Stephen J. Hunt - Find. Build. Sell.

To the Hamilton Chamber of Commerce, Hunter Business Chamber and the Bar and Nightclub Show Las Vegas for your support.

To all the sporting teams that we support, and who support us:

The Wildfires (Hunter Rugby)

The Maitland Blacks Rugby Club

The Wahroonga Tigers

The Hornsby Lions

The Bogan Bulls (Nyngan).

And lastly, to Bernadette Schwerdt, for the time, effort and support you have put into helping bring my business story to life. Over countless conversations, hundreds of emails and thousands of words, you have helped me distil a rollicking and rowdy life into a book that I hope will be of value to many others. From when we first met, I knew you were the right person to help me tell my story, and my trust and instinct has been rewarded. Thank you for guiding me through this journey and for providing me with an outstanding learning experience. This book would not be the success it is without you.

And finally, a sincere and heartfelt thank you to every customer who has walked into one of our pubs. You are the reason we are here.

The greater the difficulty, the more glory in surmounting it.

Epictetus

My name is Hunt. Stephen Hunt. Clearly, my ancestors were hunters, and so am I. My name reflects perfectly what I do — so much so, I bought a dog, a German shorthaired pointer (Snoop, on the left), in honour of that ancestry. He is one of the best hunting dogs you can find. I bought him because he reminds me of who I am, and what I was destined to be.

Snoop, on the left, the best hunting dog you can find.

In short, I am a Hunter. I track down good pubs that have the potential to be great. I round up the team who can help me restore them to their former glory. I sniff out the best deals to maximise efficiencies. I then deliver them to my investors, and do it all again. I'll stop with the dog analogy … you get the drift.

If you believe in the science of epigenetics, I am aptly named. Now epigenetics may sound like a depilatory tool you'd see for sale on The Shopping Channel, but it's the study of how behaviours and environment affect the way our genes work. Interestingly, a study discovered that 30 per cent of white men were more likely to match their career to their surname. (This is why we see Mr McBurney become a fire chief, Mr Brain become a neurosurgeon or Mr Soo Yoo a lawyer — all of whom are real people, by the way, according to the website ‘boredpanda'.)

Is that luck, destiny, nature, nurture?

I don't know, and it doesn't matter. Whatever it is, I consider myself lucky to be The Pub Hunter. I've found myself here, at 48 years old, walking side by side with my wife and partner in life, Fidelma, our five children and a $100 million pub portfolio that continues to grow daily, delivering outstanding returns for my investors and life-changing opportunities for my employees and franchisees. I couldn't be happier with the way life turned out, but it wasn't all beer and skittles when I started out.

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.

I got my first ‘scent' of a deal when I was four years old and was given a bucket of Lego for my birthday. I was playing with Luke, my next-door neighbour, and he said, ‘Can I buy that bucket of Lego off you?' ‘How much for?' I asked. ‘Three dollars?' he said. This was a fortune for a little kid like me, and I fantasised about all the lollies I could buy with this unexpected windfall. I was about to say ‘Sold!', when my mum pulled me aside and whispered, ‘Stephen, think about it. You could sell the bucket to him for three dollars, or you could sell him the individual bricks for 50 cents a brick, and make 20 dollars. What would you prefer?' ‘Can I charge him 70 cents a brick?' My entrepreneurial chops were on display, even then. ‘That would be greedy, Stephen,' she said. ‘And don't forget, Luke could go to the shops and buy them for less than that.'

In that moment, I discovered the principles of pricing structures and market forces. I owe my mother a great debt for teaching me, at such a young age, the essentials of entrepreneurship. I sealed the deal with Luke, headed down to the shops and filled my pockets with cobblers and chocolate bullets.

My father taught me my second lesson. When I was 10, we took a family trip to Hong Kong. We lined up at the money exchange counter to buy some Hong Kong currency. I watched my dad hand over the money to buy the notes, and a moment before the money changed hands, the exchange rate went up, and in the blink of an eye, we were given $200 more than if we had bought it a few seconds earlier. In that moment, I learned that timing is everything: a critical element when buying and selling a business.

I have to be honest. I didn't set out to become a publican. Growing up in a middle-class suburban home with two rugby-loving brothers (and two equally sporty sisters), I was a sports-mad jock with a grand goal to play rugby for Australia. I did make several representative rugby union and league teams, represented my school in 11 different sports and was captain of the swimming team. Unfortunately, however, my talent did not quite match my ambitions. As a result, I had to find another career. But as a 17 year old, fresh out of school, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I was too busy mucking around with my mates, playing footy, drinking beer and having fun. Which is kind of how my business began. As they say, from little things big things grow. My pub empire started as a very small operation: it started in my backyard.