Who is Tony Quinn?

OVERSTEER profiles the five times Targa NZ winner and the man behind Highlands at Cromwell

Who is Tony Quinn? Well, if you Google Tony Quinn you will get a few of them, but the one we want is Tony Quinn, VIP pet foods and that narrows it down to the man we’re after.

I knew a little of the man. Like he’s Scottish, the Eff word pops up frequently in his sentences, he’s won the New Zealand Targa five times now, he owned the Porsche Carrera Cup series in Australia before selling it and buying the GT Championship, he’s the man behind VIP pet foods in Australia and he the power that’s behind the new Highlands motorsport complex in Cromwell.

I wanted to speak to him and where better than up in the carpark at Coronet Peak near Queenstown, where, between runs in the revived hillclimb, he leans against the black Nissan GT-R, snugged into a black down jacket and, as light snow flurries whisper around, he tells yarns.

He’s got a reputation for not mincing words, hard work, not standing on ceremony and not suffering fools at all, let alone gladly. He knows what he wants and while he will listen to other points of view, you’d better have a case ready to present to him, otherwise he sort of shrugs and pulls the points of his shirt collar up towards his ears — you have just been told, “I’ve heard enough, I’m not convinced, pull your head in . . .”

He was born in Aberdeen in Scotland, where his parents Jim and Yvonne ran a small pet food factory but they lived in a home-made caravan, built onto the back of a Bedford van. Tony realised the worth of a good education and managed to find a place in a good local school where his mates were from wealthy families.

One day he brought one of these mates home to the caravan and the next day the lad called him “gypsy” in front of the class. That hurt and the memory has stuck.

He worked part-time in the family business — it was hard and dirty work. He took over the least profitable and most unpleasant part of the business; rendering. This is where the unused parts of the animals that have been slaughtered for pet food are turned into more useful products, like tallow.

He quickly showed his ability for business by turning this loss-maker into a profitable sideline for his parents. But he didn’t think that this would be his long-term goal and a talk with a local accountant saw him buying a signwriting business from a deceased estate in Aberdeen.

“It was cheap enough and while I didn’t know anything about signwriting, the accountant convinced me that with Aberdeen being at the centre of the North Sea oil exploration boom at the time, it had plenty of potential.

“Well, he was absolutely right, I did pretty well at it and let me tell you this, if you are looking for a place to set up a business, look for where oil exploration is just starting. They have huge budgets.”

He used up all of his capital buying the business and when it came to pay his staff at the end of the first week, he had nothing left in the till.

“I couldn’t get any money from my parents, so I went back to see the accountant who had convinced me to buy the business. I think he was expecting me back because he heard me out, then wrote out a cheque that would cover my outgoings until I started getting money back in.”

This conversation high on Coronet Peak is splashed with anecdotes about incidents that have happened through life, through business and through his motor racing career. He enjoys telling a good yarn does Tony Quinn.

He took up motor racing because it appealed to him and he became successful at Formula Ford in Scotland.

“I thought I was pretty good but one day this guy who lived in Rome, but who sounded American, appeared. He was in an old and previously uncompetitive car that had been a midfield runner at best, but he showed us all what going quickly really was all about. He was Eddie Cheever . . . .”

Cheever’s pace convinced Quinn that he was not going to be World Champion and so he concentrated on his business. In the early eighties he decided to migrate to Perth in Western Australian. He had been told that there was extensive oil exploration just beginning off the coast of Western Australia and he was confident he’d be able to emulate his success in Scotland.

“I really had the signwriting business under control in Aberdeen and when we arrived in Perth, I looked in the Yellow Pages and saw page after page after page of advertisements for signwriters! I knew I was in a totally different environment. Australia was far more advanced in the world of signwriting than Scotland had been — so I took up a lawn mowing round. . . .”

Life in Western Australia was good, but a visit to New Zealand saw a change in direction.

“We flew into Auckland and as we landed I saw a dairy cow in a paddock and I felt a wave of nostalgia for the way things had been in Scotland, so we moved to Whangarei where I decided to get back into the pet food business. I eventually opened a rendering factory at Dargaville and it went very well.”

But he realised that Australia presented greater pet food opportunities, even though most Australians fed their pets dry food, as opposed to wet food, like dog rolls.

The success story of VIP Pet foods has been phenomenal. Arriving on the Gold Coast in 1994 Tony Quinn and his family not only persuaded supermarkets to stock wet pet food like dog rolls, but also to convince Australian pet owners to use it. But VIP also manufactures the more traditional dry pet food — dog biscuits.

VIP is now the third biggest pet food producer in Australia, with a growing export market. One of the benefits of moving back to Australia was, and this is a sensitive part of the story, the availability of the raw material — meat!

