For Koh chief executive Charli Cohen Walters, success is more than a family affair
Charli Cohen Walters cut her teeth in the family business started by her mother and father. When they sold up at the end of 2020, it gave her the opportunity to run her own race.
Charli Cohen Walters doesn’t wish being the boss’s daughter on anyone.
“It is the hardest job and I have so much respect for people in companies that do it,” she says.
“From an outsider’s perspective, it looks like it is a breeze. But you have all the odds stacked against you, no one respects you for your value, they all think you have just been handed the opportunity. So you need to show that you belong in that role, and with that comes a lot of work.”
For three years, from 2018 to 2021, Walters was the chief executive of diversified food business KJ&Co Brands, started by her entrepreneurial parents, David and Lisa Molloy. For the previous three years, she was general manager.
Based on Sydney’s northern beaches, KJ&Co Brands has long supplied food service customers and retailers Coles and Woolworths with local bakery products, desserts and ready meals.
It is best known for bread-to-desserts brand Toscano, gluten-free brand Bare Bakers and Hart&Soul, under which products such as soups and ready meals are sold.
Despite the frustrations of being in a family business – Walters’ mother was her father’s personal assistant and her brother, Jordan, also worked in the firm, reporting to her as CEO – Walters says she owes her corporate career to her father.
“He gave me the opportunity to fail, but he also gave me the opportunity to succeed, and I think they go hand in hand,” she says.
“He didn’t micromanage me and he didn’t treat me any differently to anyone else, both from a personal and a professional perspective. He was very fair.”
In December 2020, the Molloys sold KJ&Co to the listed SunRice for a reported $50m, delivering Walters and her family the ultimate pay day.
“Selfishly, for me it was an opportunity to regain my identity and not have my personal worth tied up with a family business which I struggled with and wanted to avoid for many years,” she says bluntly.
“So for me, it was almost a get-out-of-jail-free card to have the opportunity to start again.”
The portion of the business that the Molloy family owned was held via a trust. Interestingly, Walters’ father made sure from the outset that her holding in the trust was twice the size of her brother’s.
Yet when told about the discrepancy by his father, Jordan Molloy reportedly simply responded, with a wry smile: “That’s fine. She works harder and she deserves it. She will make me rich!”
In 2022 Walters invested part of her KJ&Co fortune in a business called Koh, an Australian-based, fast-growing eco-friendly cleaning brand, which she has since run.
Koh was founded in 2016 by Sydney entrepreneurs Justin Alexander and Adam Lindsay as a side hustle at a local Bondi farmers’ market.
The brand offers starter kits and refills for household cleaning products, from surface cleaners to dishwashing and laundry detergents.
Today, Koh has more than one million customers and claims to be used in one in 10 Australian homes. The brand began rolling out nationally in Woolworths stores in July 2023, adding to its significant online presence.
Walters has said Koh’s growth is driven by the so-called Steve Jobs effect. The Apple founder famously always dressed exactly the same to make his life easier and reduce the number of decisions he had to make in a day.
She believes Koh has the same effect for its customers, removing the hassle of deciding which cleaning products to use each week, offering them a one-stop shop.
Alexander and Lindsay remain on the board.
“So there are definitely parallels between family businesses and working in founder-led businesses, especially the emotion-charged conversations,” Walters says.
But for all the compelling practical reasons for joining Joh, she says the most powerful was the philosophical: Its purpose.
“I’ve got two young kids. For me to be able to justify working late nights or not being present all the time for them, I needed a role that I felt was making the world a better place,” she says.
“Something that gave me personal growth, gave me purpose and the opportunity to make a huge impact. So here we are.”
‘Be yourself’
Walters struggled with her identity from a young age and was a proud tom boy from her first years at school.
“I think deep down, I knew that boys had it easier. For girls it was more challenging and their self worth wasn’t the same,” she says.
She was born with the first name Christy and from a young age, she didn’t feel it aligned with her identity and positioned her as weak.
She used to ask people what they thought her name should be and would give them three options to choose from. She always wanted an androgynous name so at the age of 19, she changed her name to Charli. She changed it officially by deed poll when she was 25.
Walters remembers the night she told her family about her new name over dinner. But it was like water off a duck’s back to her father. He simply quipped: “I called you Christy because I thought you’d get called Chris anyway!”
Walters has always modelled her life on the famous Oscar Wilde quote: “Be yourself, everyone else is already taken.”
So seven years ago, when her eldest son Willem was born, she returned to work after just a week. Walters’ mother was pivotal in raising Willem and then his now four-year-old brother, Odin.
“So for the first six months of their lives, my mum would bring them into the office every day so I could breastfeed at my desk,” Walters says.
