Transcripts

The Reinventor's Mindset - Episode 2
Ashton Jones in conversation with Gareth Jones Founder of Revolve Partners

Ashton: Welcome to the Reinventor's Mindset, insights about transformation with leaders who've done it from the inside. I'm Ashton Jones and I'm writing Bold Water, a book about transformation, transforming yourself, transforming your organisation and teaching this skill to others. The people I work with and talk to here aren't theorists. They're living transformation from the arena and they know what it takes. Today I'm speaking with Gareth Jones, founder of Revolve Partners. Good morning, Gareth. How are you doing?

Gareth: Good morning Ashton, I'm very well, thank you.

Ashton: Gareth and I go back a few years. He ran a succession planning and talent mapping exercise for me and my leadership team when I was at TAL, and it really shaped how I've thought about teams ever since. He's also an excellent golfer, which has absolutely nothing to do with transformation, but I felt worth mentioning it upfront. Let's dive in.

So Gareth, I thought just to kick off, I'd love to hear a little bit more about Revolve Partners, the thinking behind the company and also a little bit about you and your co-founders, Dean and Paris.

Gareth: Very excited to be here, Ashton. Thank you so much for inviting me onto this, it sounds like a great project you're working on.

Revolve Partners, we're an executive succession planning business at heart. We do a lot of other things that sit around talent, but at the heart of what we do, we work with clients from ASX listed businesses all the way down to startups to help them identify and look at talent as it relates to their business and their future goals.

We've been going for just under six months now, but I would say we're probably the oldest startup in the country. We've pretty much been going for 10 years, but in different guises. We started the business as Evolve Intelligence almost 10 years ago. Then we got acquired by Mercer, and then we spun out of that business six months ago as a divestment with a solid partnership with Mercer in the external world.

It's a really exciting journey that we're on and we've gone through different iterations of what we do, but the essence of the business has stayed true over those 10 years. And it's been a great journey, we've got some really exciting things ahead.

My partners, we've got two. Paris Gort runs the delivery side of our business, I've worked with Paris for about eight years. Dean Tullock is the other partner, there are three of us. I've known him for 20 years, he used to be a client of mine. It's just a strange serendipity I suppose about how people come back to the people that they know and the people that they like and the people that they trust. I'm very lucky to be working with those two as partners to drive the business forward.

Ashton: I love that concept of serendipity and the role that it actually plays in your career. I've found that as well myself, a few moments where people I encountered early in my career I then found myself working with later on. It's quite a philosophical thing when you have those sorts of experiences.

Gareth: Personally in my career, I know who I like straight away. I don't know whether it's a skill or sometimes a curse. I feel I can absolutely pick my type of person in the first five minutes of meeting them, whether that's personal life or business life. You were the perfect example when we met all those years ago in Adelaide. Within the first five minutes, it was very, very obvious that we would get on. And then subsequently we've worked together.

It's the same with Dean, he was a client before we became friends. We always knew, we always talked about it over 20 years, that we would work together. And we have done, so it's great.

Ashton: I say a lot to younger people who are starting out their career in Australia, Australia is a very small place, and wealth management and banking and finance is smaller than you think. So you need to really be careful about how you treat other people and manage your relationships well.

As I got more senior in my career, I've often thought about why I've made the decisions I've made to move between different organisations. And usually it comes back to being able to learn from someone senior, being able to do interesting work and liking the people that you were going to work with. It can be simpler than you think sometimes to make career decisions.

Gareth: 100% absolutely. I was talking to somebody yesterday about this, almost the exact same topic. What makes you tick and what makes you successful, it's just working with the right people that you trust and the people you like. If you don't start with those two foundations, then nothing is going to work.

Ashton: I'm very curious about the Mercer chapter, I'm going to come back to that in a moment. But before I do, I actually wanted to take you back a little bit and ask you about your childhood. What did you learn growing up in Baseleg in Wales?

Gareth: Baseleg School, I loved school. I absolutely loved school and I'm a sports nut. I'll watch any sport that's on TV. It was a very big sports school. I was always looking out the window at any class that I was in, looking at whatever sport was going on, wishing I was out there and not in the classroom.

