S1E6 Attract and Retain Top Talent with Scott Frew

Attracting and Retaining Top Talent is paramount for business success.  

Hear from Scott Frew, serial multi-national entrepreneur and highly successful businessperson as he shares 3 key 'pillars' that he and his organizations use to attract and retain top talent.  Scott has used these 3 key pillars, along with supporting methods, to build market leading businesses with a total of over $750m revenue, and to now build iassest.com, a highly successful and rapidly growing multinational software company.

For more information relating to the podcast and how you can gain access to advisory services to assist you with your business, see www.lseconsulting.net.au

Transcript

CEO Thinking Episode 6
 Attract and Retain Top Talent – Scott Frew

13 March 2024

Philip

Welcome to the CEO Thinking podcast. I'm Philip Belcher, a successful CEO and CEO, mentor, advisor, and business consultant. 

On this podcast, I provide insights to inspire ideas for CEOs, directors, and senior managers to use as they lead their businesses to achieve outstanding results.  I've applied these ideas to start, grow, turn around, and successfully exit businesses as well as to mentor my clients that have achieved great results. 

I regularly host eminent special guests who share their experiences and ideas to inspire CEO thinking...If my guests and I can use these ideas successfully, you can use them too.

In this episode of CEO Thinking, I am honored to be speaking with Scott Frew.  Scott is Founder, President, and CEO at iasset.com.  I have known Scott since the mid ‘90’s when he was a running his first distribution business, Lan Systems, and I was Managing Director at Datacraft, arguably Australia’s leading network integrators at the time.

Scott is an accomplished serial entrepreneur with over 35 years in the IT business specifically in global channels. His current startup is iasset.com, now recognised as the world leader in Installed Base and Product Lifecycle Management.

iasset.com helps Vendors, Distributors, VARs and Service Providers increase revenues and reduce costs on product renewals, cloud tracking and billing, and software subscription management.

Prior to iasset.com, Scott founded Distribution Central Pty Limited which became the 6th largest distributor by revenue in the APAC region with over 160 staff and revenues exceeding $520M. Distribution Central was acquired in March 2016 by Arrow ECS, a division of Arrow Electronics Inc.

Previous to Distribution Central, Scott founded LAN Systems Pty Ltd which rapidly grew to become the largest network focused distributor in the APAC region. LAN Systems was acquired by Datatec Ltd in 2000 and then rebranded Westcon-Comstor.

Scott kicked off his career as a Cobol programmer and in his early 20s he then progressed to helping to found a small network distributor.

A ‘hands on’ leader with a wry sense of humour and acute business acumen, Scott has vast experience in all aspects of starting, growing, operating, and exiting highly successful businesses that continue to be successful to this day.  I am sure you will gain a great deal from hearing Scott share insights into how he attracts and retains industry-best talent.

Welcome Scott Frew to CEO thinking. Thanks for taking the time to talk with us here. As is the format on CEO thinking, we cover three points on essential areas for people in business, and I couldn't think of anybody better to talk about business and the essential things for it than you, Scott, given that you've had such success in businesses and continue to do so. 

So Scott, let's get right into it. So let's talk about talent for a moment. How have you found that talent impacts your businesses and the success of the businesses?

Scott Frew

Thanks for having me on the show first, Phil. 

So to answer your question, all of the businesses are services based businesses, even though the distributors would have products going in and out the door our only real competitive advantage are the people and processes. And people are obviously the biggest overhead to provide services in the distribution context, so when I say distribution, I mean we're buying typically from overseas manufacturers or OEM's and then supplying a reseller or service provider type channel. 

Of all those businesses I've built, the last one we took to 3/4 of a $billion in revenue from scratch and none of that would have occurred if we didn't have the best people of that distribution market.

Philip

Excellent, excellent. And your current business, Scott, iasset, if I'm not wrong, you have your own developers. Is that correct?

Scott Frew

Yes, that's correct. So we originally built the iasset.com platform out of trying to make Distribution Central my last business more efficient. So that my people didn't have to do boring things like, take all the work out of quoting, tracking life cycles, doing renewals automatically, all that sort of process piece which I didn't want them worried about.

