Life, work in balance for PwC chief

Luke Sayers was in between client meetings in Sydney in August 2015 when he received an unexpected call from his father.

PwC CEO Luke Sayers with his wife Cate in Melbourne. Picture: Stuart McEvoy.

Luke Sayers was in between client meetings in Sydney on the last Friday afternoon in August 2015 when he received an unexpected call from his father.

Graham Sayers was a week from celebrating his 76th birthday. But he was calling from the intensive care unit of the Epworth hospital in Richmond and told his son to get the next plane home to Melbourne.

“Dad said ‘I need to see you and your two sisters here tonight’,” Sayers recalls.

A month earlier his father had been diagnosed with motor neurone disease (MND) and been given less than a year to Iive. His knees had been giving way and his speech was slurring.

Now he had developed a blood clot on his lungs and faced a life-and-death decision whether to remove it or not.

“He wanted us to know he had made the decision that he was too proud to go the slow MND route and that he was going to die the quick route. So we spent the next 48 hours with him and he died peacefully. I had lots of pride in him making the decision that was right for him,” Sayers says.

Each of his four daughters, Claudia, Bronte, Lucinda and the now 17-year-old Alexandra, who has Down syndrome, saw their grandfather in his final hours.

Sayers sums up in three words the most important thing his Dad taught him.

“Keep it real. Just keep it real. He believed in honesty and authenticity. The people in life that get ahead of themselves are always the people that come a gutser.”

Following his father’s mantra has made Luke Sayers a no-nonsense, straight shooter but with the charm to be equally at home with a beer and a pie in the outer at the football as he is living it up with the billionaires and the chardonnay set in the president’s box.

Federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg says Sayers displays a “unique combination of being down to earth and highly capable but with an ability to communicate clearly and effectively”.

As he prepares to retire next year as chief executive of the nation’s largest professional services firm, PwC, Sayers describes his legacy at the firm after 7½ years in the role as “amazing as the depth and breadth of our people” and its “values-based culture”.

Today he turns 50 and will celebrate at his expansive home in leafy Hawthorn with a party for friends and family. The guest list is a testament to his cache and networking skills.

In addition to Frydenberg, it includes Lindsay, David and Andrew Fox, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews, BHP chairman Ken MacKenzie, Westpac CEO Brian Hartzer, News Corp senior executive Siobhan McKenna and many more household names in corporate Australia.

But it is family — more than anything — that has shaped Sayers’s approach to people, his business career and life.

Ask her father how the past 17 years of Alle Sayers’s life has changed his world, Sayers replies, slowly: “I think she has made myself and Cate (his wife) more understanding, better people.”

In 2009 his wife of 23 years next month co-founded e.motion21, a not-for-profit dance and fitness school for children and young adults with Down syndrome. Sayers is a director.

“We are more tolerant, more grounded, more understanding, more aware,” he says.

He recalls how they discovered Alle wasn’t like her elder sister after she was born — she didn’t have enough muscle tone to breastfeed.

“We finally got to the bottom of why. Through that process, we turned very internal and very curious, upset and disappointed. You go through all of those emotions. On the one hand you are trying to look after a newborn, but on the other you are asking ‘Oh woe is me, why me?’ ” he says.

“We had gone through all the tests. We thought ‘Why didn’t this get picked up?’ Which quickly turns you into the head space of ‘Well, what if we had been told, what would we have done?’ But I remember one night, we said to each other ‘This is crazy. If we had known, we still would have had Alle because they are our beliefs.’ And really in the scheme of things, everything we had absorbed about what it was got us thinking ‘She will be fine.’

“As you see an amazing child develop, go to school, hold down an amazing job, be independent, you go from negative to neutral to bloody magnificent. Because of her and the impact she has on you and her three other sisters, we feel truly fortunate now.”

Sayers says he told his father the news of Alle’s condition three days after she was born.

“He just looked at me, grabbed my hand and said ‘There is no better place for this child to be’. That was it.”

His mother, Coral, who is now 82, told him they would cope, just as they did with all the other challenges of life.

“When things are hard, that is when friends and family matter most,” Sayers says.

The Sayers girls are close. For many years they attended the Genazzano Catholic girls school in Kew. The youngest two, Bronte and Lucinda, now attend Geelong Grammar.

“None of the girls have ever said it is hard at school. Never. None of them. I think they would tell us,” Sayers says proudly. “I am sure it has been hard on them. Have they every said it? No. But equally they are super proud of who Alle is.”

Lindsay Fox says what the Sayers parents have done for their children is “magnificent”.

“You look at a disability on the basis of ‘Does it affect you.’ And you learn to overcome the effect that it does have on you. It doesn’t stop you from loving them exactly the same as all the other kids. They might be different but they are still your children,” he says.

Sayers says he has never had to put his career on hold because of Alle’s condition. “Cate is a rock star. She is amazing. She is incredibly resilient and determined and we have always just found a way,” he says.

