JOHN Ilhan learned perseverance early. As a 13-year-old he would walk four kilometres from his home in Jacana to his soccer club for training every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon.
It was his first season. He was not picked for a single game all year. "I used to get disappointed," he once said of the experience, "but I still walked to training every week."
The next year, he played only a couple of games. Still he walked. By his third season he was captain — "a good lesson for me about perseverance". It was a lesson learned early, and learned well.
He was born Mustafa in Yozgat, in central Turkey, in 1965, the second of three children. Mr Ilhan’s academic father, Ali, fled civil war with his young family, arriving in Australia in 1968.
The Ilhans settled in working-class Jacana — "as Broady as you could get" — and the young John (he took the Anglicised name early) remembers settling in well. "I don’t look Turkish," he said. "I found it easy. But the Turkish people, because of their dark complexion, they found it hard in those days. I was quite lucky."
But things were far from easy for the family. Unable to find work as an engineer despite his qualifications, Ilhan snr had to take a job on the Ford production line. Soon, his wife, Nezaket, joined him.
"I didn’t see my parents when I was growing up because they were doing shiftwork," Mr Ilhan would recall.
An entrepreneurial streak emerged early. He started selling The Herald on a street corner, later selling the business to a friend, for a tidy profit, of course.
But after a brief dalliance with an arts course at La Trobe University — he found uni life "too educational" — he found himself on the same Ford production line his parents worked.
He soon jumped to head office as a sales clerk, but then a chance conversation led to him landing a job selling mobile phones at Strathfield, in Sydney Road, Brunswick. Here he discovered his gift, topping sales records for each of his three years with the company.
"I realised I had good people skills. I was dealing with senior management and selling 40 phones at a time."
In 1991, he left Strathfield after a dispute over commissions and, half out of spite, set up his own shop, Mobileworld, just across the road.
He had nothing more than $700 of his own money, a loan from his parents and a makeshift shop counter a mate knocked up out of plywood.
Mobileworld’s first two years were hard. His business partner walked out. At one stage he could not afford to stock any phones, and was forced to sell from catalogues. When a customer brought a phone from the brochure, he would have to lock up the store and race into town to buy one. Many times, he thought he was going under. But the business had two big breaks. The first was a name change, his company’s new moniker taken after a potential customer described his prices as "crazy".
That begat the Crazy John’s logo — he of the unruly hair, bulging crossed eyes and lolling tongue — which Mr Ilhan bought from a friend for $20 and hardly changed.
The second great break was Mr Ilhan’s decision to go out on a limb to establish more stores across Melbourne with limited backing from Telstra. The giant business, he was told, would throw in a few dollars, but the rest was up to the store operator.
Mr Ilhan developed a reputation as a generous boss, who would shout his workforce holidays to Hawaii, Fiji and Bali. But he was also as an exacting taskmaster, writing emails to staff who he thought were underperforming or unprofessional. The franchise now has 120 stores and 700 staff.
In 2004, Mr Ilhan was named as Australia’s wealthiest person under 40, with an estimated worth of $300 million.
Outside his business, which he admitted often consumed him "12 hours a day, seven days a week", Mr Ilhan was a devout Muslim, as well as a devoted husband to Patricia and father to daughters Yasmin, 9, Hannah, 8, Jaida, 6 and their son, Aydin, 10 months.
He was a generous philanthropist, pouring millions into his own charity, the Ilhan Foundation, to help needy children.
And when his youngest daughter developed a potentially deadly allergy to peanuts, he donated $1 million to set up a new allergy research centre at the Royal Children’s Hospital.
But his life was also touched by tragedy.
In 1996, his elder brother by two years, Celal — known as Gerald — died. "They said it was suicide, that he had tried to hang himself, but there was some doubt whether it was suicide," Mr Ilhan said later.
Mr Ilhan’s other great love was sport, of any kind.
It was soccer, he often said, that kept him out of trouble as a teenager, and he developed an affection for the Richmond Football Club as a young man (last year, he was rumoured to be contemplating a run for the club’s presidency).
But he also bought a $6 million stake in the rugby league team Manly and tried, unsuccessfully, to bankroll the nascent Melbourne Victory, and rebadge Perth’s Subiaco Oval as Crazy John’s Stadium.
From small change to $300m: the too-short life of John Ilhan
Simon Mann, Ben Schneiders, Jesse Hogan and Ben Doherty – The Age
IT DAWNED a seemingly ordinary day in a crazy life, but within a few short hours John Ilhan, the high-energy mobile phone salesman-turned-entrepreneur who amassed a $310 million personal fortune, was dead.
