Elton Anzac Thomas Cummings shares a name with his father who started the family business nearly six decades ago. Elton took time out from another busy day to sit down with Sara Browne on a deluxe lounge amongst the sparkling new stock now on display at his shop's new home in the 100-year-old Hensley Building on Glasgow Lane.

The company was formed in 1948 by my father in Ballina, after the war, Cummings Retravision. Then we spread out to six locations. The current locations are Lismore and Yamba. The others are still owned by the family but we’ve rented them out to other organisations. The business was bought in the 80s from Brown and Jolly, we took over when they closed up. We’ve been through how many floods? – probably a dozen – never lost anything until this time.

I’m Elton Anzac Thomas Cummings. My father is Thomas Anzac Cummings. Everyone knows Dad as Anzac. He was one of 13 children. The lady that was the midwife for my grandmother said he had to have a middle name and my grandmother said I don’t know, I’ve run out of names after 13 children. Apparently, the midwife said, why don’t you call him Anzac? So, they did. 

He was born in Ballina, the old hospital on Crane Street. I was born there too. We’ve got four or five generations of Cummings now all born in Ballina and went to school in Ballina. I’ve lived in four houses my whole life, all in Ballina, two on one street and two on another street.

I got my bronze in surf life-saving around 1970, there were six of us, and now there’s only two of us left alive. We’re all dying off.

I’ve only been involved in the company since 1971. I left school in September '71. I went to the catholic primary school in Ballina and then Ballina High after that, where my father and all his brothers went, over a hundred years. 

It was expected that I would join the family business with the focus on washing machine and refrigeration repairs and that sort of stuff, but actually, that didn’t work out because I migrated towards sales. Those were the days when the boom was starting to happen with all sorts of appliances and TVs started to come online. Although I had a good background in how things worked in the workshop and how to run a workshop – we had a big workshop – the progression of sales just took over and I never went back to the workshop.

I see sales as a craft you develop and you can observe and get it but you can’t be taught it. I guess I had a knack. I would have liked to have been better. I would have liked to know the knowledge I have now and had it at 17 when I started. The mistakes I made then wouldn’t be repeated, like putting your heart and soul into a product line that didn’t work. We were keen, when the building boom started in Ballina, we put a lot of effort into cabinets for kitchens. I was wrong, just little things like that along the way.

My home is in Ballina. We’ve got a head office in Ballina where our people who run the other side of the business operate from. We also have a storage area there and people pick up goods from that storage area, it’s the corner of River Street and Cherry Street. We have that depot there so we can service our Ballina customers.

Love in my life becomes a bit of a long story. I’ve got family in the business, my sister’s working here in Lismore at the moment and my other brother works here. They migrate between here, Yamba and Ballina. A lot of my time is spent in the Ballina office with management stuff. I’m close to my 70s now but we fill the gaps when we have to. My father was actively involved until his 80s. He’s still going well at 98 and my Mum is 91. Mum is still in her own penthouse in Ballina behind the shop where we put up a low-rise. My father is now down at the serviceman’s home, the RSL. Dad was the president of the Ballina RSL and actually built the RSL Club so he knows the structure of the organisation.

I would never recommend working with family members to anyone, ever. It’s a bit like employing, say mother and father and son – if something goes wrong, like a death, everybody’s got to go out of the business. If it’s something where there is a dispute financially, that can become an issue. So, there are some real issues with taking on your family in business – good and bad. The good is that they’re always there and they help out, especially when times are tough. But bad if you have a sibling arrangement where it’s not quite as practical if someone is working harder than others – that would be me by the way. I wouldn’t overly recommend it.

I worked overseas a little bit when I was younger, 21. I was in Bognor Regis in Sussex in England. I went over as a lifeguard at Butlins, it wasn’t for me. I lasted about three days then I went down the road to the main street and worked for Sports and Radio, selling guns. He said to me – you’re an Australian, of course you’d know about guns. All I knew about was slug guns. I shot one once and shot a bird and I was that guilty I’ve never picked a gun up since.

I got a job there upstairs in the gun shop, mainly selling ammunition, then I went down to the bottom of the shop where they sold and rented TVs in those days. It was the very start of TV with old valve, dynatron TVs. I didn’t work many hours there. The guy who owned that ended up being a friend. I was on a sabbatical I guess, to travel around. I did about three months around Europe, saw all the usual things you see in Europe.

I came back and worked for the family firm. I’ve been very involved in surf rescue and jet rescue boats for the last 50 years. I started the rescue helicopter service here in Lismore in 1980/81 with a group of lifesavers from Ballina. What it is now is from the base of what we started in 81.

A guy called Fred Little, an undertaker from Murwillumbah, his committee was trying to set it up so we came in over that and did it. The helicopter service now is way past the dream I had. The dream was to have a small aircraft with a fixed-wing feeder. Today the aircraft is a floating surgery with everything you’d ever want. My dream was a lot smaller.

We funded it ourselves for three or four years. Remember in '82 or round about, there was a major downturn in the economy and we struggled badly. We did all sorts of things for fundraising. Then they formed a fundraising committee in Lismore. The Northern Star was pretty big in those days, they got involved. Harold Fredericks was the chairman and they started to raise money for us.

I’m not married, happily partnered, only for about 30 odd years. My partner has never been involved in the business.

The company owns 47 Molesworth Street and the one next to it which had substantial damage in the flood. We decided to move out of those very quickly once the flood came through. The people beside that rented from us – the accountants and the photographer – the accountant has moved to back offices here in Glasgow Lane and the photographer is not coming back.

