THE FRIDAY INTERVIEW/Barney Eastwood: For anybody other than Barney Eastwood, selling a business for £117.5 million at the age of 75 might be a signal that this is a good time to step back from working life, writes Una McCaffrey.
The deal, in which the publican turned bookmaker turned boxing promoter turned property mogul sold a 54-strong chain of bookies to Ladbrokes, was completed two weeks ago, but does not seem to be looming too large in Eastwood's life. He has a fine new car and seems generally content but, in general, he has no plans to withdraw from his colourful and lengthy career.
"My wife would like me to take time off," he says, before wondering aloud what he would do if his days were suddenly clear.
Eastwood says he was never a seller "until the final hour", although he has received plenty of offers for the chain along the way. In the end, Ladbrokes was competing with two other bidders for the business, with none of the approaches solicited by the family.
He says he liked the "style" of Ladbrokes, a factor that was important because the deal involved him retaining the ownership of the shop sites involved in the transfer.
Property is his main game these days, but he shies away from estimating the asset value within his portfolio. It doesn't take an expert to realise it is considerable, however self-effacing the septuagenarian might be.
Currently on the table is a £250 million mixed-use development in Newtownards on the outskirts of Belfast, while the family already owns the Tower shopping centre in Ballymena and is no stranger to £100 million deals in Britain. Wales and Scotland were a particular focus for a time, but the Republic's white-knuckle market never tickled Eastwood's fancy to the same extent.
It was not always thus. Eastwood's first move into business, at a mere 19 years of age, almost brought him to Dublin and changed the path of his future. Ambitious to his youthful core, he had his eye on a pub in the North Wall, having had some experience in a pub his successful elder brother already owned in the Coombe. The venture in question required a £7,000 investment at the time (about €220,000 now) and Eastwood believed he could wangle his way to a deal.
Alas, his youthful finances did not match his self-belief and the sale never happened. Instead, he and his new wife (also 19) satisfied themselves with a £2,000 pub in Carrickfergus, outside Belfast, with the help of the aforementioned brother, who spoke kindly to Northern Bank on his behalf. A family business was born. "When you're young, you've no fear. You're full of beans. You've no fear because you can't see the left hooks coming to hit you," he says now, recalling that Carrickfergus was at the time a strange town to him and he a stranger to it.
Eastwood still runs a family business, with a number of his children involved in the bookmaking arm until the sale, and his youngest son, Fearghal, heading the property investment activities. His only daughter, Fiona, chose a different path, training as an economist and, incidentally, marrying Kevin Gardiner, the man who invented the Celtic Tiger label in a 1994 Morgan Stanley research report on the Irish economy.
Contrary to the prevailing wisdom, Eastwood has never felt the need to take advice on succession planning, preferring to act as "a strong hand" himself. The payout from Ladbrokes will presumably help in avoiding future difficulties, too.
Like so many success stories of his generation, he hails from modest beginnings. He was one of nine children in Cookstown, Co Tyrone, where his parents ran a hardware business. In reality, he says, his mother was the one with the business brain.
She was what he calls a "24-hour" worker, running the shop by day, the house by night and finding time to churn butter in between.
The young Barney (or BJ to his friends) learned by watching, seeing how business could be built up through geographical connection and retained by treating customers well. He talks fondly of how his mother used to close the shop for half-an-hour at lunchtime,and offer to feed any customer who happened to be there. It was the kind of subtle charm of which Eastwood has proven himself a master, albeit in different fields.
BJ's parents gave him the best chance available at the time, sending him to board at Armagh College when he was 12. Opinions differed on his aptitude for education, however, and he was expelled two years later.
"It was a very happy day in my life," he says, adding that his now-widowed mother took it on the chin, along with all the other worries prevailing at the time. With school out of the way at 14, Eastwood went to work for his older brother, who had made some money in the boot and shoe trade and had diversified into the Coombe pub. "I took the notion I'd like a pub of my own," he says.
