I first met George Theo back in
2012 in a greasy spoon café in a grey drizzling London. Back then I was working
at Thames Water and George was the recently appointed CEO for Unitywater, a
newly formed water utility in South East Queensland, Australia. Unitywater
had been created through the merging of 6 council water businesses, each with
their own systems and culture (no challenges there then!). George, bless him,
was visiting London to see if there were any lessons he could take from Thames
Water. Obviously I was no help at all. Thames Water is the Mary Poppins of the
water sector and is practically perfect in every way. She has clearly never
been even remotely dysfunctional or complex to navigate.
Despite my inability to help, I
distinctly recall that we had a great fried breakfast, and that I was blown
away by George’s fervent Aussie spirit of optimism.
I met George again yesterday,
this time in his home city of Brisbane, which was distinctly sunnier and
cleaner than London, and rather than a cholesterol-imbibed breakfast I instead
sipped a healthy fruit smoothie. Five years on and we are both a looking a
little bit older, balder, fatter but our collective passion for the water
sector is unchanged. The last 5 years for George have been a roller coaster. If
Thames is Mary Poppins then Unitywater is Bert Dawes (the Dick van Dyke
character that played opposite Julie Andrews in the film). Unitywater is an
organisation that has that a cheeky, optimistic, unrepentant,
take-no-prisoners approach to life, where everything is possible if you just
throw enough attention and energy behind it. I just love Australians.
Unitywater serves about 750,000
people in South East Queensland, stretching from Noosa in the north to Moreton
Bay in the south. It might not be the biggest water utility in the world,
but it makes a big noise. They have a style and approach that is fundamentally
different. They don’t try and excel at everything, but instead they adopt a
laser-like focus on a few key areas where anything less than perfection is
unacceptable. Water quality, for example. This focus of resources has created a
culture and ethos that breeds further success, even on stuff that might seem
peripheral.
For example, I was in awe when
George told me their 60+ day debt was less than 1%. This is unbelievable. Water
companies (even the perfect Thames) usually have no end of trouble getting pubs
and nightclubs to pay their bills. 6 years is a good payment schedule, let
alone 60 days. When I asked how they achieved this George explained that one of
their initiatives is to deliberately not charge their maximum allowable
revenue, because to do so would make cash recovery more difficult and ‘why
try and get an extra $2m revenue if we then have to spend as much building a
debt recovery team’. The logic here is so obvious it is embarrassing. Play
fair with your customers and they will play fair with you.
My favourite story however is
how George and his team managed to persuade a massive chunk of their customers
to switch from expensive quarterly paper bills (costing about $10 a household)
to an online service. A simple campaign was launched inviting people to switch,
with the only incentive being their entry into a quarterly draw where the
prize was free water for a year (capped at $1500). A $6k investment delivered a
$1m/year saving. Beautiful.
We were joined by Ray Aspey, one
of Georges senior managers. Ray is responsible for delivering some of the
non-regulated aspects of Unitywater. He is a glorious cross between an
enthusiastic Labrador and a Great White Shark. He has boundless energy and
eagerly embraces new ideas with an infectious, almost child-like enthusiasm,
yet he is also scarily hard-nosed and has a commercially savviness that would
make Gordon Gekko look like a pussy cat. Ray is developing plans to provide a
new service to their industrial customers that will revolutionise their
offering. The next few years are going to be fun in in South East Queensland. I
fancy the best is yet to come!
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