Success is a Choice

John Ilhan founded a company called Crazy John’s, one of the largest privately held mobile phone companies in Australia. The Turkish-Australian entrepreneur grew up in the working class suburb of Broadmeadows in northern Melbourne. His parents migrated to Australia when he was just five years old. Before turning 40, he was one of the few entrepreneurs to achieve success, ranked the richest young person in Australia by the BRW magazine. Tragically, in 2007, Ilhan was walking not far from his home in Brighton, Victoria when he collapsed and died from a suspected heart attack. The very same year, BRW magazine ranked Ilhan as the 126th richest man in Australia, with a net worth of $310 million.

John Ilhan had succeeded in a competitive industry and overcome the challenges of growing up in a poor migrant family to become a wealthy businessman and respected leader in his community and across Australia. Ilhan got his start in 1991 when he opened his first mobile phone store called “Mobileworld” in the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick, offering crazy deals like $1 phones while his competitors were selling the same products for $200. His unusual marketing methods influenced the name change from “Mobileworld” to “Crazy John’s.”

The young entrepreneur worked long hours and overcame numerous challenges to achieve success and become a phone retailer with more than 120 stores and 600 employees in Australia.

Although John Ilhan may have given off the aura of a happy-go-lucky businessman, behind his achievements in building up the Crazy John’s empire was a person who always knew how to close a deal. He was street smart and hungry, and had honed his talent selling cars at Ford Credit, becoming Strathfield’s top mobile phone salesman in his early 20s. All at a time when mobiles were as big as heavy bricks and cost more than $5000 – hardly today’s easily affordable fashion accessory.

A remarkable entrepreneur success story, John began Crazy John’s in the depths of the 1991 recession, when he leased a small shop in Melbourne’s cosmopolitan suburb of Brunswick. All he could afford were a few trestle tables and a stack of brochures to try and sell phones. He had to borrow money from his father just to afford the lease so to stock his store he would buy second-hand phones and pagers from ads in the Trading Post – and re-sell them well below the prices offered by competitors selling new phones. The key was to slash margins and work towards sales volume.

John was the first in Australia to introduce the $1 phone and the first to bundle accessories with a phone. He broke the rules to create a brand that was fun and irreverent – and completely revolutionised the Australian mobile telecommunications model.

Another coup was recognising Australians love for sport – a passion he happened to share– so he aligned the brand with AFL and rugby league. Starting with so little focused his mind in what the customer really wanted.
Better deals. He knew store location was everything and so was a headline grabbing deal that captured the imagination of the customer.

When he began expanding in Sydney he found a site that was a hairdressing salon, so John and his close friend Brendan Fleiter simply arranged to fly to Sydney to meet the owner, did the deal on taking over the lease on the spot and left a deposit on the owner’s EFTPOS machine as an act of good faith. Apparently, the hairdresser’s bank later contacted the owner querying who paid for a $5000 haircut!

John Ilhan was also a generous philanthropist and regularly gave to various charities. He started the “Ilhan Food Allergy Foundation” with a starting $1 million dollar donation after learning that his daughter Jaida had a severe allergy to peanuts.

That’s why Crazy John’s became Australia’s biggest independent mobile phone sellers and how John became one of the pioneers in developing Australia’s mobile phone industry. A man who arrived as a child from Turkey and was able to achieve success as an entrepreneur by building an empire, based on “being Crazy.”