How AutoGuru's COO rebuilt their OKR system (and got everyone aligned)

Speaker A: Welcome to Strategy Candy, the podcast that's all about creating a brilliant strategy, setting and achieving audacious goals, using objectives and key results and building high performing product teams. I'm your host, Tim Newbold. Today we've got an epic episode for you. I'm joined by Lucas west, who is joining us from sunny, uh, Queensland, Australia. He's the CEO at a company called Autoguru and he takes us through a really powerful story. Starting out with an OKR model that was not working, was too complicated, was too distracting, everyone was totally disengaged on and totally transforming it into something that was highly impactful and got all the teams behind what really counts right now. And we're actually loving the framework and getting the most value out of it they could. These sort of stories of transformation to me are some of the best cases that we can use to apply in our own workplaces and find ways to make OKR really work for us. So I don't want to carry on too much more. It's a killer story.

Speaker B: He shares a little bit about his

Speaker A: career as well, where he talks about starting out as a dancer, of all things, and then slowly making his way into becoming a coo. Uh, and we hear a bit about that story as well. The key takeaway today that I think you'll get is how do you apply some of these practices to make OKR work for you? If you've started using it and it's not quite working or it's not feeling valuable, there's tips in this which are going to change the game for you. If you're about to start, it's going to help you avoid a bunch of mistakes that Auto Guru made that honestly most people do make. You can skip all those by listening to these lessons. So let's get on with the episode.

Speaker B: So, Lucas, thank you so much for joining me on the Strategy Candy podcast. Just to help everyone get to know who you are, I'd love to know, who are you, what do you do and what's the company that you work with?

Speaker C: Thanks, Tim, for having me. So my name's Lucas, I work at Autogrew. I'm the COO at Auto Guru. I started in 2018 when we were first doing our, uh, TV commercials here in Southeast Queensland. And essentially at that stage we were a retail marketplace, so thinkbooking.com, but for car servicing and repairs and at, ah, that stage we had around two, two and a half thousand workshops that utilised our technology and essentially they'd be advertising their services on our website. And then customers could go on, make a booking. And it was the first business to actually instantly price, uh, the car servicing or repairs. You're not just looking at a directory and choosing reviews, you're actually seeing the price there. And that was a bit of a disruptor at the time. So a lot of businesses didn't like the fact that we were out there pricing on the website. And so we had to uh, come up with some really interesting campaigns and do a lot of education pieces out there to workshops to get them to join Auto Guru. And then we uh, looked at doing how we could continue to enhance a workshop. And one of those ways was utilizing Afterpay or Buy Now, Pay later here in Australia. And at the time the Buy Now Pay later didn't want to touch the industry. And that's because there's around 24,000 workshops here in Australia. It's a big category, lots of different types of businesses. And so we put our hands up and said, hey, look, we'll do that. It helps us enhance our product offering. And we actually, at that stage I even put on a sales team to just call out to workshops and give them afterpay through our platform. We even got creative and started sending out snail mail to workshops, which was really interesting in 2019. And then in, in 2020 we decided to use some of our technology in the fleet maintenance space here in Australia. There's lots of different fleet companies and they all have different ways of doing their fleet servicing and maintenance. And so we launched in 2020 with a, uh, quite a big brand. And by 2022 we had one of the big fleet companies in Australia on our network and that really turned us into a fleet SaaS platform. It helped us grow exponentially in that period where we ended up. Now we've got 13,000 workshops in Australia. We're sitting there with quite a large network of partners that work with us essentially to the point now where last year we completed, uh, our internationalization with the website and have taken it through to New Zealand for the fleet authorization side of it. Look, it's been a really interesting journey. Lots of lessons from bootstrapping, startup to stay and make profit and being in a different position where we've just cracked over 50 staff this year, which has been really exciting.

Speaker B: That's incredible.

Speaker A: The story of where you started there,

Speaker B: particularly around disrupting the markets. I know one thing when it starts, when people are looking at, for getting a service done to their car, it can be anxiety inducing. And the biggest fear is like, am I going to get Ripped off as part of this. I think that's something a lot of people have, probably unfairly. I think maybe that there is the odd dodgy workshop out there, but generally they're pretty good. But there's still that sort of fear. So making that transparent. But then also the buy now, pay later was that a first, really across the industry, that just wasn't an option previously?

Speaker C: Yeah, 100%. When Afterpay launched, it was such a consumer driven product too. And they did not want to look at bringing on any automotive businesses. So we were like, hey, look, we're a marketplace, we can do this for you. We'll do the groundwork, we'll put it out there in the workshop. We benefit from it. They were on board and we had exclusive rights there for a couple of years with it. So it was a big thing. And I think for us we've got an ethos here where we're trying to enable the workshop. You've got this fight here from, um, workshops that wanted to remain on pen and paper. And we were here going, it's time to digitize this like every other industry and we can help do that. And now that we've got into the fleet space, our workshops and our members that are on the platform truly see us now as enablers rather than that disruptor. And so it's been interesting to watch that change over the last five years.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's it. It's amazing that this is something that would have been very hard to operate before you existed, that buy now, pay later opportunity. And I could also imagine that for afterpay, it's not worth calling every mom and pop workshop out there. But for a platform like yours, it really does open it up. And you can imagine for the consumers too, it's something where some servicing can be quite expensive. Right. Especially if you're doing one of your big milestone servicing that can be really hard to fund it. So it's nice that you make that and lower that bar a little bit, enable people to have that sustainable payment plan.

