Your brain is just a dumb muscle, it will do what you tell it.
So I say, it's a bank account, we withdrew today, we're depositing at some point in
the future and I'm having a great day.
Just being a sponge for talent and particularly in business now, that's a really important
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 Cathy O'Connor, the chief executive of Omedia.
Hi Cathy, love to see you, thank you so much for coming into our studio.
Thank you Sally, I didn't have far to come, it's only a couple of blocks away at Omedia
so it's great to be here and thank you for having me.
Now Cathy, as I said, you're the CEO of Omedia, an outdoor advertising and media company.
In Australia alone, you have a network of more than 35,000 digital, classic and outdoor
signs on roadsides and you have signs in places such as retail centres, airports, train stations,
bus stops, office towers and universities.
You employ more than 800 people and last year recorded revenues of $630 million and you
have led the business since January 2021.
That's already quite a lot.
It is three and a quarter years, but I'm not counting.
No, whoever counts.
Thank you so much for allowing us to spend 15 minutes with the BOSS.
We've only got 15 minutes as I said, so let's start the clock right now.
My first question is around your morning routine.
What time do you get up?
When do you have your first cup of coffee?
I get up at 5am, ouch, and I have a big glass of water
and then I almost immediately have a big cup of tea and not just a normal tea cup,
And I have collected a series of giant tea cups because one small cup just doesn't seem
It's like my fuel, the tea.
So depending on what time I need to be somewhere, I can always take a travel mug and drink it on
the way to the exercise.
But the exercise is a ritual.
I like jogging and I often listen to audio while I jog or I do boot camp.
And so that's a 45 minute high intensity workout.
So if you jog, how many Ks?
It varies longer on weekends, but I would do anywhere from six to eight on a weekday
and push up toward 10 on a weekend.
And if you're listening to a podcast, which clearly you are when you're jogging,
what are your favorite podcasts that you're listening to?
Okay, well, there's two things I listen to.
Podcasts is clearly one of them.
But I stream ABC News Radio as well because I'm a time poor person.
That's a really great way to consume news.
And then I'm a bit of a nut on US politics.
So I have a particular favorite podcast.
Pod Save America is my absolute favorite.
Sorry, what's it called?
Pod Save America.
It's funny, it's fun.
This time of the US election cycle, it becomes almost a soap opera and I follow it intensely.
And what about breakfast?
So breakfast is normally on the run.
So I'm a yogurt and berries type of person, but I'm pretty quick and sometimes a smoothie
if I can get all the bits together and do it.
But I'm not really a sit down and eat.
I'm a grab and run type person.
So next question.
Tell me about a pivotal moment in your career that shaped you as a leader or really change
the course of what you were doing.
I think if I look back on my career, the step change for me was becoming a CEO
because it's quite a different job to the 20 years that came before it.
What that's about for me is just the ultimate accountability.
I really did love that the buck stopped with me.
I think at the time I was ready for that change.
I'd been in the role I was promoted from five or six years and I really relished that opportunity
when it was given to me.
Did it at all scare you or did you find it daunting at any point?
To a degree, yes.
But I'm a pretty practical person and I tended to just sort of back myself.
In both of my CEO roles, both at Omedia and before it at Nova Entertainment,
I followed the founders of those businesses into those businesses.
That's an interesting opportunity in of itself because the business has been built off the
principles of the person you've replaced and there's a lot of power in that.
But there's also an opportunity to not be that person and to take the best of what they were
and what they've built.
And then to make it yours and to enhance it.
So I think in some ways maybe the symbolism of being new, being not the founder and maybe
being a woman as well were all things that either energised me or made me feel I have
a brand here and a belief set and I'm going to make it work for me.
So you know how a lot of people say it's lonely at the top, referring to CEOs.
Do you agree with that?
I don't think it is lonely at the top.
I think if anything you have more attention on you at the top.
And so there are always inputs.
You know what you do when you're searching for answers or when you're feeling pressure
as a leader you can never really externalise those pressures.
So I think that sense of being selectively vulnerable is quite important as a CEO.
You don't want to appear outwardly faltering or unsure.
So to a degree you must find a way to use your outlets or admit your stresses and play
And admit those stresses to other people so you can play your husband or your partner.
But I'm also pretty good at self-talk and that is the ability to just say just think
clearly about this.
What do you think the way forward is?
Just make a decision and go.
And also a way of saying that didn't go as well as I thought it would.
It's just one point in one process on a journey.
Make it better next time.
So that self-talk as a CEO is quite important.
And also not dwelling on the issue for too long I guess.
Okay my next question is what is the best piece of career advice you've ever had?