Philip

OK, so you've got talented people in all sorts of areas, all the way from the business processes through to developing the code that underpins the business processes.

Scott Frew

Yes, a team of developers down in Sydney. We've got people in North America, people in the UK and then a 24-hour support team of our own people in the Philippines.

Philip

Ohh, there we go. So not only have you got talent in different disciplines, you've got talent spread around the world.

Scott Frew

Yes.

Philip

That's great. So I asked you for three key areas with regards to talent, that is attracting and retaining the talent. And in our discussion before the interview, you mentioned that you had a problem getting down from 8 or more and boiling it down to three. So, I've got a bit of a suspicion that you might have snuck a few of those others in with the three. 

Scott Frew

No, I wouldn't do that to you Phil, I will stick with the three..

Scott Frew

So it wasn't a matter of boiling it down, it just three of the larger items. I mean, the first thing that I would counsel any of the people I mentor or discuss this, sort of, HR and talent, is I employ people that are smarter than me and let them get on with the job. And a lot of people can't do that because they feel it's a threat to them or a threat to their position or whatever. I don't see it that way. I see the larger market is people don't want to take risk where as I’ll take risk. You know, I might be crazy to do it, but that's what I do. 

And the people that come in and work for me are people that generally don't want to take that risk and put everything on the line for a business, but they are a lot more intelligent than me. They're technicians in whatever field they're in, whether it's software development, or sales, or whatever, or QA, any of those areas. So that's my first premise, but that's not one of the three I picked.

Philip

That's a really interesting scenario, Scott. So what you're saying is, is that you look for people who know a lot more about the various areas that they're going to work in that you do,

Scott Frew

Absolutely.

Philip

… and then you as the CEO, President and your leadership team support them to do what they know and what they do really well, is that the way it works?

Scott Frew

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I've seen a lot of businesses fail because they're trying to micromanage the people, because the leadership, or worst case, if they call them managers, think that they're smarter than the rest of the people rather than employing the reverse and putting leaders, not managers in. A leader, you know, as I always say, “To lead is to serve” nothing more, nothing less. That's not my original quote, I can't remember, I think it was a US general. You know, at the end of the day, you are there to encourage these people to succeed and I think a lot of businesses get that around the wrong way.

Philip

So your attitude, and the culture that you've built into the organisation, I presume, and we can talk a little bit more about culture on the way through, but you work on that idea that “to lead us to serve”.

Scott Frew

Yep, absolutely. So I get up every morning, although I'm building business and I do it. (Well I do it because I enjoy it) but I do it because I see opportunities that haven't been serviced before, but I actually do it because I've got a great team of people underneath me that can actually do the business while I'm running around trying to make sure they've got the next opportunity to go and have a crack at.

Philip

OK, so the idea of having those talented people with those skills that you mentioned, you look for people who are smarter in those areas than you are and who may not want to go out in their own right, who may have some risk aversion, you provide them an environment where you take away some of that risk but then support them and give them an environment that they want to be of, is that the way it works? 

Scott Frew

Yep. 

Philip

Excellent. OK. Do you find that in looking for people who are smart in a particular subject areas that it can be very difficult to find these people? How do you go about identifying people with the capabilities? Do you then help them with their own learning in those areas to continue to develop their skills?

Scott Frew

We do. You know the funny thing is, we offer learning through all the businesses I run, and quite often people learn more by getting out there and doing it than they do by going off and doing training. It's always available, but I just find that today learning strategies… you know like kids at school should be taught how to find things, not actually learn things by wrote unless you're going off to do a profession… 

So I think we do absolutely bring the intelligence of our people up through various means. Finding them is almost impossible. And to that point, one of the things we try and always do is make it into the BRW “Great Places To Work” (or it may not be BRW any more) great places to work, because that will automatically tell any individual that's looking for a position with us that we're a great place to work without actually having to do all the work to get to that position. 

So my fantastic HR lady, Zarina, her entire focus is keeping us up there. Now we're a lot smaller than the guys that we have been previously, so we don't qualify to get into the big list, but we are certified by them as a great place to work. So you've got to position yourself so that great people want to come and work for you, or at least experience that fun. 