Speaker C: Oh, uh, a hundred percent. And as I said, it's really customer driven. So you know, customers need that who your tire blows out and you need new brakes all of a sudden. Not everyone can afford that. So we can assist with that. Yeah. Um, I think the other thing that we did that was really unique was look at having a really closed review system. So the only way for a customer to review a workshop on Autogrew is to actually complete a service. And so the reviews are 100% legit. They're true. They're customers that have had the service with that service supplier. You're not reading Google reviews where necessarily they might be fake or there's been an issue where we, we only allow the supplier to be reviewed once the customer's been there.

Speaker B: Yeah. Which is incredible the quality of those reviews. And that's the classic problem with Amazon right. Is uh, that there are so many products out there that have fake reviews. You also, I know of organizations where they've had others or competitors put fake reviews on to try to their reputation having that sort of control process to make sure they're real customers. That's very cool. You're tying into something there which the common thread through all this is that customer centricity and probably gets to the point of what we're here to talk about today. You've been using objectives and key results along the way and pretty typically organizations who work customer focus and have that clear outcome that they're trying to work towards use something like okrs. When did you start using okrs? M and why did you get started?

Speaker C: Yeah, so look, we started using okrs around 2019 and it was right as we were trying to ramp up and we were trying to put people infrastructure into the business and being the cool tech company we wanted to do it all the other cool tech companies are doing. And so we implemented okrs and the first iteration that we did, look we had some wins probably the first year there was a bit of momentum with it and then it really became a chore over the last couple of years. We even did things like moving it out to a longer period. So it was a six month cycle rather than a three month cycle and it just lost momentum completely. And so I think it was probably about 12 months ago in our last six month cycle where everyone was what are we doing here? We're sitting here and we're just running through a to do list and it was like how do we change this? And so I was like I'm putting my hand up, I'm just going to go away, I'm going to research it. I'm going to put together a brand new framework for AutoGroup and use learnings from lots of different places including quick start. Tim definitely grabbed some ideas from what you guys do and put together a brand new framework and rolled it out in J January this year.

Speaker B: Yeah. Before we get to that brand new framework, that's super exciting. But I want to hear a bit more of that early stage and because I definitely know too the vibe that when you're going along, you follow the bouncing ball and eventually you do start going and what are we trying to do here? We're just following the process for its sake. But rewinding right back to the beginning of okr, how many people were in the team at that point?

Speaker C: Look, in the overall team we probably had around 25, 30 people. But the OKRs were really just done at the exec level or senior management level. So we really didn't involve the rest of the team except for getting up in front of them and saying, hey, here's what our OKRs are for the quarter or the quarter or the period. And we uh, may get back together at six months later and go, hey, did we achieve it? Yes or no. So they weren't really involved or potentially the other thing that we found we were doing. And I actually went back and looked at some recently, I know like operations, we had six different objectives and each objective had four different KRs. But there were no metrics in them. It was launch this product, sell to this many people, call this many people. So yeah, it was really interesting to look back at what we were doing all those years and then this new framework which is all around metrics and things that we can deliver on and measure and actually bring value to what we're doing, not just tick off yet. We launched this product.

Speaker B: Yeah. So you're getting now into that sort of new model, I guess. Let's unpick this a bit more. So what's wrong with having those just those to do lists?

Speaker C: Look, for us it's, and it's hard being a tech company where we, we are launching new products and services and new shiny things that we want to get everyone involved in. But it doesn't necessarily mean that we're going to actually achieve them because lots can change in that six month period. We definitely don't have an ego with giving ideas a go and then not launching them. So that can happen or potentially uh, if you just say, oh look, we're going to launch this product, there's a whole heap of deliverables there. Whether it's marketing, sending out comms, the ops team, rolling out new scripts and calling the finance team being ready, it's still not bringing everyone together and giving them something that they can say, yep, we've either achieved that or we haven't achieved it. Uh, it's just a to do list, that's it.

Speaker B: So you kind of got those steps in the go to market plan. Maybe you do have the right groups involved, but still not everyone's Working towards that same outcome. Why are we doing this and what's the impact we're trying to make with this launch?

Speaker C: Yeah, plus it's just the senior management team that's really looking at it from each department. It's not all the people or the rest of the team that's actually in there driving that.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So it's funny you say that. I was with a, uh, customer. It was in Brisbane. Normally it'd be in the Goldie, not far from you guys and any of our international listers. That's the Gold coast, which is in Queensland, Australia. Australia lovingly known as the Goldie. And that's where Autoguro is headquartered in the Gold coast, right?

