"Apathy is the enemy": Q&A with Sarah Penn of Mayflower Consulting

To have a job! I was in hospitality and I was managing three cafes and at the age of 25 I decided that I was far too much of a generalist and if I didn't become a specialist then my life would be over. I threw that job in, quite unceremoniously, and I had a really fantastic recruitment agent who got me a job at Asgard Wealth Solutions. On my first day I was reviewing prospectuses and I attended a due diligence meeting and I just loved it! My undergraduate degree is in marketing and information management, which is all about databases and statistics. I'm a bit of a nerd, so financial services is a good place for me. I like numbers and I like people, so it's a good combination.

I had always wanted to have my own business. I was working at Macquarie when an opportunity came up to take a redundancy; I jumped at the chance to try something new. The first day that I came home, after finishing with Macquarie, I got onto Twitter and started having an opinion, which I just loved! I had some money in the bank, so I had a bit of a runway. People always say to me, "You're so brave to go out on your own", but really, the worst-case scenario is that you have to go back and get a 'real job' - which is hardly the end of the world.

It was a $10 billion transition for a global fund manager and one of the biggest transitions ever undertaken in Australia. The best part was working with really good people. The team were just fantastic.

My role was really about supporting everyone through the change and helping them to get all of the additional tasks, the ones they do on top of their day jobs, done. When the pressure is on, you really get to know people. These guys rose to the challenge and I've made some great friends out of it.

It was about a year from start to finish. Six months at low-speed, followed by six months at high-speed, we finished the project in March. It was pretty full on, but as I said, the team really rose to the challenge so even at its hardest it was a rewarding project to be part of.

With a project like this, there's 306 items on the task list and you just have to get them all done, which is fine because you can manage that and help everyone else to manage theirs - it's just a matter of doing it all. But the difficult part was the unit holder meetings because then you're relying on a whole lot of businesses and people outside of your control to vote 'yes'! To change responsible entity you need 50% of unit holders on record to vote yes. There were 12 managed funds, so we needed 50% on each of the 12 managed funds. We were told by numerous people that we wouldn't get all 12 over the line at the first unit holder meeting. That's just not the way that things usually work. Anyone that knows me though, knows that failure is not an option, so I wasn't going to just accept that... Instead I supported the front line staff who made lots of calls, emails and the occasional in person meeting and we did get all 12 across in that first meeting.

They were all Australian shareholders in this case, so that certainly helped. It doesn't make much difference to any of their businesses. A non vote is counted as a 'no' vote, so our mantra was 'apathy is the enemy'. For unit holders, it really does make sense to have everything in one place, have a more consistent customer experience and ability to grow the business and do more exciting things down the track, so that was a big part of how we approached them.

One of the key benefits with a firm like Mayflower is that there is no 'Group Think'. We're able to form our own opinions about issues and the nuances around them. Things in life aren't black and white, especially in big organisations, and when we go in to support them there is a level of nuance that we're able to bring to the table to help our clients navigate through the often-contradictory world of financial services and people. Human beings are just contradictory!

The second thing is that most of the roles that I've had have been either greenfields or transformational, so I'm able to bring that experience to clients and support them through change. Generally speaking, if you get a management consultant in, it's because you're trying to do something differently and have usually been trying to do it yourself and it's just not working out, usually due to lack of time. At the end of the day, we're helping all of the individual key players to get comfortable with changes and figure out what their place is going to be within that change and how the world's going to look at the end of it. We take them on that journey.

We do have a few exciting projects in the works at Mayflower. One of which is an outsourced offer document service. Managing offer documents is an absolutely required, but generally fairly painful, part of running managed funds, platforms and super businesses. Mayflower can run the offer document process from start to finish each year, including dealing with internal and external stakeholders, running Due Diligence meetings and preparing board papers. If any of your readers would like to join the waiting list they can reach me at: [email protected].

I think it's kind of circular. A responsible entity is a good example of that. At the same time that some big players are bringing responsible entity in-house, the out-sourced responsible entity companies are doing really well because there are so many new entrants into the funds management space who are looking to do new things. When you're just starting up, it's really helpful to have someone else managing such a risky and time-consuming part of the business. All of these things just go around in circles. There are always advantages and disadvantages with everything. That's one thing that I learnt from my time at Macquarie, with change comes opportunity.

One of the people who has been the most influential to me, is a lady called Maud Edminston. She runs all of these cafes in Perth called Miss Mauds, they're Swedish cafes. She is a quintessential entrepreneur. She arrived in Perth with a fry pan and small children, couldn't get a coffee that she liked so she started a chain of cafes. She's still in charge and she's 40 years older than me. I worked directly for her when I managed those three cafes and at the time I couldn't wait to get away from her. She was ideas-centric, thousands of ideas coming out of her all of the time. She was a perfectionist and wouldn't put up with substandard results from anyone - all of which combined made it tough to work for her. But when I left and started working in financial services, I realised how much I had learnt from her. She was, and still is, pretty amazing.

It came from Ms Edminston. She said to me, in a thick Swedish accent: "You can't just jump from A to D Sarah...you have to take people on the journey." Just because you can see what the obvious answer is, you still need to take people with you.

I do a bit of mentoring with younger women, which I really enjoy. My key things to remember are that corporate life is a game and you have to know the rules of the game so you decide which ones to break. Don't take things personally, business is just a big game and things are not personal. People aren't, for the most part, out to get you. They're usually just doing what they think they have to do to be successful.

I grew up in Perth, WA, right near the beach, which is funny because I am an inner city girl all the way. I live in Newtown now. I had the usual, happy childhood. My Dad was a marine biologist, which was the cool part. He's not cool, he's a total dorky nerd. That's where I got my nerdy nature from.

We have a housekeeper, that helps a lot. I try and get a balance over a week, rather than day to day. I'm also not one to feel guilty. I don't buy into the mother guilt. I take advantage of opportunities to do school pickups, or other things during the week, so I just refuse to be guilty about being a working mother.

I also sing in the Sydney Chamber Choir, which is really fantastic. We sing a varied repertoire. The next concert that we're doing is music by a woman called Hildegard von Bingen and she was one of the first people ever to write down music, which is pretty amazing.

I'd have to say it would be the Sydney Chamber Choir.