The Australian Financial Review.
You can look at it strategically and it makes all the sense in the world, but if it means
that people have to change what they do every day, change then is going to become a really
I don't understand how people leave dirty dishes in the kitchen sink.
It's sort of become a bit of a lightning rod for me, Sally, around casual sexism.
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 great advice from our leaders.
My guest today is Paul Heath, the chief executive of Coda Capital.
Lovely to see you.
Thank you so much for coming in.
Sally, thank you for having me on the show.
Now, Paul, you're the chief executive of Coda Capital, which is an independent financial
advice firm with more than 120 staff, including 48 partners and 39 advisors.
And you advise clients on more than $12 billion worth of assets.
That is actually quite a big responsibility.
Does that something that you take with you at home each night?
I'm old enough to remember, Sally, when a billion dollars was meant to be an unfathomably
And so every now and then, I stop and think about that number and the responsibility that
But you need to run a process and compartmentalize these things.
And so the number itself doesn't bother me unless I really step back and think, wow, that's
a hell of a lot of trust our clients have placed in our people, which is probably where
OK, let's start the clock.
We haven't got very much time.
Thank you so much for allowing us to spend 15 minutes with the BOSS.
Question number one is about your morning routine.
What time do you get up?
What time do you have your first cup of coffee?
I live on the northern beaches of Sydney.
I'm lucky enough that I wake up with the kookaburras.
They physically wake you up?
Well, I've got nature's alarm clock.
And what time would that be?
5.30 in the morning through to 6 a.m. is around about what it is.
My first reaction is to check what's happened in the US equity markets.
But then a while ago, Sally, I decided that the first hour of my day was going to be for
So there are two rituals.
The first one is coffee.
I've got one of those coffee machines that has levers and valves and dials.
And so there's the whole ritual of two cups of coffee before I get anything done.
But then I'll try really hard to do some exercise.
A couple of days a week, I go to a gym for over 50 fives.
I call it the old people's gym.
Saturday and Sunday mornings, I'll do an ocean swim.
When you spend time with people who swim every day, they're all happy.
And there's information content in that.
What do you mean?
I go down to the beach at Mona Vale and there's a cohort of people, mostly retirees, who swim
every day and they just look happy.
And so whether it's the swimming itself, whether it's the salt water, the sunshine, I don't
Other than it's pretty obvious that people who build that into their routine have a happiness
that you tend not to find on the commute into the city.
And do you find that swimming two days a week gives you a really good level of happiness?
I'd do more if I could, but work gets in the way of that.
But the thing I like about swimming, you can't have your earbuds in, you really build into
a rhythm and sort of relax.
It's amazing what goes on in the ocean.
It's just a great environment to be away from the normal sort of stresses and pressures
that come from being in the city.
So typically I'll do all those sort of things before I get into my day and then either head
or if I'm working from home, my day really starts in earnest about 9am.
And how many days a week would you go into the office?
I try to have at least three days there, but so often my days are dictated by, they might
be clients or things that, you know, I just need to be in the office for certain things.
But I'd probably describe myself more of a twat, Tuesday, Wednesdays and Thursdays in
the office, Mondays and Fridays at home.
And are you a breakfast kind of person?
I've never really had breakfast.
Maybe that's the coffee substitute.
And of course, now there's sort of a growing bank of evidence about the value perhaps in
skipping that meal and fasting through lunch, always have dinner and have a meaningful meal
Paul, question number two, tell me about a pivotal moment in your career, which really
changed the nature of what you were doing or changed you in some way.
I began my journey in financial services with JB Weir in the mid nineties.
I was a stockbroker and in 2000, I had the opportunity to relocate.
I was in Perth to come to Sydney to take responsibility for the Sydney private client business of
It was only a small business, but of course, at that point in time, you're sort of moving
from a pathway, which is a technical specialist into a leadership pathway.
That was the fork in the road where I could have continued left doing what I was doing,
which I love doing, advising clients, or move into a role where you were supporting
the people that were doing that work.
And I chose to turn right, have been on that journey ever since.
Did you find that transition hard?
I probably should have paid more attention to how hard it was, Sally, because being the
doer versus helping manage the people who are the doers, it's a very different skillset.
And of course, you take some time to learn those things.
You learn those things often through mistakes.
What are a couple of mistakes that you can point to that sort of stuck in your head?
I think underestimating the pain and the challenge of change.
You can look at it strategically and it makes all the sense in the world.
But if it means that people have to change what they do every day, maybe change their
identity, change how they derive satisfaction from their work, change then is going to become
a really painful process.
And I think often the mistake that I've made is I've neglected to pay attention to the
pain of change for important people.
That's resulted in people who have left organisations or have had fallings out.