Speaker C: Yep. We're here in Broadbeach. Great location. We've always been on the Gold Coast. Uh, we've got a. Our CEO, Eden Shirley, fantastic entrepreneur and he moved up from Melbourne and that's where Autoguru came from. Essentially when he moved up here, he couldn't find someone to service his car and he came up with the idea of let's do booking.com but for car servicing. And he's built it from ground up here on the Gold Coast.

Speaker B: That's incredible. Yeah, that's really cool. The story I was nudging into there was just with a customer up there. So in Brisbane, unfortunately, the Gold coast, like that's my go to spot. Love to go for a run along the beach there. Salt beach again, for many of our listeners on the Gold coast, you know I'm talking about. So yeah, so we were up there and it was interesting where you could see different parts of the business. They've just started out on their journey, so we're still pretty early days, but some parts they've really had the teams embrace okrs and their course. Why we do it, what's important about this. And to be honest, we're still just starting out with the executive team, so. Right. And rewind back to the beginning for you guys there. And the teams that are across the okr and why it's important. It's working really well. They're working towards that outcome and the impact they're making. Then if you look at the other side, you've got the teams that, uh, they know the work that they're doing that feeds into the okr, but they're not actually working towards the outcome. They're not clear on why we're doing this. They haven't had the OKR discussed. And eventually, obviously we want to have everyone working on the okrs and we want to have the business aligned around that and teams owning those okrs. But the point we're at right now, you don't need that full structure, but you can just see the difference between that connection they have with the outcome

Speaker C: 100%, and it's them taking accountability and really driving it. We've got teams in here that have completely changed around their weekly reporting. So it includes the OKRs in there. They're talking about it, the daily standups. They're looking at not just hitting the metric, but what are the other levers to that metric. And I think that's been a really interesting change within the team.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, it's really amazing. Let's get into that more now because you mentioned you've moved into this newer model with better metrics. So what does it look like for you today? How are you using okrs and how does it work for the exec team?

Speaker A: How do the other teams get involved?

Speaker B: What's it all look like?

Speaker C: Yeah, I think one of the big lessons that I learned with this was making sure that we had a really clear mission and vision, which we do. We know why we exist and we know what our broad picture of the future is. We get that and we haven't really changed that too much. So what it was about doing was okay. If we know where we want to get to, then what are we going to focus on? The near in the future, right now, here and now, over the next three months, to make sure that we're achieving or getting a step closer, uh, to our vision and our mission. And I think that really hit home. It's definitely about taking them on a bit of a journey as to why we're doing it and how it gives them purpose into achieving our vision and our mission.

Speaker B: I love it. So focusing on that connection for the teams.

Speaker C: Yeah, 100%. They've got it. They've got to be. They've got to have buy in. That's really important.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker C: And so I think one thing that we did, so what we've been really disciplined with in the first two cycles we've done this year, um, is setting up a business okr, which is the executive leadership team, and being really clear that we can only have one. In the first cycle, I had to fight and I ended up losing and getting two objectives because we do have this retail marketplace and we do have this fleet product, and so they are very different products. But in this second cycle, we've actually managed to be really disciplined now and just have the one objective and we've narrowed it down to four key results. So that was a bit of a win this cycle.

Speaker B: Love it. That's really cool. And uh, even two is a great step forward. Where were you before that? How many did you have before we really revisited and got it working.

Speaker C: Look, last year, the last six month cycle we, the business would have had six maybe objectives and tons of chaos with that. And then each department was the same. I think operations, we had four or five objectives. So you can imagine trying to check in about them, trying to keep on top of them. It's just not doable. You just can't have that laser focus if you've got too many. So I think that was a big lesson for us.

Speaker B: Yeah, the laser focus is key, Ryan. And having that regular check in cadence. This is where I think a lot of teams that I hear are having issues with OKRs. They go, uh, we can only check in on the monthly. Right. If you're doing it for a quarter, if you miss a month, all of a sudden it's one or two check ins for a whole quarter and you get to the end and you wonder why didn't we hit it? I mean when you've got that many okrs, you practically can't go through everything in one hit. It just takes too long. Of course you don't do it every week or every couple of weeks. It just doesn't happen.

Speaker C: Yeah, I think for us we put in. So I put my hand up and said I'll lead this across the business and it makes sense for chief operating officer to really drive this. I'm here to uh, execute on the strategy that's set by the business and for I guess me trying to find where that balance between the process discipline, ensuring that we're adhering to the cycles, facilitating the check ins and not necessarily me owning the check ins either. So it's just me being a part of it, being present and letting the champions really drive those sessions and then overseeing the scoring with it. But then I've still got to remember to nurture that collaborative bottom up engagement because that's the only way that we're going to get through this and get that done. And that's the only way that's going to make that OKR effective essentially.

Speaker B: And so it sounds like that's a bit of your secret ingredient as well as having that person that is there to host the overarching process. Did you have that previously or is this something one of the new improvements?

