Aviator who loves Macs

From the ruins of the Buzzle liquidation sale more than five years ago, Ben Morgan made his first foray into business, acquiring the AppleCentre retail shop in Taylor Square, Sydney.

These days, the 27-year-old who loves to fly aircraft in his spare time, has his sights set on bigger things. Morgan is set to open arguably the largest Apple store in Australia - a three-storey glass-fronted building at Westfield Bondi Junction, complete with retail shop, lab and a learning centre. He is also in the process of renaming the AppleCentre as Academy Store, a store that he owns with business partner Shannon Daniel.

Morgan entered the IT industry completely out of the blue. After finishing at Morrisett High School, near Newcastle in NSW, he started work as a clerk at the Centre for Asia-Pacific Aviation. "I was introduced to my first Mac - it was an LC475 and I was literally told, 'Like it or leave it, you have to use it'," he recalls.

"I spent a bit of time with that company - about two years - and in that time I got very familiar with Apple and was responsible for buying and maintaining [the Centre's] networks in the end," he says.

However, Morgan left the aviation consultancy business, deciding that there was no foreseeable future in that industry. What followed was a move into the topsy-turvy world of Apple reselling at AppleCentre Sydney.

"I knew a gentleman by the name of Peter Shaw and he was working as a salesperson with AppleCentre Sydney, which is no longer in existence. He was the sales guy and I got to know him through buying and selling all the Apple equipment for Centre for Asia-Pacific."

Shaw asked Morgan to come and work for him. "There was an arrangement at the time that if the salesperson got another sales guy in they received some kind of bonus, so I was in part shanghaied into this position," he says.

It was during this time that Morgan says he "fell into love" with the Apple product. "One of the things that really separated me from a lot of the other guys is that I was really looking at that business and constantly asking questions about how these things [AppleCentres] work. Obviously there's not going to be a career in sales but there's obviously got to be a career in owning these things."

Morgan decided that his future would lie in owning an AppleCentre and he set about learning the processes involved in operating a retail shopfront and how Apple ran its business. "Even since I was young, I've always had the thought in my mind that owning a company was something that I wanted to do. We were brought up as kids with that fundamental thinking - my father was always involved in several business interests at one time."

Rise from the ashes

Morgan purchased AppleCentre Taylor Square in 2000, which at the time was part of the Buzzle liquidation sale. (Buzzle was a former consortium of Australian Apple resellers that planned to list on the Australian Stock Exchange.)

Morgan says he was lucky to have met Lindsay McCombe, the owner of the AppleCentres in Broadway and Taylor Square. "I guess through that relationship with Lindsay, getting to know him and managing Taylor Square as a store for him, when Buzzle started to look like it was going south, Lindsay gave me a call and said, 'Look, if you were thinking of getting into the Apple business, your opportunity will be now'."

So with his own funds, Morgan and Daniel spent six months negotiating with Apple, KPMG and the receivers of Buzzle for the purchase of a location and in the end through some fairly careful consideration the decision was made to go with the Taylor Square store. "And we made that decision for that store based on the fact that it was one of the worst performing stores [in the Buzzle group]."

Taylor Square carried with it considerable debts and ill feeling from many customers due to the Buzzle breakdown, Morgan recalls, adding that the dilution of the company was going on for some time before the receivers were appointed.

"If we were going to take on the risk, we wanted a store that was performing badly so that we had a lot of gain. We looked at Broadway and CBD and those stores were performing mid-range."

In its first four years of operation, Morgan and Daniel tried to align the store with what Apple was doing in retail. "We've always tried to maintain that if you can produce a high quality retail experience for the customer, then you are going to be rewarded for it."