Mark Bouris - Pay it Forward...

By Raquel Neofit

Images: Con Milonas

Article for Vanilla Magazine.

Australian businessman, Mark Bouris, best known for his television show The Mentor, is the mastermind behind lending giants, Wizard Home Loans and Yellow Brick Road.

Mark grew up with hard-working parents in Sydney’s Western suburb of Punchbowl.

His Greek father and his Irish-Australian mother gave Mark a sense of the importance of hard work and dedication in all aspects of his life. His parents imparted to him the lessons of never giving up, to be fully committed to whatever it is you’re doing, and that there are no short cuts in life.

Mark’s financial planning and lending business, Yellow Brick Road, is lending over a billion dollars a month and growing in the areas of business advice, management and education. He is looking to the future with consideration about what businesses need in terms of guidance and accountability, and what his experience has to offer entrepreneurs and small business owners through his website and v-blog platform, markbouris.com.

We delve inside the mind of Mark Bouris to discover how he thinks, why he believes in the importance of ‘paying it forward’, and what it was like growing up in Sydney with a large and boisterous family of strong men and women...

How did your father share his Greek heritage with you?

Dad has lots and lots of brothers and they all had lots of kids! So I have lots of cousins and that cultural feast was a big part of my life. There were a lot of boys – my dad has five brothers – and there was a good balance of strength of character with all of them. But there are also a lot of strong women within my family. They are all really hardworking, fun people who like to do what Greeks do in terms of having fun. It was rich in terms of colour and complexity.

And do you get to Greece or Ireland much?

Yeah, I do, I like visiting them both – they’re both different to me.

They both have a certain appeal to me, but I have to say, I do really enjoy going to Greece for a break from business life in general.

You have a what-you-see-is-what-you-get attitude... how has that influenced your career do you think?

I guess my personality narrative is pretty straightforward. I don’t pretend, I say what I think. Often it gets me into trouble too, by the way.

I’m not what you’d call a particularly compliant person when it comes to rules and expectations because I don’t really enjoy that; I don’t like doing things for the sake of doing them. If I do something, then I do it with an agenda of achieving an outcome. And when I say something – and I’m not a particularly eloquent person – I choose my words carefully, making sure my words have an impact, getting straight to the point and not beating around the bush.

I didn’t realise that the TV show was your own Mark Bouris TV to begin with.

Yeah, it was my son Nick and I who put it together. Nick’s the creator of the show and Seven is the producer, but yes, it’s our show.

You asked Joey Scandizzo in an online version
of The Mentor what is the ingredient in him that makes him succeed... What’s your ingredient that makes you succeed?

I guess what I tend to do is build up logic around a proposition; I string the evidence together, draw a deduction – or logic – and then I apply that logic to a problem.

I have one particular personality trait and that is that I don’t ever give up!

And it's not because I’ve got some mad ability to persevere or anything like that, I have no more endurance than anybody else, but intellectually I just can’t rest until I know what the answer is.

I am an answer-based person. Sometimes there is no answer and you just have to keep working on it. In some respects it can be unhealthy for me because I can get extraordinarily distracted to the point where I just can’t stop trying to solve the puzzle, but I’m like that with every puzzle that gets presented to me no matter what it is.

You often talk about paying it forward, where does that come from and why does it resonate with you?

I think there is an ethical obligation on those of us who have been lucky enough to have had someone assist us in a mentoring capacity, and I think that there is an ethical obligation on us as part of accepting those people's help to pay it forward one day.

All of the experts that I bring onto the show all share in that view and they’re all happy to pay it forward, because if you’re not paying it forward you’re expecting some compensation for it – which is not proper mentoring.

For me, the TV show is about paying it forward too – on a scale that’s large enough to reach a lot of people. I don’t get paid to do the TV show, but if I can scale my mentoring on a larger scale, then it’s worth doing it and worth spending my time on it.

How do we find these mentors in life though?

Well, right now you can’t find them, that’s the problem. This is one of the reasons I’ve done the show. Additionally, it is why I’ve built the website called mentor.com and why I do the podcast called Mentor.

What I will be doing in my next stage is opening up access to people who I think are mentors. I’m building something new that’s disruptive that hasn’t been done before.

Many years ago, twenty-somethings could draw on their parent’s equity to buy a house, it’s tough in today’s market... so what’s the best way for them to buy their own homes now?

There is no simple answer to that question these days, it's very complex, I don’t have an answer other than to say, save! It’s a mathematical thing and you must understand the mathematics behind it.

They’re going to have to be prepared to wait longer, because if they don’t have a deposit then they can’t borrow any money – there’s no magic footing on this stuff.

And it might mean staying at home longer, which many people may dislike – and that’s fine, but then don’t start complaining that you will never get a house. The reason you’ll never get a house is because you moved out of home too soon.

So, you’re for kids staying at home longer?

Well, I think so, but there’s no prescription for it. Moving out of home might be a good idea because it might be impossible to stay at home, but you’ve just got to weigh all of these things up.

It’s not like it used to be when everybody moved out of home and they saved a bit of a deposit and then they went and borrowed 90% and bought themselves a reasonably priced house in Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane, and then paid it off. It doesn’t work that way anymore and it's just going to get harder and harder to borrow money.

They need to start thinking about how this all works at a young age. That’s really important to think about.