KEY POINTS:
When I ask Richard Izard if he's an angel investor, a sound suspiciously like a guffaw emanates from his belly.
"Hell no, I like profit," he chuckles, with genuine amusement.
Profit is something the 74-year-old entrepreneur knows a bit about. He also knows a fair bit about its polar opposites - loss, lack of cash flow and debt up to the eyeballs.
In the late 1980s he employed more than 100 people in three Northland saw-blade factories and exported 80 per cent of his production to the United States.
By 1993 he had sold all his interests in the business for such a sum that he and his wife, Patience, sat on a beach in Fiji "in a state of shock about the amount of money we'd come into".
But in 1978 the couple were flat broke, trying to sell sheepskin carseat covers in California. Their visiting 21-year-old son Bill and his mate had to help them fill the pantry.
These days Izard, an investor, classic car enthusiast and passionate pilot - he owns three planes and has an airstrip on his Warkworth farm - comes in on the Rich List at 130 equal, with an estimated fortune of $65 million.
He claims to hate being on the list. "When that damn thing's published every year, for about two months I get phone calls, some of them quite abusive."
But is it accurate? "They're way out. I've done a lot better than what they think," he grins.
Despite his supposed embarrassment at the lauding of his financial success, Izard has agreed to a book about his fluctuating fortunes.
Stress and Enterprise, by Paul Goldsmith - the author of biographies of Don Brash, John Banks and the Myers family - is the tale of a true-blue, Kiwi self-made man.
Izard attended Wanganui Collegiate but was not particularly academic. He left school at 15 and seemed destined to follow the family tradition of farming. But he yearned for more entrepreneurial challenges.
When an accident at 22 put paid to the physical demands of farming, Izard looked for ways to make a living out of his first love - cars.
He raced, bought and sold them, and went to England to train at Standard-Triumph Motors' head office in Coventry. At one point he lied and said he could speak German to land a job as a sales rep for the company in Eastern Europe.
In 1964, with family help, he bought into a car dealership in Te Awamutu.
Despite heavy restrictions at the time on the number of new cars that could be sold, Izard worked the regulations and built up the business.
But Izard Motors was never hugely profitable, and if there was ever any money in the business Izard spent it - including buying a small farm and a plane.
Nevertheless, in 1974 he sold Izard Motors for a tidy $93,000, and considered himself moderately wealthy.
The next few years were spent in a disastrous search for a new venture.
Businesses in fibreglass outdoor furniture, hair ornaments and breeding exotic cattle failed, and the Izards' nest egg dwindled away.
They got an introduction into selling sheepskin carseat covers in the United States and struggled, often desperately, in California for two years. But Izard had learned valuable lessons about doing business in America, and when he met wealthy entrepreneur Fred Gunzner in 1978, the course of his life changed.
Gunzner pioneered the manufacture of tungsten carbide tipped saw-blades. At the time many saw-blades were made from one flat piece of metal with the teeth cut out around the edge. To stay sharp the metal had to be good quality and was therefore expensive for the average DIY-er to buy.
Little tips of tungsten carbide are second only to diamonds in hardness, and blades made in this way were considerably cheaper.
In 1979 Gunzner and Izard registered Acu-Edge Ltd in New Zealand. With export incentives from the Muldoon Government, a loan from the Development Finance Corporation and more family help, Izard set up a little factory in Wellsford putting tips on the blank blades Gunzner supplied and then shipping them back to North America.
The travails of this time setting up a business Izard knew nothing about make entertaining reading.
He had to invent his own process for sticking the tips on, which in the beginning was low-tech and dangerous. There were battles with New Zealand Customs and his bankers. For the first couple of years Acu-Edge was always short of cash and trading literally on the edge.
"If I wasn't a born-and-bred diehard Kiwi, I would have thrown it away and got out," Izard says now. "I was very close to walking a couple of times."
But by 1984 he had bought Gunzner out - craftily putting the purchase price in New Zealand dollars, when his partner had assumed a US currency deal - and his net profit rose to $1.4 million.
The company's fortunes ebbed and flowed, but Izard stayed competitive with the constant discovery of new tricks and small design improvements.
His eventual use and automation of resistance brazing, a much more efficient method of fixing on the tungsten carbide tips, is a prime example of this and of Izard'sself-described bloody-mindedness.
Everyone, from the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research down, had told him it couldn't be done.
It took him five years, but Izard did it. Each machine could do the work of six people and improved the quality of the product out of sight. "I refuse to take no for an answer, until I know why that 'no' is there," he says.
In 1991, after a decade of hard slog, Izard wanted out and found a willing buyer in the Irwin Company of Wilmington, Ohio.
The sale price is undisclosed but was apparently within Izard's desired range of $8 million to $15 million.
Irwin was to buy him out over five years, but in 1993 it merged with a Nebraska company, and Izard suddenly found his shares were worth three times what he had thought. He walked away with a fortune.
Profitable investments in steel trader Vulcan Steel and property company Pernik Investments followed.
Nowadays he's cashed up but invests where he sees promise - although in the current global environment he's treading cautiously.
He has a share in amphibious boats manufacturer Sealegs: "That company's going to be watched very closely by some of the big boys internationally."
He also owns "a nice chunk of Queen St". After years of managing staff, now he likes to invest in "things that can't talk back at me".
But still not everything turns to gold. He reckons he's lost a couple of million on Alpha Aviation, the Waikato plane manufacturer that went into liquidation in January.
Losing money doesn't get any more palatable with wealth or age, he says. "But I never dwell on it. If you dwell on it you'll feel sorry for yourself, you'll lose more money and you'll go on downhill."
While he puts his business success down to being "just bloody determined", Izard says knowing when to pull out is also key.
"I'll back off. I can do a u-turn quicker than you've ever seen.
"People are very inclined to want to throw good money after bad ... dig themselves a big hole. I prefer to have a little hole and get the hell out of it."
Auckland QC Tony Molloy, with whom Izard bought and sold wine at one point, was staggered to discover the saw-blades he had been using to build bookshelves were made in Izard's Wellsford factory.
"I couldn't think of anyone else for many years who matched that performance from New Zealand," Molloy says.
Izard's old friends agree his success can be sheeted back to his sheer enthusiasm and drive.
"If he sees something that looks good, he will pull out all the stops to have a crack at it," says Ken Castleton, a farming friend from Te Awamutu days.
Izard's feisty nature is also renowned - he accepts his nickname at the saw-blade factory was "thunder guts". His old schoolfriend Bob Burgess says nature has been part of his success, but has been his downfall at times.
"Not everybody takes to him, of course, when he carries on, but if you've known him as long as we have, we just don't take any notice."
In the Goldsmith book, Wayne Boyd - now chairman of Telecom, but a financial adviser to Izard for many years - puts it thus: "There was plenty of bluster and drama, but it was clear he had remarkable charm and it was this that enabled him to get along with people."
Stress and Enterprise,
by Paul Goldsmith
David Ling Publishing
$39.99
RICHARD WILLIAM VINCENT IZARD
Investor
Born: Wanganui, 1934.
Lives: Springhill farm, Rodney District.
Family: Married to Patience for 52 years. Has a son Bill, 51, and daughter Philippa, 49.
Business career: Built up the Wellsford tungsten carbide saw tips business Acu-Edge, later called Izard Irwin.
