How to Build a Business Others Want to Buy

INTRODUCTION

I will never forget Friday, 10 March 1989. I had just got home from school and was about to go kayaking. Mum was in the kitchen cooking dinner. My brother was in the garage fixing his bike. My sister was in the lounge watching Happy Days, which was an ironic viewing choice, considering what was about to happen.

I heard footsteps crunch on our gravel driveway. It wasn't Dad. He would never be home this early. It probably wasn't a visitor either. We didn't get many of those. We lived at the bottom of a long, steep, unsealed road nestled deep inside the darkened forest of the Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, around 30 kilometres north of Sydney. The little street we lived on was so narrow you had to do a seven-point turn just to reverse direction.

The visitors we did get were often architectural boffins from a New York design magazine or a judge from the Royal Institute of Architects having a sticky-beak at our house. Dad spent seven years designing and building it. He was one of Australia's foremost architects and specialised in creating complicated structures made from concrete, steel and glass for the rich and famous. Take a look at any of the riverfront mansions dotted along the foreshore of the Hawkesbury River—the ones with multiple levels, unusual roof lines or those perched precariously on the side of a sandstone cliff—and odds are my dad designed it.

Who knew Australia had sheriffs?

Our riverfront home was extraordinary. It spanned 11 levels, had five ...