Podcast

Special Episode! Paul Roos, Building High-Performance Cultures in Fintech.

January 21, 2025 · Hosted by Dexter Cousins

In this special episode of Fintech Chatter, host Dexter Cousins speaks with Paul Roos, AFL legend and founder of Performance by Design. They explore the parallels between elite sports and startup culture, discussing how founders and leaders can build high-performance teams on a budget!

About Paul

Paul shares insights from his trophy-winning coaching career, steering the Sydney Swans to their first title in 72 years! The culture Roosy built at the club is still legendary 20 years later. He’s spent the past decade advising startups and executives at some of Australia’s largest companies on building high-performing cultures and unique challenges Fintech founders face.

In the interview Dexter and Paul discuss the importance of self-awareness, the role of leadership in shaping culture, and the challenges startups face as they grow. The conversation also touches on the significance of health and wellbeing in leadership, and how small companies can create a positive culture that drives success.

Key Takeaways

The culture built at the Sydney Swans is a model for startup success.
Leadership behaviours directly influence organisational culture.
Self-awareness is crucial for effective leadership.
Startups must define their culture early to avoid fragmentation.
Investing in culture can prevent costly turnover.
High-performance teams require clear role definitions.
Remote work challenges can be overcome with a team-first mindset.
Health and well-being are essential for leadership effectiveness.
Leaders should model the behaviours they want to see in their teams.
Incremental changes can lead to significant improvements in culture.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Guest Background
04:38 Transition from Sports to Corporate Culture
09:30 Building a High-Performance Culture
14:11 Leadership and Self-Awareness in Startups
18:44 The Importance of Foundational Culture
23:25 Role of Leaders in Shaping Culture
27:16 Navigating Growth and Leadership Challenges
30:13 The Shift to Remote Work and Team Dynamics
33:11 Hiring for Culture and Team Cohesion
36:32 The Importance of Defining Company Culture
39:07 Mental Health and Personal Wellbeing in Leadership
42:02 Looking Ahead: Commitment to Growth in 2025

Links

Visit Performance by Design website

Connect with Paul Roos

Connect with Dexter Cousins

Learn more about Tier One People

Send us a text

Subscribe Newsletter: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/fintech-leaders-7092732051488980992/
Connect on Linkedin: https://bit.ly/3DsCJBp

Links from this episode.

Performance by Design
Paul Roos on LinkedIn, where Paul invites founders to message him
Sydney Swans
Simon Sinek, whom Paul mentions on rewarding the wrong behaviour
Tier One People

Full transcript.

Lightly edited for readability — filler words removed, wording otherwise unchanged.

Dexter Cousins
Fintech Chatter Podcast, brought to you by Tier One People, the leaders in executive search for fintech ventures.

Hello and welcome to Fintech Chatter, the podcast we at chat with fintech leaders about their secrets to success. I’m Dexter Cousins, your host and the founder of Tier One People, the executive search firm dedicated to connecting high growth fintech companies with exceptional leadership talent. With a proven track record in placing top executives in mission critical roles, Tier One People is trusted partner for many of the world’s most recognisable fintech brands.

Today I’m joined by a very special guest, Paul Roos from Performance by Design. Roosy, he’s more commonly known to Aussies as an AFL legend. After a hugely successful playing career he became a coach and guided the Sydney Swans to the 2005 premiership, their first title in 72 seasons. The culture he built at the Swans is legendary, and Paul has taken his learnings as a coach of an elite sports team and brought them into the corporate world through Performance by Design. In this special episode of Fintech Chatter we discuss the similarities between elite sports and startup culture and the steps founders can take today to build a high performance culture. Paul, welcome to the show.

Paul Roos
Thanks mate, thanks for having me.

Dexter Cousins
You’re welcome. Little bit of a backstory. So we actually got to know each other over this last six months. I’ve been taking part in one of your leadership programs, and I guess the discussions that you and I have had, we’ve kind of had a lot of kind of aha moments with each other and noticed that a lot of the similarities between business and all of the things, the challenges that business leaders have in building culture. But before we kind of talk about that, would you maybe mind sharing with our listeners a little bit more about your background and who you are?

Paul Roos
Yes. I grew up in Eastern suburbs of Melbourne, in the days where you had a zone. So there was a 12 team competition in the VFL before the AFL came in. The AFL sort of started around mid to late 80s. But when I first started playing football you were zoned to a team, so wherever you lived was sort of where you got the opportunity to play, which was great because you just jump in the car and drive to training. And I was really lucky, I had really great mentors when I went down there. Was semi-professional back then, so we had accountants, teachers, brickies, labourers. We train in the morning, got a 6, 6:30 pre-season train, in the afternoon at 5:00.

