The new memoir No Pit Stops by entrepreneur Grant Baker tells the story of an interesting man gone deadly dull. Stop reading when you get to the second half of his book. There are only two things of note after he joins forces with 42 Below. I liked this: “Sometimes we pushed the boat out too far. One time, we had to supply to someone a prospectus that conveyed what the company was like and its values. Geoff [Ross, founder of the vodka empire] got the women in the office stripped down to their underwear and draped over my desk, to create the shots to furnish this document. The same level of political correctness didn’t exist then as it does now.” Quite. I liked this even more: “Bacardi’s offer of 77 cents per share put the value of 42 Below at $138 million.” Woah.
The rest of his story is about the rich getting richer. Who cares? It’s the getting of riches that animate the opening 100 or so pages, and make the first half of No Pit Stops a thoroughly engaging and sometimes thrilling read. It’s a pilgrim’s progress, as Baker writes of his quest in search of the holiest of all grails: fabulous wealth. What did your parents talk about around the kitchen table? Baker gives us a glimpse of his household: “In my family growing up, finances were an open conversation. Money coloured almost everything we did.”
He provides a kind of synopsis of his book and life in the Introduction. He writes, “In my young days, I learnt about high-pressure sales and measurable goals with Xerox. I moved to Papua New Guinea to try to overcome dire financial straits. I took the leap into entrepreneurship with Blue Star and Empower. Then we head towards the iconic 42 Below….and my dealings with cancer that happened around the same time. And as we get to more recent years, I focus on The Business Bakery, Trilogy, Turners.”
Lost me at “the iconic 42 Below”—what a boring brand, with its boring logo and its boring liquid gloop—but had me at “measurable goals with Xerox”. No More Pit Stops may be the finest book ever written about photocopiers.
This passage is a New Zealand social-realism classic. “Xerox, as a business and brand, was riding high. Photocopiers were big-ticket purchases – the top-of-the-line machines were the size of a small car and could cost up to $200,000. It was the time when innovative office products, like electronic typewriters replete with memory storage, were all the rage, and every secretary was begging her boss for one. If you were going to play in this game, Xerox was the place to be. The company dominated the market, and was the safe, obvious choice for any business. Buying a Xerox product was like buying a computer from IBM – no one would question your decision. Landing the job there in 1982 had been a boon.”
I didn’t dare hope to read a better passage in No Pit Stops. But he ups the ante only a few pages later with a scene from the sales floor at Xerox. This is Baker as Leonardo di Caprio in The Wolf of Wall Street (“Sell me this pen!”), as Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross (“It’s fuck or walk!”)—this isn’t death of a salesman, this is the big swinging dick life of a salesman, and Baker takes you there, evoking 1980s greed and materialism as vividly as Bret Easton Ellis in his 1991 masterpiece, American Psycho. He writes, “Our sales team in Hamilton operated out of a large, open-plan space, and it was often brutal. Every call you made, every word you said, could be heard by everyone. And we were all men, all gung-ho, with egos to match. I’d be deep in a sales call when one of the other guys would spin his chair around and mime slitting his throat – a universally understood gesture to imply that I’d blown it. He knew, and I knew too: I’d killed that sale. The competition was fierce, and the pressure was high. Being surrounded by these guys – the best in the business – forced you to raise your game. You had to lose your inhibitions fast and learn to perform under pressure.”
Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is fantastic writing. It even comes with a poignant denouement. This is Baker as David Brent from The Office, in his salad days at Wernham Hogg: “Our Hamilton team consistently outperformed the Auckland sales guys, making us the best in the country.”
Hooray for Hamilton, and yay for Baker. You cheer for him. You want the best for him. Go, Kiwi, go. The lights are on, but is there anyone at home? It’s an impersonal book. Note the placement of the end of his marriage as just one damned thing after another in this passage: “I had managed to leverage myself into four houses. I was in my early twenties, married to my first wife, and it had seemed like there was nothing but opportunity ahead of me. The market was good and there was money to be made. For a while, anyway. Then interest rates shot up, my wife and I separated, and all the money I’d made turned to less than nothing.”
“First wife”, “wife”…He takes a job with Remington in Papua New Guinea, and busts out the nameless possessive pronoun again. “With my first wife, I’d had a daughter, who was now two years old. Donna and I were living nearby and saw Alexandra regularly. An overseas move would disrupt that and be a big change. It was incredibly difficult to make the choice that saw us avoid financial ruin. But I had to do what I had to do. We would have loved to have taken her with us, but that wasn’t possible.”
