Part of brand-new BeefEater chief executive Craig McKell’s job is to expand the appeal of the successful but very blokey company.

BeefEater talks straight-up to its “mates” when selling its top-line barbecues. Indeed, its website is very “matey”. It says so – repeatedly.

But the company also sells the almost revered St George’s ovens, which, McKell says, rival upmarket competitor Miele’s products on quality but aren’t marketed to women with equivalent feminine appeal. The St George website is a curious mirror image of its brother “mates” barbecue site.

Given people now tend to hop on the net to check out products before buying, McKell says updating the site is high on his list of priorities – and not just to give it more feminine appeal.

The new CEO aims to import new web marketing and online survey techniques from the business-to-business world from which he comes. McKell was a partner at Ernst & Young for four years prior to taking up his new role in June.

There is also a second rather less sexy, but nevertheless necessary, task on his to-do list – upgrading the company’s back-office processing systems. The aim of the two improvement programmes is to rapidly treble the size of the company.

Not that Woodland Home Products, to give it its full name, is a weakling firm. At $50 million turnover, it’s a robust company. It’s a leading barbecue supplier in Australia and also exports all over the world, to North and South America, Europe, the Middle East and Hong Kong, and, of course, New Zealand.

Actually a three-in-one company, it’s composed of barbecue-maker BeefEater, the St George Appliances oven company, and Interfab, which makes sheet metal. BeefEater Barbecues constitutes 50 percent of the business, St George Appliances accounts for 35 percent and Interfab for 15 percent.

The company was set up 20-plus years ago by Peter Woodland, a founder of Barbecues Galore. After selling out of the first company, he set up the Woodland Group. Both St George and Interfab were acquired. The latter with the aim of supplying BeefEater with sheet-metal, although it’s more of an outward-facing factory operation now, selling 70 percent of its product.

“It’s very small and doesn’t have any real economies of scale, when compared with a 600-pound gorilla like CMS (Custom Manufacturing Services), but it’s hugely profitable and runs like a Swiss watch; better than the barbecue operation,” says McKell.

“Everything is based on technology and processes, and it clearly works.” McKell aims to have the rest of the company running similarly smoothly, he says.

Not ‘lipstick on pigs’
You might think that a Western Sydney company – Woodland is based at Chester Hill – would be something of a diamond-in-the-rough, but nothing could be further from the truth. Before joining Woodland, McKell says he was more accustomed to putting “lipstick on pigs”, in his previous role as a partner with Ernst & Young, in charge of sales and marketing in Australia.

“At Ernst & Young, there was a lot of helping business by putting lipstick on pigs – re-branding sub-average products and services. Peter has almost the reverse problem. I used to think that a barbecue was just a barbecue. That’s not the case. The best thing is also the worst thing about BeefEater barbecues. There’s no natural redundancy, like there is with [say] fridges nowadays – I’ve had three in 15 years – and with small cars. They’re all throwaway.”

“You can pay over $1,000 for a barbecue. Bunnings do throwaway barbecues for $200. But, equally, you can also pay $10,000 for an outdoor kitchen.”

Woodland’s problem is more that it doesn’t shout loud enough about its often state-of-the-art technology. A recent example of this is its patented infra-red radiant burner that delivers really intense heat with low flare-up.

Great for delivering meat that isn’t burnt on the outside and raw in the inside, which is often the case with lowerend barbies.

McKell is looking to a combination of online marketing smarts and modern back-end technology, including overlaying a business intelligence system on the company’s manufacturing and finance systems, to revamp and expand the iconic but under-rated company.

“At Ernst & Young, there was a lot of helping business by putting lipstick on pigs – re-branding sub-average products and services. Peter has almost the reverse problem. I used to think that a barbeque was just a barbecue. That’s not the case.”

He says he has been on a steep learning curve for the four months he has been on board, but it seems to have been an enjoyable time too. He speaks very warmly of founder Peter Woodland.

“He’s very passionate about his business, but he wants to exit it. He’s 63 and he wants to enjoy his hard work knowing the company is in safe hands.” At 42, McKell himself is young for a chief executive.

He says of the retiring owner-manager: “He’s completely self-made and self-effacing. He can seem arrogant and brusque, but he’s actually painfully shy. I have all the fancy degrees and training, but Pete learned it all by himself.”

Complex beast
Woodland is actually quite a complex beast. As well as being a three-in-one outfit, it’s currently battling adverse publicity over recent acquisition St George. Although McKell says his mum swears by her St George’s oven, as do many owners, the once iconic company has acquired a rather rough reputation.

There is a legacy of upset retailers with St George which has hurt the brand, says McKell. The previous company that owned it went to the wall, causing much damage in the process as litigation was involved. The product is excellent, better than Miele’s. It’s handmade in Sydney.

The problem now is marketing it, says McKell.

