Ed (00:04): 

I am Ed Cowan and this is Scaling Up. 

Mike (00:14): 

Everything that we do is sort of looked at through a 5 and a 10-year lens, and you can be motivated, and you can definitely motivate people with short-term financial and non-financial incentives. But if your mission is to build a business that is relevant in the community in 2025, 2035, 2045, and so on, then trust is at the heart of that. 

Ed (00:56): 

Today’s guest on Scaling Up is Mike Schneider, the managing director of Bunnings since 2016 and a 20-year veteran of the business. Bunnings is more than a retailer, it’s a cultural institution in Australia with more than 380 stores, 55,000 team members, and over $18 billion in revenue. It’s hard to imagine a time when Bunnings wasn’t the default answer to every home improvement question, but behind that dominance is a story of quiet leadership, discipline and culture at scale. In this episode, we dig into how Bunnings has earned and maintained this dominance from its everyday low-price strategy and delivering brand promises at scale to the cultural consistency that is stitched into the fabric of the business. This is a story of what it really means to scale up, not just fast, but for good. I hope you enjoyed this episode with Mike Snyder, the managing director of Bunnings. Mike, welcome to Scaling Up. I have admired Bunnings as a brand and as a business, as a growth case study for more than two decades now. And of course, that admiration extends to you and how you’ve led this organisation, so thank you so much for joining us today. 

Mike (02:21): 

Oh, thank you. It’s my pleasure to be with you and looking forward to a great conversation. 

Ed (02:24): 

It’s sometimes really tricky trying to navigate these conversations because you don’t really know where to start with a business that’s had such a rich history. 140 years ago, almost, Arthur and Robert Bunnings were running a Perth lumberyard. It was just a localised business. Of course, it wasn’t until the fifties that Bunnings listed on the ASX and at the same time expanded more into building supplies. ’94 rolled around, it was acquired by Wesfarmers, and they really saw the ability to transform Bunnings from a supplier into a customer facing retail powerhouse. And that is certainly what it is today. I think at the time they’d probably seen the Home Depot playbook really come to fruition. 2005, you join Bunnings as the New South Wales state operations manager having just had four very productive years at the Warehouse group. Take us back to that time. Mike, can you remember why you joined? 

Mike (03:21): 

Great summary of the company’s history, and I think it is in many ways a patchwork quilt business that’s been built on many companies, foundations, and I think it’s characteristic of the market that we play in that mergers and acquisitions play a role so that organisations get access to capital and talent to be able to continue to grow and to serve their customers. And in some ways that reflects my thinking in joining Bunnings almost 20 years ago to the day I’ve been working at the warehouse group, they’d made a play to enter the Australian market, so for those who Dunno, warehouse group listed New Zealand entity, general merchandise discount retailer, similar to Kmart and Big W, as we know them in Australia, and they’d made the sort of choice to cross the ditch as they say, and had acquired some deep discount retail businesses and had hoped to transform and scale those in a not dissimilar way to what they’d done in New Zealand that didn’t go to plan. 

(04:15): 

The Australian retail environment is fiercely competitive as I know because I live and breathe it every day. And they came up against Woolworths, they came up against Cole Meyer, they came up against Bunnings and it was just much harder than they thought and not withstanding a fair effort to make the business work, the decision was made to exit and to sell into private equity. And I was a young dad, had one little boy just starting school and one little boy in preschool and school fees and years of mortgage to look forward to and I was really looking for the opportunity to find a business to build the next chapter of my career and along came an opportunity at Bunnings. I was Sydney based at the time, so making the move to be the New South Wales a CT state manager was a relatively easy one, but they were hard on the sell of an amazing culture and a lot of growth, and I think having worked for a few different brands was naturally skeptical of that. But thought I’d give it a go anyway, six or so months in, it was pretty clear to me that there was something very unique about the culture and a very strong growth mindset. And 20 years later, I’m glad I put down roots and have grown with the organisation 

Ed (05:20): 

That you have. I think in your time in those 20 years, the business, the store footprint’s probably grown three and a half times, but the revenue’s probably grown nine or 10-fold and the growth trajectory has just been immense and in many ways it’s a growth story that people recognise, but it’s largely untold. So hopefully we can unpick that a little bit today just to stay in that time period. What was the opportunity for the business at the time as you saw it when you came across? Obviously, part of the cell as you mentioned was the growth and the cultural tapestry that they had been able to sow together, but as a business, it felt like it was such a fragmented market. In your mind, what was that opportunity ahead to really capture and dominate the market? 

Mike (06:08): 

It’s interesting you made the observation earlier about it started from the mid-eighties with the Home Depot and Depot in the mid-nineties to late nineties, probably revenue wise where Bunnings is today in 2025. But there was a lot to learn, and Bunnings certainly wasn’t the first large format home improvement business in Australia. There was Mitre10 mega, there was Magnet Mart, which was an ACT southwestern New South Wales business and obviously BBC had gone into the hardware house business, so Bunnings was fighting to find a role in that, but it was really clear that consumers value the convenience of a one-stop warehouse where you can get almost everything you need from the front gate to the back fence of your property. And where population migration was going across Australia, it was really clear that there were significant growth opportunities purely by expanding the physical network that Bunnings had. 

