Crafting Culture and a Lifetime of Learnings with Anthony Lee
In a past life, Anthony Lee has scrubbed dishes, flipped burgers, varnished boats, worked on ski fields and spent time as a postman... Now, Anthony is the CEO and Director at family business, Australian Country Choice (ACC), a beef, cattle and food processing company.
Anthony first came onto Oli’s radar following his speech at the EKKA Brekkie in 2022, his passion about education and promoting opportunities to the next generation was equally inspiring and motivating. Since that day, Oli wanted to sit down and find out more about Anthony.
So what better opportunity than at ACC’s annual staff event in Roma in late August.
The event is dedicated to bringing together the hundreds of people across the business for three days of connecting in teamwork and stockmanship. It's a fitting setting as Anthony talks about 'culture before capability' throughout this episode, and how he goes about crafting culture in his role as CEO. They also touch on:
Growing up in the family business
The evolution into the vertically integrated business it is today
How he has built life skills through global travel
Business aims, culture and capability
Balancing his personal life
Building and leading a team
Connecting with an urban audience
Here’s an excerpt from Anthony:
“I'd done uni and I'd worked in the business for six or seven years… But by that stage, I just wanted to do something different and get a feeling for what else was out there. I wanted to see the world.
And so I went away for a while. And that was a fantastic experience. I learned so much during that time, not really career progression stuff... But it was more just about life skills.
I always had a bit of a drawback to the business and I was always staying in touch with the old man. And he was telling me about what was going on.
He [Anthony’s Father] came to the US when I'd been away for about five years. He said, “We're about to build retail ready”, which is the value add end part of the supply chain - cutting the pieces of meat up, putting it into a tray, putting a price label on it and sending it to the store. And that was really the evolution of the business into a vertically integrated model.
He [Anthony’s Father] said, “We've not done this before, it's a new area of the business… Now is a perfect time for you to come back. You can get some training and development in other businesses, and then we can bring you in as a supervisor and grow from there.” And that's what I did.
It was exciting, it was absolutely one of the hardest times of my life.
I remember when we started the facility, we were doing 17 hour days. It was just full on every day, just getting the factory fired up and going.
And it was a couple of big, big years… Very challenging years.
And you're questioning yourself and whether you can do it and if you are the right person and all those things.
But that resilience, just to turn up the next day. And to get the facility working was a big motivator for me and taught me a lot about resilience and never giving up, just trying to do better the next day.
I look at our business in the same way today… You never give up, you’ve just got to work through the challenges. They're always there.”
