From a grower's single sheet of paper to the board paper

My father grew shiraz, chardonnay and colombard on 38 hectares outside Renmark, and he sold every tonne to one winery. In the mid-1980s, when the industry was paying growers to pull out vines, I watched two of our neighbours bulldoze blocks their parents had planted. My father kept his, and for the rest of my childhood the price he was offered each autumn arrived on a single sheet of paper. He could accept it or leave the fruit hanging. I did not have the words for it then, but I was learning that a grower who sells to one buyer has a price rather than a market.

I studied economics at Corrindale University in Adelaide and graduated with honours in 1996. My honours thesis examined how contract terms in the Riverland grape trade divided vintage risk between growers and wineries, which was an academic way of writing about my father's sheet of paper. In February 1997 I joined Ferrabee Consulting, a Melbourne strategy firm whose clients were mostly retailers, food manufacturers and agricultural businesses. Over four years I worked on fourteen engagements, among them a supplier's response to a supermarket range review and a wine company's study of whether to sell through British supermarkets. The second project showed me that I knew a great deal about growers and almost nothing about the people who decided what went on a shelf in Bristol or Leeds.

In 2001 a contact from that project introduced me to Kilbracken Stores, a British supermarket chain, which hired me as category manager for Australian and New Zealand wine. Those were the years when Australian wine led the British market by value and by promotion, and I was one of the buyers asking Australian suppliers for deeper discounts. In 2004 I took on the chain's own-label wines as well and over three years grew the range from 38 wines to 112. I studied for an MBA in the evenings at Kingsmere School of Business, finishing in 2005. Sitting on the buyer's side taught me how a range review is actually decided, how little a supplier's brand story counts against margin per metre of shelf, and how quickly a retailer can commission an own-label wine that resembles a supplier's best seller.

My wife and I came home in early 2007 with two small children, and I joined Tamberlee Foods in Sydney as head of strategy. Tamberlee made biscuits, snacks and sauces and sold three-quarters of them through Australia's two largest supermarket groups. From 2009 those retailers expanded their own-brand ranges quickly, and as general manager of customer strategy I led the company's response. We withdrew from three categories in which house brands had made our position uneconomic and invested in two where shoppers still paid for our brands. I left sceptical of the idea that a supplier can hold its place simply by being large in a category the retailer has decided to own.

Tarrowin's chief executive asked me to join as general manager of strategy and corporate development in September 2012. I knew the company's wines from my Kilbracken years, and its board wanted a plan for premium growth. I led the 2014 purchase of a Langhorne Creek producer and wrote the export plan that sent me to Singapore in 2015 as managing director for Asia. Over four years we grew Asian revenue from A$52 million to A$141 million. I should be plain about what that growth contained. By 2019 one Asian market supplied 39 per cent of our export revenue and a larger share of our profit, and I was the executive most responsible for that concentration.

I became chief strategy officer in July 2019. Sixteen months later the market I had built became almost inaccessible when it imposed anti-dumping duties on Australian bottled wine, and our revenue there fell from A$124 million to A$6 million in two years. Much of my work since has been the slow repair of that mistake and of the habits behind it: selling the Riverland business I grew up beside, declining exclusive labels that would have made our largest customer our competitor, putting a ceiling on the reopened market and insisting that retailer advertising prove its returns before it receives trade money.

I lead 22 people across strategy, corporate development, consumer insight, export market planning and commercial analytics. I hold no profit-and-loss account of my own, which I regard as a discipline rather than a limitation, because my recommendations have to persuade the executives who will carry them out. I present the annual strategy review and every transaction paper to the board, and I report twice a year to the Audit and Risk Committee on export concentration. My papers name the colleague most likely to disagree and set out their case fairly before mine.

People in the industry probably know me for an unfashionable view: that a mid-sized wine company is safer when it chooses to be smaller wherever it cannot set terms. I hold that view because I have sat on each side of those negotiations, and because my father's sheet of paper still sits in a drawer in my office. I am now preparing for a non-executive role alongside my executive one, in a business where those lessons travel.

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