Nailing Culture at Scale - Michael Schneider, Managing Director, Bunnings [S9.E4]

“What does it take to scale one of the most trusted brands in Australia without losing its soul?”Today’s guest is Michael Schneider, Managing Director of Bunnings since 2016 and a 20-year veteran of the business. Bunnings is more than a retailer. It’s a cultural institution. With more than 380 stores, $18b in revenue and  55,000 team members, it’s hard to imagine a time when Bunnings wasn’t the default answer to every home improvement question.But behind that dominance is a story of quiet leadership, discipline, and culture at scale.In this episode, we dig into how Bunnings earned and maintained this dominance – from Every Day Low Prices and delivering brand promises at scale,  to the cultural consistency that is stitched into the fabric of the business, this is a story of of what it really means to scale up — not just fast, but for good.

When Steven first joined us in 2019, GYG was already making noise—130 stores, a cult-like customer base, and a founder who was across every detail of the business from avocado sourcing to store design. That episode became one of our most replayed for good reason: it was raw, passionate, and incredibly insightful.But so much has changed since then. GYG has nearlydoubled its footprint, gone public, entered the U.S., scaled a drive-thru model, launched a new app, and pushed network sales past the billion-dollar mark. The team’s changed. The scale is bigger. But what about the founder?This episode is about going deep on that next chapter—what’s changed, what hasn’t, and what Steven’s learned along the way. It’s a candid look at what it takes to lead through hypergrowth without losing the heart of the brand. As always, please reach out if you have any feedback or comments, and for more insights on a whole range of topics the new TDM website is a great resource for investors and operators alike.

We are reaching back into the archive to revisit a conversation from 2019 with Steven Marks, the co-founder and CEO of Guzman y Gomez. This was one of the most electric conversations of the early years of the show. Steven shared his passion for food, brand, technology, and most of all, people—with a clarity and energy that defined him as a founder on a mission.At the time of this recording, GYG had around 130 stores. Steven was founder-CEO, still obsessing over every ingredient, every system, every hire. They had global ambition, but the U.S. was still a dream, the IPO was years away, and COVID hadn’t yet tested the foundations of hospitality businesses everywhere.We’ll be sitting down with Steven again soon for a follow-up episode covering everything that’s happened since 2019. But before we do, here’s where it all began. Even if you have heard this episode before, or if you are new to Scaling Up since then, this is a must-listen-to episode full of nuggets that will not only act as a great primer for our next episode, but will also leave you in awe of his energy and passion.Enjoy this re-release of one of our most-loved early episodes—with Steven Marks of Guzman y Gomez.

Tim Doyle is the co-founder and CEO of Eucalyptus, a digital healthcare business that in just a few short years has redefined what 'patient first care' can look like in this country and abroad. If you haven't heard of Eucalyptus, you might know it via its house of Brands, Pilot, Kin, Software, Juniper, each delivering vertically integrated care in everything from men'shealth to fertility to weight loss.Before founding Eucalyptus, Tim was part of the founding executive team at Koala, the mattress in a box leader in Australia that scaled rapidly to over a hundred million dollars in revenue and beyond. Here, Tim cut his teeth in the high growth direct to consumer business model and perfected how to build brands that truly resonate. But health, as Tim rightly notes, is a totally different beast. It's a regulated, deeply personal high trust industry, and that makes the scale up journey all the more fascinating.In today'sconversation, we cover a huge amount of ground on the evolution of thebusiness, a mini deep dive into the market of GLP-1’s, and most notably thefascinating team building framework that Tim has used up until this point. Whatstood out to me was Tim's clarity about how and why Eucalyptus will win as itcontinues to move through this hyperscale moment of execution across a range ofglobal markets.

