WHEN Frank Seeley was a kid he was lucky if there was a fan in the house to provide a little relief from a typical baking Adelaide heatwave.

Even then some refreshing cooling air wasn’t always guaranteed.

“There was probably one in the house and that was in dad and mum’s room,’’ he says with a laugh.

Now 77, Seeley has spent the best part of a life providing cool air to millions around the world through his eponymous airconditioning company Seeley International.

From nothing, he has grown the company from its base in Lonsdale in Adelaide’s southern suburbs into a giant with annual revenue of more than $100 million, selling to 120 countries.

Being an airconditioning company isn’t a bad position to be in these days.

Europe and the US have just suffered through their warmest summers on record and the world is increasingly a hotter place.

Seeley acknowledges climate change as a factor in increasing demand but also says technology and lower prices are making airconditioning accessible to a wider range of people.

“We are in a world that is becoming more and more hungry for cooling and that’s partly the weather and partly that as innovation increases and things are available to more and more people, more and more people come to want what is available.’’

Innovation is one of Seeley’s watchwords.

Nor for him the gloom and doom over the state of manufacturing in South Australia and Australia.

A walk through the Lonsdale factory shows a bewildering array of robots and automated machines, all hard at work.

The newest, a fast-moving arm wraps outgoing airconditioning units in plastic cling film.

There are also plenty of humans too — Seeley employs more than 500 of those. But his mantra for the future is “innovate and automate’’.

“I came to the conclusion several years ago that there is a huge future for Australian manufacturing providing we do two things,’’ he says.

“We have to innovate and innovate like there is no tomorrow. And you have to automate and automate like there is no tomorrow.’’

Seeley says his airconditioning business has been successful because it’s always been a technological leader in the field.

Seeley makes evaporative air conditioners, which suit dry climates such as South Australia and are cheaper to run than refrigerated units.

He remembers early on when he became the first to make portable air conditioners from plastic components, a change from the traditional metal, some reckoned he was mad.

“When the competitors found out about it they laughed,’’ he says.

“They said it’s not going to work. He’s going to be broke in no time.’’

Former state governor Kevin Scarce first met Frank Seeley about a decade ago while he still in the vice-regal role.

Scarce was so impressed with Seeley he later agreed to join the board and is now deputy chairman.

Scarce says Seeley is a role model in the business world and beyond.

“You hear a lot of people talking you don’t often hear about a lot of people investing,’’ he says.

“He matches his words with actions and it’s not an easy industry, it’s a very competitive industry.

“He remains at the cutting edge because of his investment in research and development.’’

Seeley has often been a step ahead of his competitors but he wasn’t always headed for success in the business world.

There was at least one false start in his life before he found his path.

Now, lazy is not a word you associate with Frank Seeley.

At 77, he still buzzes with energy and life. Crackles of laughter are common. His brain is still alive with excitement at what is waiting around the corner.

Yet, Seeley insists all of his success is built on the foundations of trying to escape his innate desire not to do too much of anything as a young bloke.

Laziness, he says, is what led him to become a teacher.

An official from the Education Department came to see the graduating class at Adelaide Technical High School in the late 1950s. He was looking for student teachers. And he put the fear of God into them about how the real world worked.

“The party for you guys is almost over,’’ he told them.

He went on to list how all the bits students love about school — the long holidays, 9am starts, extended lunch breaks, morning and afternoon rests — were all over for them. Unless.

“If you become a teacher, we will pay you to go through teachers’ college, you will get wages to learn how to become a teacher,’’ Seeley remembers.

“I went into it for those reasons.’’

Which were the wrong reasons. After two years of college and three years teaching primary school students in Port Adelaide, Seeley pulled the plug and took aim at the business world.

“If I hadn’t got out at that point in time there might have been a catastrophe,’’ he says.

“I found out when I was teaching that I was innately lazy. I would be looking forward to the Christmas holidays and when they came I would do nothing for about two weeks then I‘d start to get depressed.’’

He decided to team up with one of his older brothers and have a crack at business.

Seeley is the youngest of eight children.

The family moved from Melbourne to Adelaide in 1950 when he was a young boy because his father Geoffrey had contracted a rare blood disease and it was decided the brighter sunny days in South Australia would be beneficial to his health.

Sadly, Seeley senior died eight months later and at the age of just nine, his youngest son was left without a father and his mother was left to raise eight kids.

Almost seven decades later, Seeley still talks with great fondness of his father.

“He was a wonderful man,” he says.

“He was a good businessman but also had time for the family. And with eight kids to have time for all of them I never felt that in the nine and nearly 10 years that I knew him, I never felt once that he didn’t have time for me.’’

Naturally, though, the immediate effect was devastating.

“I can remember crying myself to sleep, not every night, but some nights, until I was 15 years old because he was the best friend I had really.’’