“It has a good name with customers. My mum has had a St George oven for over 25 years. So, we don’t want to change the name, we just want to tell a better story. If you can cut through the dirt, dust and smoke, the product will sell itself.”

McKell’s varied career, lively personal background – it includes a stint as a cop – and obvious energy add up to a diverse mix of skills that promise he’ll be well able to dealwith such hiccups. The one-time NSW policeman and corporate player is also an avid surfer – even if he’s now finding it tough to find time to ride the waves – and a once-upon-a-time busking guitar-man. As well as being a rounded person, he also has a global take on the market.

His work experience has given him the opportunity to work with people from start-ups to multinationals, he says. And this, in turn, has given him the necessary global experience that will enable him to revamp the Woodland Group and expand the company globally.

Specifically, he aims to leverage his corporate marketing experience, which was focused on business-tobusiness sales, and use it to drive consumer sales at Woodland, as well as improve business processes – and add some proper business analysis. All these changes are being underpinned by sometimes state-of-the-art technology.

“Peter and the guys know their products and the space they are in, but the business processes definitely need attention,” says McKell.

“Businesses also have tipping points – from zero to $2 million; then from $2 million to $20 million – and they need to deal with these if they are to take advantage of the enormous opportunities out there,” he adds.

McKell says there are four-to-five different transitions to be made as a company grows to the $50 million turnover that Woodland presently enjoys. The company has obviously done a lot right along the way, but now McKell, with owner Peter Woodland’s blessing, aims to take the company to the next level.

“Businesses and, typically, the people who run them need to change along the way. Initially, you get something off the ground from nothing [and] if you take a highly regulated and processed approach to getting a business off the ground it won’t.”

But the day has obviously arrived when more sophisticated marketing and a more mature approach to the Woodland business in general is called for, despite its obvious success so far.

Marketing and sex
But that sophistication isn’t always quite what one might imagine.

“Marketing is a lot like sex – it’s always better when it’s done with rhythm,” says McKell rather unexpectedly.

He’s talking about how in engaging with customers, particularly when it comes to surveys. You need to build the conversation and, for example, not ask too many intrusive questions to begin with as you try and discover what the customer wants, he explains.

Online surveys are an important part of the marketing mix McKell plans to introduce to the company.

A survey can include a simple question about what a consumer is thinking or feeling that can help you fine-tune your marketing effort, he says.

But before the surveys get underway, the BeefEater and St George’s websites need an urgent update.

“Our websites rely on buyers finding us. It’s like waiting for them to trip over us in the street. I want to use the type of sophisticated CMS and CRM systems that are used in the b2b world.”

“We currently have bog-standard websites that are five-to-six years old and are just static brochure-ware. We are about to install a full-on CMS-driven website from PowerFront that can be automated and can run repeated marketing campaigns.

“It will have Flash and video, and all the bells and whistles that people now expect. The CMS system will also allow us to run email campaigns around product promotions. We’d be able to run [say] 20 promotions out to a small market, with a 10,000 database in each set. And we’ll be able to do this twice too: for BeefEater and St George,” says McKell.

“You need a smart CMS system to do this. It’s one thing to have 10,000 people register for St George as part of a campaign; it’s another thing to replicate this globally.

“We also plan to leverage SMS, Twitter and other social networking technologies.”

Measuring which half works
McKell plans to measure the results of all this marketing activity as well.

“It’s one thing to deliver all this, but you have measure it too. You know the old joke: the CEO knows he’s wasting half his marketing budget, but he doesn’t know which half,” laughs McKell.

You have to decide what you want to get out of a campaign.

The aim is to have people want to buy your product from your retailers, so you have to communicate, educate and offer value beyond just what they buy from you, he says.

Which is where more sophisticated, interactive websites and social networking comes in. At the moment all this is in the early stages, but McKell has in mind discussions with customers via Facebook, Twitter and online surveys etc. “There is value in conversation,” he says.

Such consumer engagement could include recipes, and offers from business partners – he mentions barbecue herbs and spices from top-end providers, to give BeefEater customers extra value.

Measurement of this activity can help you manage it too. You might have 12 versions of a newsletter to send out to 10,000 people, either weekly, fortnightly or monthly,but one person may be on version 10, so you don’t want to send that person version one again. The technology to manage this is part of the new wave of CMS and knowledge coming out of the b2b world, says McKell.

He is installing PowerFront’s CMS system to do this at Woodland. It will also be used specifically to manage aftersales support for St George ovens.

“Ovens are complex beasties, with a lot of electrical components. And after-sales support is a challenge, as it’s outsourced to service agents – the ‘oven guy’ – who charges $80 a visit and treats the work like a sausage factory,” laments McKell.

