To transform your business and your products, you need to transform your people—and that means giving them transformative experiences.
This is how I remember a cold winter’s day in Logan Utah, back in 2011. I toured a very large cheese manufacturing plant, gaining a completely new understanding of how small changes to input quality can make for a huge difference in the end result.
A transformative experience that, among many other things, ultimately led to the development of Pure Dairy’s HI-Melt burger cheese, Australia’s most popular burger cheese.
I’ve been fortunate in that regard. Working to evolve business through close relationships, I’ve had the opportunity to travel the world and talk to countless people: everyone from commodity traders and procurement managers through to primary producers and manufacturers to restaurateurs and QSR leadership. You learn a lot about the many different realities of the stakeholders in dairy that way.
But whilst we all benefit from deep insights and holistic understanding, not everyone can spend their life crisscrossing the planet in search of new knowledge.
Now more than ever, you need the intellectual capital, right across the board, to quickly pivot and come up with new solutions.
So, how do you build a team of thought leaders? Simply hiring top talent won’t necessarily cut it. Because unless new talent continually learn and reinvent themselves on the job, their original brilliance will diminish over time.
This is what you see when companies recruit talent from near and far without paying heed to the fact that, in their previous capacities, these experts were likely challenged and pushed to the limits of their ability on a daily basis. For instance, maybe they worked at a major logistics firm, where they dealt with every last aspect of supply chain management. If you plonk such a professional into more limited circumstances, they’re bound to stagnate.
I’m sure there would be several ways to get around this issue, but at Pure Dairy, we’ve chosen a straightforward, albeit monumental, approach. We’ve created a microcosm of the dairy industry at large, where all opportunities and challenges are right at everyone’s fingertips, and where you work side-by-side with experts in other disciplines, enjoying holistic views every day of the week.
This is in effect what we have at our new headquarters and manufacturing facility in Dandenong South, Victoria. It’s not just a purpose-built plant with state-of-the-art equipment, warehousing and logistics – it’s a hub where our operations connect with, all the moving parts of dairy, in a place where opportunities abound.
All of this provides practical capacities and an economy of scale that open entirely new opportunities, no matter who you are.
· Want to develop and manufacture a white-label product?
· Want to consolidate procurement for all your supply needs?
· Want to leverage Australian processing for international markets?
Whether you’re big or small, in Australia or overseas, let’s talk.
This is how we grow together with our customers and partners. By staying in touch with all stakeholders, our multidisciplinary teams keep being challenged, keep learning and keep innovating.
