Action Man

The Australian:

Fitness First MD Tony de Leede is exercising his right to become spectacularly successful – in heart-stopping time.

It’s the sweltering summer of 1969 and a long-haired schoolboy from the southern Sydney beachside suburb of Cronulla sees a group of his mates from the outer suburbs struggling with their surfboards on the train. The enterprising 16-year-old sets up a storage facility (“Store a Board”) in his backyard to save these young surfers – not yet old enough to hold a driver’s licence – from lugging their boards to and from home. Word spreads like wildfire and at $2 a pop per week becomes a tidy little earner for the boy, who soon branches out into sales of second-hand boards.

Meanwhile, his four-year-old stamp-trading business is booming – so much so he can afford to buy an investment unit. Three years later, on a surfing trip to Indonesia, the now 19-year-old is drawn to piles of hand printed batik dresses being sold at street stalls. On a hunch, he buys 500 of the dresses, irons them and creates a vibrant window display in his mum’s dress shop. They swiftly sell out to wholesalers but to his dismay remain scrappily piled up in stores. After showing the managers photos of his mother’s window, and offering to duplicate the look for free, the dresses sell out. The young man learns a vital lesson he will apply time and again in his later business life: it all comes back to marketing.

The fad for batik clothing takes off. Within a year the young man has a business called Sanura Imports, a shop in Sydney’s Centrepoint, and is retailing and wholesaling a tonne of clothing a month. He rolls in so much dough he pays cash for an entire apartment building. And another. And another. He fulfils his self-made promise to be a millionaire by the time he is 30. He beats this deadline by four years. More.