The CEO’s Guide to Leading Change and Driving Performance with Matthew Rowe

“A business will never outperform the leadership that guides it.”

Transforming legacy businesses into high-performing, growth-driven organisations is no easy feat.

We’re joined by Matthew Rowe, CEO of SuperConcepts, a leading SMSF software provider empowering Australians to manage their super with cutting-edge technology. Under his leadership, SuperConcepts has undergone an impressive transformation, driving efficiency and cultural change.

In this episode, Matthew shares:

• Building a high-performance culture – Leading with strategy, fostering top talent, and addressing underperformance.
• Executing business transformation – Shifting from a legacy model to a customer-focused, agile organisation.
• Financial strategy for growth – Balancing risk, reward, and long-term sustainability.
• Leading change effectively – Communicating strategy, gaining buy-in, and maintaining resilience.

Guest: Matthew Rowe, CEO, SuperConcepts

Host: Mark Bryan, Partner at Pemba Capital Partners
Podcast Producer: Martine McMahon

Have a question for an upcoming guest? Email viewtothesummit@pemba.com.au.

Transcript

This series is produced on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. Pemba respectfully acknowledges traditional custodians throughout Australia. We recognise their continuing connections to country and culture and we pay our respects to elders and leaders past and present.  A very warm welcome to View to the Summit, the Pemba podcast for founders looking to scale to their next summit.

For our many regular followers, We hope you enjoy this episode and for our new listeners, it's great to have you on the journey with us. If you enjoy the pod, please help us by taking 10 seconds to subscribe. I'm Mark Bryan, one of the Managing Directors here at Pemba, and today we're thrilled to have Matthew Rowe, CEO of SuperConcepts, join us on View to the Summit.

SuperConcepts is a leading SMSF software provider, revolutionising the way self managed super funds are managed. So more Australians can control their super. We're very proud to have SuperConcepts as a Pemba partner company. Matthew has a wealth of experience and deep industry background cultivated across both the public ASX scene and private companies.

For the last two years, Matthew's been leading an impressive performance turnaround at SuperConcepts.  Prior to this, Matthew was the CEO of CountPlus, an ASX listed accounting and wealth services provider. Under Matthew's leadership, Count Plus saw the market capitalization increase by  250 percent and the business added over 20 acquisitions.

Matthew's also led a number of boards in chair positions. And he's well known in financial services through his contributions as a past chair at the Financial Planning Association of Australia. He's been recognised for his contributions to the industry with numerous awards and accolades. Wow. Matthew, thanks for joining us today.

We appreciate your time. 

Mark, it's great to Be here. Thanks for the opportunity. 

Matthew, as a start, in your own words, can you please tell us about your business and your career journey to date? What it is that inspires you and drives you at Superconcepts? 

Thanks, Mark. Look, I think, firstly, I'm someone that enjoys intellectually doing and problem solving.

I tend to be drawn to change and growth situations. I'm not really good at standing still,  and I'm definitely not suited for a care and maintenance type of CEO role. I like working with people to achieve something together as a team. This is what puts petrol in my tank. I've spent a lot of my career in professional services, and you learn that in professional services success is all about people, that the assets aren't on the balance sheet, Mark.

You know, the assets go up and down the elevator every day.  And I also learned that if you look after your clients and you put the interest first, the, the money side of things just naturally follows, you know, acting your client's best interest and. Shareholder's interests are not mutually exclusive and I had a lot of clients who I now call friends and that those personal relationships are very important in professional services. 

And yeah, look, I was elected by my peers to the board of the FPA. It's now called the FAAA. I served as the chair for four years. The FPA was a very different organization to lead. Membership was voluntary. So as a leader, what carried the day was influence, not, not control.  And it was during this time that I really came to understand the value of effective communication, particularly when leading change. 

And I learned that when you are a leader, you are a spokesperson, not an answer person.  And your role is to be on message all the time. And it's critical that you know what you say. You don't just say what you know.  You can only bring about change if you are able to articulate  The reasons why change is necessary, and you need to be able to do that in a clear and succinct manner.