(07:01): 

And I think what we were successful at doing, and it is a royal ‘we’ because it wasn’t me that sort of developed the format, but the team had developed a very successful low-cost capital, light way of building warehouses, bringing the offer to market and offering a compelling value proposition that really resonated. And I think it wasn’t just the product offering, it was the type of team that we were privileged to be able to recruit the culture that we were building, the deep connections from very early on that we had in the community that really gave us a license to operate, if you like, a social license really to be able to engage with different communities. And there was plenty of opportunity for physical network growth and my recollections of my first seven or eight years in Bunnings was an environment in which you’d be at 15 to 25 new store openings every year. And I think when you’re looking at a growth pipeline, that sort of physical network expansion, that space expansion is easy to model if you like, from a growth point of view. And we’re able to go about that. We have incredibly deep property credentials. Our capacity to identify sites to develop those sites and then to sell ’em and lease them back has always been a really important part of the Bunnings magic and we’re able to lean into that to be able to rapidly accelerate a physical network from 2005 really through until the mid-2010s. 

Ed (08:23): 

Yeah, it’s this physical network in my mind that really kickstart this flywheel, if you will, because it was this accelerated rollout, particularly of the consistent large format warehouse as you alluded to, easy parking rack shelves, big box retailing that also targeted not just the consumer but also trade and there’s a benefit of each. This was a designated strategy at the time. 

Mike (08:50): 

Yeah, the commercial strategy really did start to kick in a bit more detail from about the that I joined Bunnings concurrent to opening our warehouses. We started to roll out dedicated trade centres, which were large format pick, pack and dispatch centres for bulky goods, but also a convenience play for trades closer to where there was significant housing or construction activity. One of the things that I think was really smart that was done by the team at the time was whilst our focus was absolutely on opening large warehouses, so anything from 13 or 14,000 square metres to 20,000 square metres, we were also smart enough to understand that some markets weren’t going to support an asset of that size. So, we’re able to develop a number of different formats, smaller formats, and even in time multilevel formats to optimise retail space in heavily urbanised areas. If I think about Sydney sites like Castle Hill and Alexandria spring to mind, Maribyrnong in Victoria, Newstead in Brisbane are all good examples of where the hectare of land or so that we’d liked for a classic Bunnings store wasn’t available and what we weren’t able to achieve horizontally, we could achieve vertically from a construction point of view to be able to bring a warehouse offer to life if it made sense in those more urbanised environments. 

Ed (10:07): 

The benefit of having this huge fragmented market, the national rollout, and then coupling that with this everyday low-price strategy that started in the nineties but really reduced the reliance on discounting and high low pricing cycles. But it took probably a decade for this to come to fruition in my mind and really is at the heart of what became this category killer. So, let’s talk about this for a little bit. I think most people would recognise the slogan where lowest prices are just the beginning, but to deliver this price consistency is operationally very complex. It can’t just be a slogan; it needs to be woven into the fabric of the business. So, I’d love you to pull the curtain back a bit, give us a sense of the complexity as it relates to maintaining price leadership and particularly as it relates to maybe exclusive supply and private label, which was so key to that. 

Mike (11:05): 

Absolutely. Look, I think for me being an EDLP player has enormous advantage and often misunderstood advantage, I think first and Foremostly, it really builds trust with your customer. And the thing that really drives us at Bunnings is an incredibly laser-like focus on the very best offer for our customers. We want our customers to benefit from our capacity to buy in volume, to benefit from our low-cost approach to merchandising in store and the convenience of the offer. And I think having an EDLP position really plays to that. It also means that as a business we smooth out some of the cycling that businesses often face when they’re deeply involved in discounting. I remember as a young trainee manager working in target when 10%, 12%, 15% off sales days came and sort of went and they were fantastic in the moment. They were a problem for you 52 weeks later when you had to comp that number. 

(12:03): 

EDLP doesn’t have that particular pressure. And as I said, it builds trust and reliability for your consumer, but as you say, it’s not easy to maintain. And there’s a lot of price variability in our business because we also respond to what our competitors are doing to make the assertion that lowest prices are just the beginning means we have to have a very sophisticated ecosystem for understanding pricing not only in Bunnings but in the competitive landscape that we operate in. And we need to be able to respond to that very, very quickly, which is also why in Australia we have the 10% price guarantee because we do recognise that in the moment there may be a competitor that has a price that’s better than us and we haven’t been able to adjust our pricing or it’s an activity that they’ve undertaken in the moment in a local market. 

(12:51): 

And we empower our team from the very moment they join Bunnings to offer that guarantee of matching a price and then beating it by 10% on products that notionally are identical. But we do take a very common-sense approach to that and make sure that products that are like for like are also captured by our team so that our customer feels rewarded for bringing it to our attention, but it’s also an investment in that trust relationship that we have with our customers. And lastly, being an EDLP player really is at the core of our operating model because to have the lowest prices, we have to have the lowest costs, and that guides us in everything that we do, and it guides us in the uniforms in our team wearing. It guides us in the types of offices that we use. It guides us in the type of equipment we use. Everything is geared towards reducing cost and complexity in the business so that that value proposition can be put in front of our customers every day. 

