How the CEO of Oroton learnt to make the right career choices

So do you ever get tempted to look at those numbers even earlier, say in the middle of the night?

I do.

And if they are not quite as good as you think, is it hard to get back to sleep?

No, not usually. I’m very much a long-term thinker in the business. Any one day of trade that isn’t great … it happens, right? We have those fluctuations all the time. So you’ve got to be able to go with the ebbs and flows and not get so distracted that you can’t actually operate.

And what time do you get to work?

I usually don’t get to work until about 8.30 to 8.45am.

And do you have to drop your son off somewhere on the way into work?

Yes. So I drop him off on the way and then make my way to Chippendale.

So you sound like you’ve probably almost done a day’s work by the time you get to the office.

Fighting the traffic and not getting frustrated with not being able to go faster to get there, yes, but I make use of the time in the car. So I’m either listening to something that I’m really engaged in, or I’m having calls.

Has there been a pivotal moment in your career that’s really changed the trajectory of your career, or changed you in some way?

One in particular that I’ll share is when I was at McKinsey, and I was frustrated with something not moving fast enough, so I decided to look at my other options. I got myself an offer to go into private equity at a place in Boston, and I called my mentor. He reacted by saying: “Don’t always trade the known good for the prospect of great,” which was his way of just slowing me down and saying the grass isn’t always greener, really think through these decisions, and make sure you’ve made your list of all the things that are great about what you do now and where you are counterbalanced with the things that you want to change and have done differently. And that to me was the pause that I needed to really reflect.

For me, that point of reflection made me say: “Am I actually running away from something that I’m not confident in or scared about?” And that was more what I was doing than saying this place wasn’t for me any more. Then I ended up staying at the firm and really knuckling down, and I think part of it was renewal and focusing on the things that I was learning and still growing into, which was a lot at that point in my career. It was my early 30s, I had so much more to learn. So focusing on what is giving me the butterflies in my stomach, which meant that I was learning and let me do more of that and then also the renewal. Part of that renewal was making partner and moving to Australia, and figuring out how to actually rebuild my skill set in a new place, meeting new people, making new connections in that next part of my journey.

So what are the key skills that you learnt in 15 years at McKinsey? I mean, it’s an amazing company, right?

It was an amazing experience because it pushed me out of my comfort zone a lot. You’re working with some of the best executives and CEOs in the world at some of the biggest companies. So getting to see them up close and personal, watching and learning almost by osmosis, how they operated and what made them tick. Being able to see that across lots of different leaders really shapes you as an individual. Learning how to problem-solve, just remembering and knowing that my brain is my main asset, and that I can take that anywhere I go is something the firm really homes in on. How to problem-solve and break down anything that might seem like a challenge.

So, is there a particular methodology about problem-solving that you learnt that you use now?

We call it your toolkit. So you use that toolkit in various ways. Some of that might be pure strategy studies that you’re doing, where you have to take the complexity of the future that any business is facing and break it into parts, and you help put together a sensible strategy that can be communicated all the way through a business. Other parts of your toolkit are pure analysis and analytics and being able to take massive amounts of data, make sense of it, deduce insights, tell a story on the back end of it. So I would say all of those parts of my toolkit I use on a regular basis.

On that note, what’s the best piece of career advice you’ve ever been given?

I would say in my early 20s, my very first job out of college, I had someone on the board who took an interest in me. She was a big time lawyer in Chicago, and I had been trying to figure out what to do. I was dedicated to becoming a doctor my whole life. My parents told me since I was two, all the way through college, I was going to be a doctor.

And then I had decided not to do that in my senior year at college, which was a huge change, and I think it left me a little bit lost. So I was thinking about all these pathways that I could go down, going to law school, going to business school, going to find another job in another city, and she was listening to me go through this process. And she finally just stopped me and said, “No decision that you make now is permanent. You can actually change if it doesn’t work out. You’ve got to take what you know now to be true. Make a great decision for yourself, and don’t get stuck on the uncertainties.” Because you can, especially as a young woman, when you’re thinking when do I want to get pregnant? And when do I want to be married? All these uncertainties can really create paralysis in your life if you don’t know how to just push forward.

She did say – caveat – having a child is irreversible. She’s like, “you could get married and if it doesn’t work out, and you could reverse that. But when you have a child, that’s the permanent one, so pay a lot of attention to that decision.” But she said everything else; mortgages, jobs, careers, it can all be changed if it doesn’t work out.

Tell me about a time when you failed at something. How did you recover? And what did you learn? Are you a failer?

I’m a failer. I’m a failer and I learn fast from the failure. The biggest failure that I would say that I’ve learnt from in the job that I have now is around communication and the need to communicate really frequently and communicate often.

And what was the actual failure?

