David Jones, Executive Director, Better Place Australia

David Jones

David is Executive Director of Better Place Australia, an electric car infrastructure and services company, which he joined in September 2011. He is also a member of the Board.

David brings extensive management consulting and investment banking experience to his role with Better Place. He is one of Australia’s most respected private equity executives, with 17 years in the private equity industry - most recently as Managing Director of CHAMP Private Equity from 2002 until 2011.

Prior to CHAMP, David was the Australian country head for UBS Capital from 1999-2002, having started in the sector with Macquarie Bank’s private equity group in 1994. He spent four years with Macquarie Direct Investment in Sydney, and one year at BancBoston Capital in Boston.

David holds a Bachelor of Engineering – Mechanical (First Class Honours) from the University of Melbourne, and a Master of Business Administration from Harvard Business School.

He commenced his career as a consultant with McKinsey & Company in Australia and New Zealand, and was General Manager of Butterfields, part of King Island Dairies.

In 2007, David was Chairman of the Australian Private Equity and Venture Capital Association Limited (AVCAL). He is also a Director of the National Museum of Australia, the Beacon Foundation, and Global Sources Limited (NASDAQ).

 

David Jones' Occasional Address speech:

Deputy Chancellor Sanford, Deputy Vice-Chancellor McKenna, Dean Smallman, academic staff, Helen Campbell, graduands, family and friends, I am delighted to address you today.

I firstly want to congratulate you all on completing your degrees.  It is a great achievement and you and your families should be very proud.

I have two thoughts I wanted to share with you all today as you embark on your careers in business. The first is around how you think about what you do, and the second is about how you do it. These observations are based on my experiences in business and life in the 26 years since I first graduated from university. I have worked in private equity (for 17 years), investment banking, management consulting and general management. I have some scar tissue from this experience that I hope you will find useful.

So firstly what should you do? In my view you should do what you are passionate about. In my experience all jobs have their exciting parts and their boring parts. If you have a fundamental interest in the underlying product or service, you will do the good parts better, and you will grind the tough parts faster to get back to the good stuff. Similarly, the best managers I have worked with are the ones who are passionate about their business.

At this stage in your careers you have a lot of career choices ahead of you. I would suggest you consider various exercises to think about what really stimulates you. Think about the case studies you have analysed – which jobs and industries sounded interesting to you?  Or think about how you read business news: which articles do you read, which articles or sections do you skip over?

To make the point in the reverse, if you take a job for the compensation or other benefits and you don’t really care about what the organisation does, this in my view is not a recipe for success. To really succeed, to really add value, is when you come up with unique insights and ideas about how to improve the business.  If you’re not thinking hard about the business – because you don’t care about it – then how will you excel?  You need the passion to stand out in the crowd and increase your chances of making an impact.

Using my career as an example, I have always been interested in business. Something I think I got from my family – my grandfather started and my father ran a clothing company called Fletcher Jones and Staff. So consulting, then investment banking and then private equity got me continually exposed to a wide variety of businesses. And I was lucky enough to get involved at senior levels in these firms, and as such I was able to contribute to a lot of decision making: something I found very satisfying.

Separately I developed a burgeoning interest in getting involved in charitable and “for purpose” organisations, again I think partly from my family, where my parents and grand-parents were actively involved in philanthropic and community organisations. (Flecther Jones for instance was around 2/3rds owned by employees.) As an aside, I would encourage you all to get involved in community and charitable organisations now – often the best thing you can give is your time and experience – particularly given your business training.

But back to my story. I was working in full-time in private equity working with a number of companies, and also sitting on some charitable/community boards a few days a month.  Then it dawned on me, when we worked on helping pro-bono four charities buy ABC Learning that it was possible to combine both my interests: work in a large for-profit business and work in the charitable sector at the same time. (GoodStart, the former ABC Learning, runs around 600 child care centres on a for profit basis, but then returns a substantial portion of those profits back to the community through offering subsidised child care services in tough post codes.) 

So last year, after some reflection, I decided to step away from private equity and join Better Place, an aspiring player in the electric vehicle services sector. Better Place has substantial for-profit goal – to be the leading electric vehicle services player in Australia and globally – but also has the community benefit of moving the transport system off polluting petrol to clean renewable electricity.  Incidentally I drove out here today in a prototype all-electric Holden Commodore. Clean, green, quiet and fun to drive.  (But that’s another story – what did I say about passion?) At Better Place I can combine my interest in business and also have a community impact.  For me, doing it all in one place is a bonus, rather than working in business during the week and during some charity work on weekends.

So I have changed up my career substantially, to continue to do things that I am passionate about. 

And I think you can too.