Ed (13:41): 

Let’s unpick this one step further because if you take a step back, this is just a classic scale economy shared model, Costco, Amazon, and of course Buddings. Most companies pursue economies of scale, but few go to the length of sharing them back with the customer and that’s what actually makes the model so powerful. Of course, Bunnings could raise its prices and generate more profit on a short-term basis, but of course your earnings margin has remained flat for almost a decade despite the growth of the business. It takes this long-termism that’s interwoven almost a pedantic cultural pursuit of this mission. And of course, your mission is founded in having the widest range at the lowest possible price. So maybe just zooming into what enables this cultural focus because it can’t be easy every single day to ensure that all these touch points that the customer are provided with value, 

Mike (14:41): 

It’s a really important point that you make. I think first and foremostly, it’s very much the philosophy of our parent company, Wesfarmers, our parent company’s mission is to provide a satisfactory return to shareholders. And to do that, you need to be able to operate over the long term. And everything that we do is sort of looked at through a five and a 10-year lens. I’ve seen plenty of business operators come and go and you can be motivated, and you can definitely motivate people with short-term financial and non-financial incentives, but if your mission is to build a business that is relevant in the community in 2025, 2035, 2045 and so on, then trust is at the heart of that. And to me, the most important relationship we have is with our team members and creating jobs and permanency for our team is important and then that flows into the relationship that they have with our customers and that they are wanting to connect and engage and serve our customers, but also know that customers are choosing to come to our stores because they deeply understand that when they come to Bunnings, they’re getting the best value in the market. 

(15:47): 

And the temptation is clearly there to do things for short-term gain, but by building remuneration models, by building operating models that are very much geared to success over the long term, you can actually build in the discipline that you’d need to avoid that temptation to go for a short-term win at the expense of long-term performance. It’s the same with our thinking on property. When we establish a site, we’re looking to be in a market for 40 or 50 years. We design leasing arrangements to give us the flexibility to occupy a site over the long-term, but also to improve or enhance or even exit that site should we need to. And I think all of these things just reflect that very deeply ingrained sense of we are here for the long term. We have so many of our team members that have been around 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, 50, even 60 years. So, I think long-term thinking, long-term planning, long-term planning, long-term behaviour permeates fundings at every level of the enterprise. 

Ed (16:46): 

And you’re right, it comes from the top down and Wesfarmers has exemplified that attitude in every single one of its business units. One quote did catch my eye on the last earnings call from the CEO Rob Scott that exemplifies this scaled economy shared model as input costs moderated and our businesses realised benefits from ongoing productivity initiatives; our retail divisions were able to deliver thousands of price cuts for customers during the half. It’s just a clear example that there is a cultural institution of ensuring that the benefits are shared with the customers and a cultural consistency to deliver it. I think it leads perfectly into the next topic I wanted to touch on, and you’ve already touched on it I think two or three times, and that is the brand trust that has developed these savings are expected, they’re visible and they’re this brand trust. 

(17:39): 

I think I’ve heard you describe Australians as being social shareholders in Bunnings to some degree. Bunnings sits at the top of nearly every single brand trust index, but there’s a lightness shade to being a cultural institution, almost a paradox of brand trust at scale that when you are the most trusted brand in the country, expectations aren’t just high, they’re actually existential. And we’ve seen this with Qantas, Optus, Woolworths. There’s a long list of people who have had incredible brand trust, but the higher the trust, the greater the fallout even marginally when that trust is broken. So, can you get a sense of how you think about this internally if there are cultural initiatives or rituals that ensure that trust is not breached as you scale? I’d love to hear more. 

Mike (18:27): 

Look, and you’re right when you’re the most trusted brand in the country, first and foremost, it’s an incredible privilege that we never ever take for granted, not even for a moment. And unfortunately, when you are number one, there is only one direction to go. So, we’re super alive to that dynamic. Also, I think there’s so many different ways in which we think about trust. If I think about it, we are very deliberate and unlike almost any other retail business in the fact that we consciously bias our workforce towards permanent employment that allows people to have certainty of income. It allows ’em to put down roots and grow and build fantastic careers across our organisation. But it also means that there’s a reliability and consistency for our customers when they’re coming into store. Our stores are a self-service business, but they’re a self-service with service business because there’ll be plenty of times that you’ll pop into your local Bunnings, you’ll know exactly what you need, whether it’s a gas bottle for the barbecue on a weekend or firewood for a fireplace or an open fire pit or a screw or hook to fix something at home. 

(19:30): 

But there are also plenty of times where you just need advice and whether that advice is delivered through our digital channels or through our amazing team members, that consistency and reliability is there. So, we deeply understand that from that. We also know from listening to our team that our teams live in their local communities. Their kids go to the local school, they play for the local netball club or football club, or they’re in the local scouts’ group or guides group. They live, work and raise their families in the local community. I think from very early in the Bunnings warehouse model, finding a connection to the local community has always been really important. It’s expressed most famously of course, through the barbecues that people see outside our stores most weekends and some of our biggest stores throughout the week, but it’s also in the tens of thousands of activities that our team members participate in, either in their Bunnings Reds in the community or as community members through Surf Lifesaving or SES and Rural Fire Services. 