The resulting Carrickfergus pub went well under the guidance of Eastwood and his wife, Frances, with a good week delivering sales of £100 after some "tough old work". A foray into then-illegal bookmaking followed, as did the numerous court appearances and fines that accepting bets then attracted. Eventually, however, the business was legalised and as the 1950s progressed, Eastwood was a relatively wealthy man with three shops.
He could have stopped there and been able to provide a comfortable life for himself and his family. But he was still young and had the idea of growing the business in his head.
He decided to put up a "big sign" in one of his shops - "BJ Eastwood: Ireland's greatest bookmaker". He laughs, recalling that the precursor to Paddy Power probably had at least 200 outlets at the time. But it worked.
"It's surprising. After two or three years of that, people used to say, 'he's Ireland's biggest bookmaker'." More shops followed and business thrived but, looking back, Eastwood says he could have been bigger.
"Really, with the pace of things, we could have picked up a lot more," he says, almost wistful. By the late 1950s, however, boxing promotion was looming large.
Eastwood had grown up with boxing, having competed at school in Tyrone and in tournaments organised by local camps of US and British soldiers. He became experienced, both as a boxer and an observer.
"I always had a great oul' eye for fighters," he says, with some understatement. It was perhaps natural in the mid-1950s, then, that a friend who was having some difficulty promoting a show came to him for some help.
"I did alright," he says of the experience. A seed was sown and, by the mid-1960s, Eastwood was becoming a serious boxing promoter. His tracks were stopped around this time by a dispute with the local boxing board and he "lapsed" until the 1980s, when he hit the big time with stars including multiple world-title winner, the Clones Cyclone, Barry McGuigan. It was here that Eastwood's name was also up in lights, helped by McGuigan's habit of extravagantly thanking "Mr Eastwood" after each victory. The relationship eventually soured and finished up in the High Court, but thanking Mr Eastwood stuck in the collective memory. "I became a lot more famous than I ever intended to be," he says.
There was "no fortune to be made" because of all the investment that needs to go into finding one single fighter, he adds.
"I would have had a serious 14 years at boxing; financially, I would have earned more doing something else." But the experience was certainly one to be had. Eastwood and his fighters travelled all over the world, both for world championship fights and the negotiations that preceded them. "You have to go and meet people head-on," he says. "No talking through lawyers. I enjoyed that part."
Along with bookmaking, property was there when the boxing promotion ceased. Eastwood had attracted a degree of fame the 1970s by spending £1 million on buying a Belfast hotel from the Great Southern group. It wasn't exactly a time to invest in the North, with the property having previously been bombed, but Eastwood was never deterred by such factors, having persisted in business despite many robberies at his shops and a nasty burglary at his home in 1969 where he and Frances were tied up as the children slept.
In general, the Troubles did not bring huge business difficulties to the family, with Eastwood believing his love of sport helped him to work across perceived lines of difference.
As well as boxing, he has dabbled seriously in horses, dogs and even managed to squeeze in a career as a Tyrone GAA minor footballer before his marriage.
Despite his public image, he retained a low profile in business circles, rarely featuring on the boards or public bodies that draw some. Seeking status was not alien to him, however, with a participation in the famous Lloyds insurance syndicates after he went into a bank "somewhere in the world" and saw a customer being shunted along because none of his cards were acceptable. That was until the customer produced his Lloyds card, showing that he was a member of the exclusive club of "names" who underwrote risk for the Lloyds insurance company. "He was treated very differently," he says, adding that he immediately set about applying for membership. Some fair years as a Lloyds "name" followed before the 1980s when the insurance market got into trouble over unexpectedly-large asbestos claims. Many "names" reportedly went under. "I lost a few quid," he says, adding that he "probably got out on the right side".
With a 56-year career behind him, Eastwood these days has a contented air. He regards his greatest business mistake as missing out on property deals his instinct told him he should pursue. His greatest success, he reckons, was the Carrickfergus pub, because he went into it with £2.50 in savings and it set him up for all that followed.
"It's not the money. What's the difference when I die?" he says of his motivation. "It's the success; it's the winning. You've gotta win. If you're not a winner, you're a loser."
He should know.
