No decision that you make now is permanent.
You can actually change if it doesn't work out.
You've got to take what you know now to be true, make a great decision for yourself,
and don't get stuck on the uncertainties.
For me, that point of reflection had me say, am I actually running away from something
that I'm not confident in or scared about?
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
And along the way, we're hoping to get some really great advice from our leaders.
My guest today is Jenny Child, the chief executive of Oroton.
Thank you so much for coming into our beautiful Black Studio.
Great to be here.
Jenny, as I said, you're the CEO of Oroton, which is one of Australia's oldest luxury
goods brands, best known to this day, I would say, for handbags.
That is the association most people have when you say Oroton.
Now in the year to July last year, you recorded an 18% rise in sales to $115 million and you
doubled your operating profit to $7.4 million.
And I believe you have about 450 employees in Australia, head office in Sydney.
Proudly based here in Sydney in Chippendale, we have a new office we opened about a year
Well, thank you for allowing us to spend 15 Minutes with the BOSS.
Our time is short.
We will start the clock right now.
So, Jenny, my first question is, in the morning, what time do you get up?
Are you a breakfast kind of person?
I would definitely say I'm an eater.
About 6 a.m., 6.30 is my normal wake time.
And that's usually around the time that my seven-year-old wakes up as well.
My mornings are pretty dedicated to being a mom.
I've got to get him ready to school and off to school and asking the same question over
and over and over.
Have you got your shoes on?
And getting him to eat breakfast?
And getting him to eat breakfast.
And sometimes he's so slow at that that I'm making it and we're eating it in the car.
But the very first thing I do, if I'm really honest, is I open up my app to look at our
numbers from the night before.
How did we trade the previous day?
And then phone down and action starts.
So do you ever get tempted to look at those numbers even earlier, say in the middle of
And if they're not quite as good as you think, is it hard to get back to sleep?
I'm very much a long-term thinker in the business.
Any one day of trade that isn't great, it happens, right?
We have those fluctuations all the time.
So you've got to be able to go with the ebbs and flows and not get so distracted that you
can't actually operate.
And what time do you get to work?
Usually don't get to work till about 8.30, 8.45.
And do you have to drop your son off somewhere on the way into work?
I drop him off on the way and then make my way to Chippendale.
So you sound like you've probably almost done a day's work by the time you get to the office.
Fighting the traffic and not getting some sort of frustration with not being able to go faster
But I make use of the time in the car.
So I'm either listening to something that I'm really engaged in or I'm having calls.
So next question is, has there been a pivotal moment in your career that's really changed
the trajectory of your career or changed you in some way?
One in particular that I'll share is when I was at McKinsey and I was frustrated with
something not moving fast enough and I decided to look at my other options and I got myself
an offer to go into private equity in a place in Boston and I called my mentor and he reacted
by saying, don't always trade the known good for the prospect of great, which was his way
of just slowing me down and saying the grass isn't always greener and really think through
these decisions and make sure you've made your list of all the things that are great
about what you do now and where you are, counterbalanced with the things that you want to change and
have done differently.
And that to me was the pause that I needed to really reflect.
For me, that point of reflection had me say, am I actually running away from something
that I'm not confident in or scared about?
And it was more that that I was doing than saying this place wasn't for me anymore.
Then I ended up staying at the firm and really knuckling down.
And I think part of it was renewal and focusing on the things that I was really learning and
still growing into, which was a lot at that point in my career.
It was my early thirties.
I had so much more to learn.
And so focusing on what is it that is giving me the butterflies in my stomach, which meant
that I was learning and let me do more of that.
And then also the renewal, part of that renewal was making partner and moving to Australia
and figuring out how to actually rebuild my skill set in a new place, meeting new people,
making new connections and in that, you know, frame the next part of my journey.
So what are the key skills that you learned at 15 years at McKinsey?
I mean, it's an amazing company, right?
It was an amazing experience because it put me out of my comfort zone a lot.
You're working with some of the best executives and CEOs in the world at some of the biggest
And so getting to see them up close and personal, watching and learning almost by osmosis how
they operated and what made them tick and being able to see that across lots of different
leaders really shapes you as an individual and learning how to problem solve.
Just remembering and knowing that my brain is my main asset and that I can take that
anywhere I go is something the firm really hones in on how to problem solve and break
down anything that might seem like a challenge.
So is there a particular methodology about problem solving that you learned that you
We call it your toolkit.
