Is this the man???Geoff Lord has $80m worth of fingers in many...

Is this the man???


Geoff Lord has $80m worth of fingers in many pies

June 10 2003

Advertisement

Around every corner there seems to be a Geoffrey Lord business. In the suburbs and in country towns he manages leisure centres and golf courses. Outside our homes he is reading gas and water meters while bridegrooms and guests at just about every wedding are decked out in his formal wear.

He is at the same time a landlord collecting rents, a developer selling apartments and a lender providing home loans. He is prospecting for gold, smelting non-ferrous metals and treating the waste from aluminium plants. He is manufacturing pharmaceuticals and electron microscopes, building truck bodies, selling cars, driving taxis and if you want to sue someone and you've got a good case he'll even back you financially in court.

The man is simply everywhere but few would recognise him if they passed him in the street. Like other former colleagues who grew up in the supercharged atmosphere of John Elliott's business empire in its glory days, Geoffrey Frederick Lord keeps a low profile.

Since he struck out on his own in 1990, Lord has quietly built his family owned Belgravia Group into an $80 million business, or more precisely an eclectic collection of 15 businesses, knowing that it will never be the commercial powerhouse that the Elders IXL conglomerate once was.

Nor would he want it to be. He says Belgravia would not work as a public company. Because of the way it is spread over so many areas of operation it would be hard justifying the business to shareholders."None of them are a great story. In a sense they are all just acorns," he says, adding that his wife, Nanette, is the only shareholder to whom he has to justify himself.


According to Lord his days at Elders were the most exciting of his life but the long hours, especially the time spent travelling overseas, took its toll on family life. He still works hard, at least 60 hours a week, but he does it because he loves being in business and he loves running a diversity of businesses. "It would be my hobby if it wasn't my business. I like building things and having different businesses is a personal luxury, although certainly not the best economic strategy."

Geoff Lord says he is not out for power or influence beyond helping young people develop their talents and the idea of a personal interview worried him lest things were blown out of proportion. "I don't want to appear grand in this because we are not grand. We are a player but I am a down to earth sort of working class boy, as Jimmy Barnes would say."

And while he accepts that he has been successful, he says it is not due in any measure to good luck so much as an absence of bad luck. "I don't believe you should expect to have good luck and if any came my way, for example winning Tatts, it would be unfair to others. So I don't do Tattslotto."

Lord, 57 and a father of four adult children, none of whom have followed him into the business, is a pleasant man. He is short with fair hair thinning on top and as he talks he nervously fiddles with the bottom of his tie.

What you see is what you get; a down to earth character who comes out to the reception area of his St Kilda Road office to greet visitors and then proudly introduces them to various members of staff on the way into his own office.

Despite a propensity to mangle the English language, he has lots of formal education and, being the son of an insurance man who had a proven talent for authorship, he is not really a working class boy.

After completing school at Melbourne High he went to all three of Melbourne's main universities, doing his bachelor of economics at Monash University, followed by post graduate studies at La Trobe University and a Master of Business Administration (Distinction) at the University of Melbourne.

He sees his career divided into four quarters. The first quarter, between 1965 and 1973, was spent at the Ford Motor Company. He describes it as a tough grounding that taught him the disciplines of business through good reporting, good systems and good management.

The old rules still apply. Every Monday he demands a written report on sales, orders and margins from the chief executives of each business in his private group. Every month he expects a detailed package ahead of a formal board meeting and every day he will speak to each of his chief executives on the phone so that he can keep his finger on the pulse.

The second quarter was his time as one of John Elliott's team of young tigers. It began when he joined Henry Jones IXL as a young executive immediately after Elliott took it over, the first takeover of many.

He rose to the board of Elders IXL and the Foster's Brewing Group in 1978 and then in 1985 Elliott asked him to develop Elders Resources as chief executive of a stand-alone business.

The third quarter began in 1990 when he cashed in his swag of Elders bonus shares for $11 million and went into business for himself, creating Belgravia first as a private family group with a broad spread of businesses and since 1999 as a substantial shareholder with boardroom clout in "unloved" public companies.

It has taken a long time for any discernible strategy to emerge as Belgravia, so named after the location of Elders London offices, snapped up whatever was available until it became an employer of over 5000 people. However, Geoff Lord insists there is a philosophy if not an underlying strategy.

Some of the 15 businesses within the private group are wholly owned while others are joint ventures and each chief executive, who reports to Lord, is either on a profit share incentive or has equity in the business. Lord says their average age is 40 because he likes to work with younger people and create opportunities for them.

Belgravia Property concentrates on medium developments of under $50 million each; Belgravia Finance provides venture capital to clients with good business ideas; Belgravia Leisure manages 80 aquatic centres, health clubs, golf courses and stadiums in its own right and for local government; and Belgravia Technology, an inhouse software developer, has acquired Redcat, a business that supplies point of sale and financial accounting software for the hospitality and retail food management industries.

Formal wear has grown beyond dinner suits and bridal gowns into other clothing lines including the recently acquired corporate uniforms supplier Bizwear and a promotional apparel joint venture called Octopus.

The Fitness Generation has grown beyond gym equipment into other forms of recreational equipment. Premier cabs in Sydney has hundreds of licensed vehicles on the road and has authority to move into the NSW central coast.

In 1999 Lord created a new division that would invest Belgravia's money in small public companies that Lord could help grow. His plan was to acquire a sufficiently substantial interest and a position on the boards of small companies that were unloved because they were under performing.

"We knew we could not afford to take a substantial position in a larger public company but we could have an influence in the direction of very small public companies with a market capitalisation of under $10 million and we could build them."

Once again Lord has gone for diversity. He began with the motor auctioneer Auto Group and the infrastructure service group UXC and has since acquired interests and directorships in the gold and metal explorer Triako Resources, the optical instrument and medical equipment manufacturer Iatia Ltd, the pharmaceutical developer and manufacturer Institute of Drug Technology Australia (IDTA), the furnace business Ausmelt, and the refrigerated transport manufacturer Maxitrans.

Lord, who earns more than $200,000 a year from his directorships alone, says: "The market capitalisation of each company has since grown from less than $10 million to between $50 million and $100 million but we'd like them all to be at least $500 million."

In his latest moves late last month Belgravia achieved its required position in the Queensland financial services and mortgage lending group Terrain Australia. Also, IDTA made an approach to acquire Virax Holdings, which is working on the development of immunotherapeutics for the treatment of autoimmune orders HIV/AIDS, cancers and infectious diseases such as Hepatitis B.

He says the companies within the public group will make some interesting moves soon.

So what is the fourth quarter of Geoffrey Lord's career? "Whatever comes next, the future," he replies.