Carsales MD draws on AFL experience to influence business leadership style
Carsales executive and 30-year auto industry veteran Paul Barlow has seen tough match-ups, but maybe none as tough as manning Gary Ablett Snr on debut.
His nickname was “God”.
Geelong football club great Gary Ablett senior, renowned for his spectacular marks and prolific goalkicking, is widely regarded as one of Australian football’s greatest ever players.
On Anzac Day 1988, then-Richmond coach Kevin Bartlett gave Paul Barlow, a 19 year-old senior debutante weighing just 79kg, the seemingly impossible task of stopping Ablett at the height of his powers during a game against Geelong at the MCG.
“Ablett kicked four in the first quarter, and about the 22 minute mark, I got the tap on the shoulder to go to full back to play on him. I did well for about a quarter, and it got to about the 22 minute mark of the second quarter, and it all unravelled. He kicked four in about five minutes,” Barlow says.
Despite letting Ablett off the leash, Barlow played the next three games without spending a single minute on the interchange bench.
But he did not play another senior game, and was cut from the senior list during the 1990 pre-season.
Fast forward 20 years, and after securing a master’s degree in business systems from Monash University and making his name at home and abroad with roles in automotive technology, in 2009 Barlow joined the ultimate auto industry disrupter: Carsales.
The firm will always be known as one of the Australian troika – with Seek and REA Group –which destroyed the traditional classified advertising model for cars, jobs and property.
Barlow has since held several key leadership roles within the group, including managing director, international between 2013 and 2022.
Now as Carsales managing director, he oversees the strategy and operations of the company’s network of online marketplaces, as well as being part of the Global Leadership Team for Carsales’ parent, the CAR Group.
Yet, he still retains his links with football. After a stint playing in Adelaide and then in the Victorian Football Association with Port Melbourne, where he became one of the best full backs in the league, today he is chair of Melbourne’s Eastern Football Netball League (EFNL).
That role has reunited him with Kevin Bartlett.
“I went out to a president’s lunch last year in Doncaster East. This happens every time I go to something and ‘KB’ is a guest speaker,” Barlow quips.
“So I go and have a chat with him and I just know I’m going to be the butt of some material in his speech to follow. It changes a little bit each time he presents, but it goes something like, ‘I destroyed his coaching career by letting Ablett kick too many’.”
In business Barlow has also drawn on his sports experience to influence his leadership style.
In football, he recognised everyone has a role to play and he applies this concept in business, understanding every team member – star or not – contributes to success.
Experience in playing different football positions also taught him to adapt, which he has applied in navigating various business roles and challenges, while aligning his team members towards shared goals.
Contributing to team success is always more important than personal accolades, he says.
“I was never the best player. I was never close to being a best and fairest in my whole career. If people ask me why I didn’t play more senior VFL/AFL games, I simply wasn’t good enough,” he says bluntly.
“But, I played a role, and then I enjoyed taking people along the journey and growing them. I think that has certainly helped me in the business world.”
Footy player turned computer programmer
Barlow was born and bred in Melbourne’s Eastern suburbs. Today he lives only a few kilometres from where he grew up.
His father Eddie was a passionate football fan who played locally and followed St Kilda, which sparked his eldest son’s interest and passion for football.
Eddie initially trained as an accountant before in 1980 starting a successful concrete cutting business, which grew to have 30 staff.
But, faced with union troubles, he pivoted to start a detector loop business called Detector Loop Services (DLS), focused on providing intelligent traffic systems to the road transport sector.
Barlow and his younger siblings Kris and Lainie later became involved in DLS before Barlow and a friend bought the business from his father in 2005. The family still owns it, but Barlow sold his stake last year.
His mother Jan, who has an Italian heritage and hails from the Victorian regional town of Bendigo, has long been the rock of the family, always supporting her husband and their children’s activities.
Barlow says his experience of buying and running DLS with his siblings taught him the complexities of family business dynamics, which has helped him in being part of a founder-led business like Carsales.
“You are never going to agree on everything, but you’ve got to talk it through. Once you make a decision, you’ve got to get on board and move on. I’ve always had that approach and I think my brother and sister, and my sister’s husband — who’s been working in the business — have had that as well,” he says.
“I’m proud of the fact that we were in business for 19 years together. They are still in the business and we are not only all talking, but we all remain close and our children are all close.”
In October 1988, when Barlow could see his days as a senior AFL footballer were numbered, he started life as a computer programmer with auto dealer service provider Reynolds & Reynolds (which is now called Pentana Solutions) under the tutelage of Carsales founder Greg Roebuck.
