Jack Cowin on how he won friends, influenced people and made a few billion on the way… and who’s going to run his diversified fast-food empire when he’s gone.
This story featured in Issue 15 of Forbes Australia. You can grab your copy here.
Jack Cowin recounts with a sense of wonder the pivotal few weeks in his life, 55 years ago, when he convinced 30 Canadians to lend him CA$10,000 [CA$81,000 in 2024 terms] each to start a fast-food business in Australia.
“If a 25-year-old kid comes into your office, wants to get into a business halfway around the world, he’s got no experience, he’s not going to pay you any interest on your money, there’s no collateral behind him, how long before you throw him out of your office for wasting your time?” Cowin tells Forbes Australia.
One of the people who didn’t throw young Jack out of his office was Cowin’s old college football buddy Sandy McIntosh, who was in the investment business and who tipped in CA$10,000, then accompanied his pal to the office of a prominent Ontario businessman as he spruiked the worthiness of his 10-store franchise opportunity with Kentucky Fried Chicken.
“Jack gave him the story and the guy just about threw him out, said, ‘You’re crazy. You’ve got no experience. How do we know chickens are going to sell in Australia? I’m not giving you a cent’,” recalls McIntosh.
But this is not a story of Cowin persevering in the face of unremitting rejection. The fact is, says former quarterback McIntosh, Cowin faced few such refusals. He had something about him that made people trust him. History shows it was warranted. The investors who have stayed in for the 55-year journey – including McIntosh – are sitting on shares McIntosh says are worth north of $40 million each (CA$36 million, the equivalent of 15% compound interest over 55 years).
Half the investors were friends and friends of friends; the other half were legal and investment types. The smarter, more business-savvy investors took a profit and got out early, says McIntosh. “The rest of us – the other 15 or so – were investing in Jack. If Jack had gone to Australia with nothing, we would have still given him the money.”
“There were occasions where he had his shirt off in the car park.”
General manager of Cowin’s Competitive Foods, Ian Parker
And as Cowin began building on that early success – founding Hungry Jack’s in 1971, opening some abattoirs, and investing in an array of businesses around the world across multiple sectors – building a fortune today estimated at more than $3 billion – he kept offering to buy out those original investors. But they stuck to him.
“The most important thing about Jack is his personality,” says McIntosh. “It’s so low-key. Yet it’s a soothing, selling personality. You can see why he’s been successful. He’s a soft-sell; he’s not a car salesman. And I think the friends that invested with him saw that and were willing to ride with Jack no matter what he got involved in in Australia.”
I enter his corner office with views over Sydney’s Woolloomooloo, back to the top of the Opera House and Harbour Bridge. He begins by grilling me and soon learns I arrived by bicycle and that I have athletic pretensions. He seems interested and learns more about me before I see what’s happening. As a teenager, he’d read Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, which stresses the importance of asking questions. That’s not to say his questions are insincere. Perhaps the second most important lesson from that seminal self-help book is that one should not just ask questions but be genuinely interested in the answers.
I didn’t speak to anyone who knew Jack Cowin who didn’t think he was interested in the answers; that he was also there for them. Advertising legend John Singleton who’s been mates with Cowin – who he calls “Hungry” – since the early 70s, says Cowin always leaves his phone on.
“If it’s 3 am and you want to talk to someone, Jack’s your boy. When my son was getting on the piss and getting into trouble, I was living up the coast, so he rang Hungry, and Jack got up and bailed him out and drove him home. He’s an unbelievable guy, mate.
“Of all the guys I’ve met, and I’ve worked with them or for them all, I think I’ve known 95% of the top 100 [richest Australians], and I’d say Jack is the kindest. With one exception, he’s been tolerant, even of absolute fucking idiots. He doesn’t put people down in business, in life, in a restaurant. He always softens to the other person’s point of view.”