After her husband’s death, his mother Freda went back to work as a teacher, but Frank says he never wanted for anything in the family’s Largs Bay home. Almost. It was a yoyo that sparked Seeley’s first foray into business.

“I said to my mother `can you give me one and six (shillings) to buy a yoyo’ and she looked at me and said ‘I would love to give you one and six to buy a yoyo but I don’t have it’.’’

So he went out and knocked on the doors of his neighbours looking for odd jobs, weeding gardens and washing windows to raise the money.

In school holidays he would sell advertising on commission. He would also buy and sell musical instruments.

The trick being to “play them very badly when I was buying them and very well, which was not all that well, when I was selling them.’’

But, it was advertising he would return to after that ill-fated spell as a schoolteacher. He went into business with his brother Cedric and all was going well.

The switch into airconditioning was an accident.

He acted as the middle man between someone who was selling tooling to make air conditioners and someone who was buying.

Along the way he agreed to sell the air conditioners. In the first year he sold 1000.

The plan then was to split the responsibilities within the company. Frank would look after advertising. Cedric would do the coolers.

Tragedy though would again intervene in Frank Seeley’s life. Cedric went into hospital for a gall bladder operation. He contracted peritonitis and died, leaving behind a wife, who two weeks later would discover she was pregnant with the couples’ sixth child. Frank’s fourth child was born two days after his brother died.

“So at the age of 27 I suddenly had the responsibility of providing for two women and 10 children,’’ he says.

“And I also had the figure who became my father figure and my mentor taken away from me. I don’t mind telling you I was scared, I was very scared.’’

He threw himself into his work.

Over the next three years selling air conditioners became a million dollar business, which was a significant operation in Adelaide in the early 1970s.

But then came another shift — the contract to sell the air conditioners was up. The manufacturer wanted to halve the rate of commission on offer. He felt Seeley was making too much money from him.

That was the point Seeley decided it was time to make his own air conditioners.

He went home to wife Kathy and laid out his plan. They had just finished paying off the family home.

“I said to Kathy I think we will make our own coolers. And she said ‘OK’. I said that means we will have to remortgage the house, she said ‘OK’. It actually means we will have to mortgage the house more heavily than it has ever been mortgaged. She said ‘OK”.’’

Seeley wasn’t sure his wife understood the full ramifications of what he was proposing. That if it all went badly, the family would lose the house. Lose everything.

“She didn’t hesitate and looked me in the eye and said ‘I don’t care if I have to live in a tin shed as long as I can live with you.’ That is commitment. It has been so important to me throughout my journey.’’

In the first year, Seeley made 1000 coolers. These were the first ones made from plastic. Seeley’s breakthrough idea was to switch from building air conditioners with plastic instead of steel to eliminate the problem of corrosion. He had four staff. The second year was better and by the third the operation was humming along.

Then there was a phone call in the middle of the night from the fire brigade, asking if they were speaking to Frank Seeley.

“The voice said ‘well you’d better get down here because your factory has burned to the ground.’’

Five weeks later it happened again. This time, Seeley was in Melbourne when the phone call came through. He flew straight home and was confronted by a police officer with some serious questions. Seeley invited him into his office.

“I sat down and realised I was suspect number one.’’

They took two weeks to clear him. The perpetrator was never caught, although the police did deliver a warning to one of his competitors.

As a result, for Seeley to continue to be insured he had to employ armed guards with dogs 24 hours a day.

Initially, he was only interested in selling within Australia.

He knocked back a request from employee and future board member Murray Morton to explore export opportunities.

He thought Morton just wanted a jolly overseas at the company’s expense. But Morton did his homework, found some government grants that covered flights and accommodation, and Seeley gave him the green light.

One of the places he visited was Iraq, then ruled by Saddam Hussein, where, to Seeley’s displeasure he had left behind a sample.

His annoyance heightened by Morton’s admission that the Iraqis hadn’t been interested in placing an order. But obviously someone in Iraq decided to give it another try. To pour some water into the machine and plug it in.

“We got a telex asking for our best quote on 20,000 portable coolers,’’ he says.

Then another message demanding their presence in Baghdad within seven days. Not an easy assignment in 1981.

Seeley and Morton flew to Kuwait and were scheduled to catch a connection to the Iraqi capital. They made it in time but were told the flight was full.

They were due in Baghdad the next day.

Another bumped passenger overheard their plight and said he was catching a taxi to Basra, from where they could catch a flight to Baghdad, if they wanted to join him.

They could split the fair on the journey — almost 200km the desert.

“It was two or three hundred dollars,’’ he recalls. “I strongly suspect we paid for all of the taxi fare then some more.’’

But they made it and on the seventh day they turned up for the meeting.

When they finally saw the director of the Iraqi Trading Company he told them: “We are prepared to buy these coolers but they have to be half price.’’

