Looking for the six months before the downturn shows

My father laid bricks in Adelaide's northern suburbs, and our household income followed housing approvals more faithfully than any economist I have since employed. In the recession of the early 1990s his work fell away for most of a year. I was fifteen, and I remember him saying that builders stopped ringing about six months before the newspapers noticed anything was wrong. Much of my working life has been an attempt to find those six months in the data.

I studied chemical engineering at Carrisford University in Adelaide and graduated with honours in November 1996. In February 1997 I joined Torrensvale Glass Containers, a bottle plant owned by a European packaging group, as a graduate process engineer. By 1999 its second furnace was near the end of its campaign, and the owners had to choose between a A$22 million rebuild and closing the furnace in favour of bottles shipped from Asia. At twenty-four I built the energy and pull-rate model for the rebuild case. The furnace was rebuilt smaller, with more recycled glass in the batch, and gas per tonne fell by 9 per cent. I took away a lesson I still use: a furnace or a kiln is a bet on fuel and demand that lasts longer than anyone in the room will hold their job.

Curious about how an owner made that kind of decision, I moved to Sydney in February 2002 to join Merrigan Kestle & Co., an industrial strategy consultancy. Over six years I worked on capacity, pricing and market-entry questions for makers of cement, packaging, steel products and building materials, and became an engagement manager in 2005, the year I finished an MBA part-time at the Halloran Graduate School of Management. Consulting gave me method, especially the habit of forecasting housing demand by state and by product rather than as a national total. I left because I wanted to stay for the consequences of a recommendation.

I joined Marrangal in July 2008 as strategy and planning manager, and spent my first year modelling a slowdown while it happened. Commencements fell, government stimulus arrived and demand recovered unevenly from state to state. I built the forecasting model that still sits beneath our budgets, and argued for mothballing, not closing, a Queensland concrete-block plant that restarted two years later. From October 2012 I ran corporate development. I sold our loss-making concrete-pipe business, bought a Perth window fabricator and, in 2016, negotiated the sale of 40 per cent of our plasterboard business to Hayatsu Gypsum, a Japanese board maker whose forming technology we needed more than its cash.

In January 2017 the managing director asked me to run the windows division, then earning a 2.1 per cent margin. I think he wanted a strategist to carry a P&L before advising others on theirs, and it was the most useful four and a half years of my career. I closed our extrusion press, withdrew from apartment towers where imported systems had the advantage, and invested in double glazing. I also learnt, during the shipping disruption of 2021, what it is like to have a supplier fail while builders ring every hour. When I came back to group strategy in July 2021 I could no longer write a recommendation without picturing the general manager who would have to carry it out.

As chief strategy officer I lead sixteen people across strategy, corporate development, market insight and energy strategy. Energy sits with me because our kilns and dryers turn gas into product, and the contracts that feed them now decide how long those assets live. I present to the board on strategy, capital allocation and transactions, and I sit on the board of our plasterboard joint venture as Marrangal's nominee. I ask my team for forecasts that are scored against what actually happened, and for papers that state what a recommendation gives up as plainly as what it gains.

Inside the industry I am known for three views that have cost us something in the short run: that every plant should be justified at trough volumes; that onshore manufacturing earns its place through weight, urgency or fit rather than sentiment; and that a long-term gas contract deserves the same board scrutiny as the kiln it feeds. I hold them because I have watched sound assets made unprofitable by a decision taken at the top of a boom. Since March 2023 I have also served as a non-executive director of Wattlebrook Community Housing Limited, which has shown me housing from the other end, as a buyer of homes rather than a supplier of their walls.

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