Startup to Stewardship: How a family business was Built to Matter with Josephine Sukkar

To understand that our market value is the sum of our experiences, not our title. The valuing of time in the saddle. And what that's worth, how I communicate that to our staff in a BuildCorp, is that when I'm in a tender interview with our team tendering on a large construction project and I'm standing behind the team and saying, this is a team I recommend to deliver your beautiful project, no client has ever asked me, what's their title, what did they study at university, what are you paying them? They only ever ask me how. How many projects of this nature and this size and scale have this team delivered. Welcome to from the Top with Chad Hesters. The podcast for CEOs, founders and decision makers looking for a straightforward perspective on issues facing global leaders. No fluff, no jargon, just real conversations with people who've made tough calls and are here to share what they've learned. Here's our host, Chad Hesters. Welcome to from the Top. I'm your host, Chad Hesters. Have a special episode today for you. I'm here in Sydney, Australia, visiting with our team and some clients and getting a sense of the business community here. And I have a special guest today, a guest host, Alan Marks, who's a managing partner of our office here in Australia. He's gonna introduce our guest today, which we're very pleased to have. But without any further ado, let me introduce you to Alan. Thanks, Chad. Great to have you here. Glad to be here, Alan. We've got a fantastic podcast lined up today. Everyone. It's my pleasure to introduce Josephine Sukar am a trailblazing Australian business leader and champion of women in sport and industry in this country. Josephine co founded Bilcor in 1990 with her husband Tony, growing it into a construction powerhouse employing over 600 and has over a billion dollars in revenue. She is a former teacher. Previously, Josephine has been chair of the Australian Sports Commission, president of Australian Women's Rugby, and was awarded the member of the Order of Australia in 2017. Currently, Josephine is on the boards of Solpats Growth Point Properties Australia. It's the Australian Museum and the Green Building Council of Australia. Welcome, Josephine. Thank you. That sounds like a very busy life, Josephine. I don't know how you have time to sleep or anything, but great story there, but I think the Bill Corp. Story is a really interesting one. So as I remember, you and your husband started that 35 years ago, is that right? 36 years ago this month, 1st of February 1990. And you know, family owned businesses, especially the scale you have, that doesn't come easy. That's a lot of work and a lot of tenacity. I was wondering if you might share with our viewers just a little bit of that journey. What's not in the bio that helped you and your family and Billcourt become so successful? Thank you. My husband came home one day in 1990. I was seven months pregnant with our first child and he was working for an organization called Girvan Corporation, a large construction company. And they had been placed into receivership and he didn't have a job. And we'd always spoken about one day starting our own construction business. And I'd spent a little bit of time at Lend Lease with him a few years. And I said, if ever you wanted to do that, he's a builder. Builder, you know, has a construction management degree. I'd happily do that with you. We knew we could work well together. We have complimentary skills and we've easily worked together for, you know, we've been together 40 years and that's been something that's come naturally to us. But that kind of accelerated the journey. And our very first project was the one he happened to be working on for Girvan, which was a very large set of twin towers here in Chatswood in Sydney, Australia at the time. It was an $80 million project in 1990. I've no idea what that would translate to in today's dollars. Maybe a couple of hundred million. I'm not sure. Alan. And the job was half complete and he was leading it. And we sat down with the client and negotiated a contract where we completed the project. Well, Tony completed the project, went off and had our family and six years later rejoined the business. But we set it up as a partnership agreement. We had two other minor shareholders in the business who we subsequently bought out over the years. And it's been a wonderful. Jo Right. I think maybe the most impressive thing out of the whole story is you stayed married 40 years. Congratulations. Well, people often ask us, how do you work together? I couldn't work with my partner at all, but I think we were so young. I was 22 when I married Tony and he was 26, 27. And I think you continue to evolve when you're that young. You evolve and grow and learn together and set your values. I think also being young and having Tony come home without a job with I'm pretty a type and very risk averse and that was probably a pretty scary thing for someone like me, especially when I knew I wasn't going to be able to contribute to financially to the family for a period of time because I was expecting our baby. But we set ourselves up well and it just shaped the way