Paths to the Board: Revenue Leadership

[00:00:00] Intro: Welcome to Minutes by boardcycle, where in each episode we pack the insights from one of Australia's boardroom leaders into just a few minutes.

[00:00:09] In today's episode, Richard Conway interviews Hannah Browne, director of Greenpeace Australia Pacific and founder and managing director of technology consultancy Midnyte City about her career journey from sales to entrepreneurship to non-executive directorship.

[00:00:29] Richard: Welcome to Minutes by boardcycle.

[00:00:31] Richard: I'm your host Richard Conway and today my guest on the podcast is Hannah Browne. Hannah is the non-executive director at Greenpeace Australia Pacific and is also the founder and managing director of her own technology consulting firm, Midnyte City.

[00:00:45] Richard: Today I'm talking to Hannah about her path from sales to entrepreneurship and then into the boardroom. Hannah, thank you very much for joining me today.

[00:00:55] Hannah: A real pleasure, Richard. Thank you so much.

[00:00:57] Richard: So to start with, Hannah, could you just give us an [00:01:00] overview of your career so far, including what you're doing at Midnyte City?

[00:01:04] Hannah: Gee whiz, cast the mind back. My first proper job out of uni was with the British Consul General. I worked as an inward investment officer. I'd been in the UK for a couple of years prior with my daughter's father and I had a degree. So we were working with Australian biotechnology companies, advanced manufacturing, ICT and renewables, and trying to persuade them and incentivise them to set up shop in the UK rather than in anywhere else in Europe, essentially.

[00:01:32] Hannah: After that, I was fortunate enough to fall in with an amazing man called Peter Hannon. And he ran a suite of tech companies. There was a training business, a web development business, consulting organisation and an infrastructure company. And when we met, he said, you know, what do you want to do?

[00:01:50] Hannah: And I said, I want to run businesses. I think I'll be really good at it. And I, you know, I came from a family of people that run their own businesses. My dad's run the farm for years and years and years and my, my mom had a hairdressing [00:02:00] salon, for you know, her whole life, she ran hairdressing, her own hairdressing salons.

[00:02:04] Hannah: And he said, well, there's two types of people that build companies, Hannah. He said, there's salespeople who build something from nothing and there's optimisers. And they're usually more from a finance background and they're good at making things really hum and keeping things very tight. And I said, well, I don't think I'm the latter.

[00:02:19] Hannah: And I said, but I don't know how to sell. And he said, well, I'll teach you to sell. And if you can sell, you can run any one of my businesses that you like.

[00:02:26] Hannah: And that's how it went. I became the business development manager at Friday Media. And within 18 months, we trebled the revenue in the business. I'd be then became the general manager for another 18 months.

[00:02:37] Hannah: After a few years there, I moved into the consulting business. We transformed that from being a really, a body-shopping kind of consultancy with 80 percent of the revenue coming from one client, to an in house application development firm that worked in an agile way and had a range of clients.

[00:02:56] Hannah: And that single client's revenue had gone from 80 percent to 30 percent of the [00:03:00] business. Not long after that, I was headhunted by ThoughtWorks. And I had three very, very happy years at ThoughtWorks, working with companies like IOOF, MYOB, Australia Post, World Vision, Slater & Gordon, you know, I really got an opportunity to take my SME technology understanding to the enterprise level.

[00:03:21] Hannah: And with an organisation with the brand and prestige of ThoughtWorks, I turned them down three times actually before, I was playing, soccer at the time and we're out celebrating after a game and two of my teammates came up and they said, now tell us about this ThoughtWorks job. And I said, Oh, I've turned them down. And they, they really sort of sat me down and they said, do you know who ThoughtWorks are? And I said, no, I've never heard them before.

[00:03:41] Hannah: And they said, look, you know, they're really only hire the best. If you've got an opportunity to go and work with them, you really should take it. That was when I said goodbye to Pete Hannon and his, the wonderful colleagues that I got to work with there and yeah, moved into ThoughtWorks and took my experience and skills really from a local level to a global level, I would say.

[00:03:58] Hannah: You know, it became [00:04:00] ThoughtWorks was in 26 countries at that point. You know, we were over 300 people in Australia. It was well beyond anything I'd experienced before. And just that, the energy, and the passion and the excitement when you get that many people who all care about, using tech for social justice and good in the world, it was a really exciting place to be.

