Michael Hill, lord of the rings

By JULIE MIDDLETON

Put on hold at the Whangarei head office of Michael Hill International, you are greeted by twangy computer tones picking out the perky Scott Joplin piece The Entertainer.

It is hard not to smile - simple, endlessly optimistic but instantly recognisable, like Michael Hill's business philosophies. It is an appropriate metaphor for a man who has been honoured for his contribution to the arts as well as business.

A proficient violinist who once harboured dreams of going professional, a regular meditator, a five-days-a-week exerciser and keen America's Cup supporter, Richard Michael Hill, jeweller, becomes a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit (DCNZM).

The ebullient and talkative Mr Hill, aged 63, says he does not know who nominated him, but is quick to acknowledge a cast of thousands.

"It [the honour] is [for] all the caring people who have helped be part of it. There's been so many people involved in the two [arts and business] jigsaws."

The public pat on the head comes after an extraordinary year for this lord of the rings, a born organiser minus an "off" button who will not utter the word retirement. He calls it "the doom word" and says he is getting busier as he gets older.

Twenty-two years after opening his first store at Whangarei - in somewhat bitter competition with his late uncle Arthur Fisher, who first got a reluctant and "rather insecure young man" into the business - Mr Hill has cracked the retailers' Holy Grail: how to expand into Australia without ending up under a headstone.

Across the Ditch, Mr Hill has 74 stores making money at a faster rate than the 41 across New Zealand.

A public company since four months before the 1987 sharemarket crash, MHI announced record profits at last month's annual meeting - $10.04 million. It returned 22 per cent on shareholder funds.

The company, of which Mr Hill is chairman and chief vision and planning master, has had its share price substantially outperform the NZSE 40 capital index.

But one of the more outstanding performances this year was his backing of the inaugural Michael Hill world violin competition, which culminated in the final at Queenstown in June.

The competition is modelled on famous and far more expensive overseas contests. Mr Hill is coy about the price tag but admits a figure of $250,000 is not far off the mark.

"It's something I had to do," he says, "having had a passion for music and the violin." The cost of the event was not important - it was the energy that mattered, he says.

Energy is a word he uses repeatedly. He is putting a lot of that into a plan to open one of his high-turnover, low-cost jewellery stores in either North America or Britain.

He will not say just where, but his Brisbane-based daughter Emma is heading the expansion bid.

MHI is a family affair - but no longer in Whangarei where it all started, and where the store, says Mr Hill, has a cult following and a turnover that belies its size.

Christine, his Yorkshire-born wife of 36 years, has had a big impact on the look of the stores and is on the MHI board.

Son Mark and wife Monika, who live next to Mr Hill's Arrowtown home, are also involved - Monika, a fine arts graduate, does the company's catalogue graphics.

Mr Hill's father died a few years ago, and mother Billie, 86, lives at the nearby Millbrook resort.

Mr Hill is supremely confident of his Midas touch and long ago banished the word "can't" from his vocabulary.

He has fine-tuned a simple business philosophy - a relatively lower-risk internal growth plan, rather than takeovers, coupled with sometimes off-the-wall saturation advertising featuring the man himself.

"Hello, I'm Michael Hill, jeweller" may elicit groans from telly-watchers but that consistent approach has made him a household name.

The secret in life as in business, he says, is "not to have things too complicated".

"If you're not racing around trying to achieve everything, you can do some things very well. Most of us never have time to haul back and think of our strategies."

Not surprisingly, Mr Hill's New Year resolutions are of the "onward and upward" kind.

One of them is to write another book. He reckons he needs to update some of the philosophies he described in his 1995 autobiography-cum-sales-handbook Hello, Michael Hill Jeweller: Fighting to Win.

He says he trusts gut instinct more than ever and wishes he had used it when his board convinced him to get involved in a ultimately disastrous early 90s foray into women's shoe retailing.

"You know in your heart whether you are right or wrong," he says. "More confidence in your decisions is something that comes with age."

Now more of his goals involve musical pursuits - a re-embracing of the talent his family could not afford to nurture when he was a teenager.

Spectacularly unafraid to face the sort of challenge that would turn the rest of us to mush, Mr Hill did a good job of the second movement of Bach's Double Violin Concerto with the Auckland Philharmonia's concertmaster, Justine Cormack, in July.

The week before Christmas, he repeated it with another player at Whangarei's Forum North, in front of 600 people.

On February 15, he will be in front of the Southern Symphonia in Dunedin, bowing his way through Massenet's showy Meditation from the 1893 opera Thais. He knows how much a test it will be, as the violin can be unkind to the nervous.

But ever the businessman, Mr Hill has married his love of art and business and has started dealing in quality violins. Even the 1676 Amati he favours is for sale - at the right price.