About this episode

Family businesses can be great places to work, they’re often warm environments, with nice relationships between staff and with external stakeholders. But can ‘nice’ impact progress and performance? Dahlsens’ is a 150-year-old family business, in the building supplies space. But when General Manager, Mark Cooper started in 2018, he found that ‘nice’ wasn’t really cutting the mustard.

So, just prior to the 2019 Victorian bushfires and COVID pandemic, Mark along with Head of Operations, Mick Mann, engaged Leading Teams Facilitator, Ellie Pietsch, to help the team increase performance, enable quicker decision making and manage time more effectively. Not only was the business able to manage these rolling crises far better than it might have otherwise, but Dahlsens was able to expand and grow successfully during the upheaval. Dahlsens is still a nice business, but not to the detriment of performance.