Apart from one of the best seats in the house at Synthony, he also bought her a house as he built his own business empire. The night before our lunch in Parnell today, he took her to the Pink Floyd Orchestrated show at The Civic; the pair enjoyed dinner at Otto restaurant on K Road beforehand.

“We had no father at home,” says Higgins, reflecting on his life growing up. “My mum had challenges – we were in a state house, she was on the DPB, and I’d never seen someone go to work, or build a business.

“But my mum made me feel loved. So despite the poverty and all that, I definitely felt loved. I felt like an adult had my back. My mum loves me – she’s such a good person.”

He said he didn’t realise his family was poor until he was seven or eight.

“The other kids would say, ‘Why don’t you have new shoes?’ ‘Why don’t you go on a skiing holiday?’ ‘Why don’t you have a car?’

“I developed a sense of outrage. I realised that we were in a different circumstance and it created a fire in my belly. I was a bit outraged. I thought, ‘This isn’t fair’.”

He questioned why life was so hard. “Why are there these disparities? I’ve got to make some money and fix this. At that age, I had the frustration but there was nothing I could do about it.”

It forced him to put his head down at Selwyn College and, later, at Auckland University for a bachelor of commerce degree. “I always took school seriously.”

He was good at maths and statistics – he loves analysing numbers and data. He wasn’t so keen, though, on the job he secured after university.

“My view then was, you’ve got to work – it’s hard and it’s tough, but you’ve got to lump it, you’ve got to get up and go to work every day. I fell into a management cadet job, and I f***ing hated it.”

He doesn’t want to name the employer. “It was one of those organisations where you do six months in the call centre, six months on the forklifts, and over 20 years, you might get promoted into middle management.

“You don’t get to have ideas, whereas I came in like an upstart with all these ideas and opinions. They didn’t like me, and I didn’t like them.”

He persevered for about six months, dreading Mondays and every weekday. And also dreading the weekends, as he counted down to Monday.

“My attitude was, this is life. I think there are a lot of people out there who probably live like that – doing jobs they hate.

“About six months in, I had an epiphany. I thought, f*** it, life’s too short. I’m not going to do something I hate every day.”

Higgins, who is now 45, says he knows a lot of mates who persist for 10 years in a dreary role. “They bleat every week about how boring it is and how much they hate their job, but they don’t quit and try something else.

“If I was giving a message to young people – because I consider myself old now – it would be to keep chopping and changing, especially when you’re young. Don’t worry about chopping and changing until something feels right.”

After that initial job that he “f***ing hated”, he ended up at Student Job Search and found a casual job for 10 hours a week at the Employers and Manufacturers Association. He fell into events and marketing almost by accident. “They were very laissez-faire, they didn’t really give me a job description.”

He lured world-renowned Yale professor Henry Bolanos, who was visiting New Zealand at the time for the America’s Cup, as the headline act for a workshop on product management.

“It was my first event and it sold out – something like 400 tickets to New Zealand manufacturers wanting to learn about innovation.”

As well as sparking his love for events, there were early valuable lessons.

“What I learned is if you don’t have credibility, you can rent it,” he says.

“And the other saying I like is a Bob Dylan line from that song, Like a Rolling Stone, that says, ‘When you ain’t got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose’.”

He also learned he wasn’t cut out as a great employee – for anyone – and so he backed his instincts, both through his gut and his analytical mind, to start his own business.

“I didn’t think outright ‘I must be an entrepreneur or own my own business’, but I quickly worked out that in employment situations, I tended to rub the employer up the wrong way, for whatever reason.”

In April 2004, he and another EMA staff member, John McRae, set up Duco – the Latin word for ‘I lead’ – in McRae’s Herne Bay flat.

Life has not been the same since.

Higgins says he himself “chopped and changed” until he found something that felt right, in his case events.

“And by the way,” he says, moving on to a tangential point, which often characterises his conversation, “it’s not event management. I’m rubbish at event management! Event management is admin, it’s detail, it’s guest lists. I don’t want to confuse the readers. I’m not good at event management.

“I’m good at the idea – what is an idea for an exciting, interesting event? Will it be successful? I think there’s a gut feeling element to it.

“We’re not event managers, we’re not paid to run a Christmas party. We create the event, and then we take the financial risk.”

Over the years, he’s learned to build up as many revenue streams as possible – ticket sales, TV rights, sponsorship and the like – to build profit margins.

