Twenty years ago Sheridan Lee wandered, “aimlessly”, up and down the east coast of America calling fund managers to try to represent them in Australia. “All I lacked was a business plan and experience,” she said at her company’s big birthday bash last week. “I knew before Donald Trump did that that was a potentially winning strategy.”
The Shed Enterprises 20th anniversary party, a glittering event held in the Members Pavilion at the Sydney Cricket Ground on November 22, attracted about 250 friends and colleagues. Lee, the longest-surviving and arguably most successful third-party marketer in Australia and New Zealand, has a lot of friends.
Her speech to the assembled throng is worth documenting. It actually traces the history of funds management in this country and our interaction with the rest of the world, particularly those Americans from the east coast.
In 1996, as Peter Dorrian, one of the many friends, said in his opening remarks, Sheridan was coming off the back of a BDM role at what became UBS Asset Management followed by a similar position at was then Alliance Capital. And then there was a short-lived tempestuous business relationship with Tony Tuohey, which ended in court, if not tears.
As he looked around the hallowed room, where Bradman strode out to rescue Australia from the depths of despair so many times in the 1930s and 1940s, Dorrian recalled the famous words of another great cricketer, Keith Miller. Miller, possibly Australia’s best-ever all-rounder, was once asked about the stresses and strains of playing international cricket. He allegedly responded with words to the effect: “That’s nothing. Stress is having a Messerschmitt up your arse at 20,000 feet”. He was a fighter pilot during WWII.
Musing about what it could have been in 1996 to prompt her to start her own business, Dorrian suggested it may have been the surge in business confidence generally which followed the defeat of Paul Keating and dawn of the Howard era. Lee is a staunch Labor Party supporter while Dorrian is a member of the Liberal Party.
“Sadly our local member [for Wentworth – Malcolm Turnbull] could not be here tonight,” Dorrian said, “but we do have the person who could have been – Evan Hughes [another friend, art collector and member of the Shed Enterprises team who was the Opposition candidate at the last election]. Given Malcolm’s performance post-election maybe he would have liked Evan to have tried a bit harder.”
Similarly putting the funds management world into perspective, Lee said that Shed’s success was a testament to what that famous and insightful philosopher Woody Allen once said: “80 per cent of life is about turning up.” The Shed success is about her stamina, to be sure, but also about her own insights, picking the twists and turns in the Australian funds management landscape over two decades.
“For the few people in this room who still don’t know what we do, we peddle hope,” she said. “Running a small business is in many ways a high-wire act. There are so few opportunities to stop and smell the coffee or to thank the many people who have helped you along the way. I’d like to attempt to do that now… it could take some time.”
One of those helpers is another good friend of hers, Les Fallick, who wanted it to be known that “I was big in the 80s”. Why he wanted that known remains unclear.
Fallick told the audience that the one word which best described Sheridan was “indefatigable”. He said: “She is one of the great survivors . She survived working for [this newsletter’s editor] Greg Bright, working with Tony Tuohey, the wrath of [the late] Mavis Robertson and the indifference of Elena Rubin, and even today she is surviving having hired John Brakey [a consultant to Shed Enterprises].”
She is an economist, journalist, businesswoman, art collector, mentor, golfer, wife and daughter, he said. And she is great at all those roles.
“She throws a good party, travels well, is great at friendships, generous to a fault, and is good to her mum. She can also hold her liquor, except Martinis,” Fallick said.
Lee said that Dorrian, the retired former head of retail marketing at PIMCO, and Fallick, the former owner of placement agency Principle Advisory Services, “don’t get out on the podium much these days so the least I could do is let them speak tonight. And they didn’t let me down… They are my bright stars and may they always shine.”
Lee was the first editor of ‘Super Review’ magazine in 1986, having been employed a year earlier to work on the film industry magazine ‘Encore’. I was the publisher of both.
“Sadly, Greg [Bright] didn’t know a lot about his new field of endeavour either – I think it was the blind leading the blind,” she said. “So, while terms like ‘portability’ become somewhat self evident in context, terms like ‘vesting’ are another story. And we didn’t know anybody. So, I’d like to belatedly thank: John Crocker [a former partner at the old Towers Perrin], Russell Mason [then at Prudential and now at Deloitte] Jon Buckeridge [an actuary and fund manager], Gerard Noonan [former editor of the Australian Financial review and now chair of ACSI and Media Super], even Kieran Kelly [another former Australian Financial Review journalist who became managing director of the listed Investor Info, now owned by Momentum Publishing], Noel Davis, [a barrister and super expert], the EquitiLink ‘twins’ {Brian Sherman and Lawrence Freedman], and Graham Morrow [an entrepreneurial asset consultant whose company went broke].”
Lee thanked Peter White, a PR consultant, now with Shed Media, for introducing her to Dominguez, Barry, Samuel and Montague – now UBS Asset Management – in the early 1990s. “It really was my own Trumpian moment,” she said. “I parlayed ambition, ignorance, exaggeration and more inexperience into a bloody good job.”
Peter Hendricks, another colourful character, recruited her across to Alliance Capital where she was able to “travel the world and pick the eyes out of the best investment strategies in the group and bring them to the unsuspecting investor public in Australia… I’d especially like to thank [Hendricks] for the redundancy two years later which gave me the time, money and chutzpah to set up Shed.”
She set up the precursor to Shed with Tony Tuohey, for whom she would be “forever grateful for teaching me some life lessons. Tony used to say: ‘never complain, never explain’. He was the master of providing all assistance possible short of actual help. He understood the art of the deal and the notion that an appearance in the Federal Court was a rite of passage, a coming of age in one’s business life, a pre-requisite in small business.”
Shed recruited Lachlan Douglas, who went on to be a director of Principle too, and took on Bill Ireland’s Challenger as a PR client, forming what is now a separate company, Shed Media. She also lured Philippa Honner, the major shareholder in the largest specialist PR firm in Australian funds management, to run that business and Nicholas Way, with whom she’d worked briefly at ‘BRW’ magazine. Way remains a shareholder and director of Shed Media.
But funds management was always where the money was; not media. Shed Enterprises thrived with clients such as private equity manager Adveq and bond manager GAM. Earlier, Shed had brought the great global manager Bridgewater to Australia and the talented, but troubled, Acadian.
The first asset consultant and wholesale investor to sign a big cheque for Shed was Mark Thomas, the main shareholder in the former van Eyk Research, who invested with European private equity fund of funds Adveq. Thomas remains an entrepreneur but has moved into real estate following the demise of van Eyk last year. He provides valuable advice, part-time, on Shed’s retail strategies, Lee said.
“I’d like to thank my family too, of course, many of whom work for Shed,” she said. “Don’t knock nepotism. It’s worked for the Lowys and the Murdochs and, dare I say it, the Trumps.”
Lee said there would always be opportunities in the industry but firms like Shed had to remain curious and try to turn those opportunities to their advantage.
“Who knows? We, together, might have even enhanced the quality of life of a superannuation member in their retirement,” she said.
Lee announced the formation of the Frank Lee Foundation, in honour of her late father. It was still early stages, she said, but she was working with friends on the foundation’s charter, including Dorrian, Fallick, John Brakey and Melda Donnelly.
“The foundation will mean that I get to work with people I like in the memory of someone I love to, hopefully, give back a little. We have done pretty well. With a little help from my friends. Love youse all.”
And why the SCG? Sandy (Oliver) Morgan, Sheridan’s partner of 20 years, is a former fast bowler for Queensland. The pair still love their cricket.
– Greg Bright