Barlow’s colleagues back then saw him as a diamond in the rough and not a typical programmer, given he was likely then the only software developer in the country playing senior VFL football.
At Reynolds, he spent the next decade helping develop, support and grow the best dealer management system in the Asia Pacific auto industry.
But, he always had in his mind a lesson from his father: if you want get anywhere, do it yourself.
So in May 1999 he left Reynolds and started a firm called Digital Motorworks based in Austin, Texas, which was later acquired by US firm Automatic Data Processing (ADP), a provider of automotive training materials, software and equipment worldwide.
Barlow was convinced by Roebuck to return to Carsales as a strategy director in June 2009, three months before the company listed on the Australian Securities Exchange.
Four years later, Roebuck tasked him with running the international arm of the business and to pursue what then looked like a pipe dream, of boosting global sales to account for half of Carsales’ revenues.
Today they make up 53 per cent and Latin America is emerging as the company’s biggest growth market.
Barlow says Roebuck, who announced his retirement in 2017, taught him the importance of technology in solving business needs. But also, and perhaps more importantly, to never be embarrassed about getting paid for delivering value.
For 20 years Barlow has also recited a legendary quote from Carsales co-founder Walter Pisciotta from the group’s early days, when the big media players and newspapers were looking for exclusive inventory data deals with car dealers.
As an ambitious start-up, Carsales was trying to get dealers to list their cars for sale on its website by offering a seamless, automated inventory feed direct from the their computer systems.
Pisciotta famously told his staff of his media rivals at the time: “If it is this f..king hard for us, imagine how f..king hard it is for them.”
“Wal had the foresight to look at it and say, ‘I think we are onto something here’,” Barlow recalls, calling Pisciotta the smartest businessman he has ever worked with.
“I didn’t get it at the time and he was a lot bigger picture than I was back then. So it was a good lesson for me how Wal saw the advantage of what they had.”
Barlow has also worked with Cameron McIntyre for over 15 years, the past seven being while Mr McIntyre has been Group CEO.
Above all, Barlow lauds his boss’s unique ability to manage all of his stakeholders, which has translated into consistent earnings growth.
Carsales this week reported a 5 per cent increase in half-year net profit to $123m and struck a revenue lift of 9 per cent to $548m. Revenue from its Australian business, the core of the business Barlow is responsible for, jumped 9 per cent to $232m.
“I think Cam manages and understands what we have to do as a business, understands the market, understands who the key stakeholders are — especially from an investor perspective and from a board perspective — and then prepares his management team accordingly to meet the needs of them all,” he says.
AI will help, but a salesman will always exist
Looking ahead, Barlow sees artificial intelligence increasingly enhancing and streamlining the car buying and selling process, rather than completely revolutionising it.
He believes AI will help remove friction in transactions and enhance the online user experience, providing more personalised recommendations to buyers and automating certain aspects of the sales process.
Carsales has already started implementing AI-adjacent technologies, such as its Pay Through Carsales service, which uses advanced identification verification processes to reduce fraud and increase confidence for consumers making online payments.
“We’ve done over 300 transactions now worth nearly $7m, where we are taking away that pain point of people handing over the cash to get the keys,” he says.
Barlow also believes, despite technological advancements, car ownership and the used car market will remain strong.
He believes the human element in car sales, particularly in used car transactions, will continue to be important for many years to come.
While hypothetically he would love to run CAR Group one day, he says it has never been an ambition or goal. At the age of 56, he acknowledges he is not in the frame to be Cameron McIntyre’s successor.
Curiously, unlike his boss, who is the proud driver of an American-made black pick-up truck (a RAM TRX), which boasts a thumping 6.2l supercharged V8 engine, Barlow is not a car nut. He never has been.
He owns a Tesla for city driving and a Land Rover Discovery four-wheel drive for the regular road trips to Queensland he undertakes with his dogs.
“I can sleep in the back, I’ve got a second battery and a fridge, so I’m self sufficient. My dogs and I, we can sleep anywhere in that and we are happy,” he says.
He will always love football, even if he never fulfilled his dream to carve out a career at the elite level of the code.
By contrast, his younger brother Kris, who at the age of 25 was pick number 86 in the 1998 AFL draft, played 102 games for Hawthorn, including a memorable five-goal haul against Collingwood at the MCG in 2001. They are now regular golfing buddies.
“But I always remind him that no one remembers him,” Paul quips with a wide smile.
“I played on Gary Ablett in my first game. So people remember that.”
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