How I made my first million : 26 self-made millionaires reveal the secrets to their success

p
eter
 G
oSNell
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I needed the numbers to 
make the money, and
when there are 174 of
them it adds up.

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A CUT AND DRIED SUCCESS 121
GolDen ruleS
1. Use an economic downturn to refresh your 
branding.
2. Always consider change—don’t get stuck in a 
rut.
3. Do your homework.
4. Think about your business in a global sense.
5. be passionate and think big.
6. give your clients what they want, and they’ll 
give you what you want.

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A Fine Performance
Andrew McManus
Andrew McManus 
Presents; 
established 2000;
eighteen employees;
$80 million turnover
It turns out that all the 
stories are true. Sometime 
Mötley Cruë drummer Tommy Lee really is 
the hardest- partying man alive. Rock promoter 
Andrew McManus has the bruises to prove 
it. ‘Tommy and I hit it off last time they were 
here and we got lost for three days and nights,’ 
McManus groans. ‘He just wanted to keep going. 

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A FINE PERFORMANCE 123
He was too good for me. I had to put the white 
flag up—I just could not continue. Normally I 
hold my own with these guys, but he’s a charac-
ter and a half, that one.’
Drinking with—and trying to rein in—the 
baddest boys of rock is all part of the job for 
McManus, but he says the hardest partiers he’s 
ever handled are not rock stars but wrestlers. 
Back in 2000 he and the manager of Kiss, Doc 
McGee, saw an opportunity to take wrestling 
to Europe. They scooped up fifty- eight ‘big, 
kooky guys, including a guy called Big Poppa 
Pump, some midgets and some female wres-
tlers’ from World Championship Wrestling. 
‘They party really hard—how they do it has 
got me,’ McManus laughs. ‘And then they have 
to go to the gym and train during the day. After 
the wrestling, they’re just on this huge high and 
they go and hit the clubs. Boy, do they hit the 
clubs.’
McManus and McGee basically bought 
WCW and enjoyed twelve months filling arenas 
in Europe before the ka- ching king of wres-
tling, Vince McMahon, realised they were eating 
into his potential and started sending his A team 
over. ‘We were like a twenty- pound monkey 
fighting a 500- pound gorilla. He just ate us up,’ 
McManus says. It was one of the few times in 

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124 HOW I MADE MY FIRST MILLION
his high- voltage career that McManus has been 
forced to take a backward step.
Surprisingly, McManus is not a frustrated 
rocker. ‘My uncle had a pub, and from the age 
of twelve or thirteen I just wanted to be a hotel-
ier. I really liked the lifestyle and his ability to 
come and go and make money.’ At seventeen, 
he enrolled in a four- year trainee management 
course and so impressed his teachers that he was 
fast- tracked, graduating after two years to become 
an assistant manager in Townsville. At twenty- one 
he was given the Rose Bay Hotel to run, making 
him the youngest licensee in the country. ‘It was 
mine for eighteen months and I was loving it. We 
took it from doing twenty- seven grand a week to 
sixty- something grand. But I outsmarted myself. 
We were making so much money the owners sold 
it out from under me, and I was out of a job.’
Fortunately, one of McManus’s bookmaker 
contacts heard of his predicament and set him 
up with a job at the Coogee Bay Hotel. ‘They 
rang me up and said, “Do you know anything 
about music?” And I said, “Absolutely nothing,” 
and they said, “Neither does the guy who’s run-
ning Selina’s. When do you want to start?” ’ That 
was 1981. Over the next seven years McManus 
grew the live- rock venue into a Sydney land-
mark—and a huge money- earner for the hotel.

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A FINE PERFORMANCE 125
In 1985, one of his regular bands, The Div-
inyls, asked for help because they weren’t seeing 
enough profit for their hard work. ‘They told me 
they were doing all this work but never mak-
ing any money,’ he recalls. ‘I said, “Give me three 
shows and I’ll show you how to make money. 
You get 
$
20,000, and I’ll keep anything we make 
over that.” They didn’t believe we could even 
make twenty, but we made 
$
47,000.’ He went on 
to manage the Divinyls for seven years—during 
which time they had an international hit with I