Kiwi Business Story: Ben Wooding, CEO of Red Badge Group

 
Ben Wooding is the CEO of Red Badge Group and an Owner Manager Programme alumni. 

This Kiwi Business Story is based on a podcast from 8 December 2022, and all figures quoted are from that time. You can enjoy the complete podcast here.

When did you become Red Badge CEO?

In 2020, Gary and Clair Wilton, who owned Red Badge at the time, decided they wanted to sell the business. Covid had been pretty tough, but they’d had some approaches from some of the other big security companies in New Zealand.

They made the decision to sell to myself and a couple of others. We were able to pull together a management buyout – a pretty stressful time trying to put that together.

It was all new and we learned that we needed to lean heavily on accountants and lawyers. There were a lot of sleepless nights! 

Since that time, the business really kept growing, and grew quite rapidly. We’ve grown about 250% in the last three years, and Covid was a big part of that.

In the last six months we've been reviewing our structure and we've had to align our structure with our future direction. So the CEO role really came out of that. It's been a journey, and we've now got an awesome senior leadership team in place. 

How did you hear about The Icehouse?

We had worked with BNZ and just after we bought the business at the end of 2020 they prompted us to look at the Owner Manager Programme (OMP) and encouraged us to get involved. 

I suppose at that time we probably felt a little bit out of our depth and it was a brilliant decision. We were grateful to BNZ for a lot of things, but certainly that was one of them as well – pushing us to work through the programme and get stuck into it.

How was your OMP experience?

A lot of the change that’s happened in our business in the last nine months came from OMP and the learnings from it. 

Probably the biggest thing I took away was what you get off the rest of the group – the time spent talking, the lunches, the activities that are run in the evenings, etc.. Because everyone else is in the same boat, you actually find out there's this whole group that have got the same challenges. So that was very special. 

I thought the programme was incredible; the way it was put together, the planning, the thought, the structure, those who we heard from throughout the course.

I took so much away from it and a lot of that has flowed through the business, but at the time, I didn't quite realise it. It wasn’t necessarily, ‘We've just had this course – I'm going to go and do this, this and this.’ It was almost subconscious, some of the stuff that we got up and running. People within the business were asking me how it was going, and there was lots of, ‘Actually, yes, we talked about that last week’, and then it would start something else. An amazing experience, it definitely wasn't what I expected and I highly recommend it!

Anything else?

Business-wise, this whole [company] structure change. My role fell out of OMP. We engaged a HR consultant to support that process, have done some work in the sales space, learned a hell of a lot around governance, and I’ve caught up with a couple of people from the course. So, really cool.

What does the future look like for you and for Red Badge?

We've got some pretty ambitious plans. We’ve had this steep growth curve, which we're now trying to get on top of internally, and really set ourselves up with strong system and process so that we can then look to grow again. 

At the moment we’re exploring what that looks like. Do we just stay in New Zealand? Do we look overseas? Do we look at acquisitions? And I think, at the moment, the economy and that outlook is going to play a big part of that. So we're keeping a close eye on what's happening in that space. 

The biggest thing for us – and it's a challenge that a lot of businesses are looking at – is just a massive focus on that employee experience; understanding our people, what makes them tick. Are we providing them everything they need? 

Then, are our office spaces fit for purpose? Are there places that our team actually want to be? What can we do on that space? So really honing in on our people. If we can do that, then we believe the rest of it will fall into place.