How some of Melbourne’s most successful CEOs and entrepreneurs made it to the top
They’re some of Melbourne’s brightest business operators who have built their empires on big ideas. Three of our most successful CEOs under 40 share what it takes to make it to the top.
Lifestyle
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Three dynamic and driven Melbourne minds — all aged under 40 and CEOs of leading companies — discuss their road to success and all the mentors, self-doubt and haters along the way.
EMMA YEE — CEO @ PETER ROWLAND
It was a time to celebrate. At 32, Emma Yee had just been appointed the first woman to join the Peter Rowland executive team.
But someone was raising doubts about if she was up to the job at the long-running catering group. It didn’t take long for Yee to hear about it.
“I rang the executive and said if you want to know anything about me, say it to my face,” she says. “I had no issue calling out people questioning why I was there.”
She did have what it takes, and at 38, Yee is now the boss.
The single mum says she’s determined to get the South Yarra-based company back to its glory days after a tough period of high debts and declining sales.
It was saved by billionaire investor Mohan Du, who entrusted Yee with transforming the brand with the famous chicken sandwiches.
She had her own self-doubt when asked to take on the top job two years ago. Then it dawned on her that she’d already been taking on more and more responsibility.
“I’d been doing it without knowing it,” says Yee, who progressed from national accounts manager to general manager of operations, then acting CEO, and then the company’s first female and youngest CEO in 2017.
Yee attributes her independent streak and strong work ethic to her parents. Her dad —
an Australian of Fijian and Chinese heritage — ended up being the chief government engineer after coming to Australia at 16 and “not speaking a word of English”. He met and fell
in love with Yee’s mum, an Anglo-Australian nurse. They married and raised four kids in Heidelberg.
While Yee had many mentors, her parents were key.
“My mum would work during the night while my dad worked during the day,” says Yee, whose first job at “14 years and nine months” was at the local supermarket.
She says the way to the top took a lot of work “managing other people’s unconscious bias” in a bid to be “taken seriously”.
She began in operations with Spotless, working long days at the MCG. As such, she says she doesn’t want to lose empathy with frontline staff and “putting yourself in someone else’s shoes” is crucial.
“One of my mentors — an older male with great life experience — he said to me it’s always important to listen, but you have to be able to not dwell on other’s opinions as it will affect the way you are as a leader. When you’re able to stop doing that, you’ll get so much more done.
“I have lived by that.”
None of this comes without hard work and sacrifice. Yee’s day starts with breakfast with her 10-year-old son, Jack, then she drops him at school followed by a day with her team.
She does school pick-up, but after Jack goes to bed, she does much of the paperwork that dominates her role.
She says she has a “great ex-husband and a fabulous community of friends who support me”.
JACK WATTS — CHIEF @ BASTION COLLECTIVE
“I was 22 with absolutely no idea what I was doing.”
This is the self-deprecating way Bastion Collective chief Jack Watts describes his job situation before joining his older brother Fergus’s small start-up business in South Melbourne 10 years ago.
Watts had been working as a currency trader when the global financial crisis hit, and Fergus was similarly at a loose end after a frustrating, injury-plagued end to an AFL career that had spanned St Kilda and Adelaide.
Fergus had started his own small business, a marketing and advisory company called Bastion in 2009. Watts joined the same year to kick off a sports sponsorship arm.
In the decade since, Bastion Collective has grown to be the largest independent communications agency in Australia, with 200 staff in Melbourne and Sydney and about 30 in the US, covering everything from sponsorship specialists, communications experts and reputation management to merchandising and creative content.
Clients include Microsoft, Deakin University, Australia Post and Ferrari.
Fergus is the executive chairman and Watts, 31, the chief. Executives include former Western Bulldogs chief Simon Garlick, with ex-AFL CEO Andrew Demetriou on the board.
Despite all this, Watts says there was no one moment when success seemed assured.
“There are lots of little moments along the way when you realise it’s working,” the father of one says.
“The first big deal you close, the first time you say the name of your business and the person has actually heard of it, the first staff member we hired, the 100th staff member we hired, the 200th.”
Like other Aussie business success stories, this is one that started with a migrant family. Parents Jim and Kay arrived from the UK in 1989, raising their family around Hampton and Sandringham.
Jim gained respect in the footy world during time as director, vice-president and chief of St Kilda Football Club, where he turned around the club’s financial position.
“Being new to Australia, Mum and Dad wanted us to get involved in everything. As such, our family motto is ‘have a go’,” Watts says. “It’s still the best advice I’ve ever been given.”
The two brothers and their father are shareholders in Bastion Collective, and Jim is also on the board.
