In this presentation, the speaker tells the story of Graeme Maher, a little‑known Australian business champion who repeatedly turned around failing Vodafone operations across several countries. Maher’s success is used as a template for identifying and attracting similar high‑performing general managers (the speaker calls them “Graemes”). The speaker critiques conventional, lengthy job advertisements that list duties and company background, arguing they deter top talent who are already successful and have many options. Instead, he proposes a mission‑driven ad format that succinctly states the business’s core objective (e.g., double sales and triple profit in three years) and challenges candidates to deliver measurable results. The ad omits traditional qualifications like MBA or industry experience, focusing on a proven track record of growth and personal financial stability. A brief follow‑up brief further tests candidates’ understanding of the mission. The speaker explains that this approach dramatically reduces the number of applicants (from hundreds to around ten) while increasing the quality of candidates, reducing the need for headhunting, and aligning compensation with performance (low base salary, high reward). He also discusses practical considerations such as candidate salary expectations, the importance of candidates having personal financial security, and the ethical complexities of headhunting high‑salary executives. Real‑world examples, including a service firm’s billable‑hours target, illustrate how candidates react to ambitious, mission‑focused language.
Chapters
So we're going to look at this segment. We call it Where's Graeme? And there's a reason we call it Where's Graeme? Because we, we really named this segment after a gentleman called Graeme Maher who passed away unfortunately, but he's actually a bit of an unknown champion of Australian business. And, you know, he started his own mobile phone company back a long time ago. He sold that And after he sold it, he didn't have much to do, so Vodafone offered him a job. And in that job, his results were so amazing that he became like the troubleshooter for Vodafone. And when I say the troubleshooter, they would put him into a country that was, you know, failing or losing money, and every time he turned that business around very fast with no upsets when he had to put off staff. And it's just an amazing record. And so if you want to look at him, you know, he worked in Vodafone New Zealand, Australia, Czech Republic, Sweden, and just his achievements were amazing. And I think what it does is a story. His story, like, can show you as a business owner what's possible, you know, what people can achieve. Because if someone can achieve what he did with Vodafone, you know, in such a short period in each country You know, in a market that's super competitive, has expensive infrastructure, you know, all sorts of everything, really everything going against you. It's like, I think it's inspiring that, you know, that you can find your Graeme for your company. And we have found Graemes for our clients, and I want to show you how we do that. And it's actually not so complex. It's really understanding what motivates someone like a Graeme Maher or the different clients general managers that have gone out there, and it really starts with how we present the job ad, how we present the message out there to the workforce. Because one of the things we do know is it's like, rarely are we hiring someone that's been, you know, that's really struggling to find a job. Most often the people that look at our that come and work for our clients are people that are actually quite successful and doing well in the job they're in or the job they've just finished and, you know, have many opportunities. So we need to stand out from them, and the job ad is really the tool to make sure we get a Graeme coming to your organization. So let's look first at the traditional ad. You know, this is your normal ad for a job. I can't remember what this ad's for, but you can see there's a lot written about the job. The job ad starts off talking about who the company is. It says, you know, all these things about the role and all these bullet points of things that this general manager has to do. And now just think about this for a second. If you're a really good general manager, it's like, would you need all these bullet points to tell you what to do and a description of the role. Because if you're going to bring a general manager into your business, what would you want from them? What do you want your Graeme to achieve? You want your Graeme to achieve the mission. And the mission is actually simple. They need to expand the company. They need to grow the profit. They need to stabilize the business with cash flow and reserves. That's the simplicity of it. And a good general manager looks at this and goes, wow, that's a lot of micromanagement. And you don't want a general manager you need to micromanage. You want a general manager who will come in and, you know, this to them is already second nature, and as they're reading it, they feel like they're reading grade 3 maths. And I think that people write ads this long because SEEK ads cost so much, and so they want to get better value per word. But ultimately, what's the goal? When we place an ad, what's the goal of that ad? What do we want to achieve? And what we want to achieve is we want to just