Eddy Groves
| Eddy Groves | |
|---|---|
| Born | 16 June 1966 |
| Occupation | Founder, chief executive officer |
| Board member of | ABC Learning |
| Spouse(s) | Le Neve Groves (married 1985) divorced, late 1990s |
Edmund Stuart "Eddy" Groves (born 16 June 1966) is an Australian businessman, founder and former chief executive officer of ABC Learning, once one of Australia's largest companies and one of the world's biggest childcare providers prior to going into administration. In January 2013 Groves was declared bankrupt.
Eddy Groves was born in Durban, South Africa, to a soldier and a schoolteacher. The family returned to Canada in late 1966. A further relocation in July 1968 found the family on the West Coast, at Victoria, British Columbia. Groves had arrived in Australia by 1970 and settled in Queensland. He was educated at Padua College in Brisbane.
After leaving school, he enrolled at university to study for a business degree. He left halfway through, eager to engage in business rather than learning about it, and got his first job as a clerk with the ANZ bank. Later, he became a milkman for Paul's Milk in Brisbane. Armed with a loan from his wife's father, he bought a distributorship when he was nineteen years old, which was the start of his business career. He expanded his milk distribution business to the point where his company, Quantum Food Services, was the biggest distributor of milk in Queensland.
In 1985, at the age of nineteen, Groves married Le Neve, with whom he has two daughters. The couple split in the late 1990s, with his wife gaining custody of the children. She sued her former husband for "unjustly enriching himself" while he was in control of ABC. Groves left ABC with a multibillion-dollar debt, amidst allegations of poor financial management and related questionable financial dealings.
In 1988, Groves and his subsequently estranged wife, Le Neve, opened a childcare centre in suburban Brisbane, having previously concluded that childcare was a universally "needed service" much like milk distribution. Run as a franchise model, their centres quickly became successful, expanded quickly, with bank finance from St George Bank of $20 million by 1993 and listing on the (ASX) in 2001. They both held a 14.9% share in the company worth $2.5 billion at its peak, making Eddy Groves one of Australia's richest people at the time, according to Business Review Weekly.
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