Speaker 1: You're listening to a Shears These podcast.
Speaker 2: Let's chat about you. You're a dual Olympian, Silver mid middleist,
Speaker 2: investment banker and now CEO. I want to Australian's largest companies.
Speaker 2: What's your secret to thriving under these pressure cooker environments.
Speaker 1: The first thing you learned very quickly as a CEO
Speaker 1: is really it's not about you, it's about everyone else
Speaker 1: around you, right, So I think it's ensuring that you
Speaker 1: have phenomenal people working with you. And I don't mean
Speaker 1: good people, I mean phenomenal people. And you come back
Speaker 1: to where we started, which is we want to deliver
Speaker 1: a top quartile total shareholder return. We want to be
Speaker 1: in the best twenty five percent of companies over the
Speaker 1: long term. And if you have great people, then they
Speaker 1: are going to be very capable of making the right decisions.
Speaker 1: So as a leader, you just need to create the settings,
Speaker 1: the culture of the environment and the support for them
Speaker 1: to ultimately get on and make the right decisions.
Speaker 2: As there any listens that you've bought over from sporting
Speaker 2: into business.
Speaker 1: When you're training with a group of people that every
Speaker 1: day you get up and you're trying to be the
Speaker 1: best in the world, and every single thing you do,
Speaker 1: from what you eat for breakfast and your training session
Speaker 1: to the stretching and the recovery and the planning all
Speaker 1: and all of that is about being the best in
Speaker 1: the world. There came a point in time where it
Speaker 1: was very clear that physically I was not going to
Speaker 1: be the best in the world in sport anymore. But
Speaker 1: you know, I wanted to be part of a team
Speaker 1: that shared a similar sense of ambition and that's what
Speaker 1: I love about West Farmers. And for a business like
Speaker 1: Bunnings to be successful or came out to be successful,
Speaker 1: we genuinely have to be the best in the world.
Speaker 1: Like we are fighting tooth and nail with companies like Amazon,
Speaker 1: with Costco, with Audi that are really large international companies,
Speaker 1: best in their class. So you know, that sense of
Speaker 1: trying to be the best in the world I think
Speaker 1: translates really well from sport to business.
Speaker 2: So before we reap, do you have a favorite quote
Speaker 2: or piece of advice that you've picked up along the way.
Speaker 1: One of my favorite quotes is when the horse is dead,
Speaker 1: get off, And I think that actually has a lot
Speaker 1: of relevance in investing. So for your investors out there,
Speaker 1: sometimes you need to know when to you know when
Speaker 1: to get out right. Hopefully that won't be the case
Speaker 1: with the West Farmers right. But look, if there is
Speaker 1: a quote that I think is very inspiring and relevant,
Speaker 1: it's that old Roosevelt quote the critic. It just talks
Speaker 1: about how easy it is to be the critic. But
Speaker 1: really what matters in life, it's the person in the
Speaker 1: arena that's trying that failing, they're getting up, they're having
Speaker 1: another go. And you know, in history, in life, in business,
Speaker 1: in sport, it is those people that ultimately create value,
Speaker 1: create change, do special things. And i'd like to think
Speaker 1: that you know, in the West Farmers group, we have
Speaker 1: far more people in the arena having a go than
Speaker 1: we do critics sitting on the sideline commenting on things.
Speaker 2: Investing involves the risk you might lose the money you
Speaker 2: start with. We recommend talking to a licensed financial advisor.
Speaker 2: We also recommend reading product disclosure documents before deciding to invest.