(EP 29) Greg Weston (Chemical Industry Vet): The Secret to an Exit-Ready Mid-Sized Organisation

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Greg Weston joined his father’s struggling business when he returned from a year and a half traveling around the world after he finished his university course. It’s only through sheer hard work, determination, and also through forming a fantastic partnership that he’s turned this into a business that makes chemicals that go around Australia and around the world.

So the mining and agricultural sector and is an employer of over 30 employees in Sunshine, Victoria. Great. Thank you, John. So Greg, tell me a bit about your story. How did you get [00:01:00] into the business after you came back?

Well, as you said, it really was, well, it was very much an accident when I, traveling around the world was something I always wanted to do, and I really did have the, maybe the time of my life, I guess, was certainly the time of my life up until then.

But as we will remember, there was a recession in 1990 when I returned, a big recession. No jobs in the newspaper. I didn’t have any credibility really. I never wanted to employ someone who was probably more interested in travel than getting a job. I became my father’s second employee and I’d never cared in the world.

It’s, you know, it’s funny how I look back on that startup business. It was going downhill very quickly, didn’t worry me, but. I guess I have nothing to lose, but anyway, my father was trying to work out how to make a commodity wetting agent. Managed to do that in the lab, and coincidentally, someone gave us a tip off that a large mining company was about to close on a tender.

We weren’t even in the mining industry, we were in the textile industry at the time, and that’s where it was going to go. I spent half a day on the telephone, trying to find someone to talk to in this mining company. No one knew the [00:02:00] chemical name, I didn’t know any grain names. But anyway, we, I found someone to talk to, submitted a price, we hadn’t even made a batch yet in the plant.

The first, we won the tender on the basis of just a price. First batch, which was, wouldn’t have passed any quality standards today, went up to P& G and I went up there with it. Tried it out and it worked, so, and that doubled the business overnight and really started my career. But I guess even then, for a long time, it was still only a temporary job to me.

I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do. Not that I was really looking elsewhere, but I just sort of was tied up in the moment and just, yeah, kept on plugging away and gradually growing the business over the 90s.

Mm hmm. So. Over that sort of first sort of five to 10 years, you had a, your father had a factory that you were renting and manufacturing from, from fairly rudimentary equipment, I take it.

Certainly pretty rudimentary by today’s standards. Yeah. We didn’t have much in the way of a scrubbers and I was very naive about what the industry required. And we know, I wasn’t even aware that we had to have the factory [00:03:00] bundled for spill protection. Right. That’s how basic my knowledge was. So it was a period of a lot of learning, learning very much In the area though of operational things.

So how to be a chemical engineer instead of a mechanical engineer.

Yes. Cause you weren’t trained as a chemical engineer. Were you?

No, that’s right. Yeah. Falling back on my high school chemistry and really making that go as far as I could. And your dad was

a chemist. Was he by training?

He was an industrial chemist.

Um, he wasn’t as, um, some ways he probably could have told me a little bit more, I guess. Maybe he was a little bit worn out with being in business and not having seen it go so well, but nevertheless, we still worked as a team. And I guess I became the person who ran the company within a couple of years.

And very gradually we started to put some more people on to free me up to do other things. But yeah, I remained a very much an operational person for quite a long time and not really a business person.

And so were you, was he driving the sales or you were both driving the sales or really focused on the chemistry?

How did that work?

I guess my [00:04:00] father looked after the accounts more than anything else and some of the purchasing and gradually pulled back from the business because I think by then he might have been about 65 or thereabouts and probably wanted to retire. So he really pulled away from it. I looked after sales.

Not sure if I did that good a job of it, but nevertheless, we still grew. And I looked elsewhere in the mining industry. We picked up another very large customer, um, also in PNG and, uh, gradually got into the, um, aluminum processing industry as well. Did okay at expanding into the mining sector in particular.

Um, not very successful in the textile sector or the, the other area we’re traditionally in was, um, industrial lubricants. So I wasn’t able to expand that very successfully. I think it was a lack of chemistry skills and product development skills hindered me there.

So that sort of, as you’ve got through the nineties, the business was then on a, a reasonably firm financial footing.

Yes, probably talking about five years before we became financially stable. We moved from Gisborne in the country to Melbourne. [00:05:00] Probably only about two years after I joined, and that paid for itself in transport cost savings fairly quickly. I guess that was probably one early example where I did look at business management, so I was looking at the financial side reasonably carefully there.

So we moved into a rented factory in Melbourne. By the late nineties, we picked up a large contract, not a large contract in the mining industry, and that funded the purchase of a block of land and construction of a dedicated factory, uh, where we are now in Sunshine West. And, uh, I guess we grew from there, but it was, it was certainly a gradual change of lots of learning probably fairly early on, though, even though I say I was.

Very much an operational person and not a business management person. I nevertheless gradually came to the realization that I needed to acquire more skills in running a business that I didn’t have. And I remember, I don’t know exactly when, but I did a course on accounting, double entry accounting and, um, understanding how to read a balance sheet and a P and L statement.

And, and that was probably one of the, one of the most [00:06:00] important business management skills I picked up. Again, it was probably suited my personality and skills as a sort of a. Scientific mathematical type mind didn’t tell me much about how to manage people, for example. But nevertheless, I had this view that I needed to run a business a little bit more.

