TOUGH LOVE: The Mentor’s Mark Bouris
Camera IconTOUGH LOVE: The Mentor’s Mark Bouris Credit: Supplied

Mark Bouris

Lisa WoolfordSunday Mail (SA)

WE’RE used to seeing him bark orders and firing people left, right and centre as the tough boss on The Celebrity Apprentice, but there’s another side to Mark Bouris. And it’s this softer side we get to see on The Mentor.

Mark’s bringing his extensive, and successful, wealth of business knowledge to small business owners on Seven’s new show The Mentor – developed from his successful podcast of the same name. And he says it’s tough out there, especially for the underappreciated small business sector – which actually employs close to 60 per cent of people in Australia. Some of their hard-luck stories really hit home to the suave 61-year-old.

“There’s a few times where there was a personal crisis that these guys have gone through and that’s the major reason they’ve asked me to come and help them – whether from the GFC, to family loss, or children lost,” Mark says. “They all seem to have a back story where there’s been something that’s impacted on their personal lives which has slowly, but surely, bled into their business lives. And they just need someone to give them a bit of a hand, they’re desperate and that gets to you a bit.”

But let’s not confuse that with him being a big softie – “I’m not sure anyone would describe me that way” – it’s more about paying his good fortune forward. Growing up in humble beginnings in western Sydney, Mark credits his family environment and the help and advice he garnered along the way to his accomplishments – successfully launching Wizard Home Loans to take it up to the big banks in 1996, then following that with financial management company Yellow Brick Road.

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“I genuinely want to help (small business owners) because they are good people and they need help and no one ever offers to help them,” Mark says. “It’s encumbent on people like me to pay forward what I have learnt to those people who are trying to do the same thing.

“People have helped me all the way either by giving advice or by letting me into their world where I’ve observed what they’ve done and I’ve used those things to work for me.

“That’s why I called the show The Mentor – it’s not about me being smarter than anyone else, I’ve experienced things through a whole lot of circumstances and what a mentor does is pass that on to other people.”

The multi-millionaire businessman’s clearly captivated by some of the business owners among them two sisters trying to run a gluten-free bakery, a florist who works such long hours that she barely sees her young son and a Queensland family who set up a company called Ubiquitous Realty despite the fact that, as Mark points out, the public can hardly spell the word, let alone know what it actually means. But, he’s certainly not going to go easy on them, promising plenty of tough love.

“I don’t find it hard to say what they need to hear,” Mark admits. “I’m not a cheerleader. I’m straight up not here to be your best friend, or your dad or your brother or your sister. I’m here to tell you what you need to hear, if you don’t want to hear it, let me know and I won’t bother.”

It sounds somewhat similar to tough-talking, no-nonsense celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay who heads boots and all into restaurants in his reality show Kitchen Nightmares.

“I don’t swear as much, but the sentiment’s the same,” Mark laughs. “I don’t go yelling and screaming at people. I’m very calm. But I am fairly forceful in what I’m saying. I do give them options – it’s not a bully-type situation.

“I”m trying not to look like the guy on The Apprentice who’s sitting there in his suit. This is more natural and me trying to relate to them.”

Mark famously helmed Celebrity Apprentice Australia for four seasons, and says he had a lot of fun on the very-structured competition. He’s enjoying the more free-flowing nature of The Mentor, where he spends up to five days in the business, meeting their families and gaining a further appreciation of the difficulties faced.

He’s been asked repeatedly if he will follow his fellow Apprentice host, now leader of the free world, Donald Trump’s journey into politics and he laughs when Watch again poses the question.

“I’m not likely to follow Trump, no, but I know him and good on him,” Mark says. “I think I said in a an interview the other day, everything’s a possibility. It depends whether it suits me at the time and whether I can add value.

“I’m not interested unless I can add value, so am I interested in running a country, probably not running a country but am I interested in contributing to this great country? 100 per cent.”

So, no he’s not totally ruling out reinventing himself as a politician, but he’d have to weigh up everything he’d have to relinquish – such as his Greek passport, given the recent kerfuffle over dual citizenship. And it would have to be a collaboration as he told Stellar Magazine.

“I don’t think I want to be Prime Minister,” he says. “I don’t think the risk versus reward is worth it. But I have been asked by quite an influential person to form a new political party. I’ve thought about it, but right now I’ve got too much to do. In the future? Yes, it’s possible. But it wouldn’t just be me – it’d be collaborative.”

In the meantime, he’ll continue collaborating with the backbone of Australia’s economy.

The Mentor, Monday, 9pm, Seven

Originally published as Bouris is the biz