I can be an ideas fountain, that is what they would call an accidental diminishing trait
where I think I'm doing something positive but it's actually diminishing or disempowering
the people that are around me or that I work with.
One of my pet hates is group emails, whereas this will take a whole chain and just tell
you very quickly what are the key points, what needs to be done.
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 aiming to get some great advice from our leaders.
My guest today is Matt Heiner, the chief executive of NetWealth.
Hi Matt, lovely to see you, thank you for coming up from Melbourne to Sydney to come
and chat with us.
Thanks Sally, great to be in Sydney with you.
Now Matt, you're the CEO, as I said, of NetWealth, which is a $5 billion online wealth platforms
provider founded in 1999 by your father and which listed on the ASX in 2017.
You recorded a $39 million net profit in the first half of this financial year, you've
got about $80 billion of funds under administration and I should also say you've got about 600
employees, including 70 in Vietnam, you're busy.
We are definitely busy, but as you said, we've got 600 staff, so there's plenty of people
to share the load with.
Okay, on that note, we don't have very much time, 15 minutes, we'll start the clock right
My first question is about your morning routine.
What time do you get up, what happens, when do you have your first cup of coffee, assuming
that you are a coffee person?
If I talk about what a perfect week or day might look like for me, I try and exercise
three or four times a week, which will include combination of personal training and weights
at the gym and also running.
And getting up at what time?
Usually try and get up depending on the kids at about 6.15, 6.30.
That's so good that there's not a five in front of that.
No, I'm not really a morning person, so I've had to train myself since having kids to get
up a little bit earlier just to try and fit in all the things that I like to do in the
I try not to look at my phone until 8am, which I'm failing miserably at the moment.
I typically will get up in the morning, look at my auraring stats to see how I slept, I'll
inevitably scroll through the AFR, see what's happened overnight and what I'm likely to
face into during the day.
I don't eat breakfast two or three times a week, if I can avoid it, but I'll definitely
have two or three large cups of coffee.
So with your auraring, what are you tracking mainly?
How much sleep, your REM sleep, what are you doing there?
All of the above.
So I track sleep.
I'm pretty fastidious about my sleep hygiene, I think they call it.
Doesn't mean I'm a good sleeper, I'm a shocking sleeper, but really looking at how I've slept
because often if I think I've had a bad night's sleep, it will tell me I've actually had
a good night's sleep and I just need to get on with it.
So it's good little pep talk.
And other times it might just be, look, we've run down, travelling a lot, plenty going on,
so I just maybe just take it a little bit easier during the day and maybe instead of
doing a wait session I'll go for a walk or something else.
So I find it really, really helpful and it's a great way to actually set habits and to
track the positive outcomes of behaviours.
So for example, I try and eat as early as possible I can, so dinner at 5, 5.30 with
the kids would be ideal because I actually find that eating late has a huge impact on
I try not to drink during the week, even one or two glasses of wine will have a material
impact on REM, just feel pretty groggy or tired in the morning, so it's all those sort
So being able to actually see the outcomes and the benefits of either good behaviour
or bad behaviour, I find just helps set the day well.
So my next question is about a pivotal moment in your career.
Was there a point in your career that really shaped the trajectory of what you were doing
or changed you in some really critical way?
Certainly the listing in 2017, I think certainly there was a huge amount of learning to get
to that point and subsequent to listing, we're always learning and trying to do things better
whether that's communicating with shareholders, stakeholders, learning how to manage the business.
It's been incredible for me.
So what have you learnt about having to deal with lots and lots of different stakeholders
which I imagine must be a pretty big part of your job?
Stakeholder management is probably the biggest part of my job when I think about it, so we
interact with pretty much every part of the financial services market, whether that's
financial advisors with the ASX, running a superannuation trustee, we've got a very big
technology team now, so almost half our staff are technology, so it's a very dynamic environment
to be operating in.
