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