And then through the 17 years I played, 13 years at Fitzroy, and I moved to Sydney 1994 for the 1995 season, played, probably that was the first time I was fully professional, and that’s when the transition happened between this semi-professional environment of AFL football to fully professional. So I played for Sydney four years and then, as you mentioned, I became the coach of the Swans, going midway through 2002 as the interim Sydney Swans coach, and that happened really quickly, quite abruptly, and I had to make a decision then. And then I was coach of the Swans eight and a half years, winning the premiership, and then I came back to coach the Melbourne Football Club for 3 years and did a succession plan there, as I did at Sydney with John Longmire. So that’s sort of the short version of who I am.

Dexter Cousins
For the people that don’t follow Australian Rules Football, and we’re actually listened to in over 40 countries, so I think to put into context Australian Rules Football, it’s essentially the equivalent of the NFL, what the NFL is to the USA or what the Premier League is to England. 50, 60,000 fans turning up at every game. It’s the most high-profile sport in Australia. It’s real kind of high stakes stuff. It’s I guess the most prestigious sport as well, with the most money as well.

Paul Roos
Yeah, it is. I mean it’s the biggest. You got rugby league and rugby union and then obviously soccer, which is a universal sport, but I think your analogy with the NFL, because the NFL’s only played in America, it’s a bit similar to that. The AFL is only really played in Australia. There’s a similar game, Gaelic football, in Ireland, but it is the biggest sport in Australia. The Grand Final, the Super Bowl or the FA Cup or whatever you want to call it, gets 100, 105,000 people. I think, Dexter, per capita in Melbourne it’s the highest number of people each weekend go and watch AFL football in the world.

So it’s quite a, as you said, quite a high-profile sport. Certainly the salaries aren’t anywhere near what they are in the NFL or the Premier League soccer. The best AFL players make probably 1 to $1.2 million a year, so nothing like a LeBron James or Patrick Mahomes or Har Orbee or whoever it is, but certainly in terms of profile and the amount of people that follow the game, it’s a high stakes game in Australia.

Dexter Cousins
See, you mentioned the kind of move from it turning semi-professional to professional, and I guess I want to kind of dig a little bit deeper into the legendary Swans culture. Because I remember arriving in Australia in 2004 and moved to Sydney in 2005, just as the Swans had won, and certainly in the corporate world there was starting to be a bit more notice being taken of what was happening at the Swans. And I think by the time we got 2010, a number of clients who were trying to instil some of the disciplines of the Sydney Swans team into their teams at work. How did you go from being like a semi-pro to being a coach of a professional team, and where did you get the ideas from to create the culture that you did at the Swans?

Paul Roos
Yeah, probably, I mean it happened over the 17 years, but a pivotal moment was when I sat down at my desk. I retired in October 1998 and I didn’t know whether I was ever going to be a coach, but I wanted to put down the learnings that I had as a player, remembering what it was like to be a player. And I wrote down the things I liked about leaders, the things I didn’t like about leaders, and that turned out to be the best document that I wrote. And did a number of things. It sort of galvanised how I was going toize culture, take the chance out of culture.

I had really great role models, as I said, at Fitzroy, and a lot of lessons I’ve learned from them, a lot of things, some things that I didn’t want to do that some of the coaches did. And to be fair to those coaches, they were semi-professional. My first coach was a primary school teacher, my second coach was a university lecturer. As I said, we would come down, unpack our bags, run out in the field. We didn’t have time to build culture and leadership groups and behaviours and all those sort of things, Dex, that you and I talk about a lot.

But I wrote down this 25 points that happened to be in October 1998, and it was just so good, being able to look through the eyes of a player. And then when I got the job full-time midway through 2002, and then more importantly going to 2003 season, then I started to think how do we systemise culture and how do we empower the players, how do we get the players more involved in their organisation? So we went down to Coffs Harbour, spent a couple of days down there doing obviously football training but also building what we called our Bloods culture. And we got the players involved. We then got the players to pick their leadership group, which had never happened before in AFL football.

And it was purely and simply, here are our behaviours we’ve agreed, who are the players in this organisation that best exemplify those behaviours, and vote 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1. So that was really the starting point, mate. And then there’s a lot of things, how we systemise along the way, but Stuart Maxfield became the first captain, unbelievable role model. We had some really honest conversations, we regularly met with a leadership group, and they hold the coaches accountable just as we did to them. But that was sort of the start of the system in Coffs Harbour, but probably started before that in my time at Fitzroy and also sitting down at my desk in October 1998 to write down the things I liked about the leaders. And what I talk about now is, are you the leader you wish you had? It’s a really good way to look at leadership.

Dexter Cousins
And when you were looking at the players, how would you kind of elect players based on your qualities, etc?