You need to be able to clearly point to what the future looks like, and you need to be able to point to the plan to get there. Absolutely.  Look, Barry Lambert asked me to join Count Plus as a director, and then I became the CEO of the listed company.  What was really fun about that was eight years earlier, Barry had sold Count to the CBA for 370 million. 

And our team ended up buying back count from CBA for two and a half million dollars. Amazing. It was like, there's just so many parts of that story. That might be a whole podcast in its own right. As  a listed company CEO, you understand the importance of having a financial strategy and financial discipline because the decisions that you make will be under enormous scrutiny in public markets. 

Mark, there's literally, there is nowhere to hide. And so  the market will soon let you know. Through your share price, whether they've got confidence in you as a CEO and also in your management team.  And look, I think what's the government structure and dealing with idiosyncrasies of public markets, it's different as a CEO and listed versus private.

The core things are still the same and that's about strategy, execution and leadership.  And again, it doesn't matter whether you're public or private. I think in order of difficulty of those three,  execution is always the hardest followed by people and then strategy.  And then Mark, coming to how I became involved in super concepts and how we came to work together as partners, literally, I needed some CPD points to keep my professional designations.

Um, and I attended the SMSF conference in Adelaide  and I was looking around the room and it struck me how big the sector really was, but at the same time, most of the players,  000 funds,  but they'd struggle to grow above that.  And I started to think about who made money, why they made money and how they made money.

And it's, it really came home that everything revolves around the general ledger and the general ledger software,  data, automation, the financial reporting. And there are only three key players in that market. And I then worked out that one of those players was Superconcepts and Supermate  and they were owned by AMP.

And I couldn't work out why AMP owned this asset.  I also came to realize that SMSF is the truest form of profit for member in super available in Australians. And there's a lot of debate at the moment about industry funds and retail funds and the Royal commission and  governance, all those sorts of things.

But  wouldn't it be cool if you could build something in SMSF  that meant that all those barriers to entry, the cost and complexity could be lowered and simplified.  And then we could empower all Australians. If they want to take control of their super, then they could.  And I kept asking myself, well, how, how do you do this?

And worked out that. Technology is what's going to remove all those friction points. And if you really want people to be able to control, you know, their life savings and remove this complexity,  you need to be able to have a technology solution. And that's what we saw in, in SuperMate, the software.  So Mark literally.

A year after attending the conference and getting my CPT points, and with your trust and guidance and PEMBA's significant intellectual capital and belief in what we were going to undertake, we ended up acquiring Superconcepts and SuperMate from AMP and we reset the mission to simplify SMSF so more Australians can control their super. 

Now this idea was something that I could. Invest in both financially and emotionally, and let's face it, Mark, the best CEO job to ever have is when there's an alignment of your purpose and also the financial incentives as well. Absolutely. 

Yeah. And I'm imagining you also got your CPD points for this year as well.

I make sure I got my CPD points, Mark. That's good. That's great. Now that was wonderful. Thanks for running us through. Uh, your, your career and business journey to date. I'd love to start if we can with building a performance culture. Super concepts has seen significant growth and transformation under your leadership.

Some of the key attractions of super concepts. I think both we at Pemba and yourself were attracted to, obviously included to your point, strong heritage in SMSF, the market positioning and a large base of customers. But at the same point, I think we all recognise that there needed to be a change within the business and a shift from a legacy corporate structure to a much more nimble customer focused strategy.

This shift in performance culture has been very successful and it's impacted positively all areas of the business. And I do see this as one of your superpowers in setting a performance culture. So I'd love if you can, for the audience please, to talk about your experience. And insights for founders and leaders on the secrets of building a performance culture. 

Thanks, Mike. Look, I think it's really important that we should all acknowledge upfront that a business will never outperform the leadership that guides it. And high performance culture is led from the top, not just from the CEO, but anyone that's in a people leader position.  And as a founder, if your business isn't fulfilling its potential, you need to start by having a hard and dispassionate look at all the people around you.

