I go back to my outward bound experience.
What I discovered is my mental strength was way above anyone else in the group.
So when people were melting down because of either physical or the fact that we're lost
in the bush or whatever, I had the mental strength to go, you know what, and take a
When you're employing someone, I normally make my decision within the first five minutes.
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 really great advice from our leaders.
My guest today is John Caffey, the chief executive of Ingenia.
Hi John, how are you?
I'm well, thanks Sally.
Thank you so much for coming into our lovely dark studio.
It's an absolute pleasure and really nice to meet you.
Now John, you're the chief executive, as I said, of Ingenia, which is a developer of
affordable housing for downsizing baby boomers.
The company has $2.5 billion of owned and managed properties across 100 sites along
Australia's East Coast.
And I believe that this year you expect to record earnings before tax and interest of
between $162 and $165 million.
Have you always been interested in property?
So I've been involved in real estate in one way, shape or form since about 1987.
So relatively young, I started a cadetship with Lendlease.
Prior to that, no involvement whatsoever.
The family didn't come from a construction or property business.
And it's funny, it's one of those things I remember walking on a building site for the
first time down at Darling Harbour in 1987 and just thinking, like, I get this.
Immediately, you know, it's just something I understood everything very, very clearly
was all very obvious to me.
And also the process and the physical elements and the things that needed to be done were
almost intuitive immediately.
Interesting. Okay.
We haven't got long, only 15 minutes.
The clock starts now.
What time do you get up in the morning?
Tell me about your morning routine.
Pretty boring, Sally.
So I get up at 4.40 every morning.
That's very specific.
I need the alarm.
It's all timed to perfection.
So, you know, within 10 minutes, I'm out the door with my gym gear on, do a good hour or
so workout at the gym.
And then by sort of, you know, 10 past seven, I'm at my desk with a strong coffee, scan
the papers, scan my emails, a little bit of quiet time for thinking and planning the day
ahead in terms of what I want to achieve.
Then really, really important for me, think about all the things I need to do to make
sure my team can be productive during the day.
I would hate to think that someone's lost a day of productivity because they're waiting on
me to make a decision, respond to an email or make a phone call.
And are you a breakfast or not a breakfast guy?
I'm a non-breakfast guy.
I like the idea of feeling hungry.
Fasting from, you know, dinnertime until whenever it is you choose to eat, I find gives
me a good, good feeling internally.
So what time would you have lunch then?
I don't have a fixed time and I think that's really important for me.
So I don't use the clock.
So, you know, anything from between 12.30 and 2.30 in the afternoon, it just depends.
If you find that it's super productive to be hungry while you're working, do you also
suffer from the sort of mid-afternoon slump when you have eaten lunch?
Well, that's very interesting.
And I could talk about this for hours, Sally.
So about three years ago, maybe four years ago, I decided to, after a little bit of
research, go off highly processed carbohydrates and sugar.
With the expectation I would lose weight and all of that, the one thing I didn't expect
and probably took about two weeks to start happening, that unfogging of the brain, you
know, that fog that you get at two o'clock, 2.30 in the afternoon, you eliminate that
sort of cyclical or circadian rhythm in the brain and you just get this constant
switched on, unfogged mental activity.
So another productivity hack, no sugar and no highly processed foods.
Question number two, tell me about a pivotal moment in your career, a project that you
were put on or a career change that you had or something that really changed the
trajectory of what you were doing.
I was working for Lendlease and they sent me on Outward Bound.
Outward Bound is a program, I think it's an international organization that runs, I
suppose, outdoor adventures essentially, but, you know, it probably more focused this
particular course that I did on management skills by putting you in high pressure
And that consisted of a group of people spending 26 days in the Australian bush, including
three days that you spend absolutely alone.
And I thoroughly enjoyed it both from a physical and from a mental perspective.
And I came back and I sort of, I don't know, looked at myself in the mirror and said,
from now on, I'm going to take my career more seriously and I'm going to take
considered steps in my life to, I don't know, be a better person.
Not necessarily a light bulb moment, but a point at which I suppose you decide that
freewheeling teenager starts being a considered adult that, you know, is probably
more thoughtful about what you do, how you do it and how you present yourself to the
world. What I discovered is my mental strength was way above anyone else in the
group. So when people were melting down and all that sort of stuff because of either
physical or the fact that we're lost in the bush or whatever, I had the mental
strength to go, you know what, and take a leadership role.
Here's where we are. There's where we need to be.
We need to do this. You can rest for five minutes and we're going to get going and
we're going to do this.
And you also discovered that you had leadership capabilities, which maybe you didn't
Yeah, I suppose. Yeah.
And so you said that you took steps afterwards to move forward in your career.
What steps did you come back and take?
Not to take yourself too seriously.
Definitely not. But, you know, sort of portray strength and leadership in how you
dress, your posture, how you react and how you speak and respond to people.
