American-born Tom Sturgess has led quite the adventurous life. The former marine has risen to the top of the business world in New Zealand, working with a varied range of interests both here and across the Tasman.
Sturgess moved to New Zealand in 1996 with his wife Heather. His businesses include Lone Star Farms, a beef and sheep farming enterprise which has had six farms across the North and South Islands.
In June this year he sold one of the farms, the 1727ha Hadleigh farm near Masterton for $13.4 million to Austrian aristocrat Countess Veronika Leeb-Goess-Saurau, who plans to subdivide and sell off two homesteads and a cottage and plant the rest of property as a new commercial forest to be called the Bernadette Forest.
Lone Star’s general manager was reported as saying the company planned to put the proceeds of the sale into irrigated land.
Sturgess’ Tiri Group runs a collection of independent manufacturing and distribution businesses, offering products and services including engineering solutions, roofing solutions and containment systems.
He’s a director at Mercury Capital, a powerful Australian company that invests in privately-run businesses throughout Australasia. Through Mercury and his own holding company, he owns shares in label manufacturing group Hexagon Holdings; after months of rumours, last year Mercury announced plans to sell Hexagon for somewhere in the region of $A300-400 million. However, it appears the business is still searching for a buyer.
Sturgess shifts between properties in Nelson, Golden Bay and the picturesque seaside town of Santa Barbara, California. Last year he was appointed to the board of the hospice of Santa Barbara, and two years ago he sold one of his properties there to US television star Ellen DeGeneres for a reported $7,195,377.
Before coming to New Zealand Sturgess was involved in several US companies, including United Stationers Inc, Swift Independent Corp and Redman Industries Inc. Away from the business world he has a passion for motorcycles, particularly old ones; his private collection at one point numbered 400, before illness forced him to relinquish it. Though he could have sold it for greater sums overseas he wanted to keep the collection in New Zealand, and it has since been turned into the Motorcycle Mecca museum in Invercargill.
Photo: Farmers Weekly
2018: $360 million