And that includes your advisors and it includes your board.  And that we knew that super concepts wasn't fulfilling its potential and it did need a reset to your point  Nine of twelve members of the management team were changed in our first hundred days and we bought in our own team  And so look around performance culture You don't learn to climb a mountain in life by asking for a ladder You learn to climb mountains by climbing mountains But if I use a Pemba analogy and having a Sherpa with me You learn from doing, but you succeed through others. 

And you always need to have fact based explanations on cause and effect. High performing teams, they make fact based decisions, and they're obsessed, obsessed with being data driven.  And when you think about the performance of your team,  Mark, not every day is a new day, you know, over time, a body of evidence builds up showing which people can be relied upon and who can't be relied upon. 

And look, if someone isn't meeting the needs of the team, then it's up to you to either coach and train them,  put in place some guardrails, or you need to remove them. It's that simple.  You don't try to rehabilitate them. And particularly when the issue is one of a poor attitude.  And on that look, uh, something that might be helpful, I, I draw a matrix, there's two axes, four quadrants and mark those with a great attitude and great performance.

They're your stars. Right. Um, and as a CEO, you've got a role to nurture those people.  And they're about 20 percent of your team, but they're the 20 percent that make huge amounts of discretionary effort. They lift your performance overall and they bring others with them.  And then finally, as a CEO.  You're not here to be liked by everyone.

You're here to fulfill a purpose  and like yourself along the way. So your aim should be to be respected, not liked,  because being a CEO of a high performance team means you need to have the conviction or resolve in what you're doing to keep the team pointed in the right direction to achieve their goal. 

And that means you need to be able to filter out a lot of noise.  You know, your primary responsibility. Is to keep the team pointing in the right direction.  

And I think that point on being respected not liked is a really important one. And I think that's a tough one sometimes for founders and CEOs because naturally that means that position is somewhat of a lonely one.

I 

think.  I think everyone 

who's been in a CEO role recognise it is a lonely role and yeah, look, human nature default position is we all want to be liked. Yes.  It is about being respected. Yeah. You know, I've got, I've got friends that like me. Yes. In a business setting or your family as well, I hope. Yeah.

Leslie, if you're listening. Archie the Groodle. Archie the Groodle as well. Um, but look in a business setting, it's, it's about, you're there to get something done through other people. Yeah. So it's about respect, not being liked.  

Let's build on that if we can and think about transformation and change. So it's been necessary to drive significant change within the business.

As we said, can you perhaps please talk about some of the changes that have been implemented across the team, the innovation front, the custom service. And the delivery model, particularly interested in any challenges around the change management process you've gone through.  Yeah. Look, 

Mark, change is not easy. 

And when a business is not performing, there's always a disconnect between what the employees think is important and what is actually important. And when we arrived at super concepts, you know, we sat down with a number of people and we asked them what they thought was wrong, who had made the mistakes and what they would do if, you know, they were the CEO.

And you can tell who the keepers are in this process as the keepers tend to say, well, here are the problems. This is what I could have done better. And as the CEO, this is where we should take the business.  You find out very quickly, those who simply blame others.  I was very lucky to have Brad Ackerman and Andrew Rowe with me from the start.

Great. Great guys. Yeah. Yeah. Like seriously, having peers that are really smart, they're highly motivated, they're capable and they get the job done and they'll call things out. Like as a CEO, you want to have, you want to have peers around you that call stuff out. Like these are rare attributes and they build confidence in a leadership team and my confidence in that leadership team is, is bone marrow deep.

And when you go through stuff together, that's really important. That's like the secret sauce. Yeah. So when you've got this confidence in your key people, they also need to be able to cope in hard times and with stress. And look, it does take a certain personality type to be able to, you know, manage and execute on change. 

They'll tend to self select out, but you need to be careful. They also can create a lot of noise on the way out. Yum.  And so look, again, in a change process, focus on the data points and the numbers that matter and are really important. And when Marcus Raywood joined us as a CFO.  It was a revelation for the team as to what was really going on in the business.

