Can Christine Holgate deliver the goods for Australia Post?
Christine Holgate is not your everyday CEO. Smart, ambitious and driven, she is also frank and someone who does things differently.
She doesn’t know them yet, so she calls them all Brian. All those posties — 30,000 or more — crisscrossing the country in their acid-green reflective gear, manning the desks at more than 4000 post offices, sorting the mail. An army of Brians (and Brian-ettes), binding communities like a nationwide matrix of trusty, reliable, rain-hail-or-shine connective tissue. She can’t wait to meet them, to tell them how important they are to the future of the country. Those posties, and the cohesion of the communities they serve, are the reason British expat Christine Holgate has taken on the top job at Australia Post, making her, as one media outlet breathlessly reported, “Australia’s most important woman”.
It is a weighty task, remodelling the 208-year-old postal service into a modern logistics powerhouse in an age of digital disruption. That’s presumably why Holgate’s predecessor, Ahmed Fahour, was paid the big bucks. The revelation of his $5.6 million salary package caused a scandal earlier this year and, upon her appointment in June, much was made of the fact that, according to parameters subsequently set by the Commonwealth Remuneration Tribunal, Holgate’s pay packet would be less than half of Fahour’s.
But Holgate, 53, insists “hand on heart” that money has never been a motivator, and even the most hardened cynic would give her the benefit of the doubt. She’s taking a sizeable pay cut to leave the helm of Blackmores, the family-owned vitamin company she pushed into the lucrative Asian market, steering its shares from $20 to a peak of $220 during her nine-year tenure. (They have since dropped to just under $90.) It was a feat that made her a rock star in business circles and won her several top CEO accolades. The driver, she says, was making the world a better place through the power of nutritional supplements. Similarly, the lure of the Australia Post position is the chance to make a “social contribution” and to “build the future” of her adopted country.
Blackmores’ 72-year-old chairman Marcus Blackmore is “disappointed” to see her go but knew even a substantial pay rise couldn’t persuade her to stay. “I never even prompted that discussion because I knew she was not joining Australia Post for the money; she was joining for altruistic reasons,” he says. It all fits with Holgate’s description of herself as a “free-market socialist”, a seemingly paradoxical term that seeks to prove social awareness can sit happily alongside a commercial mindset. Hard head. Soft heart. Her worldview was formed early: as a bolshie English schoolgirl she made a quid selling “Ban the Bomb” badges, an unlikely marriage of right-on politics with bald-faced capitalism. “It’s about being entrepreneurial, but also giving back to people,” she says.
Those who are inured to the canting pieties of corporate Australia may be raising their eyebrows about now, but Holgate’s friends and associates insist she walks the walk. “That’s not bullshit,” says renowned neurosurgeon Charlie Teo, a good friend who last year climbed Mt Kilimanjaro with Holgate for his Cure Brain Cancer Foundation. Teo once accompanied Holgate on a tour of the factory floor at Blackmores and says he was astounded to find she knew every worker’s name and personal circumstances. As we speak, he has just finished operating on a Blackmores staffer’s mother who had been told her cancer was “inoperable”. Holgate arranged for her to be flown over from Singapore to see Teo. “Corporate Australia has a reputation for being impersonal, calculating, money-driven, and generally those at the helm of successful companies are pretty callous and cutthroat,” he says. “But Christine is different. It’s not so much altruism as kindness.”
Kindness is not a word that crops up often in the business realm. But Holgate is not your everyday CEO. Smart, ambitious and driven, she is also frank, accessible, trusting and demonstrative, unusual qualities in a competitive arena where top executives, particularly women, play their cards close to their chest. “Christine’s very personable and very genuine and very interested in the role she can play in the community,” says Bega Cheese chief Barry Irvin, who last year formed a joint venture with Blackmores to launch a line of infant formula. “She’s got a very soft heart, and has that broader view of the important things in life.” People are what matters. It’s why, when she thinks of all those posties, she pictures Brian, the regular who delivers the mail to her dear old mum back in Cheshire, northern England. Calling them all Brian creates a matrix of people, not numbers, and it aids her in framing the details of a plan.
Though Fahour put the national carrier in the black and leaves it in good shape, Holgate will face some challenges when she starts in October. The volume of letters delivered continues to nosedive at a double-digit rate and the arrival of e-commerce juggernaut Amazon poses a very real threat to the organisation’s $3 billion-a-year domestic parcel delivery business if it sets up its own delivery system, as it has in other countries. She’ll be tasked with expanding Australia Post’s Asian capabilities, dealing with a highly unionised workforce and finding new revenue streams. But top of her to-do list is saving Brian’s job. “I don’t want the post offices closing down and I don’t want Brian to lose his job,” she says. “Now, will some posties lose their job? I don’t know. I can’t clearly say that but, my God, I’m going to give it a fight.”
