YOU know when Harold Mitchell is in the room. He's a big presence. He's not your ordinary company chairman. And despite a share price that's fallen, his shareholders love him. At his Mitchell Communications Group's annual meeting this week, he bounded up to someone and said: "You've got some shares? When did you buy them? (I'm) Harold Mitchell, good to see you. How are you?"
They hang around after he's delivered his address — "We've got some wonderful things to report" — and wait for a word with the power behind the Mitchell throne, the man who they see interviewed frequently in the media, and a man who knows his way around.
Even his weight is a matter of public interest.
"You're a shareholder? What price did you get in at?" Mitchell asks someone else who has journeyed from Canberra.
Shareholder: "I bought some at 70¢ and I thought 'this is very cheap', but I was wrong, wasn't I?"
"No, no," the chairman says. "You were right at the time. Everything is a matter of timing."
Shareholder: "Now, I'm worried about you, Harold. Are you still losing weight?"
"No, I'm not, thank you for asking. I lost 40 kilograms and half of that is back on. My dad's 88 and the other day he was up fixing the roof, I believe I'm okay but I'm not a fool about it."
He takes the shareholder's name and tells him he'll mention him on a spot he does on Canberra radio. That's one of his specialties — he always asks people about themselves.
Mitchell, 66, is a man who never stops; a man who's been on the go since being born in Trafalgar in Gippsland and getting his first job as a labourer in a saw mill.
Fifty years later, he is one of those rare people — in media circles and beyond — where no surname needs to be attached, just like Rupert and the late Kerry.
But, unlike them, he didn't go to Geelong Grammar, he left Stawell High School when he was 16.
After plenty of knockbacks, he got a job as an office boy in an advertising agency, but even a year later in the big smoke the sawmill was still with him; small bits of wood were coming out of his hands.
"They're called splints, they get in under your skin and they only come out as the new skin grows," he says. He's proud of his sawmill background and has no qualms admitting he was a very heavy drinker. He hasn't touched a drop for 43 years.
He learnt everything there was to know about advertising, and generally did a bit of everything.
The same agency employed Fred Schepisi and Phillip Adams ("Phillip now denies it, of course," says Mitchell) and it appears to be there that Mitchell underwent something of a personality change.
He says he was "shy beyond belief" when he was at the sawmill. But the advertising game taught him to be a master performer on his feet.
"In advertising, you've got to be quick. To get a line in before Phillip Adams was never easy," he says.
About 35 years ago, Mitchell heard about a new type of company that operated overseas that bought advertising space from media companies on behalf of advertisers, effectively usurping traditional advertising agencies.
He twice suggested to the agency's chairman that this media buying idea would be an outstanding business, and that he should run it.
Twice the chairman said no. So Mitchell, with $2000, two children under four, and a mortgage, set up his own media buying business.
To cut a long story short, he is now chairman of Mitchell Communications, the country's biggest media buyer. Since he set up shop, he has bought close to $4 billion of advertising for a blue-chip list of clients.
One of his big clients might, for example, want a year-long marketing campaign. So Mitchell will work out when the money will be spent and which media will get the money. Television or magazines, or newspapers or internet. Mitchell gets paid by the media companies and his clients.
The company is now much more than a media buyer, it has a string of 22 wholly owned companies with activities ranging from public relations to direct marketing.
"In this business, we're seeing this incredible change with what's happening with communications, where the digital world is just taking off," Mitchell says. "We're lucky that we were there right at the beginning of it all."
So what exactly does he do?
"As chairman I go to a lot of trouble to make sure that I let the executives run the business. I think of myself as a fireman; I'm either starting fires or putting them out.
"I try to contact at least one client a day, not easy when you've got 2000 clients, but that's an important thing to do."
His workload appears enormous. He says he has always had a lot of energy, getting up at 5.15 am and going to the office.
Twenty years ago he put money into various investments that he didn't know much about and lost a lot. "I looked back and thought that was really stupid," he says. "I just had all this nervous energy that kept me doing something. I owned the Big Banana at one time. How stupid was that?
"I decided that for the rest of my life I wouldn't move outside the knowledge that I had in business."
So he joined a string of public organisations — "I usually become chairman of most things" — and his abundant energy was directed into those groups and "I didn't go and make stupid investments".
This week he became chairman of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Other jobs have included chairman of the Museums Board of Victoria and the National Gallery of Australia. He is vice-chairman of Care Australia
He is a rare beast; an insider and an outsider.
For 30 years he has lived in the same house an hour's drive out of Melbourne on the road to Kinglake, drives his cars until they fall to bits and, he says, has the same wife.
He is a great believer in what he calls "non group-think, you know, group-think where all thinking is going the same way".
"All the big media companies are in Sydney. I'm here. They all live in Toorak. I don't know the streets of Toorak, I've got to get a street map out. I live way out in the bush. I don't think I've been to Portsea for 15 years.".
He stays away. "I don't need it. I'm very confident within myself. I've got a very full life with the things that I do, and so I don't need to continue on Saturday and Sunday with the Monday to Friday people like that."
Ask how he's managed to go from sawmill hand to someone handling $1.2 billion of media billings a year and the man who's never short of an answer is momentarily silent.
He then says: "Step by step." Prodded, he responds: "Why has it worked? I don't know. I was sitting next to a lady at dinner the other night and she was asking that and I was sitting there thinking, I'm not so sure."
Keep pressing him and he says: "I think I probably have all the standard answers; that I'm interested in people and clients, but I think the greatest thing that drives people who have been successful is fear of failure. I think that drives a lot of us."
One thing that does disturb him is Mitchell's share price, which has fallen from $1.80 to as low as 33¢. That is why he asks shareholders what they paid for their stock.
"I feel bad for people who invested whatever amounts of money at a reasonable price," he says. "Our shares at one point went too high and they've now gone too low.
"I can do the best at presenting our company as being solid, of indicating what the future is and continuing to make profits and pay dividends. After that there's not much more you can do, you're rather at the mercy of the market."
Ask whether he'll be chairman in a decade and he responds: "I'll be 76. I hope not, I'll be ga-ga. I'll be around, though."
His son, Stuart, 38, runs the business and Mitchell says his son had to "learn the hard way".
But did the son of the founder really earn the job? "He really earned it. He's good. You ring anyone and ask them if he's OK at it.
"I'm not trying to make a case for him. That will be made by him over time, just as I had to do."