“It’s like a property developer in a way – they think of an idea for a skyscraper, and then make a bet that they’ll sell enough floors at that price to break even,” says Higgins. “Bob Jones said to me once that all property developers go bust… because they always have to build a bigger building. They’re never satisfied.”

Does that apply to events, I ask?

“It could apply,” he says, but he reiterates the importance of diversified revenue.

“The idea of trying to break even just on ticket sales terrifies me. A lot of promoters have to sell 80% of their tickets to break even and they’re the ones that sometimes go bust. You hear about events falling over and festivals falling over.”

Higgins has enjoyed – perhaps endured is the better word – a reputation as a party boy. Friends tell of wild nights out on the booze in his younger years.

Nowadays he’s cut back on drinking and today, over lunch at Parnell Japanese restaurant Gion, he is on a Bundaberg ginger beer.

I arrive 20 minutes late, thanks to Auckland’s traffic, and Higgins has already found a six-seat booth out back so that we can talk more openly.

Cutting back on alcohol, he says, had “probably made me a bit more reliable… happier”.

He’s not totally abstentious: There are still a few “hiccups”, every now and then.

“I’m definitely more content than I was … I’m feeling lucky in some ways to still be in good stead,” he says, laughing. “I’d call myself trying to be in recovery to some extent. I gave it a good tilt. It was work hard, play hard and devil may care for a while.”

By his late 30s, he was feeling burnt out.

“If you don’t look after yourself, your mind, your body, your soul, with even basic nutrition, you’re going to suffer. If you’re not feeding yourself some proper amino acids, minerals, vitamins, it’s going to affect your mental health.

“So definitely, I had a very stressful time for a while and didn’t look after myself and I was a bit disillusioned, but I’ve wrangled myself back into shape just by doing basic things. I’ve put a lot of work into healing, for want of a better way of putting it.”

He reads, has attended support groups, and performed hot yoga. He also runs. “I’m an active relaxer. I can’t sit and watch television – it does my head in.”

He says his wife Aria was “a catalyst for me turning things around a few years ago, and I’ll always be grateful to her for that”.

Higgins has ADHD, but does not take medication. “I’ve noticed that if you say you have ADHD these days, often the media make it the headline.”

That’s a bit weird, he thinks. “I think a third of the population has it.”

“That aside, I don’t think it’s an excuse for bad behaviour or whatever. If anything, I wonder if it’s not helped me – just thinking differently. It’s made me who I am, so I probably wouldn’t change it.”

He says his brain no longer races relentlessly.

“It’s calmed down. In my 20s, I’d go to bed at night with a risky event or a business problem, and my brain would race. I wouldn’t sleep.

“Now I can go to bed at night with a very risky event or business problem and just shut down and go to sleep,” says Higgins, even if millions of dollars are at stake. “I think that’s just experience, maybe life experience. You get a thicker skin.”

Duco turns 20 in April. Higgins has had business partners along the way – McRae, and then Dean Lonergan – but he is now the sole shareholder and director of the business.

He is quick to pay tribute to his staff, including people who have been with him for more than 15 years – Carlena Limmer and Nicky Rawhiti – and his chief executive Craig Cotton. And he’s also appreciated people like Martin Snedden and Rachael Carroll, another former director.

It’s been touch and go on a number of occasions, most famously on the day of one of Duco’s biggest events, the David Tua-Shane Cameron heavyweight boxing fight at Mystery Creek in 2009. After guaranteeing both fighters $500,000 each, Higgins needed a huge number of Sky TV pay-per-view sign-ups to simply break even.

The paying TV audience, notoriously, doesn’t sign up for a fight until the remaining few hours – or hour- before the opening round. Higgins woke up that morning, knowing he might not have a business by the end of the day.

But such was the interest that by 5pm, he was in break-even territory. By midnight, Duco was celebrating a massive profit – the bout had smashed viewership records. About 2.1 million people watched the fight; New Zealand’s population at the time was about four million.

Over 20 years, Duco has lured celebrity speakers such as Boris Johnson, Richard Branson, Elle Macpherson, Bob Geldof, Mick Fleetwood and Nigella Lawson.

He remembers Geldof hurling insults at Sarah Palin on his television set in his hotel suite and he enjoyed spending time chaperoning Johnson in Auckland in December.

“Boris … had a few security from the UK, as you would expect, but nothing over the top,” Higgins told me at the time. “In downtime, Boris swam at Mission Bay plus climbed Lion Rock at Piha (even though you are not supposed to these days). His attitude was ‘They are not cancelling Lion Rock!’”