And yeah, so anyway, we, um, we had this, uh, had this brand new factory in Sunshine West, which was, which was another springboard for further growth.

And so you got to a point where the business was reasonably stable. You probably starting to exhaust your knowledge of chemistry. How did you then progress?

The first thing was, yes, I definitely knew I was really weak on product development. Probably fairly weak on sales as well. And I had this frustration in my mind that I knew I could make things. So I was, I knew enough engineering. And even with the products we did have, I was always, always thought there’d be new markets or customers.

I just didn’t know where they were. We did enter a business partnership with another chemist, PhD [00:07:00] qualified chemist who had particular expertise in one type of chemistry. That didn’t work out for cultural reasons. We were different people. We had different ethics, I guess, on running a business and that dissolved after a couple of years.

So he’s gone on to have his own company. And one thing I was fortunate enough to do was I took some advice. And when we did put him on, we formed a partnership in a separate company, not part of Tritec Chemical, but we had a separate company. In the event of splitting up, it was actually relatively easy to exit.

Um, uh, so anyway, that, that was good.

And that’s actually a really important. Well, and, and, you know, we were talking about this before, we’ve always got to think about the exits that might happen because they are going to happen. That’s right.

Yes. Yeah. That’s true. We, many years later, we actually had another partner in the late 2010s, we acquired a partner who we also didn’t, who didn’t really fit with the culture.

I don’t know if that company at the time and that was able to be excised with a good legal agreement that had been set up. But anyway, I did meet my business partner James Knight [00:08:00] in the roughly early 2000s in James someone who knew chemistry, uh, knew how to sell, knew how to develop markets. And was a person who really fit in with, with my values.

You know, I really liked the guy. He’s, you know, he’s very straightforward, very honest and, but an opposite personality to me, very much an extrovert and a much more of a people person. Technical skills, fantastic chemistry skills. And he’d left his large employer and he was working on his own in a company that was smaller than us at the time.

And we decided to work together. So we bought out his small company and he bought into our company and that was. Perhaps one of the most important, uh, steps I think we’ve ever made, maybe the most important step. And, uh, we grew somewhat from there.

Right. Okay. And so started in 2000 and.

I think it was roughly 2005, 2006.

Yeah. I should remember these.

So then there’s a, so then over a 20 year period, you guys formed a really close and successful partnership. So how did [00:09:00] that sort of get started? Once you got, once you immersed your businesses or acquired, then what happened?

James started with looking at our current customer list.

He approached a customer that I thought had stopped buying from us for whatever reason, I don’t know why, and picked up a massive amount of business straight away. That was an indication of my neglect of, um, or inability to just sell. I just wasn’t thorough enough in dealing with the customers. He was able to, and he found other customers as well.

One thing it was very good at though, was selling and this might sound like it’s ripping off customers, but getting better prices for our products.

I understood the value of what they are buying and what the value of the rest of the market was, was ripping, ripping off. It’s actually just a matter of, of actually something I see so many businesses do is.

Recognize what the value is that they’re actually sitting on. Yes. Yeah. As opposed to just purely understanding what it cost us and we have to make us a margin on it. Sure.

Yeah. There was [00:10:00] a gradual realization that it wasn’t just a matter of making chemicals and selling them for what on the face of it looked like a reasonable margin.

There was much more to it than that. I think what I gradually realized is that it wasn’t just that margin that we wanted to make, we also wanted to. professionalize the business somewhat more, particularly in its perception to the outside world. To do that, we needed more resources in the company, putting more effort into having very good customer service.

So having very good logistics support, good support on supplying material safety data sheets and any other documentation that the customer might require. One of the reasons I wasn’t successful early on was not being seen as, as credible by customers. And I think James added credibility to that. Well, it wasn’t just his, his personality, but it was what we provided to the customer.

I guess I’m going to give an example where it didn’t work out in the 90s. We still had a reasonable amount of business selling our carding lubricants for wool carding.

Yeah.

And we thought we were trying to develop other carding lubricants [00:11:00] for the fine merino wool. So we were initially into carpet yarns and then we thought we’d look at the bigger market in Australia for Rio carding.

Right.

And. We developed some products and we thought they were pretty good, but we could never really get past the front door. And it was because we were just small, it was just me, we didn’t have a reputation. And for the customer, there was a cost in actually trying our products. They would have to, um, you know, if it didn’t work, it would cost them thousands of dollars.

Yeah.

But even just the administrative cost of, organizational cost of running trials. So. That was completely unsuccessful. And that’s one of the things that made me realize that how you were seen by the market and your customers is absolutely critical to the way your business performs. And I think James was particularly instrumental in developing.

Well, I guess, you know, as the business evolved, you, um, you grew your range of products and you. And diversified your types of clients. Certainly. Um, and as a result of that, it [00:12:00] became a complex business from the point of view of the supply chain became more complex. You were importing, uh, raw materials as well as using locally sourced raw materials.

You were having to manufacture to much higher standards and to. Demonstrable standards and actually had to have proper quality assurance processes wrapped around it. And then you actually also getting, uh, the product to the customers. I mean, you are now selling products around the world as well as around Australia.

Is that right?

