A party hire business owner who primarily deals Bouncy Castles is now under fire, almost literally, for encouraging his employees to burn down his competition. He’s now going to be behind bars for a decade.

James Balcombe was motivated by an obsessive desire to outdo his competitors when he paid his co-offenders to firebomb their businesses across industrial Melbourne in late 2016 and early 2017. Many of the fires, lit with fuel or Molotov cocktails, failed to take hold or incurred only minor damage.

Balcombe received an 11-year prison sentence after earlier pleading guilty to 11 charges of conspiracy to commit arson.