That’s not to say he doesn’t have a hard side. The general manager of Cowin’s Competitive Holdings, Ian Parker, who has worked for Cowin in three spells over 40 years, tells the story of how, when Perth was a boom-bust mining town – when to phone the Eastern States, you had to book the call three days in advance – Cowin would be at the stores after pub closing time.
“Jack was a pugilist, and Perth was just a wild town – people used to turn up at Hungry Jack’s after being at the pub and start fights, and Jack used to get in there and participate to protect his assets and his employees. There were occasions where he had his shirt off in the car park.”
Parker mentions that Cowin regularly sends a cohort of high-achieving Hungry Jack’s restaurant employees to float about on one of his two super yachts in the Mediterranean for two weeks. But his largesse can also extend to formerly valued employees, says Parker. After Cyclone Tracey devastated Darwin in 1974, Cowin flew to the city to start giving away Kentucky Fried Chicken out of a caravan. He worked closely with his Darwin manager, Eddie Schmitz, who – some 15 years after he left the company – fell on hard times.
“He had some health issues and was robbed by a relative who got control of his affairs and stripped all his money. He was living in a Salvation Army home in Melbourne and didn’t have shoes. He had nothing. Jack took on his case, and we invested north of $240,000 in legal fees to get the money back. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Cowin had a job selling trees and shrubs door to door while at university. He’s forgotten just about everything he learnt at the University of Western Ontario, but he remembers the lessons he got knocking on those doors. “That’s the greatest education I’ve ever had,” he says. “When you knock on the door, the natural reaction is, ‘No, we don’t want it.’ You’ve got to somehow get an in.” There’s no magic formula. “It’s more instinctive than learning. How do we connect? What’s important and what isn’t? You’ve got a nanosecond to sum that person up.”
He majored in psychology for his arts degree, and his daughter Sally Cowper says that understanding people remains his central personality trait. “His raison d’etre, his reason for living, is figuring out what makes people tick. So he’s happy to strike up conversations with literally anyone. I think he ultimately believes everyone has something to offer. It’s something I always say to my kids: ‘Be like Pop and understand that everyone’s got something to offer.’”
Cowin won the college heavyweight wrestling championship and was drafted into the Canadian professional football league for his abilities as a defensive end in American football. But he left that behind to work for an insurance company in sales.
His father had been sent to Australia in 1960 to help build Ford’s engine plant in Geelong, Victoria, and came back with stories about it being the land of opportunity. So when some of Cowin’s friends were sent Downunder by Kentucky Fried Chicken in February 1968 to research Australia’s readiness for fast food, he went with them.
“I’m staying with them in Mosman [Sydney], and we have a party on a Sunday night. And I have to go and pick up food at a Chinese restaurant. You stand in line for about an hour with a number. You did not have to be Albert Einstein to say if you could produce food faster and in a more efficient way by limiting the menu, there’s probably a business opportunity.”
He paid a $1,000 deposit on a 10-restaurant franchise area if Kentucky Fried ever came to Australia. He had a wife, a six-month-old son, Michael, and a mortgage. He was stretched when he got the call that the fried chicken chain’s test store on Woodville Road, Parramatta, in Sydney, was going well and that if he didn’t come out and take up his territory, he’d lose it. And by the way, you can’t have Sydney like we said, you’ve got to go to Perth.
He raised the CA$300,000 from the 30 investors. That money was enough to open only three restaurants, and he still recalls the numbers. “The land cost $50,000, the building cost $35,000, and equipment $15,000.”
The timing was good. He set up in the West Australian capital in mid-1969, and by September, demand for nickel had sent the shares in Perth-based Poseidon Nickel on a trajectory that would see it go 300x over the next 17 months and drag other miners in its wake.
“I’d talk to people and go ‘how long’s this been going on?’ It was a go-go place.
“When you’re young and enthusiastic, you don’t know the boundaries of what you should and shouldn’t do. We said, ‘Okay, what else can we get into?’” Hamburgers were gaining dominance in the US and Canadian fast-food world. He visited McDonald’s, which hadn’t yet come to Australia. It was only offered him a two-store franchise. The number-two chain, Burger King, offered him all of Australia.