Not a huge amount around the world. We still had sales in Papua New Guinea and at various times we had sales in other. Uh, Asian countries, we had a fair bit of business in Hong Kong for a while. We’re a wedding agent. Right. I think that was ultimately textiles, but probably also a competition from Southeast Asia beat us there.

But anyway, that didn’t matter too much. More in more recent years, regional sales into the States. So that requires a fair bit of logistics organization.

So you were shipping and you were training and you were trucking.

Yeah. That’s right. Yeah. Three different types. And we use every mode of transport.

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Of monthly implementation. Our wait list is open now at criticalfueactions. com. au. So what were the next couple of major milestones in the development of a business set?

Yeah, well, that knowledge about how to run the chemical plant, even though it was a detailed operational thing and something that perhaps myself as the MD didn’t really need to do, I still did.

Someone had to do it. So the plant got better and our capabilities got better. And that did enable us to increase the range of products we could make and therefore sell. And [00:14:00] we decided to invest in, someone gave me some advice and said, you’ve got these 3, 000 litre vessels, why are you sticking with such a small size, with such a small size reactors?

It’s costing you a lot of labour and I thought to myself, well, realise, gentlemen, we’re only doing this out of habit. Um, and we decided to upscale everything quite a bit. Typical reactors now are 14, 000 to 25, 000. Sorry. That was one chain. Think about cost of production and don’t trivialize the labor cost of smaller batches because it is important.

But we also invested in capability to make some high temperature products. James and I were aware of some products that required high temperatures, so we needed a different type of heating and vacuum capability, which was new to us at the time. That particular reactor that was put in was never actually successful in making those particular chemical called esters at the time.

And it was sort of a little bit disappointing, but, or at the time it was, but the capability was recognized by a future customer when on a plant server. [00:15:00] And with that plant, we’re able to make a new product, which we’d never made before for a large Australian company. And. I think that was roughly about the time I met you, John, very roughly.

And that really gave the business a massive kickstart, another kickstart for a number of years. So sometimes it can be investing in capability, can pay a dividend, even if you’re not sure what it is at the time.

Yeah,

that reactor ended up doing something it wasn’t meant to do, but it did a great job anyway.

We also, probably a little bit later, we. Swapped out one of our reactors for a very large reactor, 25, 000 up from 12, 000. We did that on the promise of business from one of our large customers in the mining industry. And that never really took off, although it has taken off in more recent years. But that reactor again, wasn’t.

Employed in the mining industry, we found use for it in another industry as it turned out. So again, an example of investment in plant, uh, allowing us to grow the business.

Yeah. I think also around the time that we met, and I hope it wasn’t because of me. You also [00:16:00] lost a large, significant client. What did

you learn from that process?

That was the product I was just talking about that gave a kickstart. So maybe I’m slightly out of my timing, but we had a lot of business at the time for that client. We did know that it might have been temporary because we were essentially a pilot plant for them to put their own plant in. We did see it coming to some extent, but we realized we had to pivot.

We had to do something. And we thought about the ag sector. We know that there was chemistry in the ag sector that was reasonably close to what we could do. And we started to do some experimentation on making our methyl oleate. Um, one of the key and different ingredients in the ag sector. And we picked up business very quickly, actually.

We worked out how to make it. And I guess we, I’m not sure what hole in the market we filled, but I think there was a growing market anyway. And that really, I think we had a downturn of maybe a year or so or a little bit less and, and we launched into the ag sector fairly quickly and that’s been successful, very successful ever since.

Yeah. Well, it’s a cornerstone of the business now. Yeah, it is. Was fortuitous in [00:17:00] some ways that challenging your customers. Demand dropped so quickly, um, and in some ways forced you to look at new markets.

It did. There’s nothing like a bit of a pressure to really force you to look at your business very hard.

Well, it was certainly an uncomfortable period as I recall.

Yes. Yeah, it was. Yes.

Yeah. And, um, I guess that sort of comes to the, to the question around how has mentorship helped you over the course of this journey?

It’s a little bit like that said early on, the one thing I realized I needed to do was to acquire more skills and I’m going to make this a little bit of a I guess, but as we grew the company, we realized we needed to find people to do different things.

So we, uh, at one stage we’ll put on a chemist. That was James’s suggestion. Actually, I didn’t realize we needed a chemist, but James did, and you know, that became very useful. We put on someone much better at bookkeeping. So someone who really understood accounting and that, that was very important as well.

So we acquired skills that way. We also [00:18:00] acquired skills by outsourcing. I was, um, I was aware that some of our consultants weren’t very good. We had an accountant early on who really wasn’t very good at all. I really pressured my father back then. That was still in the 90s. I said, look, yeah, we’ve really got to get a better accountant for this.

Same with lawyer. We had, we didn’t really have a lawyer. I know we might’ve actually, but we did find a new lawyer who was very good. Not so much for litigation or anything like that, but more for, uh, helping us with agreements and that, and having a different sort of thinking. But it was in the area of skills of understanding myself and understanding management.

But I probably didn’t think enough about for a long time. And later on in finding a mentor, that’s when I realized that it’s one thing to acquire these readily defined skills, such as accounting or chemistry or engineering or welding. A big picture of how to run a company was not something I’ve really looked at.

And it’s probably one of the most important changes I’ve made in the business. And it saw an evolution in the way I ran the business. I think back then when I met you, John, and we didn’t really have much of an idea of where our future was, [00:19:00] we didn’t really have a strategic plan, for example, or much of a vision, getting that put together was very important and helped change the thinking of the company.