Paul Roos
Yeah, it was interesting because in sort of a gap year, I call it, when I retired in 1998, I went overseas to America to live with Tammy, my wife, lived from California, so we spent 10 months over there. And I actually did some work. I went to Denver Broncos, Chicago Bears, Chicago Bulls, San Francisco 49ers, who else was there, San Diego Chargers at the time. And one of the things that stood out for me, I went to the Denver Broncos, and they won the Super Bowl that year, and I spoke to the head of recruiting and he spoke highly about their recruiting philosophy around real high character guys.

We adopted that same principle at Sydney. We really put a lot of time and effort into our recruiting. The recruiting guys Ric Barham, Kinnear Beatson, the assistant coaches got involved, the coaches got involved, so we were heavily focused on character and that made a big difference. And also the induction into the club, so we’d have the senior players induct the young players into the club based on our culture. Kirk, Benny Mathews, Jason Ball, etc, the early leaders at the organisation, so we’d get them to induct the young players. But certainly character was high on the list if you wanted to come and play for the Sydney Swans.

Dexter Cousins
So I kind of had the light bulb moment, I think, back in 2012, when at the time I was starting to work a lot more with startup businesses and a lot less with big large banks and large corporates. And there were these distinct differences behind what was high performance, what was the culture and kind of characteristics that were required, that were absolutely essential to be successful in that environment, like accountability, getting done, being open, transparent, kind of not blaming others, not playing politics, kind of all the things that you would associate with a large corporate. At what point did you kind of have the light bulb moment to go, actually, all of this stuff that I’ve been doing in the Swans that’s been super successful is really transferable into a corporate structure?

Paul Roos
Yeah, I mean I didn’t go into it sort of thinking that, because when you’re immersed in something, and obviously playing football and coaching football. But I always felt like good person, good leader, doesn’t matter whether you’re in AFL football or selling cars or shoes or whatever. But I was never intentionally thinking about the corporate world. Probably wasn’t until I won the premiership in 2005 and then I started to do a lot of keynote addresses on what we did, because as you said, Dexter, everyone sort of looked at Sydney at that point and said, “Gee, what have they done? They’ve done something differently,” because there’s a lot of publicity around it. “I’d love to get Paul Roos or Adam Goodes or Stuart Maxfield to come in and talk about the organisation.” Myles Baron-Hay was the CEO.

So it’s probably then that people would come up to me and they’d be really inquisitive and say, “Look, can you come here and do it?” I said, “No, look, I’m coaching the Swans, I can’t sort of come, and I’ve got a full-time job.” Everyone’s looking for the same things, mate, and everyone wants a leader that’s got the same qualities. And I think the thing that I’ve realised after probably eight or nine years out of football is football teaches you a lot of those what we call the basics: teamwork, discipline, empowerment, all those things that probably the corporates don’t really get taught, that they want to learn and they want to listen, but they don’t really understand it, because I haven’t been in a high performing AFL or sporting environment.

But the synergies, as you know, mate, you and I had a lot of conversation around there, the synergies are absolutely the same now. There’s really no difference.

Whereas when I was playing, back in the early 80s, we were part-time. There was an interest in high performing, great players, and come and talk to us about the game and the footy. But I think the thing that people get most shocked by when Paul Roos comes to talk to them, there’s no doubt they’re thinking I’m going to come and talk about the Grand Final and Adam Goodes and kick marks and handballs, and the number of people that come up to me afterwards and say, “Wow, I didn’t expect that. That was about culture and leadership, and it’s so transferable. We have these problems here.” And then when we start to get in this conversations. So probably was when I won the premiership and then just got more inquiries from the corporate field to come in and help their organisations.

Dexter Cousins
I think one of the things that’s really resonated with me about doing the program with you, and one of the reasons why I wanted to get you on the show, is that I think one of the biggest challenges, certainly for the clients that I work with and a lot of the businesses, are they’re what are called founder led, right? So the person who is the CEO started the business and essentially it’s their baby. And one of the challenges for them is that if they’re successful in the first five to 10 years of business, it can often be like five different businesses completely, and they have to actually grow as a leader. So a lot of them, it might be their first time as a CEO, maybe their first time as a leader.

And I think one of the, what I’ve tried to kind of instil, and kind of guide my clients on, is, hey look, you can do what Netflix does and follow that template of the culture, or the Google culture, but you not Netflix and you’re not Google. You’re 10 people in Bondi, right, not 100,000 people all over the globe, and you don’t have their resources. And I think one of the things that kind of really has struck me doing the course is just how much of, and I always knew this to be true, but I think having it reflected back to me, is how much culture is driven by the actual behaviours of the leader themselves.

And it’s kind of a bit like becoming a parent, right? You kind of argue with your wife as your kids grow up and you see behaviours you don’t like, and you start asking the question, where did they get that from? And then you walk past the mirror and catch a glimpse of yourself. “Oh, that’s where they got it from.” So I guess with that in mind, what are some of the things that you’ve seen in leaders that one, have a kind of positive impact on the culture, and then two, have a totally toxic kind of impact on the culture?

