Lindsay Fox compares business success to sex

Trucking mogul Lindsay Fox opens up about poverty, wealth, family and how business — like sex — improves with practice.

Lindsay Fox when he celebrated 60 years of Linfox. Picture: David Caird

Trucking mogul Lindsay Fox has compared success in business to getting better at sex.

“I was an academic failure, and I left school at 16,” the Linfox billionaire told The Blank Canvas podcast, hosted by Lee Rogers.

“I said, ‘Academia is not going to be for me,’ so I went out and convinced a man to sell me a truck on quarterly payments.”

Now Fox’s businesses employ 37,000 people in 12 countries.

In a wide-ranging interview, Fox opened up about poverty, wealth, family, and how business improves with practice.

Trucking magnate Lindsay Fox is one of Australia’s most successful businessmen. Picture: Aaron Francis

“I would say of the supposedly top 20 rich people in Australia, 14 of them never graduated, but they learned their skills, and honed in on them by practical experience,” Fox said.

“You take the difference of you being a lover, from the first time you made love, you became better as you progressed down the line. Work is exactly the same.”

Fox said his parents shaped his generous spirit.

“My mother and father always cared and shared for people that had less than they did,” he said.

“We lived in a little 15-foot frontage house. My father paid a pound a week rent. He made four pound and 10 pence, or nine dollars a week, as a truck driver.

“Quite often, I’d get up ready to go to school. In front of the little fireplace in a room about 12 foot by nine foot, there was a fire burning and two strangers. I didn’t know who they were, but it was raining, and my father took them off the street because they had nowhere to go.”

The trucking boss also revealed he’s never smoked cigarettes and had his first glass of wine at 37 years old.

Fox, worth a reported $US2.3 billion, said wealth is not a status symbol.

“It’s not about how much money you’ve got,” he said.

“Money is nothing more than a signature for job satisfaction.”

Fox also said trust and integrity has helped him be a neutral figure in business and politics.

“Labor think I’m Liberal, Liberal think I’m Labor, Catholics think I’m Protestant, Protestants think I’m Catholic, and the local rabbi delivers my Matzah,” Fox said.

“What am I? I’m an Australian.”