Yeah. So it’s a hard thing for me to define, um, what a mentor has done, because again, I’m very much an engineering person who just thinks of numbers. So it’s, there’s one call of soft skills there. They’re not the skills that are native to me, but nevertheless, very important.

Good. And so you got through the, uh, the 90s through really up until 2010.

And then how did the business then start to shift? Cause you were starting to do some pretty reasonable numbers.

Yes. Yeah.

But then over a course of five years, and then the next five years, you doubled the business and doubled the business.

Yeah. Yeah. It’s mostly been increasing penetration into the two biggest sectors.

We’re still in the agriculture sector and the mining sector. So business relationships with our largest distributor in the mining sector became very important. And in the ag [00:20:00] sector, both sectors really. Then an example, I think about the company that we distribute through into the mining sector. As our company grew, our relationship with that company grew much stronger so that it was not just a relationship between James and the purchaser, it was a relationship between our logistics, internal logistics, and their logistics, not just those people, other people as well, the account side.

It was a very close working relationship, or still is a very close working relationship, and that applies to all of our customers really. Something that I think is really important is when you get to know a customer. You want to get to know them at a deep level or as deep a level as possible. Um, another example would be one customer who’s relatively new to us in the, the agriculture sector, um, we’ve been very successful there because they see us as being able to provide solutions to them.

We, we’re making an adjunct for them. Nominally it is just blending of chemical and packing off. But as it turns out, we’re able to manufacture [00:21:00] most of the ingredients. We’re able to label the product. In such a way that to meet their quality requirements, we can package it and deliver it wherever they want.

So again, it’s a very close relationship and, um, I know that company has a lot of support for us.

Yeah. And so you’re actually helping them further up the value chain than just making an intermediate chemical.

That’s

right. Much further up. You know, producing effectively a finished good, which means that, um, You’re more useful to them and it reduces more handoffs, which makes their life easier and reduces their internal costs associated with it as well.

That’s right. I guess for many years we thought of ourselves as just being manufacturers, but I think it’s more and more that we, that’s a mistake to look at it that way, or was a mistake. We’re really very much service providers.

Yes. You

are. And. Actually, we’re about to see that come to, uh, we see that actually happen in a way because one of our key chemicals, we’re going to outsource and we’ll be just blending it [00:22:00] with other ingredients now.

And, um, it doesn’t matter, we, we might lose nominally with a little bit of margin, but the, but the most important thing is we make our margin more on the service we provide relative to some of our competitors.

Yeah. And that, and in doing that, you’re actually better servicing your customers. Yes. Makes them, makes you a higher value to them.

That’s right, yeah, which also builds resilience into the relationship.

Oh yes,

it definitely does. And because how would you describe the chemical market in Australia for your products at the moment, just describe it as being competitive or?

Oh, it’s reasonably competitive. Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, we have manufacturing competitors who, um, particularly in the early years really worried me.

I thought that, uh, there’s, well, uh, yeah, two in particular I saw as being really cutthroat, um, operators who could just, um, make something for very low margins. And strangely enough, we managed to hold on to business and I think it was because of, well, not think, I know it’s because of that service aspect we’re saying to be credible to our customers.

Yeah, the [00:23:00] business has grown and grown from really, uh, almost literally a, a garage operation to now, uh, a really, uh, substantial business, highly credible valued by its customers and respected by its customers, but also by your peers. Um, what have been some of the startups along the way and how have you handled them?

Well, I think, well, I’ve already mentioned it, but the biggest one was probably, um, spending a lot of effort trying to get into the textile industry. Yeah. It’s, uh, you know, I thought I understood the, um, the application of the product. It was a lubricant after all, a carding lubricant. And I, as a mechanical engineer, I understood that requirement very well.

I was maybe a little bit weak on the chemistry, but we still had a product that I thought should go very well. That’s probably one of the biggest ones.

And that was mainly because whilst you fell in love with the product, you didn’t understand the cost to the customer of change. That’s right. To be fair.

Cost to the customer of change. Um, the perception [00:24:00] of us by the customer as not being a textile industry supplier.

Yeah.

So that was one. Any other startups in particular? I guess we were very weak on the engineering earlier on. And, uh, you know, we could have done some things a lot better in terms of product quality, or even safety, we could have been have better systems in place.

I did fairly early on, actually, my father suggested we put on a, on a part time basis, an engineer that he had worked with in his days in the petrochemical industry in Australia. And this engineer. I think he’s about 10 years older than me, was a great mentor from an engineering perspective. And I learned a lot of engineering over, over a decade or two decades, actually from this guy.

Yeah. So that was, that was another type of mentor I didn’t mention, but they’re very important actually. It’s not so much a stuff up, but a gradual change in the company. I think James and I knew what sort of culture we wanted in the company. We are people who like to look after our staff, reward them as appropriate.

And we want them to be particularly in our industry. We [00:25:00] want people to be honest and straightforward. If they make a mistake, for example, we want to know about it so we can strive for better performance or not do it again.

Yeah.

I found that, um, look, certainly in the early days, it perhaps wasn’t so difficult because we’re a very small team or very much on the same

page,

but later on, as the company got bigger, I think there might’ve been, there’s probably a series on this, but you know, once you get to a certain size, people fall into different social groups.