That's sort of been a theme for all my life, I'm always looking for something that really draws me in. Back in those days, it was just sport. So I always had a curious mind. I grew up not necessarily focusing on the academics really. I did well at school, but I didn't do as well as I could have done. I didn't apply myself back then like I'm applying myself now, later on in my life.

I do look back on it sometimes and think, should I have really knuckled down and put myself out there from an academic and concentration perspective more than I did? But then I look back and go, no, I don't think that at all, because I loved my childhood. I had the best childhood, had a great family, great friends and really enjoyed school. So there are always decisions and points you make in life, and I made that decision a long time ago that I was going to enjoy myself and at the time do just enough to get by.

As I've got older, my focus and concentration, as you go through family and children and career and responsibilities, that obviously changes. But I still have that streak of fun through me in everything I do.

Ashton: No regrets. And if I ask you to think about the time between Baseleg and now, what do you think people misunderstand about how you got here?

Gareth: People say to me all the time: you're lucky, you've been very lucky. And I accept that to a point. Everyone has to be lucky in life. The best people in the world, the best business leaders, the best sportsmen are lucky. There's a great quote by Gary Player, the golfer. Someone said to him one day, he hit a one iron, which is one of the hardest golf clubs to hit, he hit it at a US Open, 200 yards to about two feet from the pin. And someone said, that was a lucky shot. And he turned around and said: the more I practice, the luckier I get.

And it's true. I have been lucky, but I've also worked at it, worked at my relationships, worked at things in the background that haven't always been obvious to other people. I do it my way and it works for me. What didn't work for me and what doesn't work for me is sitting down in front of a computer for three or four hours solidly concentrating. I have a different way of being successful and learning, and that's by talking to people and being a bit more flexible.

I find what works for me, and it works. Sometimes that can come across as lucky. But people on the inside, my friends and the people I work with very regularly, know it's not. But people on the outside think it is, and it's 100% not.

Ashton: It's really interesting. A few years back I was on a career panel and got asked a question from the audience about the most important ingredients for success looking back on my career. And I actually said luck had been an ingredient, one of the sources of luck for me was that I've had really great bosses at every single point in my career.

I really do believe in this concept that you put yourself in new and interesting situations and luck will find you. So it is a bit of both, you need to have the mindset to have those opportunities present themselves. There's a lot of things behind the scenes that people never see before the luck comes your way.

Gareth: When those lucky moments happen, you've got to be skilled enough to take them. If you're not skilled enough, you don't have the capability to, first of all, recognise it's a piece of luck, and then capitalise on it. If you can't do that, then it's not luck, it's just something that's happened that's passed you by. Luck comes across people's desk or in people's lives almost every day in some form. You'll miss a lot of them, but the ones that you grab, that's where the skill lies.

Ashton: Turning to the journey you had with Revolve, you built a business, Mercer acquired it and now you've spun it back out. I'm just curious what you learnt through that journey and what you might have had to let the previous owner change about the business, and what you really wanted to stay true to throughout that ownership journey.

Gareth: What did I learn about the business? I learned that I'm a lot more capable than I thought I would be in terms of being uncomfortable with change. The whole Evolve business prior to the acquisition was constant change, something that started from nothing really. We were all startup mentality. We all didn't have a clue what we were doing. Didn't even know what accounting system to use. Where do we buy our computer? What's the cheapest computer we can buy? Do we really need to spend all this money on LinkedIn? Can we just share one licence between 10 of us to save some money?

So that was probably the biggest thing I learned, that you have to let go of some things and take a bit of a punt on some things because in order to grow, you have to let go of control to other people that you're working with. That's where the trust comes in. But you've also got to invest, carefully invest. You can't just throw money against the wall. I learned a lot about myself in that respect. I'm actually very proud of myself because I didn't think I would have that business mindset. I thought I was probably a bit too fun-focused rather than business-focused. But I learned that I'm actually a lot more business focused than I thought.

We got acquired by Mercer after a few years of running Evolve, a lot quicker than we ever thought we would get acquired, which was a really interesting process. And it was really tough. We had a good 12-month period where they were doing their due diligence, and we were running really hard to try and hit the numbers they were requiring for the acquisition to go through. That put a lot of pressure on our business and on the relationships within the business, because we were really pushing our team hard and pushing each other really hard. Sometimes there were times when it was stretched so far that little things broke and you had to come back together and mend them.

