How entrepreneur James Spenceley turned a knack for commerce into investor gold
HE drives a black Ferrari with a numberplate representing the postcode of home ’burb Mosman, but James Spenceley is a down-to-earth success story.
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THE idea of interviewing entrepreneur James Spenceley is a little intimidating. After all, he has a net worth around $45 million, having founded telecommunications business Vocus and leading it to a $25 million listing in 2010.
His investment portfolio includes the likes of Airtasker, meal delivery service Marley Spoon, and urban agriculture concept Sustenir. However, despite his intimidating business acumen, Spenceley, 41, is delightfully down-to-earth, chatting animatedly in-between bites at his favourite Mosman eatery, Four Frogs Creperie.
His accent has a slight English twang. “I get that a lot. I just did one of those DNA tests and it came back I’m 87 per cent English and Irish. I wonder if there’s a gene for accents — some genetic history that comes through later,” he said.
Could genetics be his next project? After all, the entrepreneur — who was inducted into CommsDay’s Hall of Fame Telecom Industry Awards last month — has a habit of investing in companies he stumbles across that give him the ‘wow’ factor. Four years ago he bought a tool bench from Bunnings in Balgowlah, but was stuck for a way to get it back to Mosman — enter Airtasker. “By the time I crossed the Spit Bridge, the guy had responded to my task and delivered it to my house in Mosman 15 minutes after I got home, for $40. I thought, ‘This is amazing,” he said. “I invested the next day.”
It was the same with Marley Spoon. The Spenceley family — which includes wife Viktoria, 32, and children Roman, 7, and Sienna, 3 — loved the ease of the meals.
“My son is cooking Marley Spoon meals at seven — it’s so simple,” he said. “It’s the way of the future — when he’s 18 and leaving home, that’s how he’s going to want to cook.”
Having an eye on the future is one of Spenceley’s specialties — this is the man who in 1996, after a stint working at the Sydney Futures Exchange, began selling the internet to businesses, way back when no one knew about email.
“I used to fix Macintosh computers. I’d go in to businesses and graphic designers would be couriering big chunky zip discs to clients. I’d say, ‘Why don’t you use the internet?’ and for $900 a month I’d sell them a permanent dial-up connection,” he said.
As a kid, Spenceley’s dad earned extra cash cleaning offices, outside of his hours as a schoolteacher.
“I used to go along with him and earn money emptying bins and ashtrays,” he said. “I loved the commerciality of it — not making money for money’s sake, but earning it and doing it.”
He left school in Year 11 (he was at Scots College where his father worked, before moving to Barker when his dad transferred to Mosman High School), having lacked interest in most subjects except commerce.
“I just inherently ‘got’ it. Everything else I was terrible at. It wasn’t that I wasn’t smart — I just couldn’t get in to it,” he said.
At 28, he put his heart and soul in to telecoms business Comindico, but the company ultimately went into receivership, leaving him disillusioned, and so for three years he abandoned telecoms — and Australia — to live in Russia, where the politics fascinated him.
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“There was no English so I had to fully immerse myself to survive. I remember sitting in my car wondering how to buy milk. I said the word for ‘milk’ and the woman in the shop didn’t understand me, so I went ‘moo’. Then every time I went in to that shop, she’d moo at me.”
While there, Spenceley attempted to start up a wireless internet provider.
“Communist buildings are massively high and they all shared one phone line, so no one could connect to the internet,” he said.
However, it proved too hard because he couldn’t get licenses and “everyone was asking for bribes”, so he bought a bar in the Ukrainian town of Odessa. It was there he met Viktoria, who he married at Mosman Uniting Church in 2007.
“She used to come in to the bar and I’d call her ‘sunshine on a stick’. We were friends for a year, but I always totally loved her,” he said.
When Spenceley came home to Australia, he was ready to get back to telecoms and sold his home to finance Vocus. When he stepped down as CEO in February 2016, the company had 1500 staff, annual revenues of $1.8 billion, and a market capitalisation of $5 billion.
“I look back and think, ‘Wow, that was such a risk’,” he said. “But I was 30, and it’s like changing lanes in a car — in your 20s you do it without thinking, when you’re 40 you’re more cautious. And when you have kids…”
His children will grow up grounded. Roman already gets pocket money to put the garbage out. Sienna is her father’s daughter.
“She plays with cars, not dolls. I’m not OCD, but I like order, and she always lines her cars up,” he said.
Spenceley, who rescued the Illawarra Hawks as a passion project in 2014 when it went in to voluntary administration and drives a black Ferrari with the numberplate 2088, modestly shrugs off the magnitude of his financial status.
“People say ‘you are the most normal person to have done all this’, and I’m like, ‘Yes, I am normal’. I want to enjoy what I’m doing, and you can’t do that if you’re arrogant and think you’re better than everyone else,” he said.
“Anyway, I don’t stop to reflect on it, because I’m always worried about what I’m not investing in. Sadly, I didn’t think of Facebook, but you can’t win them all.”