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Former ABC Learning Centres chief executive Eddy Groves today spoke of the dark moments of his company's collapse, describing his attempts to prevent his downfall as "trying to hold back a dam that was about to break".
Addressing an Ipswich Chamber of Commerce and Industry lunch at the Ipswich Turf Club today, Mr Groves was in good humour and even cracked jokes that his new day job was "watching Dr Phil and Oprah" at home.
Indeed, dressed in a long-sleeved, black Versace T-shirt, he resembled more the confident young man of 2006, who was Australia's richest man under 40 with a personal fortune of $325 million.
But his fall from grace was rapid and devastating. On September 30, he was forced to part ways with the company he built after amassing millions of dollars of debt in a failed attempt to break into the lucrative US market.
Mr Groves admitted if he knew now what a US push would bring, he would not have gone down that road.
"Is the US a good market for child care and early childhood education? I think it is fantastic. [But] ... do I regret that we went in? Yes and no," he said.
"I don't regret that we went into the US, but I do regret that we probably weren't as prepared as we needed to be because no one could have sat there and said 'this is going to happen with the US dollar' and 'this is what's going to happen with the global markets'.
"If we had known then what we know now, we would never have gone to the US."
Mr Groves said "it was a scary place to be" when he knew the writing was on the wall for his company.
"That's a scary place to be, when you feel like you are holding back a dam that is about to break and the reason why it is about to break is not because of the foundations of the dam, but because there is so much water coming," he said.
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- reprinted from the Sydney Morning Herald