He opened a test restaurant in central Sydney’s George Street and bought two more Sydney suburban sites – at Yagoona and Sans Souci. “Then I got a phone call from the American company, ‘Sorry, we can’t go ahead because we just opened in Canada, and sales haven’t been what we thought they were going to be. The board says, no more international money until we figure out how we get this done.’”
He had to sell the properties.
“McDonald’s were sniffing around, looking at doing something. This would have been 1970.” He sold them to the golden arches, and the Yagoona site would go on to house the first McDonald’s restaurant in Australia in December 1971, with the other sites following soon after.
“It was extremely admirable that he never once showed the stress I now know he was under. I reflect now as a parent how he could have possibly done that and gotten through that.”
Cowin’s daughter Sally Cowper
Meanwhile, back in the west, Cowin had already opened his first two burger restaurants – the first at Innaloo, 10km northwest of the Perth CBD, and the second at the equally well-named Dog Swamp. The busiest time was when the pub closed. “They’d come to buy a burger, like blotting paper to soak up the beer.”
Still an independent business, he moved into Adelaide in 1972 by buying out an American entrepreneur, Don Dervan, who’d opened his own chain of fast-food joints – cheekily called Burger King – starting in 1962 with waitresses on roller skates.
After three years of independence, Cowin made a deal with Burger King in the US that he’d pay a reduced royalty for the use of its trademarks and processes. He loved the “Whopper” name, but even though he’d bought Australian rights to the Burger King name from Dervan, he sold it back to the US company for $1, with no desire to adopt it himself.
By 1974, Hungry Jack’s was in Brisbane. “We broke all the rules. You build a business by getting critical mass in one market with suppliers, people and resources. When that’s at a solid state, you move to another geographic. We were flying across the country, different suppliers, different this and that, we had every reason to go broke.
“But we’re so enthused. We’re in our 20s; we don’t know any of this. We just know we want to become a national business. With hindsight, though, I suppose there is a case for getting in and establishing territory despite all the risks.”
McDonald’s had come in strong in Sydney and Melbourne but trailed Hungery Jack’s into other capitals, opening in Brisbane in1975, Adelaide in 1978 and Perth in 1982.
Hungry Jack’s came to Sydney in 1980, and Cowin moved his family there in the same year to be closer to the heart of Australian business.
Sourcing the meat was a problem from early on. “I went to a supplier in Western Australia when we had just a few stores, and the guy says, ‘Tell me that this is what you want. You want to take honest-to-goodness beef steak, grind it up, and you don’t want to put flour or sawdust or anything else in it to make it go further?’ That was the mentality then.”
He didn’t have any success in getting a supplier he could trust, so he started a “commissary”, a commercial kitchen next door to the office. Then he bought a factory. “Today, that is a business that produces 35,000 tonnes of hamburger patties, which we export to 27 countries.”
Things you didn’t know about Jack Cowin
- He loves playing Cupid. “He always used to try to matchmake all our friends growing up,” says his daughter Sally Cowper. “And he had a pretty good success rate! “He’s almost like a psychologist trying to figure out what makes people tick. I remember him saying once he just likes to sprinkle happiness.”
- He owns two super yachts but rarely gets to use them because they’re both in the Mediterranean or Caribbean. You can rent the small one, Silver Dream, for as little as $240,000 a week in low season or Slipstream for as much as $660,000 a week in high season.
- Cowin is an avid reader and gets four newspapers delivered daily. When one of his grandchildren got a Taylor Swift book for Christmas, he read it cover to cover before she did because he wanted to understand what made them tick.
- He still wears the shoes he received as attaché to the Canadian team at the Sydney 2000 Olympics as slippers around the house and continues to resist family attempts to replace the battered holey shoes with new ones because “they ain’t broke”.