Early in my career it was be useful and I give it to people all the time.
People say oh I'm not sure about my role.
I just say if you're useful you will very quickly recommend yourself to be given more
to do or progress in your career.
So does that extend to find ways to be useful?
Go out and actively find ways to be useful?
Do your role well.
Make sure that your role is a useful role.
Be looking at ways your role can add more value.
So it speaks to productivity.
Be useful is always a good one for me.
It's quite a simple one.
I think as a leader it's have the right people in the room.
First think who then think what.
And invariably if I look back at challenging times or when things have gone well or when
things haven't gone well it's normally a byproduct of who you've got around you.
Because as a CEO you can't do it all.
So do you actively keep an eye out for who in the market in your sector might be good,
who outside of your sector might be good, who you could tap if you needed to?
Yes all of those things.
Just being a sponge for talent and particularly in business now.
That's a really important skill.
Looking to the edges to think about what else there might be and
some of the most risky decisions I've made in my career have been on people
and bringing sometimes people that are different in and taking a punter.
I had a good example of that in radio where I brought someone from the UK in
to lead an Australian content business and I was told by the established,
the prevailing views at the time, that won't work.
But I felt we had group think in Australian radio and I wanted to take that risk.
So how can you tell if people have got the right skills
if they're in a different industry to you?
Is it easy to tell?
It depends on the role.
So some roles are specialists and you may not err on the side of completely new people.
But the last two appointments to my team, which have only happened recently,
both came from different industries.
And I found the diversity of thought around the table of essentially a media company is brilliant.
They bring different perspectives.
They have none of the patterned ways of thinking.
And you're constantly looking at that alchemy in your team
to make sure that the stimulus is there and you're not drifting away from your customer.
So which sectors were they from?
One was financial services and the other was sport.
Oh yes, I can imagine that that would be an excellent way
of bringing different perspectives into your leadership team.
On that note, Cathy, stay right where you are.
We're going to take a short break and when we come back,
we're going to play our lovely Chatterbox game.
Welcome back to 15 minutes with the boss.
I'm here with Cathy O'Connor, the chief executive of Omedia.
Now Cathy, as threatened, this is our section called the Chatterbox.
Now in front of you is an extremely high tech brown box.
It's called the Chatterbox, inside which are about 20 questions
all folded up on pieces of paper.
Please have a bit of a forage and pick out the first question.
Tell me about a time where you failed at something.
How did you recover and what did you learn?
The biggest professional failure in my life would be the launch
of 95.3 and 91.5 FM in Sydney and Melbourne in the early 2000s.
So I was the, not yet the CEO, but I was the managing director of DMG Radio
as it was called then, now Nova Entertainment.
And these were the last two FM stations to be launched,
commercial stations in Sydney and Melbourne.
And we had won the licenses at auction and they were much anticipated.
And Vega launched and it was ambitious.
It was music and talk.
It was old, it was new, and it didn't perform.
It got about a 3% from memory, 3 to 4% in the Sydney and Melbourne ratings,
but it had a lot of talent on the air.
And so with those sorts of formats, because of the cost of the talent,
you've got to rate 7, 8, 9, 10.
So it lost money and we, in the end, had to change direction.
And I remember my boss, the CEO, at the time said to me,
this is the best thing that's ever happened to you
because it's all gone too well up until here.
And I said, gee, it doesn't feel like that.
And I was very fortunate to be given another chance.
And I said to myself, I'm going to learn from them
and make sure this next thing that I don't settle for answers that I don't agree with,
that I don't get sold a research proposition if I don't believe it,
and that I have the right people.
And this is where I brought the person from the UK in
because I thought I'm getting the same people telling me
it has to be a rock format and I don't think that's right.
I think it needs to be an easy listening format.
I'm looking around the world and I'm seeing similar stations
at number one or two position.
I don't know why Sydney and Melbourne don't have this proposition.
And those stations which were designed to have no talent costs,
low operating cost, the music was the star.
They were intensely different to the established sets.
And in the end, they both at times became the number one station in those markets.
So the failure ended up driving me to the biggest success of my career,
which is Smooth FM.
So do you think the mistake was to not trust your gut instinct partly?
Was it that you were listening to the wrong people?
I think it was overconfidence.
Nova's worked, so this is going to work.
And not challenging decisions enough.
Ultimately, you make your decisions to our earlier conversation.
You make your decisions, you get on with it.
But I had an element of doubt with some aspects of it,
and I didn't fully challenge it because I think we were overconfident.
Yeah, I love that.
Okay, next question.
Do you want to have a forage?
