Mark Powell might have barely scraped through School Certificate, but his ambition saw him working on the second computer in New Zealand. Now, at nearly 78, he's a consultant with a penchant for throwing heavy objects. He explains why his finances have involved good timing but not necessarily good luck.
I moved into a retirement home in February. My wife died two years ago and I don’t like being lonely so it wasn’t a hard decision. The grandkids like staying here because there’s a heated pool and I can go around on Saturdays and Sundays and watch them play sport.
We had a ton of stuff – every exercise book our kids had from the time they started school. I sold a lot and I went to the op shop twice a week. It was good to get rid of it. It was part of the healing process.
I grew up in poverty. My father worked at the Post Office and we lived in Ponsonby, which wasn't the posh place it is these days. We lived at my grandmother's house, six kids and three adults. I was a scallywag. I got up to all sorts.
I worked every school holiday from the time I was in intermediate school. I was a telegram boy. Back then there were the brothels run by Flora McKenzie and Anna Hoffman. We used to take the cablegrams from the ships: Dear Anna, I'm going to be arriving in three days’ time, can I see you at 3 o’clock? That was good fun.
Then I worked in a handyman centre and when I got my driver’s licence at 15 the boss said, you’re now a delivery driver. Back then if a job didn’t work out, you could walk down the street and get a new one.
I met my wife Chris in Wellington at a party at my flat. She thought I was terrible because I had a girl staying there. But a couple of weeks afterwards we bumped into each other and started going out. She’d done two years of teacher training and was in sole charge of a class at 19. I was working for the Post Office but it was boring as hell.
This potential job came up in 1967, operator of the second computer in New Zealand. It was as big as a whole room and it had magnetic tape drives for storage. They had 8000 people applying for eight jobs.
Later I asked the man who interviewed me, why did he pick me? I’d only just scraped through school certificate. He said he was after people with ambition. Because I’d gone to night school to try and get university entrance. He said, think about your co-workers: Peter, who was a good soccer player. Kevin, who was a cyclist for New Zealand. People used to think we were whiz kids. But I’d only just got school cert.
After that I worked for LD Nathan because they got their new computer. I’d just turned 21 and was earning more than my father. I never budgeted. I spent money and if I didn't have any, I couldn't spend it. And I probably frittered quite a bit of it away. I used to get a different car every six months – all beat-up jalopies, but still.
We built our house and that was a big investment. They had State Advances, where the government lent you money if you earned less than $5000 a year. There was a guy who used to do financial advice in the paper called Buck Pound. His thing was, never get rid of your State Advances loan because (the interest is) only 2.5%. But one day, we decided we had enough money to wipe out our mortgage, so that's what we did, even though it was against Buck Pound’s advice.
By the early 1990s I was a salesman for Telecom Repair Services. My new boss decided I was earning too much money so he changed the commission scheme. To incentivise me to sell more, my commission would go from 3% to 5% once I got over a certain threshold. He proudly told his buddies he’d outfoxed me. What he didn't know was that I’d just made a million-dollar deal in Fiji.
Back then, only 8% of people n Fiji had a telephone in their house and relied on call boxes but they were always getting robbed. I had a meeting a year before with the general manager of Telecom Fiji. The Commonwealth Games were on in Auckland and I said, we've got this marvellous thing, prepaid telephone cards. A year later, we installed the first of the prepaid phone systems in Fiji, which meant I had to go there every six weeks for two years, so sad!
When the deal went through my boss’s heart fell through his feet because he knew I was going get to get 5% which was more than his wage.
After a series of jobs as a software developer, I was asked to attend a meeting to discuss something thing called RFID, radio frequency identification. They wanted to track the movement of livestock animals. I was in a small team that developed a system over nearly a year. When the funder came in for a demo, he said it’s precisely what I asked for but it’s never going to work.
What we had done well was to make reader technology, so he financed us again to develop a reader. Long story short, we became known as the best reader manufacturer for livestock in the world.
I couldn't retire at 65. People kept asking me to do things so I started a business consultancy. A job doesn't have pay well, it just has to be interesting.
I go the gym. I’m a firm believer in use it or lose it. One of my sons got me a discus for my 65th birthday. Because when they did discus in Athletics as teenagers, I used to like chucking it around as well.
I went along to a ‘give it a go’ day at Auckland Masters Athletics. I was watching the hammer throw and thought ‘I can't do that’ so I asked the official to scratch me off the list of competitors. But a woman named Anne Goulter, a hammer thrower, stopped the competition and gave me instructions. Then I learned how to throw javelin. I've been doing it since I was 65 and I’m now almost 78.
Alcohol has never played a big part in my life. One of the first times I travelled for business, I went down to the bar and saw all these guys with big pot bellies, leaning up against the bar, ties undone, telling war stories about the sale they’d made that day. I thought, I don’t want to be that guy.
Chris and I decided way back that our sons would get most of our inheritance before we die. When we first moved into our house, if our parents could have afforded to give us $1000, we would have been over the moon. But I also think it’s good to feel a bit of pain financially.
It was fortuitous that I happened to be in the right place at the right time and took opportunities where I saw them. It meant I had to change jobs frequently otherwise you get stuck doing the same thing. But I can’t say luck. You make your own luck.
As told to Julie Hill.
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