And meetings have a cost, right? If you're having a meeting with 8 or 10 people and they're
senior people, that can be a $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 meeting. And there's some start-ups
that are actually valuing meetings based on how much people are paid. You never regret
moving someone off in the business when you think the time's up. Someone's been in the
role for six months plus. If it's not working, it probably won't work.
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 Adam Schwab, the chief executive and co-founder of Luxury Escapes. Hi, Adam.
Hi, Sally. I'm great. Great to be here.
Thank you so much for coming into our Melbourne studio while I am plonked here in Sydney.
Absolute pleasure, Sally.
Now, Adam, you're the CEO of Luxury Escapes, an online travel agency, which is heading
towards revenues of about a billion dollars this year. And you've got somewhere in the
region of, I think, 550 to 560 employees. So I guess that's keeping you rather busy.
Pretty busy. I think as you get bigger, it probably becomes easier in many ways. I think
that the hardest days for any startup founder is sort of the one, two, three staff team
member days. That's pretty hard. But as you get bigger, you get lots of better people.
So it becomes, I think, slightly, it becomes different, but I think probably slightly easier.
OK, well, perhaps we might get to that a little bit later. Actually, I must say, I've also
read that you run marathons barefoot and you play golf in the dark.
I do. Yes, to both.
Hopefully we'll get to that too. So thank you, Adam, so much for allowing us to spend
15 minutes with you. We haven't got much time. Let's start the clock right now.
My first question is about your mornings. What does your morning routine look like?
What happens when you get up?
I try and get up around five and probably the first hour is catching up on overseas
correspondence. So we've got a team in the UK, team in the US, a team in Europe.
So they tend to work through our night. So I do a bit of stuff catching up there, looking
at the previous day's results, and then I'll tend to do an hour or so exercise, which could
be running, could be peloton, could be playing golf and then come back and could be taking
kids to school or whatever. So there's a pretty consistent, rough schedule.
And what's your favourite kind of exercise?
I don't love running, but it's a bit of a necessity just to keep fit.
But it's probably the most effective. But probably stuff like golf and skiing is probably
my favourite exercise. It feels like you're not exercising, but you are.
So when you do go running, do you actually run in bare feet all the time?
Yeah, I started running barefoot probably about 12 years ago for various reasons.
But I pretty much haven't had an injury since I started running with those shoes.
So it's been really effective and sort of similar speed.
So not many people do it. You see the odd person here and there, but you get a few a few
So how did you get into barefoot running?
But I actually read the book Born to Run and so did my wife.
And she started barefoot running, funnily enough.
And I then started barefoot running and I found the injuries I had just went away.
So the Achilles injuries, the ITB injuries, the calf injuries, they went away.
So I just gradually did more and more.
So I started at a really short distance and then built up eventually to marathon distance.
But I think my first ever barefoot run was maybe one kilometre just to see what it was like.
But it turns out it wasn't too bad.
And how far do you run in bare feet?
I do about 30 to 40 kilometres a week.
I haven't run a marathon for a while, but I did a half marathon a couple of weeks ago.
And do you have a lot of calluses on your feet?
No, my feet aren't too bad.
OK, so what about breakfast? Are you a breakfast guy?
I tend to fast till usually about 12, 12.30.
I started fasting maybe four years ago, so it's a great time saver.
Oh, a time saver. OK.
And don't you get hangry or irritable as the clock ticks towards 12 or 12.30 and you haven't eaten?
I actually find when I eat breakfast, I get hungrier at around 11, 11.30.
But when you find when I don't eat breakfast, you may be five or 10 minutes of hunger.
But I generally don't even notice it now.
It's having done it for about four years.
It just becomes normal.
So if you can get to sort of 1, 1.30, then you can almost keep going.
You kind of just forget about eating.
So I usually eat at 12, 12.30.
But if you punch through, it's actually you probably wouldn't even notice it at all.
Wow. OK, next question.
Tell me about a pivotal moment in your career,
a moment that shaped you as a leader or somehow changed the trajectory of your career.
A truly interesting one. I don't think there's a specific moment,
but I was running the business till 2019, so for almost 10 years.
And then we brought in an outside person to act as CEO and CEO for a while.
And we changed back over Covid.