(20:26): 

Our teams deeply value the connection they have to the community and the way that Bunnings as a brand brings that to life for them and for their communities and also bringing those communities into our store. So, our team and community mesh in a really important way. I’ve spoken about the trust that comes from consistency of pricing. We think about it deeply in all of our customer touchpoints. It’s why our gift cards never expire. It’s why our exchange coupons never expire. It’s why periodically we’ll write to people and say, did you know you’ve got an exchange voucher that was issued a year ago and you’ve never redeemed it? If you’ve lost it, we’ll send you a new one. Because we don’t want to be seen to sort of profit from any activity that could be seen in a cynical light. We work hard to have productive dialogue and relations with government, with regulators because we understand the importance of being a good member of the commercial community as well. 

(21:21): 

I think corporate citizens sometimes sounds a little bit sort of hashed over many times, but I do think I do know we understand the role that we play to do the right thing as a large well-known brand. So many Australians are financial shareholders in our parent company, Wesfarmers directly through their own investments or arguably through their superannuation funds. But I do think that Bunnings occupies this unique place in the psyche, and I do think so much of it comes from the collective experience of cooking a barbecue on a weekend or going to a family night or looking at the kitchen you’ve had installed and knowing it’s come from Bunnings or knowing that we’ve been able to match the paint that you needed to cover up a mark that one of the kids has put on the wall. I think there’s so many different ways that people participate in the Bunnings brand. 

(22:05): 

That means that we’re understood. The consumers know we have their back through the service and product and price offering, but equally that we are there when the going gets tough. And I think one of the things that is sometimes less known by the community is when there are crises in the community, natural disasters and things, we work very, very quickly to get open and support the community to make sure we’re accessible for emergency services and to use our facilities to support the community in those moments of crisis. Equally, we’re a very human organisation and I think this is an important piece to stress. As a counterbalance, we employ close to 55,000 team members, which means that every day something’s going wrong. A team member who’s had a bad day and hasn’t delivered the best service to a customer or we’ve got a buyer who’s maybe been a bit short with a supplier when we wouldn’t have wanted them to be. 

(22:57): 

We’re always listening and learning, and if we get it wrong, we want to own it and put it right very quickly. But I think human organisations are also very relatable, and I think as humans, we all know that we have good days and bad. And I think the most important part of all the effort we put into enhancing trust is equally balanced by the fact that when things go wrong and things do go wrong, we own them really quickly and we put them right and we make sure that we put them right properly. And I think that that flows into the trust flywheel when people kind of go, okay, well it didn’t work out the way I thought it would, but I expected them to fix it and fix it properly. And that’s exactly what they’ve done. And I think that also helps us to sort of support the notion of this is a place that is very fair, it’s very balanced, it’s very decent, and yes, it’s very successful, but it’s also sharing that success with the people it employs, the communities it participates in and the customers that it serves. 

Ed (23:50): 

Scale economy shares is not just returning price to customers, it’s also means contributing to the community. And what I heard from you is this cultural pillar of being store led and the touch point for the customer is obviously the most important part. And there’s no point you sitting in an office dictating certain decrees. It really is at the coalface and that’s where the culture is built of the business. 

Mike (24:14): 

Our vision statement is that we are building the best and our team makes it happen. So, I think right from the inception of the Bunnings Warehouse model, we’ve understood the power of team and that continues to evolve because clearly, we’ve got different channels to market, different ways to engage and participate in the brand, but ultimately our team members are the most important asset and ambassador for the brand. And I think if you are privileged to pull on a Bunning’s red shirt and tie on one of our quirky slightly daggy green aprons, there’s a real sense of pride and a real sense of teamwork. And when you’re in a store, no matter whether you are the managing director like I am or the newest team member, the uniform’s the same. We don’t differentiate. And I think what we do do is take the work we do seriously our team take caring for their customers, caring for their community very seriously. 

(25:02): 

Our leaders take the roles that they have to drive the business forward very seriously. But in a nice twist on that, we don’t take ourselves very seriously. We’re not a particularly formal business. We’re not hierarchical. We can laugh at ourselves, laugh with each other, and we’re very open. We’ve worked hard to make our environment as democratised as you can possibly have it so that any team member can engage right across the business. We’ve got great communication channels for that. We’ve got great listening post opportunities for that so that if you are in a team and you are lost and you need some help and support, you can reach out far and wide and know that people are going to lean in and support you to be successful either in the project you’re working on or the issue you’re dealing with or the next step in your career. 

Ed (25:49): 

I love that line about taking our job seriously but not taking ourselves seriously. And for anyone that has followed along with Bluey and just seeing how you could intertwine the brand into another cultural Australian institution that is Bluey speaks to that this brand trust has really given you an incredible customer permission to move into adjacencies pretty seamlessly, but pair to auto. And there’s always a risk of mission creep when businesses do this, but in actual fact it’s been key to the resiliency of the business, particularly in recent years. I’d love to get your views on how to ensure that there isn’t mission creep. What’s the filter for saying no to a category for instance? 