He got back on his feet. He moved back to New Zealand. He found work at Telecom. “It was three weeks away from privatising. This was a huge deal. The government believed that going private would introduce market competition and therefore reduce costs and improve quality for Kiwis… But it would also lead to job losses.” Baker is put in charge of restructuring with another guy. “Our shared task was to shrink the organisation. Where they could have had one person, Telecom had employed three…We were charged with going around the country and setting up a labour force that was much leaner than the one we’d had.” This is Baker as George Clooney in Up In the Air, a comedy about corporate downsizing; this is Rogernomics in action, throwing people out of work, with nary an apology or sense of shame.
It was around about then that I wondered whether Baker was just another business asshole. Certainly he takes himself very seriously. He writes in the Introduction, “The seemingly impossible can happen – and did happen. Not just once, but many times too. And it happened because I had an impossible dream and I went after it.” Oh for God’s sake. Great artists and athletes talk about achieving their dreams. Baker sold photocopiers and alcohol. It seems to have driven him insane. He raves, “When we succeed in business, we don’t just create jobs, drive innovation, and support the economy, we also contribute to a higher standard of living for everyone. We can afford to live the lives we deserve – including, for me, getting to live out my dreams behind the wheel of some stunning and special cars.” A lot of the book is about owning cars. I didn’t read a single page in No Pit Stops about owning cars.
His philosophy is a single bang on an old drum. “Let’s all start dreaming impossible dreams and going after them.” Oh let’s not. A gargoyle of success and failure haunts No Pit Stops: Eric Watson, last heard of charged with insider trading in the US. They first cross paths at Xerox. He talks Baker into packing in his job at Telecom, and joining him as a partner at Blue Star. “Despite the fact that we were about to bring a baby into the world, I resigned from Telecom; sold our townhouse in Takapuna, a block of flats in Hamilton, and my Jag; and invested all we had into this new move. Blue Star was turning over $12 million at that point, and my investment bought me seven percent of the company.”
What was Watson like? Baker doesn’t have a single thing to say about him, but maybe there never really has been anything to say about Watson. I attended his wedding reception when he married Nicky Watson in 1999. It was held in a suite of rooms at the Heritage Hotel. Wedding singer Tina Cross warbled ‘Unforgettable’ for the wedding dance, which Watson performed by standing behind his bride and pressing himself against her. There was a lot of good alcohol and I was sick in a sink. I got talking to a rich guy over a line of speed, and asked him how he knew Watson. He said they had financial interests in common. “Eric doesn’t really have friends,” he said. “Most everyone here is a business associate.”
Back to Baker’s early days at Blue Star. He had pinned his hopes on Watson, made the gamble that would change his life. But the pilgrim’s progress was slow. “Soon we were living in half of a grotty rental property in Herne Bay – an old place that had been split into two flats. I was driving a Ford Telstar in the meantime. It was a bit of a disappointment, and I certainly no longer felt like a winner.” Again, this is good writing, with solid detail; Baker then adds dialogue, in a scene far more charged than many New Zealand writers will ever create. (I’m reminded that the only New Zealand writer who has had the first clue of life at the top of the corporate world was that amazing literary conceptualist Leigh Davis. When he joined merchant wankers Fay, Richwhite, one of his best friends, a well-known novelist and poet of considerable intellectual repute, never spoke to Davis again.) Baker sets his scene on a downtown Auckland street, where millions of people have trod back and forth, worrying about their next pay cheque; it’s where the Herald offices were until about 10 years ago, and our idea of high finance was buying the next round at the Shakespeare Tavern.
Baker writes, “I was walking back through town to our offices on Albert Street when Eric casually asked what he was paying me. It was about $150,000. ‘How on Earth can you live on that?’ Eric asked me, pointing out that I had Donna and a new baby to support at home. ‘OK, let’s make it $250,000 then,’ he added. And that’s how my income took a $100,000 leap in one afternoon.” Woah.
And then woah squared. Blue Star went from virtually nothing to a billion dollars in turnover. “I ended up with $14 million. The lesson for me was that fortune favours the brave. I was in my mid-thirties and had spent most of my life with very little, and now this.”
And now…nothing, really. He’d made it. The quest was over. Fabulous wealth was acquired. But the thrill had gone, at least from the pages of No Pit Stops, and there is little of substance or genuine excitement in his telling of the 42 Below story, and his other business ventures. He triumphs over bowel cancer. He collects more cars. He sits down to write his memoir, and the first half of it is a very entertaining record of a decent, ambitious, hard-working man for whom money seems to colour everything.
No Pit Stops by Grant Baker (Mary Egan Publishing, $38) is available in bookstores nationwide.