The media, says Higgins, often mischaracterises these celebrities.

Cricketer Shane Warne was a special guest for the Duco-organised ‘A tribute to Stephen Fleming’ in 2009 – an event that also raised funds for Starship children’s hospital. Warne turned down an appearance fee, paid for his own airfares, and at the charity auction, he paid $17,000 for a trip to Tahiti that he never took up.

“A lot of people at the time had a view of Shane Warne as a bit of a buffoon, a bit of a cad. He signed probably hundreds of autographs for kids – he was very charismatic and spent time talking to every single person who wanted to talk to him.

“A lot of people in the room were like, ‘Oh, I get it now’.”

Higgins now focuses on recurring events: Synthony, of course, and Black Clash – the annual festival cricket game featuring cricket and rugby stars and other personalities draws a massive television audience and fills up Bay Oval and Hagley Oval (the games alternate between the North and South Islands).

There was also the NRL Nines, a huge hit in Auckland for four years.

There have been only one or two mis-hits in the past two decades. The rugby 10s in Brisbane set Duco back to the tune of seven figures – Higgins says, proudly, that he paid all of the debts.

As Joseph Paker’s manager, he travelled to Saudi Arabia this week to be with the New Zealand boxer in the build-up to the now-postponed IBF world heavyweight title fight. Englishman Daniel Dubois pulled out of the fight on Friday, battling illness.

The winner of the fight – presuming it will be rescheduled – will inevitably face world heavyweight champion Oleksandr Usyk to unify the heavyweight belts.

Many experts believe any future fight between Parker and Dubois is too close to call.

“I think Joseph is going to win this and become a two-time world champion,” Higgins said over lunch and before the fight was postponed. (Parker’s WBO heavyweight victory over Andy Ruiz Jnr in Auckland in 2016 was another massive Duco event).

“And then that would be unification [against Usyk]. I think to unify the heavyweight division would possibly be the greatest achievement in New Zealand sport,” says Higgins, noting the lack of big structures and funding for boxing in New Zealand.

Higgins says he’s now at a stage of his life where he is more content.

“I’m probably taking things a bit more seriously. I’m one of the lucky few who enjoy their job to the point that it’s not work.

“I do not take that for granted. I think there’s a bit of luck involved in that, or trial and error. In a way, my whole life has been trial and error.”

Now that he’s 45, and a dad of two young daughters, he says he’s “probably not quite as fatalistic and devil may care as I was”.

His daughters, Olive, 3 and Willoughby, 18 months, are the lights of his life.

Two weeks before our lunch, I had spotted Higgins with Olive atop his shoulders on Parnell Rd. “She views me as one of those horse-trek horses. I’m the horse, and my shoulders belong to her. She steers me around. I’m happy to play that role.”

Higgins says becoming a dad “has definitely grounded me”.

“For someone that’s grown up with self-esteem issues, it’s taught me a bit about unconditional love.

“I’ve learned that if you’re a good person with your children, they will give you unconditional love. And then it’s circular.”

More than 40,000 people are expected to fill Auckland Domain for Synthony Festival on March 29 – the biggest one-day festival in Australasia, says Higgins.

It’s Synthony – the unique mix of a live orchestra, synthesised club music, and a light show all mashed up into one big dance party – that has sent Duco into the events stratosphere. It’s now global, with full-on concerts and shorter gigs from Auckland to Amsterdam. The March 29 line-up will tour Australia after its Domain debut.

Like last year, Higgins is planning for his mum, Bridget, to have a special spot at the Domain event.

“This year I’m building a platform off the sound desk – like a watchtower. It’s nice to be able to help other people. The purpose of money is to help people and have fun. I think a lot of people hoard money for inheritance reasons.”

In the brief time that he met him, his father, who was apparently well-off, told Higgins that he would one day be a wealthy man.

“I didn’t say anything, but I was thinking, ‘No, you’ve got it all wrong. You should have helped us 30 years ago when I was a kid. I don’t want your money’.”

He says of his own wealth: “I’m certainly not on the rich list, but I’m comfortable. A lot of those rich listers probably live quite miserable lives – just by spending a bit of money, you can have a far more entertaining life.”

It’s another lesson he’s learned in business. “I’m not waiting until it’s too late. I’m not waiting till you die and then help people. It’s been a privilege when money’s come to be able to help others along the way.”