I have never really thought directly about managing my resume, nor about compensation. Money is useful as a means, but not an end.  In my view if you do a good job – and a great start in that is something you’re passionate about – then the compensation will follow.  Incidentally I am earning less now than I was before. But I am far more stimulated and happier, and again as Better Place grows I am sure my compensation will too.

So that’s my first point: what you should do. My second thoughts are around how you do it. 

Here are three approaches that have worked for me that you may find useful in your careers:

1. Ask questions. I have spent my career asking questions, sometimes stupid-sounding questions. It regularly amazes me how a crazy sounding question often leads to an interesting discussion, and sometimes some new perspectives.  Often the end of the conversation is very different to the starting question, but without the question the end would never have happened. 

For example, recently I joined the board of a family owned, European-based, education company. Their core business was English language travel, which is young people travelling to English speaking countries to do typically an 8 week English immersion course.  Their business is very strong, and they have lots of opportunities to improve in language travel.  In my second board meeting earlier this year I asked why we were seeking to expand into university pathway programs, which is preparing foreign students for undergraduate courses. This was not an easy question to ask.  The company had a great team that had been working on it for around a year, they had their first university very interested to commit to being a partner, and more broadly in the education sector this was seen as a “sexy” segment to be in. The team had flown in from all over the world for the approval of this plan at the board meeting. After some discussion however we all recognised this was quite a different business, with quite different dynamics, and one which we had no experience in. Furthermore we had plenty of issues and opportunities in our core language travel business. So, based on one simple question, after 30 minutes of discussion, we decided to stop that development initiative, and redeploy those resources into our core segment.  Not easy, but important to ask these questions.

Related to this, if I don’t understand what has been said, I ask for another explanation. Then if I still don’t understand after the second explanation, then I don’t support what is being recommended. In my view if something can’t be clearly explained to you, then I conclude two things: the presenter does not understand what they’re recommending, or even if they do, you should not support it. You need to understand what you’re doing, otherwise how can you take responsibility for an initiative if you don’t get what they do.

2. Focus on a few critical things. In my experience most businesses are really only driven by a small number of critical variables. If you get them right, success normally follows. Many companies often try to not only do too much (like the language travel example above) but also they monitor too many variables. One company I invested in was Austar, the regional pay-TV company, recently merged with FoxTel. Austar was broke and management were distracted with a myriad of issues in their many different business lines. After some time assessing their business, it was clear that Pay-TV was their core (and best) business. So we either mothballed or sold their other business lines, but then we really focused in on the key drivers of the central Pay-TV business.  And they are two: sales and churn - new customers and lost customers. We monitored this monthly, weekly, we even got down to daily text messages of yesterday’s sales and churn: two numbers, daily. To paint the extreme at the other end, we talked about programming margins probably only once a year. (They were under multi-year contracts with studios and so we did could not influence them very often.)  Focus on the key things daily, then you’ll be 90% of the way there.

3. Apply your morals.  Be clear what you moral settings are, and then work to those. And work with people with similar settings. Your families and friends are here today, and I am sure you have learned your moral settings from them. In my family growing up my mother was regularly bringing a sense of morals to our conversations.  From time-to-time in business you are presented with difficult decisions, and often where the “better” decision is the more costly one. Sometimes you are presented with options that are “technically” legal, but standing back they are morally challenging. I have found when in these situations that I imagine myself telling my mother what I decided to do – often then the decision is pretty clear.

4. Treat all people the same. Whether you have a degree or not, are CEO or a shopfloor worker, you should be treated the same. In my view this is good common sense, and also I have often learned very useful insights about a business, its culture, its issues, from talking directly and sincerely to people on the shopfloor, the receptionist, etc. Often the real juice does not get to the board room, and definitely all wisdom does not come from the board room.  In many companies I have been involved with our best initiatives have come from regular employees. Fostering an open culture of discussion, of forums for feedback, of listening, is a real opportunity. In the reverse, businesses that have a real distance between senior management and the team, when senior management access is limited, often in my experience are the weaker performers.

So these are my four approaches that I have found useful: ask questions, focus, your morals and people equally. To me they are tools I use every day. 

At the end of the day business is about judgment. There is no right and wrong, rather there are a series of settings and decisions that need to be made on a regular basis. You make a contribution by bringing your perspectives, your experiences, your judgment to a situation. By offering a view of the way forward, you are offering a leadership position, even if you are not strictly in a leadership role. This will be recognised by others.  This does not mean be dogmatic – you must listen, and be flexible to better perspectives – but it is my view that you are hired for your insights, your perspectives.

If you can do these things, and in an industry and business you are passionate about, then I think you’ve given yourself every chance of a successful, and importantly, a satisfying career.

I wish you all every success in your careers. Again, congratulations to you, and please thank your parents and friends for their support.

Thank you

Return to New beginnings for UWS spring graduates

Photos: Sally Tsoutas