Braveheart

Like medieval alchemists, Hong Kong's would-be entrepreneurs and aspiring business stars are constantly searching for the magic formula they believe holds the key to a glittering career and untold riches.

For some, the secret lies in collecting degrees and lining their shelves with the words of the prophets: Donald Trump, Richard Branson, Jack Welch and Stephen Covey. Each chapter is dissected for nuggets of wisdom, and each deal analysed ad infinitum.

Others have already divined that if you want to walk the walk, you first have to talk the talk. So, they put their faith in telling the world, in the words of their employers, that they have a passion to perform, are focused on offering total- value solutions or, rather cryptically, are actually listening to their customers.

To the casual observer, these methods can seem inventive or mundane. But, as any self-respecting billionaire knows, what these hopefuls should really be doing is just getting out there, rolling up their sleeves, and getting on with it.

That was the essentially the formula followed by Gulu Lalvani, and in a career spanning 50-odd years, he has rarely put a foot wrong. The Karachi-born, Mumbai-raised entrepreneur built a business empire from scratch and attributes his success to seizing opportunities, trusting his instincts and, when necessary, being prepared to 'put my money where my mouth is'. With this approach, he transformed Binatone, which started life in the late 1950s as a small British-based importer of transistor radios, into a consumer electronics giant and the world's second largest manufacturer of digital cordless phones. Along the way, of course, he also accumulated a considerable personal fortune, branched out as a private investor, and became a fixture on the society pages and all those international 'rich lists'.

Everything came about, he believes, thanks to three things: luck, judgment and a 'natural gift'. That is the ability to spot a gap in the market, and then move quickly to fill it.