Hi, Dave here, and welcome to another edition of Up Close & Personal.
In this session I have the pleasure, nay, the honour, of introducing you to an incredible entrepreneur I first met around 4 or 5 years ago when we both joined a Mastermind Group together…
And you know, sometimes, when you meet people for the first time, you get that feeling there’s something different about them, something special…
Well, we got on like the proverbial house on fire and quickly became good friends… and, over the last four years, I’ve grown even more impressed…
I don’t know many people who can think as fast as this guy… and that’s probably why he quickly gained the nickname in our group, as the Mach3 Kiwi…
Ian Stewart is originally from New Zealand, after a short spell in the UK, he’s now based in Charlotte, North Carolina. He’s built a number of successful businesses around the world… and claims he’s now slowing down a little and going to spend more time with the family, but I wonder if the Mach3 Kiwi could ever slow down!
Let’s find out from the man himself… Welcome Ian.
Ian Stewart: Thank you Dave, it’s very humbling listening to that… I almost closed my computer screen.
Dave Dean: That’s because you didn’t want to look at my face, come on, tell the truth… I should let the listeners and readers know the fact that you and I are doing this from a distance. I wasn’t lucky enough to be able to get on a plane and get over to Charlotte and be able to spend some time with you. I wish I could have done that, but I’m looking forward being able to do it very soon.
IS: That sounds great and do you know what, my lovely wife has family history in Cardiff so I’m sure we’ll get over there.
DD: Yea, good, we’ll look forward to seeing you over here and welcoming you. So Ian, the way these interviews work is about helping our readers and fellow Renegades really get to know people and understand their path, their journey from an entrepreneurial perspective. So, today I’d love to help them understand how this young man from New Zealand, who stumbled almost into the motor industry, suddenly sits before us today having won numerous championships, and has transitioned into this leading man in sport and an extraordinary entrepreneur.
IS: I think it’s a story of impatience more than anything else.
DD: Impatience?
IS: Yes, I think from a young age there was a lot of desire to not follow the herd, or at least be evaluating what the herd was saying. And I think that for better or for worse… sometimes for worse and sometimes for better, I wasn’t easily sold on the mantra of the people around me. So I started thinking for myself a lot more and that certainly caused me a lot of challenges. I made an awful lot of mistakes and learned the hard way, but it was really impatience I think, just not willing to follow the path that you once thought life should follow.
DD: I think that began very, very early didn’t it, because if I remember rightly, you were the kind of mechanic who didn’t just follow the traditional methods, you very quickly learned how to use automation to tune up cars and to get to the depth of engineering problems in the car?
IS: Yea, I think it started before I even got to working full time as a career. I left school I think four weeks after I was legally allowed to at 15 years old. I was already impatient. I looked at High School as a waste of time, I was wasting my time as I had more things that I wanted to do. Just impatience. A lot of innocent arrogance but in hind sight, looking back at that, it did allow me to learn a lot of things really quickly by just not learning to wait. I done things the hard way for sure, but that’s the lessons you learn from sometimes… you never forget them. So, I started out as an apprentice mechanic, I never finished because I got too impatient to move on. So, two and a half years later at seventeen and a half, I started my first business.
DD: Yea, so at seventeen and a half you’d gone from being a mechanic, working for a garage owner, to become the go to man, then you go off and start your own business and the garage owner says, “Hey, I need you to come and supply your services to me”.
IS: Yea, it was a dealership and it was the era when fuel injection started coming out in the mid 80’s and I was a young Vo l u m e 2 I s s u e 6 | R e n e g a d e s 2 1
boisterous guy then. I was learning it and no-one else cared so the short story is, I got tired of working my arse off every day and no-one else had anything to do because they couldn’t fix these new-fangled cars at the time. I went and asked for a pay rise, because as an apprentice I was making about $80 a week or something, which was a fraction of what a tradesman was making and it pissed me off. I was told no, as they had a contract and I was an apprentice and that was the way it worked. I was told to get my arse back to work. So I waddled off to lunch and never went back… The next morning when I picked up all my stuff from the garage the owner said, “What you doing”, and I said, “Something else…”.
So I went home, my Dad had a small auto repair shop at the time, he said “what you doing here”, I said, “ I quit my job”, he said “what are you going to do now”. I said, “I don’t know, I think I’m going to start my own business”. He said, “Alright, go ahead”. I’m sure he was thinking it would be a great lesson for me to fail it and sure enough, all this work I was doing at the dealership that no-one else could do, no-one else was there to do. So, I got a call from the dealership within a few days and they were like, “Hey, we need you back, we’ll give you that pay rise, and I was like, “No, it’s too late now, I’m done, but I tell you what, you can be my client”. And so, that was the foundation.
DD: So, if I’m not mistaken, you did that for 3 or 4 years and then decided that it was time to spread your wings and just one morning said, it’s time to go to the UK?
IS: I’d grown up around motor sport and so once I’d started making a reasonably comfortable living with this little business I was running, I started racing myself and I was already fascinated by the physics of race cars and suspension geometry and all the rest of it. At that time there was no internet so I’m like buying books and all kinds of stuff and started buying race cars and by now, I’m very competitive. Then I realised I needed to learn more about this and I was impatient, there was no-one to learn from and I didn’t put a lot of personal value on the business I’d built. I enjoyed doing it but it was a way of making money at that point to learn more about going racing. And so it was a happenstance meeting, my girlfriend at the time was at the airport, she was flying up to the other end of the country and I ran into a lady who was waiting for her son to come back from the UK. He was working for Official Motor Sports in the UK and she was telling me what he was doing. Then and there I looked at my girlfriend and said, “I’m going to the UK”, and I went home and sold everything, and within a month I was on a plane with no idea where I was going. There were some VHS tapes about Formula 3 in Britain and I’d looked at some tapes and figured out who the top teams were. I’d figured out the one team that I really wanted to work with because I loved this team, and so I landed in the UK and walked in this guy’s door and said, “I’d like a job”. He goes, ‘What do you do”, and I said, “I’m a mechanic”, “Have you got any professional motor sports experience”? “No”. Well, the season starts in January or something, so he said “Come back then”. I said, ‘No, I tell you what, I’ll clean up around here for free every day and you tell me when you don’t want me to come back. He laughed a little bit and said, “Ok, we start at 8 o’clock in the morning”. Three days later I had a job as a race mechanic, so it started there.
DD: And how long did you stay with that particular company?
IS: Oh, I was impatient again! One season… I started as a mechanic and by mid-season I was an assistant race engineer under the team owner and started in the R & D Department in the corner of the business building prototype wings and some other things. I was young and boisterous and I made some, what would now be considered as political mistakes. I jumped up like 10 years’ worth of promotions in 6 months and it caused resentment in the team. I was like a 22-year-old kid with an impatient attitude about where I was going in life, and you know how that goes sometimes…
Listen to the rest of the interview at 729Renegades.com/podcast