Scoundrels
Famed ad man John Singleton met Cowin in the early 1970s. “Jack wanted to do a great launch ad for Hungry Jacks in Western Australia, and I came up with a really terrible, really embarrassing launch ad. Rodney Rude was the star. I said to Jack, ‘I’ll redo it at my cost.’ We did another, it wasn’t as good as Hugo [“Hugo said you go” a famed campaign for KFC that Singelton had played a role in], but it did the job … We were the same age, and we enjoyed the social aspects of life – a few drinks, nightclubs, restaurants – and we just became friends as we still are 55 years later.
“I remember when Jack saw the movie Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, he rented the house from the movie in St Tropez, and he invited eight or 10 friends, half of them were football mates, the other half were business mates. It was just fantastic. But he was so diligent with his homework. After dinner he always goes over to his desk, with his old fountain pen, his Swan ink, and he goes over every projection, every income from every store from every franchise. For a guy who loves life so much, he’s unbelievably diligent. It’s like Harry Triguboff knows every building. Gerry Harvey [owner of Harvey Norman] can tell you the rental basis of every store he’s got.”
Return of the King
Asked what his lowest time was, Cowin nominates a fight with Burger King that began in 1992. “It was owned by a company called Diageo, a big liquor company. And they said, ‘Who’s this idiot in Australia who we have a relationship with but who calls it Hungry Jack’s rather than Burger King?’ This Pommy lawyer arrives and says, ‘I’m here to buy your business.’ I said, ‘Welcome to Australia, but what happens if we don’t want to sell? We’re trying to build a business, and we don’t think we’ve optimised where we are.’ He said, ‘Well, if you don’t sell, we’ll make it very difficult for you. One, we’ll come in and compete with you. Two, we’re going to stop you from having the ability to grow.’ I said, ‘I can’t stop you from coming in. But you can’t stop us from growing.’”
“You watch.”
Burger King turned up in Australia and opened. After a deal with Shell service stations, they had 50 stores in Australia – one on the same block as Hungry Jack’s busiest outlet in George Street, Sydney.
The contract with Burger King stipulated that Hungry Jack’s had to open four new restaurants a year in Queensland, Western Australia and South Australia and that Burger King HQ had to approve each one.
In 1995 Burger King stopped giving those approvals. Hungry Jack’s couldn’t meet its four-store-openings requirement, so Burger King terminated the contract.
Cowin sued.
“Having someone who’s a billionaire as your father is inherently complicated … You get people making a whole bunch of assumptions.”
Michael Cowin
And so began his darkest hours. If he lost, he could be up for $100 million. Over the next five years, he spent $8 million in legal fees. “You never know whether you’re going to win or lose. The judge scratches his nose. Does that mean he believes you or doesn’t believe you? You go through all this stage of intimidation. We got to the stage where ‘Should we maybe cave in, accept the money they’re offering us?’ And one of the things that you’ll learn in my life’s lessons is, never, never give up if you think you’re right. Big companies operate on the basis that a little guy will fold. Showing up eliminates 85% of competitors who won’t go the distance.
“The flip side of that is, don’t die on your sword in pursuit of mission impossible.”
Cowin’s daughter, Sally Cowper, recalls how, during this period, her father never brought any sign of stress back home. He’d be at the dinner table every night, asking questions of her day. “Looking back as an adult and parent now, I just think it was extremely admirable that he never once showed the stress I now know he was under. I reflect now as a parent how he could have possibly done that and gotten through that.”
Hungry Jack’s won the case, and it went to appeal, but on the night before the judgement was due to be handed down, in June 2001, after five years of bitter fighting, Cowin rang Burger King’s lawyers and offered to settle. There was too much to lose, he says – about $100 million – so why not take a modest profit instead?
The lawyer agreed verbally and promised to send an agreement via fax. When it came through the next day, however, the deal was off. It turned out that Burger King had been so shocked by Cowin’s sudden reversal that it suspected he had inside information that he was about to lose.
