Following his recent appointment as COO for The Furniture Group, we caught up with Mark Smith to discuss leadership.
Mark Smith has built a career spanning supermarket, convenience retail, fast food and pharmaceuticals — industries where companies have little in common on the surface, yet share a common thread: the way Mark leads them.
Spending his early years growing up in government housing in the UK left a lasting impression that continues to shape everything he does.
"Growing up the way I did has been my biggest driver," he said. " I learned early on that if you want something, you have to go and work for it. If you want more, you put in the effort. I'm always looking for ways to change the odds in my favour."
Now a father, that drive has only deepened. His son, just three and a half years old, is a constant source of motivation.
"I look at him and think. He deserves every opportunity I can give him."
Mark started out in retail in the UK, working his way up through management at Tesco – and learning some key lessons along the way. In his early 30s, he moved to Australia and discovered an entirely new workplace culture that was heaped with potential.
“In the UK, when I was coming up through Tesco, there were always ten people waiting to cut my knees off and take my job,” he said. “In Australia it’s not really like that. If you’re willing to work hard and build good relationships, opportunities come. You get a fair go.”
He joined Woolworths in Perth as a Group Manager, leading nine store managers spread across 700 kilometres. From there he moved into zone operations in NSW, overseeing 24 stores and $1.3 billion in annual sales, before crossing to Coles as Head of Store Operations for NSW/ACT, where he was responsible for 136 stores and 15,000 people. From Perth to Sydney to Adelaide – the geography never held him back, because it never occurred to him that it should.
It was at OTR, working alongside founder Yasser Shahin, that Mark found his biggest opportunity for growth. Yasser was a true inspiration, had built the business from scratch (he would later sell it for $1.2 billion), and Mark had never worked in a private business before.
“He challenged me in a way I’d never been challenged before.
When OTR was acquired by Viva Energy Mark became the Retail COO, leading 900-plus convenience stores. Then came National Pharmacies, a $330 million member-owned health organisation founded in 1911, where he took the CEO role. Although the company was smaller in scale, it had a different level of complexity, providing further opportunities for growth.
Before joining any business, Mark makes a point of understanding the customer experience. He signs up to the loyalty program, places an online order, and goes in-store – mimicking everything a customer would do.
Then, once he’s signed on, his first move is to get out from behind the desk.
As the youngest person in C-suite, he said getting to understand the business “really fast” helps combat any doubt about his capacity to lead and drive change.
“I go to the people on the ground who do the work. I was that person, so I know what it’s like. There’s no point sitting in an office talking about what’s going on in a store when you can just walk in. They’ll tell you all the stuff that’s going wrong, straight away. They don’t hold back, which is brilliant.”
“I walk in unannounced. I wear the uniform. I ask direct questions and I say upfront: ‘don’t give me the corporate version’.”
He works to what he calls the rule of three: If he hears the same issue in three different stores, it is real. If he hears it just once, he assumes it’s just one person having a bad day. But regardless, he always follows up. “People want to know they were heard,” he said. “Even if nothing changes immediately, they want to know it’s on someone’s radar.”
And he never shies away from the truth, because he’s found that when you’re honest about a challenge the company is facing, your people will inevitably come through with the solutions and give you that honesty in return.
Importantly, too, he doesn’t commit to action unless he’s confident it’s going to happen. “Most CEOs lose the trust of their people when they say things they can’t deliver. Once people sense you’re lying, they’ll wonder what else you’re lying about,” he said. “Do what you say you’re going to do. And do the right thing when no one’s watching. That tells you more about someone’s character than anything they do in public.”
If one story captures how Mark Smith thinks about building a team, it starts with a punnet of cherries at a Tesco store in London’s Canary Wharf.
It was early in his career and despite exceptional performance metrics, his employee engagement ranking was poor. When Mark’s boss sat him down and told him: ‘you get results the wrong way. Your team feel like you don’t trust them’, Mark pushed back.
But when he spoke to his team, he received the same feedback.
One of his managers said the same thing his boss had: he needed to trust their experience. Mark said he would try.
Three minutes later, the same manager came back and asked to order 15,000 units of cherries in preparation for a 60% off promotion. The store normally sold about 1,000 units a week.
“My gut said don’t do it. But I’d just said I trusted him. So I went: ‘all right, do it’. He went, ‘Really?’ I said, ‘yeah, go and do it’. I was honestly panicking.”
He sold 12,000 units on the first day, and 25,000 by the end of the week.
“I sat back and thought – I wouldn’t have let him do that. But he did exactly what he said he was going to do. And because I backed him, he worked longer hours that week and put in more effort. He made sure it was going to work. That was the turning point. I realised that I’m not always going to have the answers. What I need is trusted people around me who do what they say they’re going to do.”
Mark has run with that ever since. “That experience at Canary Wharf – that first real pivot – I honestly don’t think I’d be here without it.”
Another important lesson has been to prioritise progress over perfection.
“If you strive for perfection all the time, you’ll get left behind – the world moves too fast. It’s better to be first than second; no one remembers second.”
However, he is clear that progress over perfection is not a licence to cut corners. The work still has to be done. The difference is in how you treat risk. “You assess it, you accept it, and you move,” he says. “I see my job as asking: am I okay with that risk? If I am, we carry on. If I’m not, I mitigate it and go again.
“The question is never whether to take risk. It is whether you have done the work to understand it.”
Simple. Not always easy.
This search was led by Adrian Belle, Chief Executive Officer of Allura Partners, alongside Senior Consultant Elizabeth Ocampo.