Paul Roos
Oh, let me start by talking about, as you said, startup companies, because they’re all quite similar. When we’re doing work with startups they’re all quite similar. As you said, they start with a couple of mates at school or a couple of mates at university, or someone has an idea and he gets his other mate, and they get to the certain point where they’ve got a lot of similar values and similar views because they’ve hung around each other. But then there’s a point where they’re adding people to the organisation that they don’t really, they’re starting to put applications out, such and such. The biggest mistake they make is not harnessing the culture code. So who are we, what do we stand for?

And we’re seeing a lot of startups reaching out to us now, because I think they’re starting to realise that we have to embed this culture before we bring people into it, because if we don’t then it’s just going to fragment off into five or six or seven different cultures. Or in 12 months, 2 years time we’re going to have 100 people and we’re going to have culture, but it’s not what we want, and then it’s hard to harness it back in. So my first thing I would say is get someone in to work out your purpose, your values and your behaviours, and why the behaviours are so important, Dexter.

Is honesty to you and I can be something different, but tell the truth, this pretty clear-cut. Deliver on your word, do as you say, those sort of things. So if you set your culture code then you’ve got things you can hold each other accountable to.

So in terms of the actual leaders themselves, I would say the biggest mistake, or equal to some of the biggest, is they think they need to know everything. I think the ego of the leader that doesn’t reach out, doesn’t ask for help, thinks he has to know everything, because if he asks a question or does a course or gets a coach, people will look at him go, “Roosy doesn’t think he’s any good ’cause he’s got a coach.” Not, “Roosy wants to get better, that’s why he’s got a coach.” “Why is Roosy asking so many questions? Does he not know?” Great, Roosy’s a great leader because he asks so many questions. He makes decisions. So I think ego is one of the biggest impediments to great leaders.

And probably what do I see in really good leaders is self-awareness, which is, if you’re a self-aware leader what does that really mean? It means I know what I’m good at and I know what I’m not good at. I know how I deal with people, I know which people I struggle with.

Then if I’m self-aware, during the hiring process I can bring in people that going to help me. If I’m not self-aware, and a lot of times, Dex, you would see this, a lot of startups are like this, you end up with four owners that are all got the same skill set and they all keep doing the same things. And then they end up having a falling out because no one wants to step aside for anyone else. We all want to do the same things, we don’t want to do the things we don’t want to do, and we don’t want to get anyone else in to help us. So I think self-awareness is a really, really important part of being a great leader.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. I did some research on this actually, and what I found, so I’m going to class a startup business is 1 to 30 people, this is how I based the research, but I actually looked at the number of businesses who had engaged or hired a senior HR professional in that 1 to 30, and then looked at their growth and their staff turnover. And the businesses who had hired somebody at that earlier stage, as you say, to go through all that culture and get all of that kind of really kind of done in the foundational stages of the business, their turnover of staff was half of businesses that hadn’t.

And what tended to happen was that first 1 to 30, I don’t mean to sound disparaging, but actually that is the easiest part of the journey, right? And as you mentioned, it’s usually friends, you’re hiring friends of friends, and so everybody’s got the same values, you kind of know each other. And so I think what happens is it’s almost like the founders at the roulette table, and they get on this lucky streak and they think they’ve created this system for winning, and then they start to lose, but they double down because they think they’ve got the system for winning. And unfortunately what happens is they just plough more and more resources into this system that is actually screwed, right, and it gets them into deeper trouble.

So I think it’s kind of fascinating to see that founders are still investing most of their time and energy in growing the business and raising capital without this foundational kind of blueprint of actually, what are our values? And then unfortunately sometimes they bring in people, consultants who talk about these aspirational values and it ends up like, “Oh, we’ll have this diversity program,” and, “We’re going to, like, unlimited leave and take holidays whenever you want.” And it’s like, that’s not what people are signing up for, right? It’s like, we actually want to build something and be part of something amazing. Like, culture is not party pies and ping pong.

Paul Roos
That’s part of it, like some of the things you’re saying are part of it, but you mentioned before, mate, culture is what the leaders do. And I talk about this all the time: ask your newest person what your culture is. Because they’re not going to recite the HR manual, they’re not going to remember what they said in the hiring process. What they’re going to do, if you go out for lunch with them after week two and you say, “Roosy, how’s your first couple of weeks?” “Oh, it was great. People got back to me on time, people were friendly, they said hello to me, they always responded to my emails.” That’s your culture. “No one spoke to me. Geez, everyone was really rude. No one comes in the office, everyone seems to work by themselves.”