All of a sudden, the entire team had data to make decisions. And we knew our cost to serve. We had business unit P& Ls and, and we were empowered by the data. We, you know, we weren't. Any longer just rely on opinions  and having a peer you have confidence in and can trust as a CFO is absolutely mission critical to the success.

Full, like full stop.  When you have a good CFO, you breathe easier as a CEO, you know, together we worked out the economic engines of the business and our job was to remove the grit and the gears of these engines and get them firing.  We also stepped back, you know, being part of a big corporate, they're always very inward looking, it's about them.

So we stepped back and we looked at everything through the eyes of the customer, the client. And in our first hundred days, we knew that the pooled call center service delivery model wasn't working and wasn't working for our clients and it wasn't working for the team.  And we had to make significant change.

We had to completely revamp the service delivery model.  And we had to do it in a way that we would overhaul what was an institutional decade old legacy client service operating model. And, and we did that in three months.  Now, it took courage and conviction by the entire leadership team to make this decision, to plan for it and then to execute it, but it was a watershed moment for us because this change in the operating model, you could see people throughout the team build a belief in what we could do as, as a result of this success. 

And we all started to stand a little taller.  We started to believe it reminded me that having a plan is important, Mark, but people don't follow a plan. People follow action, right? Mark, they follow results, you know,  and since we've made these changes, our net promoter score has gone from what was historically negative to plus 60 and we're seeing a continued positive trends.

And we know that with further change that we're making and further innovation improvement, you know, we're going to be aiming for a net promoter score of plus 80 and that's world class standard. Yes, it's just, it's huge. Yeah.  We now know that 90 percent of service queries or technical queries, they're sold within three days.

And before we got there at one stage,  it was taking three months to solve those same sort of queries.  And again, if you look through everything through the client's eyes. We had 78 products, Mark. Um,  so we undertook a simplification process and we've now reduced that to four products. We're now focused on being excellent in our core service offering rather than being average across many things.

Very 

good. Yeah. And getting some of those quick wins I think has been really powerful for the team, adding the confidence and fueling the desire to continue to perform well. I think that's been really important. It's, Mark, it was almost like we, we 

had to show them how to win. 

Yeah. 

You know, I think you use that word belief and I don't want to overplay it, but  when you get in early and you can show them the way forward and they, and they can see the results and they start to believe in you as a leadership team, it becomes self fulfilling because the leadership team starts to believe in themselves as well.

And you do, you all stand up and then you think about, okay, well, what other challenges have we got? We can have a crack at. And that the person they're putting now, you know, we knew the business was loss making 12 months later, it's profitable.  We're now delivering. Better lodgment rates for funds. You know, we've now lodged more funds in six months than what we used to do in 12 months.

Yeah, that's amazing. And you know, we've had a 200 percent productivity and efficiency improvement markets. It's just remarkable when you look at where we were and where we are now. And that's because we've got a, you know, we've got a great team. Yeah. Well done. Thank you. Thank you. 

So Matthew, with, with your extensive experience in finance and managing large organizations, how do you approach financial strategy and ensure sustainable growth?

Are there any key principles or lessons you've learned about effective financial management that founders and leaders should consider?  

I think Mark, you. As a CEO, you need to sit down and realize that the core job  that you have is to create value for shareholders, to also create value for your clients and value for the people that are in your care, your team. 

And to do this, you need to be able to see, you know, where you are now in the business, to then set goals for where we should be in say a year.  And then I think, uh, you know, a good team has the intellectual capital and imagination to be able to see over the horizon and aim at where we could be in future. 

So if I think of financial strategy in three stages, where we are now,  where we should be and where we could be.  But it's really important to understand that, you know, if you, if you're going to choose the result, you need to commit yourself to it. So leaders make a choice to do not to try  and leaders make a choice to commit.

You, you commit before, you know, whether this something will succeed or fail in a public company environment. It, it's different. So it's about a short term focus on earnings, um, earnings per share. That's why a lot of this, the company CEOs tend to communicate in language of adjusted EBITDA. You know, famous man, man once said that EBITDA is a bullshit number. 

