Video: All-Stars and waterslides
The NRL and Indigenous All-Stars hit waterworld
NRL / One Community
11 February 2010.
Click to watch the All-Stars and their fans cutting loose at White Water World on the Gold Coast.
Video: Players' Christmas Party 2009
Fun and games at the NRL Players’ Christmas Party
NRL / One Community
24 November 2009.
Click to watch Kiki and Sassy joining in at the NRL Players’ Christmas party at ANZ Stadium.
Video: One Community Awards 2009
Behind the scenes at the Museum of Contemporary Art
NRL / One Community
24 November 2009.
Click to watch the Kiki and Sassy video coverage of the 2009 One Community Awards.
Press: Maverick Media
Steve Mascord
Rugby League Week. 3 June 2009
Out of the Box: p. 34
MAVERICK MEDIA
Strike up another victory for drama and scandal.
This story was going to be a light-hearted look at two of Australia’s new alternative media outlets, two men and two women who worry more about giving us a laugh than avoiding offence and who cut through the artifice of our normal mainstream day-to-day footy coverage.
Not enough people know about them. Brett Oaten and Steve Ferris on FBi radio’s Fire Up like nothing more than a good off-field scandal to sink their near-libellous teeth into, while oherrol.com’s Sarah ‘Sassy’ Neill, Lozzy Maher and Kiera ‘Kiki’ James offer critiques on NRL players’ tackling styles, pecs, representative careers and backsides.
Click to read the full article.
STEVE MASCORD.
Press: Kiki + Sassy = New Spin for Gen Z
Peter Hanlon
The Age. 12 March 2009
This Sporting Life
Read it online here.
Kiki and Sassy Talk Cricket
Blogging the VB Tour of South Africa and the Ashes
Cricket Australia.
From 10 March 2009.
Read it all here.
Press: Female team scores
Sam de Brito
Sun-Herald. 7 September 2008
S Section
BIT ON THE SIDE
Those pining for intelligent female voices among the chest-beating throb of rugby league commentary should check out a new website called Oh Errol, written by a quintet of Sydney gals.
Irreverant, sometimes obscene, but always showing respect for and knowledge of the game, the Oh Errol girls provide a humorous look at aspects males overlook, like the site’s Caramel Delicious Award for the Best Skin in League.
Administrators of media execs keen to broaden rugby league’s appeal need only look at the Oh Errol website for some great ideas: 2GB or Channel Nine could do a lot worse than getting a weekly rap from these bright young women.
SAM DE BRITO.
Rich 200
Rich 200 25th Anniversary Flagship edition
BRW. 29 May 2008
Researcher and Writer
Public Face of the Law
Feature: Slater & Gordon
BRW. 22 May 2008
Pages 48-49
CASHED-UP CLASS ACTION SPECIALISTS REDEFINE THE LEGAL PARTNERSHIP AND EMBARK ON AN ACQUISITION AND EXPANSION SPREE.
It has been a year since Slater & Gordon became the world’s first publicly listed law firm, but it is unlikely that lawyer and managing director Andrew Grech will be throwing a party. He and the other directors have had other things to worry about.
“The listing, to be frank with you, is pretty incidental,” he says in answer to how the float has altered company culture and business practices. “It was never for us an end in itself. It was always for us only one more way of achieving what we wanted to achieve as a group.”
Instead it has been a catalyst in a broader overhaul begun in 2001 when the firm was first incorporated. The May 21 float last year netted a capital injection of $35 million and allowed the company to begin an ambitious course of acquisition and expansion that has returned revenues and profits beyond even the directors’ initial expectations.
The listing was also a path to running the law practice in a more democratic way than the traditional partnership model. “We had assembled a really talented group of people, and wanted to create a way for them to have the same opportunities for ownership that we did,” Grech says. “But we also realised that we’re in an environment where, for people to work collaboratively, we had to move away from the more traditional model which we feel encourages people to take quite a short-term view, operating quite independently of each other.
“In a partnership, it’s really about what fees [lawyers] generate and what clients they personally bring in rather than what role they play in the execution of a strategy for the whole of the practice.” The partners all received substantial stakes in the listing, with Grech and deputy chairman Peter Gordon both sitting on stakes valued at more than $89 million. But almost a quarter of employees are now also stakeholders through a shareholder plan.