So Cowin fronted court to learn that he’d won. The $71 million he was awarded in damages went a long way to buying Burger King’s 50 stores, which were re-branded as Hungry Jack’s. He stresses that “we are now best friends” with the American company and – under new management – they are very happy with the “handsome” royalty agreement.
Original investor Sandy McIntosh says he stayed in the company these past 55 years because of Cowin, but at the same age as the 82-year-old, wonders where to go from here. “The three or four remaining investors, we’re all riding on Jack. And our question now is: What happens after Jack goes? Is the company going to keep running the way it is? Is the family involved in it? Is part of it going to be sold off?”
“I said, ‘Jack, we’re getting old. We’ve got to cash in and have some more fun.’”
Cowin’s old friend John Singleton
So what is the succesion plan?
“I don’t have a …” Cowin pauses and reframes. “We have a business with management. So if I fell off the perch tomorrow, we’ve got people that can run this business. I’m 82. Same age as Joe Biden. Buggered. But my image of others is Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger. These guys are all my age and still up on stage. My view is I want to remain active until I can’t do it anymore.”
Gazillionaire
The four Cowin children, Mary, Jane, Sally and Michael, all worked menial jobs within the business as kids, such as Mary sweeping floors and serving at Hungry Jack’s in the Sydney CBD, and Sally taking pizza orders over the phone for Domino’s. But they’ve never been encouraged into the business.
The eldest, Michael, 56, studied chemical engineering and worked for Procter & Gamble making shampoo for three years. His dad had always said to find a job he loved, then, it’ll never feel like work. “And you sort of go, man, this is not what I’m going to do for the rest of my life,” Michael tells Forbes Australia [with an Australian accent] on a recent visit back to Australia. “Eventually I joined investment banks and got into funds management. I’ve done that for the last 25 years.”
Michael is the only one of the Cowin children born in Canada and, for the last 14 years he’s been living there, not because he especially wants to, but his epileptic daughter has complex medical needs that are better served in North America.
His father never tried to set up Competitive Foods as a family business, Michael tells Forbes Australia. “When you’re a self-made gazillionaire like Dad … There’s families like the Foxes [and] say the Packers and Ray White where they’ve been multi-generational and people are encouraged to go into the business … with Dad, it’s always been ‘Go out and do your own thing and be your own success.’”
Michael worked with UBS and AMP where he ran the Small Companies Fund, and, from 2007 to 2018, he was an equity partner and fund manager of Northcape Capital, which had $10 billion under management.
Related
He does sit on boards of family businesses [among others, he is chair of Domino’s Pizza Japan] and is trying to formalise the structure of the family office, Corom Pty Ltd.
“For me it’s been good. I’ve done okay in life but having Dad as a role model, having someone who’s a billionaire as your father is inherently complicated, particularly working in the stock market. You get people making a whole bunch of assumptions, but at the end of the day they get to know you and figure you out.
“It helps open doors occasionally. But the reality is it makes zero difference after they get to know you.
“Dad never encouraged us to go into the business. But he’s now 82. None of my sisters are involved day to day. I’m sort of there running money on the side.
“My younger sister, Sally, her husband [Paul Cowper] is a CFO in the business. And that helps.”
Asked how the family office, Corom Pty Ltd, is shaping up, Michael says it’s “still evolving”; he needs to spend more time in Australia. “You get someone like Dad. He’s got strong opinions on how you should be doing things. And we don’t always agree on it. At the end of the day, that’s fine. I’ve had the privilege of running small-cap money. You meet a lot of self-made people who list their stock.
“Having a father like that sort of gives you an advantage because you get where they’re coming from. And, you know, it helps you understand their motivations and how they’re driving the business. And that’s also allowed me a better understanding of Dad.
“It’s given me an advantage just in terms of understanding the complexities of families. And it’s interesting because you see other wealthy families: everybody does it differently. And there is no right way to run a family business.”