achieve— we want a Graham. We just need one person to apply. We just need that person to fit the job and be able to execute the mission. And you could say that the ultimate ad would be the one that's placed in the right location with the exact right wording that only that person applies. And you could say that is the goal of writing job ads. So we continually strive towards that goal. So when we write a job ad, it's a little bit different. So there's our usual ad that we just looked at— lots of words, lots about the company, lots about what you're going to do in the job. And also achieving the job. The ad's not wrong, it's just not as effective as we know our ads are. If we look at a mission ad, it's like, it's simple. We just talk about what's the mission. Okay, so your mission as general manager of our business. Okay, notice we actually talk to them, we give them the mission. It's already their mission. We don't talk like over here, we're talking to nobody, we're just describing something. This, we're talking to them. Person. Your mission as general manager of our business will be to double sales and triple profit over the next three years while extinguishing all debt. It's nearly like you want that Mission Impossible music to start. Da da da da da da da. Because it is. This is a tougher mission than Ethan Hunt has to take on. Ethan Hunt, he just goes in, shoots a few people, you know, jumps over some walls. And his mission's done. This guy, he's got, you know, 3 years to double sales and triple profit. And, you know, this is not easy. Not many organizations can pull this off. They're small businesses, and, you know, not many people out there really, you know, could get in and make this happen. But there's enough of them. There's enough of them out there that when you look out the window of your airplane, you see, wow, there must be a lot of really good operators or this wouldn't all happen. And when you look out over the city you're flying out of, most of what you're looking at happened only in the last 20 years. Then we go on and say, it'll be tough. There's many things going to be sorted and implemented to see the mission attained. So when your Graham is reading this, he's going, wow, they're honest. Because I know that's what it's going to take. And tell me, you know, what job, what organization would someone have to go and do this where this doesn't apply? This applies. It's tough. When a productive general manager reads this, he doesn't read quite tough. In the back of his mind, he's going, this will be majorly satisfying. This job is going to make me feel so good as I achieve all these tough things to make sure this mission happens. That's what he's reading. If the person reading this ad just wants to be a general manager because they used to be a sales manager and I think that's my next thing, he reads that as like, oh, it's probably not the job for me. If someone just wants salary This sort of takes that out for them. Salary not so high. In actual fact, sometimes we write salary will be very low. With high rewards for attaining the agreed results. And now the person reading this has gone through, wow, that I love, that direct to the point. That's what I like. Give me a mission, I'll execute it. Don't give me everything I've got to do. And then it's honesty. Now it's like, great, I'm actually going to be recognized for my results. Because if they're going to pay me for my results, I've got to make sure that those results are tangible and can be measured. And of course, not only do I— I'm going to get rewarded with my satisfaction, but I'll get rewarded with my salary. And nearly every person we talk to that we eventually— our clients eventually hire, make the decision and hire, They'll tell us that quite often they only applied to our ad, and they only applied to our ad because it was so different and interesting and felt it was talking to them, that we understood them. And also they felt like it was going to be the sort of job where, when it's going to be a results-focused organization, politics isn't going to play a role in it. How this person looks and their past credentials isn't going to play a role in it. What's going to play a role in this job is the results they get. And for many people that have come from the corporate world, it's like this hasn't been their experience a whole time they were there. And so this becomes their dream job. Now, of course, we give them One little filter here is that they'll need to have a verify— sorry, they'll need to have a verifiable past of creating growth and efficiency. Or we could say even better, creating value and profit and expansion. So however this is worded, but here we tell them we're going to be— you need to show that you've done this before. Notice we haven't said, you know, that That you need to have an MBA or that you need to have experience in the plumbing industry. We're not interested in those things. If the person has an MBA and has experience in plumbing and it's for a plumbing job, this could be just fantastic icing on the cake. But we don't know, just because someone has got plumbing experience doesn't mean they can build a plumbing company. It could be quite the opposite. And we know that just because someone got an MBA doesn't mean they can go out and build and execute this mission. The fact that they've gone out and they've been disciplined enough to get an MBA may help to build the