Chair Fiona Pak-Poy takes Tyro battles with Potentia in her stride
Tyro chair Fiona Pak-Poy says being thrust into her family business after her father’s sudden death, then a breast cancer battle, has steeled her for current boardroom tussles.
It was the longest and hardest plane trip of Fiona Pak-Poy’s life.
She had been in Southern California doing work experience for a global engineering company in the first week of January in 1988 when she got a call from her older sister Cathryn that she will never forget.
Her father, Patrick, had died suddenly while skiing in the Italian alps. He was only 54.
“We developed skiing as a family passion and it was dad’s love,” she now recalls.
“He’d had a lovely day out skiing with mum and all his Italian friends and sat down for a lovely meal. Then he had a heart attack.”
She immediately boarded a flight to her home town of Adelaide, where her father’s body was being flown.
“It was just the most horrible flight ever. I remember when I was checking in I asked for a window seat because I was so upset. I’d spent the day with my brother’s friend’s mother, this lovely lady who wanted to sort of cocoon me and wrap me up and took me to the airport,” she says.
“They wouldn’t let me. So I had to sit in the aisle just bawling my eyes out for 12 hours. Strangers were walking by and asking if I was fine. It was just so horrible. That feeling of being so helpless and just totally thinking ‘This can’t be happening, this is not true’.”
Patrick Gerald Pak-Poy was one of Australia’s most notable Chinese-born entrepreneurs.
His parents were born in Darwin after his grandparents emigrated from China in the late 1800s. The family evacuated to Adelaide during the Japanese bombings of the Second World War.
After leaving school Patrick moved to Sydney and became one of the earliest graduates of the Masters of Engineering Science (Transportation and Traffic) from the University of New South Wales, where he also studied Town Planning.
In 1965 he returned to Adelaide to start what became a famed international consulting group called PG Pak-Poy & Associates.
It worked on iconic projects such as the construction of Adelaide’s iconic Rundle Mall, the Adelaide casino built inside the city’s historic railway station, and Canberra’s iconic Hyatt Hotel.
He also served as an adviser to the Federal and State Governments on economic development, trade and tourism and worked for the World Bank.
Family legacy
Fiona, the youngest of his children, studied engineering at Adelaide University thinking she would eventually work in his business. But upon his shock passing, she was thrown head-first into it as the sole family representative. Her siblings were not involved.
She was forced to take a year away from her passion of playing hockey after making the Australian Under-21 team and just missing the senior squad for the Seoul Olympics. That year it became the first to win an Olympic gold medal.
“Dad was my mentor and a true optimist. His philosophy was always success breeds success. So that is something which I’ve always thought - that if work hard, you can achieve,” she says.
They were skills that steeled her for a career as a management consultant with The Boston Consulting Group, then as a General Partner in a venture capital fund that invested in high tech startups. She also secured an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Today, after serving on the boards of MYOB, Novotech and Insentia, she is the new chairman of listed payments group Tyro, backed by billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes. It is her first public company chairmanship after she took over from David Thodey in March.
For the past nine months Tyro has been in takeover talks with private equity group Potentia Capital Management, which collapsed in spectacular fashion a fortnight ago, sending Tyro shares down 25 per cent over the following week.
Despite the failure of the talks, she is philosophical about the process and the outcome.
“Having worked with on both sides of deals, lots of transactions, lots of IPOs, you can see and understand different motivations. When you are in negotiations, it is not really helpful to just put a wall up and say, ‘Well, this is our view, take it or leave it’ You really need to try to understand what the other party is thinking,” Pak-Poy says.
“That doesn’t mean it is easy. It was a really challenging process.”
She reiterates that the board and management remain confident and excited about the company’s outlook, especially after Tyro recently upgraded its earnings guidance and announced that it now offers ‘tap to pay’ on iPhones which can accept contactless payments.
Tyro is one of only a handful of public companies that have both a female chair and a majority of female directors and going forward, Pak-Poy says her focus will continue on being “exceptionally well organised” in her thinking and leadership style.
“You’ve got changing leadership teams, you’ve got growth aspirations, you’ve got market change, you’ve got an uncertain economy and then you’ve had a complex M&A situation. So there is a lot to get your head around,” she says.
“You certainly need to be fair when considering all shareholders, which requires good people skills where you can really try to draw the best out of the board.”
She says she has learned a lot from Thodey, a former chief executive of Telstra.