It was a real test of our relationship and the strength of the business going through that. We got through it. Then we went into the Mercer world. Mercer are an incredibly impressive business, obviously global, based out of New York, and they are great and successful for a reason. They're very considered as a business. Very methodical in how they work through every region. They have to be because of the control they need in all parts of the world.

What we realised over the six or seven years we were in that business was it's really hard for them to integrate a business like ours that's a bit more entrepreneurial. Because we can't consistently predict revenue over 12 months, 24 months. Our business is lumpy, depending on clients bringing us pieces of work just before Christmas and wanting to deliver by end of January, or wanting a Christmas break and not doing any work. So we would have revenue of 10 times X in July and one times X in August. And Mercer couldn't get their heads around it.

I think what happened was the investment we were originally expecting from Mercer didn't quite materialise in the way we'd hoped. It became a point where we would be much more effective as a business again on our own, with an affiliate partnership rather than full integration. And to Mercer's credit, they recognised that too, which is why we were able to spin out with a good partnership in place. It was done in a really good way and I give Mercer full credit for recognising that and maintaining the positive energy that we brought to the business.

Ashton: You spoke a little about the nature of business cycles being quite lumpy. In the context of change and transformation, one thing I've always observed is you have these periods where it feels like not much is happening, and then all of a sudden momentum builds. You find the current, and it unlocks quite a lot of velocity. I was interested in your reflection on working with clients going through people change, through transformation, moments where a client has been doing the hard yards and then something really unlocks things and allows momentum to flow.

Gareth: In our game, sometimes it can be really frustrating. You talk to a client about a big transformation project and you get really excited, you think, we're going to get involved in this, it's going to be 12 months, 18 months of work, we can help them reshape their business. And then nothing for three months.

But what I've learned over the years is that nothing is not nothing, it's just that they are either letting things settle to see how things land, or they're getting their ducks lined up. Lots of conversations are happening with the business units, with their board, with their shareholders, about what is best for their business. You've just got to be patient.

What we've found in our world is that providing as much context from the external world that they don't have visibility of can help them make decisions internally. We do a lot of work with clients to talk about other organisations that have done something similar, happy to connect, to talk about that as a process, but also connect the people who actually ran that transformation with our clients. Just have a coffee. No structured agenda. Understand what went really well, but more importantly, what went really badly and what avenues they went down that you don't need to go down. Just close those doors.

We've got a client in the health insurance business and a really good banking client going through major transformation, and they don't know what they don't know. When they understand how others have gone down different journeys, if you speak to the person that was either leading it or instrumental in making it successful, do that early. Have that conversation early. You can probably save so much time in your own transformation by understanding what the hurdles are going to be upfront.

Ashton: Early on in the transformation journey you need to build a coalition of the willing. I was speaking to a CEO last week, Fiona McGregor, who recently took over as CEO at TAL, and she spoke about something she did earlier in her career in an innovation role, which was to use external proof points for the change she was looking to drive internally. A similar strategy to what you describe, getting key stakeholders to have informal coffees or meetings with people who have been in similar situations and come out the other side better for it. It gives a kind of social validation to things that are really hard early on.

Gareth: Take the golf analogy, do you think Tiger Woods, when he was starting off, didn't talk to Jack Nicklaus about the pressures Jack felt when he was the best golfer of all time? Not just how to win a tournament, but how to handle the noise after winning. When you become successful, when you become the biggest thing in golf, he's going to talk to the person who's been there and done it.

Rory McIlroy is the same thing. He talks to Tiger Woods all the time. Do you think he doesn't talk to Tiger about how to handle it? They talk all the time. And that's just him transforming how he behaves in front of the camera, with his sponsors, with the fans. There's no reason why that should be any different in a business context.