Yes.

So getting that culture across the company was probably not my skill. And, uh, in later years, actually, um, not too many years ago, we, uh, appointed someone else to run the company. Operations manager became the. Ultimately became the CEO and she has actually been much better than me in instilling that culture and values across the company than I’ve ever

been.

Perhaps another point I should mention too is the importance of delegation. I think, I don’t think I’m someone who really holds on to things a huge amount, but I still did sometimes hold on to jobs that I shouldn’t or [00:26:00] should have let go and let someone else to do. Yeah, that’s, uh, that was probably a. I can’t think of any particular examples where it’s been a stuffer, but it’s probably held us back a little bit.

Sometimes

it’s an important learning, but you don’t often realize that until you’re actually of, of hand to tummy over, usually because of necessity as a . Yes. Yeah. Uh, structured desire and then you realize how much more successful and and effective you can be as a result of that. Yes. And also how. And you can stretch and grow and empower people and watch them develop as well, which, you know, it’s like a personal prodding.

Um, you know, I mean, that’s one of the roles that we have as leaders is to develop and grow people.

Right. But that point about delegation, I should mention, I’ve also seen as a weakness in other staff in our company too. We had an operations manager who had two very competent people working under him, but he would not let them, or he would not give them more responsibility.

And I think it was a mistake that [00:27:00] James and I made to hold on to, or to not force him to let go of some of his work. And he was someone who just did everything. And a lot of it was in his head

and

he had, and you know, he could have done it more efficiently if, if he’d let go of some of it. That’s, that was an important realization too, to look at how our staff are running there, the people who work on it.

Yeah. Yeah.

And, and it’s one of those things that as you grow a business from one to two to five to 10 to 20 to 50 people. As you said before, you do go through those cultural shifts because one to two, it’s basically two buddies working in a business. That’s right. Two to five, it’s, it’s two buddies and a couple of mates working in a business.

And it’s pretty easy for you at all to be on the same page. And if one of them isn’t, then they’ll probably actually exit by themselves or you’ll exit them with them. Yeah. And you’ll find someone who is [00:28:00] more on your same page. Yes. And so the culture is sort of revolving and, and, and morphing, but it has at its core something that’s pretty easy to enforce.

As you go from five to 10, all of a sudden you start to realize that, you know, when you have. 7, 8, 9, 10 direct reports, all of a sudden the lines of communication become, start to become more complex and a bit more fractured. And there’s a lot more work required to be communicating and stay on the same page.

All of a sudden when you go from 10 to 20, then it’s a big deal because all of a sudden you’ve probably got three teams of seven. Mm-hmm. With somebody who actually has to be taking the lead. Mm-hmm. And that’s not necessarily the CEO because even a 20, the CEO has probably still got a core role within the business.

Yeah. Um, but there are at least 2, 3, 4, 5 teams Yeah. That need to be communicated to, and, and. You know, [00:29:00] there’s a delegation of authority. There’s an empowerment of those leaders who manage their staff. Um, and it can be uncomfortable for a leader to actually step back from that and let their managers or their leaders lead.

Then of course, go past 20 to 50, then you’re in a completely different game because now we’ve actually got small business units within one business. You actually got low management and whilst it’s ideal. Uh, or it might seem ideal to have as flat a structure as possible. And by default, there’s going to be little clusters that are in different

areas.

I guess as a company gets bigger, each person can only know an increasingly smaller amount of what’s happening. So that’s another reason why communication has to improve one’s, uh, one’s own sphere of influence gets diminished as the company grows.

It does. And that actually is a time when it actually tests the strength of a culture.

And it’s actually [00:30:00] important to actually define what that culture is, you know, what is the tri tech way? How is it that we do things around it? You know, what do we care about? Well, we care about green chemistry. We care about the environment. We care about our staff. We care about doing the right things. We care about doing what we say we’re going to do, you know, those sorts of things.

All of those, I think are important parts of, of the way you’ve defined your culture. They are. And I think that’s something that you’ve consciously done over the last sort of five to eight years is, is to actually define the culture. Yes. Do you want to talk more

about that? We, um, we did. Well, it probably goes back to, I think, uh, pre COVID, we started to look at the company culture and, uh, come up with a set of values.

We didn’t do much with it for a little while, but after, I think after COVID, we revisited that and, uh, and started to put a lot more work into how do we get this culture across to the whole company? We employed another person to assist with that. And in our HR role, we’re working part time. She’s been great at holding workshop [00:31:00] sessions.

Well, the whole company, I think also our current CEO is taking that even further. She’s just very good at holding meetings with people and, uh, just developing a rapport across the whole company. Whereas I tend to do, perhaps I was probably too aligned at the engineering side of the company. That was my skill and didn’t really spend enough time with other people.

I think so. Yeah.

And I think that, um, you’re having a champion of the culture. Yeah. Um, Indeed, the CEO as champion of the culture has actually been an essential step forward for Tritec as you’ve gone forward.

I do remember a couple of missteps along the way with culture too. There have been the odd occasion where we found someone who just doesn’t really fit.

