Gerry Harvey

He’s a household name who’s been in the retail business for 60 years. But the executive chair of Harvey Norman Holdings – and an active campaigner for good corporate citizenship – would just as soon have been a farmer.

What was life like as a kid in rural NSW?

My father was a publican. I’d wake up, dress myself, have a bit of breakfast, go to school and eat in the pub. You wouldn’t see your parents. I was a little entrepreneur, rabbit-trapping and selling skins from when I was five or six.

Then the family moved to the Blue Mountains and there was disaster…

My dad sold the pub then proceeded not to work and gradually went broke. And my mum was sick. We bought a house in Warrimoo that burnt down and we lived in the garage at the back. Today, people would say it was squalid, a mother, father and three kids living in a garage. I never invited anyone to my house – I would have been embarrassed – but I never look back and think I was underprivileged. I always felt I came from a family that had a lot of money.

Did it drive you to want to make money?

It most certainly did. I watched my parents just not work and I remember, even at 10, thinking, “I’ve got to somehow or other never let that happen to me. It ain’t going to happen.” I couldn’t understand the stupidity of it.

Why did your dad do it?

His father was a very wealthy bloke and he left my father a quarter of what he left to his other kids, who were all farmers and did very well. My father was always on about how he was cheated out of his inheritance but his father thought, “If I leave it to George, he will waste it.” He was right.

In your teens, you saw guys making good money selling vacuum cleaners...

I thought I’d give it a go, reluctantly, but I was 18 and couldn’t sell anything. I was watching people earn up to £100 a week when I was earning six. I’d be flat out selling one vacuum cleaner a week. Then it clicked. There are certain points in the chat where you close the sale or you don’t close and you come back. If you haven’t closed by the fourth time, you’re probably never going to. I was never the best salesman but I had the capacity to work harder than anyone else so I was earning huge amounts; £300 would be a top week and £200 would have been regular.

Did you get carried away with it all?

I was a big shot, in all the nightclubs. I bought the big car and the latest suit and always had 3000 quid in my pocket. You know, “You got change for a hundred?” Then I started selling real estate but 1961 was the big credit squeeze and I was completely broke in six months.

Tell me about your business relationship with Ian Norman, with whom you co-founded retailer Norman Ross.

We’d sold vacuum cleaners in country towns. Then his father died and left him 700 quid so we opened up an auction place in Arncliffe [in Sydney]. It went off from day one. In the middle of a credit squeeze, we’d go out seven days a week and buy everything in a house – furniture, electricals – and resell it. I’d go to tile factories in Kyoto and Nagoya and fill containers with seconds. Then I started selling new stuff – fridges, washers and lounges – and I thought, “This is better.” We had 13 [Norman Ross] shops by the time we went public in 1972.

You were only 33 when your company went public...

I was probably a millionaire at 30 so 33 was old to me. All I wanted was to buy a farm. That was the only reason I was working – not because I loved it. It was the money.

In 1982, you sold Norman Ross for $23 million. Are you glad you did?

I set myself back 10 years. I used to think, “Idiot! You should have taken over Norman Ross.” I’d spent 21 years working extraordinarily hard and we had 42 shops. What I should have done was buy out my partners and grow it from there but it was all gone. So within three months, I opened my first [Harvey Norman] shop in Auburn [in Sydney] and we made $750,000 in the first nine months. Then I opened another shop and another and it just kept growing. Now I see that what happened in that 35-year period is beyond anything I’d ever had in mind. [As at 30 June 2016, there were 168 Harvey Norman stores in Australia and 85 stores overseas (New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Slovenia and Croatia), plus 18 Domayne and six Joyce Mayne stores in Australia.]

Looking back, were there any “gasp” moments when it all could have gone south?

There’s always an element of, “Don’t get too cocky because you might end up on your arse.”

So there was no waking up one morning with the big strategy?

It’s about grasping opportunities.

Do you regret not buying retailer Myer in 2005?

Katie [Page, CEO of Harvey Norman and Harvey’s wife] and I talked about it for a year. “Lets do it!” we said. We’d make $10 billion, no risk. But I would have had to move to Melbourne, work a lot harder and morph Harvey Norman into it. Then we’d have philosophical talks: “How much more important is it to be worth $3 billion or $10 billion or $1 billion? How does that change your life?” If we’d been having that conversation when I was 35, I would have done it – no question – but I was 65.

In 2011, you campaigned for GST on online purchases from international sellers. Now Amazon plans to open distribution centres in Australia. How do you see that challenge?

I always take a lot of interest in other retailers, whoever they are, and try to work out where their business model – and mine – will be 10 years from now. We’ve always believed we’re the trendsetters in furniture and electrical retailing in terms of the showrooms, promotions and being ahead of the market with the latest technology – you know, opening computer stores before anyone else. Over the years, I’ve watched practically every retailer in Australia go broke. Anthony Hordern, Mark Foy’s and Waltons disappeared. Why? We’re constantly challenging one another and the people around us. We have respect for where are we, who are we and where we’re going. We’re not living in the present.

More recently, you’ve taken issue with the practice of short selling.

Short sellers have been around for a long time. And what do they really contribute? The answer is next to nothing. It’s another bit of financial engineering that takes the American freeenterprise system to greed-is-great levels that are bad and ugly and don’t do anything for humankind. It’s share manipulation.

Let’s finish by talking about your horses. You own more than 1000 now?

I never add them up but there would be [that many], yes. I have two horse studs in New Zealand: 230 mares, half a dozen stallions, two big properties. I’ve got more than $50 million invested over there in horses. You need to have a passion in life. I have my horses, my cattle, my studs and my farms. I’ve never been a farmer but I’ve always wanted to be. [Meriton founder] Harry Triguboff’s family says he wakes in the morning and he’s building a building; then he goes to bed at night and he’s building a building. That’s his passion. I need more than that.

“I watched my parents just not work and I remember, even at 10, thinking, ‘I’ve got to somehow or other never let that happen to me.’” GERRYHARVEY