My Background

Career

I began my career with ANZ Bank. I worked for three years in the Business Banking division, focused on credit analysis and working with medium sized business in distress. I learned how to get up early and put on a suit and tie, and I also learned that trading banks are very big organisations – a little too big for me.

In 1994 I moved to Goldman Sachs JBWere (“J.B.Were & Son” at that time) as an assistant analyst in the Asset Management division. Over a three year period I held several roles including dealer, analyst and portfolio manager. I was then appointed to the role of Head of Equities and rebuilt the investment team, and for the next eight years managed a team of analysts and portfolio managers. We outperformed our investment benchmarks, won several industry awards, and grew assets under management to around $2bn. I was a member of the Asset Management executive team and helped grow the division from 15 to over 100 staff, and was also a Partner in the JBWere Group and a member of the Partnership Committee.

Over the last two years I have spent most of my time as a director and consultant to an IT business in which I also held a majority stake. That role came to an end in a less than ideal way, but one which taught me as much about business as any other period in my life.

The next decision was one of my easiest. I had developed a passion for understanding what makes businesses tick, and the way I wanted to use that was to work with a small number of different businesses in a formal adviser capacity. And here we are today.

Skills

Most of my working life has been spent in the investment management industry, investing clients money in the Australian sharemarket. Managing other people's money and leading a team of investment professionals requires a broad range of skills: numeracy; accounting knowledge; humility and resilience; an understanding of psychology and human biases (particularly your own and those of your team); marketing skills and the ability to communicate complex ideas in language that non-investment professionals can understand; an ability to ask questions and identify issues in companies that your competitors may have missed.

In my later time with Goldman Sachs I reduced, then finally gave up, my investment responsibilities and focused on a range of issues across our business including HR (training, recruiting, motivation and rewards and culture). I also spent more time on product development and marketing, as well as business planning and financial control.

Personal Interests

My hobbies include kitesurfing, golf and occasionally fly-fishing, while my love of computers, gadgets, the internet and building spreadsheets can be classified somewhere between skills, hobbies and mild obsessions.