Silvija Martincevic, the Croatian born, San Francisco based CEO of Australian founded Unicorn Deputy.Silvija's executive career has been immense in the world of fast-growing technology, as the COO of Group On, and then the chief commercial officer of Affirm, that scaled annual revenue through the billion-dollar ceiling and beyond IPO. Silvija grew up in Croatia and while she didn't learn English until she was 18, she's an incredibly lucid storyteller. We traversed some key scaling challenges from moving Deputy from a point solution to a full workforce management platform trying to move from the fickle SMB market towards solving larger and more complex problems for mid-market customers. All of this is wrapped up in a big global push to continue the growth trajectory that now has reported revenue well over a hundred million dollars a year. While Sylvia is known in the industry as an incredible executor, as an operator, it's her leadership skills that have been front and center in Deputy’s post Covid transformation, despite not being the founder, her ownership mentality is the cornerstone of her values-based leadership principles, which come clearly through as accountability, trust, and empathy. Her insights into scaling culture as a non-founding CEO were a real highlight of the conversation. As always, please reach out if you have any feedback or comments, and for more insights on a whole range of topics the new TDM website is a great resource for investors and operators alike.

Very rarely do you get to tell the story of a wildly successful entrepreneur that is largely unknown beyond the immediate circle of influence. Today on Scaling Up, Greg Boorer, the CEO and Founder of CDC, formally Canberra Data Centres, which is in some rarefied air among companies globally, having compounded earnings at over 30% for the last 15 years. It's now valued well in excess of $10 billion and is at the centre of the beating heart of Australia's critical infrastructure. All this, and it still has a massive growth runway ahead of it. Greg's story in many ways is the CDC story from an aspiring cyclist and reluctant it graduate. Greg has become the face and often lead salesperson of a business that has rewritten industry standards as it relates to innovation and security. In what is seen from the outside as a commoditised industry, CDC has thrived by listening to customer needs and adapting accordingly. This is a story of initial hustle and belief in an opportunity, but ultimately it's about resiliency and delivering on promises. Greg has undoubtedly built one of Australia's best businesses from the ground up, and to hear him speak about this scaling journey with the knowledge and passion that he does will undoubtedly be inspiring to all our listeners. Transcript: CHAPTERS:   (00:55) – Greg’s beginnings   (05:50) – A foreign start   (11:32) – Moving back to Australia    (18:40) – Building Canberra Data Centres , now CDC (22:40) –Tactics, tips and techniques (24:12) – Technological and competitive ddvantage    (30:54) – Solidifying CDC’s Future   (36:58) – CDC’s scaling journey  (44:08) – Why you need to partner with the right people   (47:33) – CDC’s sustainability commitment 

Bill Beament grew up in a working class family out of Esperance in Western Australia. He dreamed of being a general manager of a mine one day. Instilled at a young age with a deep work ethic and an acute commercial sense, he achieved much, much more than this as CEO and Executive Chair of Northern Star. Bill reshaped the underground gold mining industry and built from scratch a $16b, ASX 50 behemoth. Not resting on his laurels though, Bill has more recently turned his attention to wrapping up all his learnings about mining, about people and about leadership to his own venture Develop Global (ASX:DVP), which is on the precipice of replicating Northern Star's success in critical minerals with its unique business model of both mining services and mine ownership. This is one of Australia's great stories, largely unknown and untold outside the resource community so heavily centred in Perth, but the scaling lessons, as you'll hear, are applicable to all sectors and leaders of businesses, of all shapes and sizes. This episode takes you underground into a world unfamiliar to most, but applicable to all. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Scaling Up with Bill Beament, CEO and founder of Develop Global.  Show Notes: CHAPTERS:   (00:55): Bill’s upbringing in country WA (04:09):  Starting in the underground industry   (06:19): Lessons from Barminco  (09:11): Building Northern Star    (14:03): What makes a world-class underground mine operator (18:48): Operational excellence at Northern Star and starting Develop Global    (24:23): Unearthing critical minerals   (29:14): DVP's business model (32:34): Buying Woodlawn mine (35:59): Best in class hiring and retaining talent (41:47): Remuneration philosophy