Ashton: Staying with the analogy for a moment, they say golf is one of the biggest mental sports, it's often a battle with yourself more than anything else. And it makes me think about the fact that in business, I actually don't think we talk enough about the mental game. You actually need to manage your energy flow, be in touch with yourself and think about how you're showing up frequently to be your best in a work context. We often talk about the task, probably too much about the task, and not enough about what's going on within yourself, how you're showing up, how you do the work in a way that builds followership. The mental game of work is as important as the tasks of work.

Gareth: Absolutely. Someone asked me yesterday what I expect from my team in terms of hours. I don't expect anything from them really, I expect them to do their best when they're in work. I don't expect them to be in at eight in the morning and leave at six at night. If they come in at 10 o'clock and leave at four, I'm cool with that, as long as those hours are solid quality. Outside of that, look after yourself. Look after your health, look after your mind, look after your family.

Once all those building blocks of your personal life are stable and positive and your energy is up because you're healthy, you've moved your body every day, you've risen with purpose, if you've got those things set up as building blocks, those six hours could be the biggest and most impressive six hours of the day. Switch off. Do the other things that make you happy. A happy employee is a really high-functioning employee and makes everything else easy.

Ashton: One of the light bulb moments I had in my career was when we had a former professional sports player who became the head of mental health at TAL. His name's Glenn Baird. He explained the process they often use with professional sporting teams to manage their energy flow throughout the season, it being really important to not have the foot on the pedal for the whole season, because you really need the team to be up for it in the moments that matter, particularly come finals time. It really transformed how I thought about managing high-performing teams, not having the whip out 24/7, actually creating space for downtime, creating space for people to come out of peak periods of activity, reset, recharge and be ready for the next championship moment.

Gareth: We can learn a lot from sport. You cannot work at 100% capacity all the time. You'll burn out. And you see burnout all the time, people just absolutely falling over because they are just working so hard and don't get a rest. They don't look after their mental health, their physical health, their family life. All those things are just so important to make you the best player.

Ashton: We've started touching on the ingredients for high-performing teams and leaders who are able to drive transformation and create high performance. Throughout your career you've assessed quite a few executive teams, for PE firms looking to make an acquisition or through merger processes. When you walk into a room, what tells you that someone can really drive transformation and not just talk about it? What are the signals you look for?

Gareth: There's a concept called radical candour. You've heard of the shit sandwich, it's the ability to take away the bread of the shit sandwich and just deliver the middle part. But in the right way.

When you're giving feedback, when you're talking to a team about performance, or about a project's success or failure, when they know in their heart that they haven't done a good job, a shit sandwich is the worst thing you can do. Because they know it's coming. They know that bit in the middle is coming and whatever you say in that first piece of bread and the last piece means nothing. They forget both of those things and only concentrate on the middle piece.

So anybody who has that concept of radical candour, to deliver it in a very succinct, straight, open way, without any judgment, without any blame. Don't go the man, go the problem. Any person who can deliver that type of feedback effectively, with the end point in mind, they're the ones that drive success in any transformation or leadership position.

I don't deliver those sandwiches anymore. I sometimes do, I have weak moments where I think, I'll just soften it a bit. But in reality, I've learned that softening it doesn't make it any better. It actually just makes it harder to get to the point. You don't have to be a nasty person by delivering it, it's just being honest. And 99.9% of people appreciate that rather than the sandwich.

Ashton: Full disclosure, I'd say I'm still on the journey of when to be delicate and when to be direct. It's not always easy to read the room or work out what's going to influence and drive people in different circumstances. But you really do need to cultivate that skill of being direct and being able to not beat around the bush, particularly when it comes to hard feedback and hard decisions.

Gareth: In any transformation, body transformation, work transformation, relationship transformation, it is not easy to go from one thing to another that's completely alien to you. You have to be honest with yourself and with the people you're working with in order for it to be successful. If you're not honest with them, you're never going to get there.

Ashton: The All Blacks motto is through difficulty to greatness. I've really come to believe that difficulty is the teacher, you learn so much more from difficult moments than easy moments, and you almost have to cultivate those moments a little bit. Adversity is what allows you to learn and become better.

Ashton: Continuing with the theme of talent assessment, I'm curious whether there's a pattern in the leaders you've seen successfully navigate M&A and acquisitions, particularly on the being-acquired side. In the wealth management industry right now we continue to see a lot of acquisition activity. Even Insignia Financial, my own company, is going through a private equity acquisition from CC Capital. What patterns have you seen in leaders who successfully navigate acquisition versus those who maybe don't survive it?

