that if you’re not involved in the business, it’s not good. In specialty retail, you’ve got to have great standards and discipline, great controls.’
BK: How much did you pay?
BB: I shouldn’t say, but it wasn’t anywhere near what I got for it, because it was essentially a bit broken. That was another very important lesson for me. There were a number of lessons.
BK: What were the lessons out of that? Don’t have partners?
BB: That was a really important lesson. No partners makes life easier, in my view.I’ve got to qualify that because I’ve got partners right now, but each partner has to bring something different. In any event, even with partners, there can only be one boss. So, that’s a hard and fast rule for me. One captain of one ship.
I learned that if you’re not involved in the business, it’s not good. In specialty retail, you’ve got to have great standards and discipline, great controls. Every store has to behave in the same way. You can’t call yourself a group if every store is ranging something differently or serving customers in a different way or has a different process.
BK: What the brand promise is, ultimately.
BB: Brand promise is gone. What people know from one store to the other is gone. Systems and processes, the back end of the engine in terms of data integrity, payment of bills, processing–
BK: And then, dropping your costs through scale, you get none of the benefit.
BB: None of that benefit. In specialist retail, you have to ensure the brand promise because there are so many people, far and wide. We’ve got stores from as far away as Siberia (Russia) all the way down to Burnie in Tasmania. It’s about empowerment through standards and disciplines and a culture. So, all of that has to be the same.
That means, if we’re going to set up a new event, and it’s going to happen at 3 o’clock on Tuesday, it has to happen in all stores, at the same time, delivering the same message. Otherwise, you can’t control hundreds or thousands of stores.Retailing is a fabulous business when it all works. It’s disaster when it doesn’t.
You learn most lessons from mistakes. I was fortunate to watch this mistake happening so I didn’t have to pay for the lesson. I had instinctively already figured out that systems and processes are about being very disciplined but letting people operate within that discipline in their own way so they can contribute and make a difference. That was a very important lesson. The other one was not to take on too much debt, because that was also part of the failing.
BK: So taking on debt to buy you out?
BB: Yes.
BK: Roughly how many Bras N Things stores did you have when you got the eight back?
BB: I probably only had about thirty or forty at that stage.
BK: So now you’ve got two businesses to run?
BB: Two businesses and I had moved to Sydney.
BK: How did you make that happen? Was it through your mate, Daniel?
BB: Yes. He was still working in music. It was called Jets.
BK: And he became the guy who ran the eight stores?
BB: Exactly. I grabbed hold of Daniel, who I had always seen as a talent and said,‘Why is this great business that I left now broke?’ And he knew exactly the reason why. He said, ‘Well, all the things that you had, they changed.’ And I said, ‘So, how much money have you got?’ He said, ‘$23 000.’ I said, ‘You whack the $23 000 in.We’ll go buy this.’ I can’t remember what percentage that equated to, but when we floated, he had about 3%. I think he might have had 18% before that?
BK: About 18% when it started?
BB: When we started, that $23 000.
BK: And then, what was the float value, roughly?
BB: A hundred million.
BK: What year was that?
BB: 1997. And we did this in about 1992. So, terrific run. Essentially, we kept it in Melbourne, I was Sydney. Daniel and I spent almost every day of our lives talking to each other on the phone, sometimes ten times a day.
BK: What have been the greatest challenges for you? Most people have identified finding and keeping good people?
BB: Sure it is.
BK: So, you know Daniel is the right guy. He’s ambitious. He’s got the right character. you give him an opportunity to buy in and you know that he fundamentally respects you and agrees on those foundational principles that you think would make it successful. Even though you’re not there, you can ticktack in and it’s as good as being there.
BB: It’s as good as being there. We had a terrific relationship. He absolutely honoured the principles and the culture in the way that I understood it –customer first and the need to create energy through our culture, standards and disciplines. That was very important. The second thing was we liked each other.I have always had the privilege, as an owner, of working with people that I like.
We had a good relationship. He was the sort of guy that when he was stuck on a decision, he’d pick up the phone and say, ‘What do you think we should do here?’ And we’d talk about it. Then he’d go off and make the decision. Now, I’m always very involved and I certainly was back then. So, it wasn’t that I wasn’t playing the director role. We would talk regularly and I’d be a part of that. But fundamentally, I was putting most of my effort into Bras N Things.
BK: And before you got out of that business, he’d done about fifteen years with you?
BB: Yes, probably at least fifteen because he started when he was sixteen, remember? Other great leaders came out of that era also – Greg Milne, Shane Fallscheer and my sister, Tracey Blundy.
BK: How do you find them?
BB: We focused on succession planning. It wasn’t even something that I thought was some great business idea. When you’re growing retail fast or growing any business fast, you’ve always got a demand for people so it’s forcing you to think about it. It’s forcing you to watch people. It’s forcing you to give people a go.
Back then, I was young I didn’t have a problem with making someone who was twenty-one a regional manager if they had the right attitude. I think, in lots of ways, we’ve lost a bit of that as we’ve all got older. The organisation’s got older.I’ve got older. The leadership’s got older. We forget that twenty-one-year-olds can do the job. Not all of them, but some of them. We shouldn’t look at someone and say, ‘You’re too green.’ If I had done that twenty-five years ago, we wouldn’t have many of the senior leaders we do at the