Shareholders, clients, investors, so you do need to be a very good communicator and that's
probably something that I've had to learn on the job and constantly refining.
And how do you go about balancing all the needs of the various stakeholders because
you've got to feed the mouths of shareholders, your immediate customers, which are the financial
advisors, their end customers, you've got lots of people you have to please, I guess.
It's about trying to make sure you prioritise the right things at the right time, which
sounds easier than it is, and making sure that you are quite disciplined around what
you're working on at any given time.
Something that I'm not particularly good at is saying no and so having to find ways that
I can either defer conversations or things that might need to be done or just saying
look, now's not the right time to be talking about this has become increasingly important.
But it's 12, 15 hours in a day and you get through what you need to.
That's interesting.
So that's a tactic that you've got of just trying to delay the conversation so you've
got time to think about it and think about your response.
Not necessarily think about the response, but when you've got a lot of competing priorities,
it's actually, I think, around making sure that we're always working on the most important
thing at the right time.
And that might be that I'd really love to do something or to have a conversation or
to catch up with someone, but that now's not the right time given other things that are
more pressing or need to take priority.
So it might be that we do still want to do something, but we do it in two or three months
Yes, I take your point.
You've really only got so much time in a day.
So, Matt, my next question is, what's the best piece of career advice you've ever been
I've always been given a lot of advice, but the one that really stands out is, and I think
this was dad that gave it to me, was that a lot of people have really good ideas, but
it's the ability to actually execute on those ideas or to do those ideas that will be the
difference between success or failure.
So making sure that if you have got an idea, that you give it a go, that you're not afraid
of failure, but equally, if you do fail, make sure that it's a small bet, that it's not
going to take down the company, and importantly, that you actually learn from those failures
or what hasn't worked before, sort of charging ahead again.
So that ability to fail, fail fast has been critical, but also being able to run with
an idea where you think it's got legs.
One of the things that I'm trying at home at the moment with my kids is you start with
yes until it's a no, and I think that that just gives a really good outlook on life where
rather than deciding you're not going to like something or that you're not going to try
something, give it a go, and if it's not for you, that's fine, but at least you know that
you've given it a shot and that it's not something you want to go forward with.
I love that. Start with yes until it's a no.
So on the sort of the ideas and execution, do you think you are stronger on the ideas
front or on the execution front?
Do you have a particular skill or gift for one of those?
I can be accused of being an ideas fountain.
I think that's great and really helpful.
Other people might not agree and might be overwhelmed or find that it's actually difficult
for them to then prioritise or work on what they think is the right thing if I'm constantly
coming up with new ideas.
So one of the ways that I'm looking to deal with that is when I walk into a meeting,
actually calling it out upfront and just saying, can I have permission to brainstorm so that
it's very clear that it's not me actually saying, can you go away and work on these
It's actually saying, can we have a discussion and hear some things that I'm thinking about
or the business is thinking about that we think might be worth exploring.
It doesn't necessarily mean that that's now a priority and you have to go away and work
Interesting. So staff taking that on board, do they then hear that and think, OK, I don't
need to be overwhelmed.
This is just Matt downloading on us.
Now, Matt, stay right where you are.
We're going to take a short break and we come back.
We're going to open our lovely chatterbox.
Now, Matt, welcome back.
This is our section called The Chatterbox.
In front of you is our lovely brown chatterbox inside, which are 15 to 20 questions, all
folded up on little bits of paper.
I'm going to ask you to pick out a few and I will then, of course, ask you to answer
them one by one. So please have a forage.
The deal is you have to give me the question because I get to do the asking.
Thank you. Do you have a favourite productivity hack to help you get more out of your day?
I've stopped wearing a watch.
I used to have an Apple watch and a Garmin for when I was running, and I found that it
was beeping and flashing and tapping me so regularly.
It was incredibly distracting.
And so I now don't wear a watch, which is which has been quite refreshing.
