start, because with gaming more mainstream than ever, it was important to make sure the shop was inviting and accessible to people of all ages, genders and experience.

“We’ve started a regular ladies’ night because we noticed how many girls were coming in and they were driving the purchasing decisions of their partners, not the other way around. We usually get around a dozen at each event and one comes along with her five-month-old baby and it’s a chance for her to play some Dungeons & Dragons and socialise.”

Alcorso says it can still be difficult to drag himself out of bed some days, and he has trouble working long days, but having his business is all the motivation he needs.

“I usually only work until about 2pm, then I have to go home and sleep for a few hours. I’ve basically had a permanent headache since the accident. It’s one of those things that kinda’ sucks but now it’s just normal,” he says. “But that’s where having the shop helps. If you’re just home on the couch with nothing to do, you suffer from that malaise of no reason to get up, you’re hungry at lunch time but the food is in the kitchen and you can’t be bothered even walking that far.

“But having this place really helped me. There is a responsibility to get up and go and do something. I have a business, I have seven staff, people are always lining up outside waiting for the door to open. I have something to do. And it keeps me happy. Not many people can say they get to play games all day.”

Now, as a parent, Alcorso is excited at the prospect of passing his hobbies on to his kids, Toby, 8, and Liam, 6. “Toby wanted one of the models he saw here and he put it on lay-by. I don’t want him to think it is all just free! So he came in here and paid his $2.50 a week and he picked it up last week and was so over the moon. We spent the weekend building it and painting it, I’m so proud my kid is a nerd, I’ve succeeded at life!,” he says.

His children have a different upbringing from his, of course. Growing up on the Moorilla Estate is something Alcorso sees as a huge privilege and one that has furnished him with many great memories, even though the site is now occupied by Mona.

“It’s amazing going to Mona now, seeing how it has changed from when I was a kid. I often get tourists passing through here on their way to Hobart and of course they all want to go to Mona and I’ll say ‘when you’re in this particular part of this building, you can see the holes in the wall from when my brothers and I were chasing a water rat with a spear gun!’,” he says

“Or go into this certain gallery and up there you see where we threw a bottle of tomato sauce on the fire and the sauce stain is still on the ceiling from where it exploded.”

While not everything in Alcorso’s life has gone according to plan, and he has the scars to prove it, he says he wouldn’t change any of it. “I ended up in a series of events that resulted in me being married to a fantastic wife, I have two beautiful kids, and a pretty happy life. Some things haven’t worked out so well, but if I’d changed one thing, that whole chain of events might never have happened.”

The Launceston Chamber of Commerce Business Excellence Awards are announced on October 27 at the Hotel Grand Chancellor, Launceston