Seeley was unimpressed. “I just stood up, shut my book, grabbed my satchel and said you have wasted our time coming here. We cannot do them for half price.’’

So the negotiation started.

Eventually, the Iraqis placed an order for 20,000 coolers. Half way through the production run, an order arrived for another 20,000. The following year, it was 100,000. Still the biggest single order in the company’s history. It was also the last from Iraq.

The Iran-Iraq war erupted the following year and that was that.

From the outside the order for the 100,000 air conditioners was just a good business deal. But Seeley believed a higher power was at work. A religious man, he sees the hand of God at work in his life — even if God does sometimes move in mysterious ways.

A couple of year before the order for the 100,000 came through, Seeley was having a disagreement with the company that made the motors for his air conditioners.

He thought the company was putting up its prices too quickly. The problem was, the company had a monopoly.

Seeley told them if they weren’t more reasonable, he would make his own. Not for the first time he was dismissed as a fantasist.

“He (the head of the company that made the motors) said, ‘Frank, my boy, you don’t know what you are talking about. It would cost you a million dollars to get into making electric motors’.’’

The bloke was right. It did cost Seeley a million dollars to set up his own plant. But he also reckoned he saved $10 a motor by going it alone. And $10 by the 100,000 air conditioners sold to Iraq added up exactly to $1 million.

Seeley doesn’t see that as a fluke. “People might just say that’s coincidence,’’ he says. “But for it to be the exact amount of money that you save, is the exact amount of money it cost you?”

Is someone looking after you? “It’s my God and saviour.’’

He gives another example, this one more recent.

Seeley had been at a function at the Hilton Hotel and had parked his car in the Central Market. He was using a cane, still recovering from his first knee replacement. His car was a powerful Audi A8. Seeley was going to pay at the barrier as he left the car park, but he put his credit card in the wrong way and as it came back out, he dropped it. He fumbled around and was leaning half out of the door, scratching around on the ground trying to find the card, when the car started to move. Thinking his foot had slipped off the brake, he stood hard on the pedal. It was the accelerator.

“The door was wide open. The first thing that should have happened was it (the ticket machine) hit that door and close on my head. End of Frank Seeley. That didn’t happen. I saw the gate splinter. I was back in the seat with my hands on the wheel when I hit the gate. That’s not humanly possible but that’s where I was.”

Somehow he managed to stop the car before it hit a wall. But he knows what should have happened.

“Half way home it suddenly hit me I should be dead,’’ he says. “There is no explanation as to why I wasn’t but I should be dead.’’ When he checked the car for damage the next day there wasn’t a scratch on it.

Frank and his wife Kathy were born into the Exclusive Brethren, an outfit which in later years would attract a lot of controversy for the control its exerts over its flock and its insularity which severely limits its exposure to the outside world.

The Seeleys left in 1974.

“We came to the conclusion that being there was not bringing us closer to God, it was taking us further away from him,’’ he says.

Before going, he went to see his eldest brother Harold who had left the Exclusive Brethren in 1960. It had to be a clandestine meeting as the rules of the Church prohibited contact between the brothers.

When his brother was out the room, he noticed a piece of paper upside down on his desk which outlined the money Harold donated to various charities. There was $100,000 there. Frank was astounded.

His brother had established a charitable fund. Frank decided he would follow suit. Seeley is understandably reticent to talk about how much he has given over the years. But he offers up one example.

The company has a dealers’ conference each year. One year it was in Thailand. While he was there he was given a bottle of Braemar whisky as a gift. Braemer is one of the company’s brands. That night a charity auction was held. A different bottle of Braemar was put up. The crowd bid and bid on the bottle all the while expecting Seeley would come over the top at the end to claim the prize. But he had his bottle already so he kept quiet. Bidding reached $4000 before it was halted.

The crowd assuming Seeley would have made the final bid. So Seeley went on stage and said the auction would be restaged and whatever the final bid was, he would match it and the proceeds would go to charity.

It started a tradition. Each year at the conference the same whisky bottle is auctioned and Seeley matches the bid. It’s probably become the most expensive cheap bottle of whisky in the world.

“It has turned over $1 million,’’ he says.

“I think it’s about $1.2 to $1.3 million. It’s the most expensive bottle of scotch in the world and nobody ever gets to drink it.’’

And that’s only a fraction of the money Seeley has given away over the years.

“It’s a wonderful situation to be in to be able to do it,’’ he says. “You don’t give it away to get blessed but you give it away and you get blessed anyway.’’

There is no doubt Seeley enjoys his life. Son Jon is group managing director, while Seeley senior is executive chairman. Wife Kathy is also still a director. He still loves the job and thinks all the activity keeps him “spritely”.

“People ask me ‘when are you going to retire?’ I say when I stop having fun, but I’m not expecting to stop having fun for a long time — unless the creator decides it’s time for me to stop. Then I won’t argue with him.’’