Coming Home: Adapting Skills to a New Market
Andrew Poole is a self-described “gypsy”, having worked in New Zealand, Australia, South-East Asia, and the United States; a career spent primarily with Nike, in roles including Sales Director, General Manager and Managing Director.
For a keen sports enthusiast, Andrew said “there wasn’t a better place to go to work. A brand focused on bringing innovation and inspiration to every athlete – it certainly gave purpose to the work and my role in the team”.
However, in 2020 while living in the United States, he decided the time was right to move the family home to Melbourne, eventually landing a job with the private equity-backed firm, Quad Lock.
We asked Andrew about his experience transitioning from a global brand to leading a small Australian owned company on a rapid transformational path.
Q. How did you find coming back to Australia?
We left the United States to return home to Melbourne at the end of 2020. Our son was headed to secondary school in 2021, and there was significant uncertainty with COVID. It felt like the time was right to return home. While we had all the logistics taken care off, I had no idea of what I was going to do once I got back to Melbourne. For the first time in my professional life, I had no connection to a corporate entity. It was stressful, but also oddly liberating at the same time.
I was fortunate to secure a role quickly, accepting a position with an online retailer. While I recognised this wouldn’t be my forever role, I viewed it as a great learning experience. I learned a great deal about online commerce and leading a team of relatively young people, all eager to build a career in fashion.
That role provided significant clarity that my passion really sat in a space where I was accountable for building and executing strategies that connected brands and consumers; building teams of purpose driven individuals who were equally excited about the opportunity, and their won potential. I often categorise my role into four very distinct quadrants: People, Culture, Strategy and Execution. In that order, if you get it right, you can’t help but be successful, and you can have some fun doing it along the way too.
So, one Monday, late in the afternoon, I was sitting at my desk in the study, on the tail end of another lock-down period, and I had a call from Adrian Belle from Allura Partners. A friend had suggested my name for the role of Chief Executive Officer at Quad Lock.
Following a conversation with Adrian, I was introduced to Chris Peters and Rob Ward; the company founders. I walked into their office at 5.15pm on a Thursday afternoon, and I left at 8pm. And wow! I was so excited by the conversation, how they thought about their brand, their focus on the enthusiast, a culture they were passionate about. It felt like an amazing fit, and an exciting opportunity. I often tell people, working at Quad Lock, is how I imagine the early days at Nike.
Q. What was it that excited you?
Rob and Chris seemed to have recognised they’d reached a point where they needed assistance. They also knew what they didn’t want to do as founders. That was really refreshing.
I had a lot of experience working with a brand, thinking about marketplaces, how you scale business in an appropriate manner, delivering the right product to the right consumers in the right way. What made me a little nervous was that I had no experience in private equity. But it was a young business with high energy; and it was a growth opportunity. Most importantly, I could see these were two guys I could work with quite easily.
Q. How did you prepare yourself for the world of private equity?
I had very little connection to the world of private equity. I leaned on my network heavily during the selection process to ensure I understood what they would be looking for, and to ensure I accurately represented the value I could bring to the role.
In the three months before I physically started in the role, I met with the Quad Lock leadership team – either together or individually – every Tuesday for breakfast, and I met with Rob once a week.
Upon commencing in the role, I spent time meeting with every person in the team, hearing their stories about their experience at Quad Lock, the things they enjoyed, and the things they found challenging. That enabled me to start building my own framework for leadership, and that was hugely beneficial. It also helped me to start piecing together a map of what our strategy could look like.
The team is vital in this equation, and I still meet with every new employee we onboard, just to introduce myself and share a little bit about the vision for Quad Lock, where the business is at, and the importance of being culturally additive.
Q. Who did you lean on for support in the early days?
In my first six months I had regular meetings with a leadership development coach who I’d known when I was at Nike – I met with him every second week for breakfast to talk through anything I was finding to be a challenge. I would share my approach and Leigh was helpful in sharing some thoughts on stretching my perspective and finding a solution.
Having the endorsement of both founders also made my transition into the business a lot easier. I continue to lean on them – they remain culturally important to the business, and they remain great advocates of making change a reality.
Q. Having delivered the three-year strategic plan for growth, what challenges have you encountered in the implementation?
We’ve made significant progress, embedding a strategy, evolving teams, restructuring roles, and employing an additional 40 people. We've rolled out an ERP implementation, delivered a new supply planning tool, and reset our global third party logistics providers. That’s a great deal of change in 18 months. To deliver that you must encourage people to let go of legacy thinking. That requires work; but the founders have played an important role in this area of change. First and foremost, they are entrepreneurs. If you don’t disrupt yourself, your competition will be the disrupter.
Q. What have you realised about building a team?
I’ve always subscribed to the philosophy that it's important to hire people who are smarter than you. Finding people who aren't necessarily a cultural fit but are going to be culturally additive is an area that also brings dimension to a business.
There’s no point employing people who are simply your reflection. We need to bring people into the organisation that will stretch the way we think, who will challenge us, who will ask questions of why we are doing things in certain ways. And that goes back to diversity. Diversity of thought, diversity of background, diversity of thinking.
As a leader, my job is to challenge people and to have them think differently. It’s also to ensure we deliver on the promises we’ve made – our strategic plan. And, it’s to make sure the organisation I leave at some point, is in better shape than when I arrived. So that notion of stewardship around the people, the brand, the culture, and the strategy, is as important as making sure you land that FY25 budget number.
Q. How would you advise someone who is considering moving into private equity?
The transition was more difficult than I expected, particularly because I’d come from working in a large organisation overseas. Reflecting on that time, I think people looked at me a little oddly; they thought I might be a bit difficult to deal with because I hadn’t been in Australia for a while.
But the value of working in a large organisation is that you build a transferable skillset around leadership and people, around strategy development and implementation.
I would encourage anyone returning from overseas, or simply looking to transfer industries, to ensure they have a robust network to lean on. Make sure you’ve got a breadth of people to support you. Speak with key influencers like Allura Partners who have a strong connection in the private equity space. But don’t discount your own network or the skillset you’ve built over time. There is value that you just need to leverage.