Podcast transcript: EY Change Happens Podcast – Don Meij

Intro: Change happens how we respond to change can make or break us and our careers. Join us for an intimate insight into how senior business leaders face change. The good, the bad, and everything in between because whether we like it or not, change happens.

Jenelle: This podcast series ‘Change Happens’ is a conversation with senior business leaders on leading through change, lessons learned along the way and how they’re coping during the current COVID-19 crisis. Today I’ve asked the King of Pizza, Don Meij – MD and Group CEO of Dominos Pizza to take us through his experiences as a leader during the pandemic. Don’s 33 career with Domino’s where he started delivering pizza and worked his way up to CEO is one that celebrates many firsts associated with Domino’s under his stewardship. Not just the ultimate learn on the job success story but a true innovator with exceptional entrepreneurial skills. Domino’s was the first company to introduce plant based pizza in Australia, moved quickly into a permanent work-from-home policy, or work from anywhere policy, and was decisive enough to develop out of a slowed COVID-19 global trade slump into sourcing Australia ingredients by adopting a sovereign mindset from making pizzas during the pandemic. I look forward to exploring how Don and Domino’s pizza are managing this current crisis and beyond.

Hi Don how are you, and how have you personally been throughout the last few months?

Don: I’m great. Thank you Jenelle. Thank you for hosting me here. I suppose just like everybody else it’s been an incredible roller coaster from the most dramatic fear of where does the bottom hit in that peak during March/April around the world cause we’re in 9 different countries but then wrestling with all the growth that’s what we are now currently experiencing because of how we’ve embraced the environment around us.

Jenelle: I know that, we all know that many businesses in hospitality have been hit particularly hard through this time but somehow at Domino’s you’ve been able to make some quick changes to the way that you operate. You’ve managed to really leverage your delivery model and maintain stuff and at times grow your sales. Can you take us through what kinds of changes you’ve made and what’s been the result of those changes?

Don: We are fortunate that a lot of the work that we were already doing as a brand has put us in the right place, at the right time during COVID. There are some really big things like our online ordering platform. How driven we were already in delivery which are two big drivers but what we did pivot really quickly is that we went from start to finish within 6 days once we predicted that it was going to … before the word ‘pandemic’ was used, that we should be implementing zero contact delivery processes which means that through the whole ordering experience the only hands that will get to touch a pizza once it leaves an oven are those of the customer. Originally when we were sitting with the team, oh this will probably take us six weeks and we said we may not have six weeks, we did it in six days. Which has also now responded to zero contact carpark delivery which goes after the pickup or the carrier customer which is somebody we lost in the first epicentre. We got a lot of delivery, but we didn’t always compensate enough in that very early period the loss of the carrier customer. Now with carpark delivery which is like a concierge service, no extra charge, but we put it in the back seat of your car or in your boot with gloves, with masks and we are doing that in Melbourne right now.

Jenelle: Don, as you say something like that might have taken something like six weeks maybe on a good run. You managed to do that in six days. What is it do you think about you and the organisation that allowed you to make that kind of material shift in that short of a period of time?

Don: Yes so embracing technology and learning over the last ... since 2005/2006 we studied a lot of our job practices, we put them in place and I think when you are running a business agile it doesn’t mean all day you’re running at full capacity of that agility but you are continually pulsing in and out of that and you build up habits or what we call in our business ‘muscle memory’. You’ll burn people out if you run, if you are completely agile 100% of the time because you do need some cadence. You do need some normality but when you do ask the organisation to rise because you’ve got all the practices and the muscle memory is there, we found that they do. From food crisis’s, many years ago we had boning in beef which wasn’t going to do any major damage but still it was not a pleasant eating experience. We had all of the beef in Australia removed within 24 hours and a complete new menu without beef seamlessly. That’s just an example of that side let alone on a technology side. We’ve done many trips to Silicon Valley. We’ve been fortunate enough to have a lot of coaches from that. We’ve had business partners work with us. We studied as a group – books and built that muscle memory over the last decade into the business.