Inevitably, change can look great on a strategy document, actually getting that change to
stick with people, with good people, and taking them on a journey for change.
That's the bit that's hard, that's often underestimated by people leaders.
It's so true, isn't it?
You can have all the ideas about transforming a business that you like, except that you've
got to get people to come along with you and you've got to have them feel comfortable about
And that goes back to that fork in the road between as a technical specialist, if you
want to do something, you just do it.
People leader is about painting a vision, building a case for why where you're going
is better than where you are, helping people get over the pain of change and realise that
there's a good thing that's going to flow on the back of it.
The communication, the one-on-ones, the effort that has to go into that is so much greater.
That's probably been the lesson that I've learnt, Sally, and often the hard way I've
learnt that lesson.
So, Paul, what would you say is the best piece of career advice you've ever been given?
It was actually when I was part of the group that was working at MLC and I was able to
sit in the back of a room while a Stanford professor who had done a lot of work with
the advisors within MLC gave a presentation.
He had a little grid.
The grid was effectively used smiley and sad and neutral faces to describe a system.
And the system described the benefit of doing something that nobody else was doing, going
against the herd.
And of course, if you go against the herd and you succeed, you look like a visionary.
But if you go against the herd, do something that nobody else is doing and you fail, you
look like a fool.
And his point was the system that produces the visionary, by definition, must produce
Often we're so afraid of the fool that we just accept running with the crowd.
And I think that idea that we all want to think about we've got the courage to go against
the herd, but you've got to be prepared to accept the downside out of that.
And the reality is, is that most of us are so afraid of the downside that we accept the
herd and mediocrity and conventional wisdom.
It's why it's so hard to truly innovate.
For me, it's guided so much.
It was absolutely that idea was foundational in sort of thinking, well, is there a better
way for the wealth management industry?
And you know, it began the conversations with Steve Tucker and it resulted in where we've
ended up with Coda Capital today.
So on the one hand, yes, you went against the herd and you did innovate, but you still
really don't know what it's like to fail and to feel like to feel the fool.
Did you prepare yourself to about how you would feel and how you would cope if you were
the fool? Because as you say, the same system produces both sides.
Yeah. Well, at different points in time, my anxiety levels over all of those things
sometimes were low and often were quite high.
But at the end of the day, I always felt that if we could achieve something that showed
the industry that there was a better model, then that was worth that reputational tradeoff.
Now, Paul, on that note, we're going to take a short break, but don't go away, because
when we come back, we're going to play our fabulous Chatterbox game.
Welcome back to 15 Minutes with the Boss.
I'm here with Paul Heath, the CEO of Coda Capital.
Now, Paul, as promised, threatened.
This is our section called the Chatterbox.
In front of you, you'll see this beautiful brown shiny box inside, which today I reckon
there are about 12 questions, maybe a bit more.
I'm going to ask you to pick them out one by one, hand them to me, and I will then,
of course, ask you to answer them.
So first question, Paul, have a forage in the box.
Wish me luck, Sally.
Yes. Oh, you might need luck.
I love this question. What's your pet hate in the office?
The kitchen sink.
I don't understand how in an office environment, people leave dirty dishes in the kitchen
sink. It's sort of become a bit of a lightning rod for me, Sally, around casual sexism and
the way that there are certain roles within an office that are deemed that that's what
the females do. Yeah.
So do you think it's many of the blokes who are doing that?
Totally. Are the women the ones who are picking them out of the sink and putting them in
the dishwasher? Yeah, I think the reason the dishes go into the sink is because the
dishwasher is full and it's a simple process to put the dishwasher on and empty the
dishwasher. But in an office context, for a lot of males, that's never been any of their
responsibility. And so it really does upset me because for me, it's become a symbol
of the challenges that females face in a setting that's just not fair.
The financial services industry has a real problem.
The wealth management industry, Sally, has a real problem because this is a system that
has been male dominated for a long period of time.
And with the intergenerational wealth transfer coming, more and more females are going
to be responsible for money.
So leave aside the morality.
The business case says if you can't create an environment where you're treating all
your female staff, not just equally, but putting them on the same footing, you're not
going to have a business case 30 years from now.
Yeah, Sally, at the end of the day, these things will get fixed when the males will
take accountability for it.
And I've I've set expectations around that issue for the organisation.
It is one of those things where you have to be careful what you walk past, because
what you walk past, everyone will just accept is the norm, right?
100 percent. And for many of us, me included, this is about changing the habit of a
lifetime. But that doesn't mean it's not an important issue that needs to be tackled.
Yeah, interesting. OK, Paul, next question.
Have a fish. Do you have a favourite productivity hack to help you get more out of
I try to compartmentalise work as best I can.
Sally, I spoke earlier about the first part of the day trying to be for me.