You can’t fake culture, mate. And the number of times before a workshop we had meetings with the CEO or the head of sales, whoever it is, and they’d, “Oh, it’s a great culture, everyone gets on.” That’s great, fine. And then we’re in the workshop and you start to delve into what the behaviours that they’re seeing. “Oh, we’re siloed, we don’t speak to anyone, everyone’s disrespectful.” That’s when you start to make change, when you start to identify what the behaviours that are holding you back.

All right, well, what do we want to see in this organisation? But you’re right, too often there these airy fairy, and how often do you walk into an organisation and you see words on the wall, “honest”, and the CEO is the biggest liar in the organisation, the CFO just wants to shaft everyone to get the CEO’s position, and we’ve got passionate, loyal and honesty hanging up on the wall.

Dexter Cousins
Talking about that, when you’re walking into environments and the culture isn’t what they think it is, what tips would you have for any founder or leader within a culture that is perhaps toxic, as to things that they can do to start to turn it around?

Paul Roos
Yeah, most people, even though they talk it up, most people aren’t surprised with their culture. I think, Dex, the biggest thing is no one teaches people how to lead and how to build a culture. ‘Cause if you think about the system, okay, primary school we go and learn ABC and spelling and all that. High school we go and then we start maybe get more advanced, geography, chemistry, physics. Then we go into university in whatever course we do. But no one’s teaching us about building a high performing team, no one’s teaching us about behaviours and self-awareness and empathy and empowerment. So to me the question should be more, why haven’t I got a coach? Why haven’t I got someone? Because no one’s taught it to me, so how can you be expected to learn it?

So there’s nothing wrong with, as a founder, saying, okay, I’m going to build this company and I’m going to have a culture coach come with me and help me along the way, and they’re going to coach me on the journey. We talk about a lot: Usain Bolt, the greatest athlete of all time, had a coach. Roger Federer, just retired, had a coach. Rafael Nadal had a coach. So I think it’s, don’t be embarrassed that you don’t understand how to build a high performing team. I didn’t really know. I just played for Fitzroy and learned through osmosis, and then I implemented a system.

So I think that’s the thing. Then when you see it, that’s when you’ve got to systemise it, right? So if you do have a set of behaviours, how are we systemising it? Are we rewarding on those behaviours? Are we giving monetary compensation not based on sales but based on the behaviours and the culture, or both, or 50/50? I think as Simon Sinek talks about it, the scoreboard’s wrong in the corporate space, because we actually reward bad behaviour. The performing salesperson never turns up to meetings, doesn’t care about anyone, bags everyone behind their back, goes out drinking and partying all the time, but he seems to sell. So what do we do? We actually reward him with a greater slice of the salary. So systemise your culture, and if you don’t know what that looks like, reach out to someone that does and they will help you do it.

Dexter Cousins
One of the things that I think I’ve found has been really eye-opening for me, and it’s changed one of my beliefs during the course with you, is some of the people that you’ve had on to share their experiences and their insights on leadership. They’re like CEOs of businesses with 60 odd thousand people, and yet what they were sharing was exactly the same kind of strategy playbook as you would for a 10 person business on building a culture. And I’d always felt that these two cultures of the corporate world and startup world, they were like oil and water and you couldn’t mix them. What have you found have been those kind of, the secret to being able to have this almost like ubiquitous approach to culture that is going to work in any environment?

Paul Roos
Think it’s got to start with an understanding, like you touched on it before. First and foremost we’ve got to have an executive team or group of founders that really clear on what they stand for, and they’ve got to role model those behaviours, ’cause if that doesn’t happen I don’t care whether it’s a 10 person team or a 60 house. If the leader is not, I talk about this ages ago, a podcast I talked about it, that it shouldn’t be the CEO, it should be the chief role model. That should be the title. You’re the chief role model of the organisation. So if we start to think about it from that, if we have an executive team that’s all really good, now that doesn’t mean they’re not going to make mistakes.

If they do make mistakes: “Sorry Dexter, sorry guys, I was angry yesterday, I shouldn’t have shouted at you, that’s not the way we behave here guys, apologise.” That’s okay, apologise.

But we have to have congruency around how we act, and then it starts to filter through the organisation by osmosis. Certainly the induction process at footy club’s fantastic. When you’re inducting people at the organisation: “Here are our behaviours, this is what we stand for, and what do you think? Are you prepared to act your way into this organisation? ‘Cause I need to ask you this before we can employ you. Do you want to buy in? This is what we do.” So sometimes I think people think it’s got to be more complicated than what it is, but it’s not, it really, now there’s some complexity around how you do it in bigger organisations, but the reality is that you have to be prepared to be a role model leader. If you’re going to ask everyone to be on time, if you’re going to ask everyone to empower their staff, then you got to empower your staff.

