Carsales.com.au

Joining a fifty-person company

I joined carsales.com.au in a small Burwood office when the whole company was around thirty people, long before it became the ASX-listed business it is today. I started in an entry-level, customer-facing role, then picked up "CSI" duties: phoning people who'd enquired through the site to check whether they'd bought and, if not, why not. It was an early customer-intelligence function that turned out to be a genuinely useful retention tool. From there I started helping out with dealership photography, took it over fully, and was eventually handed a dedicated installer role: visiting newly signed dealerships to set up their initial stock and photos on the company's inventory system and train their staff to maintain it themselves. I covered virtually every dealership across Victoria, then did the same initial rollout in New South Wales, before training someone else to take the role over.

Running ERG International

From there I moved into management, promoted to head up ERG International, a market-intelligence business covering web and physical sales data across construction equipment, marine and bikes, which had been absorbed into the company alongside another acquisition around the time it moved offices to Oakleigh. I managed a small team of an account manager, a salesperson, a programmer and reporting staff, modernised the way we reported data from manual processes to proper database and spreadsheet systems, and travelled to Singapore each year to run an industry breakfast for major construction-equipment clients. I also ran the Australian construction-manufacturing group CMEG. I was mentored directly by a senior figure at the company and was selected for the Future Directors Program. ERG was eventually folded into a larger division of the business that covered data, training, photography and website-building.

Why I left

As carsales scaled into the number-one classifieds business in the country and acquired smaller competitors, I watched leadership start layering in the more rigid, bureaucratic workflows those acquisitions brought with them, over the flexibility I credit for the company's own rise in the first place. The job increasingly became meetings about meetings. I was holding vested share options that I later worked out would have been worth a genuine fortune, and I walked away from them when I left. It was burnout and wanting out of the culture, more than any single trigger. I took a multi-month career break afterward, which is where the next chapter, Visual Entertainment Group and McGuire Media, picks up.

Why it matters

This is the chapter that turned a habit of building things (starting with the pizza shop) into an actual career: onboarding hundreds of dealerships, running a business line with its own P&L discipline, and learning what it feels like when a company's culture outgrows the thing that made it worth joining. It's also, I think, the clearest example of why I've never been precious about starting at the bottom.

Read the longer version of my career story →