Renowned retailer Rick Hart once tried to retire after he sold his Rick Hart business. He lasted six or eight weeks, which he says, “just about did my head in”.
These days his Hart & Co business is a family affair with his two children involved in the business, but Rick says he’s still very much part of the team.
“I’ve got to be doing stuff, so I’m involved in the business. I look after various aspects of it,” Rick says.
“I try and mentor everybody around me and I’ve got a business partner who’s been with me for 25 years,” the 81-year-old says.
Rick’s retail career started back in 1975 with a well-documented story about buying a container load of damaged refrigerators which they sold through the Sunday Times Reader’s Mart.
While Rick grew up in the Wheatbelt town of Merredin where his parents operated a grocery store, he had no ambition to follow in their footsteps.
After school in Merredin, he joined rural company Dalgety & Co, which he says was a way of helping him get back to the country.
“All throughout my school years, all I wanted to do was be a journalist. And when I got to Perth, a little country boy, I applied for a cadetship with WA Newspapers, but I think there were about another 800 kids wanting to do the same, so it was hard to get into that.
“Then, joining Dalgety, I spent my first 13 years of working life with them, mainly in their wine and spirits division. I got a big intro to the liquor trade and that’s really where I wanted to end up, but through one thing or another we didn’t get there with that.
“And then this fridge thing came along and we started from there. Then 1975 was the advent of colour TV, so we started selling colour TVs. That was a pretty buoyant market back then.
“My business partner at the time was into air-conditioning installations, so we decided to sell air-conditioners and just expanded it from there.”
Rick’s career along the way has included 13 years as a bookmaker at the races, president of the Fremantle Dockers, and chairman of Renaissance Minerals Limited.
Rick has learned plenty along the way, starting with those first days of colour TV.
“The thing that appealed to me about it was I didn’t think that there was anybody that was really doing it in a way that was beneficial to the customer. I learned about customer service, and I studied up before embarking on it. And it became a bit of a passion of mine.
“We just kept inventing ways of delivering customer service to people.
“For instance, when we were selling colour TVs, on a Saturday morning you’d have 10 or 12 people in the showroom looking at colour TVs and not being sure what they wanted.
“We allowed them to take the TV with them and try it out over the weekend and they could come back on Monday and pay for it or bring it back, whatever you decide.
“The logic behind that was that if you give somebody a television to take home and they’ve got little kids with them the chances of it coming back on Monday and saying, ‘Dad’s taken the TV back’ was remote. So that was a pretty successful thing.”
Most of Rick’s competitors were focused on price.
“The big chains around in that time were working on big numbers and very small margins and it was very hard to compete in that space with them.
“That’s why we tried to find a way around so that we could concentrate on products that weren’t competing with them and giving a bit better service than they did and being local and trying to create a community background.
“It worked really well.”
And over the 50 years he’s been in business Rick says the model has been refined across several different businesses.
The Rick Hart business ran from around 1980 to 2005 and by the end had 18 stores.
“And then we got into European upmarket appliances. When I sold Rick Hart back in 2005, that led to us starting up another business called Kitchen Headquarters, which at the time was probably the best showroom and the most unique retail offering in Australia.
“It was hugely successful. Then that got sold off and we started Hart & Co five years ago.”
Rick says his children had grown up in the retail industry and wanted to get back into it.
“I thought, well, maybe I’ve got one last Ferrari I can have a crash at. So that’s what we did, and we’ve got a good niche in the market.
“We’ve got a good brand, the Rick Hart brand, of course, has stood the test of time and still works very strongly for us now. And I love the fact that I’m still involved in it.
“The big thing in business is that if I had to say one of the two things that makes this a success, I think the first one is delivering, not just straight, delivering superior customer service.
“Making an offering that’s different to other people either in the way you go about the business or the product that you sell is different to what everybody else is offering.
“And the third one is to surround yourself with quality people. You know, I’m very lucky in that regard.
“And the other great thing about business is to enjoy yourself, and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it for 50 years now.”
