Читать книгу Find. Build. Sell. - Stephen J. Hunt - Страница 9

I was a ginger-haired, fat-fingered, freckled-faced kid from suburban Sydney. I was also left-handed and had one kidney. What I did have going for me was that I was good with numbers and good with people. Those qualities have served me well. I now run Hunt Hospitality, a conglomerate that owns seven pubs up and down the east coast of Australia. We employ 350 staff and have won some of the most prestigious awards in the industry.

I started out washing dishes in pubs, and graduated to running them and, eventually, buying them. My modus operandi was simple: I'd choose poorly performing pubs, renovate, revalue and resell them for a higher price, repay the investors with an outstanding rate of return, and then do it all again. I got so good at buying pubs that friends, and then friends of friends, would say, ‘Steve, can we be a part of this? Can I get in on the deal?', and I'd say, ‘Sure', so I started to take on sophisticated, high-net-worth investors. I made them so much money, I became a private equity fund manager and started an investment fund, called The SJH Pub Fund. Top marks for creativity there, but it is what it is: a fund that owns, operates and manages a portfolio of successful pubs. I launched it in 2015 and it's been growing at a rate of 15.42 per cent with a cash return of 12.18 per cent per year since it started.

I'm not a trained accountant, but to manage such a complex investment portfolio, I had to become very, very good at reading numbers. And I did. I have my family to thank for that. My dad is an accountant, as are three of my four siblings, so I've been surrounded by numbers all my life. It wasn't unusual to talk about financial statements over breakfast, lines of credit over lunch and debt funding over dinner. My parents were ultra-conservative people, and they would have loved for me to become an accountant, but I had different plans. I took my passion for people and pubs and leveraged those talents to make a profit. I have found my strengths and made them work for me. When you find what you love and can make a buck from it, you'll never ‘work' another day in your life.