[00:04:21] Hannah: And there was, even now there's a huge swathe of my friendship groups and friends that I first met through, through that organisation. I got fired from ThoughtWorks. I got fired a few times in my career, but I got fired from ThoughtWorks about three and a half years later and ended up, getting reached out to on LinkedIn by one of the former directors of Kloud with a K.

[00:04:44] Hannah: They had bought a DevOps company in Sydney and wanted to know what I knew about that. And I said, well, look, you know, Jez Humble from ThoughtWorks wrote the book Continuous Delivery, which is the foundation of the DevOps movement and the biggest initiatives in the Southern Hemisphere have all been on [00:05:00] clients that I was, you know, the custodian of at ThoughtWorks.

[00:05:03] Hannah: So I'd say, actually, I'm probably the best equipped salesperson to do anything in the DevOps movement in Australia at this point. And then they said, do you want to come and build a company? So I ended up starting Cevo in Victoria and grew that to about 40 people before, you know, the board had a change of strategy at that point in the organisation.

[00:05:24] Hannah: And, you know, it really made a lot of sense to everyone that would probably be the end of my time there. So we parted ways at that point. And then I had a bunch of time off, sat on the sidelines for a little bit, watched COVID unfold, and then started Midnyte City on 1 July in 2020. We specialise in boutique technology consultancy.

[00:05:43] Hannah: So we do a lot of work around DevSecOps, around the Kloud, particularly AWS and a bit of GCP. We do software development and delivery leadership, helping people with complex programs of work essentially.

[00:05:54] Hannah: And we work with amazing, amazing clients like Chargefox who do the electric car charging infrastructure, [00:06:00] MYOB, Airtasker, the University of Sydney, Optima, who are bringing a scope three emissions platform to market, Estimate One, who's one of Melbourne's really exciting up and coming prop tech firms. Yeah, that's the sort of organisations we work with.

[00:06:16] Richard: How does Greenpeace fit in with that? How did you get involved with Greenpeace and, yeah, how did you find the time?

[00:06:22] Hannah: The timing was really fortuitous, actually.

[00:06:25] Hannah: I had been doing the AICD course at the end of my time at Cevo. And through a friend of a friend knew the CTO of Greenpeace. So when I was in Sydney one time, just reached out to him cold and said, Hey, you know, can I buy your coffee? His business partner tried to recruit me to run their business earlier in life.

[00:06:43] Hannah: So yeah, when we caught up, I was able to connect him with the ex-ThoughtWorks network in Sydney. We ended up, you know, snowballed from there. I joined as part of the Technology Advisory Board, which was part of what he had to set up when he joined Greenpeace. And from there, I joined the General Assembly, which is the [00:07:00] group that oversees the board.

[00:07:01] Hannah: From there, the chair sent around a note once, it was not long after I'd finished up with Cevo, and I had a bit of time on my hands, and he sent a note around saying, I'm going to put together a nominations committee. And I remember responding with, what's a nominations committee? And he jokingly said, haha, you're on it.

[00:07:15] Hannah: So, there I got to meet the incredible Helga Svendsen, who runs a governance group, specifically focused on women and female identifying individuals called Take On Board. And we built the Nominations Committee for Greenpeace. And then a few years later, when the inverted commas, tech person on the board of Greenpeace stepped down, you know, Helga and the CTO and a number of other people pulled me aside and said, look, you've got to apply for this role.

[00:07:41] Hannah: At that point in time, I was just about to get Midnyte City up and running. And you know, my, my two career goals since I was 15 years old was to run my own business, and to be a non-executive director.

[00:07:53] Hannah: And in August of 2022, I sat there in COVID, in lockdown, in my [00:08:00] slippers, with a very nice bottle of champagne, at my desk, in my spare room and thought to myself, well, here I am. And before I'm 40, I've achieved my two big life goals of starting my own business and becoming a non executive director.

[00:08:14] Hannah: And I can't celebrate with anyone because my partner doesn't ever drink. So, so I sat there in the, in the cold August Melbourne winter with a bottle of champagne to celebrate the achievement of my two biggest career goals in August of 2020.

