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About Tony
By any definition of the word, Tony's life has been an amazing experience.
Whilst some would liken it to a roller coaster ride, he succintly puts it as "having climbed the stairs to heaven and walked the halls of hell".
He is a man who is an achiever-
- He was educated at The Scots College, one of Sydney's leading private schools and where he played in the 1st XV Rugby team for two years , rowed in two winning Head of The River rowing crews,won many Diving awards and was the College Open Boxing Champion in his final year. His adopting father had cause to say that it was an expensive sporting education given that he only passed two exams in five years!
- He took his small town family owned stock and station agency of Fountain & Co Pty Ltd from being just another little agency to where they were the leaders in the pleasure horse auctioneering field in Australia and conducting auctions across every Austyralian State and territory.
- He co-founded what is now Australia's largest rural merchandising company Combined Rural Traders Ltd
- He was a pioneer in computer oriented livestock marketing when Fountain & Co Pty Ltd became the first to sell pigs by auction based on a computer description.
- He was the Editor and Publisher of three livestock magazines,The Drovers Journal, The Cattleman and Australian Angora News. As well, he was Marketing Manager, through his Company Studadco (which also published the magazines) of the Santa Gertrudis Beef Breeders Association, now Australia's third largest beef breed.In this role he was instrumental in making the breeds commercial market a lot stronger and at his instigation, the Accredited Commercial Sales concept was launched and fully developed.
- He is a successful author, having had magazine articles published for some years in Australian and overseas aviation, livestock and yachting magazines. He is currently working on his autobiography entitled, no surprises, " The Rainbow Chaser".
- He is an accredited beef cattle judge and he has judged in three Australian States up to and including "Royal Show" level.
- He has held a Private Pilot's License (with instrument rating for a number of years) since 1977 and flying has been very much part of his personal and business life.
- He has gained a real insight into the workings of the Australian political scene with his serving four terms in the early and mid 1990s as National President of the Australian Democrats.
- He has appeared as a Keynote Speaker at Conferences and Seminars in every Australian State, in New Zealand, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and in four States of America.
- He is an accompished blue water sailor and spent 5 years, following heart surgery, living and working aboard his yacht as he cruised the east Australian coast.
- He moved to Sydney in 1988 from Chinchilla (SW Queensland) to commence the auction operations for the then newcomer to the Sydney scene, Ray White Real Estate, and within 21 months had them auction market leaders, a postition they slipped from during his absence sailing. By June 2004, some 17 months after returning to Sydney in January 2003, he had taken them from then number 3 back to market leadership again.
- He was part of the central team that expanded Ray White from a Queensland and NSW operation to where it opened up in Western Australia, South Australia, Indonesia and New Zealand. He takes great pride in the fact that he conducted the first ever residential real estate auction in Indonesia.
- In 2006, he resigned as Chief Auctioneer of Ray White Real Estate to establish his own academy - the Fountain Auction Academy - a dream he had for 20 years. The FAA trains agents in the auction method of selling and in doing so "produces practical professionals".
Here is a man, who through life's experiences and the hard basic facts of business life, has seen what hard times look and feel like and in the process of trading himself and his businesses back into the black, he learnt, as he succintly puts it, what many other human beings have learned, that "when the only thing behind you is the back of your shirt, life can be bloody lonely". How Tony handled this nadir of his life and how he emerged on top form a big part of many of his talks.
Here then, is the man they call "THE RAINBOW CHASER", Tony Fountain.
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