‘I didn’t believe they could turn it around’
Cowin is famed in his family for minutely choreographing spectacular holidays. And his friends often come too. “Most years we go away for a few weeks,” says John Singleton. “His lovely wife Sharon is there. His kids and their partners, and his mates often arrive, especially now he’s got these rich-person boats.
“Jack’s still young at heart. He still thinks we’re 26, but we’re 106. But we still do a lot of things together.
John Singleton
“Back in the early 90s, he rang me about Channel Ten. Gerry Harvey and I were going to buy it. And when we bid for it, the first meeting Gerry Harvey turned up late because he ran out of petrol. He only got a few dollars’ worth so he could fill up where it was cheaper, so he missed the meeting. That buggered that up. But because I’d done so much homework on Channel Ten Jack rang. He asked why I thought Channel Ten was so good and I started to bore him stupid with revenue and what had to happen. He said, ‘I’ve been offered 20%. I’ll go you halves and we’ll go and have lunch instead of this boring talk about revenue’. So we went and had lunch and we finished up with 10% each.
“Channel Ten had gone from very profitable under Rupert Murdoch to minus $100 million and in the final negotiations Jack went in and came back with a generous deal.”
In 1992, they were part of a consortium that bought Channel Ten out of receivership. With a no frills model, management quickly changed its fortunes. “I didn’t believe they could turn it around to $100 million profit as fast as they did, but they did.” It floated four years later.
“We got 1,300% return from the investment,” Singleton says, but it was unusual for Cowin to sell anything. “That’s Jack Cowin’s theory. He never sells anything. He just accumulates. Accumulates. I said, ‘Jack, we’re getting old. We’ve got to cash in and let’s have some more fun.’ ‘Johnny, you’re right,’ he says, then he goes off to 23 meetings in the next two days.”
“Friends often say to me, ‘you must regret not doing more [business wise] with Jack or Gerry. Look how much better off they are than you.’ I look at where I live now, with the dog , and I say, ‘No, I don’t envy that. I envy the stability they’ve got at home that I’m not able to have. My fault in every case. Jack and Sharon are a team and have been since they were 20. They are the same as when they were young. It’s given Jack a tremendous advantage to have that stability at home. She’s given me license to speak about this, but I work for the Exodus Foundation at Ashfield. We give away more free meals than anyone in Australia. And apart from money, who goes out there every week and works? She’s known as ‘Shaz’. No one knows she’s the Hungry Jack’s and Domino’s lady.”
The Whopper
- Cowin owns 98% of Hungry Jack’s, valued at about $2 billion with its 470 restaurants, most of which it owns.
- It is owned by Cowin’s Competitive Foods Australia, which also owns a meat processing business turning over about $300 million annually, with three plants in Australia and New Zealand exporting to 27 countries.
- He owns seafood importing businesses in Australia and New Zealand, plus several venture capital investments, including artificial meat business v2food.
- He owns 26% of Domino’s Pizza Enterprises, the ASX-listed entity worth $2.7 billion, valuing his share at $700 million.
- He owns the Lone Star Texas Grill restaurant chain in Canada, plus a major holding in another Canadian fast-food company, SIR Corp.
- He’s the major shareholder in a rail supply company, Railcrew Xpress, based in Kansas City and he owns a construction-safety and maintenance firm, Apache Industrial, which has some 40 facilities across the US.
- He sold his 55 Australian KFC stores for $71 million in 2013.
- He bought a share in Channel 10 for $4.5 million in 1992 and sold out for $72 million when it was listed five years later.
- He set up BridgeClimb with Brett Blundy for $6 million in 1998. It was earning $25 million a year in profit when it lost the tender in 2018.
- He was in a consortium of three that bought grazing giant Standbroke Pastoral for $495 million from AMP Life in 2003 before he was bought out by partner Peter Menegazzo in 2004 for what he says was a $40 million profit.