Gareth: From an acquiree perspective, I think people are missing, they probably don't put enough focus on the emotional side that it takes out of leaders. Because it's a really hard process. You're getting people coming into your house and going through your drawers and seeing what's in there, seeing all the things you've hidden away because you know people are coming around. You want to tidy it up and make it look perfect.

I think any company going through an acquisition, it's really important to get it all out there. No company is perfect, and the company that's going to buy you is going to find things at some point, whether pre or post acquisition. It's better to get it out and have those conversations.

We found that when we went through the acquisition of Evolve. We were a startup and we did loads of things wrong, not because we were doing anything underhand, just because we didn't know the right process. But all that stuff came through in the due diligence. And at the time we were like, we can't let them see that, that's so embarrassing. Look at that PowerPoint, it was awful, like a load of amateurs. But we were amateurs, we'd only just started.

When Mercer were going through the acquisition, the guy running it, John Gross, would smile at us and laugh at us and say: guys, we expect to find all this. This is what we expect, this is what we're buying, we're buying a startup that's been going for five or six years, we're not buying IBM. What they also wanted to see was the journey we'd gone on from nothing to where we were, and how we navigated that change. In order for us to go into the Mercer business, navigating change was essential. So they needed to see evidence of that.

That's a big eye opener for me, and it's what I see a lot in people who are getting acquired. They get really emotional and they want everything to be perfect. But you do need to show them the bad things and be able to tell the story about how you got to where you are now.

The other one is empathy for the staff. If the staff know the acquisition is happening, you've got to give them empathy. They're going to be all over the place, not sure what's going to happen with their jobs, with the business. So you've got to give them enough ability to express their emotions as well. That very empathetic leader is very good in the acquisition piece.

And from the acquirer side, John Gross was a perfect example. He didn't play the process down but was very honest, he'd catch up with us after the big meeting for a coffee and say: look guys, this is part of the process. We're not here to trip you up, we're here to support you. We want to acquire you, so we want to make this work. We're not trying to find reasons not to, but we want to make sure we're doing the right thing. His honesty was really refreshing. And subsequently, as often happens in my career, I've become friends with the people I work with, he's now a friend, and I learn from him almost every day.

Ashton: Given we've already been giving Mercer a bit of a big pat on the back today, I'm going to give them one more, I've also done M&A deals with them and worked with John Gross and Mark Thompson. You're so right to say that the way people on the acquirer side show up throughout the transaction can really mean the difference between a deal that everyone feels good about and one that doesn't feel so good. Full credit to them, in the way I've dealt with that organisation throughout my career, they really do know how to acquire businesses. And in your instance, divest businesses in a way which is respectful of the founders and the people involved in the transaction.

Gareth: Absolutely.

Ashton: We're almost out of time, Gareth, so just to wrap up, I wanted to ask you a question I'm hoping becomes a bit of a signature question for the Reinventor's Mindset series: what childhood belief did you have to let go of to become who you are today?

Gareth: When I was a kid, I wanted to be a doctor. And I always believed I could be a doctor. I still think I could have been a doctor if I'd had the right application, that sounds terrible, but I believe it.

But I didn't have that application. So I have to let go of the fact that my personality does not lend itself to being a doctor, and my attention to detail does not lend itself to being a doctor. It wasn't ruining my life or anything, but at the time I thought I'd love to be one.

Looking back at that now, any sort of role or opportunity that takes a huge amount of application and a lot of dedication to sitting down for hours and hours, I will use partners, friends, colleagues to help me with that, because I know it's not my skill set. I've become very aware of where I'm good, but I've also become aware of where I'm not so good.

Ashton: Being honest with yourself about what you're good at and what you're not so good at is one of the hardest skills to learn in life. Full credit to you for learning that early.

Gareth, thank you so much, it's been an absolute pleasure. I've really enjoyed the conversation and gotten a lot out of it. This has been the Reinventor's Mindset. Have a fantastic day.

Gareth: Thank you, Ashton.

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