Outlook's also got a really great feature that I use quite a lot called Focus Time,
where at the start of the week, you can ask it to basically block out time during the
week where you just don't want to be interrupted or don't have meetings booked over the
top. And so I'll actually go through and find sort of half hour or hour blocks within
your calendar each day and just put them in as focus time.
So I found that's actually really effective.
And then it is a conscious choice whether you actually book something over the top of
it. But you know that if someone else is trying to schedule a meeting with you, that
it's already blocked out.
That's interesting. So does half an hour work for you?
Because I think if you just gave me half an hour of deep work, I would think it's not
really enough time to do anything really nitty gritty.
I think one of the downsides of virtual meetings is that the tendency is to roll from one to
the next to the next to the next.
And it's not uncommon that even without a lunch break that you've suddenly done eight
back to back meetings with no breaks.
And I've found it actually forces you to have that time in your diary, as opposed to, as
I mentioned, going from one meeting to the next to the next and then having to catch
up for the whole day at sort of nine or ten o'clock at night.
So I think from a mental perspective, sort of being able to have a bit more time just
to reflect on either a meeting you've just been in, think about what the meeting might
be that you're going into or catch up on some emails or a phone call if you need to.
Definitely worth having a look. It's one of the first productivity hacks I think that
Microsoft actually introduced, but not particularly well known.
Yeah, it's a good hack.
The other one which we could probably spend an hour and a half on is just some of the
new copilot tools. That's the Microsoft version of OpenAI.
They are seriously incredible as far as productivity hacks go.
We can summarise an hour long meeting that I might miss or don't want to attend very
quickly to five dot points.
The copilot will automatically transcript the meeting, work out action items, work out
who needs to do what, as well as allowing you to jump between different sort of speakers
throughout the course of the meeting.
So all of the tools coming from from Microsoft at the moment are absolutely focused on
productivity and you need to explore them.
So are you attending fewer meetings as a result?
Definitely. So it's not that I necessarily do it deliberately, but it means that if I do
need to miss one for a particular reason, that I know that I can always go back to that
meeting where it's been a virtual meeting, obviously, and quickly catch up on what the
key items from that meeting were.
Then there's also some some great tools.
So copilot, it will allow you to automatically summarise group emails.
So one of my pet hates is group emails, whereas this will take a whole chain and just
tell you very quickly, you know, what are the key points, what needs to be done, and
that can save, you know, three, four minutes.
And the thing that I've been saying to colleagues and people that are asking about
copilot, it's not necessarily that it's just three or four minutes on that task.
It's when you start to add up those three or four minutes that it becomes quite
meaningful and you could easily get back half an hour, an hour of your day just through
using the different tools in different ways for different jobs.
And you could deliberately stop going to some meetings where your presence is not
really critical, I imagine.
And then you're saving half hour blocks, hour blocks, maybe two hour blocks.
Absolutely. And if it does turn out that it was a meeting that I should have been at
or needed to be at, you can then easily just watch the video.
Oh, fantastic. I love that.
OK, have one more fish.
OK, what's your favourite podcast or streaming show and why?
I was hoping you might pull that question out.
So the obvious answer is my own podcast between meetings with Matt Heiner, but I'm
an avid podcast listener and also audiobook listener.
So during the day, if I can, I'll listen to multipliers by Liz Wiseman.
Tell me about that.
Yeah, so multipliers.
It's really around how do you empower and get more out of your staff and colleagues.
And it's through the power of delegation, through empowering the senior
leadership team and each level down, because I think what they're suggesting
in the research says is that most staff are probably operating at about 70 or 80
per cent. And there's a whole range of reasons for that.
But if you can actually empower them and give them a framework for decision making,
you can increase that or move the dial to 120 per cent.
So you can imagine as businesses grow and scale, making sure that you're actually
getting the most out of all your staff and that they're feeling rewarded and
satisfied is critical.
And are there some key points in doing that?