I think the challenge, even though I pushed the developers out to working from home six months before COVID, it is anyway I think the challenge now is “how do you build culture remotely?”, especially in smaller organisations like us. So we've been, sort of, cracking that nut for a while. I don't think we've solved it completely because isolation, even me, the CEO, I'm isolated. I was living in the UK, got trapped here during COVID at my farm here in Queensland, so I'm isolated from the team in time zone as well as just that general day-to-day conversation. I think that's where the biggest struggle is. 

But you know, Teams has come a long way, (I think Slack is the other one) to try and keep that community conversation going. So I think that's the biggest challenge. But culture is obviously critical to retaining those people, if you know what I mean. And of those eight things that I discussed, the three things that I pulled out of that was:

Fun because you're spending most of your life there. The rest of the most of your life is asleep. 

Candour because a lot of people suffer with politics, which I don't do. So candour is, if you have a problem with someone, don't tell someone else, tell the person you’ve got a problem with; and finally 

Celebrate success. So if you don't celebrate the wins the rest of its meaningless, and it just becomes drudgery. Rather than, you know, you'll finish the great project or deliver the great sale, or whatever it is that the outcome for your business it is. 

So they're kind of a three that I've pulled out of my larger list of eight.

Philip

Alright, so Fun, Candour and Celebrate success. Three key things you work on. The culture aspect of it is something that underpins so much, and yet it's one of the most esoteric things. It's very hard to define, isn't it?

Scott Frew

It's almost impossible to define and what I would say you Phil is that if you can get the right core of people, of those cultural stakeholders, that's the most important part. They may not be the smartest guys in the business, or the girls in the business, but they are cultural stakeholders that are like glue. So you need some of those in there to hold that team in place.

And as I said, it's more difficult today with remote working and all the rest of it, but that underlying culture is what keeps the business driving forward. And then you've got to employ for that culture. And if you get it wrong and employ someone that doesn't structurally fit the culture, because sometimes even great people like me screw up and let other people through the door, you've got to do deal with that almost immediately, because if you don't, then the rest of the culture goes “Ohh. You know you're protecting someone that isn't one of us. That's bad. You know, I don't want to be in a company that's looking after someone that's actually destructive in whatever fashion”.

Philip

So what you find is the culture starts to become somewhat self-perpetuating in as much as you publicly looking for talented people on a regular basis, you're presenting a feel for the organisation, (which is probably not a very technical word) but when someone reads through or gets an impression of what you're doing in your organisations, and I've been very lucky to work alongside you in different areas there and seeing you develop those organisations, which I do have to say from an external point of view, you could always tell that there was a feeling in those organisations. And “Yeah, I'm part of this!”. 

So presenting that to the general population, which out of that you then want to get these talented people, who may have innate skills, they haven't even developed them quite yet, I guess. 

Scott

Yes, absolutely.

Philip

And then once that culture starts to get going, then you as the leader and if you like the orchestrator, are able to inject into it and nurture what it is that keeps that culture going. Is that how you work?

Scott Frew

Yes, that's basically, again that “lead to serve piece is: I'm sitting outside. I mean, it's like the skipper on a naval vessel is always separate from everyone else, because he has to make a tough decision. So you’re not in the middle of the culture, you're on the outside and just moulding that culture so you're working from the outside - in rather than being in the middle of it. The core should be the people of the business, and as I said, we'll get these pillars in the middle which are these cultural stakeholders and they will keep the gel together, but they’ll also be the first to alert when there's something not quite right.

Philip

Interesting. So you've built these large businesses and you continue to build substantial large businesses that really are imperative that your organisations that you've built all of them, it's imperative for the end customers that you operate well and yet you as an individual must be a very busy person. So what's your attitude to any of your people if they want to talk to you about things, how do you go about dealing with that?