We had someone in the chemistry team who was just incredibly disruptive. In fact, we had two, and while they potentially had something to offer, they were so disruptive to the rest of the company that ultimately, well, they had to go. We had a, um, an operations manager in production. Was a great plan operator and a great micromanager who can really run [00:32:00] the plans very well, but he stifled everyone else’s initiative.

And that was an example of poor culture because he didn’t really let other people speak. Speak for themselves and didn’t, didn’t develop them. So that was relatively early on. That’s probably going back about 10

years.

So we’re certainly aware of the need to improve the culture to be a more open and inclusive type of

arrangement.

I think that’s a really important point because quite often we tolerate, sometimes tolerate for too long people whose behavior is at odds with the culture that we want.

Well, I, yes, we did. I tolerated that behavior for quite some time because. We were still getting goods made and made fairly well, I guess.

And, well, that was enough for me. In retrospect, what I should have done was spend more time consulting and talking and perhaps even asking for, um, development of KPIs, which I didn’t really do, but I sort of, you know, let that, by then I’d let the production side be a silo on its own and I wasn’t too involved with that.

I was [00:33:00] more involved in the engineering with building new plants, not so much how the production was being run. So that’s a learning, I guess, that as a CEO or a manager, one has to Really consult with one reports and find out what’s going on and get to the bottom of it issues or find out if there are any issues.

And certainly something that I’ve seen time and again, um, across my class is that hanging on to somebody who’s a high performer, but actually completely adults. So I remember, um, a business a few years ago, you know, the highest performing sales person by a substantial margin was really toxic. Fantastic in front of the client and abhorrent in front of his staff and the people around him.

And, you know, there was always that question around, well, we can’t afford to lose him, uh, because he’s 20 percent of our revenue. But by the same token, you know, we’re having to turn, we’re either having to, um, to [00:34:00] deal with. Uh, from staff or we’re having to actually change staff because they were leaving, you know, people don’t leave an organization, they leave their manager and they were, they were certainly doing that.

Um, and, uh, in that particular case, um, through a process of counseling, we got him to really understand that there was, that his behavior was not going to be tolerated and that wasn’t acceptable. Um, and to his credit. And this is highly unusual. He actually was able to actually modify his behavior and actually learned to become more effective as a team player.

On the other hand, what typically happens is, you know, we, we tolerate someone, um, by tolerating their behavior, we’re effectively endorsing it. You know, there’s a, there’s a fantastic saying, that which we overlook is what we accept. And so people sort of say that, you know, if their bad behavior is being accepted, right, it.

Uh, is being [00:35:00] overlooked for then it must be, be acceptable. And so typically it’s, uh, there is a point where we just have to draw a line, either start a performance management process or exit that person so that the organization can move on. And, and typically when they speak, we’ll move on, which is usually the outcome of performance management.

Because I can’t change, but it’s been pretty well locked in stone in that personality that the immediate response from their team members, I’ve seen it so many times, the immediate time response from their team members is what took you so long. Yes. We’ve been carrying this person or tolerating this for.

Months, years, usually it’s years and it’s only then that you start to see how much damage and strain when putting on the business and the teams within it because the business is just going. Yeah. And so, um, I tend to be when my clients start to get niggles about cultural issues, [00:36:00] I’m more inclined to push for them to act fast because I know they’ll be resistant.

Because it’s uncomfortable having it, these sorts of uncomfortable. Yeah, there is,

there is a bit of fear

and fear of also fear of change. Will there be a, will there be a negative impact on the business? Well, often there is a, a difficult period. You’ve got to go and find someone to replace him. You can find someone, you could bed them in.

Yes. It’ll take you six months, but you’re better off starting that six months now and waiting 12 months and then having to replace two of their staff. Yes. Um, or have to pick up the bleachers. Yeah. So I guess it’s such an important one.

Yeah. I guess as the company grows, some, it becomes harder for a senior manager to actually see what’s happening all throughout the company or see the, see how people behave in that.

Yeah, certainly there were some behaviors done by one or two people at the operations level that actually didn’t see for a while. I was too far removed from us, but that’s, I guess that highlights the need to have good managers who really can [00:37:00] see that and question and find out what’s happening wasn’t really my strength.

Yeah. But probably one of the most important things that I see in leaders is self awareness and being able to understand what are the things that they excel at that they find effortless and other people find difficult, but also to realize what it is that they don’t do well. And, and take steps, not necessarily to correct their own, uh, behavior, but to actually find people that can actually compensate for it or be their counter.

Yes. You know, and you found you to recognize that, you know, you were an excellent engineer, but you didn’t have great chemical knowledge and you weren’t a great salesperson. And so finding James actually was really strong in those things, but actually not particularly good in, in engineering or operations management, and that’s not discredited to him, but that’s actually not what was, uh, required for what’s [00:38:00] turned out to be a really beautiful partnership where you both brought something really, um, important to the process, different personalities, different skill sets.

And from what I’ve observed, a really deep mutual respect, um, you know, cause you, you work very effectively as a team.

We have, yes. We’ve worked extremely well over, over a long time now.

Yeah. Are you looking to pinpoint the areas that will make the biggest impact on your business? Check out the organization performance and value diagnostic.

This powerful tool lets you evaluate your business on multiple facets and provides email reminders to keep you on track. Head over to criticalfueactions. com. au And get started now. So can you think of any game changes that have really changed your business for the better?

