THE EXAMINER, Monday, March 25, 2002

Gunns boss John Gay couples a direct manner with a constant eye on the future.
So John, how do you think you've acquired this reputation as a crusty old so-and-so?
"What? What do you mean? Explain," demands John Gay, Gunns' executive chairman, international businessman.
One bushy eyebrow shoots alarmingly skywards. He was relaxed, leaning back comfortably in his padded executive desk chair, gazing casually about his fine timber-panelled office. Now he is bolt upright, his attention riveted on this reporter.
Mmmm – perhaps that wasn't the right question.
The interview had proceeded perfectly until then.
Tasmania knows John Gay, master timber producer, tough corporate negotiator; but what about the man?
We'd already chatted about growing up at Deloraine, school at Hobart's St. Virgil's college, the farms, his taste in music.
I tried again.
"You know that you have this reputation in the community for being a bit of a crusty old so-and-so", I mumbled.
‘But I'm not old!" shot back the manager who likes things just right.
John Gay doesn't like talking about himself.
When he describes his father – still very much alive at 86 and running the family farm near Deloraine as he has always done - Gay Jnr could be describing himself.
"He's a proud sort of person; he doesn't say much," he said.
But he does love talking about his three professional passions
– Gunns, trees and an economically viable Tasmania. The trees probably came first.
The love for them has been with him since he was a boy at home on the Deloraine farm run by his father Eugene and his brother, also Eugene but called Gene. His mother died in 1950.
Like most country youngsters of his generation, John was sent away to high school – St Virgil's College in Hobart.
"We came from down that way," he says as an explanation.
You learn a bit more about the man as he talks of the school years.
"I loved it," he said. "It was a typical regimented boarding-school life, and I fitted into the regimented life pretty well. Some people find it easy, some don't. I liked it.
"I played all sports, was always more sport-orientated than academic, but I played none of them well."
The legacy is what John does now with some of his rare leisure time.
"I love to fish – and golf. I started playing golf straight after school and never stopped," he said.
After school John returned home to the bush and the trees.
"My father has a sawmill as well as the farm. I worked at the sawmill for a couple of years; then I constructed a sawmill at Oatlands and started off," he says. Its trade-mark John Gay – direct, no elaboration, no fuss.
But as an afterthought he mentions that he was under 21, at the time. He had to get his father to go guarantee so that he could start up his own business because he was so young. Yet within a decade it was so successful that major Tasmanian timber company Gunns headhunted him.
Gunns' executives Keith Hardman and John Gunn hired the young John Gay in 1973 to run the company's Waverley and Summerhill operations on a grand salary of £7000.
He was offered the top job of the general manager just four years later, but turned it down,
"I was a sawmiller, not a manager," he said.
Launceston businessman Jack Bain took the job instead, and John Gay – older and wiser – became General Manager after Mr Bain.
The rest is history.
The Deloraine sawmiller is widely acknowledged as the man who transformed Gunns into the successful international timber company that it is today.
You learn a bit about how John acquired his reputation as a crust old so-and-so when he starts talking big business.
Gunns' breakthrough into the national and international corporate arena started in mid-1999 with John Gay at the helm, when the company bought Tasmania Board Mills from Boral for $23.3 million. It then bought Boral's Tasmanian forests and chipping interests in August 2000 for $72 million, and – to the amazement of the Tasmanian business community – cheekily acquired North Forest Products for a cool $335 million in mid-2001.
Most chief executives, as John Gay had become, would have seen those extraordinary buy-outs as the deals of a lifetime and relaxed to enjoy the accolades.

This no-nonsense negotiator saw them as only the beginning.
"They gave us size so that the company could grow and develop, and we started to become large enough so that people noticed us," he said.
But it will be a couple of years before he makes his next move.
"You always need two years of consolidation following an acquisition to get it all running properly," he said.
"People do deals and feel so good about the deals that they don't concentrate on what comes later."
So how does the boy from the Tasmanian bush handle himself in the corporate boardrooms?
"I don't get nervous," he said. "I get the deals together, get them completed and go forward – and don't lose sight that there is always a risk that something might go wrong. You have to always be on yours toes."
He becomes defensive again for just a moment.
"People misjudge me if they think I'm a grumpy bugger," he said "I usually have a view and I usually stick to it. But I can change and do change.
"No, I don't suffer fools," he agreed. "If things are not done properly, I like to be informed. When I show toughness is when that doesn't happen."
He describes himself as a hands-on manager.
He still gets to work about 7-7.15 a.m. every day from his home just around the corner in Clarence St., and is still there 11 or 12 hours later.
"I suppose it would be a nice walk from Clarence St in the morning," offers the helpful reporter.
"Never walked to work in my life," spits back blunt John.
When he is on the job in Launceston, rather than flying to business deals around the world, he spends time every day talking to his staff. "An important part of management is talking to your people. I get around the sites and know my staff," he said.
These days, after nearly three decades with Gunns, he says that the company has become his passion rather then the means of raising the revenue to take care of his family – a son, now 23, and daughter, 21, with his wife of 30 years, Erica.
"The motivation now is to see Gunns succeed."
And that leads to his other favourite business topic – keeping Tasmania economically sound.
"Gunns needs to be a strong company for the State," he said.
"It's most disappointing that we've lost a lot of the big companied. Tasmania needs strong private and public companies.
"And if we don't maintain a small-business community that is strong and profitable, we will end up being a state that is commercially controlled from the mainland,"
But hang on! This was to be about John Gay, the man.
Music. What kind of music do you listen to, John?
"You shouldn't have to ask me – country, of course," he says.
And what about when he is not putting in a 12-hour-a-day, six-day business week?
He is fulfilling his boyhood dream – owning his own farm.
He brought his first farm in his early 20s as soon as he could save enough from his first business, at Oatlands.
There are now two – both out near Deloraine, of course – where he "potters about" driving tractors or moving sheep and cattle about.
"I like working sheep and cattle," he said, still unashamedly country.