But the experience of obviously maintain shareholding and was still involved
in the business in many ways, but wasn't running it for a year or so, just over a year.
And that gave a really interesting and different perspective.
And it's really hard to see the label from the inside of the jar.
So being able to see someone else do some stuff that was really good
and probably some stuff that I would have done differently was really helpful.
It certainly changed how I thought about the role and how I operate in the role.
So it's now been about three years back in.
So nine, ten years during the role, a year out, three years back in.
I think it's a very, very different style of leadership,
having had that opportunity to see from the outside.
So what do you do differently as a result of having stood outside for all that time?
As a founder, you're inevitably super hands on.
And now I think having taken that year a few years ago, I'm still very hands on,
probably compared to, I guess, what we call a corporate CEO.
But I think a fair bit less hands on than I was
when you were sort of one of five people running the business.
You have to be hands on.
So that really gives a chance to break habits and start new habits
that hopefully are much improved.
Yeah. Developing good habits is always something to strive for.
I agree. OK, my next question is,
what's the best piece of career advice you've ever been given?
One piece of sort of advice that I always think I can't remember
if someone specifically said it to me or not, but you never regret
moving someone on from the business when you think the time's up.
There's always a temptation, if something's not right, to persist with it.
Maybe that person will improve or maybe it'll get better.
It's not talking the first couple of weeks.
Someone's been in the role for six months plus.
If it's not working, it probably won't work.
And it's usually not helpful for the team member either to stay in a role
where they can't perform.
So I think understanding when time's up, time's up.
So best to have an honest conversation rather than prolong something.
Because chances are that the team member in a month's time
will thank you for it anyway.
Often it's really hard to do, especially if you really like the person.
It can be even doubly hard.
But ultimately, the right decision isn't always the easy decision.
So sometimes you've got to make the right decision.
So, Adam, stay right where you are.
We're going to take a short break.
And when we come back, we're going to open the chatterbox.
Welcome back to Fifth Demons with the Boss.
I'm here with Adam Schwab, the chief executive of Luxury Escapes.
Now, Adam, this is our section called the Chatterbox.
Normally, the Chatterbox would be in front of you.
But as you're in Melbourne, I have it here in my hand.
It is a lovely brown, shiny box inside, which are 20 questions
all folded up on piece of paper, which I am going to ask you to answer.
The thing is that since the box is in front of me, not you,
you are going to have to trust me to forage around in the box
and pick questions on your behalf.
Are you OK with that?
I'm OK with that.
That's lucky because you haven't got much choice in this.
OK, I'm going to start foraging around in the box on your behalf.
Here's the first question.
Who is a leader, either business or otherwise, whom you really admire and why?
I think business wise, I think we've got Reid Hastings has done at Netflix.
Forget value creations, as people have created more value.
Netflix, I think, is about one hundred seventy five billion dollar business,
a really big business, but there are bigger ones.
Look what Reid Hastings has been able to do is constantly reinvent himself
multiple times. So if you reinvent Netflix multiple times.
So Netflix started as a mail order DVD business in the late 90s.
And that was effectively leveraging off the power of the US Postal Service.
They created this new business, had a bunch of imitators,
but then Reid made the really unusual decision to completely cannibalise
the business. So it went from DVD by mail to over the top streaming, essentially.
It was a huge risk. The market hated him for it. It worked.
And then risk number two was when they started creating their own content.
So they started with House of Cards.
Now they spend, I think, 17 or 18 billion dollars a year on content.
So to reinvent themselves multiple times.
And there was plenty of doubters both times.
And it was just an incredible example of a business willing to take chances
and really understand what customers want before customers tell you.
And that was really that Steve Jobsian type.
And probably you'd put Steve Jobs in that category.
But he's obviously got a checkered reputation as a CEO.
But Reid doesn't have that.
Reid's got a fantastic reputation as both a leader, but also as a visionary
in terms of understanding what customers want before they tell you they want it.
I've always thought that Reid Hastings must be an amazing visionary,
given that he was so far ahead of everyone else on the streaming front.
Absolutely. He was literally years ahead.
And that was the thing that I think Lennon said.
Nothing happens for 10 years and 10 years happens in a week.
