KEY POINTS:
Mike Pero can recite his life story with almost no prompting these days.
He must have told the classic rags-to-riches tale hundreds of times over the years. And in any case, it's been recorded for posterity in his ghost-written autobiography, Mike Pero: Motorbikes to Mortgages.
His first job after leaving school at 16 was in a cardboard factory, so things improved a lot when he decided to become a motorbike mechanic. From there he got into motorcycle racing, where his natural flair saw him crowned New Zealand road race champion six times in the 350cc and 500cc classes.
But he decided there had to be more to life than blue-collar work, and became a trainee manager at Woolworths. That led to a job as a sales rep for Hansells.
"I did that for a year and got the company car. Then someone came along and offered me the opportunity to join the life insurance industry. He said I'd double my income. Well, that appealed, although I didn't double it - I almost quadrupled it."
Pero attributes his success in sales to his background as a sportsman. Motorcycle racing required reliability, consistency, working hard, training hard, and dealing with sponsors - all useful skills in sales.
"I've seen that over my lifetime - people who have extra energy in a particular field can cross-credit to business. There's a more than 50 per cent likelihood, I think, that someone who's good at sport, athletics or art or whatever it is, can transfer those disciplines to business."
Back in 1986, when the average wage was less than $30,000, Pero was earning well over $100,000 a year as an agent for what was then known as Provident Life (now Vero).
In 1987 the company offered him golden handcuffs. If he agreed to stay, they would lend him almost a quarter of a million dollars interest-free to invest in anything he liked. Some of his colleagues jumped at the chance to invest in the sharemarket, which at the time was going crazy. Pero admits he bought a few shares himself in the notorious Ariadne, but claims that even then, he realised it was all too good to be true.
He declined the offer and ended up taking a break to pursue his love of flying.
Like many pilots, Pero was hooked the first time he took to the air at a local aero club scholarship competition. His first job as a commercial pilot was with Pacifica Air, flying between Christchurch and Wanaka. He also flew for Mt Cook Airline, and was on the list for an interview at Air New Zealand, but missed out when the company hit turbulence and laid off staff.
Pero briefly went back to selling life insurance, but amid the stress of managing his career, his marriage fell apart.
All his pilot's training had been at his own expense, so by the time he was single again he had nothing to show for his hard work, other than a car and $6000 in cash.
To start Mike Pero Mortgage Services in 1991, he was forced to rely on his credit cards. "I used my Visa card to pay my Mastercard to pay my American Express. It was a money-go-round to survive."
The rest, we all know.
At the time, banks shut their doors at 4.30pm and refused to open at weekends. Pero was happy to work seven days a week, so he was available to real estate agents who were selling homes at weekends.
All the major banks eventually came on board, excited by the boost in sales they were experiencing through the use of brokers.
"We couldn't do anything wrong, it seemed. We were well received by our customers. We were seen as the Robin Hoods out there - not robbing banks, but showing people other options and making it easier for people to get a home loan."
He acknowledges that banks have since vastly improved their service, and that there was a degree of luck in his timing.
"It's a bit like rugby: being in the right place, and having everything set up to score a try. For me it was being at the right place, at the right time, and it was relatively easy, I thought."
That said, others have copied his formula with less success, he notes.
Pero is quick to remark "you'd better not print that" when anything slips out that he thinks might reflect badly on someone, but his antipathy for Adam Parore is already on the record.
"Maybe the idea was good, but the personality certainly wasn't," he chuckles of his rival. "I don't know the guy well, but he seems to put his foot in it every time he opens his mouth."
When it came to selling out, his timing was perfect. He had sold half the business to South Canterbury Finance in 1996. Eight years later, he bought it back again.
"I was genuinely settled in for the long haul and then along came a merchant banker. He indicated he had a buyer. I said it wasn't for sale. He said, `This is the figure', and I said, `When do we meet him?' We concluded a multimillion-dollar deal."
The merchant banker was former Ernst & Young partner Tim Howe, who has since co-founded private equity firm Ocean Partners, which is also an investor in Pero's latest enterprise, Flight Experience.
Pero notes that Christchurch businessman George Gould, who bought Mike Pero Mortgages and took it public, made as much money out of it in a few months as Pero made in several years.
"Some people felt cheated, but George did a damn good job. On average, everyone did far better than they could have done."
These days it is a private company again, having been bought out by Liberty Financial and NZ Finance Holdings. Pero, one of only a handful of Kiwi one-man brands, remains a director, and insists he's still passionate about the business.
"It would be fair to say we've taken the same hit that all the banks have, and all the real estate agents, and the whole industry," he admits. "I think it's performing at 60 per cent on average over the last six months, so everyone is down and that's life."
But is it now a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, given the current economic turmoil, and the moves by banks to slash broker commissions long before the sub-prime monster reared its ugly head? The company, after all, is on to its third chief executive in less than a year.
Pero won't have a bar of it.
"There's absolutely no doubt the industry will turn, it's just a matter of when."
Which is almost certainly true. But you can't help wondering whether such optimism is genuine, given his public pronouncements when he quit regional airline Origin Pacific in 2005.
At the time, Pero explained his exit by saying he was confident Origin had become a "viable" business. He later confessed to the Herald he had in fact quit out of frustration, as the company was in a steep nosedive it had no hope of recovering from.
Pero's excuse is that he didn't want to be blamed for any premature crash landing. In anyone else, this might be regarded as unconscionable, but he somehow got away with it.
It's unsurprising, perhaps, that someone who excelled at selling life insurance seems to have accumulated so much public goodwill. Yet Pero appears to have an almost naive quality that's too guileless to be pure practised charm. He seems particularly wary of Auckland, for example, with its world-class traffic and its residents who spend far too much money on goodness knows what.
And he gushes about a recent encounter with former corporate titan Hugh Fletcher, at an industry dinner. Pero was genuinely thrilled to be seated next to Fletcher, who observed that running a multinational with all its built-in infrastructure was probably easier than trying to keep an SME afloat.
"It was a very interesting conversation. And it's true - small to medium businesses are more challenging. You've got to dance like a boxer really, on your feet, because things can turn and you don't have the resources to fall back on like an Air NZ or Carter Holt or Fletchers has."
The closest he gets to cynicism is when he insists he doesn't lead a lavish lifestyle, "thanks to the GST rule". For those of you who are still on your first marriage, that's the rule that says by your third marriage, you're down to 12.5 per cent of your original income (half of 100 per cent being 50 per cent, and half of 50 per cent being 25 per cent, and so on).
Pero is open about why his first two marriages failed. The first one, which started when he was just 21, was largely due to the antisocial nature of flying as a career, he says. The second was due to "I guess, all the commercial pressures" he was facing at the time, including his investment in Origin Pacific.
Marriage number three is due to take place in February, and he's determined that this one will last.
"It's different this time. In any case, I'm running out of excuses," he grins.