Hiroki Takeuchi, the co-founder and CEO of GoCardless started in 2011. GoCardless is a star of the blossoming UK FinTech scene- last valued at $2.1b, the business is on a mission to take the pain out of payments for businesses of all shapes and sizes – from your local gym collecting monthly membership right through to the Uk’s biggest utility companies. Payment collection is a problem as old as time, and in creating a bank payment network to rival the card networks like Visa and Mastercard , it is also an incredibly complex ecosystem to navigate and operate in. But Go Cardless has seen tremendous success – it currently processes over $35b in payments annually from close to 100,000 customers. Aside from regulatory complexity that is only heightened when you throw cross border payments into the mix, the challenge of scaling a business that form day one  has had such a variety of customer shapes and sizes gives rise to some wonderful lessons for operators. Hiroki’s personal story is incredibly inspiring. The founder’s journey always involves a level of grit and determination to overcome adversity, but Hiroki takes it to a new level; five years into the Go Cardless journey, a bike accident resulted in a spinal cord injury. If anything, it gave him a him a perspective on life and leadership that has enabled Go Cardless to flourish like it has. Show Notes: (02:12): Founding Story (06:45): Why direct debit? (10:03): Unraveling the complexity around cloud-based payments (12:31): Navigating the rules and regulations on collecting payments (14:02): GoCardless’ competitive advantage (19:00): Scaling challenges when expanding internationally (21:52): G2M success via partnerships (24:21): GoCardless’ culture journey (26:55): Embedding and living company values (28:26): Leading the business post bicycle accident (31:10): Evolution of leadership when scaling a business

What is a high-performing culture? It's a question some think as straightforward as it is philosophical. In these special episodes, we explore high performing cultures;  what they are, how to create them, and most importantly how to not just maintain them, but scale them. By drawing upon the wisdom of the previous CEOs, founders, leaders who I have had the pleasure of interviewing over the last six years between them have created some $150b in market capitalisation. After 42 episodes of Scaling Up and 300,000 words of transcripts we now have a database of knowledge to dive into to pull some common threads together. This second episode of the Culture Scaling Playbook is wholly dedicated to the integral culture scaling topic of hiring and retaining great talent. The crux of every scaling success is great people, and this episode aims to give operators meaningful and tangible best practise ideas for them to execute upon when it comes to attracting and retaining top talent - be it from onboarding, feedback or remuneration (and everything in between). Culture Scaling Workbook: Includes show notes, links to sources and other interesting thought starters - ⁠DOWNLOAD Chapters: (02:00) The importance of belonging in high performing teams (06:56) What makes for great hiring and why is it the centre of successfully scaling culture? (13:56) The role of the Chief People Officer and the right time to hire one (16:29) The importance of onboarding when it comes to building a cohesive culture (20:12) Let's talk remuneration (23:43) Building trust through feedback (30:34) Diversity of thought and why it produces better outcomes (33:23) The wrap up For more content and insights: ⁠www.tdmgrowthpartners.com⁠ ⁠https://twitter.com/TDM_Growth

What is a high-performing culture? It's a question some think as straightforward as it is philosophical. In these special episodes, we explore high performing cultures;  what they are, how to create them, and most importantly how to not just maintain them, but scale them. By drawing upon the wisdom of the previous CEOs, founders, leaders who I have had the pleasure of interviewing over the last six years between them have created some $150b in market capitalisation. After 42 episodes of Scaling Up and 300,000 words of transcripts we now have a database of knowledge to dive into to pull some common threads together. This first episode of the Culture Scaling Playbook is wholly dedicated to the role values play in successfully scaling people and culture; why they are important, how they have to be at the centre of every decision made and every behaviour exhibited in a business and importantly how best to do this. Chapters: (02:00) High performance in teams (04:18) What is culture - the triangle framework (07:18) Link between effective cultures and exceptional business results (13:02) Values and when they get formalised (21:35) Living the valuies and codifying them (26:13) Values and hiring - from interviews to onboarding (34:25) Can you refresh or change your values? (37:07) The wrap up Culture Scaling Handbook: Includes show notes, links to sources and other interesting thought starters: Download For more content and insights: www.tdmgrowthpartners.com https://twitter.com/TDM_Growth