Speaker C: Uh, definitely one of the new improvements. Before it was our CEO Uh, and the senior management team would all get together and do the business one and then all the teams on their own and no one really drove that process through except C level that was responsible for that department. So with this new framework it's me not so much working with the rest of the exec team, it's more working with the champions that are put in there in charge of that OKR for that period. And that's worked really well for us.

Speaker B: Loving it. Uh, a lot of familiar language here. This is really cool. So you talk about champions. What's a okr? Champion.

Speaker C: Okr, uh, champion for us is the person who is assigned to drive that OKR through that department or through the business. And we're really trying to make sure that there's cross functional teams happening as well. So each champion or each OKR will have. Sorry, each KR will have two champions and they'll work together on driving it within the teams and then reporting back. So they're in charge. At our. We're doing a mid cycle review that's a bit more formal and a catch up where we're actually documenting how we're going and then we're doing the end of cycle review. And so what's been really good with that is it's not just your exec team standing there talking about the to do list that we did. It's about the champions getting up and hearing more voices within the business and that's been really good and exciting and I think everyone's really enjoying that and we're getting good feedback around that as well.

Speaker B: Amazing, amazing. And maybe one more question just on how the exec team is using it. So how do you track your okrs as a leadership team?

Speaker C: So we're just using PowerPoint. It's pretty simple. I'm trying to keep it as simple as possible. When I was researching I was seeing spreadsheets and documents and all these amazing things and I'm sitting there going, you know what, I don't really want to manage this labour some process either. I want it to be fun and enjoyable for everyone. And so yeah, we've just done literally a PowerPoint and you have your okr, uh, that we set at the start. You've got your mid cycle review, parts of the deck and then you've got your end of cycle review at the end. So we're trying to just keep it really simple.

Speaker B: Nice. And do you talk about it regularly as a leadership team or is it something that's sets behind the scene?

Speaker C: I talk about it weekly.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Okay, Cool on that. Uh, do you do confidence scoring? I know something a lot of people do. Do they talk about the confidence, how confident they are going to hit the okr? Do you do any of that or is that making it too complicated?

Speaker C: No, we're definitely doing the confidence score. So we're using 0 to 1 and generally we're doing the confidence score at the mid cycle review and then the end of the cycle review.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Great. Okay, very nice. So you've got that really tight. And how has that helped you so far using that sort of scoring method? Does it add value to the conversation?

Speaker C: 100%. So tech wanted to reuse one of theirs from the first cycle that we did. And they'd scored that 7 or 0.7. And I was like, but if you've hit 07, which is you've nearly achieved the OKR, then why would we do that same KR again? A hundred percent. The scoring's helped because they had to go back and rethink about what they were gonna do this quarter.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah, it's one of those sort of things where you gotta challenge that thinking. I often talk about it being, what problem is this objective solving? And have we solved that problem? And typically, yeah, uh, if you hit that 70% mark, you've probably solved it or solved it enough that you're ready

Speaker C: to move on 100%. And, uh, that's the stance we've taken.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. Love it. What do you think the next thing is in terms of how you improve how you approach okr?

Speaker C: That is a good question. I think because it's our second cycle, we did actually learn a lot from the first cycle, making sure that we didn't have too many okr. I've definitely seen a decrease in them in the second cycle and making sure that they're really succinct. I think that was really important. Again, it's just completely changing that whole way that you do your to do list and going, we're going to launch this product to no, uh, we're going to test to see SAT score and we want to get over 75%. And so I think that's a discipline that will take time to get everybody on board and really understanding. But we're definitely seeing the whole team get beyond behind that and it has gotten better, uh, in this cycle.

Speaker B: Yeah. So this is a really big one and I'm seeing customers really try and get into this a lot more. If you're into the product space, you talk about the Product, operating model and a lot of that talks about having continuous discovery, which means getting clear on the problem, doing some experiments, testing things out. Do you have much of an experimental culture there where you're testing out new features and those sort of things without building the full thing and launching or how does that look?

Speaker C: Look, probably in the earlier years we definitely did a lot more AB testing. We're probably not doing as much now. We're just so product and feature driven at the moment. Every time we bring on a new big fleet company, it's a lot of work to onboard them and they may have unique things that we need to build for them and they can be quite big projects too. So we're talking about integration with multiple companies and partners to just get one fleet company up and running. These are big, all hands on projects that happen. So it can be a little bit difficult.

Speaker B: Yeah, I guess while you're at that stage, often you don't want to optimize for one particular customer. But at the same time when you've now got a customer type, which is these fleet companies and let's be honest, we're still pretty early on the, on the journey with that one, you've obviously got some really good wins and you certainly still got many more customers to go. Eventually that hits a point where it's a bit more standardized and you basically just rinse and repeat as people come on. But as you're going through this initial part where there's that sort of customization that's pretty normal that we have to build certain things, we know there's certain capabilities. So it's a bit of a balance between the two. You can test things over the top, right?