we've run and grown the business. Do you know, we've often said whenever we make decisions for the business for buildcorp, we never want anyone who works for us to feel the way we felt that that day. When you're a young couple, you're about to have a baby, your husband hasn't got a job. Interest rates in Australia were around 18% in those days. It was a pretty scary time as a property crash. And it does inform the risks you decide to take on as a business owner. So it was a very early and very salient lesson for us, being a larger business with a professional management structure, but also a family business. And, you know, family companies operate slightly differently to public companies, as we've talked about in the past. How have you sort of managed to integrate the family connectivity into the running of the business? I reckon lots of family businesses must be like ours, but it's probably fair to say most family businesses probably don't know how other family businesses run, because you don't know what you don't know. You just decide you're going to set up a business, right, and off you go. We certainly didn't have a business school education framework. We were both. I was educated in a public school. My husband Tony went through the Catholic school system. But we were hardworking, a little bit of courage, which was probably. We had each other supporting each other, which was great because this is one vision and it's worked for us because we were very clear on where we wanted to go, which was build a construction company. It became large, but in a slow, controlled way. So we'd set parameters around the business. We've had a CAGR compound annual growth rate of around 12 and a half percent from when we began. And we've maintained that and always been really careful to make sure the business doesn't grow bigger or quicker than we can actually service it or service our clients. So that slow, controlled growth has meant that we've been able to control the culture of the business, given us an opportunity to develop our own people along the way and do all the things that we now know are really important to do. But I guess we were just lucky and learned it along the way to develop our own people, make sure that they're very clear on what we're tight on as a business. The cultural pieces, values, process adherence, particularly in construction around safety. And I mean, there's no flex in Safety, no flex in values. There are things we're not prepared to flex on and our people are really clear on that. But then of course, you need to be entrepreneurial when you've got your own business. So you need to be able to unleash that talent, bring entrepreneurial thinking into the business and give them the confidence to tell you what you need to hear, make scary decisions and ensure that we're equipped as as business owners. Just surround those big scary ideas with appropriate risk frameworks to ensure that those ideas can succeed, but have to figure it out along the way. And I'm sure a lot of the family businesses that you work with are the same. Probably one of the risks is you want to make sure you're not a little bit too navel gazing because you don't get an opportunity to jump into another private business and see how other people do things. Right. You mentioned risk a couple times here and I think we've had a lot of leaders on this podcast and a lot of our viewers are leaders. And you mentioned framework, risk framework. I think most leaders would agree you can build as many frameworks as you want around risk, but at some point you have to take a decision and some of them are scary. And I'd be interested to hear if you're willing to share with our audience. Maybe when you think back about BuildCorp, was there a risk that you took, a decision you took that really worked out and maybe if you're willing to go there, maybe one that you took that maybe you kind of wish you had a do over on? When we decided to grow the business geographically so set up an office in another state, that was probably for us a little bit scary because to have a business and have a leadership structure in another state where we weren't there every day to, you know, in the office or on site, because the nature of construction companies are your staff are spread across a state or a country or the globe and they're not in the office with you every day where you get to walk the floor and control the culture. They're everywhere. To spread geographically. That was a little bit scary for us, but also one of the great lessons we learned was that's where you probably need to provide the most flex, but also the most tight. The cultures are different in the three states across the eastern seaboard of Australia. Queensland is very different to Victoria, which is quite different to New South Wales. And to succeed in those states, you need to allow Queenslanders and Victorians and New South Wales people to be able to work within and adapt to their own environments. And any organisation, whether it's a Coca Cola or a global brand or anywhere, have to be really clear on we're tied on our marketing. No one gets to muck around with a logo. Nobody gets to play with it. What are you prepared to be more malleable around? And even though