Nicolette Connors on failing fabulously

Monday, 11 April 2016

Nicolette Connors opted out of The Real Housewives of Auckland audition with good reason. Twice divorced, the ad woman/publisher turned property investment adviser is nobody's wife, though as she opens up about depression, failure and success, she's certainly real. Eleanor Black writes.

It really couldn't get any more Auckland.

A luncheon of seafood and free-flowing champagne at Harbourside restaurant in the russet-coloured Ferry Building; high-priced nosh with a high-priced view.

A table of semi-notable socialites and businesswomen sizing each other up as cameras captured every eye roll. In the centre of the table, a bowl of printed questions to guide the conversation, so producers can weed out the performers from the dullards.

Then, a golden moment, heavy with dramatic possibility. One of the women, evidently keen to make an impact, leans across the table and exclaims to a soon-to-be bride: 'I f****d your fiancé!'

That was when Nikki Connors ('My mother calls me Nicolette; men who really like me call me Nicolette') realised she wanted nothing to do with The Real Housewives of Auckland, the local version of a reality TV juggernaut (Beverly Hills, New York City, Orange County, Vancouver, Athens, even Melbourne) that has provoked dozens of women, globally, to lose their minds. As in throw a prosthetic leg across a room, flip over a table, pull out an enemy's hair, loopy.

'I was shocked,' Connors says of the fiancé-in-flagrante comment some weeks later, thick eyelashes batting her cheeks like pretty insect legs. 'It took my breath away. I sat up and went, 'What? What are you saying? What is this? What a thing to say!'

Having launched a string of businesses here and overseas, Connors is focused on her property investment firm Propellor Properties. She has been head down, bum up for eight years. 'The future is still property,' declares her website. 'We'll take you there.'

Constantly shuttling between offices in Christchurch and Auckland (she has just secured a monthly spot on the panel of Paul Henry's TV Breakfast show), she doesn't have time for, nor does she particularly want to be associated with, the kind of dramatics she witnessed at Harbourside in the dying weeks of summer.

And yet, she sent out a press release soon after that dire luncheon. 'Although flattered to be considered [for The Real Housewives… I prefer to spend my time helping Kiwis like me chase their dreams of homeownership and a comfortable, mortgage-free retirement.'

She also plumped her new book, A Fabulous Failure: How New Zealand's Queen of Property Turned Failure Into Fabulous!, a memoir that takes the reader on a brisk tour of Connors' stints in advertising, television, publishing and property, her marriages, her heartbreaks and the hard work of raising a son, the adored Nico, now 28, on her own. Not to mention her climb out of some very public business failures to a comfortable position in which she owns a property portfolio.

While Connors presents her book as a property investment guide, 90 percent of it is about her tumultuous life: the men, the booze, the depression, the betrayal, the money, the celebrities. She is putting it all out there, which appears to be her personal style.

Meeting Connors, you can see why the television producers were interested. She is bright, funny, a little naughty, and in her 50s (she is non-specific), she is a very particular sort of bombshell. Where does a near-stranger look? At the oversized glittery jewels, the impeccably white smile, the sweep of blonde hair, or the serious cleavage?

Even following foot surgery, she forces on a pair of gold Jimmy Choos which cause her obvious pain and limps across the floor to pose with a reproduction airplane propellor symbolic of her company. She sits beside it, smoothes her skirt and comments, 'Childbearing hips, even at my age.'

In the background, her staff work the phones. 'It has a sea view,' one says brightly, 'but it's $660,000…. The rental is somewhere between $700 and $750…'

Connors toils seven days a week and says she doesn't have time for a partner or more than the occasional lunch out. 'I'd like to meet a kind man,' she says. 'It's got to be somebody who's kind. Someone who sees my faults and is just… kind.'

The self-declared Queen of Property seems almost nervous about this interview; vulnerable. She is coy in her choice of words, holds them close like a present until she hands them over, but she wants to be taken seriously – that much is clear.

So why publish a frothy little book that could do more to harm her reputation as a business woman than enhance it?

'I've laid myself bare, but whose life is perfect?' she says softly, safe behind a barrier of sofa cushions.

'I think it would be quite churlish to start criticising my life when others may not have taken the risk. When it's all out there, yeah, you can criticise it. I don't expect to have a free ride on this one, that's for sure.'

