Profile: George Lewin
By Lucinda Schmidt | smh.com.au | 19 November
George Lewin
They say you can't time the markets perfectly but inventor and philanthropist George Lewin, 59, came pretty close.
Last year he was sitting on an $8.5 million share portfolio, built from the proceeds of selling his Triton tool company for an eight-figure sum in 1999. The day after watching a Four Corners program in October last year on the subprime mortgage crisis, he rang his broker with an order to sell the lot.
The S&P/ASX 200 was at 6680 points (it's now about 4000) and he's earned 7 per cent to 8 per cent on his cash, while super funds and share portfolios are awash with red. But he's angry that others have been less fortunate.
"These masters of the universe, it serves them right, the greedy bastards," Lewin says. "But the collateral damage is huge. These suits in Wall Street and Collins Street and Pitt Street rob people blind and then walk away with millions of dollars. The world is stuffed."
Lewin shot to prominence in 1976, aged 27, when his Triton workbench for home handymen appeared on ABC TV's The Inventors program. The day after the show, he had more than 1000 orders and big retailers were clamouring for stock.
For 20 years he lived and breathed the company before realising it was time to walk away when he negotiated the biggest deal of his life - $35 million in sales - and felt empty inside.
"I realised there had to be other things to do with my life - I'd become so typecast as Mr Triton," he says. "I made the decision to reinvent myself."
It has not been an easy path for Lewin. It took him five years to ease out of Triton. "I'd been disempowering my managers for two decades," he confesses.
"Nothing happened in that company without my grubby hands on it."
Slowly he shifted the balance, spending more time at his property near Byron Bay (where he now lives) and "writing myself out of the script".
Once he was free, however, he swapped his Triton workaholism for more of the same on establishing and promoting the Triton Foundation to recruit and mentor young inventors. He flew around the country haranguing politicians, bureaucrats and television executives on the need for more support for "The Clever Country".
In 2002, Lewin's doctor threatened to hospitalise him for high blood pressure unless he gave up the foundation and went overseas for a long holiday. The five-month trip reduced his stress levels but he came back depressed and on anti-depressants for the first time in his life. "I felt my life had turned to shit, quite frankly," he says.
He was unhappy with the direction the Triton Foundation took after he left, coupled with the refusal by the Tax Office to allow him deductibility for the $1 million he had pumped in (the Foundation closed in July this year).
The Triton company was gradually shrivelling from 120 staff to less than 20, unloading containers from China. Lewin is now throwing his energies into another venture, the George Lewin Foundation, established in 2003, supporting 40 or 50 local, national and international causes, including Rainforest Rescue, Southern Cross University and CARE Australia.
He is candid in admitting that his philanthropy originally stemmed from a desire not to pay any tax to the Howard government, because he abhorred its policies on the Iraq war, detention of refugees, funding of rich schools and other issues.
"I don't live very extravagantly - I have no debt," he says. "I'm a single man with a dog. I believe we are here to heal the planet and help people who are disadvantaged."
The big questions
Biggest break: Appearing on [ABC TV's] The Inventors in July 1976. It was the five minutes that changed my life. I'd spent 16 months trying to interest the world [in his Triton workbench].
Biggest achievement: Overcoming the myriad obstacles between inventing and successfully commercialising. I hung in there and kept picking myself off the floor.
Biggest regret: That I didn't use professional engineers five years earlier. I knew zip about designing or manufacturing but, with the optimistic pretension of youth, I thought I could do it all myself.
Best investment: A toss-up between backing my hunch that I could survive the trauma of a start-up and buying my own factories instead of renting, so I could put in the infrastructure I needed.
Worst investment: The decade or more bashing my head against a brick wall with the US market. I wasted a fortune and tens of thousands of hours.
Attitude to money: It can be the root of all evil. It's convenient, sure, but it doesn't make you happy. I'd like to give away my last dollar as I take my last breath.
Personal philosophy: Try to live life so you leave the world a better place.
First published by Smh.com.au on November 19 2008
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