But I tell you what happens, it’s the player coach syndrome. We see it all the time. What does the executive team do? They take all the work off the people below them, because they’re used to doing, most executives are used to doing, and that’s why they get promoted. But in AFL footy as a coach I can’t run down on the field, so we have to empower our staff, ’cause I can’t run down and kick, mark and handball. We still can’t in the corporate space. So we have to see ourselves as coaches as well as the technical side of what we do, coaching our people.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah, it’s funny you mention that, Paul, because one of the guidelines that we’ve got as a business is we work with companies that are past a certain stage of growth, and the reason for that is when we’d work with earlier stage startups we’d find them amazing people, and the founders would be, “Hey, the business has got too big, I need to bring in somebody now to take all of this stuff off me, who knows what they’re doing, who can…” And you find someone and everybody’s in love, and 3 months later it all ends in tears, because the founder isn’t ready to give things up, they question everything that’s being done, and the person that’s being hired is, “But you brought me in to take this off your plate, and when I interviewed you told me that you didn’t know what to do for the next stage, and that’s why you were me.” And then they get in there and say, “Well, that’s not the way I would do it.”

And I think this is kind of one of the, I guess, real sticking points of growth, right, and success, is the founders being able to let go and recognise that, hey, I might tell people I’m not the right person, but deep down the ego won’t let me kind of let go of it.

Paul Roos
And mate, there’s no such thing as a perfect leader. I haven’t met, there’s no such thing. So I think that’s the self-awareness piece. You’re right, people think if I give it up they’re going to do it a different way, but it’s also, have you been really specific on job description? What is your role? Role clarity is super important. You do this, I’ll do that, and that’s not to say I’m not going to help you. And if you come in, “Roosy, can you help me with this?” I’m going to help you. But if we don’t have role clarity.

What I say, for those of you out there that don’t follow sport, go to a game, a really good, if you’re in the NFL, if you’re into the football. It’s a great helicopter view of your business, ’cause what you see when a great sporting team plays: everyone playing their role, everyone parking their ego just for the team, no one playing for themselves, everyone communicating over the field. If things go wrong they don’t blame each other, they fix it in a hurry, they take responsibility.

I say that to people in my keynotes all the time: go to the MCG, go to Wembley, go to a stadium in America, watch a great sporting team play, and it gives you a view of what a great business should look like. The CEO stepping away from certain things, handing it over, making sure that everyone’s playing their role really well, making sure that he’s rewarding people and challenging people. It’s just a great way to look at your business.

Dexter Cousins
One of the big challenges for leaders in this last four or five years has been this move to remote workforces, people working from home. And I guess, look, you wouldn’t have experienced that per se, but every match day, once those players cross the line, it’s almost like they are working remote, right? Your influence is limited. What guidance or tips would you have for leaders who find it much easier to do that in-person kind of leadership, and maybe’s on finding there as effective when they’ve got a dispersed workforce and they’re doing everything over video?

Paul Roos
Yeah, I’ll answer this a couple of different ways. We’ve always had remote workers. I worked as a sales rep for years. Sales reps have always been remote. But let me tell you where I had to be on a Friday afternoon at 3:00: in the office at the sales meeting, every Friday afternoon. Peter Thor, Peter Waram, the two BS that own the business, they didn’t say, “Roosy, don’t worry about coming in Friday afternoon at 3, we know you got to play tomorrow at 2:10 for Fitzroy.” Mate, it was, I’m a remote worker and here when the sales manager, here’s the sales meeting, this is when you got to be in.

So where we’ve lost our way, mate, is it has to be about the team. It’s now become more about the individual. If I said to you, people listening out there, if you followed the San Francisco 49ers and the team never got together until the weekend, how do you think they’re going to perform? If you follow the Carlton footy club and the backs trained in North Melbourne, the midfielders trained at the MCG and the forwards trained out at Richmond, how do you think they’d perform? You’d rip up your membership ticket and you wouldn’t follow them. So my view is really simple: it should always be what’s best for the team. Okay, nothing else matters.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. And it’s obviously my key area of expertise is in hiring and the recruitment process, and everything that you’ve talked about today is just say, yeah, that’s why recruitment processes fail, that’s why hires don’t work out. And it’s because businesses are trying to hire people without that congruent approach. And so what ends up happening is they run these recruitment processes where usually advertising, so you have a limited pool of people to go at and it’s competitive, and they’re all making promises just to try and get the person into the business, rather than, “Hey, this is who we are, this is what we stand for, this is what you’re signing up for, here’s the mission, here’s the team, here’s the standards, here’s the rewards,” right? And just being really clear about what people are signing up for.