You hear talk of transformation on adjusted EBITDA when there's a soft result in this And that short term financial strategy is about management. Not being an owner or an entrepreneur, an owner or an entrepreneur, they, they see something and they dream about what it could be.  A manager seeks to control what it is.

And look, I know that I'm personally at my best when I'm allowed to have an owner mindset.  And if I were to think about value to, you know, to your question, maybe think about in a formulaic way, value equals income, less expenses,  multiplied by growth, less risk.  Now  income, less expenses as he's as profit.

No,  but I think. That, you know, really at your core, you need to  be able to make a decent profit, but decently. And by that, I mean,  you need to be profitable, but you need to do it in the right way.  On the growth metric. Well, I'm in a PE world, so the rule of 40 percent comes into play. Yeah. Um, you know, revenue growth plus EBIT margin must be 40%.

And then on risk.  I think it's important we contextualize risk as opportunity, not a compliance risk appetite statement. Listed companies, lots of compliance checklists, risk appetite statement.  But risk is something that is an opportunity and As a CEO, you should never afraid to be fired. You must be willing to take risks.

Um, but look, Mark, it's a brave CEO that, and probably brave, not in a good way, a brave CEO that bets the entire business on one roll of dice. I don't recommend that either. 

So calculated risk. And 

I think, you know, you need to, you need to bring people into the tent on that. Like you, you, your board have got a really key role in oversight.

You know, there's always going to be risk. How do you mitigate it?  What's the opportunity cost of not taking it, but if something goes wrong. Yeah. What could it 

possibly mean? Yeah, that's right.  Very good. Thank you, Matthew, for that. Um, so the super concepts business has had a clear strategy really from the point where yourself and the management team, the core management team of Brad and Andrew and yourself partnered with Pemba.

And that strategy obviously was set in conjunction with the board. What have you learned through your career around setting strategy and communicating that strategy? It's a great question. 

Look, a business that doesn't have a goal means you're choosing luck. You're choosing luck to take you somewhere.

Potentially anywhere.  And there is no point having a goal without having a plan to get you there. So vision without action is a daydream, but action without vision is a nightmare. Uh, and look, I've, you know, and I've already said this a few times, but planning is important, but people don't follow a plan, they follow results.

And look, if the plan doesn't work, change the plan, but never change the goal.  

Matthew thinking about organizational structure. You've had exposure to a number of businesses at various stages of growth through your career. How do you approach setting the talent and organizational structure of a business?

And also, can you please comment on how you build accountability performance within an organization and keen really for any lessons learned around building and motivating teams?  

I came across this, what I think is a really useful tool. It's the Galbraith star model for how to design your team and organization.

It's a five sided star. You start with your strategy. What's your goal? What's our purpose? Why does it matter? What capabilities do we have that will enable us to be effective and achieve this goal?  And then on structure, it's about how you're organized, what are the really key roles we need. So forget about individual names.

You know, you never draw this with people's names in it.  What are the key roles and functions? How is our work managed? And what role or function is going to have influence or authority in decision making?  You think about process and operating decisions are made. How does work flow between roles? And then what mechanisms do you have for collaboration? 

And where you've got friction points from a, you know, from a client perspective in delivery, how do you remove those friction points?  On the data side and metrics and rewards, well, how do we want behavior to be shaped by the goals we set and measure? And then most importantly, incentivize. I mean, look for the incentives and you'll see the behaviors. 

How do we assess progress against plan? And if you step back, how do we make better data driven operational decisions? What is it that we really need to know?  And then finally, how do we plan and assess our strategic return on investment? I mean, that's about what shots are we going to take. And the final one about people, well, I really refer back to the conversation we had on the people matrix.

Yeah. You need every six months I spend time and I go through that people matrix exercise with my leadership team and the senior management.  And look, when you think about a balanced scorecard. It's how we join the dots from our business plan to how we execute the plan.  It's important to plan, but a high performing team, they don't follow a plan, they follow results.