When you're at school, what did you want to be when you grew up?
When I was at school, I wanted to be a businesswoman,
but I didn't know what type of businesswoman.
Did you know what it was?
I knew what business was.
I knew I wanted to have a job in an office and be a businesswoman.
I signed up for law because that was the most businessy thing
that I could see that was available.
It was arts law at Sydney Uni was my preference.
Then a friend of mine said,
you know, there's a brand new course called
BA of Communications and Arts, and it's really fun.
It's the media and journalism.
I said, oh, that sounds good.
Then literally, the day before the form was due,
I swapped, and the rest is history.
Why did you want to become a businesswoman?
I'm not quite sure where it came from
because my father was a dentist and my mother worked in the home.
I had a feeling that that's what people who had jobs did.
I must have got that through observing the world I grew up in,
which was suburban Sydney, other people's parents,
and perhaps learning commerce at school.
I just thought, yep, I want to do business.
I want to be a businesswoman.
I didn't actually become a businesswoman,
but I ended up in a sector being radio that I loved.
I listened to it when I was growing up.
So I couldn't believe, you know, this world of music
and content and business came together.
So it was probably my perfect role.
You could have it all.
What keeps you up at night?
Well, the beauty is I can fall asleep very easily,
and I almost always fall asleep instantly,
but I can wake up early, sometimes too early.
So 5 a.m. is a normal time.
Could be a two o'clock, could be a three o'clock.
If I've got a big project or there's a lot on,
a busy mind keeps me up.
So it's learning not to let the thoughts in
and to tell them just to hold on and go away.
Breathing is a good way to do it.
And I get it right.
Some nights, some nights I don't,
but I can very quickly shift negativity or concern or worry
into action and doing.
And the only way to break an anxious moment
as an executive is to do something.
So on those nights, you haven't had enough sleep presumably
because you've might've been up thinking.
But in your job, you have to be full of energy every day.
So are you very good at hiding the fact
that you've had no sleep?
You've sort of inside your head feeling super grumpy,
but you can't show that.
How do you cope with that?
So here is how I cope.
First of all, many of us have Fitbits or Apple watches
or any number of these devices.
And for some time I would look at that and it would say,
your sleep, it had a four in front of it
or a five in front of it.
And then you say, I'm gonna have a terrible day
because I've had, right.
So what I've learned about sleep is on average,
no matter whether you get the four hour sleeps
or the eight hour sleeps,
if you look at the average stats over time,
it's about the same.
You know, for some people it'll be eight hours,
some people it'll be six hours.
You sleep about the same.
So I say sleep is a bank account.
Sometimes you're withdrawing
and sometimes you're depositing,
but every day you feel the same
because you just, Kath, doing a job, living a life.
And that's my mantra.
So I don't say I've had a terrible night's sleep,
I'm gonna have a terrible day
because you will, your brain is just a dumb muscle.
It will do what you tell it.
So I say, it's a bank account.
We withdrew today,
we're depositing at some point in the future
and I'm having a great day.
And it works for me.
So it's a conscious thing that you tell your brain.
You have passed the chatterbox section with flying colors.
I now have one last question and that is,
if you had 12 months off, unencumbered,
you could do anything you liked, what would you do?
Travel, overseas travel to places I've never been.
I also love camping.
So I would love just to head north in the winter
in whatever device made it easy
to get a bit off the beaten track.
That would be a good thing to do.
I also, we have a small, very small rural property.
So there's stuff to be done there.
So I do like growing things and then I like cooking them
and bottling the whole subsistence thing.
We've got bees, it's kind of cool.
So I'd like to do more of that.
I'm just too time poor to do it well.
So I'm somewhat underdone
as a horticulturalist and beekeeper, but-
So do you bottle tomatoes and-
Yep, zucchinis, tomatoes.
Make tomato sauce, make jam, make marmalade.
Do lots of things.
I love making things.
And on that note, our time is up.
Cathy, I have loved chatting to you.
Thank you so much.
Thank you for your advice also
on using failure to energize yourself
and turn it into a learning experience
so that you can improve on what you do next time.
I like the fact that you hire people outside your industry
to increase the perspectives you have
on your leadership team.
And also the way you shift negativity
through action and doing,
and for reminding us that our brain is a muscle
and we can use it and train it like any other muscle.
So Cathy, thank you so much
for allowing us to spend 15 minutes with the boss.
The same, and what a pleasure.
And thank you to everyone for listening.
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This podcast was hosted by me, Sally Patton,
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Video and audio assistance,
and our music theme is by Alex Gao.
And our executive producer is Fiona Bufini.
The Australian Financial Review.