And I think the reason why a lot of businesses don’t do that isn’t because they’re trying to mislead people that they’re hiring, they just haven’t invested the time into that process of clearly defining the culture, the behaviours and everything else. And therefore, we see this so much, Paul, right? You get these businesses that kind of have this early kind of period of growth and then they get stuck in where you typically get the growing pain. So when you get to around about 50, 70 people, pretty much every client that I’ve worked with has said, “Oh, as soon as we got to like 50 people I didn’t know everybody’s name, and I just felt like the wheels were coming off,” right?

And what we found is that the businesses that were able to minimise, and I like to use an analogy of if you’re a business, it’s like a journey of a caterpillar to a butterfly, and you can’t avoid that sticky mess in the middle, but what you can do is you can limit the time that you spending there and grow your wings and be able to fly out. And unfortunately too many businesses just get stuck in that sticky mess in the middle, and when you pick apart why, it’s because the culture wasn’t defined. And so what they have to do is then bring in all of these executives and all of these external hires to try and kickstart the culture again, and it’s almost like starting all over again.

Paul Roos
And it’s a great point, and that’s why I love working with the smaller companies, because it shows their commitment to getting it right. And that’s that Good to Great, you sort of got to this point where we’re pretty good, we’ve started, but we actually want to get better. The hardest ones are the ones you’ve articulated, mate: they kick the can down the road. “I will worry about culture 6 months time. I will worry about culture 12 months time.” And suddenly they look around and they’re like, “Wow, we’re now 120 people.” 18 months ago we actually had a good culture, probably 6 or 7 out of 10. We’ve now got a two or three. So we come in, and guess what we do? It takes us 12 months to get them back to the six and seven.

Now if we had got in there when they were six or seven, they’ll confidently sit around a seven, that’ll be their lowest point, and they’ll flux between an 8 and 9 and back to a seven and back. But they wait, they kick the can down the road because, as you articulated before, “Ah well, we have a lot of other things to do, we going to raise some capital, I’ve got to put a new CFO on, I’ve got to do this, I’ve got to do that.” And it’s the biggest mistake, honestly, as you know, it’s the biggest mistake they can make, is not defining their culture and hiring and firing based on that culture.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. As I keep saying to founders, look, you got to hire like you’re raising capital. And unfortunately what I see is they spend 90% of their time, energy and focus on chasing after people who are going to give them a one-off cheque, and they spend 10% of the time on the people who are actually going to deliver and grow the business. And I think that it should be the opposite way around.

Paul Roos
Well, even to this point, I remember I ran into this young fella just started this company that bought and sell other companies, and I said, “You must have people that go and see, look at their culture,” and they said, “No, no, we don’t.” And I said, “So you will buy a company not knowing how good, bad the culture is?” He goes, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, and we’ll find out once we get in there.” I said, “How much does that…” Said, “Roosy, that could cost us, if we bought a company for 400 million, then we find out we’re going to sack the CEO, the CFO and the executive team’s terrible.”

And it’s unfathomable to me to think you could spend $500,000 and not know intimately the culture and the executive team, who you going to keep, who you going to. And he said this, he goes, “Mate, you’re right, ’cause sometimes we buy a company for 500, we work out that it’s just a shocking culture, and that takes us 3 years to build back up to a $500 million company, because we realise we’ve just sacked the CEO, we’ve had to sack the two founders.” But again, gets back to the point we’ve sort of laboured on a bit, is it’s so easy not to do it, but it’s at your peril. If you don’t get your culture right, it’s going to bite you in the backside at some point.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. No, I guess the other thing that’s really, particularly over this last two years where there’s been a lot of challenges for founders, there’s been this shift in focus on mental health, physical health, wellbeing. There’s two parts of the program that I think have had the most impact on me, and they’ve all been brilliant. I think the first was personal brand, and kind of moving beyond the, hey, just about reputation and having a good kind of name in the market, to what is it that actually stand for.

The other is the bits on mental health and particularly meditation, which I’ve really struggled with, and your wife Tommy’s got this amazing approach of just three minutes, these three minute chunks, which I do about four or five times a day now. And it’s really had a big impact on just dealing with pressure situations and kind of the mies from home and work and just keep my cool. What are some of the, I guess, kind of rituals that you’ve developed over the years that help you kind of maintain being a high performance leader, and that have helped you, I guess, kind of keep your cool in those high pressure moments?

Paul Roos
I think one of the things I heard a while ago, which is a really good saying, was that your own health will determine the health of business. Now I was lucky to be in a healthy environment as an AFL player, but then the meditation you mentioned, I mean I went to a meditation course 20 plus years ago and I realised football was very physical, it was such a physical game. And then there was a point there I realised, why don’t we spend more time above the shoulders? And that’s when we started to bring meditation into the Sydney Swans, and Tammy did that. So I think for me it’s just, again, simplify your culture, simplify your health. And as you know, the meditation module’s great.