Scott Frew

Right. So I've always run open door policy. If door my door is shut it means I’m talking to one of them. But yeah, now it's an open Teams or open Video Conference type environment. And let's go back to the Distribution Central days. I would still get up from my desk if I was in the office and walk around the office, at least a couple of times a day and cover everyone, even the guy that was locked in the back room doing staging for some of the tech or some of the warehouse guys. I had a relationship with every single one of those people working for me, even though there's 160 odd people in that, you know, environment, you've got to get out there and that's that “management by walking about” (I think someone coined the term years ago) that is a critical part of any leader because you won't spot the things you need to spot if you don't get yourself involved. There's too many people that sit in ivory towers behind locked doors or… You know, even though I have executive assistants and you might want to get time with me to go through her, they could still walk in my door, right past her, if they have something urgent to deliver, because I've got that relationship that I speak to them nearly every day, if I'm not travelling.

Philip

Scott, your people, I would imagine, and I, don't think I've ever had directly this conversation with any of them, but they would consider you part of their team, is that the way that that the way it works? 

Scott

Yeah, I think that's how they feel about. I mean even my ex staff that work for. customers and end-users and the rest, still could be boss. But yes, I believe that they’d say I was part of the team.

Philip

Isn't it interesting? It happens, and I've similarly been through different organisations, but you get with those people that you've worked with, and you've been through the trenches, right. You've been through some tough stuff with those people.

Scott Frew

Ohh, absolutely yeah. Yeah, any startups going to, you know… When I start all of those companies, it's usually been me and maybe two other people. So, you know,I'm not a warehouse guy because the 1st 32 stock takes for Distribution Central were me because I screwed it up every time. You know, the first tech support calls were me. The 1st. demonstration was me. I don't. I'm not. I'm a start up guy. Once we get to that really big size, it's all directors compliance and, you know that's a different personality. That's not me. I like to be out talking about customers and people and engaging.

Philip

And your team, and being with them, and making it happen. There's so many things in what you're saying here, Scott, that touching to the other areas that I'm covering on these calls, so be careful I'll tap on you to get back and talk to me about some of those other ones.

Scott Frew

That's all-right Phil, anytime.

Philip

Let's get back to these three points that you had there. 

Scott

Yep

Philip

Let's talk about fun. Well, what I'm hearing is that you see fun is one of the most critical parts so could you talk to me a bit about the fun in your organisations? 

Scott

Look, first of all, if you build that culture, that's very similar and I've got to say, it's a challenge in a software development company, and this is my first software development company, developers aren't necessarily extroverts. But to talk in general terms, you've got to make the environment enjoyable so it can be visual. So we, you know, built offices that look like Silicon Valley offices, even though we’re a boring old distributor. We hung, well we, you know, rented out from various places, to hang on the walls, which would change every, you know, six months or so. We would certainly have vast amounts of alcohol because the IT industry available for, you know, events and things like that, and people wanted to genuinely stay. They, you know, a lot of people want to go home at 5:00 or whatever? My people would generally want to stay and at least have a couple of drinks with their colleagues and sometimes they go way longer than a couple of drinks. 

But create that environment. You know we celebrate people's birthdays by giving them the day off. I hate going and working on my birthday. I kind of have to but that's the nature of the job. But little things are like that, that just gives them a bit of enjoyment, I guess in their employment world changes the way you know. We have kids coming to work, we’d have family picnics towards the end there and we had a lot of families. 

So all of this, I guess, it blurs the line between work and home, but we want to communicate that, you know, you spending a lot of your life with us, we want to make sure you enjoy it. ‘Cause also you'll perform better, you'll stay on longer and you know it's all about trying to keep people engaged and entertained, especially in this modern era, with short term social media type attitudes, I guess so, yes, it's got to be, its critical, it's. Got to be a fun environment to be in.

Philip

Excellent. Scott, that topic of fun, again, you've touched on so many areas, making it enjoyable for people to be there having fun, but you've also touched on making sure that that extends a little beyond just the individual that's working with you and their close people, their families or the people that are around them, so you see that for them to have fun and enjoy working with, you, that you also see it as a holistic side of things, whereas them and their significant others and those that they care for.

Scott Frew

Yep, absolutely.

Philip

So let's talk about that next point that you were talking about there, Scott, candour. What a great term. And I have to say that's not something I hear around the management articles that I see. So tell me a bit more about candour, from your point of view and how it's worked in your organisations.

