THE PROPERTY DEVELOPMENT REVIEW
be difficult and undifferentiated and what would be special about us that would enable us to build that? And how did you go about doing that? Largely through being pretty focussed about what we wanted to do, we’d already had some corporate partners join us in the Nineties, so we had a bit of a taste of all of that and we decided that we would just go out and see if we could target people who were young, ambitious and leading practitioners making a name for themselves and persuaded them to join us. I think we were a new dawn of energy, a lot of ambition, not hierarchical, fairly flat, egalitarian kind of culture where people were free to pursue whatever is they wanted to do within the scope of what we wanted to do. And we’ve had some ups and downs in all of that, it hasn’t been perfect by any means. But, you know, if you keep your head down and you’re resilient and you understand that the house is never built and you continue to breed and make sure you inculcate through the firm this sort of sense of insurgency. We’re doing something here. We’ve done this. We can do something better than this tomorrow and just go from there. I think those sort of cultural imperatives are really important. And at the same time, you know, it’s a business. I want to ask you about the trajectory of the firm from two people in 1988, to I think 950 plus staff now, how have you managed to get to that level of success for the firm? It’s really thinking about what the future is all the time, where is the work going to come from. And you know, we’re here to serve the interests of corporate Australia and what are those needs and where is there going to be interesting and demanding work that’s going to be highly profitable. And you look at pockets of opportunity to develop there and you grow that capacity. So we grow a lot of that capacity internally and where we think there’s a deficit, we go out into the market and bring people in so it’s been a continuous process of building in that way and a preparedness to take risks, to understand that we’re going to do something a bit different here. What about building client relationships? You build client relationships by doing terrific work. That’s the best way. I mean, people have got difficult problems. They want solutions. They want transactions to be completed in an effective, efficient way. And litigation, you’ve got to communicate with people. You’ve got to produce lawyers who are understanding what they’re doing, understanding what the client’s wanting to achieve here and communicating with them, and that sounds all pretty easy.
But in the execution of that, it’s not. Everybody is capable of doing that. But you have to deliver a first-rate service. You have to develop personal relationships. You have to understand that they’re human beings just like you. They’ve got jobs to do. They’ve got somebody looking over their shoulder. Biggest challenges along the journey? Oh well developing the focus for the firm, working out what’s in and what’s out has been an iterative process. I wasn’t at all disciplined about that in the early years. I’ve learnt that discipline and that focus over the years. So getting all of that right has been fundamental and then bringing people along and getting their buy-in has been critical. What does it take to be successful? Well, I think you’ve got to have a bit of ambition and you’ve got to be clear about what it is you want to do. You’ve got to be prepared to work hard and you have to make choices about what you’re going to do and what you’re not going to do. I think it’s more about resilience, ambition and focus and an ability to live in a world of ambiguity, not knowing what the next question is, let alone the next answer to the question. Also, having a really a strong sense of self-belief that you’re going to achieve something. So it’s an amalgam of all of those things. And anybody who can bring those things together, it doesn’t matter in what field you work, whether you’re working in a cafe that you might have been working in for ten years or something, you know, those people are successful as anyone and I think you’ve got to think of it in that way. And you should. And success should not be looked at through a narrow lens of what might typically be thought of success. I mean, people live successful lives across a whole spectrum of activity that might not be regarded as having the kind of success I’ve had. So I think, if anything, you’ve got to be ambitious. You want to achieve something for yourself, and you want to make a difference. What are the key lessons that you’ve learnt? I think I’ve learnt that those personal attributes are, at the end of the day, more important than natural intelligence and skills. So I’d say that and I’ve got a really strong belief that, you know, Australia is an egalitarian country and with the right conditions, people can do just about whatever they put their mind to. I’m fortunate because there’s nobody in the country that I can’t pick the phone up to and have a conversation with who won’t take my call, you know? You know, you never imagine that those things would be available to you. And so I think people ought to face into the world and have that sort of belief and vision.
April / May 2023 – 9
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