At the age of 71 years young, veteran businessman, Gary Blom could out-run the best of us. If he isn’t peddling out a quick 160km up through the Southern Highlands on the weekend, he’s probably jumped off his road bike at a cellar door to try the local vintage.
Unlike many, he isn’t worn down or worn out from more than 45 years hard slog leading companies throughout Australia and the USA, but rather the opposite – he is invigorated, excited, energised and ever-ready to take on the world.
Completing his education at Randwick Boys Highschool, Gary Blom was one of very few who were invited to join the original Qantas management program, spending time in different parts of the company, throughout a year, to learn how businesses operate.
There were thousands of people who applied for the program, and they only chose a select few to participate. For me, being able to get a job and get paid for it straight after school sounded great!
While working at Qantas, Gary was first introduced to computers – large machines that took up entire rooms and processed information faster than any human ever could. His passion for technology was ignited, and would guide him for the next 50 years as he progressed in his career.
From Qantas, Gary Blom joined Sperry and then National Cash Register (NCR) – at the time, one of the biggest technology companies in the country – and he started selling and marketing the large computers of the day.
Inspired by his years with NCR, Gary had the desire to do something entrepreneurial and took the plunge into business leadership, starting a software consulting company, which then evolved into a broader technology provider, ‘The Computer Company.
Internationally recognised as an innovator, The Computer Company was invited to work on the first ever Japanese micro-computer, with a brand that was known at the time as National Panasonic. The project was supported by an array of leading-edge thinkers from around the world, and Gary was fortunate to work closely with people including Bill Gates, in the very early days of Microsoft.
During the three years he owned the company, before selling to the Singer Corporation, it launched the first Japanese micro-computer – the pre-curser to modern personal computers – in Australia, and successfully sold Panasonic and Mitsubishi computers, printers and other peripherals.
For Gary Blom, this period was a crash course in how to run his own business, both in terms of the operational requirements, and building teams and culture.
He learned to hire people based on their positive mental attitude and motivation, and worked by the philosophy to ‘always hire people better than himself’. He surrounded himself with highly-skilled and driven employees, and challenged himself to set the course, visualise the outcome and to ensure everyone shared that vision.
I learned a lot during that phase, and have kept learning more since. Most important is resilience; that capacity to never give in, even in the face of major hurdles, there is always a solution. I found people who knew more than me, who were specialists and I brought them into my team, because I knew that to be successful, I needed more skills than I had on my own.
After ‘The Computer Company’ he attended a management course at the Stanford Management Institute, where he met a team of people working on what would be the first IBM PC. When IBM launched in 1981, he was one of the first in Australia to have one of these much more modern, compact and cutting-edge machines.
With an increasing interest in software due to his past experiences, Gary Blom started Attaché Software in 1981 – today, one of Australia’s oldest software companies still in operation. The company initially specialised in producing accounting software for IBM in Australia, and launched in the USA after achieving a successful capital raise there.
The USA business was sold in 1985, and having learned personally of the challenges to raise capital in Australia, Gary Blom formed Corporate Capital Group in Michigan, USA, and built a team dedicated to helping Australian businesses make their own success through overseas investment. The company worked with brands including Oroton, Mayne Nicholas, James Hardie, TNT and Wormald, among others.
Through a series of mergers, first with Laventhol and Horwath, and then with a leading USA investment bank, Ladenburg Thalmann, the business became truly international and partnered frequently with Austrade to achieve its original mission.
Following 12 successful years in the USA, Gary returned to Australia and became the founder of IMAX theatres in the Asia Pacific, which he took public in 1996, in addition to purchasing the historic Penfolds Dalwood Estate in the Hunter Valley.
Most recently, Gary Blom has continued to work with Mainstreet Capital, an investment firm he founded in 2008 to pursue his focus on supporting Australian businesses here and overseas, as well as a new project that has reignited his interest in evolving technology.
After being introduced to real estate industry body, EAC, in 2019, he recognised the incredible and increasing role data is playing in the property space, and the challenge many property professionals have in obtaining the insights they need. He founded National Property Group, an exciting new property data company in 2020 to address those challenges.
The real estate profession is on the precipice of great change – like other industries, it is just about to become truly data driven, with key business strategies and decisions informed by real trends, tracked using innovative platforms. These platforms will be the foundation of this change, and how they are built, how easily they can be used and navigated, how accurate they are, will all play a role in the pace at which the industry evolves and modernises.
Gary’s heroes range from Richard Branson and Steven Jobs, to Bob Mansfield and the late Charlie Bell, and he gets his local inspiration from thinkers like Steve Kulmar.
What they all have in common is they are prepared to really take on a challenge; they don’t shy away.
He looks to them as visionaries, and people who steer their companies in the right direction, but recognise the talent of the people they surround themselves with. Gary acknowledges they are hard workers, yet smart workers, and that approach is something he’s built into every step of his own career.
Focused currently on rapidly building National Property Group into a leader in its field, and evolving it into something the industry hasn’t seen before, Gary is not even close yet to trading in the office for a caravan and map of the open road, like many his age.
With self-awareness he gets bored easily, he’s not up for a traditional retirement, even when the time comes. His passion for business will keep him motivated and focused, and some time down the track, he hopes, his love of agriculture will see him back in the wine business.
For now though, and he thinks until he’s at least 80, he’ll keep rising every morning at 4.30am as the sun starts to come up, pulling on the cycling kit and hitting the road for a quick 40kms, before most of us have even thought about brewing our first cup of coffee.
You make mistakes and you just have to learn from them. Don’t do the same things over and over again, that’s what you really should learn from hard knocks! Even so, I have no regrets, I’d do it all over again. As they say, you’re dead a long time and life’s not a dress rehearsal, so I’ll keep being the first to turn on the lights in the morning and the last to turn them off at night as we take on the world, one challenge at a time.
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