Jenelle: That’s a fantastic set of examples. I know that you and your senior team are very interested in self-improvement literature. I believe you have been reading ‘Atomic Habits’ James Clear book amongst many others. Going back to all those first principles around working agile, making behavioural change. How do you build that kind of constant view to improving and personal and professional development into the day-to-day physic of everyone.

Don: I think part of it comes from because I studied to be a school teacher. As a business I think all leaders lead by example. So building a reading culture. Building a development. We go away on retreats and often there is one book, a couple of videos, sometimes two books that we will make compulsory reading going into that retreat. It’s sort of like a bare minimum for leadership and then personally if you ever come into my home for a dinner, of if you ever came to one of my coffees with Don sessions, I would always be handing out books and writing something on the front about what some of the key things that I got out of it. I typically would, that’s the only way I would write on a book cause for me I don’t like to change the way people read that book because I’ve highlighted it everywhere. I do think whether you’re watching video content like ‘Ted Talks’ and YouTube videos, studying people or whether you’re reading papers or books, you’ve having a personal conversation in your head with those people and that’s what we’ve been trying to drive in the organisation is that whether someone who is not even alive today or some of the most extraordinary brains on the planet and by reading their material you can get decades if not 6 – 12 months’ worth of each epicentre knowledge and you have that conversation with that individual when you read that book. It doesn’t mean you always agree with them either. You may take a different perception. Trying to feed that in the organisation and then bring a lot of outside people in because we’re quite an insular culture, we run very fast and there is always a danger that we believe all of our own information and that actually we could be misreading and we’ve seen that in the past.

Jenelle: It’s fantastic. I know that you were studying to be a high school teacher before so it sounds like that passion for training and educating people seems to have permanented into the pizza world for you.

Don: Yeah totally. We say at Domino’s, every day is a training day at Domino’s, every day is a day of learning and development. You’re either providing it or you’re receiving it but every day is a training day and at our best we do that very well and at our worst we reflect and say we could do that a lot better.

Jenelle: Don, being in the delivery business and quick service restaurants, the idea of working from anywhere seems a little difficult to get my head around. How have you managed to do that in your organisation? What sorts of changes have you made in that regard?

Don: We were really early on to close down the office because before and even our rally they were almost at the same time. We would normally have had 1,500 people at a conference on the Gold Coast in and around that time of the epicentre. We cancelled those rallies inside the organisation to a lot of people’s horror because it’s like ‘boy are we over reacting but being in the food business we couldn’t be associated with a cluster. When you think about something like a pandemic and then you were one of the contributors it doesn’t go very well with the brand.

Sometimes when it comes to food safety and human safety you’ve got to be paranoid, you’ve got to act in a more extreme sense. Now because we are a technology – we’re a pizza company I don’t want anybody to confuse that. The best way to drive retail and the best way to drive retail pizza for the last 15 years has been through technology. There was a few little things like the bandwidth of data, scientists to work from home more, producing TV commercials and graphic material required an immense amount of broadband and bandwidth, so we had to build some things in there, some security and then the culture. The culture eats strategy for breakfast.

Jenelle: How would you describe the culture? What ways have you had to evolve that culture?

Don: First it was denial. There was a fair bit of push back in the business like this is an overreaction. We had a little taste of that back with SARS where in hindsight it didn’t play out for the worst in places like Australia so the things we spent money on, well I always say they’re an investment but you could be critical and say they were a waste of money because we didn’t use them.

There was this denial and then there was a very, very sharp ... because it just came on so quickly around the world. We were going from days to all of a sudden we closed France and New Zealand and they were not even conceivable 3 or 4 days before. All of a sudden was the whole business going to close? How do you survive this and how long will this last? That fear period was actually when we were the most agile. The most extreme change in our business in many, many different ways.