In New Zealand it was old, unwanted farm animals and horses. In Australia there were the growing problems with, erm, kangaroos that needed to be addressed There seems to be no slowing down the birth-rate of Kangaroos and Australia’s national emblem has multiplied to the position where Tony Quinn’s VIP pet foods has license to cull four million kangaroos a year.

“So far, we have taken no more than two million, but we are having a job finding shooters who want to take the job on. That’s surprising, because a bloke can make good money in a night’s shooting.”

While there is the potential for a heated emotional debate over the culling of kangaroos, it does seem that they are a prolific animal and stories abound about finding them in residential areas of large cities.

They are, apparently, in plague numbers. Offsetting any adverse publicity, VIP are the largest sponsor of a group that’s dedicated to saving the endangered bilby from extinction.

The VIP pet food empire is large, with shareholding in another pet food company in the USA and recently Quinn and his family bought the Australian chocolate and liquorice maker Darryl Lea after it went into receivership.

Moving with his customary speed and decisiveness Quinn and his son Klark have moved very quickly to restructure this business to bring it back into profitability. This includes closing some shops and building a new, large factory.

The purchase of Darryl Lea has made him a bit of a hero in the eyes of most Australians who looked on in disbelief as one of their most favourite brands looked like it might vanish before their eyes.

Besides business, there is the motor racing. Tony was lured back into the sport he had left behind in Scotland when a friend persuaded him to lease a Porsche for a Targa Tasmania. Although he found the Porsche hard work, he enjoyed the event and now he’s a regular competitor, a series owner, a team sponsor (DJR in the V8 Supercar Series) and about to become a circuit owner.

 

His list of successes in motorsport in long — but in New Zealand five wins in the Targa are stand out results — one in a Porsche and now four in the Nissan GT-R. He owned the Porsche Carrera Cup Series in Australia before selling it and then buying the troubled GT Series, which he has “fixed” and has turned it into one of the most highly, rated series in Australia.

He competes in his own series in an Aston Martin — from a garage filled with ten competition cars.

Normally a garage of thoroughbreds like these would require an army of “engineers”, but as is the Quinn way, there are just two here! The line-up of cars includes a McLaren MP4-12C, which is expected to appear at an open day at Highlands near Cromwell early next year driven by Craig Baird.

Life has certainly changed for Tony Quinn after he and his wife Christina arrived in Perth with two small children and a third on the way. Today there are four Quinn children as well as grandkids — and it’s obvious that “family” means much to him. His parents Jim and Yvonne are now also on the Gold Coast with them. It’s no secret that Tony Quinn was asked to take a look at Hampton Downs earlier this year with a view to buying it and easing some of the financial pressures there. Talks ended with both parties apart on the price but his interest in owning a circuit was piqued and he bought the partially developed Highlands near Cromwell.

Actually, the first question I had asked Tony Quinn after we shook hands and said hello as the cloud closed in up on Coronet Peak was — “The media is saying $20 million to complete Highlands, is that accurate?”

“Well, I never really wanted to talk about the cost, but the media has run with that figure. What happened was that after I visited here and decided to buy it, I said to my children and grandchildren — ‘I’m going to spend some of your heritage’, and I put aside $20 million Australian for the project. I’ve assured them that there will be no more, that’s the total budget for getting this project complete — after that, it must stand on its own feet.”

And, in the Quinn way of doing things, the speed with which Highlands is rushing towards completion is breathtaking. The people who Quinn bought Highland from — Ian Begg, Grant Aitken, Allan Dippie and Scott O’Donnell — didn’t just take their share of the purchase price and run, but have stayed on as enthusiastic consultants.

But Quinn has also employed key people for key posts. Taranaki man, Kevin O’Neill, who prepared the Nissan GT-R for the Targa events, is onsite at Cromwell, overseeing the construction process and expatriate Kiwi Mike Sentch was head-hunted as Operations Manager after working with Aussie V8 Supercar teams. These are exciting times at Cromwell.

But back on the top of Coronet Peak, the cloud closed in, the snow became heavier and it got colder. It was obvious the number of runs up the hill were coming to an end and I took the opportunity of a ride back down to my car where I had a thick jacket waiting for me. My time with Tony Quinn had been fascinating.

He’s a dark, haired, active, good looking man of 55 and while he obviously loves a yarn, he also has a mind that is constantly working, never at rest and when he makes a decision, mostly it stays made.

He’s not afraid to admit he’s wealthy and describes himself as “a pet food tycoon”. We’re all nosy when it comes to how much a wealthy person is worth. The Australian business media has variously estimated the worth of Tony Quinn and his family at between $194 and $400 million.

And the secret of amassing that sort of fortune since moving to the Gold Coast in 1994? Be decisive, work hard, have fun and keep it in the family.