BOUNCING BACK

STEPHEN CORBY TALKS TO FIVE RENOWNED BUSINESS LEADERS WHO HELPED THEIR COMPANIES BOUNCE BACK FROM DISASTER.

- STEPHEN CORBY

In business, as in life, adversity is a given, and some CEOs find themselves stumbling from one crisis to the next, struggling not to be overwhelmed, like the exhausted firefighters during Australia’s Black Summer. But the scale and speed of the global pandemic we’re dealing with now prompts the use of a more telling term than ‘crisis’ or even ‘recession’ – it’s a full-blown disaster.

And as the CEO of Aussie Home Loans, James Symond, quite rightly points out, very few people have faced something of this magnitude before.

“The fact is, there isn’t a serious business person – certainly not anyone under the age of 50 – who has been through a truly tough time in Australia, and the last real recession was in the late 80s and early 90s,” says Symond, nephew of the famous Aussie John, who remains his company’s chair.

“And this is a pandemic, so there simply isn’t a rule book for this one.”

Symond, who describes himself as a young CEO at 48, believes his business is perfectly placed to bounce back from disaster because it’s had so much practice. “There’s always been a crisis at Aussie Home Loans,” he says.

“This business was born out of adversity – the big banks were against us from day one. We had to fight that.

Then we had the GFC with huge issues of credit, and next, the Royal Commission came along and tried to smash the mortgage-broking industry. But that’s what it’s like for a lot of businesses today; you go from crisis to crisis.