The Australian Financial Review There's always kind of this sense of nearism
bias in organisations.
You know, the closer you are to the CEO, the more you get looked at, the more chance that
you've got to move through an organisation and I think there's some reality to that.
I had this one experience once where a great big guy, huge beard, tats everywhere came
up to me and his hand was quivering.
I was kind of taken aback.
Hi, I'm Sally Patton, editor of BOSS from the Australian Financial Review and welcome
to 15 Minutes with the BOSS, a podcast about success and failure and everything in between
and along the way, we're hoping to get some great advice from our leaders.
My guest today is Brett Woods, the chief executive of Beach Energy.
Hi, Brett, how are you?
Thank you so much for coming into the studio.
Thank you very much.
Now, Brett, as I said, you're the CEO of Beach Energy, which is an oil and gas company
based in Adelaide.
Between July and December, you produced 10.2 million barrels of oil and gas, which led
you to recording a net profit of $237 million.
The company is worth about $3.2 billion on the stock exchange and you have around 500
That sounds like quite a lot to get on with.
It's a lot of fun, actually.
We've got a great little business in which we're growing really rapidly, so I'm really
We've only got 15 minutes.
We won't delay any further.
The clock starts now.
My first question is, what does your morning routine look like?
What time do you get up?
I normally get up just before five in the morning.
Over the last year, taking my son rowing before school, that's been a 5 a.m. start every day.
But historically, I always also do that anyway myself.
I usually start the day with either some cycling on my trainer at home or walking up
Mount Lofty Hill in the Adelaide Ranges.
That's a good way to get started.
From there, it's into the office as quick as I can and a cup of tea.
Are you a breakfast type of person?
Really, I'm trying to have some team meetings, some one-on-ones with my direct reports.
If I can fit them in, if they're available in the morning, I love to have a morning breakfast.
Otherwise, for me, it would just sit down and read with a cup of tea.
Typically at a cafe, I quite like being outside.
So I'll go to one of the local cafes in Adelaide, order myself a pot, then I can sit there with
my iPad and get the reading started.
So that's an early start.
Do you get into the office early too?
About 7.30 a.m., 7 o'clock.
And do you find that gruelling every morning?
I quite like the quiet.
Getting there early is just gives me a bit of clear air because soon as everyone else
starts coming, well, then the requests for time come pretty quickly.
And I find if I go through a day and I'm constantly interrupted, my ability to execute
everything I wanted for the day is fragmented.
So if I get started early, that means I don't have to stay there till late at night.
So I find I'm more effective first thing in the morning.
And why no coffee?
That's a bit of a funny story.
When I was a little boy, my grandma used to always have Rose's chocolates.
And in those chocolates, because I'm really horribly colorblind.
So you get the color palette out telling you what chocolates to have.
And for the life of me, I always tried to pick a Turkish delight and I'd accidentally
grab a coffee chocolate and I just couldn't stand the taste of it.
And I think that's always stuck with me.
I just I've never had coffee since.
And coffee is that absolute.
No, no, for me, it's for me, it's too bitter.
That's hilarious about the chocolate.
I love that. I must say, I'm a tea drinker, too, actually.
Now, my next question is, tell me about a pivotal moment in your career that somehow
changed the trajectory of what you were doing.
Yeah, I spent 10 years from a graduate at Woodside Energy, and I was lucky enough
to work on some really exciting projects.
And then around at that 10th year mark, I got an opportunity to work in the UK.
I took the opportunity to resign from Woodside and move overseas.
I think it was important for me because, you know, I grew up in Fremantle, spent my
whole life working in Western Australia.
I really wanted to get a sense of the industry was more than just what I see in my
backyard. So moving to London.
By myself was really exciting.
It exposed me to working in Africa, you know, raising capital, doing things that I
would have not necessarily done as in my technical career at Woodside.
And I think if I had any one moment of massive career acceleration, it was probably
What role did you take up in London?
Yeah, I was become technical manager for West Africa for a small company called
Sterling Energy. So they had assets in Mauritania, Cameroon, Gabon, also in
Madagascar across the other side.
So what's interesting there is that you went from Woodside, which is a very well
known high profile company in Australia, to what I suspect was a far less
profile, far lesser known company in England.
So you weren't jumping to a blue chip company.
Why did you choose to do that?
Why didn't you wait for, say, an offer from BP or Shell or one of the household
People I used to work for at Shell and at Woodside, and many of them were super
bright. They'd been there for a long time and they'd stayed very much in their
technical swim lanes.
And I thought in 20 years time, I could still be there, maybe being a really
senior technical person, build a lot of things and, you know, had a good life.
But I think I wanted something different.
I wanted something that could possibly be transformational for me, you know, to
have something that grew me just out of my humble beginnings from Fremantle to
something much more significant.
So when I saw an opportunity with a small company like Sterling, I knew that I
could influence them to bigger and better things.