So TV largely stayed the same for 60 or 70 years.
And then you had cable come in at some point.
But TV, linear TV largely stayed the same.
And then which you were basically beholden to broadcast schedules.
And Netflix completely changed that.
And now the entire way we watch content is on our demand
rather than when networks tell us to.
So it was completely changed the way people behave.
And Netflix really was a pioneer of that.
Do you think that being a visionary is innate in some people?
Yeah, I think I think it's a combination of understanding what customers want
and having the guts to back a judgement when pretty much everyone
will criticise what you're doing, because ultimately people
anything that's different is going to get criticism.
Anything that's new is going to get criticism.
People think that there's a reason why something's that way and it will never change.
So it takes a lot of defiance, a bit of arrogance in a sense,
because you've got to be able to back yourself a bit, a small amount of narcissism.
But you've got to be able to also be humble enough to know when you've got it wrong.
So it's a really tough balancing act.
And I think every every CEO and founder has to deal with these challenges
from time to time, but the really good ones can sort of punch through that.
Yeah, and I guess it's all then about perseverance and implementation,
which is a whole other story.
Yeah. OK, we're going back into the chatterbox.
I'm going to fish around on your behalf.
Do you have a favourite productivity hack to help you get more out of your day?
I don't have a specific hack.
I'm a very much a zero inbox guy, so I don't like having
some people have hundreds of thousands of emails in there.
What my colleagues Mark used to say, it looks like you do as well.
I have lots of emails. I just like having I use my inbox a bit of a to do list.
So I like to have sub five emails in there.
Some of it blows out to 15 or 20, but not for long.
So that's less of a hack and more of just a way of working.
I'm not a massive fan of meetings.
I'm not as I think you have zero meetings, but a shorter meeting
and having a really defined purpose to the meeting.
I don't like having a meeting with it without a really clear agenda
and anything longer than an hour.
You want to have a really good reason as to why we're going to have such a long meeting.
And sometimes there is a really big need for it.
It's a big strategy meeting or something like that.
But you want to be prepared going in and understand really
what you want to get out of it.
So how many meetings would you have a day, for example?
Do you really try and cut that number back a lot?
Yeah, I think a combination of, I guess, whips or one on ones with reports.
I'll tend to have sort of one or two conversations with a direct report
at least per week. I'm having sort of five or six, but at least one or two.
I think eight or nine direct reports that sort of call it 18 or 20 combos a week.
And then you've got specifically scheduled meetings.
I maybe have a couple of day and then you got external meetings on top of that.
So one thing I don't know if you've ever spoken to Carolyn Creswell on the show,
who's a fantastic CEO and founder, who founded Carbons Musely
or certainly made it what it is.
And she's and she's got a great art and the art of saying no
and something I've tried to learn from her.
And sometimes you're just too willing to accept meetings
that probably aren't in the interest of the business.
So being more willing and more capable of saying no is a skill
that I'm probably not quite there with yet, but something I'm certainly trying to learn.
So how long will your whips or work in progress meetings be with your direct reports?
Probably 20 or 30 minutes each one.
And then we'll have sort of quicker conversations through the week.
Right. OK, so pretty quick.
I try and make it pretty quick, because I think longer than half an hour
and you start sort of repeating yourself, dragging on, getting into minutiae,
the shorter the better.
I must say, I'm with you.
I reckon half our meetings can achieve an awful lot.
And meetings have a cost, right?
If you're having a meeting with eight or ten people and they're senior people,
that can be 10, 20, 30 thousand dollar meeting.
And there's some startups that are actually valuing meetings
based on how much people are paid and how long it's been taken.
And this is every time you meet with someone, you're taking time out of their day as well.
So it really has to be productive for both people.
Oh, that's a really interesting way of looking at it.
How much it's actually costing the company for you all to sort of sit around
and chat for half an hour.
OK, we're going to dive back into the chat box.
Oh, this is a good one. I like this.
So assuming that you do cook, what's your favourite thing to cook?
I do love making Asian food.
So I've done quite a few cooking classes over the years.
I do like making dumplings or other Asian stuff.
Also, my business partner, my co-founder, bought me one of those pizza ovens,
which I actually quite like using as well and makes basically
restaurant quality pizzas, which is good.