Connors grew up in London and on the slopes of the Bombay Hills. Her entrepreneurial father James met her mother, Yvette, who 'shared more than a passing resemblance to Rita Hayworth', while flatting in Auckland.

Connors went to Pukekohe High School, had a brief encounter with acting ('You're nothing but a ratbag!' she scolds Bruno Lawrence in One of Those Blighters and rode the 1980s money train as an advertising executive in Auckland.

'By the age of 27 I was earning more than the Prime Minister of New Zealand,' she says in her book.

'We earned huge amounts, we drank too much, we took white substances to keep us awake through presentations, we leased German and Italian cars, we borrowed to the hilt for bigger and better houses and we supplemented it all by juggling our finances and relying on the half-dozen or more gold credit cards dished out to us like sweets.' It was also, she writes with the shudder of hindsight, a time of financial foolishness. (She had a mortgage of over $700,000 at 19.5 percent interest.)

But she was a bona fide babe, and while smitten with her music executive husband Lachie Graham, she attracted attention from many men, Bob Geldof and Bryan Ferry among them (there's a lot of name dropping in this book). Radio DJ Kevin Black abandoned niceties and simply threw her to the floor and 'dry humped' her – a passing group of school children and nuns were witnesses.

Men have been an ongoing distraction through the years, professionally too. Connors won the prestigious Air New Zealand contract when she worked in advertising but says senior male executives muscled in on her territory, attempting to guide her project in a different direction. Around the same time, her marriage ended, she tired of Auckland and started looking for a bigger shark tank to swim in.

She and her young son moved to London, where she made promotional trailers for the BBC, and in the evenings and weekends she fixed up and sold properties, earning, she says, £10,000 profit every four months.

Wanting to run her own business, she and best friend Lorraine Engledow launched the restaurant magazine Entrée from the kitchen table. A mix of advertorials and advertising, each issue also contained a loyalty card which encouraged repeat visits to promoted restaurants.

While the magazine afforded Connors and Engledow Michelin-star meals all over London and trips to Tobago, Barbados and Miami, within two years they had decided to move on, selling the business to

a competitor who swallowed it whole.

Recounting her boom-bust-boom career, Connors is often sad – about lost opportunities, about lost people. The most painful part of her story concerns Citron Press, the publishing company she founded in 1997 with second husband Steve Connors, an ice hockey player and printing company salesman. 'I was smug in my happiness, with my new Cartier solitaire engagement ring,' she writes. But it wasn't to last.

Citron was based on a novel idea – a twist on vanity publishing whereby authors vetted by Citron would publish their work on demand as orders came in.

Martin Amis called it 'a brilliant idea… of almost mathematical elegance' and it could have launched a thousand writers' careers,  but who cared what a girl from Pukekohe High had to say about subverting the fuddy-duddy traditional publishing model? The couple campaigned for 18 months before they were allowed to join London's famous Groucho Club, a members-only establishment where they mingled with publishers, writers and media executives who took an interest in their proposal

'It could have been absolutely fantastic,' Connors says of their model, which netted her a nomination for a Veuve Clicquot Business Woman Award. She is fiddling with a cushion, eyes wet.

'I've never been bitter. We were doing all the right things. Well-known authors – Sebastian Faulks, Fay Weldon – were so supportive, both in the press and privately, and that was giving us a huge amount of credibility.'

Within two years Citron Press had signed 300 authors and published 130 books, small print runs averaging 260 copies each. But they weren't making money – they were waiting on a prospective deal with a software company that would allow them to sell newfangled e-books – and Steve Connors grew impatient.

'All we had to do was to tread water, because we had the content and it was all ready to go at the push of

a button. That to me is the saddest part, because it all came down to greed.'

By Connors' telling, this greed was on the part of her now-estranged ex-husband, who she says enlisted the help of two young bucks with start-up backgrounds to force her out of the business. There was a showdown as she drove her convertible through Knightsbridge on a sunny day, shouting into her cellphone, 'Are you out of your f****** minds?!'

'I think we were both to blame; it was the egos… It imploded; we imploded. He categorically wanted me out, out, out. And that was for emotional reasons.'

She allowed herself to be shunted aside in the business, partly in a last-ditch attempt to save her marriage and partly because she knew she wasn't the financial brains of the operation. 'Yes, I could read spreadsheets, but it was pretty rudimentary,' she says. 'My thinking had to change. The confidence I now have, I never had then.

