Method behind the madness
By Melinda Collins
“It was a great big bloody accident,” the Mad Butcher says of his success. “But it’s quite the fairytale story really.”
As summations go, it’s not far off the mark. Peter Leitch left school at 15 with no qualifications and what would now be classified as dyslexia. More than half a century later his persona is one of the most recognisable in the country, he is renowned for his philanthrophy and home-spun philosophy, and he’s scooped up a knighthood along the way.
It has been quite a journey from 1959 when, in his last year at Wellington Technical College, his form teacher summed him up as having a promising future as a “reliable worker”.
After six months as the local postie, he jumped at the chance to work as a butcher’s boy for Charlie Yeoman at his shop in Seatoun. “When you don’t have great results from school, there are not a great number of jobs you can choose from. You couldn’t be too fussy — you really had to take what came along.
“At first I chose to be a butcher for no reason other than to make a living.”
And other than one incident, there was no doubting he was good. He was breaking down a beast when he stabbed himself in the thigh, the razor sharp boning knife flashing within an inch of his groin. “To be blunt, I nearly cut my dick off.” But on most days breaking down a carcass was a task in which he took pride. “It’s really an art, not many people recognise that. If you get it wrong, you’ll lose money on the carcass, so someone who can work quickly and cleanly is very valuable. I got a lot of pleasure in the work.”
In 1964 he moved to Auckland, in 1965 he married and in 1967 he bought a business.
Janice and Peter used to cruise around Auckland at the weekends in their first car, a 1950 Morris Minor. “We’d look at the odd butcher’s shop and on one particular day we saw a shop on Rosella Road in Mangere East that was for sale. It was closed but the owner was there with the land agent.”
Long story short, Peter says, the owner financed them into the business. “We got the shop set up and called it Rosella Meats, because it was on Rosella Road — a very creative bit of thinking, that.”
He had managed a butchery shop previously but quickly found ownership was a different kettle of fish, or meat perhaps. “Managing and owning are as different as black and white. What people don’t really understand is that to this day I don’t know all my alphabet, or my times tables, which is not a good thing if you’re in business.”
By some miracle he survived. What he didn’t know academically, he made up for with business bravado. “My mother used to shop at Self Help, because that was where you got a bargain. That was how I developed my business and that’s the way we’ve tried to continue to the present day.”
In the late 1970s Peter noticed supermarkets were increasingly moving into the meat trade and he feared independent butchers like himself would be put out of business. Expansion was the only option.
“The Rosella Road shop was never going to be a humdinger because it was in a side street. I battled on but it didn’t go that good. I had to work at night and from a very early hour in the morning to pay the rent.”
A shop on Massey Road, where the Mad Butcher is still based today, was vacant. When the new Rosella Road landlord put the rent up to an unaffordable rate, Peter moved on. This is when he learned his biggest lesson. “You can try as hard as you like, but if you don’t have the right position, you’re wasting your time. It turned out for all the hard work I did at Rosella Road, I might as well have been pissing in the wind because its position wasn’t right.
Business lesson two was loyalty. “I thought my customers would follow me around but they didn’t. I had to build a whole new base of customers. That was a learning curve — that people won’t automatically be loyal to you.”
Building a brand
He called the new shop Rosella Meats, just like the old one. “I didn’t really know what a brand was in those days.”
At Massey Road he utilised the side of the building for advertising specials and bargains. “It absolutely proved to me how important a good buy was. There was a dramatic difference if we had a red hot special.
“That was when I learned how much position matters, because I went from making a living to making money.”
In 1979 he started developing what would be a long association with radio and while no other butchery was doing the radio thing, he became a brand.
A Maori “fella” walked into the local one time and said “there’s that f***ing mad butcher.” The slogan became ‘Rosella Meats, home of the Mad Butcher,’ before becoming simply The Mad Butcher.
Specials were rarely seen in those days and shop hours were strictly Monday to Friday, nine to five. Peter led the charge in terms of opening hours — he was the first independent butcher to open on Sundays when he saw supermarkets starting to do the same.
His philosophy always was — and always will be — huge turnover, low margins. He would spend almost all the profit from one week on advertising the next, without a worry. There was no science behind it, no complicated business theory, just a gut feeling.
Another philosophical gem from the The Mad Butcher is that price drives success.
“Quality and service are important, but price is the most important. We’ve had not exactly loss leaders, but stuff where our margins were very, very fine.
“So if we don’t sell volume, we don’t make money. We’re the people who brought cheaper meat prices to New Zealand.”
“Where people get it wrong is that I’m not a shit-hot businessman. If I was, I’d be a millionaire. I’m not poor but I’m not rich either. I was a very good butcher. That’s what I’d like to say.”
But it was a lot of hard work. “I was very lucky I had a very supportive wife.” Plus, for 25 years, the responsibility for the books lay on Janice’s shoulders.
Good advice
But she’s not the only woman who he credits his success to. His mother had some advice for her son when he entered the business — to always treat others as he would want to be treated.
“It’s a simple principle, but that’s what I’ve always done.”
Famous almost as much for his philanthropy, it’s a well known fact money has never been the driving force behind the business.
The two other women in his life are daughters Julie and Angela. Julie’s partner Mike Morton purchased the company in 2007 and continues to build the Mad Butcher empire.
He continues to hire Peter as his brand manager, so his raspy voice still rings out on radios across the nation.
“The Mad Butcher has become folklore.
It’s been a humbling journey, to be fair. I look up to the likes of Michael Hill. I was never a sharp businessman, I was just a good butcher.”
Yes, despite building one of New Zealand’s most successful brands, Sir Peter Leitch has never moderated his colourful language.
He concedes that he’s not a corporate high flyer; seemingly relishing the fact. “I’m not Michael Fay, but you’ve got to take every race for what it is.“ I doubt that any of the big businessmen have had the fun building their business that I’ve had.
“I’ve enjoyed my sporting contacts, plus I’ve done a lot in the community. I think it’s pretty rare for a businessman to do what I’ve done, which is to get into the other things. Most people are so focused on getting their business up and running that they don’t have the time for anything else.
“People ask me if I had a vision when I got my first butcher’s shop. No, I didn’t have a vision. I could get up now and say I did — pretend I was Martin Luther King and say ‘I have a dream,’ but that’s bullshit.
“I went into a butcher’s shop and all I wanted to do was pay the rent and survive. That was it, I didn’t set out to build a big brand, but that was what happened.”
