The write stuff

Walk into a local company and chances are the owner’s office won’t have a bookcase lined with memoirs from local business heroes, because, frankly, they don’t exist. There might be the odd bestseller – Good to Great by Jim Collins, Straight from the Gut by legendary former GE chief executive Jack Welch, or Business Stripped Bare by Richard Branson – but they are invariably written by some bright spark offshore.

Carey Smith, CEO of real estate agency Ray White New Zealand, is an exception. Never mind that he arrived here 12 years ago to take over the real estate franchise group, which now spans 125 offices responsible for around $5 billion in sales annually, we’ll claim him as one of our own. Smith, who turns 44 this year, has just published his own tome of wisdom, called Deliver: 36 Real Life Stories on Leadership. Rather than take the traditional route of book publishing by approaching a company like Allen & Unwin or Penguin, he paid for it himself through Zenith Publishing Group’s online self-publishing service PublishMe, so that he could have more control over the book.

He wasn’t tempted to have the book ghostwritten, although he’s not a natural writer. “It takes away a lot of the raw energy,” says Smith, whose writing until now has consisted of a letter each year in which he takes stock of the year gone and lists his goals for the year ahead. Evidently the book was one of those projected goals. It was written on weekends with his partner, and his initial plan was to send out copies to clients and friends. “It was more of a personality rather than a management book,” he says.

Smith took advice from an author who told him there were two types of people who could read Deliver – and he needed to decide which audience he was writing for. There were people who read books regularly, and there were people who read the newspaper from cover to cover but didn’t read books a lot. He decided on the latter. They were like him.

He took advice from high-profile friends, like Trade Me’s Sam Morgan and former Fairfax Media CEO Joan Withers, who encouraged him to put more of himself into the book and to go into more depth. Morgan describes Smith as a thoughtful leader who “makes the time to continually reflect and improve”.

Smith hasn’t used his work as an author to settle any disputes. Rather, the book reflects his leadership, and the leadership of Ray White New Zealand. “It could potentially have a positive effect,” says Smith, who has been with Ray White here and in Australia for 20 years since joining the group as a real estate cadet when he was just 17. His first job was as a junior auctioneer with the Ray White Group in Sydney.

Head office in Australia has been supportive and Brian White, chairman of Ray White International, has written a complimentary review on Smith’s website. “I would not have written the book if there had been any risk,” says Smith, who took care to check with staff who were associated with the stories he used.

He sank a lot of money into his personal project, but the advantage of being CEO of a major company meant he had both an extensive network and a PR company at his fingertips. The launch party for the book saw many of the great and the good attend. His PR company does press for the bookshop chain PaperPlus, a nice coincidence from which he will benefit, and it introduced him to PublishMe.