Speaker C: Yeah, 100% and we. There's probably a few iterations even in our retail marketplace to explain, explain it this way. Back in 2019 I had the same team size as I do right now, but we've got over uh, 1 100% growth in transactions and how we've done that is we've had to be problem solvers and we've had to come up with some really unique and interesting ways to get our suppliers to use the website. There's been a lot of education, there's been a lot of changes with self service and automation that we brought in along the way and that really helped us grow without having to put on more headcount, which is super important, especially when you're bootstrapping.

Speaker B: Yeah. So it's really true. I think that there's, you're raising an interesting point there where you see a lot of organizations, they go, they get that funding and then you just see this exponential growth of the team and it's very hard to have all the numbers marry up right where you're bringing in that revenue to the point that keeps you growing, plus you're getting that external funding. And it's where a lot of companies fail, where they've got a great product and they've got a great offering and a great experience, but they're just scaled too aggressively where focusing on smaller steps, continuous improvements and automations, that's really where you can give the best customer experience and focus on what you do best for the business.

Speaker C: 100%. Yeah, I totally agree with that. And look, it's been a very interesting journey and we have had to, we've had to really look at what we're doing. And I think even to the point with answering the question a few years ago around who is our customer? Is the consumer our customer or is the supplier our customer? And it's hard when you're in a two sided marketplace to make that distinction. But at the end of the day, when the consumer's using our product for free and the workshops they're paying for, that's where your customer is. So even things like that along the journey that you have to come to a realization with and then really start to think about where do we spend our time and money and our resources and whose experience do we enhance?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, it's had uh, a lot of similar debates. My background, I worked with Seek for quite a few years, many moons ago now, that was one of the big conversations we were having is who is that customer? Because you have got the advertisers or the people who are posting job ads, those are the ones that are paying you the money, they've got their subscriptions and you've really got to deliver a great experience for them. But the core bit of value is how you can introduce the employees to these employers, right. Or the candidates. And having a really clear picture on we need to create the best possible experience for the candidates because that is how we create this healthy marketplace. But at the same time you've got to make sure that those customers have all their needs served. So having that clear distinction around who is the consumer or the user of your product, who is the purchaser or the customer and how do you link all those needs together so that they have a shared common goal. And that's art of a marketplace, right? Is having that common goal across all the board, across those different customer groups

Speaker C: and those user groups, 100%. And you're right, we want to make sure it's still a great experience for the customer, the end customer there, and they're happy, otherwise they're not going to use the service again. But, yeah, it is a struggle that marketplaces deal with.

Speaker B: Absolutely. So, Lukas, I'm, um, really curious to hear a bit more about your journey personally, because I think this is something that we sometimes miss this point around the leaders that have helped get an effective OKR model going. Before we jump into that, I also want to see if you've got any more words of wisdom. Anyone who's getting started with okrs and who knows, maybe it's similar stages to you on the journey. Possibly right at the beginning, possibly they're at a sort of that moment of going, I think we need to reach, do this thing. What would be your advice? If someone is at any point on the journey, what should they be looking at from a OKR perspective?

Speaker C: I think researching best practices important. You need to arm, um, yourself with enough information around what other businesses have learned that is good. And then you have to tailor, make it to your business and you've got to make sure that it's going to work for the people that are in there, otherwise they're not going to follow you, they're not going to follow you on that journey. So I would definitely recommend that you research and then you tailor, make something that's really special for your business that you know you're going to get that buy in from the leadership team and you know that you're going to get buy in from the rest of the team as well.

Speaker B: Yeah. So what you've said there, I think, is that sort of hidden message, which is it's got to be something people want to engage in on. It's got to be something that, you know, I like to think of it as being fun. Maybe some people don't think it's fun, but it should be something that is enjoyable to get involved in. There should be some sort of impact that they're feeling, they're making. Is that the right way to look at it?

Speaker C: Yeah, 100%. Like they, they feel like they're having a purpose for that quarter that they can really get behind, they can really drive and then they can come back at the end of the quarter and celebrate it too. This last session where we did a playback session, we completed the, the first cycle and then launched the second cycle. And I was really worried, I was like, are we going to be able to do this in an hour. I've got the whole business in here. We want to just whack this out and make sure that we're, we're not going to two hour long sessions. But it was so good seeing everybody be really supportive. Everyone was clapping and cheering and saying well done to everyone. Regardless of whether that actually hit the number, the 0.7, if they've made some effort for it, everyone was rewarded for it. So it was a really good opportunity to hear shout outs also from the rest of the business. So again, not just that top down congratulations, other people around the business saying, yeah, this person's worked on this part and this person did this and it was great to see them work together and we achieved this much. So I think that was really special. That was good. Yeah.

Speaker B: It's funny those top down awards, they do have a bit of that kind of, I don't know, fun Tie Fridays vibe. But how do you actually get that gratitude and thanks and that sort of conversation happening with the teams, with having a bit of fun and sharing that thanks with each other? That gratitude. Yeah.