The reason why I think that's important is that when that's out of the way, you can
then focus fully on the job that you need to do for the day.
The second element is that so much of my work is supporting the professional team
and the work that they do with clients.
It's a genuine coaching, mentoring.
So that work tends to be a lot of management by wandering around, talking to the
team about what they're doing, working out where I can support them.
That's really good use of my time.
And often that means doing emails, administration, life administration.
Actually, doing that when you're in the office isn't the best use of the valuable
time that you've got.
So how many hours a week would you spend, say, just walking around the office,
talking to people on an ad hoc basis, just trying to gauge the lay of the land?
It's a really good question to put it into hours, because I don't 100 percent
know. However, why don't I tell you a story about what I do?
We all work in open plan offices like the journalists here do, Sally.
So I sit out in the room with everybody else.
But in the corner, I've got a little table and chairs.
And on the table, I have a jar, which I keep filled with snakes.
And the whole idea, as I say to anybody, you can come and sit down, pull out a
snake and we'll solve a problem together.
And so as much as it's me sort of walking out into the team and finding out what's
going on, I try really hard to encourage people to come and bring problems to me
and we'll solve them together.
So my my hack is to be really clear about what what value it is that I can bring
and make sure that when I'm in the office, I'm focusing on those things.
And that often means emails, admin and all those other ancillary things that come
with your work. I tend to try and park those for times when I'm not around and in
Yeah. OK. Fair enough. I get that.
OK, let's next question.
OK. What's the one device you can't live without except your phone?
Totally. It's my coffee machine.
OK. OK. So as I said, I've got one of those fancy coffee machines that's got
levers and dials and I grind the coffee and it's actually become more than just
the coffee itself. It's the ritual of preparation that I just really enjoy it.
Is anyone else allowed to touch the coffee machine?
I'd be absolutely delighted if other members of my household would touch the coffee
machine. But they've all decided that I'm too fussy and they use the Nespresso
machine. And so my wife and daughters would gladly make me an espresso.
But I'm a bit of a I'm a bit of a coffee snob.
So I'd like it to come out of my machine.
Do you get annoyed when you buy a coffee that is not up to scratch, given that you
are such a connoisseur of coffee?
No, I don't. Do you know what, Sally?
I do travel a lot to the United States for a bunch of different reasons.
And it still it amazes me that the coffee culture is really bad.
But even then, the ritual of in a hotel room, I actually find hotel rooms now that
have their own coffee machine in the room so that I can do that little morning
ritual of making myself a cup of coffee, even though in that context, it's
Oh, really? So you'll book hotels where, you know, they've got little machines.
Ah, you really do like the ritual, don't you?
Well, it is as we get to it, it's probably the thing I can't live without.
Paul, on that note, you have passed the Chatterbox session.
Well done. Hope you're not too traumatised by the experience.
I'll get over it.
Now, before we finish, I've got one last question, and that is if we gave you 12
months off unencumbered, you could do anything you like.
What would you do?
I would travel, Sally, but I would do what I call immersive travelling.
Last year in October, I happened to be in London and I had a day which was
I was at the British Museum at the beginning.
I was there at the close, spent the whole day in there, really just enjoying
the exhibits and reading everything.
There's so much knowledge.
I could do that for three or four consecutive days.
Wouldn't miss a beat.
In the British Museum?
Any museum or art gallery, there's so much knowledge there.
Taking the time to understand what they're trying to say with these things.
But then at the end of that, and it was one of those lovely English summer
evenings, I caught up with a mate and we went to a pub and we were drinking pints
in London, you know, where the crowd spills out onto the streets and just
hanging out with the locals.
I mean, for me, that's an awesome day.
Just immersing yourself in different elements of the culture.
So it sounds like you would end up in lots of museums and drinking a lot of beer.
Couldn't think of anything better.
That is our 15 minutes up.
Paul, it's been a great conversation.
Thank you so much.
I've loved your message that dishes in the sink is a bigger symbol of the
challenges that women face in the workforce.
I love your idea that change is pain.
It's all very well to have great ideas, but you've really got to take
your team along with you.
I love the fact that you reserve the first for yourself.
And that's a real morning ritual.
Another one, of course, is the coffee making and good luck with that immersive
travel. It's a shame we all can't come along with you.
So thank you again for allowing us to spend 15 minutes with the boss.
Thank you for having me on the show.
And thank you to everyone for listening.
If you like the podcast and would like to hear more, please consider sharing
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At The Financial Review, we investigate the big stories about markets,
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This podcast was hosted by me, Sally Patton, and produced and edited by LapFan.
Video and audio assistance and our music theme is by Alex Gao and our executive
producer is Fiona Buffini.
The Australian Financial Review.