And it became sort of, I suppose it was natural, maybe something you're subverting
because you want to be part of the crowd.
But it was quite natural for me to do that.
I just had to do it more consciously, even though that was natural.
Interesting. So that strength that you uncovered and those leadership qualities,
you just basically took those and honed in on them and addressed them in your life.
Pretty well. And without getting into the psychology of a life, your circumstances
point you in a certain direction, you know, and, you know, we immigrated from
Italy. We lived in low socioeconomic areas, you know, went to school in rough
and tumble schools.
You learn to deal with that through tools, right, to break out of that, which is
probably not natural anyway, back to where you think you belong.
And that moment made me think, OK, I've play acted for the best part of 18 years
in order to get through life.
I'm not going to do that anymore.
I'm going to be who I am.
So you're not acting anymore.
You're now being yourself, you know.
Yeah, interesting. OK, next.
What is the best piece of career advice you've ever been given?
I could go on for hours, but you know what?
One of the simplest things someone told me and it goes, I suppose it leverages
off that same story.
Be yourself because everyone else is taken.
So do you want to explain that?
In business, you know, everyone wants to network and do this and do that and put
on a persona of someone that you're not or whatever.
And ultimately, you're only kidding yourself, right?
You are who you are.
You've got strengths and weaknesses.
You leverage off your strengths and, you know, you try and compensate for your
weaknesses. But trying to be someone else, you're just kidding yourself.
So one of the criticisms that is often levelled at leaders in Australia is that
Australians tend to like to be liked, which can make sometimes making hard
decisions very difficult.
Do you fall into that bucket or do you not care if people don't like you?
I think I'd be lying if I said I didn't care, but I would prefer if I had a choice.
I'd rather be admired than liked.
So therefore, you know, do the things that give you an admiration.
What I don't want is a bunch of people telling me they like me because I go along
with everything. You know, the guy's a fool or whatever.
He shouldn't have done that or he should have dealt with that issue.
I think admiration is a better form of like than, you know, he's a really good
guy. He had a drink with us.
You know, I don't drink with the team.
I don't do any of that because I need to separate the leadership role from, you
know, John's a good guy and he went out with us sort of.
It's not something I aspire to.
That's a really good way of framing it.
Actually, it's you'd rather be admired than liked.
Absolutely. On that note, we are going to take a short break, but John, don't go
away. When we come back, we're going to open our incredibly lo-fi chatterbox.
Welcome back to 15 Minutes with the Boss.
I'm here with John Caffey, the CEO of Ingenia.
Now, John, as promised, nay threatened, this is our chatterbox section.
In front of you is this really beautiful, shiny brown box.
Inside are about 15 to 20 questions.
I'm going to ask you to have a bit of a fish around, pick out some questions and
we can get moving.
What are some no-nos when applying for a job?
You presumably interviewed lots of people over the years.
What are some of the mistakes that people make?
I think the biggest mistake people make is not doing their research.
When you're employing someone, I rarely take a short-term view.
If I employ anyone, I'm employing on the basis they're going to be with us for 30
years and get a gold watch at the age of 65.
I would hope that they've targeted our organization and not just looking for a job.
Now, you are going to find people that are just looking for a job.
But so as a minimum, I would expect that I've done enough research to understand the
organization, its objectives and whatever.
There's plenty of publicly available information.
Read the annual report, all of that sort of stuff.
I would expect that as a minimum.
And often I've been disappointed when people really have no idea about the
organization, but they're looking for a career in that organization.
And do you have a favorite interview question?
I used to have a sack of them or whatever, but all the standard, you know, where do
you see yourself in five years or 10 years?
Interestingly, with me, probably maybe a lot of people are like this, but I'll admit it.
I normally make my decision within the first five minutes because you do get that
sense with people and something I've, I mean, I've, you know, I've been to the
Chicago Booth doing an advanced strategy MBA and they talk about luck and intuition.
And I think some of that stuff's real.
You know, you do form a view very, very quickly.
I'm not saying your view can't be changed.
It can, but I form a view within the first five to 10 minutes.
So a lot of that would be based then, I guess, on how much they know about the
company, because that would come up very early in the piece.
Within the first 10 minutes, I think you can make the decision about not hiring.
I think the two hire, once you get down to the two or three candidates where
you thought they're both good, that's a much tougher decision.
Then you're weighing up pros and cons.
The do not hire are generally within 10 minutes.
So I guess the lesson there is you need to make a good impression
in the first few minutes.
I guess that's probably true of almost all interviews.
And I think, you know, I take that same attitude when I'm doing business.
I've got five minutes to establish rapport and credibility.
And if I haven't done it by then, you know, the person's lost, lost interest.
And, and saying that you're always dealing with different personality
types, but you know, a lot of leaders, unfortunately, you get to leadership
roles predominantly because you have those characteristics.