Scott Frew

Well, it goes to honesty Phil, you know. The best way to describe it is to remove that political situation that often grows in larger organisations. 

First, we have to get people to understand that they're safe. So if you look at, to give you an example in North America, selling to middle management in North America, is fundamentally complex because they won't take risk. The reason they don't take risk is they don't feel safe because they can get fired literally tomorrow. And you know, you always see them on the movies with the box walking out the door. Whereas in Australia and European companies, you can't do that. You've got to go through a process and justify why the actions, etcetera. So giving them the ability to be honest with everyone in the business and expect that in return is a critical part of the business, 

And not involving other people, and you know, from a psychology point of view, you try and get them to understand that the problem’s in front of both of them. It may not be, you know, it's not about you versus me. The problem is here and we'll both got a stand together and look at the problem and see if we can fix it and it might be a process issue that is creating more work downstream. You know there's going to be a solution or, worst case is you get to the point where, OK, we agree to disagree. Here's my position, yours I don't agree with it, but I accept your position, and you move forward. 

And again, in today's technological world, with trials and social media and all the rest of it, I think people have lost the ability to do that because the immediate response is something, that is not good, is to absolutely slam either the person or, you know, the organisation or whatever, rather than how do we solve this together?

Philip

So is that something you as a leader, and your leadership team in your organisations because the organisations, the size of them, they're your relying not just on you and the direct relationship with everybody, you're relying on others and your other leaders to be the same. Is that something that you go out of your way to make sure that you're having those direct conversations with your people.

Scott Frew

Well, I think again, lead by example. If I'm not open and honest with anyone in the organisation, then it's going to fail dismally and sometimes it's going to be a bad conversation, but you've got to be prepared and you should lead them. People will automatically resist being managed. That's not how nature works. So you have to learn through that and you have to go and be able to have those honest conversations with them. Here's the problem or here is the issue, but here's the solution I see. Or you mentor them through to get to their own solution to whatever their outcome is and if you're open and honest with them, they will start to understand it's OK to be open and honest and not be walked out the door because you've said something that is going to cause an issue, but you're actually just highlighting a problem that you're having. And can you wrap something around it to solve that problem in an honest fashion rather than just bitching about it for how many weeks?

Philip

Interesting. Now candour can go two ways. There's a negative connotation around candour where, as you said before, sometimes you’ve got to have the tough conversations. But have you found that, out of that, encouraging that straight talk, that you got feedback from people, that's positive and you've been able to build on and use in the business?

Scott Frew

I have repeatedly got that over those series of businesses, but I've also had people that can't deal with candour. So again, back to the they've got a culturally fit and if they can't handle positive criticism or be able to work through issues with other. colleagues, they're never going to fit because you're never really going to have someone that positively engages and then has the ability to have candour with someone else in the organisation as a proponent rather than a recipient of, if you know what I mean. 

So lead by example, you know, lead to serve, all that sort of stuff. That's what it's all about, and if you demonstrate that ability in front of your team, they work out that it's safe to be like that. 

Philip

Do you find that they then talk to each other in a more candid manner as well?

Scott

Yep, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, I mean, you know, some of them are the leaders over time. And some of my people. And even when they're out talking to customers, they are candid.

Philip

Right. OK. So again, this candour, it sounds to me as if that's something that's built into the culture of your organisations as well.

Scott Frew

Yeah, it’s one of the pillars, one of the 8 pillars.

Philip

There you go. There you go. We're going to have to get to those other five pillars at a different time. Scott, I'm very interested to find out what the other five are.

Scott Frew

Ah, well, we'll leave that for later.

Philip

Stay tuned for the next exciting episode.

Scott Frew

Yeah.

Philip

Thanks for sharing those first two points about fun and candour. Now the third one that you highlighted is an interesting one. I'm not sure this translates into multi-national corporations that I've worked for, but let's talk about celebrating success. What does celebrating success mean in your organisations?

Scott Frew

So obviously they call it work because this is something you're doing really to drive an income so you can go and spend it on or whatever, you know, food all the way through, you know, computer games, whatever it is you're spending money on, right? So, it is work. So, if you're going to do work like a lot of organisations I've seen, and it just is day in, day out, there's no real up and down, there's no ebbs and flows. You're going to lose interest in it, or you're going to do a terrible job because you're not fully engaged.