So you use that toolkit in various ways.
Some of that might be pure strategy studies that you're doing where you have to take the
complexity of the future any business is facing into and break it into parts and pieces that
you help put together a sensible strategy that can be communicated all the way through
Other parts of your toolkit are pure analysis and analytics and being able to take mass
amounts of data, make sense of it, deduce insights, tell a story on the back end of it.
So I would say all of those parts of my toolkit I use on a regular basis.
OK, so on that note, what's the best piece of career advice you've ever been given?
I would say in my early 20s, my very first job out of college, I had someone on the board
who took an interest in me.
She was a big time lawyer in Chicago and I had been trying to figure out what to do.
I was dedicated to becoming a doctor my whole life.
My parents told me since the age I was two, all the way through college, I was going to
And I had decided not to do that in my senior year at college, which was a huge change.
And I think it left me a little bit lost.
And so I was thinking all these pathways that I could go down, going to law school, going
to business school, going to find another job in another city.
And she was listening to me go through this process.
And she finally just stopped me and said, no decision that you make now is permanent.
You can actually change if it doesn't work out.
You've got to take what you know now to be true, make a great decision for yourself,
and don't get stuck on the uncertainties.
Because you can, especially as a young woman, you know, when do I want to get pregnant and
when do I want to be married?
All these uncertainties can really create paralysis in your life if you don't know how
to just push forward.
I think the funny part of what she said, she did say, caveat, having a child is irreversible.
She's like, you could get married and it doesn't work out and you could reverse that.
But when you have a child, that's the permanent one.
So pay a lot of attention to that decision that you make in your life.
But she said everything else, mortgages, jobs, careers, it can all be changed if it doesn't
Yeah, that's really good advice.
Okay, on that note, Jenny, stay right where you are.
We're going to take a short break.
And when we come back, we're going to open this beautiful chatterbox.
Welcome back to 15 minutes with the boss.
I'm here with Jenny Child, the chief executive of Oriton.
Now, Jenny, this is our section called the chatterbox.
In front of you is our chatterbox, which has got 15 to 20 questions all wrapped up in little
I'm going to ask you to pick out a couple of questions one by one, hand them to me,
and I will get you to answer them.
So please start foraging in the box.
This is the scary part.
Yeah, I'm afraid so.
Tell me about a time when you failed at something.
How did you recover?
And what did you learn?
Are you a failure?
I'm a failure and learn fast.
Learn fast from the failure.
The biggest failure that I would say that I've learned from in the job that I have now
is around communication and the need to communicate really frequently.
So what was the actual failure?
The failure was thinking that if I shared the strategy with the business, then everyone
would just know it and be on their way.
That was the failure.
And I had an interesting conversation in my early days as a CEO with a friend who said
they had a boss and every meeting that boss would sit down and state the priorities of
It was so pedantic that everyone was, of course, like, this is crazy, why does he always keep
But at the same time, this person was telling me every single person in the business could
recite the priorities and the strategy of the business because of this tactic that the
Now, that's not my style.
I wouldn't do it that way.
But the lesson in that is you've got to say it again and again and again in different
ways because people hear things and absorb things in different ways.
So how do you communicate that again and again?
Do you communicate that in every meeting you have with individuals or do you have town
halls or how do you reinforce the strategy?
So sometimes it's bring everyone together and let's start the day with a reminder of
And other times it's more subtle and nuanced and worked into the agenda.
And we do have a framework for every meeting, which is performance, product, people.
And we use that rough framing to just make sure we're clear on what are the big things
in those three areas that we all need to be talking about and thinking about.
And do you get sick of repeating it and trying to find different ways of communicating the
I think that was part of my problem at first is that for me, someone repeating something
to me is my worst nightmare.
And so I do find creative ways.
We'll get together and we'll actually have different people present different parts of
the strategy or we'll do some sort of recording about a part of the strategy and send it out
to the retail team.
So we find different ways to communicate.
Okay, interesting.
So when you were in school, what did you want to be when you grew up?
Now we've had this, we know you wanted to be a doctor.
What made you decide not to be a doctor?
So my dad was a doctor.
My biological father was a doctor and my mom was a nurse practitioner.
And I got close to getting ready for my the test that you take for med school.
And I started to think about what life would be like.
And one of the things that a conversation I had with my father at the time was how disgruntled
he was about the medical system in the US.
It was just really tricky to practice what he started out loving.
And I just didn't think it was for me in the end.