Then we moved into the fatigue phase where it’s kind of like ‘well we all survived and actually business is really good and we’re all whole’. In fact, we didn’t lose a single franchisee throughout the whole experience, which for the size of our business we normally would have had somebody leave the business and yet we not only held everyone together, nobody left.

I think now in the fatigue, we’re in one called ‘the rallying’ phase now that this is our new normal. We just take the position none of us have a crystal ball but we take the position that we’re going to be living with COVID for 1 – 3 years. It’s a longer thought process so therefore don’t … whilst we do a lot of short term things in the moment, build it properly straight after. If you don’t have that long view there is always a risk you just keep it in the fragile duct tape solution upfront. That’s where we are now. We’re in the rallying phase right now. Rallying around. This is our three year window and how are we going to drive this three year window?

Jenelle: Well I think also if you take that longer term perspective, if you anchor yourself in a situation of ‘we’re going to go back to what we knew soon enough we’ve just got to wait this out’. I think you’re denying yourself the opportunity to really think about what you might do on a more permanent basis to innovate and maybe set the tone for change rather than waiting for it to happen to you and then trying to figure out what goes on then, setting up this is it for the long term, so now what creates a frame of innovation.

Don: That’s exactly right. We say that hope is not a strategy it’s a bonus when it comes along. Plan for it the truisms that you do know today and then if something happens sooner or better than that’s a complete bonus.

Jenelle: You just mentioned franchisees. It’s an interesting set of stakeholders that you have to manage. In addition to shareholders and employees, you obviously work with a large network of franchisees across the globe. To me that represents a whole lot of risk. How can you be sure that they’re going to hold to the brand that you want particularly with so many unknowns and so many changes. In your view what have you found to be the critical success factors in forming solid, long term relationships with your franchisees?

Don: I’m really glad you’re touching on this because coming into COVID there was a global rallying cry that franchising wasn’t healthy. That it needed to be far more legislated and not just in Australia but in many locations around the world which was contradictory to all the statistics but that was a populist theme that was running around the world. I think what the pandemic has shown is that we’re a franchising as well and we were able to quickly access what was going on in China, what had gone on in Italy, how they were looking at their curve. We followed almost similar behaviour in the rest of our business depending upon how lockdown you were as a business.

The reality of franchising is it is far more resilient and we kept each other whole throughout all this. To do that it’s a trust thing. When we did rally quickly and we stood beside the franchisees when they were closed for example.

We’d say to them very calmly “This is not a moment for us to do well, it’s to do good”. We’re going to be standing right next to you. Whatever it takes we are going to get through this. Don’t live in fear use the period if you are closed for example to invest in what it’s going to be looking like when you’re open because you are going to get through this. We’re going to help you through this and then we’re going to flourish.

It really strengthened a lot of our culture. The way we used Teams and Zoom around the world to … I touch more franchisees now and all the leadership touch more franchisees on a more frequent basis be it not physically through all of this media. It really drew us together around our purpose and our values and then we lived our values. Cause you can talk about values but sometimes it’s unfortunate but in extreme circumstance puts the value to test.

Jenelle: I think your point of saying this is a time for us to do good rather than do well. The reality is I think more often than not in doing good one does do well. I don’t think it necessarily does need to be a trade-off at least not in the longer term anyway. Is that something that you have found to be true as well?

Don: Absolutely. In that very early phase from everybody. Your business partners. How you treat your business partners like landlords, suppliers, everybody. You’ve got a budget, bonuses are thrown out at that very moment. You say “you know what for the longevity of this business this is just not a time to be looking at those old..” It’s hard if you’re in marketing you build all these beautiful TV commercials and they’re all now completely irrelevant to the environment you have to chuck them away. That’s quite an emotional process to go through and to make people feel ok about that, in fact, they’re champions of it by doing it rather than hanging on. That’s when that agility kicks in. There is systems too. Where we run our strategy document in the business, the way which is very, very agile and that leads to some of that positive behaviour that we want, we use this opportunity to introduce things that we’ve been struggling to get introduced. One example is our ‘whitepaper’ culture which is getting ideas up and ideations up into the group through a system not just random emails here and there that just frustrate and distract.