If you celebrate success, and it could be just a minor thing that's happened during the day with some individual that's gone out of their way to deliver something above and beyond. Or it's a project delivery piece or, you know, I've had people go into warehouses in the middle of the night to pick up products for customers who are down, who are critically down, that need to be up 24/7. You've got to acknowledge the efforts of those people, because otherwise if they go and do that and get no recognition, then it doesn't have to be financial or anything like that, it can just be recognised throughout the organisation. They're not. Going to keep doing that. 

So, you've got to take every success that there is and then make sure you explain that to the organisation, not just, you know,” Thank you, John”, or whoever. You've got to tell the entire organisation what John did, how he did it, why he did, it etcetera and then they all understand that they'll be recognised for that sort of thing. 

And even if even at a lower level, if it's only a small thing, at least getting on the phone and saying to the warehouse guy, “you did a great job” or inside sales where “you do a great job” or finances, you know, “you just saved us some money” or whatever. You really need to push that home because that's what brings the ebb and flow into the business rather than this, just monotony of work.

Philip

Interesting. So, it's not the big things. It's not saying, “Oh, we're going to hand our gold medals here to someone who achieved something for the whole year”, which you do.

Scott Frew

Yeah, absolutely.

Philip

But it's finding the wins and the successes and the things on the way through, however big or small, and making sure that they're celebrated.

Scott Frew

Well, all those little things build up to be a big thing, right? So when you have the gold medal at the end of the year, what we used to do is whichever staff member got Employee of the Year, it was all voted on by the cohort, got to join us with our customers on overseas trips to various places. And that was a huge drive for all this stuff because they wanted to get on those trips, and these were not inexpensive vacations. They were, you know, networking, bonding trips with the CEO's of our top 20 customers. And you get every type of individual and make that trip for each year. They were all driving for it. So all those little ones do lead to the big one at the end of the day, but you've got to acknowledge the little ones.

Philip

Fantastic. And just a word of thanks and congratulations, which follows through on your candour. If you're walking around or picking up the phone and talking to someone and saying, “Well, thanks for getting into the warehouse the other night and getting that gear out because that's saved our customer, really wanted to say thank you”. Now whether there was any tangible reward under that or not, but just hearing from, say you, as the CEO or a senior person in the organisation, that can make a lot of difference to a person.

Scott Frew

Huge difference. Huge mental difference.

Philip

Yeah. And you mentioned earlier that people get a day off on their birthday. 

Scott

Yeah, absolutely. Well, who wants to work on their birthday? Right? If it fell on the weekend, they can take the Friday or the Monday. 

Philip

Is that right? That's great. Yeah. I often wondered about that. I wondered why we got a day off for the Queen's Birthday, and I didn't even know her, but I had to work on my birthday. Just never quite made sense.

Scott Frew

Well, yeah, I couldn't work out which birthday was the Queen's Birthday, because every state is different I think.

Philip

I don't know. I'm not sure about that. But anyway, we digress. 

So celebrating those little things. 

It's interesting. I when I was working for what was called the PMG which became Telecom, which became Telstra, we had a Senior Engineer of the area where I was working, come down to the depot that I was working at, which was a telephone installation depot and he was walking around and meeting people, which was, “Wow!”

These people lived in ivory towers. And so I was this long haired trainee with hair halfway down my back, and I was introduced to him as the Trainee Technical Officer in the depot. So, I was the only one. I didn't think I was anything particularly special, but I kind of thought it was cool to meet this guy, because, you know, we were just ‘plebs’ only working out here. These engineers, they were unobtainable, untouchable. 

And he walked around and when I was introduced to him as the Trainee Technical Officer, obviously that meant that I was studying engineering, basically. so, he had a very broad English accent or very toffee English accent. He went “Whowoowweeroooo?”. We couldn't quite understand what he was saying. And I said “I'm sorry. I don't quite understand, He said “Whowoowweeroooo”. So I said, “Look, I'm sorry. I don't know”. I didn't want to say I can't understand you. So as he walked away, I realised that he was asking me the differential coefficient of Cos and Sine X. 

