Family business, global outlook

FACING the most widespread challenge in a century, Roger Fletcher and son Farron spent a few days during March driving through outback Queensland to catch up with producers, suppliers and agents who are vital links in the Fletcher International supply chain.

That’s the way the company does business – face to face – although this time around, the social distancing conventions were observed.

After droughts and floods, farmers uncertain about how the Coronavirus pandemic was going to impact them had a new worry – many areas were infested by tiny flightless grasshoppers that were laying waste to the lush feed those graziers had spent years praying for.

Acknowledging the seriousness of the grasshopper plague, Roger Fletcher told those affected that they were exactly the same type of locusts that drove him off his family’s farm in 1965 after finally seeing good feed after an extended drought.

“I said to some people, ‘Well, see those little grasshoppers, without them I wouldn’t be standing here today because that’s the reason I left home, they ate our farm out, I put the sheep on the road, worked out while I was on the road so that I could make a living out of the stock routes, and the rest is history,’” Mr Fletcher said.

“I walked off the farm with an old ute and a little box trailer, we had our backs to the wall but there were no other options and that’s no different to what we’ve got with the Coronavirus, the same sort of challenge, and we have to make it work so you’re looking at long term.

“Out of the adversity of it all there will be some positives, and that always happens. I always say you’ve got to think forward, I think this is just another challenge,” he said.

He says starting out with nothing, and valuing family and the company workers more than material possessions, means he can face this current crisis with the same attitude he and wife Gail have used to combat many adverse situations in the past.

Mr Fletcher is urging the wider community to keep their distance and to have no unnecessary interactions, and he believes the trials and tribulations of the months ahead will bring people closer together.

“You know, out of all those things comes positives, and even with all this challenge in front of us, hopefully a few years down the track we can say we’re a better country because we’ve learned some lessons from it.”

Mr Fletcher believes the success of the company rests on innovative thinking, learning from adverse events and creating a culture where the entire workforce is encouraged to contribute ideas.

Setting up a new abattoir in 1989, the first in about 20 years, was innovative in itself at a time when dozens of council-run plants across the state were going broke.

“Dubbo’s the central part of eastern Australia, if you look at a map it’s very close to being the centre, so you can drag from Queensland and Victoria and NSW, east and west,” Mr Fletcher said.

“The city had a large enough population to supply reliable labour, the intersection of the roads was good and we were fortunate enough to get a site where we wouldn’t be entrapped by housing.

“It was a no-brainer and I mean, you’ve gotta remember that previous to that there were council abattoirs in every small town in eastern Australia. They were all failures – government can’t run businesses and they shouldn’t be running businesses,” he said.

The current crisis, he said, has brought the company even closer to their clients in countries like China which have suffered so badly.

“We’ve had a huge crisis with shipping into China, and I think it’s not only brought our Chinese clients closer together, there’s even more trust now between us,” Mr Fletcher said.

“With all the problems they’ve had in China, we haven’t had one customer let us down, that’s massive. We worry about them and they

The Fletchers value their long-standing partners – multiple generations of the family turning out to give a tour of the grain terminal to former drivers, staff, contractors and drovers from Walkers Transport at a company reunion in January 2019

worry about us.

“In adversity, good things can come out of it, and the best thing the Dubbo community can do is support each other. When people are down, give them confidence that we’re going to come out of this and Dubbo’s going to be a better city for it.”

Also proving a great help in the current crisis was the mid-1990s decision to close the office in Sydney and run the entire business from Dubbo. It was an unheard of move at the time, but it turned out to be the solution to so many marketing strategies over the years and it’s of unparalleled importance now – having all the key decision makers in the same location when critical decisions need to be made every minute.

“The problem was the people down there were selling the meat but they never saw the meat, and they couldn’t see how production was all working, so I sat down one day and said to a couple of the young people working for me, ‘Why do we need an office in Sydney?’ And I think that’s probably one of the greatest things we did,” Mr Fletcher said.

It’s not unusual to see three generations of the Fletcher family on the production floor in any one day, and Roger Fletcher says the key is to bring everyone up through the company the same way. He’s thankful that son Farron handles the farming side of the business, one daughter Pam works at the Western Australian plant, and their other daughter Melissa oversees the group as CEO.

“Our kids were taught from the bottom up you know, they’d go out with me buying sheep or they’d be working in the abattoirs; they started with little jobs and that led to other jobs, so they’ve done everything that any of the people working for us have done, and they understand where everything comes from.

“When Melissa was only three or four years old, I’d take her out buying sheep and she knew all the old agents and the farmers, but I mean, that’s all part of it.

“Melissa worked at this plant packing brains and things when she was a little kid – and that was important. All the young people who start with us, they learn under us, we never bring anyone in from outside as a senior person to run the business because they need to be taught and to learn from the bottom up,” he said.