A new customer relationship management software suite from CRM Now will help the company track service complaints and figure out what’s going on. “Say we get a complaint from a customer in Victoria. It could have been a bad day for the service agent, or the customer could be the problem. But, if we get three complaints about poor service in Geelong in the last 30 days, we know we have a problem.

This is data you can make hard decisions on.”

CRM Now is designed to meet the CRM needs of SMEs, and employs the kind of sophistication that has only been available in the b2b world for the past three or four years, through Siebel-on-Demand, says McKell. CRM Now’s founder is the former CEO in Australia of Siebel.

[CRM Now] is allowing us to roll out the next wave of service technologies and processes, so we can have continuing conversations with our customers and measure every-thing as well.

“It’s allowing us to roll out the next wave of service technologies and processes, so we can have continuing conversations with our customers and measure everything as well.”

Monkeying around
Part of this conversation-and-measurement initiative is the use of online surveys from Survey Monkey.

Commonplace in the corporate world, they’re actually quite cheap, at $200 a pop, says McKell. You can upload and run your own online survey to any number of respondents, he says.

“At Ernst & Young we used to run one every three months, to discover information about different market trends etc.”

“It’s all about measurement of the customer’s experience.

We’ll be able to integrate relatively unobtrusive market surveys that will allow us to ask – rather than guess – what the experience of 2,000 people has been over the last year.”

Fine-tuning processes
Despite the introduction of all this snazzy marketing technology, McKell is not upgrading the company’s pres-ent MAGI Enterprise Resource Planning system, which, he says, he’s “quite happy with it at the moment”. His view is that, when it comes to back-office processing, it’s 80 percent about the people and only 20 percent about the system. “No training, no curiosity, it’s easier to sit and whine; the usual suspects,” he says of the people-and-technology issue.

“There’s a problem? The conclusion: the system is stuffed; get a new one. But you can’t, because it’s too expensive.”

“What you actually need to do is ask: what information do you really need, and is the system capable of providing that with a few tweaks? After two months of this type of analysis, we have now moved a long way down this path ourselves,” he says.

“The system is not SAP – we’re not at that level of sophistication – but it’s a good fit with our business where it is now.”

In addition, McKell has addressed a training shortfall.

Finance & accounting went through a three-day training course recently, he says. The first training they had had in a long time. That’s a big deal when August to Christmas is their busy period. And warehouse and manufacturing have now taken two days out to be fully refreshed on their technology as well.

Intelligent extras
There are also some technology extras planned for January-February, when business is quieter.

McKell plans to use this calm period to install IBM’s Cognos business intelligence suite across the top of the company’s general ledger and other systems, along with a new Siebel-on-Demand system.

Cognos will be able to pull information out of Siebel, PowerFront and MAGI, and provide us with new business insights, says McKell. The data is being captured, but it’s not being shared properly, and they can’t collate it and get reports.

“Nirvana is in June, when we’ll be starting to manage with insight. Instead of looking out the rear-view mirror, we’ll be able to look ahead and manage for the next 6-12 months, picking up on the long-term trends that are floating through different data-sets.”

“We’ll also be able to share this with our business partners, distributors and retailers. We can all get strapped to the rocket and compete with the Webers (barbecues) of the world. We already have the product, but we need to make our distributors and retailers love it and work on our behalf too.

CEO GADGET WATCH
Have Lapop, Will Play

McKell is a laptop and BlackBerry man – but most especially a laptop man. He loves his top-end Toshiba laptop, he says – for work and play. “My life is my laptop.”

For work, he uses it to power through emails at 90wpm – his phenomenal typing speed is a legacy of his six years in the NSW Police, where he was forced to learn to touch type.

“We had to pass a 40wpm exam to be confirmed and we were only allowed three mistakes. Nor could you do it with two fingers as they’d watch you.”

Passing the exam proved harder than the unarmed combat test, but McKell managed it eventually, he says, and is now hugely grateful for the skill.

For fun, he uses his machine to store his thousands of songs, as well as a guitar chord dictionary. In an earlier life, he used to play guitar and busk. And then there’s the swell-and-wave predictor that he accesses from the Swellnet website. It provides a seven-days-ahead forecast for surfies.

However, the new job is out west and McKell lives on Sydney’s north shore, nearer the northern beaches – Narrabeen is a favourite – so he’s not getting so many surfs in nowadays.

There’s also his wife, Stephanie, and three boys, Nick, Baeden and Cameron, to pay attention to as well, and the joy and suffering of supporting Eastwood Rugby and the NSW Waratahs.

There’s one other gadget that he’s tethered to, albeit more reluctantly: his BlackBerry. He says he has a love-hate relationship with it.

“I avoided having one for a long time, arguing that there’s rarely an email that can’t wait until you get back to the office or get the laptop out on the train. Now I can’t go 15 minutes without looking to see if I have one. It’s addictive. It bites into holidays. It’s a poisonous circle, but it’s just the way it is.”

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