MARKET PULSE: We spoke to people who are setting up new business, including Roger Swinbourne and Jeremy Mansfield in Sydney and Brisbane and David Mansfield in Perth.
Watch out world, there’s a bunch of people who’ve left the big end of town and are enjoying their newfound freedom.
From what we gather, they’re also feeling pretty upbeat about the possibilities.
Among those recently retrenched are about 22 people from KPMG who were part of SGA, bought in 2014 (see our article at the time) to handle due diligence for property acquisitions. Most are doing quite well. See below.
Others include names better known in sustainability – Jeremy Mansfield, ex-Lendlease; Roger Swinbourne, ex Arup; Olivia Tyler, ex Edge Impact; and Lee Stewart ex Fonterra and Fujitsu.
Roger Swinbourne’s new company is called PositiveFuturesAdvisory but he says this group of four is talking about how they can collaborate and create impact that’s bigger than the sum of the parts.
It’s a work in progress but Swinbourne and Mansfield are both upbeat about the possibilities. We spoke to both.
Swinbourne has recently completed an Australian Institute of Company Directors course to bring him up to speed with what the senior executives know and don’t know about sustainability. Suffice to say, he says, there’s a lot of work to do for him and his new colleagues.
“Quite a few of us starting to realise that at the senior level executives and boards need assistance with the mandatory disclosure for how corporations and global financial markets are shifting and valuing assets,” he says.
Driving concern among institute members is that the obligations of company directors in Australia are tougher than in the US, for instance, with directors held more personally accountable for their actions.
“CFOs (chief financial officers) and COOs (chief operating officers) don’t have necessarily have the technical depth and breadth to address that.”
Then there are the opportunities
Avoiding risk is one thing, but are these companies also managing to take up the massive opportunities on offer?
The economy is shifting, he says. It’s a new frontier.
A big challenge is finding ESG investment-ready assets and assessing those medium- and long-term implications.
Swinbourne likes to work not so much in buildings but in the big complex spaces that lie “between buildings” – cities, in other words. Not so much “linear” projects such as buildings or road infrastructure, for instance, that avoid their connection with the public spaces and people they, in fact, have an impact on.
In the ESG realm, he agrees with the conclusion we’ve come to in our briefing and research for our next masterclass, Sustainability Reporting – tools and tactics, that it’s all a bit of a mess out there.
Individual software might be brilliant, say many experts, but it fails to integrate or “talk” to the overarching software that connects the dots.
And we need that integrated picture so that analysts, investors or government entities can look under the hood of our property assets and be confident that what they see is not deep fake AI.
But measuring the problem is not good enough, Swinbourne says. We need to know how to reverse the damage.
He has a cute analogy for the challenge – it’s like working out if there are termites in the house you want to buy, but not knowing how you’re going to get rid of them.
And we need to go beyond scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions reporting, he says. We need to track progress on all 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
This means being aware of the impact a project will have on the things around it – getting away from the “linear” development idea, like a road or…a renewable energy project.
Renewable energy developers seem to think they have a social licence to operate, Swinbourne says, but if their project doesn’t consider its impact on the complex system within which it exists, then it’s not aligned with the SDGs.
Based in Brisbane, Jeremy Mansfield is also firing up his new company, Mansfield Advisory, which will also focus on mentoring and strategic guidance for top-tier companies and government agencies.
Mansfield loves the personal transformation and empowerment story that is the other side of the transition story.
“Before I left I had at one point 17 people reporting to me included six graduates, in regional and national reporting… I had a lot of managing and mentoring. It’s something I really enjoy, helping people on their growth path and skills development,” he says.
And clearly, the fandom goes both ways. His LinkedIn post when he left acquired a massive number of comments and “likes”.
One of his mentees, Andrew Forrest, is a finalist in the Future Green Leaders awards through the Green Building Council of Australia, he proudly shares in a conversation with The Fifth Estate.
He’ll also do assessment work for ratings or commitment agreements and evaluate risk, whether it’s at the project or enterprise level, he says.
And there’s already work underway to project manage an embodied carbon policy for the Australian Sustainable Built Environment Council (ASBEC).
There’s a piece of work he would love to do more of if he can, and that’s climate resilience, but sadly, there seem to be very limited funds for this, he says.
The retrenchment bit is quite common these days, he says, and it says absolutely nothing about the victims it claims.
These days, there’s a big network of alumni from various companies who support each other’s work.
So how’s he coped with two such redundancy events?
“Some people get jaded and feel it a bit personally, then they see the macro stuff going on and realise ‘it’s not about me, it’s about a whole lot of other issues’.”
Besides, he’d been at Lendlease for so long – 26 years– that they had to pay him out a “quite reasonable amount”.
Even without that, he says, “there’s so much to celebrate”.
“I feel a bit unleashed from the corporate work and feel I can have a greater impact outside of that.” It’s an opportunity to evolve.
Mansfield already has experience in personal evolution. It’s the second time he’s been retrenched. The first time was when he worked for builders Fletchers and it decided to close the Canberra office where he was based. The year after, in 1997, he joined Civil and Civic, which was owned by Lendlease.
Then, in 2004, he jumped ship from construction into sustainability.
“I created a whole new career for myself. I wanted to be a sustainability manager and so I wrote my own job description. At the time I was a single dad with three kids and it evolved from there. I had to have more meaning in my life.”
KPMG retrenchments
Elsewhere some of the 22 people recently retrenched from KPMG seem to be finding their feet.
The cohort was part of SGA bought in 2014 (see our article at the time) to handle due diligence of buildings.
David Mansfield (no relation to Jeremy), who was part of the original SGA but left in 2019 to start up Mansfield Property Advisory, says most of his former teammates are doing well.
New Zealand based Scott Marshall, now based in New Zealand has around eight staff members in his new business. Ivan Duncan in Singapore is also running a new gig and Mansfield himself has 25 people in his business, which he co-owns with
Sydney based, Gerry Filgate.
Mansfield, who is based in Perth, told The Fifth Estate on Thursday that his business relates mostly to technical reports of risks and projected costs of potential new assets for investors.
Right now, he says, it’s understandably “not hugely busy” for transactions, thanks to hybrid values and falling values, but sooner or later, investors such as super funds will need to either buy property to shore up their portfolio or change their weightings towards property.
Around the nation, the leasing work is capturing the bulk of the attention as tenants look to recalibrate their office space needs and accept that no staff will come back to the office full time anytime soon.
Others, though, such as Make Architects in London, have managed to attract their staff back with an equal measure of “carrot and stick”. Mind the carrot part looks fun – cultural and educational events and plenty of “design safaris” that essentially mean a great night out on the town. If it works, it works.
See our article with an extensive suite of video clips and an audio on the round table briefing provided by the Make team.
Value Net Group
Another company that’s recently started is Value Net Group, whose founder is Andrew Pawley.
Pawley’s company name is inspired by strategic value game theory, which at its core is related to co-opetition – the idea that collaboration, even with competitor companies, can assist your company.
The new business will focus on bringing a UK technology to Australia that can cut the massive waste of energy that occurs incidentally and can be abated – such as walk in and drive in coolrooms. And it’s run remotely.
It’s early days for Pawley, but with a background as chief executive of a transport company and various global sales roles, including a ground handling company at the airport and at Qantas, he is confidence he’s on a winner.
The beauty of the technology, he says, is that it requires no capex (capital expenditure), and it can be run remotely.