Is it about giving them more autonomy or are there key themes in that?
Yeah, it's largely about the manager.
So a lot of it's quite self-reflective.
And I've touched on before that I can be an ideas fountain.
That is what they would call an accidental diminishing trait, where I think I'm
doing something positive, but it's actually diminishing or disempowering the people
that are around me or that I work with.
Because they feel overwhelmed.
Correct. And they don't need to necessarily come up with the ideas because Matt will
do it. So this is actually about saying, here's a problem.
Here's something that we'd like to solve.
What do you think? Or can you go away and work on this and come back with some
suggestions or recommendations?
So really putting the decision making power back into the business.
And the creativity back into the business.
I love that. OK, I have one more forage, Matt, right in front of you there.
What is your favourite party story you like to share?
One that I've been telling a little bit lately for no particular reason is when I
was 12, I was actually held up at gunpoint.
So that one generally is a pretty good story.
And wow, what happened?
Basically, mum and dad were going out for dinner.
They were going out to a ball, I think.
And I was at home with my brother.
He was upstairs. And as they sort of got to the end of the road, dad realised this
going back, obviously, many years that there wasn't any paper in the fax machine.
That's how far back we're going.
And came back home, went into the cupboard where the fax machine was.
And as he did so, two people in balaclavas came out.
When he started screaming, I started to get up from the room next door and very
quickly was told to stay on the ground and not move by one of the gentlemen in the
IRA style balaclava pointing a gun at me.
So there's a lot more that happened off the back of that.
But suffice to say, we're all safe and no one got hurt.
Oh, wow. How long did it take you to recover from that?
Just being a kid?
I definitely would check the locks and keep the lights on at night for as long as I
Do you still think about that incident?
Does it sort of impact you in some way today?
Do you still check locks, for example?
No, not so much. Thankfully, today it's more just a good party story.
I'm glad it is only a party story and nothing more serious.
Thank you very much.
On that note, that is the end of our chat box section.
I now have one final question for you, which is if you had 12 months off unencumbered,
you could do anything you like.
You could take the family or not take the family.
What would you do?
Can you even imagine what that would be like?
I think I'd be bored for 12 months.
So I don't mind a holiday.
One of the bad habits that I learned from my father was to always take January off.
And I find that after about two and a half, three weeks, I start to get a little bit itchy
and need to do things.
So there's only so long I can I can lie on the beach.
But I try and make sure that we have good time as a family throughout the year.
We go skiing and go to the beach.
But if push came to shove and I had to take 12 months off, I'd love to go over, maybe
go overseas and live somewhere in a foreign country for six months or so and learn
Spanish or French.
So when you start to get twitchy on your summer holiday after two and a half or three
weeks, do you start dialling into the office or looking at checking your emails or
how do you cope with that?
Usually starts with just checking in on emails and then it will end up in responding
to emails and generating my own.
So how long do you think you could comfortably take off without getting too bored?
Two to three months, Max, I think, as long as I was doing something interesting and was
keeping myself occupied.
So if you were skiing, I guess that would at least give you something to do physically
every day and perhaps prevent you from looking at your phone all the time.
The beauty about skiing overseas or particularly in the States, which I was lucky enough to
do over Christmas, is that it gets dark and cold at about three thirty, which just happens
to be when Australia comes online.
So I can still do a couple of hours, even if we're skiing.
You really do know how to work.
And that is our time up.
It's been an absolute pleasure talking to you, Matt.
I've loved your thoughts on executing ideas and about not being afraid to take risks,
but making sure those risks aren't too large that they're manageable.
Thank you for those productivity hacks.
Everything from booking out mental break times to all the copilot tools you use and also
your tips about empowering people without overwhelming them.
Once again, thank you so much, Matt, for allowing us to spend 15 minutes with the boss.
Thanks very much, Ellie. Enjoyed it.
And thank you to everyone for listening.
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The Australian Financial Review.