The failure was thinking that if I shared the strategy with the business, then everyone would just know it and be on their way. That was the failure. And I had an interesting conversation in my early days as a CEO with a friend who said they had a boss and every meeting that boss would sit down and state the priorities of the business every meeting, and it was so pedantic that everyone was of course like “this is crazy. Why does he always keep doing this?” But at the same time this person was telling me every single person in the business could recite the priorities and the strategy of the business because of this tactic that the CEO had. Now, that’s not my style, I wouldn’t do it that way. But the lesson is, you’ve got to say it again and again and again, in different ways because people hear things and absorb things in different ways.

So how do you communicate that again and again? Do you communicate that in every meeting you have with individuals? Or do you have town halls? How do you reinforce a strategy?

So sometimes it’s bringing everyone together, like “let’s start the day with a reminder of our strategy,” and other times it’s more subtle and nuanced and worked into the agenda.

We do have a framework for every meeting, which is performance, product, people, and we use that rough framework to make sure we’re clear on what the big things are in those three areas that we all need to be talking about and thinking about.

And do you get sick of repeating it and trying to find different ways of communicating the strategy?

I think that was part of my problem at first. For me, someone repeating something to me is my worst nightmare. So I do find creative ways. We’ll get together and we’ll actually have different people present different parts of the strategy, or we’ll do some sort of recording about a part of the strategy and send it out to the retail team. So we find different ways to communicate.

What made you decide not to be a doctor?

So my biological father was a doctor and my mum was a nurse practitioner. I got close to getting ready for the test that you take for med school and I started to think about what life would be like. I had a conversation with my father at the time about how disgruntled he was about the medical system in the US. It was just really tricky to practise what he started out loving, and I just didn’t think it was for me in the end. So I wanted to spend some more time exploring, which is what I did for the next five-ish years of my life.

And how did you get into McKinsey?

I had left school, and I spent that time thinking about what my pathways were. I did a lot of work in the nonprofit sector, which was very interesting, because I could be in inner-city Chicago, inner cities, helping young people have financial literacy and have access to thinking that they weren’t getting in the school systems. And while I loved that, I was really using it also as a time to investigate what I wanted to do next. I found my way to business school, because I thought that was the most versatile degree to then port myself into a new sector. And I got approached by McKinsey in the process of being in business school.

Are there particular points or things that you took from working in the not for profit sector which shaped you as a business person?

I learnt how to be very self-sufficient. I was in my early 20s, and I was given a region of Chicago to build relationships with corporations, law firms, consulting firms, to access volunteers, and then build relationships with school systems and administrators in the public school system in Chicago. Then my job was to marry the two things together. So you’re given this pretty big responsibility as a very young person and I remember the first time that I had to present to the CEO of the nonprofit I was working for what my plan was. I worked for weeks with no framework, but I was really diligent in strategically laying out priorities, and then a plan underneath that to accomplish what I needed to that year without a lot of help or tutelage. So I think I learnt that I loved that. I really liked the thinking in that and the strategy behind accomplishing a goal for the nonprofit or the business.

It’s interesting that a not-for-profit could be a real career start-up for someone like you.

It gave me a lot of room to wear a lot of hats. When you start shining in an environment that doesn’t have a lot of resources, you get a lot of opportunities. So I made my way to the headquarters after a few years, and then I made my way to [Washington] DC where I was part of this lobbying effort to get government funding. We raised millions of dollars for what we were doing so in a very short period of time, I got to wear a lot of hats and do a lot of things.

What is your favourite party story you’d like to share?

Okay, so I have to answer this honestly. I’ve answered everything, honestly so I’ve got to answer this one honestly. When I was young, about eight or nine, there was a contest on the radio. I, for whatever reason, got very inspired that I was going to win this contest. The contest was to recite the entire McDonald’s menu at the time within 30 seconds or something. Really rapid fire. So I practised and practised and practised until I could sing it in the right amount of time perfectly. And of course, my parents were like, “this is insanity”. Then you had to wait until they ran the contest on the radio and dial and dial and dial and try to get through and I never got through. But to this day, I can recite the McDonald’s menu from the mid-’80s by heart. And so sometimes at a party, you know, I might be known to recite the menu if I get a bit silly, and I’m definitely not gonna sing it here, I promise.

If we gave you 12 months off, you were unencumbered, you did not have to take your seven-year-old son with you (although you may if you choose), what would you do?

What a luxury. I would take my seven-year-old, and my partner. My son and I always talk about how you need to be strong, you need to be smart, and you need to be kind. And teaching him how to be those three things, even when it doesn’t feel like being those three things is, especially for a seven-year-old, very hard. I think pushing yourself out of your comfort zone travelling to places where you are uncomfortable, you’re learning new things, you’re seeing new people, new cultures, not quite understanding it, not knowing how to navigate it would be a massive lesson for all of us. There’d be so much growth in it, and we would actually be able to learn together as we went through that year, but him especially. I think the independence, and the strength and the smartness and the kindness that he would come out of it with would be well worth it.