Speaker C: And uh, it's great. Look, we've got a celebrate channel in Slack. I get it, 80% of the slacks in there in that celebrate channel, our uh, management. But when you've got a champion there that is one of the agents in the contact center or is one of the finance team or marketing team and they're in there giving their spiel around what worked, what didn't, what they learned from it, what their score is and then everyone's congratulating them. It's great. Like it was such a good feeling vibe.

Speaker B: That's cool. That's cool.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: And this is the thing too. It's uh, all about that balance. Right. Often you are going to have management in those sort of sessions because they're thinking and they are keeping an eye across the board. Right. Whereas people doing some standout sort of efforts. So you need that but you also need that bottom up from the teams and that shared appreciation. Do you do anything else to celebrate success as part of that or is it really just shouting it out and saying thanks?

Speaker C: No, just at this stage it's just shouting it out and saying thanks. We probably sparked an idea there. Maybe we can do more for those teams where we do hit them. Anything's possible. That's our M mindset here.

Speaker B: I'll give you a bit of a thread and I don't know, maybe some of the listeners will find something interesting in this. We do this with quite a few different customers. It's basically called a kudos activity. So that's what you've talked about there. But we capture just with AI. But there's a simpler way to do this now, but we capture. Thanks. And so we basically get people to drop it onto different categories on a Miro board. You could do it by chat if you wanted. But it's basically people have helped me with my okr. People have helped me personally at work. Some people have helped me personally in a different way. It's like all these different perspectives because sometimes it's not the work stuff as well. Maybe someone's come and helped you out on a weekend move or something like that. That's a pretty cool thing to be able to share. Thanks for, you know, so we go through that and then we take a randomized selection. So there's not like a guaranteed you're going to get a prize out of this. It's not an expectation, but it just adds a bit of fun. So basically out of that group, we take a random set of names of people who both gave feedback or received feedback and then we do a bit of a randomized sort of prize thing, which is you win anything from a potato or a pencil all the way up to $100 gift card or a book or something like that. So there's a few different things like that and just adds a bit of fun to the activity. So there's different things you can try. Yeah. Cool. All right, let's get into you a little bit and your story. So how did you become a coo?

Speaker C: Uh, yeah, look, I'm from the Gold coast here originally. I actually, this is my. I started off in my teenage years and was actually a dancer, professional dancer, and went and traveled the world, worked on cruise ships, worked on casinos, dancing, all that fun stuff. And around 26, got into an accident dancing and actually broke my neck pretty much. So was done, career done. And I'd worked in a contact center in between work, working as a dancer. Uh, and, uh, when I came back from overseas, everyone that I'd worked with and started with in that contact center had moved into management. So right place, right time, got into more of a management role pretty quickly within a large Fortune 500 company that had an office here on the Gold Coast. At the time, they were one of the largest employees on the Gold coast. And I was really fortunate to be able to work there because it really taught me all that kind of governance and process and all the things that you really need to understand as a people leader and a manager. You probably wouldn't get necessarily smaller businesses at times. I'm talking about a large HR team of probably about 30 people and you're doing your certifications, you're doing courses, you're doing all your leadership training. And it was just a brilliant base for me to learn from and I had some really good leaders there at the time that allowed me to come through and learn as much as I could. Like I was always the one that was asking questions and annoyed everyone and how does this, why does it work like this? How does this happen? What's going on here? How do I fix this? So I was always quite inquisitive with whatever I was doing and that's how I got put into succession plans for management in there and then grew my career in there. After I left that company, I went and worked for the Commonwealth Games here on the Gold coast. And that was an interesting experience. Although it was very government driven in run, which was very different from that publicly listed company but still that same governance and policy and frameworks that you would expect in the government. So it was interesting. I actually set up the, the General Inquiry contact center and the volunteer contact center there before I got asked if I could do something different. I'll always put my hand up to do something. Never say no to an opportunity. Always just put your hand up and do it. You'll either learn from it and if you fail, it's okay, you're going to learn from that too. That's always been my M ethos, it doesn't matter. But yeah, went and worked on project managing, scheduling and rostering for the Games. And it was around 17 and a half thousand people rostered over four weeks across 64 business units. Small little task but yeah, definitely taught me a lot. And uh, what I loved about working at the Games was it was a very much a startup vibe because we'd never had the Games here. That's the first time that the Commonwealth Games were here on the Gold coast and it meant that we had to get really creative so there was nothing that existed. Everything we had to create from scratch. And so when that finished, that contract finished and we finished the Games, I was like, what do I want to do next? I like this creativity and I look back at it now and think when I was in that large Fortune 500 company, it was all about maintenance. M and that's how I explain it. Now you're maintaining your budget for the month and you're making sure that your shareholders are happy and your boss is happy. But it wasn't a very Creative space. And I was really looking for that and making the leap into startups, it was, was like, okay, this is a space that I can get really creative because you have to be, you've got to be a problem solver, uh, you've got to be thinking about different ways and all the risks that are out there and bringing it all together and you're creating something with a team. Like, I look back at it, I came in as the customer service manager here at Autogroup. That was in 2018. And then as that role shifted and I took over more parts of that operation, moved into customer relationship manager and then into chief operating officer. This is the first time that I've been at exec level but being part of the senior management team here, uh, at Autogrove the whole time. But yeah, look, there's a lot to learn still, but it's been a great journey so far.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's fascinating. You go through each of these sort of steps along the way and you basically prove out your different ideas and different ways of working and eventually it ends in a state where you've got a really solid foundation that gets you into those executive positions. It's also interesting, you're not the first person that I've spoken to that has a arts background that's got into, uh, literally a CEO role. Another person we have a podcast with that's actually want to have a quick, cheeky look and see if I can find where it is. And I can't. I can't tell you which episode it is, but there is an episode. I'll probably do this on the flop notes. Actually. No, it's episode from April 4th. There it is. But yeah, April four episode. So Matt Lawrence, he was at the Opera House and he was doing prop production. Right. So that's what he was done very much in the same sort of space for him. Thankfully, he didn't have an injury that he had to go through like you to transition out of that. But there's something about the arts and that connection with people and story. And for me a CEO is a big part of a, uh, big influence in the organization. How we get people motivated behind certain things. So often I think people look at it as a really op. It's in the title, an operational type role. Just cookie cut it. But really it's actually. There's a lot more to it. It's about that connection with people.