“Yes Alle has Down syndrome, and yes she is blind in one eye and we had to have one of her eyes removed and have a glass eye put in.

“But she gets on the tram, goes down to school, comes back, and hangs out with 46 chromosome kids as opposed to 47.

“Occasionally she does a party trick where her eye falls out and that scares everyone,” he adds with a wide smile.

“But for all intents and purposes, she is another kid.”

When Alle was 10, in 2012, the then 42-year-old Sayers was appointed PwC Australia CEO, the youngest CEO in the firm’s history. He immediately cut 200 staff and 10 per cent of the partners, in the process losing the trust of many who had chosen him to lead them.

It took him up to a year to, as he puts it, bring a “calmness back to the culture”.

Fast forward to 2019 and Sayers is universally respected not only by PwC’s staff, but by the firm’s clients and leaders in the business world.

David Smorgon, who in 2015 sold his advisory business Pointmade to PwC and became executive chairman of its family business practice, describes Sayers as “energetic, likeable, strategic and smart with the skill to make things happen with the backing and support of his team”.

Packaging magnate Raphael Geminder, who served with Sayers on the board of the Carlton Football Club for many years, says he “has been a terrific asset to PwC in growing its business”.

“He builds deep enduring relationships because he is the real deal. I have never ever found him to be political, he doesn’t have a big ego, he is a very level-headed thinker,” he says.

While PwC has grown strongly on Sayers’s watch and remains the biggest accounting firm by revenue in the country, it has also endured controversies such as locking horns with the Australian Taxation Office over alleged “aggressive” tax structures for clients.

Sayers was also one of three partners who made personal investments in Australian Visa Processing, a company part-owned by PwC that is tendering for a government contract to run Australia’s visa processing system.

They were asked to sell their shares, worth less than $50,000 each, back to the firm after revelations of their interests caused an internal storm. There was also media speculation the global firm had intervened because of a perceived conflict of interest.

“The personal investments matter relating to AVP was an ­internal issue for the partnership — it raised an equity issue in terms of who had the opportunity to personally invest,” Sayers says.

“There was no external conflict of interest.”

Last year two anonymous letters from an aggrieved female staff member also emerged criticising the firm’s human resources complaints process and questioning its condoning of extramarital affairs.

It struck at the heart of Sayers’s boasts about culture.

“I felt a mixture of feelings,” he recalls of receiving the first letter in late 2017.

“I felt firstly really sad that somebody had to be anonymous. If there are things that need to be called out, what is wrong with our culture that somebody can’t just put their hand up?”

Sayers says he took a strong stand on the issue at the time and that the firm “continues to try really hard on all things involving sexual harassment and discrimination”.

“Do I believe we have changed the culture and moved the dial on everything related to inclusiveness, yes I do,” he says firmly.

Sayers is also set to be quizzed at a looming parliamentary inquiry into the quality of the big four’s audits of listed companies amid claims their legacy audit businesses are being used to subsidise their higher-margin consulting services.

“We do great quality audits for the majority, we have great people in the place that do great client service work outside of audit. But we acknowledge that from time to time we don’t necessarily get it 100 per cent right,” he says.

PwC has audited Lindsay Fox’s trucking and logistics giant Linfox for a decade, but Fox only met Sayers four years ago.

He describes him as a “friend”.

“Friendship is something you earn. You can’t buy a friend. He personifies that. If there is something I don’t understand he will explain it to me quite simply that I do understand it. I don’t get a bill for that. That is how friends work. We have more of a friendship than a commercial relationship,” Fox says.

Sayers has been advising Fox on family succession issues. The billionaire describes “dividing up the pie” as “just a natural process of life”.

“That will be looked after equally. There is only one way to do it. Cover the thing on the basis of there is no such thing as entitlement, there should be nothing in the form of expectation, and what comes out of it — whether it is $10, $100 or $1000 — the only difference is noughts,” he says.

Sayers appears determined to stay in the private company world in the next stage of his executive career. There is speculation that he is looking at setting up a private equity firm backed by several prominent Melbourne families.

“I think with the trend of the next five years with class actions, litigation and regulation, my choice is probably going to be more towards the private area,” Sayers says, declining to be more specific.

Sayers also appears to be in the box seat to replace Melbourne property developer Mark LoGiudice as Carlton Football Club president next year.

“His involvement at Carlton I think will be topped off after he leaves PwC as president of the club,” Lindsay Fox declares.

As he celebrates his milestone birthday today, Luke Sayers will surely reflect for a few moments on the curve balls life has thrown him.

It will pain him that his late ­father will not be there to celebrate. But the inspiring story of Cate, her daughters and the praise and respect he has garnered at the helm of PwC will more than make up for it.

“Everyone has challenges going through life. I would not say I am special on that,” he says.

“We all live with the challenges and complexity of life. But when you stand back from that, we are very fortunate.”