Grech stresses that as an ownership and management structure the public listing places remuneration partially in the hands of the market, making it dependent on overall performance rather than concentrating the power to determine promotion and reward with a group of senior partners.
“There’s talk in some parts at the moment of people scaling down and not admitting any new partners. In a partnership if you know your income’s going to be less, you cull the number of partners. We wanted a business that allowed the rhetoric [of supporting lawyers’ careers] to become a bit of reality.”
It is a claim that mirrors the egalitarian way Slater & Gordon believes the organisation approaches the law and business in general. “What troubles us is the sense that sometimes we are viewed as though the business is all about one small group of people in charge,” Grech says. “We believe one of the strengths of the business is the group we’ve built around us. And if you look, we’ve built considerable wealth for a lot of people.
“Rather than the rhetoric about those things, we’d like people to judge us by what we actually do. The fact is our people are out there every day helping clients, that’s what they do. Whatever people might think of us, there’s no denying that we fill a real need in the community, and the community commitment of our people, I think, is absolutely unparalleled.”
Grech is referring to the class action law for which Slater & Gordon is famous - or infamous - from the watershed 1989 compensation award to miners affected by asbestos in the CSR Wittenoom blue asbestos mine to current cases centering on asset management firm Opes Prime, retail investors Centro and Westpoint Property Group.
With the additional reporting requirements and transparency of a listed company, as well as the capital injection from public investors, Slater & Gordon’s project and class-action workload is likely to ramp up even further.
The public company structure has raised the interest of domestic and international litigation funders, and Grech expects the shareholder class-action market to open up dramatically in the next year.
“They see us as having the competency and the scale now to be able to deliver the results that they need,” he says. “If you’re a litigation funder, one of the things that you’re very focused on is the capacity of those that are engaged by the clients to carry it out. Your investment really hinges on the competency and the capacity of the lawyers that are engaged.”
It will be helped, he believes, by a more receptive environment for class actions in Australia. “Now I think it’s widely recognised that class actions and group actions have a significant role to play as an economical way of redressing people’s legal rights. There’s a lot of hyperbole about about ‘an explosion of litigation’, but more informed commentators agree that grouping claims and sharing legal costs has got to be good for the client.
“I also think they see the private profession and the civil law system as a way of ensuring and essentially providing a significant deterrent for people to ensure that these things don’t happen in the first place.”
This month, Grech is overseeing what will be the company’s eighth acquisition in the past year - Secomb’s Solicitors of Footscray, western Melbourne. It will bring the company’s legal network to 26 locations with more than 500 staff and expertise in areas such as wills, probate, family law and wealth protection. Grech estimates that at any moment, the business is dealing with more than 12,000 individual, active clients.
Having set an original target of $65 million revenue for the 2008 financial year, Slater & Gordon has turned over more than $37 million in the first half and has adjusted its projections. Profits for the first half to December 2007 were almost $7 million.
Grech attributes much of the growth to expansion into regional areas, and an attention to providing commercial legal services to small and medium businesses that Grech believes have previously been priced out of top-tier legal firms.
“One of the things that running cases on a conditional-fee basis teaches you to do is run cases very cost effectively. We’ve been able to transfer those skills into the more traditional fee-for-service areas of commercial litigation and business transactional work.”
On the issue of a possible worsening US sub-prime crisis or credit crunch, Grech is unfazed.
“The stockmarket fluctuations are disconcerting. It would be less than honest for me to say that’s not a concern. But overall we take a long-term view on share price, and it’s just pleasing that the price remains above the listing price, notwithstanding any market volatility.”
The share price currently sits comfortably above the issue price of $1, an exception among newcomers on the ASX. Grech’s explanation is prosaic: “There’s hardly a relationship between the rate at which people get injured on the roads and the economic cycle, or even the rates at which people get injured at work.”
It should also do little to soften the scrutiny that Slater & Gordon’s directors have become so used to, with the market ructions likely to increase opportunities in their commercial law sectors and boost their profile even further.
“In fact, one of the things that attracts investors to our business is that in a way it’s counter-cyclical,” Grech says. “In the business law and commercial litigation area, we’re moving into a period with tightening credit where businesses are going to become distressed, and that tends to create legal problems. It creates a volume of litigation that drives work for firms that provide services in those areas.”