A brace of Chinese guardian lions stand sentry at the entrance to the Blackmores campus at Warriewood on Sydney’s northern beaches. Once past their bared teeth, the vibe is serene and green. A walkway lined with therapeutic herbs — camomile, lavender, aloe vera — leads to a cluster of light and airy buildings, naturally cooled and ventilated using sustainable design principles. Everyone’s smiling. You could probably leave your car unlocked.
Holgate opens the glass door to her office. All the trappings of an office are present and correct. So why the sense I’m being ushered into the backstage dressing room of a Hollywood star? Perhaps it’s the heady drifts of fragrance within. Or the enormous spray of hot-pink lilies still resting in their paper sheath. I think, however, it’s her.
As a teen rebel, Holgate once flaunted a shaved head and a nose ring. Today, she is a study in low-key glamour: knee-skimming coat of flamingo pink, heeled suede boots, a filmy scarf. Her nails are painted the colour of red geraniums.
Holgate is, by her own definition, “girlie” but she’s also charismatic and unexpectedly candid. Confessional, even. She will tell me later, through a veil of tears, of a pivotal life event following a family tragedy. It not only redirected her career but triggered a conscious decision to be vulnerable and open enough to, for example, reveal intimate details of an intensely personal moment to a stranger. She hasn’t just shed corporate armour; it’s as if she’s peeled off an outer layer of skin.
Initially, though, the corporate dynamo launches into an anecdote about the press conference announcing her appointment as one of the highest paid public servants in the land. It was June 26. Holgate knew she was taking a big step up from Blackmores, with its annual revenue of $720 million, to Australia Post, which has annual revenue of $6.5 billion. She would see the number of people in her employ jump from 1000 to 30,000. She hadn’t yet wrapped her head around just how big a deal it was, however, until she emerged to a find a solid wall of photographers and TV crews. “That’s when I realised, ‘Oh my God’,” she says. And then she looked at her phone.
“All sorts of random Australia Post people had found me on LinkedIn and started sending me messages: ‘Can we come and see you?’” The messages that day numbered in their thousands, and it wasn’t only the postal workers who tracked her down. “A number of people have reached out to congratulate me and also tell me about the challenges of the queues in their local post office,” she says. A Blackmores shareholder emailed to protest about the cost of stamps. An acquaintance complained about delivery delays. Former Telstra chief — and Holgate’s ex-boss — David Thodey texted with a “well done” and added that, by the way, the snaking queues at the Neutral Bay post office in Sydney needed sorting pronto.
A tsunami of randoms flooding your inbox with grievances and gripes: surely a busy executive’s worst nightmare? Not at all, says Holgate, whose international career spans telecommunications, internet businesses and finance. It was “really lovely” to hear from them all and, anyway, it’s not as if she’s hiding. “Almost anyone can find my phone number and my email address,” she says. “I’m very open.” She’s not kidding: 15,000 Blackmores shareholders routinely receive dispatches with her mobile number at the bottom.
“Nobody believes it’s really my number, but I do it and I’ll tell you why I do it,” she says. “You know when something goes wrong and you’re so frustrated — you can never get to speak to the CEO, can you? Well, I want people to think that they can talk to me. If you empower people with the thought that they can talk to you, they often don’t need to. But if you say they can’t, they get totally frustrated and you become this aloof person. And you need the support of those people; it’s like a relationship, isn’t it?”
She insists she will be just as accessible at Australia Post, even though friends like Teo have warned that she’s “mad” to do that. “People know you’re doing a job and they respect you for it,” she counters. “They’ll only come when they’re massively frustrated and I think that’s a good thing. I’d quite like to know as it’s probably something going wrong in our system.”
Who writes letters any more? At the end of June, outgoing Australia Post chief Fahour struck a new enterprise bargaining agreement that effectively shields posties from mass redundancies sparked by the death of the letter for at least the first three years of Holgate’s tenure. Australia Post will commit to no forced redundancies with one proviso: that the workers look for another job in the organisation. Holgate will continue the organisation’s strategy of increasing the role of posties in delivering smaller parcels ordered online. But she knows that’s not enough.
