Ash Hunter

Mebourne-based entrepreneur Ash Hunter is the owner of Just Magazines (which publishes Australia’s top car and motorcycle magazines, Just Cars and Just Bikes) and Hunterfive, an investment company that includes stakes in a record label, a Chinese glass factory and a property development business.

Hunter, who appeared on this year’s BRW Young Rich list with a fortune of $58 million, has just launched new websites for his Just Bikes and Just Cars publications as part of a new online push.

In this revealing interview he talks about diversification, surviving the downturn and how old and new media can coexist.

Ash, you really have got an old-fashioned conglomerate with different and quite varied interests. Was that on purpose or did good opportunities just come up?

Well, I guess on paper it looks a little bit confusing, but when we look at our ventures we have an area that is involved in media publishing, video production, music and all our web stuff that sits under the media umbrella.

Property is a traditional secure investment, standard type of investment. Our manufacturing actually came about from a need to learn more about China. And an opportunity did present itself to enter into a venture with some friendlies in China which then has expanded into a number in the food service area over there. But really it started as a way to learn about the Chinese market.

We find that you can only learn so much from study, it’s not until you actually jump in and have to sink or swim and it is not theoretical anymore, that you really learn how the government works, how the legal system works, why they have these wacky accounting systems, what you need to do to run a business – it has been a fantastic learning process. Also, it has provided us with some really interesting opportunities in the Asian market.

Is there more to come in China do you think?

Absolutely. Once you start to move overseas and you start to become comfortable with different markets, it is no different to moving to another state, town or city. If you understand the landscape and the market and you see opportunity you are prepared to play. I mean the more you travel, the smaller the world gets.

But really at the centre of all this as you said is the media business and quite a specific niche around automotive. I gather it was really a family business to start with.

Absolutely and it still has the same feel, the same nature to it. Auto is an area that was of a great interest to my dad – my dad loved cars. I’ve still got some of his model cars, his Matchbox cars he had as a kid.

He grew up reading The Age newspaper and the Motor Market. He used to dream about these cars in text form, but often he’d be flicking through reading the pages and you’d come across a car that he didn’t know what it was. So there was a Delage at one stage and he thought, what does a Delage look like? He said, wouldn’t it be great if there were pictures with these ads. And that’s really where the business stemmed from, his desire to dream about cars.

Over the years I started a photo classified magazine in trucks, Deals on Wheels, started Trader Boat, started Unique Cars, all those titles, really out of a desire out of seeing pictures of things for sale.

We’ve been very focused on niches. We’re not interested in every late model car out there. Modern cars are a commodity. There’s a thousand of the same model at about the same price, they’re not something that most people get passionate about, they are functional. Whereas collectable cars are something that has an active, vibrant community surrounding it. We have our byline just under our masthead which says: ‘Buy, Sell, Dream’. That’s what it’s all about with these niche markets; it’s about buying, selling and dreaming.

You have these tight knit little communities that love to buy, sell, dream. They get together at events, they read the magazine, they talk to their mates. You end up with these great little communities.

And I guess they’re not all actually in the market at that time to buy something. A lot of it’s just that wish to look at nice cars.

Absolutely, you’re not only going to buy the magazine because you’re going to buy a car this month, although every person that buys it is a buyer or seller at a point in time. The great thing is they remain active in the market on a monthly basis by reading the magazine or going online. So I guess looking at these niches, while they are these tight little niches in the auto space, you put enough of these niches together, it actually does involve quite large communities. I mean Just Cars is about collectable cars but it is the largest selling car magazine in the country. Just Bikes is the largest motorcycle mag in the country as well and I think they are both in the top 50 sellers in the country.

It’s been a pretty difficult year for a lot of media companies in the last 12 months, how has that affected you?

Sales of the magazines have remained very, very strong and I think part of that is that our products are a cheap dream – I mean we’re talking about less than five bucks here to dream.

In the advertising front, from October last year we had a definite and pronounced fall in advertising revenue but we changed our focus at that point as well. So instead of measuring our dollars, we removed everyone’s revenue targets and started measuring customers. So we made sure we focused on looking after our customers, designing the appropriate package. So we spent our time trying to make sure that instead of extracting as much money as we could – which has never been our focus – to making sure we were a useful part, an important part of their business. And we’ve found the result of doing that has really allowed us to maintain good revenue figures for the ’09 year but also set us up for 2010.