I got a great advice.
Have another fish in the box.
What's something, or perhaps the one thing that other people worry a lot
about, which you don't worry about.
I think, you know, some people worry about unknowns, particularly, I mean,
different personality types, but some people need the future spelled out in
step form to give them confidence.
And others, I suppose, can see that there's a path to the end.
And even though it's not obvious, intuitively, you know, that you can
get there and I'll go back to my outward bound experience.
The thing that freaked people out was not knowing where we're going
and how we're going to get there.
And I sit there and go, well, I know we're going to get there because a
thousand people have done this before me.
It's possible we will get through it.
So I don't fret or get concerned or bogged down on those sorts of issues.
So you've got confident that whatever the challenge is, you'll get there.
And do you always know where you're going?
You know what you want to achieve, the objective, and there's always a
little bit of ability to move there, depending on how things play out.
I don't necessarily know exactly how we're going to get there all the time.
You'll have a good strategy laid out and a plan, but you want enough
flexibility to pivot as and when required, sometimes using intuition
and sometimes using data in order to do that.
So I don't, I wouldn't say I don't know.
I do know, but I'm happy to keep it relatively fluid to make sure, A,
I don't miss an opportunity and B, I can pivot if circumstances change.
I don't need a rigid layout of, you know, how we're going to
have steps to get there.
Have another fish in the box.
Do you have a favourite productivity hack to help you get more out of your day?
You know, I suppose it's part of my morning routine.
I do sit and think at certain points in time during the day to remind myself,
is what I'm doing the most productive thing to meet the objectives of the
organisation, either in the short term or the long term, because if it isn't,
then should I be doing something else as a result?
And when I'm in meetings, the same thing applies.
I continually remind myself, is this a productive meeting?
Do I need to be here or do these other people need to be here for, you know,
for the right level of productivity for the organisation?
So they're just constant reminders.
I also use my diary very, very effectively.
So I've got a colour coded diary for all the different activities to make sure
that once again, they're all productive things and different colours means more
important than other things to make sure I'm productive.
And I think this is really important for any leader.
I have a very close working relationship with my executive assistant.
So typically I sit down with her at least once a week or once a fortnight and go
through the things that are important at this point in time, the people that are
important so she knows they get access to the diary versus people that are maybe
less important right now that don't need as much access to the diary.
So if you're constantly going through the day, thinking about how you need to be
the most productive, to what extent can you tweak what you're doing during the
day or change meetings to make sure that you are being more productive?
Because you may have meetings banked up all day.
Lots of CEOs do, right?
Yeah, look, it's not easy, right?
And the other thing you've got to be accessible in my view, I do have an open
door policy and I do like to be accessible to staff and also to stakeholders.
So, you know, it is limited and that's why that, you know, that morning routine
of mine are looking at the day ahead and then trying to triage from that point
based on productivity or looking a week ahead with my EA is probably more to the
point, but I think the ability when you've been invited to do a two hour
meeting to sit in for 15 minutes and say, okay, I can't contribute anymore in a
meaningful way, I'm going to leave the meeting and let you guys carry on with it.
So quite often I'll do things like that.
On that note, that is the end of the chat box section.
I now have one more question for you.
And that is if you weren't the CEO of Ingenia, what would you be doing?
I think I need to be kept busy and doing something that's fulfilling and also
productive, so I go and live in somewhere in Southern Italy, probably
Sicily, find somewhere near a winery, then just literally walk into the
winery and offer myself as free labour in exchange for obviously learning
something about operating a winery, but also to be able to sample the output
of that particular winery.
And do you think you'd come back to Australia and run your own winery?
Maybe not a vineyard, maybe olives, peaches, truffles, whatever.
It doesn't really matter.
It's more about, you know, having a purpose and being able to be productive,
doing something you enjoy.
John, thank you so much.
I really enjoyed talking to you today.
I really like your advice that being admired is actually more
important than being liked.
So forget the being liked at all costs.
I really like your advice to people applying for jobs, do your research and
make sure that you give a good first impression in the first 10 minutes,
because that is the same in business in general.
You really need to develop a good rapport very early on.
And I also really liked the way you use diet as a productivity hack.
The fact that you like being hungry, that you have no fixed time to eat and that
you avoid the mid-afternoon slump by not eating sugar and complex carbohydrates.
I'm going to try and give up chocolate tomorrow.
So thank you again so much for allowing us to spend 15 minutes with the boss.
Thank you, Sally.
It's been an absolute pleasure.
And thank you to everyone for listening.
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At The Financial Review, we investigate the big stories about
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This podcast was hosted by me, Sally Patton, produced by
Lapfan and Martin Peralta.
Our theme is by Alex Gao and our executive producer is Fiona Buffini.
The Australian Financial Review.