“The posties are under serious threat,” she says. “People aren’t sending letters anymore, but here we have these postmen, and my observation is that they are the most trusted person who comes to your house. Most people know their postman and they know their post office. In rural communities, sometimes the only shop is the post office.”
Holgate has a plan for all those letter-less Brians. Here, she starts scribbling furiously on a scrap of paper, outlining her vision for a network of postmen, trusty and true, traversing the country and carrying out social services, knitting together communities in danger of being riven or destroyed by the onward march of digitisation. Brian could do in-house checks on the elderly. Parcel pick-up as well as delivery. Do door-to-door banking. “We are looking out to a future with an ageing population — 30 per cent will be over the age of 65 very shortly — and they are not going to want to do everything on the latest device,” she says. “They’ll want to go and talk to somebody. I think we could really empower the post office to be a place of trust in the community, offering advice as well as doing all the things the post office traditionally does.”
Some European countries have their postmen deliver dry cleaning and groceries. Others deliver over-the-counter medicines. “One of the biggest burdens of healthcare costs is that they have to deliver the medicine to people’s homes,” she says. “Why could we not consider having the postmen do it? Why are we paying organisations owned by foreign nationals to do that when the government already has a person going to that house? Any profit that comes from [Australia Post] actually goes back to the government and the people of Australia, not to some bloody foreign country.”
And how does she imagine the postal workers will feel about taking on additional responsibilities? Her answer is succinct and typically forthright. “I think the posties want jobs,” she says. She’s read the room there. “Nothing’s off the table as far as we’re concerned,” says Communications Workers Union national secretary Greg Rayner. “The writing’s on the wall with the letter business so the troops are happy to discuss any ideas she might have that will bring in more revenue for the company in order to maintain their jobs.”
Marcus Blackmore predicts Holgate will have “more on than the first settlers” dealing with the three different unions working for Australia Post but says “she’s eminently capable of managing that”. Though they hail from different sides of the political divide — he’s a “capitalist with socialist tendencies” while she’s a “socialist with capitalist tendencies” — Blackmore says their leadership styles are similar. Asked to describe that style, he settles on “benevolent dictator”, adding: “She wants to get on with the job, she’s decisive, but she also cares about the people it affects.”
Holgate is also attuned to the demands of unions. Her first job after migrating to Australia in 2003 was at Telstra, where she rose from marketing director to head the telco’s business sales unit, giving her responsibility for 4000 unionised workers. At Blackmores she continued an employee profit-sharing scheme which, at the peak of the company’s share price, delivered bonuses worth six weeks’ pay. In highlighting her qualifications for the role, Australia Post chairman John Stanhope noted that, along with her proven ability to grow a business in Asia and her success in working in highly regulated industries, Holgate was “a warm and authentic and honest” leader who was “good at motivating people”.
Holgate grew up with two sisters and two brothers on a smallholding in rural Cheshire, England, near the village where her parents were born. Her father ran a building company, but also took in strays. “We weren’t really farmers but one of dad’s mates went bankrupt and had nowhere to put his cows so they grazed on our fields,” she says. “Somebody else gave us two blind potbelly pigs they had no use for, and my brother turned up with a bunch of chickens from school that were going to be put down. We also took in a donkey that had been abandoned in a ditch.” Holgate remembers a constant stream of foster children, and a homeless man joining them for dinner every Christmas. “It was probably an unusual childhood in that way,” she says. “Mum and Dad did an enormous amount of charity work and the importance of giving back was just how we were brought up.” Her entrepreneurial father also insisted she earn her pocket money, prompting her to set up a string of “little businesses”.
Even as an eight-year-old, Holgate dreamt of the wider world beyond. “I have a very vivid memory of standing on the gate at the end of the drive and looking out at the world, wanting to be free,” she says. “I was only a kid but I knew I didn’t want to be stuck in a village.” At the age of 18, she took off for the bright lights of London but she was a rebel without a cause until she met her “guardian angel”, a kindly 78-year-old named Flo. “You can do better than this,” Flo told the young punk with the pierced nose when she wandered into a church, achingly lonely and seeking out solace. Holgate had been lying awake at night staring at the broken polystyrene tiles on the ceiling of an attic bedsit in north London, stomach left growling from a diet of packet soup. She knew Flo was right. So she enrolled in a business course at college and she and Flo set up a small cleaning business to pay her way through her studies. Now, when Holgate stared at that cracked ceiling, her mind churned with ambition: one day she would be a chief executive.