case. And then a little call to action. You know, if this is your type of mission, apply now to get more information. And then we send every candidate that applies, we just send them a little brief, one page, with a bit more information. And inside that brief, we challenge them a little bit more. And we may talk about little parts of the strategy that they would need to look at and perhaps understand to make them more interested. And other people would look at it and go, I don't quite get that, or I think that's impossible, so I'm not going to do it. And to give you an example of that, like, we had one organization, a service organization, where we said, you know, billable hours right now are at 75%. And they need to come up to 105%. And so some people wrote back going, hey, how can you have billable hours at 105%? That's impossible. And then we, you know, from that perspective, it's like firstly that something impossible is always a bit of a worry. But secondly, it's like if someone has some experience of running service personnel or running teams, they know that you can go above 100% of billable hours. 'Cause there's things like callouts and minimum callouts and these sorts of things. If you're charging a 1-hour callout plus the hours, then in an 8-hour day, it's possible to, you know, bill 9 hours or even 10 hours if you're efficient in how you move your labor around. And so this is the difference. And we know from practice, from doing split testing, that if we place a traditional ad we could get 200 to 300 applicants. General manager jobs are popular. Lots of people want to be general managers. Lots of people, you know, only every company only has one, or maybe, maybe they have more, but most companies only have one general manager. And a lot of the time, if you look at most companies in Australia, the general manager is the owner or the founder. You know, there's 1.3 million or more, you know, registered ABNs out there, which means that there's a lot of general managers, but they're the owner. Then the companies that are larger and have general managers, lots of people below them that want to move up. Next step's general manager, but the company they work in, if the general manager is doing a good job, he's going to be there for 3, 5, 10 years. So when you advertise general manager, a lot of applications. When you advertise for your Graham with our Graham ad. It's like now this may only get 10 applications. But because Performia has a very exacting screening system, we can measure the applicants. We can measure how much value they're likely to add. We know how much value they're going to add. We can measure their fit to the job. And when we measure the applicants here out of the hundreds and measure the applicants here out of 10, Quite often we get more here that we're going to want to talk to and interested to do more with than we do out of this ad. When hardworking people, when effective people that create results look at this sort of ad, they get bored, not so interested to apply. When they see this ad, they get really challenged and go, I've got to find out more about it. Even if the job doesn't suit them or even if they, you know, all other things are wrong, they just can't help themselves but want to apply. Which means that if they're not even looking for a job, they might be 1 year out to finish the job they're on and they still may apply. And so this saves us having to go and headhunt because headhunting has its own complications, its own moral issues, also has its own issues that, you know, headhunting someone that's on $400,000 salary and go, we want to pay you much less or no salary, it's You know, it could be a little bit tough. And it starts attracting the guys that normally wouldn't apply for jobs through Seek or whatever medium it is that you're advertising on. So also, these ads will attract people that maybe are more looking for just straight-up salary. And you know, a lot of people in Australia need to have a weekly salary. If they don't get paid for a week or a month or 2 months or 3 months, it's like they can no longer afford to live. They've got themselves structured in such a way that their debt and their commitments and their family costs, you know, pretty much equal their wage. And so when you go, hey, you know, can you take this job with low pay? It's like, no. So the people that need salary or looking for high salary that are motivated by salary And they're different categories actually, needing salary and motivated by salary. They're different categories, can be the same. Can't, won't really apply for this job. The people that have come off high salary and they've set themselves up financially, you know, perhaps they own their house, they've got some investments, they've got some cash. You know, they can look at this and go, you know what, salary is not a big deal for me. And if you're hiring a general manager, I think it's a good idea to hire a general manager that has their own finances in a good position. Because now they're going to come and be responsible for growing and improving your finances. That's a little bit tough if they haven't had the same experience of doing it off their personal finances. So it's one of the criteria, even with these low salaries, it helps to get people that have their finances in check. And that's a very much better chance that your finances will— in your business will end up much better in check.