Mike (26:36): 

It’s a great question. I think you’ve only got to go back to was it Michael Porter who talks about the fact that the hardest part of is often what you say no to, right? And when you’ve got momentum, it’s sometimes easy to go. What’s the next obvious thing? If we sort of circle back to Bluey for a moment, did an episode of Bluey in a hammer barn. It was actually one of our Queensland Bunnings stores that they based that on. And our ability to sort reimagine and rethink the brand and bring it to life for another generation of customers and actually rebrand half a dozen of our sites as Hammer Barn create a lot of fun. And it does show you that if it’s organic and relevant to the community, then you will get a good response. And that carries over into our thinking on range and assortment. 

(27:17): 

We operate in an incredibly competitive environment. I’m regularly quoted for saying that you can buy nearly everything you need for a home renovation project from Bunnings, but equally you can buy nothing at all. The strength of Beacon Lighting, Reese Plumbing, total Tools, MITRE 10 independent paid shops, independent nurseries, all illustrate the fact that the market is very competitive. It’s 110 or so billion-dollar market across Australia and New Zealand on our current revenue that puts us just under 19 or so percent, which shows you the opportunities that are there. So, our aspiration is always to grow the market and then grow our ability to participate in it. And what we’ve done, if we stick with the DIY side of the business is think about it through the lens of a home. So, for us, we say that the playing field, our arranging playing field or arranging lens as we call it at Bunnings, is the front gate to the back fence of the home and how we service different members of that family, whether that’s fixed items in a home, so kitchens and flooring and paint and lighting to more decorative items like pots and plants and things like that. 

(28:26): 

We’ve long understood our ability to sort of play. And what’s interesting and exciting about our business is the evolution of the products and the product categories. 20 or 30 years ago, if you bought a power tool, it always came with a cord. If you were serious about doing a project and it came with a battery, if you were doing something pretty lightweight in 2025, it’s pretty rare to sell any power tool with a cord no matter how powerful it is. And such as the transformation in lithium-ion batteries and the transformation from the Nike batteries from 20 years ago in Smart Home, we sell products now to automate a home that were almost a stuff of science fiction 10 or 15 years ago, and our ability to participate in those is more obvious. But equally, for many years we’ve allowed the four-legged member of the family to shop in a budding store with its family and servicing. 

(29:14): 

That was a logical extension. We’d been in pets for a very long time, but in a very limited way. Pet enclosures, chook pens and scratching poles for cats, nothing particularly exciting, but we did know that the customer was interested in participating with us in the pet category. So, you then set about doing some market research to understand whether it’s going to be relevant for customers. And when the answer overwhelmingly is yes, we think it is, then you do the work with suppliers and your supply chain team to understand how you might bring that to market. So, we want to be where the customer is at. We understand with the scale of our business, the customer traffic digitally and physically, it would be tempting to sell a whole range of things purely because of the volume of traffic. We move through our business digitally and physically, but we stay very disciplined to that front gate to back fence mindset. 

(30:03): 

And that’s really how we sort of view the market where we’re right on the edge of launching a range into our regional markets that services properties that are sort of five to 50 acres, so hobby farmers and light rural and commercial ranges. Now we’re not going to put those in our metropolitan stores. They’re not relevant, but they’re very relevant if you’re in Warrnambool or Dubbo or Tamworth or Toowoomba. So, there’s lots of opportunities for us not only to think at a macro level, but also a micro level to stay relevant to our customers because the biggest strategic risk I guess we face in many ways is being the retailer that our parents went to shop at. And plenty of businesses have sort of gone down that pathway in Australia and around the world. The last two largest retailers in the world, Sears and Kmart US, are both out of business today because they lost relevance to their customer. And we look at those case studies very, very closely and work hard to make sure that where the customer wants to be through the channels that we offer, but also through the products and services that we bring to market. 

Ed (31:04): 

That makes sense and is a perfect calibration, I guess, of the Bunnings strategy coming to life. Not all great or best laid growth plans always come off, and I do want to touch on the UK expansion that Wesfarmers undertook and then had to unwind, but I guess mainly through the lens of how it shaped your leadership and strategic vision for the business. Because since that moment of unwinding Bunnings in the UK, the Australian business has gone strength to strength. So, there must’ve been some lessons that were curated out of that. 

Mike (31:40): 

And the lessons of the home base acquisition, I personally was heavily involved in the second of the two years really understanding what the opportunities were for the business in the UK and then ultimately supporting Wesfarmers in the exit of the business and also caring for the Bunnings team who’d moved to the other side of the world and making sure that we were able to bring them back into the Australian business and help them to continue to build their careers. The big takeouts for me were very much the importance of digital. Bunnings had a website to sort of showcase products and services way back from 2008, but even when we exited the UK in 2018, we didn’t have that capacity to offer a digital sales channel to our customers in Australia or New Zealand, but it was such a strong part of the UK market. So that was a really clear learning. 

