A pleasure not a problem

I’ve decided to do a series of articles on mentors. Not the formal kind, where you reach out to someone previously unknown to request wisdom in exchange for coffee. I‘m talking about the ones you may not realise are shaping your critical thinking framework, and career, until months or even years later. The ones that gently, or not so gently, steer and guide you. Those whose sound bites reverberate in your head and reappear much later, just when you need them. So, over the coming weeks I’ll go through the mentors that have shaped the marketer and business person I am today. 

First up is Phillip Morgan.

I met Phillip in 1995, I had just turned 18, moved to Newcastle, from Sydney, and was in my first semester of a B.Bus. I was in Phillip's Marketing 101 class at the University of Newcastle. When he spoke about businesses and their brands it was in real life terms, including how they can both inspire and infuriate us. I’ll never forget his impassioned diatribes on his love-hate relationship with CommBank. He taught me that people will sometimes like and sometimes hate your brand, often simultaneously. As well as not think very much about your brand at all, which is worse.

Phillip’s jam is distribution, the Place ‘P’. He loves distribution and as a result I do too. When clients would question marketing’s rigor and efficacy (he owned a marketing consultancy, The Grassroots Group) he would delight in explaining, “Corporately-owned, backwardly integrated, marketing distribution systems” and how they have reshaped the retail landscape in Australia over the past few decades.

He’s also a Services Marketing man, in fact he did his Masters research and thesis on the subject. When he told me about it I was immediately hooked. Phillip was analysing customer pain points, reshaping service offerings and baking solutions into them before I had properly shaved my face for the first time. It’s people like Phillip that were the forebears of Customer Experience (CX) and were doing it before the term had even been coined.

After teaching me at undergrad in multiple subjects he also taught my wife and I at postgrad in the early 2000’s. He delights in telling the story of how competitive we were in class... and how she usually got the better grades! The final year long strategy course he delivered was a revelation. We used MarkStrat, an FMCG market simulation, and our group loved it (and killed it!). We called ourselves “The Glue” and years later we are all senior marketing leaders and still great mates. Here’s looking at you @SallyEagleton , @MichaelUlph, @KateMurphy.

After graduating with M.Mktg and continuing my career, I remember hiring Phillip for various consultancy jobs and he spoke at the first national conference I organised for 3D Paint stores way back in 2004 in Darwin (that’s a baby faced Joel with Phillip in the photo). He has been a referee for me and a sounding board many times over the years. He’s had to push me once or twice when I was off course but he always did so in a way that made you self-reflect and eventually realise he was right and you were wrong!

Phillip says that I’m a, “man after my time”. Meaning I should have been in business in the 70s and 80s, the era of the loooong lunch. We share a love of food and wine and the service of it. Phillip owned popular Italian restaurants in the 1990s in Sydney, Ricardo’s in Crows Nest, and in Melbourne. His stories of running the restaurants are a masterclass in service excellence, culture and delivering authentic service experiences via his all Italian, all crazy ‘family’ of staff. The who's who of the Sydney advertising and broadcast media scene used to dine at Ricardo's and everything was, "a pleasure not a problem". A catchphrase Phillip coined in reply to any customer request, from the innocuous to the absurd.  

Phillip was, like me, a Marketing Manager for a national organisation and came relatively late to academia. It was he that introduced me to sessional lecturing at University back in 2006. He gave me the confidence to do it and even shared my first course, so we delivered it together and he showed me the ropes. He notes how our careers have been eerily similar. I have enjoyed being able to guest lecture in his courses over the years at UTS, Macquarie and of course the University of Newcastle, to give back to his students some of the rich knowledge he imparted to me over the years.

My respect for Philip comes from the holistic nature of his business experience; corporate practitioner, small business owner, marketing consultant and marketing academic. He’s also just a bloody great bloke.

Phillip and I can talk shop for hours and debate theories and practices until the sun goes down and the wine bottle is empty. The gems of wisdom he has imparted to me have stuck in my mind and have shaped the strategic choices I’ve made in roles spanning the length of my career. Especially when it comes to Distribution and Services Marketing. We still catch up regularly and can talk the hind legs off a donkey. There’s always too much to discuss and not enough time to discuss it. 

Thank you Phillip, you’ve been immeasurably valuable to me in my career and also in life my friend.