Well, I guess having James on board was a particularly big game changer, but it was, it was a gradual awareness that I lacked a lot of skills and needed to bring in [00:39:00] other skills, probably the single biggest.

Now I look at one of our competitors, I said, I’ve got, we’ve got a couple of low cost competitors. I know one of them, the manager there is still working, running the plant in many cases. And, uh, that was an extreme example of not letting go and not delegating. So having an awareness of skills and developing that awareness of skills or lack of skills and knowing the lack of skills is important as knowing what you are skillful at.

That’s been a game changer and coming on from that, being able to develop a strategy and culture, largely with the help of you, that and others that we’ve employed along the way, they have been game changers as well.

So tell me about the role of vision and strategy over the last 10 or 15 years, how’s that helped you?

Vision has been important in aligning, particularly the, well, aligning everybody in the cabinet to make sure we’re all on the same page. Particularly [00:40:00] the, I guess, the people. In the office, the finance staff, sales staff, everyone really, how can I better put that? We have a vision to grow the company by a certain percentage per year.

It means we have to put a fair bit of effort into developing new products, new markets. So there is a target to, there is a target to strive for the sales team. That’s part of it. Part of that vision is also to maintain a good culture where people can, people feel safe and secure. Particularly psychologically safe.

So they are willing to be part of a team. Without that. People wouldn’t be, I guess, as interested in the job and having that dedication to the work and to the company is what can only come from a shared vision. So it has been important to get that vision and the message of that across the whole team.

Certainly the senior management team is well aware of the strategy we have for growing the company further. Um, we, uh, we know, uh, what areas we need to work on. For example, we have an, on our job description. [00:41:00] Uh, diagram, uh, general positions. There are a couple of vacancies there. Yeah. Yeah. We actually know there’s a couple of vacancies there, which need to be filled.

So that’s, that would only come about by knowing something about our strategy and vision for the future and other people are aware of that. I know that there will be other people who will be. Part of the team in the future.

Yeah. And how has the process of developing the strategy been helpful for you?

The process of developing the strategy, I guess it’s helped us or helped me think about the future and take my mind away from the day to day matters. It makes me think about things we have to do, not today, but the things we have to do tomorrow, next year. So it’s helped with some decision making.

Where do you

see the business going from here?

I can see us being seen more and more as a supplier of chemicals and services to the mining and ag sectors in particular. I see us as being more embedded with the larger companies and expanding [00:42:00] into further companies. Um, we do have some very good prospects in both the mining and ag sectors at the moment.

And, uh, of course I realized that. We don’t always expect 100 percent of those to come off, but if a couple of those come off, then the business will still continue to grow. Um, and it’s doing so with me not being involved in the company anymore directly. I just have a board role now. I have a, an indirect influence.

So I see that growing under the stewardship of our, uh, CEO. So there is, um, the growth we’ve had over the last 30 years, I see it as continuing at a, probably even an accelerated rate for the next five years. Well,

I guess that’s sort of points to the ultimate form delegation where you’ve now stepped out of the instrument database, to speak for you.

And the, the reigns directly over to see, uh, and you, you have got both freedom of time and mind space pursue your next career, but also look at this [00:43:00] very much as an investment, um, as opposed to your day to day job.

That’s right. Yes.

How’s that transition been?

It’s been good, I guess when I retired, I was, I was not sure how I would go with letting go because I had a lot of, I still had control of the engineering side of the company and I sometimes think to myself, I get to see some of the, uh, the work that’s happening and occasionally I want to have some input and yeah, I do have to, um, not quite bite my tongue, but just be careful, like not to get too involved because I know the staff there are doing a great job.

Sometimes I might do things a little bit differently, but it doesn’t really matter. I have been able to just look at the, to step back from all that detail and just look at the high level result of how the company is going. I think that’s worked pretty well with that relationship between myself and the CEO where I’ll sometimes ask detailed questions more than I need to, but generally speaking, um, I’ve been happy with asking her higher level questions.

And I think she has responded very well to that. So it’s actually been a pretty good relationship, that [00:44:00] director to CEO relationship. Yeah. But it is a big, it is a big change to make because, you know, if I think about my career, I was, you know, I even learned how to weld, for example, and, uh, some other trade skills, plumbing, for example, and all that detail.

And now I’ve just had to let go and think about the big picture of the way a company runs.

Yeah.

Perhaps another bit of training I did that I should mention is, and I have to leverage on this a little bit more, but I did do the, um, AICD director’s course, which, um, is fantastic, I think, for teaching one about, um, the roles of a director.

And, um, how to operate a company from that, um, high level perspective. Uh, and I don’t think that can be, um, underrated for its importance.

Well, I think understanding the, the role of governor or an investor shareholder director’s perspective is an essential skill. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Just as I think having our CEOs appropriately skilled to.

Relate to, to brief the [00:45:00] directors is also an essential skill. So, you know, I think they’re definitely really important things. I think there’s probably two things that sort of come to mind from that. One is both Fiona and James went through the CEO masterclass. Do you have a sense as to what the organization got out of them having gone through that process?

I think a clearer picture of, um, some of the details about how we’re going to grow. Perhaps one that’s come out of it is the realization that James is someone who hasn’t let go of quite as much as he should have in his role. We recognize that he is extremely good at market development, or market development in particular, with a bit of chemistry, but he has needed to let go of the detail side of chemistry for a long time.