This was a Christmas goodwill, meet the pleb manoeuvre, and meanwhile he was asking me about differential calculus, so I just thought, man, celebrate success? So I thought I'd kind of done OK getting to where I got to, man. he just smacked me down. And right there and I have to say to you, I remember that and that was in 1973.

Scott

Yeah.

Philip

I remember that to this day and right there and right then, I said “I got to get out of this organisation, cause if that's the attitude of that person that comes around here just to say hello and meet people, I don't want to work here anymore!”, and sure enough down the track I just, you know it never got any better than that. 

So just that, just you congratulating people, giving their birthday off, etcetera, makes a huge difference to those people.

Scott Frew

Yeah, absolutely. And it costs you a day of productivity, but mind you, my staff, because we're a global business, are working out of hours, and, you know, sometimes weekends ‘cause the Saturdays overlap with the Americans and Europeans. And so, you've got to take into this view of, yes, there's a productivity hit potentially of taking an extra day off, but at the end of the day it will get paid back in spades in productivity from those people who appreciate the fact that the company actually cares about what they do for their birthday.

Philip

There you go. These seem like little things but they all add up, don't they? 

Scott.

They all come together. 

Philip

So look, we're running out of time and I know you're extremely busy. So, I really do appreciate your time. Scott. Thank you. 

Just to touch on one last point and then we'll wrap it up. We are now, let's call it remote, with this working here. Have you found anything that's working for you in that or is it still a work in progress?

Scott Frew

It's always work in progress. I'm by nature of my personality, I don't sit still. I'm always looking for the next, you know, like 100 metre runner looking for the next 0.1 of a second. I'm  always looking for that. What's done is done. Let's move forward. 

I haven't got any magic for you on this one, Phil. For the Australian team, we bring together for a monthly lunch, so that at least they're face to face each. I'm leaving on Sunday for around the world trip. When I get to England, I'll bring all the English team together from the various parts of the UK. 

Unfortunately, I won’t get through to Manila but my leader that sits in Denver, he manages those people, I shouldn’t say manage, he leads those people, he flies over and sees them on a regular basis. 

So the face to face thing is critical. And even for you and I doing business out there in the field, the difference between meeting face to face on a Zoom call is completely different. When you're present in that with your staff or you know the people that surround you,it's a different outcome to if you jump on a Zoom call ‘cause as soon as you turn off the Zoom call, and I accept we're doing a radio show, that if you're doing a Zoom meeting, as soon as you turn off, you're like “What I do now?” and you’re off somewhere else. 

When you leave a meeting, you've got the exit part, and the conversation, and you go to the car park. And there's always a different outcome for that face to face. So you've got to somehow get face to face with all of those people. And yes, it's particularly difficult because we are global, we're small organisation, but we’re global. But I think if you're a local team inside this this country, or this region, then you should absolutely face to face your people as often as you can and have them face to face because this remote business works and it's convenient for a lot of things, but for our mental health and our culture building thing, it's almost impossible to do that.

Philip

Fantastic. So, what I'm hearing is digital transformation is all well and good, but don't forget there's people at the middle of it.

Scott Frew

Yeah, absolutely. That’s a fact for the people. You have nothing if you have bad people or people that are just disconnected.

Philip

Fantastic. But look, really appreciate it. There's so much in there that the listeners to this podcast can tap into. Your three key points of; make it fun, be candid, and celebrate the successes. I think there's, it wouldn't matter how small or large your organisation is, you can work out ways of doing that in your businesses and whether you are not-for-profit or a for-profit, it's just as important to make sure that those components that you've pointed out to us Scott fit into the business.

Scott Frew

Absolutely.

Philip

So thanks so much. Really appreciate it. I'm sure that everyone's got a lot of. I'll look forward to talking to you in the near future, Scott, to hear the other five points on how you attract and retain the best talent.

Scott Frew

No worries, Phil. Thank you.

Philip

Thanks Scott. 

Thanks for joining me for this episode of the CEO Thinking Podcast. 

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I'm Philip Belcher and I'll look forward to talking to you in the next episode.