“One of my favourite quotes is that on a board, if everybody is thinking the same thing then no one is thinking, because you want people to voice their different opinions. But at some point, you need to draw the discussion to a close. David was good at that,” she says.
“I would like to think that I have learned that skill. You have to pick your battles. But as long as people understand that their views are being heard, that is what is most important.”
Annus horribilis
1989 was the year from hell for Pak-Poy as she was single-handedly forced to keep her family’s business going while still grieving over the loss of her hero.
“It was really our business yet I wasn’t sitting up there in dad’s office in the front. I had no title, no nothing and I was still was incredibly emotional,” she says of being given a “cupboard size” space at the back of the office to work in.
“It was just the most stressful year ever because I had to work with the lawyers, the accountants, the management and the board. I had to learn about balance sheets and profit and loss and try to understand whether what the accountants was telling me was true.”
But she remembered her father’s life lessons: What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger; be fair, honest and always believe in yourself; and on big decisions, think carefully about the pros and cons.
Eventually the business was sold in a management buy-out a year later.
“What we didn’t know at the time was that we had been approached by significant overseas companies, including (US engineering giant) Parsons Brinckerhoff. The family was not told, so were sideswiped by the management,” she says.
The sale generated enough wealth to keep her mother Barbara and the family “comfortable”, but by no means rich-listers.
It retains Patrick Pak-Poy’s original family home in the Adelaide Hills, which he purchased from Reginald Murray “R.M.” Williams, the famed Australian bushman and entrepreneur.
The family still returns there for holidays.
Fifteen years later in 2015, Pak-Poy had just finished playing in a hockey semi-final in Sydney when she went for a routine mammogram. After being sent for a biopsy, she was told she had breast cancer.
“I was like, ‘What? That can’t be true. I thought I didn’t have any risk factors as no one in my family ever had it. I was fit and healthy, I breastfed the kids, I had not lost weight. So why would I have it?”
But the diagnosis was definitive.
She immediately told her husband and together they prepared to deliver the devastating news to their three teenage children when they came home from school.
“It was literally a massive shock for them and we just sat together holding each other, talking, crying and hugging. It was actually a really beautiful afternoon in a very sad way because we were just so close as a family. I didn’t know what to expect,” she says.
“But I’ve always been a very positive person, partly due to my dad’s perspective on life. So I thought, ‘Well, I’ll just tackle it with gusto, find out all the facts and get the best information I can. I studied all the research.”
More challenges
Pak-Poy then went through a traumatic period of treatment while one of her daughters was finishing the HSC. She was so sick she couldn’t attend most of the final graduation events.
“I did come out of hospital one night after three operations in three weeks and went to the second graduation dinner. I had to keep people around me as bodyguards because I didn’t want to say what had happened. But I got through it,” she says.
She finished her radiation treatment on December 23, 2015, returned to Adelaide for Christmas and started training with her son to return to the hockey field. Remarkably she then played the 2016 season.
“It helps to be fit when you face adversity because I think the fitter you are before anything happens, the easier you can get through it. Then you need to have the mind strength and mindset to rebuild your fitness afterwards,” she says.
“But worrying doesn’t help. The more you are positive, the more it can impact your family because you don’t want them worrying.”
She still plays hockey and will forever miss the motivational notes her father used to slip into her training bag when she aspired to be an Olympian and got within touching distance of playing in a a gold medal winning team.
She has represented South Australia, New South Wales and Australia in under-age, Open and Masters hockey and is still involved in the sport as an administrator.
Last year she took time away from hockey to walk the 211-mile John Muir Trail, a world-famous trek in the Sierra Nevada mountain range of California, passing through Yosemite, Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks.
She was in the wilderness for 3 weeks, walking at elevations as high as 4000 metres above sea level.
“It was extremely challenging, but a lot of fun,” she says.
She still regrets losing the family business three decades ago, but isn’t sure the family would still have it even if her father was alive today.
“I think times have changed. Dad’s mindset was to build a business and stay in. He had such a huge commitment to his employees,” she says.
“But I think these days, particularly with my experience of going in and out of businesses, there would be more of a realisation that it is okay to sell if you get to the point where you can actually make some money. Yes I am sad that we didn’t have the business longer because dad wasn’t around. But ultimately I think that perhaps we would have moved on to something else anyway because he just had so many ideas.”
She still misses him.
“I wish I could still get his feedback and advice because I relished it so much,” she says.
“I think he’d be very excited by what I have done with my life so far. But also extremely proud.”
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