'I believed, and this was reinforced, that I was someone who comes up with the concept, the big idea. Then I left the other side of every business to someone else, because I thought I wasn't a salesperson, which is rubbish because we're all salespeople. I felt my credibility came from coming up with the idea…. And that was up till quite recently, the last 10 years.'

In the book she writes of this post-Citron period where her second marriage was falling apart.  'Mentally and physically, I broke into a million pieces… I took every single aspirin, Disprin, analgesic and anti-depressant I could find, including everything else in the house that looked like a pill.'

A change of heart brought her to the ER, where her stomach was pumped and she was force-fed charcoal. A few months later she was back in Auckland with her young son, flattened by depression and ill health. 'I was in my 40s and I was at less than zero,' she writes.

The upside, she says today, was that her weight dropped to a new low. 'It was great, I've never had so many cheekbones.'

Despite it all, she forged ahead with another business: a restaurant magazine much like Entrée, called Ciao. Again she included a loyalty card with each issue, this time imprinted with the logo of sponsor American Express. She also sold advertising to wine and food producers and got an investor on board, the controversial venture capitalist Robin Johannink, who was soon battling cashflow problems of his own. Attempts to woo the support of Barry Colman and other publishers failed.

Meanwhile, she had ambitiously organised a fundraising dinner for the Yellow Ribbon Trust,

a suicide prevention initiative. Suppliers would get free advertising in Ciao, and at the dinner 100 plates signed by celebrities would be auctioned. 'I had one staff member working almost full time on getting the plates to the right people and then getting them back.'

Reading the tale, it seems almost inevitable that the whole project would collapse, but Connors was badly shaken by the reaction to the demise of both her magazine and her fundraising event, which she describes as swift and spiteful. She was no more than a month in arrears, she says, hardly front-page news, and yet there she was in the headlines. The animosity came from the media and from disgruntled former employees – two of whom she recalls smirking when they saw her working part-time in a boutique at the mall as she strove to get her feet back on the ground.

'I had never had that level of animosity before, ever,' she says, blinking fast. 'I think that there was this thought that I had been stashing away funds or something. It became very obvious afterwards that

I wasn't stashing anything.

'It's my own fault. You can't blame anyone else. If you don't find out what's happening, if you don't investigate, if you decide it's more expedient to take things on face value, you can't say, 'it's not me'.'

Which leads us to Catalyst2, the forerunner to Propellor Properties and another short-lived project that initially showed promise. The issue this time was that Connors wanted to set up an independent property investment agency, but went into partnership with real estate salespeople from an established firm. Soon, she says, she was being encouraged to recommend clients buy into developments that would benefit the firm, 'which went against everything I believed we stood for'.

She walked away from the business and it folded a year later. The idea, though – and it is not unique – formed the basis of Propellor Properties. Connors and her team offer mum-and-dad investors a wraparound service: they find properties, guide clients through the purchase, and with a property management arm launching soon, they will rent out those properties as well.

'My problem was that I always had a good product but I didn't have a good financial structure or a good legal structure to protect me,' Connors explains, looking back on the businesses that might have been.

'You know, first time unlucky. Second time, well you know?' she shrugs. 'Third time, there's not many more excuses you can give yourself.'

We laugh. Her book, after all, is called A Fabulous Failure. She has made a lot of mistakes, and she has learned. A few hours later she reconsiders her comments. Via email she says, 'I think that it would be inaccurate to portray me as a serial business failure, when in fact I have made an impact in every industry

I turned my hand at.'

Her publicist, Sarah Thornton, passes on socialite Colin Mathura-Jeffree's endorsement of the book, and of Connors herself, whom he describes as an 'impressive, indomitable survivor'.

'A Fabulous Failure is a fabulous favour,' says Mathura-Jeffree, 'to those needing the motivation to win, and the fearlessness to enjoy it in front of a society that is more willing to accept you as a failure, because they're too afraid to shine themselves.'

Connors herself is more low-key, possibly tired of talking about herself, tired from working all the time, tired of doing it all on her own. She mentions that her sister is very ill with cancer. Her values have changed.

'I have a lovely home, I have something set up for my son, I take care of my mother. It's about consolidation. I want to be able to take care of myself and the people I love…'

'I wanted to be king of the universe. I don't want that any more.'    

A Fabulous Failure: How New Zealand's Queen of Property Turned Failure Into Fabulous!, by Nicolette Connors (Primrose NZ Press).