Building a Legacy

I'm sitting in Fort Lauderdale with Ian Malouf in the ultra-chic, white and blue salon of his recently rebuilt 238-foot (72.5-meter) Lürssen Coral Ocean. It’s hot outside, so the Australian entrepreneur, who is in his 50s, pulls our two draft beers himself from an array of options at the bar. He tells me about growing up in Sydney with his parents’ small boats. He often went fishing with his dad for bluefish.

“It started with a runabout, then progressed to speedboats, then to a 43-foot cruiser, which was massive back then,” he says. “I knew boats would always be a part of my life.”

He’s been called a disrupter in the business world, but he prefers to think of himself as an improver—someone who sees a gap in a system and figures out how to bridge it. He’s been messing around with boats and machinery since he was a kid, and he’s still messing around with the larger yachts today. In 2019, when he bought the 1994 Jon Bannenberg-designed Coral Ocean in a deal that closed over the course of just a few days, his plan was to undergo a refit that made her the best possible luxury charter yacht.

Today, Coral Ocean is the flagship vessel in the Ahoy Club, a digital charter platform that Malouf founded in 2018. H2 Yacht Design in London oversaw changes to the exterior decks and layouts, while Malouf’s wife, Larissa, an interior designer, handled the renovations inside. She transformed the yacht from a dark ambience to a bright, light décor that incorporates many shades of her favorite color, blue.

“Her vision was to see if she could run me out of money,” Ian says with a laugh. “I thought it would be a 5-million-euro refit. Somehow, it ended up being 35 million.”

The journey to that multimillion-dollar refit started for Ian in 1984. After high school, at age 18, he bought a pickup truck and enrolled in college to study law. “The truck was a good idea,” he says. “More school was not. I ditched classes about six weeks in. My mum was not exactly delighted by the choice at the time, but nevertheless, both my parents were super supportive.”

He helped pay off his truck by collecting and hauling away his neighbors’ garbage. He went knocking door-to-door looking for business. “Mum started answering phones, and dad helped me shovel my first loads onto the truck before and after his day job,” he recalls.

One truck begat another, and another. Soon, he became known in Australia as the “garbo man.” He named his company Dial a Dump. Over 35 years, he grew it into the largest privately owned waste management and recycling company in Australia. Bingo Industries acquired it in 2018 for a reported $577 million, leaving Ian with what he calls “a telephone number” worth of cash as well as shares in the company.

By that time, he had chartered an array of yachts in the Mediterranean, kept a 72-foot (22-meter) Princess in Australia, and bought the 174-foot (53-meter) Baglietto Blue Scorpion, which he renamed Mischief.

“At the time we bought Mischief, it was the only home we owned. We always just rented,” Larissa says. She recounts that one time, when her youngest kids wanted friends to join them on vacation, they were slightly embarrassed to bring them to a yacht. “I told them, ‘Hey, we don’t own a house. We simply have a floating home.’”

The Maloufs—childhood sweethearts who started dating in their teens—today share their three residences in Australia, and their boats, with their five children. They have four of their own, plus Ian’s nephew, whom the couple integrated into their family with no hesitation after both his parents passed away.

“We are very family oriented,” Larissa says. “Ian has loads of cousins, and often 40 or so of us get together for barbecues. We are a very noisy group.”

In refitting Coral Ocean, Larissa worked with Capt. Will Kaye as project manager for 23 months at STP Shipyard in Palma, Mallorca.

“The owner’s deck and the sundeck have been entirely rebuilt,” Kaye says. “We reconfigured the VIP, relocated the master, moved bulkheads, and added day heads and pantries to every deck.”

Kaye says that nearly the entire superstructure was taken down to faired aluminum. Two and a half decks got new wiring, systems, lighting, a swimming pool and a glass-bottom hot tub. Planking on the decks is now 120 millimeters wide—twice the standard width of teak planking. The deck planks are joined by gray Sika caulking, as opposed to the traditional black, creating a different, softer look.

And that look is already garnering plenty of bookings by charter clients at the Ahoy Club, where their 27-year-old daughter Ellie is CEO. “We have always instilled a strong work ethic in our kids,” Larissa says. “Monkey see, monkey do. One of our sons works in the waste management company—it’s all in the family, rubbish and boats.”

For Ian, it’s all about seeing the gaps and figuring out how to bridge them.

“We are living our best life. We are very lucky,” he says. “Why settle for less when the best is possible?”   

For more information: ahoyclub.com

This article was originally published in the Summer 2023 issue.