LPE CEO Damien Glanville reveals how life on streets influenced his business success

Suicides, rape, drug addiction... he heard and saw it all while he was still a teen, but this Queenslander has worked his way up from homelessness to being the boss of an ASX-listed company. Here’s how he did it.

LPE chief executive Damien Glanville says his time growing up in a small Victorian country town was influential for his business success. Picture: Cade Mooney

Damien Glanville has it all: A top floor office in Maroochydore’s new CBD; designer furniture; nice views over the evolving heart of the Sunshine Coast, only interrupted by long, sheer curtains; a new Mercedes EQ 400 safely parked in the garage.

And a company, Locality Planning Energy (LPE), that is making waves in the electricity retail market.

But underneath his business attire are creases that can’t be ironed out.

Glanville, 44, was adopted at birth, experienced loss at a young age and, by the time he was a teenager, he was homeless.

Suicides, rape, drug addiction – you name it – he heard and saw it all while he was still a teen boy.

“I wasn’t gifted anything,” he says. “I had to work hard.”

DOG DAYS

Glanville’s mother Glenys was from a strict Irish Catholic background.

When she was pregnant with him, she had two choices: Give birth and continue working at the St Joseph’s Receiving Home in Carlton, Victoria, or walk through the arched facade of the large concrete building without a child.

She chose the latter.

“Adoption”, according to submissions to a Commonwealth inquiry in 2011, was the most appropriate action to solve “the problem of being pregnant out of wedlock” at the facility.

St Joseph's Receiving Home in Carlton, Victoria, in the 1960s or 1970s.

Glanville’s adopted parents, Eileen and Ian, took the young boy to Bacchus Marsh, a small country town about 50km west of Melbourne.

But Eileen died on Christmas Day, just before he turned five. She had cancer.

Life took a dark turn not long after that.

At age 15, home became so toxic neighbours tipped off child services and Glanville was put up in a housing complex with other lost souls who had nowhere else to go.

Much that happened inside those red brick walls would have brought a teenage boy to his knees. But Glanville stayed on his feet.

He still remembers the blood all over the walls after a young woman was beaten up by her partner in a heroin-fuelled rage.

The horror was so traumatising his face was white as a ghost when he went to work afterwards. And, yet, he says “you just deal with it”.

Eventually, the streets became the safer option.

There the community gave him food and work, sometimes two or three jobs at a time. No work was ever too good.

LPE chief executive Damien Glanville as a child in Bacchus Marsh. Picture: Supplied

The local AFL club taught him discipline and fuelled his competitive nature.

And a noble woman, called Mary, gave him everything else.

She took him in, aged 17, and made sure he finished high school – her influence a defining moment in his life, he says.

After that, he found freedom – and money – driving trucks across Australia.

“I just loved it,” he says. “I always had, call it ego or I don’t know what it is, this need to drive big trucks. I wanted to drive the biggest truck I could possibly drive or push myself to drive the most amount of hours before I fell asleep.

“And that’s what drove me.”

NO TURNING BACK

Glanville found himself in a house sitting opposite his birth mother once.

He had tracked her down to Tallangatta, about 400km northeast from his hometown, a few years earlier.

After that he also realised his birth father Ronald lived a few streets from his family home in Bacchus Marsh. He knew him for about a decade but neither of the pair ever made the connection.

Glanville looked at his mother. He watched her talk, watched her mannerism, the way she moved. He suddenly excused himself to go to the bathroom but walked out the front door instead and never saw her again.

Glenys had told him how sorry she felt for the life he had to live. But Glanville wants no pity.

“Ultimately everyone has a choice in life,” he says. “I chose to go down the route that I went on. I could’ve easily gone back and just lived that life but I didn’t.

“Everything I’ve ever done I’ve chosen to do and I made my own decisions. Right or wrong, I made them and I live by them.”

DOORS ARE OPEN

In 2014, Australia’s biggest investment bank, Macquarie Group, assembled a 10-strong team to establish its retail electricity arm, targeting large entities with high electricity needs.

The announcement came just months after the deep-pocketed Macquarie revealed plans to establish a solar leasing business and committed nearly $200m to the solar leasing industry in the UK.