(32:29): 

It was a really clear learning for me that you need the right capability and the right roles to be able to take a business forward and the businesses need to transform and evolve and be relevant too. And looking back at the uk, maybe it was the wrong asset to buy. Maybe some of the skills that we needed to make the business successful in terms of turnaround weren’t really in the DNA of a business like Bunnings, which had been successful and stable over a very long period of time. And it’s very challenging to run a business on the other side of the world. Your Workday finishes in Australia and a workday in the UK is starting almost at the same time and suddenly you’re in a 24-hour cycle. Those are all significant challenges, but it definitely shook out any hubris that might’ve existed in the Bunnings business. 

(33:13): 

And bearing in mind in 2016, the Woolworths Lowe’s joint venture that was masters exited the Australian business. I think Bunnings did a very good job of being a fierce competitor for Lowe’s and Woolworths. And I think Woolworths, similar to what Bunnings did in the UK, made a series of strategic choices that with the benefit of hindsight, you might’ve done differently. And I think when you have that sort of success, sometimes you can let a little bit of hubris creep in, and I think Bunnings UK definitely shook any of that out of us, but it also really challenged us to understand what we were going to do to drive growth. Because the UK acquisition international expansion is a very legitimate growth channel, but suddenly that growth channel is not there. You’ve got to find growth somewhere else. We doubled down on our aspirations on the commercial side of the business, and we doubled down on the need to rapidly accelerate and implement a tech transformation to make Bunnings a truly omnichannel retailer and to leverage the opportunity to participate in the e-commerce space, which up until that point in time we hadn’t had. And really in doing those things, we created some really important platforms that we benefited from significantly as Australia and the world was plunged into lockdowns and restrictions through the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Ed (34:29): 

That’s a great call out in and of itself because there’s no doubt that significant investment, not just in transactional e-commerce, but click and collect, which is complex when you have 300 stores around the country really position Bunnings to capture some of those COVID tailwinds, so to speak. The next topic I’d love to dive into is your leadership. And I think people have gathered after 30 minutes or so, its pretty low ego, mission driven, very aligned to the win-win with the customer. When Bunnings win, the customer has to win. And it feels as though your leadership is very much aligned to this philosophy. Before we get into philosophy, let’s talk about your career more broadly because there must be something that retail lends itself to long duration domain specific careers. If you look at the Costco CEO, I think he was a forklift driver guy Russell former, we and Kmart leader had run McDonald’s, had previously flipped burgers. There’s something, the empathy for the customer and having experienced the shop floor that turns you all into great leaders. So, I guess the question really is framed. Do you think your career and its base and where it came from shaped how you view your role as a leader today? 

Mike (35:55): 

There’s no doubt that it has. I went to high school in Sydney, had aspirations to be a marine scientist, and for a variety of reasons that pathway wasn’t as accessible as I’d hoped it would be. And plan B was to become a high school teacher, which is what I went off to New South Wales Uni to study to be a high school history and English teacher. And it was when I was out doing prac teaching that I realised that vocationally, it didn’t light my fire, but serendipitously I’d got a Thursday night, Saturday casual job at targeting Chatswood, punching checkouts, pushing trolleys, unloading trucks, occasionally washing the boss’s car. Apparently, you can’t do that in 2025, which is a real shame, but such is life. But what I did realise is I loved working in a team, I loved working with customers, and I was really fortunate that I had a couple of leaders that saw in me some potential to lead some very small teams leading a front end or leading a small department or supervising sort of a warehouse in an early taste of leadership. 

(37:00): 

And I liked the responsibility that came with that, and I liked the ability to create an environment where teams could thrive. And I went from that to doing a management traineeship. I fell out of love with retail for a little while and went to work in banking, worked for Westpac Bank for about five or six years in the mid to late nineties. And I absolutely loved the opportunities that the bank afforded me. I think it was less age-based in its mindset around leadership progression than retail had been at the time. And I found more opportunities to sort of grow my career and travel and learn, but I missed the buzz of retail Christmas time, 2000, 2001. I was working in Melbourne, walking down Burke Street Mall and retailers are going crazy and bankers are all starting to take their clients out for lunch. And I was actually missing the busyness that retail had. 

(37:51): 

And that’s sort of what drew me to the warehouse group and then ultimately to Bunnings. And I do think there’s a real empathy for a team that are serving customers every day. They are the ones that represent our brand. They’re the ones that really do the work in Bunnings. And I think that when you understand that and you understand the importance of that contribution and the value that that contribution creates for an organisation, then you have a strong empathy for it. And as I said right at the start of this Marks the 20th year at Bunnings and it’s almost equally split between running operational teams or running the company in terms of timing them in the MD role. And I don’t think I’ve ever really lost that desire to sort of connect to individual teams. I love popping into induction when they’re running here in our support office and welcoming people and thanking them for choosing Bunnings as a place to build a career. I love individual relationships. I’ve built over two decades with individual team members, and I think it keeps you really grounded, and I think that it allows you to sort of be a better version of yourself as a leader. And I think it keeps you very alert to what are the real drivers of performance, engagement and ultimately culture, which lead to trust and commercial success through your team. And we’ve touched on some of that this afternoon. 

Ed (39:07): 

It’s amazing actually, the research hadn’t uncovered that you were a trained teacher. I’ve often said my experience formal life as a sports person, the best coaches I had were all trained teachers and often primary school teachers. And there’s a strong belief that the role of A CEO or a managing director is to coach. It’s not to play. 

