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a
Ndrew
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arSwell
GolDen ruleS
1. Nothing happens without a brilliant, committed
team.
2. The goalposts change every day, and you must
be able to change rapidly.
3. Never underestimate the value of loyalty.
4. Never let the competition know what you are
doing.
5. Always be thinking about how you can make
your brand better than the competition.
The Day That
Changed A Life
Margot Cairnes
Zaffyre International;
established 1986;
thirty employees;
$10 million- plus turnover
Sitting outside a kiosk on
one of Sydney’s northern
beaches, Margot Cairnes
had no inkling that her life was about to change
forever. It was 1985, and she was up to her neck
in debt, unemployed, bringing up two children
alone and nursing her dying father.
Desperately in need of a break, she’d decided
to have a ‘rich day’ with her kids. ‘We were really,
Photo: Anthony R
eginato
68 HOW I MADE MY FIRST MILLION
really, really poor,’ says Cairnes. ‘But we test- drove
a Jaguar, then went to Double Bay and tried on
beautiful clothes we couldn’t afford. Then we
went to the kiosk at Manly’s Shelly Beach and I
had a glass of champagne and the kids had a glass
of pink lemonade. I said to the kids, “One day
we’ll be rich.”
‘My ten- year- old daughter looked at me and
said, “Mummy, we already are rich. We have each
other.” I was speechless. I felt about two inches
tall.’ At that moment, Cairnes resolved to work
hard when she could and be happy with what
she had. Not long after, her father passed away. It
was time to find a job.
Years before—while still in her early twen-
ties—the trained teacher had moved from
Sydney to Darwin and landed the top position
in a child- care company. Taking charge of five
child- care centres and three family day- care
schemes with more than 1000 children, Cairnes
jumped into the deep end and survived.
‘I had also trained as a psychotherapist,’ Cairnes
says. Now a mother and deep in debt, ‘I had to
decide what to do with all my qualifications. But
I couldn’t decide—so I made it up. I started my
own company and just went out to do some-
thing that hadn’t been done before.’
Cairnes created her own brief: a consultancy
THE DAY THAT CHANgED A LIFE 69
that would improve managers’ self- belief and
relationships with their staff and in doing so help
companies reach goals they’d previously seen as
impossible. She says it was ‘pure luck’ that two
men from Victoria’s Portland aluminium smelter
heard her giving a speech. ‘They liked what I
said, introduced me to their boss, and that led me
to where I am today,’ she says.
Cairnes took seventeen managers from the
smelter on a camping trip through central Aus-
tralia, on small boats down the then- flooded
Cooper’s Creek. ‘We were gone for ten days, and
I called it a leadership training course,’ she laughs,
admitting that she made it up as the group went
along. ‘The first night out we camped on mud
flats without tents. Me and seventeen men, most
of whom snored,’ she says. ‘In the end, it changed
their lives—and the way they ran the smelter.’
Cairnes said it felt as if she’d ‘found the cure to
organisation cancer’. After that, things happened
fast. ‘I started to get headhunted.’ She worked
for the Reserve Bank of Australia and for BP,
both in Australia and in Europe, helping with a
merger with Mobil.
Cairnes’ debts had been more than paid off
by this stage, and her first million was racked up
before she headed overseas. She allowed herself a
moment to reflect back on that day at the beach.
70 HOW I MADE MY FIRST MILLION
‘I was sitting at my home in Clontarf on the bal-
cony, looking at the water, holding a first- class
ticket to go to London to stay in the Ritz Hotel.
I thought, “This is it, I’ve done it.” ’
Cairnes also bought herself a BMW and—as
she still does today—indulged in natural ther-
apies as a reward for all her hard work. ‘I love
massages and going to spas, and I’ll often go to
health retreats just to spoil myself,’ she says.
At first she resisted
hiring staff and set-
ting up an office,
but the business was
expanding so fast she
couldn’t avoid it. She
finally set up Zaf-
fyre International in
the late 1990s. Fletcher Challenge Energy chief
executive Greig Gailey had worked with Cairnes
on the BP–Mobil merger. Now in New Zea-
land, he asked her to come and work with him.
‘He said: “I need to turn around a whole com-
pany, so I need you to have a company”,’ recalls
Cairnes. ‘That was when I started to recruit other
consultants.
‘I just didn’t have it in my blood to build the
company before that point. [Growth] wasn’t my
driving force. I just loved doing what I did and it
‘
‘
I was sitting at my home
in Clontarf on the balcony,
looking at the water,
holding a first- class ticket
to go to London to stay in
the Ritz Hotel. I thought,
“This is it, I’ve done it.”
THE DAY THAT CHANgED A LIFE 71
made me a lot of money. I get my thrills working
as a consultant. As soon as you have a whole lot
of other p eople working for you, then you are
really doing something else.’
She soon found herself jet- setting on an
almost permanent basis. ‘One year I was out
of the country for thirty weeks. I was working
with Levi Strauss in the US, BP in London, and
Fletcher Challenge in New Zealand.’
An unspoken partnership started up and, each
time Gailey moved on to restructure a new com-
pany, he took Cairnes with him. Other major
corporate clients include Zinifex, Origin Energy,
Western Power, Alcoa and Telstra. With twenty-
five staff and an office in North Sydney, Zaffyre
continues to do consulting work throughout
Europe, the US and Australia and is currently
experiencing a resources boom of its own in
Perth. ‘On a good day I walk into the office and
there are about three p eople here because the
rest are consulting all around the world,’ Cairnes
says. ‘These days I myself mostly work with just a
handful of managing directors and boards.’
So is retirement on the cards? Not likely,
she says: ‘I tried to retire and it didn’t work. At
the time I’d become tired of going to work.
I suppose I got run down and burnt out and I
tried to disappear to Byron Bay. In the end I had
72 HOW I MADE MY FIRST MILLION
a year off, but that gave me a chance to change
my attitude. I had a year of doing yoga, going to
the gym, going to the beach and finding a new
husband.’
Cairnes now has a house in Annandale, Syd-
ney, and a holiday house at Byron Bay, where
she spends a week every month writing books.
She has six under her belt already, including
Boardrooms that Work—A Guide to Board Dynam-
ics; Staying Sane in a Changing World and Peaceful
Chaos. As to the failed retirement, Cairnes has
no regrets. ‘The company went on, of course,
but not as well as it would have if I’d been here.
Now that I’m back, it’s just sky- rocketing, and
I’m having a ball.’
And there’s a new challenge down the track.
‘When you see p eople come to life and reach
goals they once wouldn’t have dared imagine, it
is really exciting. I’m very keen to take what we
do to more companies. But I also want to take
it into communities. There’s no reason why a
government couldn’t do this and take the whole
country to a new level. If you can get an entire
community to go through this process, the social
good is just colossal. That is my dream.’
Given her track record, there’s every reason to
believe she’ll make that dream, too, come true.
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