At the time, the three main retailers – AGL, Origin and Energy Australia – had a tight grip over 76 per cent of the energy retail market in eastern Australia.

Glanville’s LPE too received authorisation to sell electricity from the Australian Energy Regulator in 2014.

But unlike Macquarie, Glanville had no employees, no customers and no funding.

All he had was the drive to know more and do more. And a vision to employ more renewable assets on apartment buildings.

“So that everyone can really benefit from renewable energy and become more sustainable,” he says. “I think that makes a difference.”

Glanville was selling solar panels for several years and was behind the Valdora solar farm on the Sunshine Coast, which aimed to make the council the first in Australia to offset 100 per cent of its electricity consumption with energy from a renewable source.

He recognised the need to bypass the major retailers and sell electricity directly to the customers if he wanted to build more solar farms.

So he and his former business partner Ben Chester knocked on “hundreds of thousands” of doors, mainly apartment blocks, to install solar panels on roofs and reduce electricity prices by large groups of units sharing one renewable energy source.

“We did everything, from knocking on doors to sending out bills,” he says.

Former LPE business partner Ben Chester hands over a check for 12-months free electricity to the McKay Family.

In 2016, the start-up was listed on the stock exchange and two years later BlackRock, one of the world’s largest investment funds, supplied a $30m debt facility.

Today, the company has 70 local staff and 38,000 customers. The goal is 150,000, or 10 per cent of the Queensland market, in the next five years.

Small profits in the past quarter were the price the company paid to invest in new technology, people and marketing.

In May, it was announced LPE was the first major sponsor of the Sunshine Coast Business Awards in its 26-year history.

Glanville is realistic that his company, which is now worth about $14m, is only scratching the surface of a highly complex sector. But thanks to start-ups, such as LPE, the market is now more competitive than ever. And a growing number of customers have access to renewable energy.

Would he do it all again though?

“Hindsight is a wonderful thing,” he says. “And naivety is equally wonderful because it enables people to be successful or to take a journey which they would never have taken if they actually knew what they had to do to achieve the outcome.”

DANCE WITH THE DEVIL

Glanville admits he has made plenty of mistakes – bad financial decisions were made, the wrong employees were let go.

Last year, LPE was ordered to pay a $10,500 penalty for breaching the Electricity Retail Code after the company allegedly failed to provide sufficient pricing information on its website.

About the same time, it was stung again when LPE’s secretary Daniel Seeney submitted a cleansing notice to shareholders a day too late.

The matter went to the federal court but a judge found no reason to suspect dishonesty in the case.

“There are so many little pieces that I would argue selling the electricity is easy but managing the regulation is way, way too complex,” Glanville says.

Glanville’s key to success is listening, learning and surrounding himself with smart people.

And sometimes he says you need to “dance with the devil”.

“It’s one of those things in business,” he says. “You meet some unsavoury people. … They think they can steal your idea and be better at it.

“But I already knew from as a kid there’s a point where you keep things close to your chest. You need to make sure that you are in control of your own destiny. Control is everything. You might share information with people but you don’t share enough to throw the baby out with the bathwater.”

LPE chief executive Damien Glanville overlooks the Maroochydore CBD from his top-floor office. Picture: Cade Mooney

PLACE TO REST

Glanville still plays by the same rules that earn you respect in a country town.

He gives people a job because of the way they look him in the eyes or shake his hand.

He is firm but fair. He is honest, sometimes brutally so, like you would expect from someone standing at the bar in small town pub. Just that Glanville doesn’t drink much.

He says his upbringing was instrumental in his success. “I don’t think I would’ve gotten to where I am today if I didn’t grow up in a country town,” he says.

The father-of-two dreams of returning to where it all began, driving a truck and carting hay. “It’s seriously a goal,” he says. “There is no pressure when you’re carting hay. No one is up ya.”

But before he gets there, he has a final duty to fulfil.

“To get to where I am today I had a lot of people support, trust and believe in me,” he says. “And I think it’s only fair that I give back to the next generation coming through in the same manner.

“Whatever that may be, time will tell but it’s critical that I return the favour.”

Originally published as LPE CEO Damien Glanville reveals how life on streets influenced his business success