That's really good advice, the advice to not necessarily go for a blue chip
employer, but go for an employer who you suspect will give you more opportunities
to broaden your skill base.
Oh, absolutely. That was so important for me.
The small company had individuals that had scope of their roles that was much
broader than what a very large organisation where you just had single point
speciality. You know, being asked to be the technical leader as well as the
commercial leader and having to raise the capital and having to manage the
risks normally done by hundreds of people, having to have that breadth under
your own role just helps you learn so much faster.
OK, fantastic. OK, my next question is, what is the best piece of career advice
you've ever been given?
I think for me, it was about always take chances, back yourself, put yourself in
difficult situations.
You know, if you feel like you could possibly do with another couple of years
of experience, let go of that anxiety and have an opportunity.
I think when you step into something that is challenging, you can learn so fast.
So I've tried to keep on accelerating my learning through putting myself at, you
know, kind of professional risk.
So what is one of the most difficult challenges you have been faced with?
When I worked in Western Australia for Santos and we had a very high performing
business generating very strong cash flow for the organisation.
And then I was asked by the board to take over a different part of the business.
So it was wasn't performing very well.
And in fact, it was really underperforming and losing, you know, several
million dollars a day.
I'd always worked offshore, never worked onshore.
So the risk for me is, you know, can I utilise what I knew and into a different
terrain? So I moved to Adelaide from Perth, took on a role that was very
challenging. And within six months, we turned around that business to be losing
in the order of several hundred million dollars to being free cash flow positive
for that asset by completely restructuring that organisation.
That was tough and very risky, but incredibly rewarding.
So did you jump at the chance or did you amenar about it?
Oh, no, I just jumped at it. I saw it as a great opportunity for me to demonstrate
to this organisation, which I really enjoyed working for, that I got the skills
to be able to turn something like this around.
Great. I love that. OK, on that note, Brett, don't go away.
We're going to take a short break.
We are going to come back very shortly and open the delightful Chatterbox.
Welcome back to 15 Minutes with the Boss.
I am here with Brett Woods, the chief executive of Beach Energy.
Now, Brett, this is our section called the Chatterbox.
In front of you is this really beautiful,
shiny brown box inside of which today are about, I'd say, 15 questions.
I'm going to ask you to pick some out and we'll get going with more Q&A.
Thank you. If you could relive one day in your career,
which would it be and why?
I think the best day was when I got called by Woodside that I'd been successful
in application on their graduate program.
I remember I got a call from the head of HR at five o'clock in the morning.
Five o'clock in the morning?
Yeah. So really super early.
And I was surprised. I went, hi.
And he said, oh, Brett, I'm such and such from Woodside.
I'm just calling to make you the offer.
I said, oh, sorry, I wasn't I was still asleep.
I wasn't expecting the call so early.
And that excited me as well.
I think the thing that really took me back is if you've ever been in a HR
process and they can take months and months and months, there's nothing more
debilitating to your soul than waiting a long time.
Yeah. I mean, hearing back instantly told me that they were really interested in me.
And I felt 10 foot tall and bulletproof that day.
It was great. And for me, it was pivotal to set me up for the rest of my life.
Fantastic. And why did you want to go into the commodities area?
Well, I think, you know, being West Australian, you know, they're everywhere.
They're everywhere. It's, you know, it's the foundation of our economy.
You know, we're really good at digging things up.
You know, our standard of living is very much on the back of the resources industry.
And I, you know, when you sit there as a young boy growing up and you're looking at these
huge things that we're building pipelines, you know, floating offshore
drilling rigs, it's exciting.
It's like you feel like you're doing something, you know, important for the world.
And world class. Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah. No, it's great. OK, I have another forage in the box.
Let's have another one.
Thank you. What's a misconception people have about CEOs?
I think most people think that they're inapproachable.
Certainly my experience meeting people in the field is I had this one experience once
where a great big guy, huge beard, tats everywhere came up to me and wanted to say hello.
And you were the CEO at the time?
I was CEO at the time.
Off beach. And he put his hand out to shake me and his hand was quivering.
And I was kind of taken aback because, first of all, I thought he was going to throw me off
the balcony. But moreover, that he was really nervous to meet me.
And I think that most CEOs are typically very approachable.
They want to have a conversation.
They want to engage with the frontline workforce.
And I think this is kind of unsubstantiated fear that CEOs just about kind of bullies
in a suit. And I think we're very different to that.
There's opportunity to to know people, to understand people and to support people.
That's what kind of drives good CEO behavior, I think.
And I think people just sometimes are a little bit scared of the title rather than who
So would you encourage people who are, say, mid-career executives or early career
executives to meet the CEO wherever they possibly can?
Absolutely. I think it's good to have a relationship with the CEO at some level, even
if it's just in passing.