Mr Ilhan, who was 42, collapsed while on his morning walk along the beachfront near his Brighton home about 7.15am yesterday.
No one had expected it. He had appeared fit and well. And despite a high-profile multimillion-dollar legal stoush with Telstra that had been played out in recent months, the man who had commandeered the moniker "Crazy John" in a canny marketing ploy had apparently been stress-free and on top of the world. "He was playing lots of golf, he’d been away with his family on a few holidays the last few months and he was very comfortable with the way things were going," said his company’s managing director, Brendan Fleiter.
On Monday about 11pm, Mr Ilhan had telephoned television reporter Jonathan Creek of Channel Seven’s Today Tonight program, after the screening of a story about him. The pair had arranged to meet with their partners last night for dinner at Melbourne’s Flower Drum restaurant.
Mr Ilhan had appeared in good spirits, according to program host Anna Coren, who had spent a day with Mr Ilhan and his family about three weeks ago working on the story. "He called (Creek) and said he really liked the yarn," in which Mr Ilhan had discussed the trauma of the suicide death of his brother as well as his own rags-to-riches tale. "Oh my God, he was so fit and healthy, just this amazing enthusiasm for life," Coren said.
"I asked him what (would be) his legacy. Not only does he want to be remembered as a successful businessman but as a family man."
The son of Turkish migrants, Mr Ilhan grew up in working-class Broadmeadows and would often describe himself proudly as driven and self-made. He was married to Patricia and had four children — daughters Jaida, Hannah and Yasmin, and a son, Aydin, who is 10 months.
Mr Ilhan was found on the bike path near the Elwood Croquet Club by passers-by, who called for help. Bystanders performed CPR on the unconscious Mr Ilhan for several minutes before ambulance officers arrived. They worked for more than half an hour trying to revive him. He is believed to have had a heart attack.
Mr Ilhan, a devout Muslim who did not drink, had given up smoking only in the past year. But he appeared in good health. "He had a gym at his house. He walked every morning. He was a smoker, but he’d given up. He was fit and healthy as far as we were all aware, and (as far) he was aware," Mr Fleiter said.
Mr Ilhan’s death prompted a stream of visitors to the family’s home in Brighton’s famous "golden mile", which Mr Ilhan bought in 1999 for $6.5 million, a then record price for the suburb. They included Ahmed Fahour, NAB’s chief executive of Australian operations. The bank recently took a 20 per cent stake in the Crazy John business that Mr Ilhan started in the early 1990s with one store and $1000.
"I’m deeply shaken and saddened," Mr Fahour said.
Mr Ilhan’s death drew comment from the Prime Minister and the Premier, as well as a host of business associates, including his competitors.
Mr Howard, campaigning in Adelaide, hailed the businessman as "a wonderful migrant success story, (who) came here as a three-year-old and built a huge business through hard work and inspirational commercial leadership".
Premier John Brumby said Mr Ilhan "got a lot out of Australia. It was a land of opportunity — he’d tell you that — and he made the most of it. But he put back in, I think, much more than he ever took out."
Mr Ilhan was a strong supporter of charities and last year set up the Ilhan Food Allergy Foundation with his wife, after the couple discovered their daughter Jaida was allergic to peanuts. The foundation’s aim is to support research into determining the causes of food allergies. Mr Fleiter, who was Mr Ilhan’s lawyer before joining Crazy John’s as its managing director, described Mr Ilhan as a "big thinker".
Asked what drove Mr Ilhan, Mr Fleiter said: "I can tell you it wasn’t money, it was success … to be the best in what he did, to give customers what they wanted … He was a proud person but also a humble person, and someone who could relate to ordinary people. He was a complex man. He was a big risk taker. He backed himself."
Mr Ilhan opened his first mobile phone store in 1991 in Sydney Road, Brunswick, and by 1998 Crazy John’s had added another 14. Today the company has more than 120 outlets, employing more than 700 staff. In the latest Business Review Weekly "Rich List", Mr Ilhan appears as Australia’s 126th richest person.
Family friend and fellow Broadmeadows "old boy" Eddie McGuire characterised Mr Ilhan’s success story: "Turkish boy, lands in Broadmeadows, has a shopfront in Brunswick, turns it into a multimillion-dollar business. But he still looked after his parents and looked after the community and put everything he could back into it. John was a gentle, loving, respectful, tremendous person."