My Net Worth: Simon Tong, CEO, Craigs Investment Partners

Simon Tong has had a varied corporate career including senior leadership roles at Compaq, Fairfax, Paymark and ASB.

I grew up out in the sticks, back in Hamilton, on a farm with my two brothers. And we had a great upbringing out there. I went to St John's College, I had a terrible score. In fact, my kids found my school reports recently, and they're just dreadful. Even I was surprised how bad they were. So yeah, I wasn't great at school. I wasn't focused.

Those first few years, all I wanted to do was make enough money to have a bit of fun. I didn't really change until – through working at the Housing Corporation – I got into technology and computers. So, I started at Compaq as a pre-sales engineer. And that was really the start of a proper career. I was supposedly an engineer. But it was all pre-sales.

I ended up running quite large teams of people running software support and maintenance and other things. I thought, 'geez, I probably should be qualified'. So, I started working away at it. I didn't finish my master's in management until 2000 – it took me seven years. University was something I felt I needed to do. I always felt like a bit of a fraud, to be honest, because I didn't look qualified.

Fairfax was really good fun, but very, very difficult. We had 2,500 people in Fairfax when I first started. I wouldn't want to say how many when I left. I grew to respect journalists a great deal through my time there. It's a calling, like being a nurse or a schoolteacher. It's a similar sort of thing: journalists don't go into it to make a whole lot of money.

I like technology a great deal. And that's helpful because a lot of what we do in any business involves technology, but I don't really think about it that way. I'm more of a people person. I enjoy working with people. The main thing is just to shut up and listen to people. And also to get to, you know, what the underlying issue really is. The other thing I'd say is you just can't let things go. If there are rotten apples, if there are things that are not right, you have to fix them, because everyone's watching.

Stress? I don't really worry about it too much. I go running. I listen to vinyl. I've got a lot of vinyl – it's like an addiction – and I go fishing. We'll go anywhere on the Hauraki Gulf from Army Bay in Whangaparoa down to Maraetai. That's the thing with a jetski – you can just go anywhere.

I rely on my wife a great deal. I'm lucky – she keeps me in order. And then I've got four children aged between 13 and 30. So that just keeps it real.

You can’t take life too seriously. You only get to go around once. You know life. It comes to an end pretty bloody quickly.

I don't think I've got the balance right all the time. I think that's the lesson to be learned. My view on that is that it seems to take quite a long time to figure that out. If you're a conscientious person and you're committed, you tend to work much harder and not smarter than you necessarily need to until much later on in your career. And then you sort of start to think, oh my god, is this balance right? Why am I still going flat tack in my mid-50s? So back to the vinyl: I’ve got a big collection; I just keep going with it. I’m from Hamilton so I’m somewhat bogan – a rock, alternative metal sort of guy. But I’ve got everything from Al Green to Shapeshifter. The most valuable one I’ve got? Well, believe it or not, it’s a band called Shihad, a 1995 album called Killjoy, which is very hard to get.

I'm a typical New Zealander in that I'm interested in the markets but I'm not absolutely manic about them. But here at Craigs we have people who just live and die on the markets every day. I think of myself as someone who cares and wants to make sure that investors' nest eggs do well, but doesn't necessarily want to be involved in every single decision.

 

As told to Victoria Young. My Net Worth interviews are edited for brevity and clarity

victoria Young/Published Date: 14.4.2024

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