we're a small nation, relatively speaking, especially compared to the states, we do have subcultures that you've got to be able to work within. So that for us was a pretty risky thing to do. And certainly our first foray into Queensland was difficult and we worked really hard at that. The GFC hit, we pulled out of Queensland and went back in and relaunched again, second time with a better understanding of, okay, this is how it's got to happen in Queensland, which made the move to Victoria much easier. Again, so that increased risk any business takes when they have geographic spread and that's any business. Certainly an interesting lesson learned. Very good. Thank you. Josephine. We've chatted about this before a couple of times, but you're in the fortunate position that you sit on a couple of public companies. You have an entrepreneurial private company background. What do you think public companies could learn from your experience as an entrepreneur about how they keep their governance, but be perhaps a bit more nimble, have more of an entrepreneurial type of cadence in how they operate? I think today where all organizations and governments and individuals, to be frank, need to be entrepreneurial and flexible, whether it's the adoption of AI, whether it's moving into new markets, we don't have a choice anymore. We don't have a choice to sit back and say, I don't think email's a good thing and I don't want to take it up or we don't have that choice. And I trained as a scientist and Charles Darwin didn't talk about the survival of the fittest. He spoke about those are most adaptive to change are going to be the ones that survive and nothing has changed. We need to be able to be adaptive. And the risk we run in public companies, if we're not careful and we're watching it with the decline in IPOs, I'm not sure whether you're seeing that in the States, but certainly here in Australia some of the not so much restrictions but well, there's certainly some barriers that are being put in front of public companies and red tape by regulators can be almost anti business and we have to be a little bit careful. We're trying to be agile in public companies to try and ensure that we are able to return shareholders the growth they need. But audit was a real problem post gfc, where we got very nervous about failures of large corporates. So we stacked boards with audit partners at the risk of entrepreneurialism, where quite sensibly, boards wanted to say, well, where has this been done before? This is something different you're bringing to me, CEO. How do we know that this isn't going to fail versus actually to fight our way out of this GFC or this downturn? We need to be doing different things. And back to risk frameworks. The role of boards is to ensure that we help management and the executive teams build risk frameworks around big, scary ideas. And one of the greatest lessons I learned as a director was from a very respected businessman in Australia, Ziggy Swykowski. When I tell him this, he goes, I don't remember saying that to you, but he certainly did was when I joined the board of an arts company, the largest arts company in Australia, Opera Australia. And one of the early board meetings we had, the artistic director came into the meeting and said, these weren't his words, but I've got this idea. I want to do an opera on Sydney Harbour. It's going to float on the water. It's going to have the backdrop of the Sydney Opera House and the Sydney Harbour Bridge. And the board were just so relaxed at this idea. And I was looking around as a builder thinking, I've never seen Opera Australia build anything outside before. I wonder what it's like. How can you float if it rains? What would happen if it rains? What if we miss opening night because construction just so I had a million questions in my mind of all the things that could possibly go wrong. But as a new director, I thought it must be because I'm new and I don't understand things. So I pulled the chairman up after the meeting and said, look, I know I'm new, but that opera on the harbor thing. And he said, yes. And I said, is like, are you worried about that? He said, what do you mean? I said, well, I don't know safety. If a singer or a dancer goes off the side of the pontoon or if it rains and we miss the start date because we can't miss an opening date at Opera Australia. But weather, like, we're builders and weather. And I had a million reasons why things could possibly prevent this thing going ahead. What happens if it rains? Do we lose revenue? Can you buy rain insurance? We didn't know any of these questions and he sent me away to go and think about how I might address some of these questions in my own mind. And over dinner one night with my husband, I said, if we were wanting to build something outside in the harbour, for example, and do an opera, he said, oh no, you need to speak to Sydney Harbor Forester Authority, you need a project manager, you need safety, this, you need to speak to a pontoons engineer. I think he said to me, a marine engineer. Let me put you under my friend the marine engineer. And we built a small little subcommittee of volunteers who I very generously offered two free tickets to opening night if they could