By Lyndall Crisp
WHEN she was four, Judith Swales helped her older siblings deliver milk around Silsden, the village in North Yorkshire.
The experience taught her two valuable lessons: responsibility and how to build a good relationship with customers.
The road from milk run to chief executive and managing director of Goodyear & Dunlop Tyres Australia was a circuitous one.
After completing a Bachelor of Science focused on microbiology and virology at Warwick University, she wanted to learn more about leadership and in 1988 she was one of about 40 successful applicants to get into Marks & Spencer’s graduate training program in leadership and management.
“You have to learn to be a manager,” she says.
“Too many times you see a great accountant become finance manager or a great shop assistant is promoted to store manager and they are woefully trained to do the job. People are expected to know (by osmosis).”
Three years later, Swales moved to a smaller company, Cullen’s, later bought by Tesco, which started a string of upmarket metro convenience stores.
“I got to be a regional manager and made the move into buying, and developed a passion for understanding what consumers wanted, where their tastes were going, what they were willing to pay,” she says.
“That’s when I developed the fascination that I’ve built on my whole career: how do you engage the workforce? How do you manage people to get the best out of them?”
Five years later, Swales took a year off and ended up roaming Australia in Greyhound buses and waitressing in a seafood cafe.
Back in England she was invited to join WH Smith to run their news and magazine business.
The division represented 20 per cent of their sales, but was under threat from supermarkets, which were starting to stock books and magazines. In her six years there, she moved up to be merchandising manager and then managing director in charge of entertainment.
That’s when fate stepped in again. When she mentioned to the business development director that she’d like to work abroad, preferably in Australia, he smiled.
WH Smith was about to buy Angus & Robertson and had her in mind as sales and marketing director. And when the person appointed to be managing director in Australia pulled out, Swales put up her hand.
“I said to the CEO: ‘I’ve never been a managing director, but I’m willing to give it a red-hot go’.”
She got the job and moved to Melbourne in September 2001, aged 34.
WH Smith foundered in the US after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and Angus & Robertson was subsequently sold to Pacific Equity Partners in 2005.
While walking her chocolate lab Jasper and border collie cross Harvey on St Kilda beach, and pondering where next, Swales received a phone call testing her interest in joining Goodyear as managing director of retail.
“I looked at the stores and thought: this is an operation that needs some retail attention,” she says. “So I made the move. Just over a year later the CEO moved back to the US and I got the job.”
Now an Australian citizen, Swales is responsible for more than 700 company-owned Beaurepaires stores, franchised Goodyear Autocare stores and Dunlop Super Dealer licensed stores, which employ a combined total of more than 2700 staff.
“Part of the reason I joined Goodyear was that this was a chance to understand the end-to-end,” she says.
“We’re a manufacturer, we supply the original equipment manufacturers, we have our own retail network and we also have a large raft of dealers aligned to us under our Goodyear and Dunlop brands. But then we supply the major players, so it’s a complex business. That’s what excited me. It was a sleeping giant with a lot of potential.”
Being a woman in an essentially male world proved an advantage.
“As a woman, I had a different perspective,” Swales says.
“I didn’t think like everyone else in the organisation.”
She quickly recognised that while half the customers in the consumer stores were women, it was not an attractive environment in which to shop.
A couple of new concepts were tested in Melbourne and then rolled out in about 400 Beaurepaires stores over 18 months.
Out went the girlie calendars, the racks of smelly tyres and the high counters. In came a fresh, clean look with low counters and seating. Staff were taught how to answer the phone courteously and to engage the customer.
Using market research and brand analysis, Swales found out what the customers actually wanted, something that hadn’t been done previously.
“They always feel like they’re being ripped off, they’re deeply suspicious,” she says.
“They want someone they can trust, a nice place to wait and they don’t want to get too engaged in the decision.
“The reinvigoration looked at every aspect of the business. It’s not just women who don’t know about tyres. Increasingly, guys feel intimidated, thinking they should know about tyres and they don’t.”
Swales admits when she’s stopped at traffic lights she can’t help checking out other people’s tyres. But she doesn’t profess to know everything about them.
“The one thing I challenged was the naming of tyres, Decaro or NCT5 or names that meant nothing to me,” she says.
“We launched the Fuel Max and Efficient Grip tyres, which . . . tell the customer what to expect. It’s gone from being a manufacturing-push business to being a consumer-core business.”
In her five years with the company, Swales has guided the business to double-digit increases in revenue, profit and sales productivity performance, as well as winning multiple internal awards.
One of the toughest decisions she had to make was closing the South Pacific Tyre factories in New Zealand in 2006 and in Australia in 2008. About 1000 employees were laid off.
Customers wanted more complex tyres, but the factories weren’t geared to produce them and to update would have cost more than $100 million. Goodyear went to a fully imported model.
“That was the time to change the culture of the organisation. So we changed the name from South Pacific Tyres to Goodyear Dunlop and now sell to retail and marketing organisations,” Swales says.
While there are women in the marketing, sales, call centre, human resources, legal and finance departments, Swales would like to see more on Goodyear’s shop floors.
“We encourage diversity, but it’s difficult getting women tyre fitters because it’s a dirty manual job with a fair amount of heavy lifting,” she says. “We do have female store managers and interestingly it’s the women who get the exemplary audits because of their attention to detail.”
Source: www.theaustralian.com.au