We had to get out of our building because there was just too much damage. This was a lot easier because it’s a lot higher, this building is 100 hundred years old, the old Hensley's building, hence the name of the carpark.

It’s about 18 inches above the '74 flood, so we bought this to have it for electrical and furniture stock. But then people were renting it from us so we stayed where we were. It’s been easier to get fixed up here – new carpets and paint – we had about two and half metres through this shop. We lost all our stock. It cost the family about $600,000 in stock losses. Renovations are going to be touching $250,000. The carpet is $100,000…30 for the painting, I’m not sure what the electrical bill is going to be, hate to get that one. It goes on and on and on.

I didn’t think about not coming back after this flood because the town overall has been good to us as a family. The buildings that we have on Molesworth Street have paid for themselves in rent. If you’d said to me – is the exercise worthwhile or closing down and not doing it, would you be better off? Probably not. The exercise is what’s good for the town and for us, to get going, open up and be successful again.

Every day, people come in and say “you’re local, we want to support you”, “my mother and father bought from you.” We’ve been here in this town 40 something years. We now have a second generation of customers. They can come and talk to the family that owns the store. And we get them out of trouble. When they deal with other companies that aren’t family companies, they have to deal with a structure and they can’t make a decision to swap something over or fix it. I wear the cost. Big commercial companies can’t do that.

The flood conversation with other business people is usually – early, no, never going to come back – two weeks later, oh I might come back – five weeks later, yeah we’re looking at what we can do. Slowly but surely, I think they’re going to re-establish themselves. Not all. If we’ve got 50% back in 12 months, I think we’d be lucky.

There are some great opportunities, if I was young enough, or game enough. Some of these properties will be bought at the right price and if they can give us two more metres of flood relief well, that will pretty well get past most of the floods. I think you could pick up some real estate quite cheap if you gamble.

I feel very sad for other people who own property who’ve invested and haven’t got any ability to re-invest in that building. Because the bank obviously wouldn’t give them funds and they will struggle to get a tenant. I don’t know how that’s going to work.

I work seven days a week from seven to six normally, but to make things successful now, I have to put the yards in. That’s coming to an end. It’s completed here now as you can see. We are going to open seven days now which we never used to. That’s going to be a challenge, we’ve got to get some extra staff.

We’re trading really well at the moment because people need washing machines, they need lounges, TVs, dryers and we’ve been able to secure stock. I’ve invested in about 1.5 million worth of stock. I’ve been able to get a lot of stock that others haven’t. Two days after the flood, I was buying up mattresses, ordering over a period of time to make sure I could secure them. I secured massive numbers of fridges because I knew that 200 and 300-litre fridges would be in demand. That’s just knowledge from all the floods we’ve gone through.

I do take time off sometimes. I do some charity work overseas. That is my holiday. I usually do a month or two in Malaysia or Borneo or the Philippines. I help support aquatic life-saving in different locations. Basically, it's surf lifesaving.

A bloke called David Fields has been doing it for years and I just tagged along with him 10 years ago and set up a few groups in different locations. Now, they’re pretty well self-sufficient. I don’t know how they’re going to go, I better go back and check where they’re up to because a lot of the resorts aren’t operating at the moment. I’m more on the job with those trips than I’d like. To go away on a holiday without doing something would be a bit challenging. I like to be busy.

When I’m not working…I like crabbing. I used to have a jet ski. I had one of the early jet skis, rode it every weekend, too old for that now. I go to the beach, a lot of surf life-saving over the years. I clean the house, jump in my pool, take the weeds out, work in the garage – there’s never enough weekends to do that work.

How many times a day do I think about retiring? I don’t think I could do nothing. I’ve tried that a couple of times, it hasn’t worked at all. Not even my dog likes me at home, quite frankly. I’m always busy doing things. There’s no reason to retire unless you have to, I suppose.

One of the other flood problems I face, I guess, is how would you face your staff and sack them? They depend on our business for their livelihood. They’ve got children. I’ve got four staff here, I need two more. All my staff have been with me for years and years. And in Ballina, my office lady has been with me for 30 or 40 years and my operations manager Paul, has been with us for I don’t know how long. 

I don’t know if I’m a good boss or a weak boss. It’s part of a boss’ ethics I suppose, to make sure the business is viable so staff have the ability to be paid reasonably well and have a job. It’s not black and white, it’s just the way it works. I don’t know what the staff would say about me as a boss. You can ask. It depends what day it is, if things go right or wrong.

It's like the craft of selling things, the craft of managing people is probably another skill you learn and pick up. I always refer things to craft rather than skills. You develop your craft in management of people and business and sales and everything else as you go along. It’s very hard to teach that. People say to me, can you teach me how to sell? I say no, you can observe and learn, I’ll show you some fundamentals.

I observed my father. When I first started, he had a couch out front for people. You’d wait to see him, it was the personality business. I decided I was never going to be quite that. That relied on Dad and all these people waiting for him, they all wanted to see Anzac, please see Anzac. All of us standing around not doing things. I decided a long time ago that wasn’t the way to go. But there were skills I learned from other people employed by us, you pick up bits as you go along.

When Dad got sick, Mum ran the shop. Mum was always the person in the background that supported the family and the company. She was a business woman before that term became popular, back 50 or 60 years ago. She was not a women’s libber as such but was certainly influential within the structure of the company. Modern women think they have it now. Mum had it and other women of her status around Ballina and Lismore. They were just as active 60 years ago.

Mum was always there supporting the family and Dad all the time. There was no concept of women’s rights like there was later. It was there anyway, but people didn’t realise they had it. There was a lot of very active women in the area who were in businesses, older women, they were just as active as the men, many of them more so. Many of them held the company together.