Speaker C: Oh, uh, 100%. It's about. Yeah, it is. It's such a generalist role because you are. You've got to be across everything, the number one thing that you've got to be able to do is bring everyone together, uh, and get shit done. That's what you've got to be able to do. Yeah.

Speaker B: Love it, love it. And so what got you personally interested in outcomes? I'm frontloading the question there. Maybe this is not a jam for you, but of course, obviously you're heading up the OKRs and really being that effective host there. What got you interested in outcomes rather than outputs?

Speaker C: Look, I've always loved KPIs, don't get me wrong, it's always been a part of every role I've had in operations. But I feel like there's coming in autogree on the last few years. There's so many different things that get you to an outcome and I think that's what I've really learned here over the last few years, that there's a million and one ways that we can do things. But what is the actual outcome that you want at the end? Because that's what's really important. And so whether that is, for example, putting in something as simple as a ability for the customer to reschedule their booking online versus us manually calling that customer and doing it over the phone, the outcome is the customer wants to be able to reschedule their booking, but there's a really laboursome way that we can do it or there's a digital way that we can do it. What's it going to take to get the outcome that the customer wants and put in the easiest, most efficient way to do it? Yeah, I think outcomes, uh, are really important and probably another way to explain that too. I've always driven the team, especially in the contact center. Uh, you've got your sales targets, you've got your booking targets or whatever targets that you've got there. And they are important. Obviously we want to be achieving them, we want to be doing that, but if it's probably not going to give your team that purpose. So if you can actually talk around the purpose. So if you want to get that customer to have their car serviced and have a really good experience and to be really happy and to be safe on the road, that's going to give more purpose than, hey, team member, you need to get 10 bookings today.

Speaker B: Much more inspiring and engaging allows the team to work towards that outcome as well. Right. Like how do we really optimize for the impact that they're trying to make? And it also gets away from the monkey's core, which is the whole, you've got to be careful what you wish for. You might wish for becoming rich. Okay. You become rich because all your family are killed and you have their, uh, life insurance payout.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Sometimes those 10 appointments, they might not be the 10 appointments you want. It's about, what's this really look like? How do we drive that?

Speaker A: Success?

Speaker C: Yeah, totally.

Speaker B: Yeah. Ah, very cool. All right, so I've got one more question about you, and then a bit of a hot round to get us on the close out here. I always find it interesting. Usually people have a way of doing things that gives them a bit of an edge and makes them more effective than others. That's a bit of a stretch, but everyone has their own way of doing things right, and it gives them a bit of advantage. What do you think you do differently to get results than other people?

Speaker C: Look, I'm really big on continuous learning. I think throughout my career over the last 20, 25 years, I've worked on a few different things, but I've had two different distinct careers. And coming as a dancer, you had to be disciplined. You had to do all of that to get to the top and actually be getting booked jobs. It's. It's a really hard thing to do. And so I've always worked really hard and will make sure that I'm learning. And continuing to learn, I think, is really important. Even when I at my team at the moment I came, when I started in here, it was just me, and I really had to build out that infrastructure with the team. I've had to put mechanics into the contact center, which was very different, especially for me managing them. But it's about going, hey, come and have a career with us and I'll help you. I'll learn. You can learn with us. Come on that journey. And there's lots of opportunity there, and I think that is really important. So making sure that you've got people around you that want to get better and not just sit here and want to get paid and go home.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: Help me make this better. I think that's important. Love it.

Speaker B: Love it. Very cool. All right. That's amazing. Yeah. I mean, it's that I think so often we get to a certain point in our career and then we just get tied up in busy work and we lose that connection with the continuous learning. I think that, to me is real art to it. If you can't always come back, always rediscover. It actually leads me into the close act questions. And I had one, but I'm gonna swap it, swap the order A little bit. My question is, what's your favorite professional book? Speaking of learning, what's something that you've read recently, or even maybe a little while ago that really got you thinking?