The wisdom of elders has been crucial.
“Almost everyone I’ve managed has been older than me, sometimes much older and definitely a hell of a lot more experienced,” Watts says.
“While that can be challenging at times, it’s truly been a gift as I’ve learnt a lot more from them than they have from me.”
Watts says family again made a positive change to his life when he and wife Rosie welcomed daughter Iggy this year.
He says his solution to most problems over the years has been to work harder and longer.
“The business has reached a size where that solution doesn’t work anymore. We need to implement things at scale now and I can work as long as I want, but unless everyone is pulling in the same direction, it doesn’t make a difference.
“That can be hard to let go of, but thankfully that decision has been taken out of my hands now. My wife and I had our first child five months ago and my aim is to always be home by 6pm for bath time.
“Most days I go to work thinking that I’ve got a bit on today, it’s OK if I miss bath time tonight, but then I get to 5.30pm and think, ‘Is this email more important than spending an hour with my daughter?’ — no way. And so I very rarely miss.
“One of the great lessons for me over the past couple of years has been to prioritise time with my friends and family. I can work from anywhere at almost any time (depending on where the client is) so I’m determined not to miss the key moments that too easily go sailing by.”
Despite the size of the business, Watts says he’s determined to understand what makes his staff tick, despite initially doubting his abilities managing people.
“I still write every staff member a Christmas card. I started doing it when there were five people and now I write 200. It takes on average about five minutes a card so that’s 1000 minutes of writing cards in the lead-up to Christmas.”
CYAN TA’EED — FOUNDER @ ENVATO AND HEY TIGER
Cyan Ta’eed never felt like anybody else’s idea of a tech entrepreneur or a CEO.
She felt that way in 2006 when she and husband Collis, both living at the time in her parents’ basement in Sydney, started Envato.
The idea was for a network of online sites trading digital goods like music, graphics, video, photos and website themes.
Now, at 38, she still feels that way as the couple’s wealth has reached an estimated $184 million and Envato has eight million users.
The mother of two has since launched another successful start-up — the social enterprise Hey Tiger, a chocolate company using ethically sourced ingredients in eye-catching packaging.
Between King St-based Envato and Hey Tiger in Cremorne, she employs about 650 staff, and says the clichéd views about how to be a boss did not suit her.
“I think at first, especially in tech, you have a vision of what a tech person is going to be like, and I’m not like that I think,” Ta’eed says.
“I came from thinking ‘Maybe a leader needs to act this way’ to ‘No, I’m never going to be that person’.
“I’ve had a person say to me, ‘I wish you’d shout at me when I fail’, but I’m never going
to be that person. I think a leadership model of being warm and gentle works for me.”
Ta’eed says work is about relationships and allowing people to be passionate and to occasionally fail.
While the journey seems meteoric, it wasn’t always smooth.
“We didn’t take a salary for a couple of years,” she says. “When we finally got to the stage of taking a salary, we sold everything we owned in a garage sale.”
In late 2007, the couple flew to Hong Kong and worked on Envato from a suitcase for a whirlwind 18 months, including visits to parts of Asia, Canada, the US and Europe.
“By the time we got to Paris, we were working 60-hour weeks.”
It was in the city of light that she got a call from Envato’s Melbourne team saying the office had grown so much they needed someone to come back and run it. The call quickly ended their travels.
Ta’eed says the hardest part of the job is not having the love of risk that many people think comes naturally to entrepreneurs.
“Many entrepreneurs have a gambler’s personality and they thrive on making those decisions — I don’t have that. I really actively dislike it,” she explains.
“I’m very careful. It’s kept me in good stead. I don’t invest more than I have to. It really takes a lot out of me.
“With Hey Tiger, I had to invest a lot of money into it to get to the scale I’m at now.
“During that process, it would make me feel ill when making those calls.”
Ta’eed now counts one of her toughest challenges as a blessing.
In 2016, she was struck with an aggressive bacterial ulcer in her eye from wearing contact lenses, forcing her to lie in darkness for a month and not use screens.
“In hindsight, it was one of the best things that happened to me,” she says.
“It got me out of day-to-day. I started having ideas again.
“I really got a chance to think big picture.”
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It was after that experience she started Hey Tiger in March last year.
Ta’eed realises that while she loves working with her husband to run a business and raise a family — the couple has two boys aged five and eight — it wouldn’t work for everyone.
“I find working with Collis to be wonderful (and) in terms of running the family, it’s a 50-50 split.
“I think I’m not willing to miss anything important in the kids’ school. I do what it takes — if my son is doing Jump Rope for Heart and he wants me looking at him skipping, I’ll be there watching him skipping.”