And let's face it, Mark, it's, it's called a scorecard for a reason. Yeah. Like  there are no participation medals in business. A specialist of businesses  and around that and the KPIs that you want to track, you know, in our business and super concepts, we focus on our clients.  Then in our business, it's about people in process because we believe excellence comes from the combination of process and our culture,  technology and innovation.

And look, in our case, we, we really believe our software. Is what's going to be mission critical for us to simplify SMSF. So more Australians can control their super  and then financial results. Well, they, they absolutely need to be there. But again, it's about that point, making a decent profit, but decently. 

And so the business has an overall balanced scorecard. And in reality, that's my scorecard, the CEO and everyone in the team, everyone in the team knows what my scorecard is. I'm completely transparent with it.  But then it's important, particularly in the C suite.  Your KPIs, or your measure of success,  they're weighted towards the drivers that people can control.

You know, they're in their control. But, but again, in my case, and in the C Suite's case, it's the financial driver that's probably going to have the heaviest weighting, and that should, in my opinion, that should be at 

least 50%.  Understood. Very clear. Thank you, Matthew. That's very helpful. Now you've spent a lot of time in and around the board environment through your career.

So extending on management reporting and having effective board reporting and clear communication is obviously crucial for any business. Superconcepts reporting is indeed very clear and we have a very effective board reporting cycle. How have you approached these aspects of superconcepts and other roles?

And what strategies have you found most effective at the board level? 

Yeah, Mark, I think, look, let's  No matter how great the business performance is, if the board dynamic isn't working well, this dynamic will bring the business performance down. And that's normally because the board dynamic has moved from where it should be, which is it should be interested  and it's moved into something more approaching interfering. 

You know, let's talk about what good looks like. And in my opinion, my experience,  there are three CEO.  You know, responsibilities and making sure people are clear and then there's reporting. So the chair and the CEO,  it is probably the single most important relationship in the entire business without doubt.

And if you've been a CEO and I've been a CEO and a chair that holds true. Yeah. Agree fully with that. Yeah. I've seen it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, because it sets the tone for the entire business  and where there is mutual trust and respect and there's collaboration. And the board and the entire team will be engaged and they'll rally around a strong CEO and chair relationship.

They just will. You know, it starts from the top.  And when, when you, as a CEO, when you're working with a chair, you need to respect that every person is different, they'll bring different talents and different experiences. And so, you know, in my view as a CEO, what, what you really need to understand with your chair and have, and have these conversations is.

Well, what do you need from each other to be successful?  How do you want to both handle challenges when things go off track? Cause I will, what's the communication preference method, frequency of communication, how do we know what's getting done? How's it getting done? And you don't want to leave things to chance when you're communicating with the board, what you're actually getting done.

And you should always be having conversations about how you enhance any board meeting.  When you ask about reporting, and I think it's, it's a lot. It's a lot easier and it's a lot, it's a healthy and constructive relationship with the board. When you're aligned on priorities and goals and, and you're going to have a much higher likelihood of achieving these goals when everyone's on the same page. 

Then agree on what are the really key data points or numbers that matter and should be a focus. And in your CEO report to the board, make sure you call these things out early in the report, like in the executive summary, be transparent on progress that's being made.  Have a no surprise rule with your chair and your board. 

Have a plan with your chair for when things go sideways, because not every day is going to be sunshine and roses.  Being able to acknowledge and assess, you know, options when there are problems and they can't be ignored, you know, they, they shouldn't be dealt with in secret, you need to be transparent with your board when things are going off track. 

Now, the job of the board is to challenge your assumptions and to ask the right questions and ensure the collective wisdom of everyone sitting at that board table is used as a force for good.  You as a CEO, you have a responsibility for making sure they're getting the data that they need to make those decisions. 

That's great, Matthew. Thank you for that. Now, thinking about working with a capital partner, Matthew, a number of our founders may well be contemplating partnering with a growth capital partner that are listening today. You've operated in both the ASX public environment And of course the private arena, can you please comment on the pros and cons of the public and private markets and specifically what you think is important for founders when selecting a growth partner? 