Jenelle: You’ve mentioned to me, I know that there has been some really interesting innovations and world records that you’ve been setting in delivery time. You talked about Project 310. Is that related to this culture and behaviour of testing fast and learning?

Don: It is. The phases that we’ve been through in technology. The first phase was bringing more or less an online shopping centre together originally with our one digital platform which is our online ordering platform which then follow into apps. 

Don: The second generation of our technology and experience was around becoming a great marketer. So we got the data and we started marketing very well and we build our own media platform. But more recently the last 4/5 years we’ve really spent, and we’re spending more money than ever before now on what we call ‘Co-pilot’ or ‘Operational Technology’. The co-pilots are built along the idea that these are AI and sometimes they’re hardware, if a team member is Tony Stark we’re trying to build them the Java suite and make the execution better. Something like pizza checker is an example that improved the quality of execution and we have many other ones with productivity. That’s the phase of technology that we’re building today.

Jenelle: One of the big differentiators for Domino’s is that you own your delivery arm. I’m interested in the role of aggregators like Uber Eats and Deliveroo and why perhaps you think ownership of that delivery arm is so important for the success of your business?

Don: Yeah the aggregators play an important role in aggregating those who haven’t invested in technology and creating a market place. It’s a little bit like what Google or Facebook have done in their areas. We think of aggregators as ‘Frenemies’ just like a social media or a search engine or YouTube or so on in that unlike television or our own media we do share our data with these platforms, so you’ve got to play to win in each of those platforms in which we think about the aggregators and they’re really just another search engine. But what we will not give up is the Domino’s experience because nobody delivers like Domino’s. We’re far more efficient than anybody else. A lot of these companies are giving away – I mean all they are serving is a product and they’re not in control of how the standard of that product arrives. They are literally giving up everything than that bit of brand and the origin of the product.

If you look at any retail experience it’s product, service and image. We can’t give up that service. We can’t give up that image and we’re far more efficient. We won’t give that away and we still get some of the data. These are important pillars that are not comprisable today and we’re very passionate about these things.

Jenelle: Yeah it’s really clear to me that your clear on where your value proposition is, where you get the most value and then quite fearless in facing into anything else outside of that which is fantastic.

I’m interested in talking about customers and consumer preferences. Attitudes and consumer sentiment and preferences are shifting rapidly. When I think about consumers looking for healthier eating options, I know Domino’s has really led the healthier product innovation in the world of pizza. When I think about your footprint in 9 different countries and how fast consumer preferences are shifting, how do you make sure that you continue to stay relevant to consumers across a global landscape? And stay if not in line with their expectations, even ahead of them? How does that work for you?

Don: Yeah so you do have to be careful of getting ahead of. The big thing here is you’ve got to once again know who you are and what are your brand attributes and then how are you going to bring something to life? For example, customers will say to us the number one reason I buy Domino’s is it’s a treat but they’ll also say sometimes it’s the number one reason why I stopped buying Domino’s because it was too much of a treat. The fine line of that is that they’d say ‘Look I want to eat better but whatever you do don’t take my treat away from me’. We often talk about indulgent health. We always said if you can eat that most indulgent donut and still be healthy then that would be like nirvana. We try and do the same thing with pizza.

These things flow in different trends and different times. There was a phase of low fat. We would measure that by removing what we call the ‘stain of regret’ in the bottom of the pizza box and that is you love eating your pizza but you get to the end and you see this oil stain at the bottom of the box and that’s a reason not to buy pizza next time cause you have this ‘ohhh’.

Don: We were really successful in removing that and ironically now with the Keto diet and does fat really make you fat and so on, there is a shift changing in that. You’ve got to eb and flow with these things.

