Ben Lisle on life lessons, riding motorbikes and helming Hesperia

He is still sporting a rain-soaked shirt, and I’m certain he has not yet caught a glimpse of the menu, but Ben Lisle is adamant he is ready to order.

“I like pressure,” Lisle tells Bar Loiter boss Patrick Ryan, as we settle in for our lunch at Italian restaurant Dilly Dally in Subiaco.

The response is hardly surprising for a man tackling a multibillion-dollar project pipeline via burgeoning property firm Hesperia, which he helms alongside prominent developer Adrian Fini — best known for his restoration of the State Buildings.

WAtoday journalist Jesinta Burton and Hesperia managing director Ben Lisle at Dilly Dally in Subiaco.Credit: Ebony Talijancich

It has been four years since the pair devised a plan to join forces via their respective entities Linc Property and Fini Group from an office 150 metres from where we are seated.

Together, they created a formidable entity with projects across the state spanning commercial, industrial, residential, healthcare and hospitality, including Dale Alcock’s ABN Group headquarters and the adjacent Leederville Hotel.

That’s what you’d expect of two men with their pedigree, with Adrian having inherited his father Tony Fini’s eponymous building firm and Lisle being the nephew of property doyen Nigel Satterley.

But Lisle insists it’s not the career he set out for.

Too squeamish for medicine and fearing law would bore him, the Christ Church Grammar graduate enrolled in mechanical engineering and physics at the University of Western Australia in 1992.

But when his attendance slipped and the intermittent cramming became unsustainable, Lisle took a year off, swapping the halls of the Nedlands university for a Welshpool sheet metal workshop.

His father worried he’d never return to his studies, but Lisle says it was a pivotal experience that had the opposite effect.

“That’s when I thought, ‘God, I’d better get my act together’ — there was certainly a switch,” he recalls, as the bruschetta and Tiger Prawn with crème fraîche and dill entrées arrive.

Hesperia managing director Ben Lisle.Credit: Ebony Talijancich

Lisle returned a reformed student, graduating with first-class honours and as the top student in his year — an accolade that caught the attention of corporate adviser John Poynton and his firm.

It was a “work hard to play hard” culture, and as the firm’s first hire, Lisle says he was stretched thin, but that it worked in his favour and accelerated his learning.

Lisle worked his way up to director before co-founding Azure Capital alongside Poynton and Perth deal-maker Mark Barnaba in 2004.

But within 2½ years, Lisle came to the realisation he wanted to be the principal, not the adviser.

He exited in 2007 to found Linc Property, an industrial and commercial property firm he would devote the better part of the next two decades to building.

As he reflects on the projects he took on ahead of the Global Financial Crisis, from large-format retail to industrial, it becomes clear there is more to Lisle’s success than sheer luck.

He is meticulous when it comes to risk management, acutely aware — even obsessive — about the risks posed by the state’s cyclical economy and the need to move quickly.

Lisle’s approach to business is underpinned by more than concern about profit, something he reveals was shaped by financial difficulties his family experienced in his early life.

As the ribbon is cut on the Murdoch Precinct Project that brought them together, Lisle and Fini (right) have begun implementing a major restructure of the firm that will see them lead separate business units.

“We have very big hits of demand relative to the size of our economy, but we struggle with the people and the housing supply to then facilitate that, and our slow building processes mean we take a long time to catch up to the demand,” he says.

“I have an intimate understanding of the human cost of these cycles, which create a lot of destruction … I became genuinely interested in how we better facilitate that more timely response.”

When Fini Group won the rights to the Murdoch Precinct Project in 2020, Lisle levelled a co-investment proposition. But Fini had a counterproposal.

“[Adrian] said, ‘Sure, but why don’t we look at merging [our] businesses?’” Lisle says.

The idea of diversifying was an attractive one for Lisle, who had thrown himself into work after going through a divorce at the start of the pandemic.

Lisle is reluctant to be drawn further on his personal life, including his two children, though finds it easy to talk about his affinity for motorcycles.

Lisle says his love of motorcycles and mountain biking is inherited from his father, who used to ride motorcars, and that it forces him to be present and connect with nature outside his work schedule.