And so I wanted to spend some more time exploring, which is what I did for the next five-ish years
And how did you get into McKinsey?
Another life juncture where I had left school and I spent that time thinking about what
my pathways were.
I did a lot of work in the nonprofit sector, which was very interesting because I could
be in inner city Chicago, inner cities, helping young people have financial literacy and have
access to thinking that they weren't getting in the school systems.
And while I loved that, I was really using it also as a time to investigate what I wanted
I found my way to business school because I thought that was the most versatile degree
to then port myself into a new sector.
And I got approached by McKinsey in the process of being in business school.
Now, that's interesting that you work for a not-for-profit.
Are there particular points or things that you took from the not-for-profit sector which
shaped you as a business person?
I learned how to be very self-sufficient.
So I was in my early 20s and I got given a region of Chicago to build relationships both
with corporations, law firms, consulting firms, to access volunteers and then build
relationships with school systems and administrators in the public school system in Chicago.
And then my job was to marry the two things together.
And so you're given this pretty big responsibility as a very young person.
And I remember the first time that I had to present to the CEO of the nonprofit I was
working for what my plan was.
And I worked for weeks, had no framework, but I was really diligent in strategically
laying out priorities and then a plan underneath that to accomplish what I needed to that year
without a lot of help or tutelage.
And so I think I learned that I loved that.
I really liked the thinking in that and the strategy behind accomplishing a goal for the
nonprofit, the business.
Interesting that not-for-profit could be a real career starter for someone like you.
It gave me a lot of room to wear a lot of hats because when you start shining in an
environment like that, doesn't have a lot of resources, you get a lot of opportunities.
So I made my way to the headquarters after a few years.
And then I made my way to D.C. where I was part of this lobbying effort to get government
funding, millions of dollars we raised for what we were doing.
So in a very short period of time, I got to wear a lot of hats and do a lot of things.
Wow. Amazing. I love that.
OK, Jenny, next question.
OK, I'm getting less scared now.
Yeah, I can tell you're enjoying it.
What is your favorite party story you like to share?
OK, so I have to answer this honestly.
I've answered everything honestly, so I've got to answer this one honestly.
When I was young, about eight or nine, there was a contest on the radio.
And I, for whatever reason, got very inspired that I was going to win this contest.
And what sort of contest was it?
And the contest was to recite the entire McDonald's menu at the time within, it was
like 30 seconds or something, like really rapid fire.
Sing the McDonald's menu.
And so I practiced and practiced and practiced until I could sing it in the right amount
of time, everything perfectly.
And of course, my parents were like, this is insanity.
And then you had to wait till they ran the contest on the radio and dial and dial and
try to get through.
And I never got through.
But to this day, I can recite the McDonald's menu from that mid 80s by heart.
And so sometimes at a party, you know, I might be known to recite the menu if I get a bit
silly. And I'm definitely not going to sing it here, I promise.
OK, Jenny, therein lies the end of our chatterbox session.
Well done. You've passed with flying colors.
I now have one last question for you, and that is if we gave you 12 months off, you
were unencumbered. You did not have to take your seven year old son with you, although
you may if you choose.
What would you do?
And I would take my seven year old and my partner, my son and I always talk about, which
is you need to be strong, you need to be smart and you need to be kind.
And teaching him how to be those three things, even when it doesn't feel like being those
three things is especially for a seven year old very hard.
And I think pushing yourself out of your comfort zone, traveling to places where you are uncomfortable,
you're learning new things, you're seeing new people, new cultures, not quite understanding
it, not knowing how to navigate it would be a massive lesson for all of us.
And there'd be so much growth in it that we would actually be able to learn together as
we went through that year, but him especially, I think, independence that he would feel coming
out of that and the strength and the smartness and the kindness that he would come out of
it with, I think would be well worth it.
And that is our 15 minutes up.
Jenny, I love your attitude of turning good into great.
I love your mantra of being strong, smart and kind.
I love the way that you also have learned how to deal with uncertainty and you don't
get rocked by uncertainty.
And I so love the fact that you can sing the McDonald's menu in 30 seconds to whatever
So thank you so much for allowing us to spend 15 minutes with the boss.
It's been an absolute privilege.
Thank you, Sally.
And thank you to everyone for listening.
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This podcast was hosted by me, Sally Patton, produced and edited by Lapfan.
Our theme is by Alex Gow and our executive producer is Fiona Buffini.
The Australian Financial Review.