help us out. Tony, my husband, I commandeered into this little group and he would check these cranes for me every year. And with the board they did build sensible risk frameworks around a big scary idea. And this is what the arts community do. They don't want to see something that's been done before. Their job is to imagine something creative and something totally different. And I remember walking away from that very first. The opening night of Opera Australia. We mounted a Traviata. It was amazing. There was an opera singer, a soprano being hoisted in a nine metre wide Swarovski crystal chandelier of the jib of a crane, like a human off a crane inside a chandelier where she hit, you know, her high note up the top. It was amazing. And in that moment I thought this is what every board should be doing, not just ask board. And it just reshaped and reframed the way I looked at risk and what my role as a director was not to be the order partner. We absolutely need them to stop us going broke, but we also need to be flexible and entrepreneurial. And I think that's what we've had to be as a family business. The most family businesses have to be. So it was a very long winded way. Telling you how one of my lessons came to me, it was off an arts board. I'm very grateful to Ziggy Swikowski for the lesson he doesn't remember giving me, but it was wonderful. I think what's interesting about that story, I mean other than story in totality, is that at some point in our leadership journey, I can almost remember, like the salient point in my time when you realize that everybody else may not have thought of everything yet. And that little voice that you were talking about, you're in the meeting and you're like, what are these hundred risk I just came up with? Has anybody considered it? I might just be new, maybe I don't bring it up, but at some point in the journey, you realize your impact like you're in the room for a reason. Right. And all that scar tissue and experience that you've built are there to have the confidence to say that my little voice is talking to me about this. Let's have a conversation. It speaks to sort of the impact of leadership and that leaders have outside of just sitting down and managing project at a desk. You know, they walk through life casting a bit of awake behind them. And you and your family have certainly cast an outstanding wake even outside the business community. As I understand you're the founder of Bill Corp foundation and had a lot of focus on mental health and community wellness. Can you maybe tell us more about your passion around that? And then maybe what's the foundation thinking about now and priorities and going forward? To set up a foundation was something that came to me when I was appointed to my first listed board, the trust company, which was a trustee business here in Australia that was acquired by Perpetual. And one of the jobs the then chairman, Bruce Corlett asked me to do was oversee some of the philanthropic funds that the organisation was managing. Some of the largest foundations in this country. So for Australian listeners, that's the Miles Franklin Award and a few other really significant Australian, which is a literary award, Chad, here in Australia, some significant foundations and the different structures within them. And we had been like most organizations, trying to do our little bit philanthropically every now and then, but it gave me a little bit of a window into what structuring giving looks like. It allows you to go deeper and make a greater impact. So when I rolled off the board a few years later, Tony and I had a conversation and we established a foundation which is a public ancillary fund. This is where we can raise funds from the public as well as what we donate ourselves so we can amplify mine and Tony's giving. In Australia, there's a very high suicide rate in male construction workers. So this was something that was important to our people. We literally were as coarse as sending an email, this is 1112 years ago, to all of our staff and said, if we were to establish a foundation, what causes would you like us to support? And mental health become a bigger and bigger thing. And we eventually just went, it's mental health these days. We've distributed over 7 million Australian dollars. We run a pretty tight ship. We've got no staff, the operating costs are pretty much zero. It supports Lifeline, which is a telephone and online service offering to people who are thinking of taking their lives. There's a number that they can Ring here in Australia, 13, 11, 14 and there'll be someone on the end of the line. But at the time when we started they weren't able to get to all of those phone calls. And I think just that thought of someone's had the courage to finally, before they jump or make that terrible last decision to pick the phone up and not have anybody answer that was a bit hard to wrap our heads around. It's powerful. And back then 8 Australians Day were dying by suicide. On average in Australia that number's increased to nine. So a few years ago we began looking for because we felt like we're never going to catch up. You know, we can keep giving money to lifeline to telephone operators to answer phone calls. So we looked