I’ve got another module on just healthy eating as well, because I firmly believe, as a leader, people want you to turn up the best version of yourself. It’s not selfish to be fit and healthy and full of energy and vibrant. It’s not selfish, that’s what your staff want.

But sometimes, as a society, we’re an interesting race, human beings, aren’t we? Sometimes things that should be inspirational can become a bit, “Well, I can’t do that.” So when we see someone run 1,000 miles or run across Australia, we go, “Well, I can’t do that, so why would I be healthy?” Keep your diet simple, keep your routine simple. You mentioned 3 minute meditations. Take your dog for a walk, that’s a form of exercise.

But I think sometimes we look at health as running a triathlon, the cone a triathlon, diet, as you know, these ridiculous diets that come out, these fad diets that come out from time to time, and then we say, “Well, I can’t do that, so I’m not going to do anything.” My advice is stick to something that works for you and get into a routine. Keep it really simple, get into a routine that you can manage, and if you get off track you can get back on track really quickly. You don’t have to go to run the Conor Marathon, you don’t have to go on the ridiculous diet, you don’t have to run 1,000 km. Just keep it really simple.

Dexter Cousins
Now, we’re at the end of another year, can you believe it? What can we expect from Performance by Design in 2025?

Paul Roos
Yeah, look, I love what I do, as you know, Dexter. I think I’m seeing a really nice awakening. I think people are now more inquisitive around leadership, around culture, around behaviours. I think they’re more invested in it now, this coaching. I think even health, mate, you’ve made some significant changes to your life, which is fantastic, congratulations on what you’ve done. I think people are ready to make a commitment. So for me, ’25 I think’s exciting for everyone. Keep making the commitment, little incremental changes day after day, just keep getting better. For me it’s the same thing, I want to get better in 2025, a better version of me than I was in 2024, and I think if we can all have that as a theme, we’re going to keep improving.

Dexter Cousins
So is there a few, I guess, different ways in which people can kind of get engaged? So I’ve joined Performance by Design, you got a Leadership Academy which I’ve joined, where it’s a platform and it’s kind of forum, and there’s a load of videos and exercises to do on there, which I found brilliant because I can do it at my own time and kind of reflect on stuff and work through it and go back. But you also go out into businesses as well. So we’ve got founders who are listening and they kind of want to really kind of drive team performance in 2025. What’s the best way for them to find out more, and how do they get in touch?

Paul Roos
I’m pretty active on LinkedIn, as you know. Really, I like that vehicle. Just shoot me a message on LinkedIn and I’ll get back to you, and then we can determine what’s appropriate. If you’ve got a good team and you’re leading a team, we’ll get in, we’ll do a workshop, we’ll bring everyone together, we’ll do what we’ve talked about today. But I really like that platform ’cause it gets me to meet really cool people like yourself, and then it’s a bit like a diagnosis, and can sort of diagnose, I can have a chat, and then we can determine what the best outcome is.

Dexter Cousins
Yeah. And look, you use the word workshop. I think I should caveat that to say this isn’t workshopping. It’s kind of serious noons, let’s not each other. It’s kind of, it’s real work, it’s not just a consultation and a bunch of ideas. There’s actually a playbook there that’s actionable. And I think one of the things that really defines why I believe the approach is right for startups is it doesn’t cost really any money to implement the changes that you promote within the blueprint or the 25 point plan, right? It’s all stuff that can be done immediately, and the only thing you’re investing is your time and your commitment and your dedication, actually making those changes and living by those changes.

Paul Roos
For me it’s the opposite, mate. It will cost you money if you don’t invest. And regardless, if you want to spend some money, don’t invest in your culture, because you will be spending money as unite hand over fist. If you want to save money, invest in your culture, get that right, and the changes will be absolutely dramatic.

Dexter Cousins
You’re 100% right. Well, it’s been fantastic to have you on, Paul. Thanks so much for sharing your insights. Look, and thanks so much for your kind of support. It’s been a real highlight for me this year, getting to know you and, as you mentioned, seeing the improvements myself, and kind of seeing just how those incremental changes that you’ve talked about, consistently over not a very long period of time, really start to compound and make distinct differences, not just for yourself but the people around you as well.

Paul Roos
Yeah, no, thanks man, it’s been great, and well done, you’ve done a great job. And I love what I do, as I said, and I think people out there listening, understand you can make change. It’s not that complicated, but you have to be committed to it, your individual personal growth and the growth of your team. See yourself as a coach and everything’ll look after itself. So thanks mate, great chatting to you, appreciate the time.

Dexter Cousins
You too. And thanks folks for listening. If you’re new to the show, make sure you follow us on wherever you listen to podcasts, or you can check us out on Fintech Chatter TV on YouTube. If you’re coming back, thanks so much for your support, it really does mean a lot to me and it really helps in getting great guests like Paul onto the show. Until the next episode, keep well.

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