Focusing on fundamentals to achieve successful change

Kersten Ross, GM for Transport and Fleet Sales at Viva Energy Australia, discusses how the company has built itself into the organisation it is today.

Focusing on the fundamentals has been important to the creation of Viva Energy. The company was created following Vitol’s purchase of the Shell Australia downstream business, so we’re a unique case study in managing change and laying the foundation for a transformation in organisational culture and performance.

The success of Viva Energy shows that with the right focus on fundamentals, significant and successful change can be achieved in a short period of time.

Focus on the fundamentals

Shell’s downstream business in Australia (as it was previously) was in operation for more than 110 years, and safely supplied over 25 per cent of Australia’s fuel energy needs. However, the change of ownership provided a new lens on our business. It gave us an opportunity to simplify and create a new roadmap. It all began with a focus on the fundamentals:

• People leadership– having the right people in the right jobs, and engaging them to think and act differently;
• Putting our customers first; and,
• Investing in our future.

Focusing on fundamentals sounds simple in theory. But for us, change traditionally wasn’t easy and we didn’t consider ourselves agile enough to implement major projects quickly.

However, spurred by a supportive and enthusiastic Viva Energy Board, we acted swiftly to implement the necessary changes.

Analyse your own backyard

One important challenge was to ensure we were working towards achieving our vision. For me, this meant having a dedicated team committed to helping customers achieve their goals.

But firstly, it was important to do some self-analysis. What was working? What wasn’t? What I found is that there was a strong emphasis on processes and making sure we adhered to them. This was not a bad thing in itself, but on occasion it had led to us having to turn away customers.

I also felt that we needed to increase our understanding of what our customers wanted to achieve, and therefore where we could potentially assist and add value.

It takes courage to analyse your own backyard. In our case, honesty about where we could improve has been refreshing and fruitful.

Now instead of looking at a potential customer and turning them away because they don’t meet a rule, I take great delight in encouraging my team by saying, “If a customer wants to buy from us, let’s make it work!”

Build respect and trust with customers

I also stress that we need to build respect and trust with our customers. To do this we need to inherently understand their businesses.

This means sitting down with a customer over a good coffee and actively listening to them. At the moment I expect my team to be out on the road – in front of customers – three days a week at a minimum. If they’re not doing that, we’re not listening to our customers enough.

Empower passionate people

The key ingredient to driving a real culture of change and specifically a real culture of service is passionate people – people who are genuinely interested in what they’re doing. It’s important to empower people at the frontline and give them the freedom to innovate and follow their ideas. This includes the freedom to have a go, to trip (or fail), and to get up again and have another go.

Some early win-win examples range from something as straightforward as identifying where customers see gaps in our retail network, to implementing more complex, technologically driven solutions for our customers.

Invest in the future

For Viva Energy, stripping away unnecessary processes and costs hasn’t meant putting a halt on investment. It’s been quite the opposite.

On day one of becoming Viva Energy we announced we’d be investing $1 billion in our business across a five-year period, and we haven’t wasted time in progressing our plans.

For example, at our Geelong refinery we are constructing a crude tank that will increase storage by 40 per cent. We’re also just about to commission a $23 million pumping station on our pipeline that connects the refinery to our Newport Terminal, which will increase the amount of fuel we can transport by 25 per cent.

I’ve been proud of what we have achieved in our first 18 months. We’ve taken the Shell legacy – including a strong brand, national footprint, excellent customer base and sound approach to business – and used this as an opportunity to refresh, simplify and extend our business.

Being local means we now make nimble decisions to support our customers. It also means we’ve successfully pared back the bureaucracy associated with a multinational organisation.

There are always going to be challenges in business, but at Viva Energy we accept these realities and welcome an opportunity work in partnership with our customers and our suppliers to overcome them.