Mike (39:27): 

And that’s why I think in leadership context is important. We just had our national conference a few weeks back. We had 13 or 1400 of our nearest and dearest teammates with us here in Melbourne. And it’s always an energising period of time. Everyone’s together, everyone’s in their reds. We’re talking about our performance very openly, very candidly, and our plans for the future. But I always talk about the importance of leaders’ role as coach and context is king, and understanding why we do the things we do is really important and always challenge team to sort of come my way. If the reason they’ve been asked to do something is because Mike said to do it, that’s a bad reason. There’s always a reason why we want things done and context allows us to teach and pay that forward. And I think it’s just such an important part and it’s why probably I love working. I’m privileged to work with a number of people in different organisations outside of Bunnings. So, who’ve either been elite sports people or coaches and have a high-performance mindset, but also have that sense of how do I bring the best out in others? I learned from them all the time. 

Ed (40:26): 

That’s interesting. I’m keen to dig into this philosophy of yours that is based in this authentic low ego leadership. And part of me thinks large retail operations, when you’re dealing with 55,000 employees, you need a very crisp, simple philosophy to create both alignment and clarity at scale. How do you think as the managing director of 55,000 people, that’s a full SCG, how do you create that alignment and clarity? And I guess the question is really what are the systems and rituals that have supported you in operationalizing that? 

Mike (41:03): 

I guess I have two frameworks. One is the Bunnings leadership model, and the other is sort of my own personal reflections. And the Bunnings leadership model is built around three strategic pillars that have been a part of our business since the inception of the warehouse model. So, they’re 31 heading to 32 years old, and that’s to have the lowest prices, the latest range, and the best experience for our customers. And they’re pretty good catchalls for all the things that we want to do commercially. But if you don’t have a great culture, then it’s very hard to deliver those over the long term. And equally, those strategies aren’t clear and consistent, and you do have a great culture. Often you just go broke, you just go broke, having a good time. Culturally, we talk about integrity and respect, and they’re all about how you build trust. 

(41:45): 

And in many ways, integrity plus respect equals trust. It’s almost an equation. And if you’ve got trust, that for us is the foundation of our third guiding principle, which is teamwork in sport and in business. If you’ve got great teams, great teams win, which leads us to our fourth guiding principle of achievement. And if you’re winning, you want to keep winning, which guides us to our fifth guiding principle of innovation. And for me, the left- and right-hand side of the Bunnings leadership model is something that is really important to us, and we recognise that the codependency of those, and to deliver great results, you need a great culture. And to have a great culture, you need to have a really clear sense of ambition. And I think we do that. I overlay that with some personal philosophy that’s sort of been really built over 30 odd years of being in business. 

(42:29): 

And you’re right, when you’re talking to big teams or you’re speaking on these topics, having things that are either easy to remember for yourself as a presenter, but for others that are listening are equally important. And I sort of ended up with four pockets around value, attitude, gratefulness, and then an overall perspective. And as I sort of mused over a couple of years, I realised that I could sort of distil ’em into four words and all four happily started with the letter H. The first one for me is honesty. And in the world in which we live, it’s sometimes really hard to believe what you’re being told or believe what you see. There’s a lot of fake information out there, and that’s only accelerating with deep fakes and ai. So I think being old fashioned, your words, your bond and being a straight shooter is really important. 

(43:16): 

And it does enable trust. And in many ways, it picks up on that integrity and respect that sits inside the Bunnings guiding principles. But for me, that’s really important. The second one is humility. And I think one of the things that’s unique about Bunnings, when 90% of the community think about Bunnings, they think about their local store. In fact, when people ask me where I work and I say I work at Bunnings, the most common question I get asked is, what store do you work at? And I love that because that’s the connection, that’s that community connection, that’s that connection to regular faces at your local store. And what customers don’t need to see and really don’t need to worry about is a big complex organisation that’s a fully integrated omnichannel. B2B B2C retail business with a retail media business, got property development capabilities. It’s got all sorts of things. 

(44:03): 

But ultimately what our customers care most about is do you have the product I want? Is it in stock? And am I getting the best possible price? And I think that’s why we sort of have this mindset of not taking ourselves very seriously because actually this is Bunnings. We are not at the forefront of scientific research into a horrible disease. We are not solving some humanitarian crisis. We are not solving political crisis. We are not to the best extent we can. We actually stay as clear from political debate as we possibly can. We’re not a social commentator, but we are a very dedicated provider of products that make your home your business a better place. And we don’t need to get too big for our boots. And in fact, to the best extent I possibly can, let that permeate all aspects of my life where I choose to live, how I choose to live. 

(44:50): 

My social circle isn’t famous people and CEOs, it’s mates. I went to school with mates; I played footy with parents of kids who went to school with my kids. And that’s, I think, a great way to live a life that lets you get the most out of life in every dimension. But equally, I’m mindful that I’ve been afforded incredible privileges from those early moments that I touched on early in my career when I was given a bit more responsibility as a young kid in a target store through to the faith that Wesfarmers and the Wesfarmers Board put in me in 2016 to become managing director of Bunnings. So, it’s incumbent, I think, on me and on all of us as leaders to pay that opportunity forward. So, there’s plenty of times you get asked for help. Plenty of times you get asked for a connection, whether it’s on LinkedIn or email or randomly to the best extent I can. 

