From diamonds in the rough to skilful workers

Michael Hill has a message for young New Zealanders. Photo / Janna Dixon

Don't ever suggest to Michael Hill, jeweller, that working in a shop is a dead-end career. He'll glare from behind his expensive glasses, snap the cuffs of his designer shirt and put pay to the idea with an impressive revelation.

His CEO, he says, earns three ... possibly four ... times as much as the Prime Minister. Given that John Key's annual salary is $393,000, it puts a career in retail in a whole new light.

Hill, therefore, seems genuinely perplexed over why Kiwis are so sniffy about shop work.

He wants to know why young people want to work in "a coffee shop" but not a jewellery shop?

Hill knows this to be true because there's no shortage of young people wanting to work in Joe's Garage cafe, a business in which he has invested.

The cafe franchise started in Arrowtown and is spreading through the South Island. Once Hill and the other directors, who are behind the Lone Star group of restaurants, get the formula right they will be "spinning them out" throughout the country.

But Hill is struggling to find enough good people who want to be part of his rapidly expanding jewellery empire. That's one of the reasons he has written a book, Toughen up - what I've learned about surviving tough times.

Apart from wanting to pass on hard-learned lessons and inspire give-it-a-go-Kiwis, he admits the book is a recruiting tool.

"I'm desperate for great people. I mean, I've got a couple of thousand staff but I want 10,000 staff. I can't do this alone."

"This" is part of the Michael Hill dream - to open 1000 jewellery stores by 2020. So far he's opened 250, in New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the United States.

Another new store opens every 10 days. And he needs everyone from shop assistants, or "sales professionals" as they are known in Hill's empire, to general managers of overseas stores.

And by "great people" Hill is not talking about cocky university graduates waving MBAs. He's talking about grassroots New Zealanders.

Ordinary, hard-working folk who might not be the slickest, most good-looking people in the land but are prepared to roll up their sleeves - as long as they still look tidy - and "knuckle down".

People who, like Hill, will become evangelical about retail. "People just don't grasp it. They think a male to go into retail working in a jewellery shop would be a wimpy, poncy thing to do."

On the contrary, he says, his jewellery business has changed people's lives. Toughen Up is sprinkled with vignettes from appreciative staff saying just that.

Galina Hirtzel, group diamond buyer for Michael Hill Jeweller, was a "girl" from Invercargill who started on $10 an hour as a shop assistant 17 years ago. Now she flies round the world spending $100 million of the company's money every year on diamonds.

Hill says Hirtzel looks "like one of those hippies," with long hair and "a long, floaty dress", drawing startled reactions from the male world in which she moves.

Hill chortles over this. "No one can put her in a box but this is what I love." He gets a kick, he says, out of taking ordinary people and seeing them achieve extraordinary things. "Anybody can do anything, that's the scary part about it."

Scary is one of Hill's favourite words but, since his house burned down in 1977, he doesn't seem to be afraid of anything.

He spent the first 40 years of his life being timid - a lonely, shy, misfit of a boy, impeccably dressed and embarrassingly clean in a town where other children were not.

He went to work in his Uncle Arthur's Whangarei jewellery shop, learning the art of selling from his beloved father Dickie.

Hill and his wife Christine built themselves (literally) an architecturally designed house overlooking the Whangarei Harbour. The night that house burned down, Hill realised something had to change.

He was 40, still working in his uncle's shop and considered himself a failure. He had failed academically, failed in his dream to become a professional violinist and failed to persuade his uncle to sell him the jewellery business.

So he and Christine decided to open their own shop in competition. Says Hill in Toughen Up: "I took him [the uncle] at his own game ... and I won."

Today Hill divides his life into two parts - the 40 years before the fire and the "thrill" of the 30 years after.

At 70 he is fit, toned, ambitious and rich. Rich enough to have built a multi-million-dollar superyacht, rich enough to buy himself a rare Stradivarious violin and rich enough to build himself "Hillbrook", an 18-hole golf course outside his home near Arrowtown.

He owns an Aston Martin, which he drives mostly between his house and Hillbrook's golf club, gleefully admitting to breaking the speed limit because the road is on his property.

Through the book, Hill is keen to share the secret of his success. Listen up people, focus. His message is this: set your goals, visualise, work hard, be disciplined, meditate ... and go to bed early.

That's why he's irritated by a group of young people "yahooing" at 4.30am on Thursday in the street below his Auckland hotel suite.

It was not so much the noise that bothered him, it was the thought that those young people should be getting a good night's sleep ready for a responsible day's work.

Hill is frustrated that they might be directionless and wasting their lives when they could be having a great career with him instead.

He quotes himself in the margin of his book: "Health, wealth and happiness only comes to those who focus on all three" and admits to being driven.

The recession, he says, is not such a bad thing. Hard times force people to re-examine how they are running a business, how they can do better and where they can trim fat. And, if it goes on long enough, it might teach those young yahoos outside to "knuckle down" and get cracking, he says.

And there's no sign of him letting up. Apart from opening new stores, Hill and his team are constantly refining the business formula that has earned them millions so far.

By the end of next month, a new prototype shop will replace the existing one in Auckland's Queen St. "I don't like our present look. It'll be gone," says Hill.

A new one opened in Canada last week "is going like a rocket", with "much improved sales figures".

Hill has already launched his own brand of watches and next year will launch a French perfume with a scent he describes as "wonderful ... a New Zealand smell".

Not that everything he touches turns to gold. He acknowledges the "disaster" of his brief foray into the shoe business but insists that only by making mistakes do people learn and become stronger. "If you're not making mistakes, if you're not coming a cropper occasionally then you're not living life as you should be."

He admits retail is a tough game, and that he's had to be tough to thrive. He has told staff, delicately, that they are overweight, have bad breath or drink too much, and set about helping them to improve.

He has sold his wife's engagement ring at least four times, each time replacing it with a bigger stone.

When Hill named his 34m superyacht he named it VvS1, a jewellery term for an almost flawless diamond. Why not call the yacht Flawless, he was asked?

"Well," says Hill, "here's another thing I have learned in life: nothing is perfect. That's what keeps you striving for more."

Toughen Up, ($39.99, Random House. Proceeds to Cure Kids).