[00:08:28] Richard: Yeah. I think, COVID ruined everything, didn't it? Even the opportunity to celebrate those kind of things. What I wanted to ask you from that, Hannah, is well, you said that you had a career goal to be a non-executive director, so perhaps I'll reframe my question a little bit to you.

[00:08:44] Richard: Everything else that you have done before that is pretty hands on, anything to do with entrepreneurialism, running your own business is incredibly hands on. How have you found moving into a non-executive director role, which [00:09:00] is inherently, it's not an executive by definition. You are not hands on and you're not meant to be hands on. How have you found that difference?

[00:09:08] Hannah: I absolutely love it. Richard. It's come at a perfect time in my career. Because it forces me to think differently and it forces me to behave differently. And it has grown my understanding of our organisations exponentially. I've been on the Greenpeace board for four years now.

[00:09:26] Hannah: So I know, how I work around it. Whenever the board pack comes out, I get a sense of anxiety. You know, I'm like, oh, how am I going to pull myself out of Midnyte City stuff for long enough to give these papers do the justice to which they deserve and give it the thinking and the consideration that it owes for my role in Greenpeace?

[00:09:45] Hannah: And I usually have to travel to Sydney, especially now there's only me and one other director based in Melbourne. So there won't be any more Melbourne visits, unfortunately, we'll be up to Sydney four or five times a year. And then I think to myself, gee whiz, you know, how am I going to find two days out of the schedule to go up to [00:10:00] Sydney?

[00:10:00] Hannah: And, you know, I've got to organise to be away from home and organize, you know, what's going to happen with my daughter and all of this kind of stuff. And then I find, you know, once I get to the airport and I've read the papers, I just enter into another world for a couple of days. I'm able to extricate myself from the mad duck under, you know, duck paddling under the water existence of an entrepreneur in a startup, you know, in in reasonably challenging economic times, and I get to think about risk and strategy and governance, and I get to think about big picture stuff, and I get to think about decisions that are going to have a significant impact on the organisation for the next 5 to 10 years, if not longer.

[00:10:45] Hannah: We did complete an exercise last year, or maybe it finished up earlier this year called the generational vision. Greenpeace turned 50 this year. It's an international organisation that's been at the forefront of the environmental movement for 50 [00:11:00] years. The role I play is, is so small and it's such a small cog in that great machine of all of the people who've come before and all of the many who'll come after.

[00:11:10] Hannah: And being able to just take myself out of Midnyte City and put myself into Greenpeace world for a couple of days, every couple of months is so refreshing. And I always come back really energised and really excited and with all these new ideas.

[00:11:28] Hannah: And it's a bit like, you know, a friend told me. I think she wrote a blog years and years ago about, about doing jigsaw puzzles and talked about how important it is to take breaks. She said, you know, often when I'm doing a jigsaw puzzle, if I get up and I walk away and I make a cup of tea and come back, I'll find like 10 pieces that slot in just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

[00:11:45] Hannah: And I think, you know, we often find that smokers say the same thing. They say, you know, they do their best thinking when they're outside having a cigarette.

[00:11:50] Hannah: And I think that's the same when I go away for Greenpeace stuff. And I look at other problems for a little while. It actually gives me a new perspective on the [00:12:00] stuff I'm dealing with day-to-day.

[00:12:01] Hannah: And I come back just invigorated, totally replenished, totally re-energised and knowing a whole lot of things that I didn't know before.

[00:12:09] Hannah: I'm, you know, incredibly honoured to work with the people that I work with at Greenpeace.

[00:12:14] Hannah: It is the most incredibly diverse, amazing array of humans that it is so unlikely that we would ever have crossed paths in any other, you know, situation or dynamic. And one of our board directors is Michael Dodson who was the 2009 Australian of the Year, and the first Indigenous person to be appointed to the bar in Australia. He's an absolute national treasure.

[00:12:40] Hannah: And the fact that I get to work with him, you know, Nicolette Rubinsztein is our incoming chair. She's a financial services powerhouse from Sydney, you know, we've got Dorothy Wickham from Samoa in the Pacific Islands, you know, these remarkable humans that have such a incredible view of the world.

[00:12:57] Hannah: And our current chair, Louise Tarrant is such a people [00:13:00] first person. Getting to work with these folks, I learned so much just from being in a room with them, just from mulling over problems with them, just to listening to their perspective and having them listen to mine and then bouncing ideas back and forward to get to a great solution.