Talking about plant based meats, how do you bring a product to market that is plant based that is still actually natural, cause some of the plant base food actually are worse than the natural ingredients. You are trying to suit one audience only to alienate other one. We think we’ll try and be preservative free so how do you do that with some of the plant based foods. How do you make sure that they really are indulgent? That they are still non-compromised because if you bring a compromised product to market then really you’ve failed what you weren’t meant to be which is a treat.

All of these things, whether it’s gluten free, whether it’s vegan menus, the most successful promotion in Australia’s history of what we called the ‘Taste the Colour Promotion’, I think it was 3 or 4 years ago. That was when you squint with most fast food it’s all browns, yellows, it’s all processed food. We wanted to show the consumer how much we were bringing. Real food has colour and how we were showing that at Domino’s our roadmap meant that we were continually putting natural foods on the product which were colourful and tasty cause natural food is tasty. Tastier often than preservative food. That was a huge campaign. I think we shared with the shareholders we were up 28% in one month off the launch of that and we’re not a new brand. It just showed how you could bring that treat in a way in a story and particularly with females cause we were losing female customers leading into that and ‘bam’ Mum’s the gatekeeper to the home and she opened the doors cause she said ok that resonates with me and I’m going to put Domino’s to the test.

Jenelle: Well I can honestly tell you that I had not heard those three sentences at all much less in one answer to a question. The taste of colour. The stain of regret and indulgent health! I definitely learnt a bit from that answer Don.

Don: Thank you.

Jenelle: Now when we spoke before this discussion you said something to me that really stuck in my mind. You said we like people with opposing opinions so we can find our own truth. I really like that sentence but I’m keen to know what exactly did you mean by that?

Don: I’ve never lived the other way or moving in and out of companies because my whole working life has been in this one business and so its hard for me to get my head around how someone has got to build all of that muscle memory, knowledge and sync with a company when they’re only there for five years and deliver a lasting result. You know, it just doesn’t sit naturally with me, although there’s so many professional successful CEOs who seem to be able to do it but for me, when you’re building something that’s built to last over a really long period of time, having you know, a lot of leadership and if you look at the tenure of all of our senior leaderships, its material. You know, you’ve got people who have tendered 25 years, 33 years and yet they’re all so young because they all started in this business so young. You know, I’m 51 and I still feel like I’m really young.

Jenelle: So tell me, I’m trying to figure out, you know, was this a conscious mindset that you had from somewhere. It sounds like it did or did it sort of morph over time because what shifted in you to move … moving from a part time job as a delivery guy to making this a long term career path. Do you remember a moment when you’re like, this is it for me or did it just kind of creep up on you.

Don: Yeah it did creep up and there’s many periods of time that then cemented it to be more real. You know, I literally took a full time job in the original business Silvios, because I just didn’t finish my degree ironically. I thought I was going to start a new degree the next year and I had nine months to kill. Which, you know, in hindsight sounds really silly. Why didn’t you finish those nine months and go to the next place but in my view as well, it was just the next natural thing. You know, here I still am but as time goes on, when you’re a public company CEO, you do realise that as much as I’m a large shareholder, I am a paid employee at the whim of shareholders and all the stakeholders, you know, I’m a servant leader. That’s my job, its to serve this business. You know, with that there could be things that happened unintentionally that then I could be a casualty of that and so the way I’m comfortable in my own shoes, is that I hope I’m here for a lot longer but if I wasn’t, I’m also not fearful of what else I could do in my life.

Jenelle: I’m interested in your appetite around risk. I love that one of the Domino’s values is “crush convention”. That there’s a difference between having a failure and being a failure and I think that’s something that many of us perhaps struggle with. You know, we want to avoid taking risks with the, you know, possible chance that we could fail and what does that mean about us and I feel like that’s a clearly separated thing for you. You’ve won accolades for entrepreneurial leadership, you champion innovation top to bottom at Dominos. Where is that confidence and … comes from to take those kinds of risks. You know, and have there been times where it just didn’t pay off for you.

