Graeme Hart - Early Years

Early Years

Hart's successful business career has humble origins—in his younger days, he worked as a tow-truck driver and as a panel beater after leaving school at 16.

In 1987, Hart completed an MBA from the University of Otago. His research thesis outlines the strategy for Rank, then a small hire company, to evolve into a major corporation. This strategy relies on using the cash flow of well-performing companies to fund debt, which as it gets paid off, increases the equity value of the initial investors, a.k.a. leveraged buyouts.

Hart gained a big break when he purchased the Government Printing Office for less than its capital value in 1990. The purchase was 1.4x Earnings and Hart was provided generous payment terms. Then New Zealand Prime Minister David Lange initially refused to sign off the transaction. The following year he bought Whitcoulls Group which at that time included a retail chain of bookstores as well as office and stationery concerns. He has since sold off these interests.

Read more about this topic:  Graeme Hart

Famous quotes containing the words early years, early and/or years:

    If there is a price to pay for the privilege of spending the early years of child rearing in the driver’s seat, it is our reluctance, our inability, to tolerate being demoted to the backseat. Spurred by our success in programming our children during the preschool years, we may find it difficult to forgo in later states the level of control that once afforded us so much satisfaction.
    Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)

    At the earliest ending of winter,
    In March, a scrawny cry from outside
    Seemed like a sound in his mind.
    He knew that he heard it,
    A bird’s cry, at daylight or before,
    In the early March wind.
    Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)

    If you feed a man, and wash his clothes, and borne his children, you and that man are married, that man is yours. If you sweep a house, and tend its fires and fill its stoves, and there is love in you all the years you are doing this, then you and that house are married, that house is yours.
    Truman Capote (20th century)