(45:38): 

I always try to pay those things forward. And someone is looking for a job at Bunnings, at least help them get an interview of someone wants to launch a product in Bunnings, at least let them talk to a buyer. So, the third H for me is helpfulness. And it really is driven on that. How do I pay things forward? And I hope that in the fullness of time, people look at that and see that that’s added value in different ways. In fact, saying yes to someone pitching a job or pitching a product has led to some great products in their business. It’s a little bit like standing in lift and seeing someone rushing for the lift and the door starting to close. You have a choice about whether you press the door open button or the door close button. And for me, the more door open button you can be, the better it can be. 

(46:17): 

And that leads to the last of the four Hs, which is just happiness. Without being too philosophical, the morbid, we get one shot at the life we get to live. And regardless of your belief system and what the next life does or doesn’t look like, my guess is we all get to the last moment and probably wish we’d done a hundred other things. And if I can get to 50 of those rather than a hundred of them, then I’ll have done a good job. So, you want to be happy doing what you’re doing. And if I wasn’t happy at Bunnings, I don’t think I’d be here. But that’s a really important philosophy to have because life is too short to let work dominate everything, and life is too short to not have a laugh and have a bit of fun along the way and enjoy what you’re doing. 

Ed (46:54): 

Wonderful reflection and all good frameworks that it’s going to be easy to remember. For listeners, I’ve got one last question for you, and that is still on the topic of talent and culture. In my mind, there’s a benefit of sitting under the Wesfarmers infrastructure. You’ve obviously got a shed technology infrastructure in many respects, but there’s also a shared cultural infrastructure. And often people move from Wes head office into the divisions, people move across divisions, people rotate, people move up, and it’s an immense grounding, as we’ve seen over many years to conquer corporate Australia. I feel like this gives you some kind of cultural competitive advantage, but also provides attention, and that is this connecting cultural tissue. But of course, the flip side of that is a lack of fresh eyes or ideas. So, I’d be curious how you think about that tension and also the advantage that having this, what I would call a house of talent approach that the Wesfarmers has enabled. 

Mike (48:00): 

It’s a really good observation. I think we’re really privileged to be a part of the Wesfarmers Group, whether it’s access to capital, access to talent. I’m privileged that I get to work on an operating business and drawn far less into corporate governance and investor conversations than some of my corporate colleagues are. And the roles that they play are really important for that. And I think that’s where we get breakdown of skills to get the best sort of talent into the right environment. And I think some of the parts means that Wesfarmers is in a position to sort of outperform because you’ve got such strong businesses with such strong governance and corporate support. And yes, people do move across the divisions and up and down, but equally, the divisional autonomy model means that we’re able to operate with quite a significant degree of autonomy and to some extent compete with one another at times where Bunnings will compete with Kmart or Kmart will compete with Officeworks and so on. 

(48:54): 

And that’s the dynamic of the markets in which we all operate. But the shared values are very important, and it drives alignment. And where there’s synergistic benefits across tech or people or legal or anything else, we are able to optimise those in a way that I think adds real value. But just as my predecessors did in the early nineties when they went to the US and studied the Home Depot, we remain enormously curious and enormously alive to the fact that whilst there’s many incredible reasons why living in Australia is probably makes us some of the luckiest people on the planet, we’re also a really long way from everywhere else. So, we are active students of our industry, the home improvement industry globally, and we have incredibly deep connections with Depot and Sodimac in South America and Hornbach in Germany and Leroy Merlin in France. But we also study the Walmart’s and the Walgreens and the Lowe’s and the B&Qs and the, you name it, we study it. 

(49:55): 

And I think when we see some of our global peers come to Australia or New Zealand and walk our stores, they often see elements of their own business that we’ve brought to life as we’ve sort of stolen those ideas with pride, but equally happily share them as well. So, I think being a part of Wesfarmers, we are absolutely motivated to be the best version of Bunnings that we can be, take the best of Wes where it makes sense. But equally, we know that we’ve got to go out and chart a course for ourselves that makes Bunnings the best version of a home improvement, outdoor living lifestyles retailer that we can possibly be relative to our global peers. And that starts with learning, followed up with sharing, and then we consolidate and bring that to life through our website, through our stores, through our fulfilment centres, so that the customers right back to what we talked about at the start, have the trust in the brand to choose us when they’re doing something around their home. This has 

Ed (50:46): 

Been a fascinating conversation, and the theme I just keep coming back to is just delivering cultural discipline at scale. And that is not easy to do, and it’s a testament to you and your leadership team that the Bunnings has been able to do that and build the brand that it has over the last 25 years. So, congratulations. Thank you so much for joining us on scaling Up, Mike. I’ve absolutely loved it. 

Mike (51:12): 

Oh, likewise. And very privileged to have the opportunity to chat with you. And yeah, really enjoyed the conversation as well. So, thank you very much. 

Ed (51:19): 

Thanks, Mike. 

Mike (51:20): 

My pleasure.