down the chain for a preventative solution and I spoke to the then Minister for Education in New South Wales and said to him if I came to you with a million dollars, how might you use those funds to help young Australians think about their mental health a bit differently and provide them with some tools? And he connected me with the department and we began funding and are still doing that. I've got another 2 million ready to go. We've just invested another million last year. Where programs are being rolled out in primary schools to put tools into the hands of school children to help them understand what to do if they're feeling anxious to stop pathologizing the language of emotions, of normal emotions. If we're nervous about an exam tomorrow, that's not anxiety, we're nervous. If we're sad because our dog died, we're sad because our dog died, we're not depressed. So to begin to help them understand how to communicate feelings and to help parents and teachers and seems to be having some real impact. So we don't guide that. We're not mental health professionals. We speak to the wellbeing departments, the wellbeing at your departments within the departments of education and they guide us and we say what are you looking to fund? And we fund it and that happens from our clients, our staff and it's beautiful. In a couple of weeks time we're going to be downing tools on about 50 odd sites. BuildCorp up and down the eastern seaboard and they've got fundraising going on sites and we'll be dollar matching every dollar Australians donate over a 24 hour period. It's exciting. Well, that's amazing. If we had listeners or viewers here that wanted to contribute to that, would there be a way to do it online? Yes. BuildCorpFoundation.com and they can donate straight in. We can immediately issue you the tax deductible receipt. We have DGR status, deductible recipient status for Australians here. But absolutely anybody can donate and it's really exciting. We're very lucky because the community who support us, trust us. Our role as we have an external board of directors is to make sure that we do the appropriate assessments on who we donate to and then we're off and running. There are no costs coming out, we've got no staff, we are all running this off the side of our desks in a build corp, which is great. So the money will go straight in and out to the corporate. We just provide the tax deductibility. Fantastic. It's a wonderful thing you do with that, Josephine. Really is remarkable. Final question from me, thinking back to the beginning of your career and with what you've learned on the journey, if you could give Josephine at the beginning of all this a piece of advice as to how to go forward from your learnings, what would it be? I didn't think this was me, but I do remember my late father used to watch Tony and I and say, slow down, just slow it down. And I didn't really understand what that meant and now I'm a grandparent myself. Slowing down is good, but I think specifically for anybody in business these days, and I think I'm speaking to younger professionals in the workforce as well, to understand that our market value is the sum of our experiences, not our titles. So the valuing of time in the saddle and what that's worth it, how I communicate that to our staff in a build call is that when I'm in a tender interview with our team tendering on a large construction project and I'm standing behind the team and saying, this is a team I recommend to do your beautiful, to deliver your beautiful project. No client has ever asked me, what's their title, what did they study at university, what are you paying them? They only ever ask me, how many projects of this nature and this size and scale have this team delivered. So that our market worth is the sum of our experiences. And that comes with time. It doesn't come with change in title. So to value the experiences that you're achieving on the job today, not try and rush those because the quicker you get there, you're going to be doing, in our case, a build called blessed projects. That's not ever what clients ask me. They ask how many of these and the valuing of time and experience. Wonderful. Thank you very much, Chad. Yeah, I think that's such an important commentary that and I hope everybody listening to this passes that on to everybody they can. That's great. But Josephine, thank you so much for joining us today. You have an incredible story, both personally and your business story. And Alan, I want to thank you for the opportunity to co host with you. It's been great. And again, thank you, Josephine. It's been a wonderful story for everyone to have the benefit of being able to listen to. And thank you for your time. Thank you for inviting me. It's been a real privilege and honor to be here. Well, thank you for joining us. Stay tuned for our next podcast coming out soon. And please don't forget to go check out the Bill Corp. Foundation and help support their efforts to support mental health here in Australia and throughout the world. Thank you. If you're ready to make better leadership decisions and avoid the costly ones, subscribe to from the Top with Chad Hesters on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, thanks for listening.