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John Donlan: Building An ‘A’ Team

Following last week’s interview with Nick Nairn, it was wonderful to catch up with John Donlan the CEO at Pharmacare on this week’s podcast. John’s success can be put down to one key focus – Building an ‘A’ team.

Download the podcast on iTunes, subscribe or click to listen: Superior Sales Disruption Podcast – Episode 4

An employee, like a start up, requires a certain amount of up-front investment. A good leader, like a good investor, knows how to exercise patience. If you take this approach with your whole ‘portfolio’ of employees, the result will be an A-team: people who achieve the ‘sweet spot’ of highly engaged growth at different times. John Donlan is one of the most respected CEO’s in Australia and his emphasis on people to drive growth has seen Pharmacare evolve into a half billion behemoth.

Download the podcast on iTunes, subscribe or click to listen: Superior Sales Disruption Podcast – Episode 4

Team Transformation

Getting The Right People On The Bus

The Right Cultural Fit

I’ve found that working with a smaller business you got to be hands on with all areas of the business and whilst that suits me I know that it doesn’t suit everybody. It’s something I always talk to people when they’re looking to come into Pharmacare and the type of business we are. Whilst we’ve grown a lot in the last 20 years we’re still a private company so everybody gets in and gets involved in different areas of the business. I’ve always enjoyed and being someone who’s come up as a salesperson, I for many years have been in involved in marketing and logistics and so that cross fertilization and experience across many different areas of the business is the thing that I’ve always enjoyed.

Creating New Markets

When I joined Pharmacare, it was a $30 million business, predominantly in the pharmacy market and had been operating for about 15 years at that stage. It was said to me that Pharmacare could never make grocery work and that was the lure to get me into the business. Over the last 18 years, we’ve grown that business from a $30 million business to what will be a $500 million business at the end of this current financial year. We now operate and have offices all around the world (including Shanghai, Guangzhou, UK, Europe, USA, Canada, Malaysia, Thailand, New Zealand etc).

Crisis Management

The pan pharmaceutical crisis some 15-16 years ago nearly wiped the business out in a day. That was a real challenge for us and the industry took a long time to get over that. But we pushed through that and it galvanised us. We actually acquired from Unilever, Brut and Norsca during that period of time. And whilst many of us probably said to Toby the owner, it wasn’t the right time to make those acquisitions; his belief was more about how we got back up on our feet and, got some brands in place. And we did a deal with Unilever and that really helped us get through to the next stage.

NPDs and innovation is what we’re all about. If you talk to any of the retailers that we deal with, that’s what we’re known for. We’re very quick to market. I’ve just come back from a trip over to the states last week where we had about 15 or 20 of our marketers from around the world over to the states to look at stores and a big Expo that occurs over there from a natural health perspective. So we’re always looking for innovation and bringing innovation to the market. Whenever we bring people into the business, they know that’s what it’s about. And from a marketing perspective, we get plenty wrong. But we’ve got a lot right over the years and we see ourselves as leaders in that area. From kids gummies that we brought to market probably 15 years ago now, to being the first to come into grocery with bulk packs of vitamins. Innovation is in our DNA. So we’re very quick to look at ideas and to look at NPD and those sorts of disruptions. We’re not as big as some of the others. But that’s a real drive.

Mentors Help You Grow

A former CEO said to me to me once never be shy to change a decision. Don’t be too proud to say no, that’s a decision I made, I’m going to stick with it. Be big enough to say, “No, no, no, it isn’t working out as we like and we’re going to move to a different direction.”

It was fantastic having a podcast with someone who clearly loves developing an A team. Not only does John seek external perspective but is also savvy enough to encourage ‘reverse’ mentoring. Not just from industry ‘doyens’ but also from those just starting. “You can watch you can learn from them. You need to know from those younger people how it is that they, manage their lives, how they get information, how they get content.” You can’t stop the change that’s going to occur. So I think it’s better off getting involved and understanding why. And again, getting into that strategy and the plan going forward with the new challenge.

The Pharmacare phrase is to create tomorrow today. Somebody is sitting in the shade today, because somebody planted that tree many years ago. And I think that’s what businesses have to do. We all get picked off with products and ideas. The market catches up to you. So the growth aspect and the challenging everybody within our business of what’s the next idea and what’s the next opportunity is embedded in our business. It is our mantra; it’s what we’re all about. So that won’t change as a business. But it’s really important when people come into our business that not just they’re told that, but they see it, they understand the history, and they live it as well. People enjoy being at Pharmacare because they can see that what they do makes a difference and they buy into the team aspect of the results that we achieve.

Anyone now want to work at Pharmacare?

So many great takeaways from this conversation. Listen to the episode in the player below, or download, subscribe and enjoy it on iTunes.

Download the podcast on iTunes or click to listen: Superior Sales Disruption Podcast – Episode 4

If you want your Sales team to Gamify it’s performance please contact us at https://www.superiorsales.com.au/contact-us/

Next week we are going to delve deeper into the elements of Creating The Game.

If you are looking at running a Sales Game workshop either email Mark at mark.truelson@superiorsales.com.au OR dig for more information at https://www.superiorsales.com.au/storytelling/workshops/

At Superior Sales we build programmes leveraging all the core drivers of capability – organisation, people, process and culture, not just skills. Refer to our white paper at https://www.superiorsales.com.au/storytelling/whitepaper/

At Superior Sales our capability experts work extensively with companies to equip sales teams, and indeed the whole organisation, to deliver a better customer experience. Please get in touch at https://www.superiorsales.com.au/contact-us/

Happy Weekend!