Don: Yeah, well when you take a lot of risk then of course you get a lot of things that don’t work and they’re constant. You know, just in the last seven days, one of our team got a brilliant social media idea, it started out fantastically, we were celebrating and then it shifted on us publicly and you know, that particular person in the organisation felt hurt the next day and meanwhile I’m writing a private email saying “congratulations, I’m so proud that you did this, you went out there, you fearlessly brought an idea to life out of nowhere in 24 hours”. The key to that and we learnt this once again from our trip to Silicon Valley, is its actually harder to celebrate failure but you have to if you want to get more risk in the organisation. You’ve got to be grounded in the reality that it doesn’t always work but if you do post an analysis, you know, one of the worst things I watch in organisations is the benefit of hindsight and people crush ideas that fail with the benefit of hindsight and therefore people become risk averse but if you celebrate, you know, that you pushed the envelope and because you’re that kind of person, you’ll – on the law of averages, are going to get more right than wrong because you, you know, you’re going to continue to push, you’re fearless, we check and learn. There is still a post analysis why it didn’t work but organisations need to learn from what it is but celebrate that learning, that’s the benefit that came from that and without that risk, you didn’t get the learning and then, you know, more often though you will … once you do build up all that muscle memory and have it around it, you’re going to get even more of them right. You know, me personally, one of the benefits of being a public company is having a very strong board, very deep in governance, having … we have those who … the entrepreneurs in the group and then we have those who measure the risk. So you’ve got to have those balances, you’ve got to have very strong opinions in the room who are the anti-risk in a sense. Like they’re running it through the legal filters, they’re running it through, you know, brand damage filters. They’re running it through financial filters or the downside because without that, yeah I scare myself sometimes, that there’s some ideas that maybe just are not right for this, for who we are.

Jenelle: And do you see it at the time when you’ve got one of these brilliant Don ideas, that maybe doesn’t get over the line or get the resounding support you might have hoped for from the broad or whomever else and in hindsight, have you looked back and gone “that was probably right”.

Don: Yes and so most of the ideas aren’t my ideas. I just become one of the champions to support it, based on … once its got through more or less that white paper process and there’s enough thought and consensus for buy-in. I’m the face of Dominos but most of the ideas in the organisation come from all the great people in our organisation and I’m just one of the cheerleaders and I can help cut through all of the bureaucracy and I mean, I had a call this morning where it was, you know, it got a little bit bureaucratic in the business where someone who was taking a big risk and the peers were trying to bring them back down again. So in my job was to say, “no, we’re going to protect the risk taker here because otherwise they won’t be a risk taker and we will sort of the process of why did we get, this conflict”. It was potentially avoidable, rather than the other way around because that’s what's important. Its that culture of encouragement of “hey, you just got beat up over the weekend, because your idea somehow didn’t go through the right channels and you got a few noses out of joint but don’t stop being who you are, lets just fix how we would have got the channels right”.

Jenelle: Love that. I had the good fortune of spending some time in Silicon Valley myself earlier this year, at a time when we were actually allowed to travel, so long ago but I remember speaking to some Venti capitalists and they said, “we take failure as a badge of honour an when we speak to people that we want to invest in or their organisations, we ask them where they’ve failed and unless they’ve got a few up their sleeve, we won’t back them because it means they have taken the risks, they haven’t learnt from those, they’ve haven’t checked and learnt like you said. So that was really eye opening for me who’s probably, where actively work to avoid failure, to see that as a badge of honour was really interesting.

Don: Yeah, the words we use … its not okay to fail in a sense. We’re not trying to go out there and fail all over the place. We’re not taking risks to win but in the event we do, yes, all the values and the learning and so on and we celebrate it in that way and yep, that’s what encourages it. I think the heroes in the business are often supported as the biggest risk takers.