So I'm pretty broad sort of cook.
But yes, and I do I do a fair bit and it's a pretty wide range of stuff.
So on the dumpling front, you have favourite flavours that you do.
We don't eat meat, but you can use some pretty good meat stuff.
So you can use Beyond Mints in dumplings that taste pretty much as good as me.
I've got a pretty stock standard
potsticker recipe that I've fashioned over the years, but
actually pretty easy to make and get them similar to what you should eat
at the dumpling restaurants.
So what does a quick midweek meal look like?
Can be a number of things.
It's when you don't eat meat.
You got to think about cooking a lot more.
So I haven't eaten meat for about four years and you put your basic protein on
and add to it with whatever.
But when you're not using meat, we tend to plan our meals a week out
and go to a market and buy the produce well in advance
so you can really balance out the food.
Otherwise, it can actually be a lot harder to cook.
And then you've obviously got kids as well who have certain dietary preferences.
So trying to please everyone is always interesting.
But I'm lucky enough to live really close to a market so I can buy
some pretty good stuff each week.
And is there a particular reason that you gave up meat?
My wife gave up meat first.
She was more for ethical reasons, so be it environmental and animal reasons.
And then I watched a Netflix documentary called Game Changers,
which I'm not sure if you've seen, but which was super interesting.
It really basically shows how athletes perform better when they don't eat meat.
So I thought I gave it a try, even though I actually love meat to eat.
I gave it a try and I found my performance of improved
run faster and just feel generally lighter and better.
So I didn't think I'd keep it up, but it's been almost four years now.
So I managed to somehow do it.
So taste wise, I still obviously love the taste of meat,
but also pretty lucky now there's lots of alternatives
and lots of sort of fake meat stuff you can eat, which is pretty good.
And I guess you're still clearly getting your protein from somewhere.
Yeah. So you actually get a lot of protein from lots of non-meat stuff.
So you just got to be a bit more careful on how you plan your meals
and obviously avoid junk food and too much sugar and all that kind of stuff.
But yeah, it's actually not too hard if you give it a bit of planning.
OK, I'm not sure I'll try being a vegetarian,
but I'll take your comments on board. Yeah.
OK, Adam, that is now the end of our Chatterbox section.
Now I have one final question for you, which we ask all our participants.
If you had a year off, unencumbered, you could do anything you liked.
What would it be?
I think it depends on the stage of life right now.
I think at some point I'd love to retire and work on not for profit stuff purely.
But I think where I am, I got two pretty young kids still.
We've always talked about taking the kids skiing for six months.
We take them skiing for a week or two here or there.
But I think going six months and start living in Coulter Whistler
or US or Europe somewhere and skiing for six months would be pretty good fun.
So I do write articles and host podcasts a bit like you.
So I'm sure I'd still do that stuff remotely.
But combining that with skiing would be really good.
And what would you like to do in the non-profit sector?
I think if we can have a really great result with a business one day
and have a windfall, I think if you look at what
there's some people who've done a really good job where they treat
not-for-profit like a business.
So how do you actually create a not-for-profit, not simply
donate money to other not-for-profits, because obviously that's fine.
But I think taking business skills and adapting it to a not-for-profit
environment would be something I really love to do, be it in the sort of refugee
space or the underprivileged kids space.
But there are probably a couple of things that that I'd love to be able
to help out at some point and more than just as a donor or as a board member
or whatever, which you can sort of do any time, but to actually create something
that has longer lasting value would be really good.
OK, and that is our 15 minutes up.
I really loved hearing you talk about your exercise regime
and how you became injury free after you started running barefoot.
You're clearly a zero in box guy, which I will at least take on board.
I really like the fact that you have calculated just how much money
meetings can cost a company.
And I hope that one day you'll be able to get into the not-for-profit sector
because I think that your skills would be really valued in that area.
So thank you so much for letting us spend 15 minutes with the boss.
Thanks so much. It was a pleasure.
And thank you to everyone for listening.
If you like the podcast and would like to hear more,
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This podcast was hosted by me, Sally Patton.
It was produced and edited by Lap Fan.
The theme is by Alex Gow.
And our executive producer is Fiona Buffini.
The Australian Financial Review.