The company intends to continue its expansion. Client referrals from regional areas are growing “exponentially,” and the company that previously earned 98 per cent of revenue in Victoria now earns 40 per cent from other states. It is a strategy it believes will spread risk as most personal injury legislation, in particular, is state-based. There are also plans to corner a larger piece of the $700 million-a-year personal-injury market by providing local legal services.
But don’t expect any change in attitude. “It’s not as though we’re unused to being criticised,” Grech says. “The legal profession has its share of petty enmities. It has been new territory, a listed law firm, but business has been growing across all areas, and our strategy is pretty clear. We’ll continue supporting organic growth.”
SARAH NEILL
The Power of Two
Fast Starters Profile: TDA Interiors
BRW. 24 April 2008
Page 52
A SMALL OFFICE FIT-OUT COMPANY IS WINNING BIG SUCCESS THROUGH THE POWER OF PARTNERSHIPS.
Andrew Holder and James Kemp are used to working in a partnership. The two have been friends for more than 25 years, as travel partners and flatmates, and each was the best man at the other’s wedding. In their latest venture, the pair has built TDA Interiors into a $22 million commercial fit−out business in only two years.
The business provides conventional office fit−outs − requiring internal restructuring, partitioning, air−conditioning, lighting, carpeting, furniture and finishes − but can also act as advisers on building choice, location, budgeting and design.
Holder was a 13−year veteran of the fit−out industry when he left TDA in the United Kingdom for Australia in 2004 with his young family. It coincided with an offer from one of TDA’s founders for £40,000 ($84,578) capital to establish TDA Interiors in Sydney. The first step was to organise for Kemp to make the move to Sydney as co−director.
From there, “it evolved very naturally”, Holder says. “On day one it was me and a cardboard box in a serviced office, then we won our first project with Nokia, then all of a sudden we had six projects on our plate.”
“In that first year we did work that perhaps other people don’t want to do, the messy work of moving an office around rather than having a fresh plate to work from − difficult work.” Paying those dues gave TDA a $7 million turnover in its first year, and a small profit, and one of the jobs led to a breakthrough project: the 84,000−square−metre Optus headquarters in Sydney’s North Ryde.
TDA’s youth was an advantage. “We’d just delivered the Yahoo!7 job successfully with the same project managers, DTZ, but more importantly, we were a small entity compared to the other companies that were competing for the work,” Holder says. “If you give a large project to a company that’s quite small, you’ve got a risk there, but on the flipside, you know that the company is going to give everything to make sure they
deliver.”
TDA has promoted its “fresh” image in the market, with particular success in the media and advertising sectors, wooing clients including Nokia, Virgin Mobile, the Photon Group and Yahoo!7. “In conventional, hard−dollar tendering it’s very difficult to differentiate yourself,” Holder says. “Often the prices are very similar. You need to brand the document and touch the client somehow.” TDA argued its case with Yahoo!7 through a custom−designed faux website and a submission branded with the company’s signature colours.
With revenue projected to reach $40 million for the 2008 financial year, the next step for TDA is national expansion. A Brisbane office has been established for 18 months and will provide almost $15 million in revenue. The company will open an office in Melbourne later this year, with staff and resources to be shared.
TDA has also signed a two−year deal with travel group Flight Centre to outfit its regional head offices in Australia and New Zealand. It is the kind of deal that Holder and Kemp aim for, believing relationships with companies that “culturally align” will produce steady and satisfying work, just as relationships with compatible designers lead to their best work.
To manage the continued growth, the two directors have introduced a seven−person group management team from their 35 employees.
“We’ve made mistakes,” says Holder of the past two years. “But we always pay the bill, rather than try to recoup the costs from the client. Bad delivery or bad reputation will ruin you overnight in this business.”
“What we sought to do was bring a real personality to the industry. The businesses here were very stale, weren’t delivering fun, the salesmanship was missing. I think that’s why we’ve grown so quickly.”
6 TDA INTERIORS
Last year: Not ranked
Founders: Andrew Holder, James Kemp
Turnover: $17.65 million
Three secrets of success:
- Maintain a point of difference − TDA nurtures its “fresh” image in the conventionally staid construction field.
- Choose employees carefully, and build a core of key staff to rely on.
- Stick to your word − clients need to trust the quality and delivery times of your work.
SARAH NEILL