You know, sometimes people feel a little bit isolated in their roles and they don't see
what they're doing as contributing to the whole.
And I think when people understand that they're part of a collective rather than just a few
individuals in space, it brings much better connection back to delivering your ultimate
game, which is deliver value and keep people engaged.
And do you think that in that case, you as a CEO might look out for their career and
might be prepared to help them along a little bit?
Oh, absolutely. I think there's always kind of this sense of nearism bias in organizations.
You know, the closer you are to the CEO, the more you get looked at, the more chance that
you've got to move through an organization.
And I think there's some reality to that.
So, you know, if you're a mushroom in the corner and not much light being shone on you,
no one's really going to pay much attention.
So I think it's important to also have some humility in that conversation, but to to
be known to to be the advertisement of your own career.
And I also love your advice to make the most of nearism bias.
It's alive and well, and you might as well make use of it.
Absolutely. Fantastic.
OK, but on that note, have another fish.
Let's let's try again.
Tell me about a time where you failed at something.
How did you recover and what did you learn?
I had a challenge in Africa once when we were trying to win a license, you know, pick
up a new entry and I had had to bring a local company along for the journey.
I was so excited about grabbing this opportunity that I didn't do enough diligence
on the local company.
And then once we put our application in, it was kind of too late.
Oh, because you were with that company by then.
Yes. So in reflection, we did some more digging and we recognized that the individuals
involved in this company weren't the type of people that we should be doing business
with. So effectively, we had to pull out of what I thought was a really exciting
opportunity, which has gone on to be a major discovery.
And, you know, for me, what I learned about it is you just can't do enough up front.
You've got to make sure that you've got the right team beside you who are ticking all
the boxes to make sure that you've got the right company, you've got the right partners.
And in our business, it's risk.
So you've got to have the right partners to move forward on.
So I learned a lot through that.
It was a tough failure.
So looking back on it, do you think at the time you just didn't ask enough questions,
if you were prepared to be too trusting of the people who were doing the due diligence?
Absolutely. I thought that box was ticked and it was being ticked by someone else.
And I was focused more on what success looked like while we're going to do with all the
gas and all the oil and what the market messaging was about that, rather than making sure
that we had all the ducks lined up beforehand.
So the advice there, I guess, is to think much more about the risk involved.
Yeah, I think where I missed it, it was I didn't work through the full risk matrix.
And subsequently, when I've looked at acquisitions and business development, we make sure we
have all those things lined up.
Oh, that's interesting. So you really did learn a lot from that lesson.
Oh, I did. Yeah, yeah, it was brutal.
On that note, Brett, well done.
Thank you. The chatterbox section is now over.
You have passed with flying colors naturally.
I now have one last question.
And that is, if you weren't the CEO of Beach Energy, what would you be doing?
Well, I love working.
So if I wasn't the CEO of Beach Energy, I would be seeking to be a CEO of another energy
company. I'm also interested in electricity generation at the moment.
You know, traditional oil and gas companies have shied away from that.
But I see a lot of value in connecting molecules to electrons.
And, you know, we're so short on the East Coast of Australia for electricity.
You know, the risks of blackouts are a challenge.
So I'd love to kind of get into the generation part of the business as well.
And, you know, something that I'm thinking about it at Beach.
So that, you know, I've struggled not to be working.
I've got to be doing something.
And then, you know, if you force me to have a holiday, I'd probably do a lot of
adventures, you know, ride my bike, take the kids somewhere.
But I think I would have to get straight back on the wagon and get into another role
and hopefully a bigger role again.
So what do you particularly love about being a CEO?
I like that the responsibility stops with me.
And that doesn't worry you?
No, no, I love the the excitement you get when you've you've got an idea and your
organisation delivers against it and it works.
It keeps me centred, you know, it's part of who I am.
I think I do love love the industry, love the fact that we supply one of the most
most important things in people's lives, though the industry has had a bit of a
funny smear across it over the last few years.
I think people have now realised the importance of it, that, you know, I can't
stop doing what I'm doing.
And that's the bell. Our time is up.
Brett, I really loved hearing your attitude towards taking chances to throw yourself
into the deep end and see what happens.
And I like your advice not to necessarily go and work for a blue chip company.
You just might find better opportunities, more opportunities from a company which is
less well known, smaller, less high profile.
It sounds like you had a difficult time of it, but learning the importance of due
diligence and leaving no stone unturned is really, really valuable advice.
And I love the idea that young executives, up and coming executives should go and
talk to the CEO, see what pearls of wisdom they may have to offer.
And nearism bias does exist.
So try and benefit from it.
I love that. So thank you, Brett, so much for allowing us to spend 15 minutes with
Thank you very much. Appreciate it.
And thank you to everyone for listening.
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This podcast was hosted by me, Sally Patton, and produced by Lapfan and Martin
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premium content is Fiona Buffini.
The Australian Financial Review.