When Queensland-based entrepreneur Maxine Horne sold the last of her communications and beauty empire Vita Group last year for a sum that would ensure she would never have to work again, one would think she would be ecstatic.

But instead, the former Queensland Business Person of the Year with a net worth of $900m reveals it led to what she thinks was actually a state of depression.

Spend five minutes with the zealous, industrious and ruminative former Fone Zone and Artisan Aesthetic Clinic founder, however, and it’s not hard to see why she wasn’t joyously celebrating from the rooftops.

While the 61-year-old is charming, vivacious and warm during our two-and-a-half hour interview in Brisbane’s Teneriffe, Horne also has what she calls a “mongrel” side – a dogged determination to work and fight hard for what she wants.

It’s what helped her build telo operation Fone Zone from a single store at Pacific Fair shopping centre on the Gold Coast in the mid ’90s to a group with more than 130 locations, turning over in excess of $770m a year, before it was sold to Telstra in 2021.

So when she sold out of the rest of Vita Group and Artisan Aesthetic Clinic last year for $22.3m to Sonic Healthcare, said goodbye to her position of CEO that she had held for 28 years and was left without a day job, she admits she didn’t know what to do with herself.

“To be honest, really the first three months, I was probably depressed,” she shares, admitting she loves to be busy.

“I really struggled from going to being … whether you want to say the word needed or relevant, having something to do … to not having anything to do.”

She says she eventually pulled herself out of her mental state by giving herself a “bit of an uppercut”, but more crucially by cementing a regular morning routine as she had when she was CEO.

It’s a schedule she continues to adhere to, starting with a weights session at the gym every morning at 5.30 and some cardio “only because I know it’s good for my heart, but I don’t like it”. She says it helps bring structure to her day and allows her to “start doing stuff”.

That “stuff” includes a business venture she has created with two former Vita staff which provides temporary workforce accommodation, such as dongas, to those in construction working on major infrastructure projects in regions where there isn’t the housing to accommodate them. The business turns over $1m a month.

“I’ve really enjoyed it because it’s been a totally new industry so that’s been interesting,” she says.

She is also an investor in a company providing software for smoke alarms; trades stocks, and is an avid property flipper, with houses across Queensland from the north to the southeast.

“I like building businesses, I like building houses, I like creating and I really love art,” she says. “People used to say to me, ‘Why do you keep working? You don’t have to’, and my answer was, ‘Well, that’s because you associate work with money.’ I don’t work for money. I work for other things. I work for my own sense of purpose.”

Her latest project buys into that narrative, while also pushing the self-confessed “private person” wildly outside of her comfort zone.

Horne has signed on to being a “shark” on the upcoming season of Channel 10’s Shark Tank, where entrepreneurs try to secure funding for their business from a panel of investors aka “sharks”.

The role promises to place her firmly in the spotlight and far from the “anonymous” life she says she tries to lead. In fact, she doesn’t like to stand out in any way and that means even visually playing down her wealth.

She dresses smartly but not ostentatiously for our interview and photoshoot, wearing white linen pants, a navy blouse and expensive but minimal jewellery.

There’s no designer bag. In fact, 10 months ago she says she sold all her designer handbags because she “didn’t use them”.

“I don’t like to be showy – I’m not that type of person,” she says.

“I like to fly under the radar.”

It’s a trait that perhaps stems from her upbringing in the UK, where she says she grew up poor, raised by her grandmother, Rose, a cleaner, and grandfather, George, a carpenter, and gasfitter father Malcolm with little money to their name.

As a child she tried to hide her poverty, even running 4km home each school lunchbreak to eat a jam sandwich, rather than eat a free government-provided meal at the canteen that would signal to her peers her family didn’t have money.

She says she didn’t believe being poor was her “lot” in life, which is why she refused to accept it. However, hiding her wealth is more about staying humble, something she has instilled in her two children, Jack, 29, a professional gamer, and Grace, 25, a physiotherapist, who both had to work for their pocket money growing up and were never spoiled.

However, Horne is well aware that her modest, incognito lifestyle will soon change by appearing on a national TV show alongside fellow investors Oodie founder Davie Fogarty, online clothing boss Showpo’s Jane Lu, international entrepreneur Robert Herjavec, and tech and marketing guru Nick Bell.

“For me it’s about sharing the knowledge and the wisdom that I’ve obtained over the years by making all of these mistakes and I can hopefully help people not make them. So for me those are probably the driving factors,” she says, though she admits gaining a little praise and kudos through the process doesn’t hurt either.

Also encouraging the lifelong learning advocate to put herself out there was the opportunity to educate herself about film and TV – something she hasn’t been involved in before, but has always been curious about.

Though she admits she felt like a “real fish out of water” when she first hit the set. In fact, it wasn’t until some gentle words of advice from Shark Tank veteran Herjavec that she finally began to relax. “Robert said to me, ‘The trouble is that you’re thinking of it as if it’s a business program in media, but if you flip it on its head, it’s actually an entertainment program that happens to be about business.’ The minute he said that, it made a really big change in my mindset when I was there,” she says.

And once she relaxed into the role, she says she found true joy, keeping an eye out to invest in businesses that appealed to her interests of dogs, health and wellbeing and longevity, but, more importantly, people with the right attitude.

“This sounds very wanky, but when you get to the level that the Sharks are at, their time is money and if you’re taking their time, at the back of their head they’re thinking, ‘Oh, I could be making more doing this’ or ‘This is way too much effort for the reward’,” she says.

And for Horne, she has no desire to return to the 80-hour-a-week life of a CEO.

She insists she is more than content working 20-25 hours a week on her various investments and spending the rest of the time with her mining consultant husband Adam, 50, who she married in 2021, her kids, and trying to accomplish her lifelong dream of being able to surf. And if she commits a fraction of the dogged determination she gave to running Vita Group to riding a board, there’s sure to be no stopping her.

Shark Tank Australia airs from Wednesday, October 16 at 8.30pm on Channel 10 and 10 Play