Look Mark, I, you know, I did a lot of due diligence. Around capital partner that I want to select. And  you want to take advice from someone that's successfully achieved something at least three times. So I knew I was dealing with experts and there's a natural sense of alignment.  Help facilitate growth, particularly around acquisitions in a way that brings a discipline in the process of planning and execution.

And look, Mark, I remember  when we were in the guts of the AMP super concepts transaction and going through the rigor and discipline involved. In your investment committee process. Well,  I really valued that I wasn't alone in that process.  Also, what's really important for me, and I think this is a key difference between public and private is  I have members of my team that have never had an equity or a capital payday, and  they now have options, uh, in a, in an ASX system environment, you're locked into a, in a, into a templated process around LTIs and other things.

You, you know, you're an indentured servant in a listed environment. Whereas if there's something that's really important to the team success, we can have a number of options in the management equity plan to accommodate the individual circumstances.  When you've got this partnership approach, it does bring a natural sense of alignment.

I mean, there's nothing more motivating than when a team member has skin in the game and your success will be their success and vice versa. There's just that natural alignment and, and look Mark, it's amazing when you can see the difference in people's faces when they've got that mindset, when they become an owner in the business. 

Great. It's a great partnership. Yeah. And now Matthew, I've drilled quite a few questions at you. Uh, thanks again for all those invaluable insights. A question we ask all of our guests is to describe in a few words, what are the most important values to you now? They could be values you expect within team members, or they could be values that you live your life by.

So with that in mind, what would be your three key values and principles? Uh, 

my easy first one loyalty, loyalty involves trust, reliability, and a willingness to stand by someone. And this may be the hardest lesson I've learned in life and I, and I learned it late in life is to endure the betrayal of a false friend integrity. 

Now this is all about doing the right thing even when no one is looking, particularly when no one is looking  and then resilience and resilience is, is an often underrated value, but I deeply respect someone who's being knocked down seven times, but they get up eight times. Yeah. Yeah. You know it. And.

Resilience 

is something that can be learned. Yeah, very much. So love it. So loyalty, integrity, resilience. Yeah. Three, three great values. And Matthew, finally, you've dedicated your career to driving business success. Um, and I know that, um, very much your purpose now is democratizing SMSF for all Australians.

Do you have any favorite apps, hacks, or business strategies that you're currently using or you find effective? Or it might be a great book you've read recently on business. I can highly 

recommend reading Better, Simpler Strategy by a Harvard professor, Felix Oberholzer Jay. The book breaks down strategy through the concept of the value stick, focus on incentives for customers.

And employees and it's overlaid with price and cost. And it deals with how you capture value on your ability to create a customer willingness to pay, improving productivity, and then having things that are difficult to imitate and introducing network effects that leverage complements. It's, it's a great book.

And  I think, you know, we think about it often within super concepts about, you know, the 

willingness to pay. Right. It sounds like a great read. We'll add that to the, uh, to the Pembroke library. So Matthew, thanks so much for sharing your insights and experiences with us today. Congratulations on all your successes.

It's been a pleasure having you on the podcast and your leadership at super concepts is inspiring. And I'm sure our listeners have gained valuable takeaways from the conversation. In particular, I really love listening around the performance culture, identifying the style. team, backing them and making sure that the energy is not drained from the team, from the minority that are not bought in to the strategy.

I love the comments on a clear and concise strategy. And finally, the importance of the chair and CEO relationship. I've seen that in full swing across various boards and it's powerful. So to all our listeners, thank you for tuning into this episode of View to the Summit. We hope you found it insightful and informative.

Please join us next month when we'll be talking with Rebecca Martin, an award winning brand marketing and communications strategist. Also another addition to View to the Summit, we'd like to offer our listeners the chance to ask any questions of our guests. So if you have a question ahead of an upcoming pod, please email it to  viewtothesummit at pemba.

com. au and we'll aim to have your question covered. Until then, keep striving for your next summit and thanks for listening.