“That was a decision I made that was important to me at the time and I don’t have any regrets about that. But as a result, Mum spent a lot of time looking after my children through their childhood.”
Yet as the years went by, her mother started making some concerning comments about the mannerisms of her eldest grandchild.
“She first made a few observations. Most parents are in denial, right? They think their kids are fine. It wasn’t until we got to school that it became quite obvious about some of Willem’s challenges,” Walters says.
In April this year he was diagnosed as autistic, with ADHD, and neurodivergent. He requires significant time and attention from his parents, grandparents and carers.
Parenting their eldest boy has been a hard road for Walters and her husband, especially when Willem has been aggressive towards his younger brother. Their relationship is evolving, but it remains a work in progress.
Yet Walters believes she has been irrevocably changed for the better by Willem.
“It is the empathy an autistic child will teach you. You will look at this child and say ‘They are naughty’, when they actually are not,” she says.
“EQ hasn’t been something that was my strength. Having Willem has taught me an immense amount of EQ, understanding and empathy. So he’s actually been my biggest teacher.”
One of the most difficult conversations of Walters’ life was breaking the news of Willem’s diagnosis to her father earlier this year.
When I ask what his response was, after a long pause she replies: “That’s a sensitive question, because there are a lot of parallels in their lives, so I think it was potentially confronting for him.”
She then pauses again before apologising for failing to find the words to describe how he reacted.
When I ask if it was negative, she eventually replies: “I think he was potentially dismissive at the beginning. But now he is intrigued. It has evolved and it is still evolving.”
Walters describes Willem’s autistic brain as “unbelievably special” and “out of this world”.
“Autistic people are mesmerising, engaging and it is entertaining just watching them in the world. It is a beautiful mind, right? But with a lot of that comes a lot of complication,” she says, before adding, tongue-in-cheek: “My husband and I still joke that we wanted to have a smart kid. But once you’ve had a smart kid, you just want a simple kid.”
Keeping it simple
Over the two years since she joined Koh, Walters has shown a knack for making strategic decisions that drive real change.
For example, the company discovered almost 20,000 of its biodegradable dish sponges were going mouldy in their warehouse.
So instead of sending them to landfill, Koh converted them into low-cost gardening tools for its customers in the form of sponge gardens.
The unused and eco-friendly sponges act as ingenious water banks in wicking beds, providing plants with essential moisture through capillary action. The sponges act as a layered garden bed, creating a self-watering design, reducing water usage.
Walters says the move into Woolworths was transformational for the business.
“We had one in 10 homes in Australia via e-commerce, which is substantial considering the percentage of people that shop online is not the whole market,” she says.
“So the ability to further grow the business and build out mainstream impact needed to come through playing in more mainstream channels. Launching in Woolworths has been a huge success.”
Going forward she believes there are adjacent categories that Koh can disrupt.
While she won’t comment on the specifics, she says Koh will be innovating in new areas outside cleaning in the near future while maintaining the brand’s values of safety, sustainability and effectiveness.
“For me, sustainability is about mass market reach and making it simple for people,” she says. “If you make it difficult you are not going to get the uptake and at the end of the day, will have less of an impact.”
Given her father has been a gambler his whole life, Walters is an avid poker player and has even set up her own tournaments.
She learned early on from her dad the value of reading body language and observing, a vital component she takes into the boardroom.
Through poker she has also built a strong network of friends and associates and not been afraid to tap into it to ask for opinions, advice or feedback.
While she blames herself for her parents’ recent divorce (because she feels like the family business kept them together for so long), she remains an eternal pragmatist on the break-up.
“I think, scientifically, it is quite difficult for two people to grow at the same pace their entire life,” she says. “So from that perspective, I’m think that if you can beat all the odds, it is a rarity. It is OK to learn, grow and change.
“I actually said to my husband on our wedding day, ‘In my vows, I am not going to say ‘I will love you till the day I die’. Because I think that’s not realistic, and I would be only lying if I said that.”
She is proud of being the female leader of a rapidly growing consumer business, and fears too often, honesty – especially from women – can be viewed as a weakness in the business world.
Her passion is around women being able to be their authentic selves as corporate leaders. It is the most powerful trait she learned long ago from the man who will always be her greatest mentor.
“The one thing that I really admire about my dad is his authenticity. He is not afraid to share his opinion on a matter and potentially ruffle some feathers. So you always know where you stand with him,” she says.
“The value of the conversation that he brings, whether personal or professional, has a lot of weight to it because of that authenticity. It is something that I really try to embed in my personal and professional life, because at the end of the day, what else is there? We are all people connecting with each other.”
More Coverage