And that I think has been holding him back. And I think that’s actually been probably, um, that realization has partly come about because of that, um, the work that Fiona and James had done on strategy and that could be, that actually could be a very major change for the company to free [00:46:00] James up to be, to do exactly what he is particularly good at and to rid him of the detail stuff that someone else did.

Yep. I think you’re right. The other thing that comes to mind is this concept I often talk about, which is being exit ready. You know, I, I often look at, um, people who, um, they go to put their house on the market, they recarpet. They tidy up the garden, uh, they do a paint, they might do a bathroom renovation, get a spick and span, take out 20 years of stuff that’s been actually hanging around the house to declutter it, uh, and make it as inviting as possible for sale day.

And I’m certain, as was the case with me, that, that, you know, when they look at their house when it’s, Getting ready for open, especially when I look at it and I think fantastic house, we should stay here. And I think about that as in parallel to businesses about getting an exit ready, which is very much around, okay, well, how do we prepare this business?

As [00:47:00] if it was for sale, what do we need to do from an operations perspective, a financial performance perspective from having the right people in our leadership team in, in place. How do we make sure that we’ve secured our customers and good supply chain so that the business is performing as well as it can over a three year period.

When you sell a business, you have to have a three year financial record. And so I like to challenge my to start that three year journey of growth so that. They have a choice as to whether or not they choose to sell or whether they choose to actually be an investor in their business, because it’s getting great returns.

How has exit ready been important for you?

I think you might’ve mentioned that concept being exit ready is one way to run a company going back, you know, 12 years or more, that is a concept for running a company. And I think [00:48:00] also perhaps our accountant who was an advisor at one stage. Mentioned the same thing.

You can look at a company or you can run a company as if you are prepared to sell at any time. I thought I’d understood at the time and thought it was just having the company running as good as it possibly could, you know, getting, doing the best one can with sales, new products coming on, development, but it’s only relatively recently I realized there’s much more to it than that.

And the single most important thing I think is to make sure that the, the, the team and the company is exit ready. So if you are still working as an owner in the company and you sell the company, what happens then? What’s a buyer going to think of the company if you’re still working there? It might still work, but you know, one’s going to have a different motivation if one becomes an employee versus an investor, or perhaps a better way to look at it as an owner of the company.

And if I want to be exit ready, I’ve got to make sure I’m replaceable or have myself replaced. Or perhaps the only other way of my work would [00:49:00] be to maybe maintain a little bit of equity or main, or have a commitment to stay on for some time, but the,

the

buyer has to be able to, any potential buyer has to look at the company and see that there are no personnel risks, including the owners.

Yeah, you’re absolutely right. If we were going back in time and talking to Greg, as he was just starting out. What advice would you give young Greeks all those years ago, knowing what you know now?

Yeah, that’s a, that’s a big question. Look, the cliche answer, and I realize the cliche answer is work on the business, not in the business, but I’ll mention it because I’m probably very similar to a lot of people in that I got into business because I had skills.

Maybe not directly related, but close enough to what the business does. So one might have skills in, say, retailing, for example, and knows how to sell, operate a shop front. But in most, in the case of most businesses, that [00:50:00] skill you have for the operational side is not a skill in running a business. So I think from a very early stage, one has to learn about, about what a business

is.

And it’s partly about acquiring new skills oneself, but it’s also about finding out where you can get those skills or where you can delegate to get those skills. That’s the most important one I learned from an early stage was understanding financial management. I know that’s a detail, but it is so critical to a business that I got a huge amount out of that.

I think understanding and perhaps the other most critical one too is understanding safety in a business. And even in a non manufacturing business, that’s important because you have to Look after the welfare of your staff from a, it comes down to culture, partly, but it comes down to all other aspects of psychological safety.

So be very aware of how people are treating one another and how you treat them. They would be probably the most important things I could say, um, uh, work on the business. [00:51:00]

And finally, I guess, yeah, finally, Greg, if you’re speaking to a CEO. That’s looking to develop their business based on your experiences, what would be the #CriticalFewActions™ that they should start tomorrow if they did nothing else?

I think probably, um, ask yourself, do you have the best people in their various roles in the company? That is really important. And perhaps that’s something I could have mentioned earlier in this interview. It’s probably one thing we did quite well, reasonably early on was to find very good people. Might even mean changing the role of people in the company as well.

So that’s absolutely critical, having good people. I think also look, try to get a view about how your customers and how the market looks at you

or looks

at your company. That’s probably, it sounds obvious, but I think it’s really important. Spend some time examining that. And I think particularly as a company gets bigger, look at the vision and strategy for the company and, and get an understanding of where you’re going.

And [00:52:00] if you don’t do that, then I think growth is stifled and you just end up just drifting. So that’s, that’s three things that I think are fairly critical. I mean, there are lots of others, I guess, but they come to mind.

Great. That’s fantastic. Greg, thank you so much for sharing your story, your insights, and the learnings that you’ve had over the last 30 years, as you’ve developed this business from really a backyard operation to something that is internationally recognized.

Um, and an important part of the Australian manufacturing, mining and agricultural, uh, landscape.

Well, as always, John, it’s been really nice to talk to you and my pleasure and, and, uh, your advice has been fantastic all the way, so thank you.

Thank you.

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