[00:13:13] Hannah: It's a, it's a highly functional, really connected group of really different human beings who are really united by this cause. And it's a absolute, I would say it's actually really important for me, that I'm able to leave my entrepreneurial day to day at the door and step into another world.

[00:13:33] Hannah: Because what I then bring back into Midnyte City is a much better head for governance and risk and strategy and the big picture focus.

[00:13:39] Richard: And to flip that last comment around, Hannah, I wanted to ask what do you bring from Midnyte City or from your entrepreneurial background to Greenpeace?

[00:13:48] Richard: So what are the skills and things that you think really let you add value there? And I guess on the flip side as well, are there aspects of the way you think an [00:14:00] entrepreneur thinks and works that you have to leave at the door when you're stepping into that NED role?

[00:14:05] Hannah: Absolutely. To answer the first part of your question first, someone shared with me yesterday that they think I'm really good at the people stuff.

[00:14:13] Hannah: And I guess, you know, a long career in consulting, mapping people with problems to solve in a variety of organisations and dynamics and around different technologies, it was, it was very nice to hear that. And I think the people issues are everywhere are the hardest ones that we face. Like, I was on a call with a bunch of CTOs the other day and they said, look, give me a technology problem to solve, please.

[00:14:39] Hannah: The tech is always the easier part. So the people stuff and how to work well with other people and in diverse groups and how to get the best out of people and how to align people around, you know, a strategy and how to like have clarity around implementation and then get the best, most effective outcome from that.

[00:14:57] Hannah: You know, get the fastest route to value, I think is always going to [00:15:00] be a useful skill. I'd say for Greenpeace in particular, my sales background, when they are a fundraising organisation that is, you know, Greenpeace don't take any contributions from organisations. They don't take any money from government.

[00:15:15] Hannah: Their independence is absolutely crucial to the operating of the organisation. So that model, it makes a background in revenue generation and business development and how to bring money into organisations, you know, very, very useful. So I'd say the tech and the entrepreneur, and the, the revenue focus of my role, I think has been quite useful to, Greenpeace.

[00:15:36] Hannah: To the second part of your question, I think you're really right when you ask that question, I sort of had a giggle to myself that I think entrepreneurialism and governance do make relatively strange bedfellows.

[00:15:47] Hannah: And if I think about all of the startups that I've worked at, and all of the startups that I've worked with, often they run by the smell of an oily rag, often it's what one person can achieve with the strength of their own will. There is really a [00:16:00] needle to be thread between that gold plating and being so loose that you're actually running a sort of existential risk.

[00:16:08] Hannah: So I think governance could always move a little bit quicker, but I think too the entrepreneur in me has really been educated with the governance experience that I've gained on Greenpeace. And I've certainly developed a much stronger understanding of the place that process and systems, the value that they add in organisations, in society, if you had have asked me that question 10 years ago, I would have said governance is a load of crap and, and it's just bureaucracy on steroids and it's a complete waste of time and we should just hire good people and let them do the work.

[00:16:43] Hannah: And, you know, that's a lovely idea and certainly the opposite is also true. We have a lot of organisations that are completely stifled by bureaucracy and if not for perhaps a monopoly or quadopoly system in Australia, when we look at the banks, maybe those organisations [00:17:00] wouldn't be so successful if they had more competition or, you know, more of an open market.

[00:17:05] Hannah: I know there's certainly difficult places to work from the friends of mine that have gone to work there. It's a, it's a whole lot of reporting and a whole lot of meetings for not a lot of value or outcomes.

[00:17:13] Hannah: So I think, governance can take something from entrepreneurship, but I certainly as an entrepreneur learned a hell of a lot from governance that has contributed to stability, resilience, more systematic approaches and process driven, you know, right size process is I think what I'm trying to say here.

[00:17:32] Hannah: And I think that's one of the reasons that the startup journey can be so exciting, is because you need to overhaul your process and your systems reasonably regularly, especially if you're scaling rapidly. Like what made sense 12 months ago doesn't necessarily make sense if you've trebled your user base, or you've trebled the size of your team, or you know, you've entered into four new international markets.

[00:17:54] Hannah: Well actually, the governance models you need to put around that are very different to what you did when you were just Australian based, or just 30 [00:18:00] people, or just 300 people.