Chapter 20: You gotta know when you gotta go

Chapter 20

You gotta know when you gotta go

I always remember sitting in a meeting where we were lucky enough to have legendary Australian cricket captain Ian Chappell (who became a board member of Com Tech) speak to us about leadership.

One of our managers asked Ian, ‘How do you know when you have reached your use-by date?’ I remember Ian’s reply so clearly. He said that when he didn’t feel mentally tough enough to lead an Australian cricket team on a gruelling tour of the West Indies, he stepped aside as captain, enabling his brother, Greg, to take his place. A few years later, Ian was asked by Kerry Packer to become captain of an Australian cricket team that was to spearhead World Series Cricket. Kerry knew what an amazing leader of men Ian was.

By 2001, I was totally burnt out – in fact, I was burnt to a cinder. We had grown from 240 people in 1996 to 1400 people by 2000. We had built the largest and most respected network integration company in Australia, but it had taken its toll. I’m not good at much, but I was good with people – staff, customers and business partners. This was the value that I added to the company. My competitive advantage was that I knew everyone in the company, from reception through to sales and tech support. I knew their names and sometimes their partner’s and even their kids’ names. I knew what their hobbies were, what their challenges were and what their objectives were.

In August 2000, we moved to amazing new premises in a heritage building in Sydney’s CBD. I hated it. In our previous, very basic, offices I sat at an open-plan desk right at the front door and saw everyone coming and going. I would ask what deals we were working on, what deals we had won, what I could do to help and what their plans were for the weekend. You could feel the pulse of the company from where I sat. In our new office, they put our GM, CFO, EA, head of M&A and me behind a screen, on a level that was located a long way from the sales team. It was like working in a big corporate. I didn’t feel part of the action, I couldn’t feel the buzz – and it just wasn’t for me anymore.

It was time to say goodbye to my fourth kid. I loved the people and the culture, but I believed that I had lost the ability to make a difference. Everybody should want to add value in a company, no matter their position. Like Ian Chappell, I just felt that I was not mentally tough enough to take the company to the next level. To compound the issue, the CEO of our new owner (Dimension Data) and I each had a different vision for the company’s direction. I wanted to invest in the future while our core business was strong and move the company into the internet age – but the global CEO was fixated on the past. I simply didn’t have the energy to challenge our new owner. In addition, the dot-com bubble had burst. For the first time in our history, we were laying off staff. It was horrible and it was hard.

When UK television presenter Michael Parkinson interviewed Shane Warne, he asked him why he was retiring from cricket. Warne answered, ‘My mentor, Ian Chappell, told me, “Shane, better people ask you why you did than why you didn’t.”’ That was exactly how I felt. In October 2001, I officially walked out of DiData’s offices and never walked back in. I still miss the incredible people and can-do culture that we had in Com Tech. I’m proud of what we achieved during my tenure as CEO, but I knew that my time had come.

The two leaders who took over from me – Steve Nola, who ran the integration business, and Ross Cochrane, who took over as CEO of the distribution and training businesses – did a better job than I would have done taking the company to the next level. There’s a time for coming and a time for going. I am proud that I hired Steve in 1989 to run our Melbourne office, when he was a young kid of 23. I gave him a sales target of $1.8 million dollars for his first year. We were pretty much doing this without an office, so I wanted to give him a target that he would achieve. I remember Steve’s olive skin becoming a pasty white – he nearly fainted. Who would have thought that Steve would go on to run DiData in Australia and preside over a business with more than 2000 people and revenues exceeding a billion dollars? He also ran DiData’s global cloud business. This is what makes me feel so proud. So many of us, myself included, achieved so much more than we had ever believed we were capable of. There are other stories similar to Steve’s, but to tell them I would have to write another book.

A good leader should be able to motivate a team to be the best they can possibly be. I know that at the outset, many of us at Com Tech (again, I include myself) did not realise that with the right attitude, opportunity and company culture, anything is possible.

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