CNBC On The State Of Great White Shark Enterprises
/Tom Cunneff in a special to CNBC caught up with Greg Norman en route to a Teeterboro wheels up situation to chat about Great White Shark Enterprises and reveals some interesting things about the empire that is all things Shark. Mercifully, his Instragamming was not discussed.
Complaining about too much banking regulation in his adopted homeland, Norman has started the Great White Shark Opportunity Fund.
The newest division at Great White Shark Enterprises he's most excited about is the Great White Shark Opportunity Fund, an asset-based debt-lending fund that provides alternative and flexible capital to small- and mid-cap companies. Norman won't reveal what companies they've invested in so far but said they have $75 million in capital.
"It's a good place to be in right now, because a lot of small, entrepreneurial businesses can't get capital to grow their business," he said in his familiar Australian accent. "Many years ago my partner, David Chessler, and I invested in a couple small business and just saw the returns we were generating, in the high 20s and even above. We started off very small, but now we're growing at a comfortable pace, and we have institutions interested because we have a performance track record that's very positive. We don't want to be a $20 billion fund. We just want to be like the space we're in."
Cunneff says Norman's design fee is down to $1.5 million from a peak of $2 million post-recession, and says the Shark's famous wine business has seen a decline.
One division that's still lagging is wine. Norman has been a connoisseur and collector since 1976, when he won a bottle of the award-winning Australian red Penfolds Grange. Twenty years later he partnered with California-Australian conglomerate Beringer Blass (now Treasury Wine Estates). The company, Greg Norman Estates, makes 13 different varietals and shipped 160,000 cases last year to Australia and the U.S.—down about 90,000 cases from 2006—with the majority made in his native country. (A Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand will debut in April.)
"Part of business is identifying the divisions in the company that need to be helped a little," he said. "And now, with the Australian dollar below par, our margins are improving on wine. It's a business I really want to start focusing on and getting it back up to where it was pre-recession."