But today, as we tuck into our lunch – risotto for me, bucatini for him — I’m keen to move back to business because, much like the economy he watches so intently, it appears his career is on the cusp of a new cycle.

As the ribbon is cut on the Murdoch Precinct Project that brought them together, Lisle and Fini have begun implementing a major restructure of the firm that will see them lead separate business units.

As the ribbon is cut on Murdoch Square in August, a new era begins for Hesperia. Here Lisle is pictured at the ceremony in August with Hesperia director Ian Smyth and Health Minister Amber-Jade Sanderson.

Despite speculation the pair would be going their separate ways, Lisle maintains the pair work closely together as directors of the two entities and the carve-up is to help the company better tackle its long and diverse list of new mega-projects, including the state’s first specialist orthopaedic hospital.

And he is transparent about the personal cost of the business’ rapid growth.

“I take the responsibility for us to deliver it for all of our investors very, very seriously, and by the end of last year I was feeling pretty exhausted,” he says.

His interest in economic cycles and immigration policy has also prompted his venture into the politics of planning, having been recruited to work on the state’s industrial land strategy and review the end-to-end planning system.

“When I was young and starting out, I was thinking about how I could make enough money to retire young and go travel. But as you mature, you start thinking about having a family and building a business, and then it becomes more about purpose and finding meaning,” he says.

“For me, having gone through divorce, there was a real sense of loss and I went looking for meaning by throwing myself into work and finding problems to solve.

“I am a firm believer in optimising for the system as a whole rather than arguing for your own personal interests as, in the long term, if you do the right thing by others you end up doing better also.”

Lisle says it is laggy approvals that are especially problematic in a state as cyclical as WA, pointing to the impact of planning constraints on affordability.

But he credits the McGowan/Cook government with beginning to change that.

Lisle reserves special praise for planning minister-turned-Treasurer Rita Saffioti, who he says has displayed leadership in being prepared to wear criticism to “do the right thing”.

He also commends the Barnett-era development assessment panel system, which he says has depoliticised planning by limiting interference from local councillors and placing decision-making in the hands of planning professionals.

While acknowledging apartments are not as cost-effective as detached dwellings, he believes the social and environment benefits of density are worth the investment.

The Bruschetta and Tiger Prawn with crème fraîche and dill at Dilly Dally in Subiaco.Credit: Ebony Talijancich.

He says the social and affordable housing program is a good opportunity to subsidise density in well-considered locations where it might not otherwise stack up, and he isn’t afraid to weigh in on the unrelenting opposition to density in the affluent western suburbs — including Cottesloe.

“I just fundamentally disagree with the idea that we should keep sprawling out to Bunbury, it’s like saying ‘I’m set, I have a house in the right place, but I don’t want anyone else living here’,” he says.

“A place like Cottesloe, our premier beach, should probably be more than it is, but you have this huge resistance to change and reluctance for people to share what is really a public asset and, personally, I find it quite selfish.

“[Urban sprawl] is not great, but it’s now very challenging to make infill development work anywhere other than the western suburbs because we’re in a constrained labor environment, apartments are three to four times more labour-intensive, and we have opened up lots of land.”

Despite the list of flashy projects Lisle has been involved in, he says industrial park Northlink is what he was most proud of.

It was a heritage site as challenging as they come, with a Noongar burial ground and camp occupied by a charity, protected wetlands and Carnaby’s Cockatoo habitat, and onsite contamination.

Consultation with the traditional owners resulted in two-thirds earmarked for development, the burial site ceded to the Metropolitan Cemetery Board and the rest set aside for conservation, ultimately generating $30 million for the charity.

As we push away our plates, Lisle tells me he hopes to leave a lasting impact in environment, health, and social disadvantage matters, and to create a vibrant city capable of retaining smart young people.

And he has his sights set on transforming how the public see those in his line of work, too.

“It would be nice to be seen for what we [property developers] really are,” he says.

“There’s a lot of cynicism around property development, but as I said, I genuinely never want to do anything that isn’t making things better.”

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