“I think it’s a wonderful story,” says Blackmore, who’s often heard Holgate describe the unlikely friendship with Flo as a defining moment in her life. “She decided she could be better and that’s a journey she took in life that’s now culminated in her running one of the biggest businesses in Australia. What’s delivered for her is hard work, passion and caring for others.”
Holgate’s international career has seen her work across Europe, the Caribbean and Hong Kong, holding executive roles at Cable & Wireless, investment bank JP Morgan and at the doomed British telco Energis. It was after the latter went into administration in 2002 that Holgate made one of her characteristically bold decisions. She upped stumps and moved to Australia; soon after, Telstra’s Thodey offered her a job.
Today, Holgate owns a house in Sydney’s blue ribbon harbourside suburb of Mosman and a $5 million Pearl Beach getaway on the Central Coast. The Collingwood Football Club board member is also finalising plans to buy a terrace in East Melbourne, close to Australia Post’s head office and, incidentally, the Melbourne Cricket Ground so she can cheer on the Magpies. Her Blackmores shares are worth $4.3 million. Holgate is not hard up. But her working-class roots aren’t forgotten and her ties to her family in England remain as strong as her northern accent. Her father has died, but Holgate talks to her 81-year-old mother on the phone every day.
She also stepped into the role of mum to Brian, 15, and Eddie, 11, the two boys left motherless when her older sister, Elizabeth, died of cancer in 2008. They live with their father in England, but she visits regularly and Facetimes often. The boys were in her wedding party when she married Michael Harding, the chairman of engineering group Downer, in the English coastal town of Aldeburgh, Suffolk, in 2015. She met Harding at an Ernst & Young event in Sydney and was surprised to find that not only was he also from northern England, they used to drink at the same pub in Tarporley, Cheshire. “Sometimes things are just meant to be,” she says.
Holgate points out her young nephews, flanking her mother in a framed photo on her desk, and suddenly loses her composure. Her sister’s death, agonising and prolonged, is still a raw wound and tears appear at the mention of her name. “Over two years she had multiple operations — the cancer had spread — but I would not tolerate her ever saying to me she was dying,” she says. “But she was dying, and she must have been in enormous pain.”
Elizabeth left her younger sister a note when she died, a simple pen-on-notepad scrawl, asking for one thing: that Holgate dress her body for the coffin. It was the hardest thing she’s ever had to do. “Me and my brother-in-law, we got the clothes and we go down to the funeral parlour and Elizabeth is on this slab,” she says. “I just couldn’t look at her but I really wanted to do it because it was the one thing she’d asked me to do, besides look after the boys.” That’s when she noticed her brother-in-law stroking his wife’s hair and talking softly in her ear. “Here was a man who didn’t see this emaciated body that had gone through hell; he saw the 23-year-old woman that he’d married and he loved. And I knew then that I had to change; that I had to let people in.”
She takes a sip of hot lemon water and a deep breath. “I knew watching him that if I wasn’t careful I was going to live a life where, sure, I might have a great career and travel around the world and do all these things, but I may not have ever really allowed anyone to love me properly. And I might not have spent enough time doing something which was inside me, which is the side of me that calls for social responsibility. That was the moment I kind of knew I had to change.”
The day she flew back to Sydney after attending Elizabeth’s funeral, a call came from the same headhunter who had introduced her to Telstra, suggesting she meet with Blackmore, who was looking for a CEO to head his pills and potions company. Emotionally raw from her sister’s death, Holgate was taken with the notion of complementary and alternative medicines. “I always felt like it was her, that Elizabeth made that happen,” she says.
The Busa Wangdue Goenpa monastery sits high in the mountains in the east of Bhutan, the insular little kingdom that measures its progress not in terms of Gross Domestic Product but Gross National Happiness. Eight hours’ drive from the capital, Thimphu, the monastery has no mobile coverage and the rare visitor can go days hearing nothing but the sonorous chanting of the monks and the call of black-necked cranes. Peter Osborne, managing director of Blackmores’ Asian division, donates half his salary to the Buddhist temple and nearby village and has been urging Holgate to visit for many years. It’s rare that the CEO of a publicly listed company can afford to be offline but the moment she resigned from her Blackmores post, Holgate booked a ticket. You’ll find her in this Himalayan eyrie next month, seizing two weeks of peace far from the jangly Western world and the stresses of corporate life. She’ll be chanting, meditating, helping out; clearing the whiteboard of a vigorous mind before she sets out on her journey to try to save Brian’s job at Australia Post.