Speaker C: I'm currently reading Leadership Mindset 2.0, which is the psychology and neuroscience of reaching your full potential. It's been an interesting book. I wouldn't say that it's. I'm, um, that I'm learning brand new things in there. It's definitely stuff that I've learned over the years. But what I really like about it is the way that it breaks it down and it gives you things that you can do during the book. And I, uh, find that really interesting because some of these books can be quite laborsome to read. So I'm finding this one is quite good. My next one is Humanocracy. I think things that push the boundaries of what we think is normal and traditional is important, and giving us different insights and thoughts around how we can challenge ourselves to be better and how we can challenge the organization to be better is really important. Love, uh, it.

Speaker B: Love it. That's really cool. All right, so last question. What's something that you've been experimenting with lately?

Speaker C: Experimenting with? So I'm actually enjoying OpenAI Academy at the moment. So I'm trying to hone my prompt engineering skills. So I'm enjoying going through that and learning that and doing that. I think it's really important with the way that things are going and how rapidly technology is going. I think we all need to be tinkering with it and learning how we can use it within our businesses and our lives. Because it's coming.

Speaker B: Yeah, 100%. I really do feel like it's the new computer literacy. It's that sort of thing where once upon a time, my dad was part of that generation where he rode the Internet out, right? He was like, in his sort of last few years, his Internet was bankable. Computers were becoming a thing. He had a secretary that used to take all these notes and those sort of things. And he came out of work and then he realized, oh, geez, I actually better learn how to do this for banking and everything. So he was forced back into it. He's 81 now and he's. He retired quite young. He. He's seen that full sort of journey. And I think I remember when I started working too, there'd still be a lot of people that just didn't know how to use a computer, like basic sort of stuff. It feels like AI is that next thing. Right? It's do you at least have some basic practices? You don't need to be a pro, you don't need to be trying to hook up and code AI agents, but you need to have some ideas around how to use it, uh, how to put lean on large language models, all that good stuff.

Speaker C: 100 and even if you look in the last 24 months, you've gone from generative AI bots and agents into agentic AI that's coming out and that's going to change the landscape of things a lot. And I'm. I think it's great. I think we're living in such a technologically advanced period of time and you've just got to embrace it. Things are going to change and you'll either be a part of that change or you will be left behind.

Speaker B: Yep, that's it. Yep. Be part of that change will be changed, right?

Speaker C: Yep, 100%.

Speaker B: Lukas, really thank you so much for the time today. I think it's been a really incredible journey and hearing your story there and so many of those learnings. Really appreciate it. You have an amazing rest of your day.

Speaker C: Thanks, Tim. Appreciate the chat.

Speaker A: So there you have a team. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. I thought Lucas was absolutely amazing and his approach was incredible. Seeing how he's rolled that out and really got the most out of it for the teams is amazing. Here's my top three takeaways. Number one is have one impact focused okr. I've said this a lot on this podcast, but there you've heard it firsthand. That is the biggest thing that they did that really got people behind it or one of the biggest things. So singular okr. Don't worry that not every team can be able to support that singular okr. They can have their own okrs and they can be empowered to set their own thing. We don't need something that ladders up and connects everyone and has all these complicated things. Keep it simple, keep it clear and focused on what really counts because otherwise you're stuffing in a bunch of stuff that doesn't really matter and that just distracts the business. Number two, have champions. This is something that I learned early on is every team or every team that's using okrs should have a go to person that can help them get the model. If it's not working, they can tweak it and prove it. The champions can share lessons around with the other champions. So you get this learning culture going on. So you build this continuous improvement approach where it's not just teams going through these learnings on their own, but they're sharing these learnings. So that for me was absolutely game changing. Okay, I shouldn't suck. I feel like it's crazy to say that, but if it's feels harder than it needs to be or things aren't quite working, go ahead and fix it, change it.

Speaker B: You've got your own approach that will

Speaker A: work for your organization, so you can get some inspiration here, but you need to tweak it and apply it and just give things a bit of a go. Don't be afraid of failing and learning. It's something that's really important to go through on these type of journeys, particularly with focusing on outcomes.

Speaker B: If you can't set this up to

Speaker A: have a bit of failing and learning on the journey, then you're probably not going to be able to focus on outcomes and experiment and try things out to see if you can make an

Speaker B: impact in the market.

Speaker A: As always, if you're getting value out of the podcast, I would love it if you could drop a review or

Speaker B: star rating on, um, whatever platform you use.

Speaker A: It really helps us get the message out and other people hear about these episodes. It's also really good feedback for me to learn how do I make it better? Uh, if you want some of the resources that Luke's and I spoke about and other material that we've talked about in other podcasts, you can get all of it on okrquickstart.com podcast. You got everything there, resources, templates, cheat sheets, all those kind of things to help you focus on outcomes and empower your teams. Until next time, everyone. I hope you have an amazing rest of your day and I can't wait to speak to you soon. Take care till the next episode.

Speaker B: Peace.