Jenelle: So Don, what's surprised you during this period of time.

Don: If you would have asked me pre the pandemic, you know, as a full tax paying company, following all the laws of the land that it was a privilege to trade, I would have told you “no, it was a right to trade, its democracy and we’re doing everything right so who could take that away from us”. But we very very quickly learnt in that late March/early April is that there were five stakeholders who had the ability to take away that privilege if we didn’t nurture those relationships and work very very hard and the five were, first of all our own team members. If they didn’t feel safe, they wouldn’t rock up to work and if they didn’t rock up to work, we didn’t have a business to run because we need our customers, they needed to feel safe, that you know, we weren’t putting anybody at risk, that the practices we were talking about were real. Our own franchisees, their own trust in the brand. You know, we saw in France, we’ve got a little bit of divided thing there where there were different epicentres in the country and some would have been legal if we wanted them to trade and others were saying “well you have to let me trade, otherwise I’ll be legal against you” because it was that passionate with how dramatic it was in France. So then you’ve got the government. The government. Well, we’ve clearly seen that they closed us in New Zealand and they can … we’ve seen quite strong measures from government to manage the pandemic and finally the whole community spirit that goes beyond the customer, that even the stakeholders in the community that aren’t your customers, that may take a view and there’s a little bit of that in New Zealand too, where one of the large competitors that wasn’t able to trade rallied the government that we shouldn’t be allowed to trade during that so it was kind of an interesting experience for us, but yeah, we will never forget this, that we have a mission mindset now to keep all of those stakeholders fully informed, with all the processes and why we are doing what we’re doing and how we’re doing it, or putting communications out to customers or government. Anybody who trades through this pandemic, it’s a privilege and don’t abuse that privilege and be very generous as a result of that because there’s under-employed, unemployed, under-trading or not trading businesses and if you are trading, it’s a privilege to do so, then you’d better be very generous in all of your actions.

Jenelle: I love that. So shifting from a view of seeing business as a right, being business as a privilege, means you have a mission mindset which translates to a behaviour of generosity. Is that what you were listing that as.

Don: Absolutely. That is 100% correct. That you know, we need to lean as little as possible on government, we can do so much more rather than taking as few as possible, those handouts. You know there’s going to some in different forms, sometimes that you know, those on the front lines, feed the front lines, those are in needs, you know, through donations of money to organisations and individuals that are suffering to our own people. If we’re doing well right now because of the hard work they’ve done, make sure that they are being paid their bonuses and I’m proud to say at Dominos, that our team members will get pay rises this year because they’ve done such an extraordinary job and they deserve that. They should share in that. Just like shareholders and all the other business partners that the stakeholders have. So you know, it’s a time to do good and well now so its to do both but through the “well” just keep channelling that back to those stakeholders because its such a privilege and literally “deer in the headlights” privilege that you know, you see the fear when you know, that governments are deciding about lockdowns or team members may not want to come to work, you know, very very passionate about it.

Jenelle: It’s a real humility to a business mindset which is great to see.

Don: I also think what's being and it shouldn’t be surprising but how quickly we adapt, both good and bad to what's going on around us and what I mean by good and bad is that the good news is that mentally I think people have just so quickly shifted and adapted. The bad side of that is often then we’re missing the opportunity because they’re not looking at it with the same fresh eyes of the circumstances that are around us. Business success and wealth and the ability to be so good in our communities come from that really wide awareness that as much as we’re now fitting into the new normal quite quickly, it isn’t a long term normal. This is still a moment in time that may last one to three years. At the end of the pandemic, then there will be a much more, a longer cadence of that normal versus this three year in and out of lockdowns and change and shift and … because who would have predicted Melbourne a month ago. You know, you could have predicted it was going to happen somewhere but the fact that it came on so fast in Melbourne. Again, its surprising how people just adapt and normalise and for the bad and the good, they miss the big opportunities that are on the table, that pivot to and run it. One of our … we had a culture coach at Dominos who’s an outside person who’s worked with us for 30 years, Bernie Kelly, and his current programme is “run to the raw”. In other words, run to the fear. If Don’s asking you all to take the biggest risks in our company history, with data uncalculated, be fearless, be bold, be brave, have courage because we’re going to really really support that and there’s enough shifting sands around us at the moment that feed that compendium when things are in the normal, you know, run of the mill cadence that it runs at in real life.

Jenelle: Love that. So if I was to ask you, reach down and pull out a crystal ball that you might have sitting next to you and asked you the question, you know, “what do you think in five years’ time, people will be saying about COVID-19, what are your predictions for society and business as a result of what we’re going though now”. What would you say.

Don: I think that there will be the winners and losers and the strong will get stronger, that the big trends that were already pre-COVID just accelerated things like, in our case, delivery and online ordering and the retail change that needed to happen, our priorities in life around … I do unfortunately think business travel will be affected although I think people will still want to get back to social travel and experience the social things of life. I don’t, you know, almost go back to where it was pre-COVID if not even more for a moment in time because we’re so missing it but businesses will be different. I think we’ve all learnt a way to be more productive. We get a lot of CEOs on our global weekly calls to get these different views from big and large companies. We’re very fortunate at Dominos that we can attract those sort of quality speakers and common theme is “less space for office space, far less business travel”. I can’t see us ever returning to that if there is an ever, rallying to health, speeding up at the moment. We’re appreciating our health and wellbeing more than before because of what the pandemic, you know, our immunity should be stronger and we should be healthier and so on. So I think those things will be the things that will be quite strong.

The last three, three fast questions on change to finish the podcast.

Jenelle: I’m going to finish up, if I can, with a more light-hearted “fast three”. So the first one is, what is a misconception that most people have about you.

Don: Calls it a success in the tenure that I’ve been here that I’m a lot more in the business than people probably think, that in fact it’s the great leaders of Dominos all through the organisation that are really doing the incredible work and I’m the face of the company and I do want to know how everything works but I lead the business, I actually don’t manage it all day, every day. There’s a whole network of incredible people here that are doing the real brilliance that’s Dominos and I just get the credit, you know, and trying to give more credit to more of the leaders but its just how it falls sometimes in the public company.

Jenelle: And what's one guilty pleasure.

Don: I love fast food. I love pizza but I love fried chicken, I love donuts, I love hamburgers, I love fries, I love fast food.

Jenelle: And what's one thing that you’re absolutely hopeless at.

Don: I’m not a person that “dots the i’s and crosses the ts”. I get the bigger picture and lucky we’ve got great lawyers around us to do all that.

Jenelle: And look, I can’t let you go without asking you the question “what's your favourite pizza”.

Don: Anything with pepperoni. I love pepperoni. Pepperoni cheese, you know, jalapenos, mushrooms, but the base has to be all the varieties of pepperoni and cheese and very rich rich sauce.

Jenelle: So Don, look I wanted to say thank you so much for your time today. Your passion is very clear. I’ve taken away many things from the conversation and in no particular order, I think, for me doing good to do well and playing the long game. Building an organisation that’s there to last has come through strongly. I love the view of, you know, treating every day as a training day and your clear mission to keep people developing and growing and learning and reading and building the muscle memory of the organisation. Absolutely love celebrating those who take the, you know, chance to push the envelope and check and learn and creating that culture of encouragement and finally, you know, I’m sure it wasn’t really a call to action for us but it certainly feels that way to me, “run to the raw”. I’ll definitely be taking that one forward with me as well. So thanks very much Don for your time and all the very best to you.

Don: Thank you for taking the interest, thanks Jenelle.

The ‘Change Happens Podcast’ from EY. A conversation on leading through change. Discover more where you get your podcasts.

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