Huon Aquaculture - Case Study
With Frances Bender – Co-Founder and Executive Director
From Match Fit: Shaping Asia capable leaders
Huon Aquaculture builds its senior team’s Asia capabilities by ensuring they visit key export markets frequently
The founders of Huon Aquaculture strongly believe that major future growth of their business will be driven by new markets in Asia.
Frances Bender, co-founder and executive director, explains: “Having access to Asian customers gives us confidence that we will be able to grow our business beyond its current output. The [salmon] industry has a strong domestic market, but it is certainly prone to fluctuations. The ability to export to Asian markets gives us the security to further invest in the business, particularly as the lead time to get products to market is long, at three years.”
Although Huon is a listed company, it is still majority family-owned by Frances and her husband Peter, the CEO. This husband and wife team that started Huon more than 30 years ago has led the charge on the firm’s exports to Japan since 2007.
Ms Bender cites knowledge of the market, including the operating environment, logistical challenges, financial regulations and payment terms, as well as a deep and current understanding of consumer preferences and behaviours, as the Asia capabilities that impact their business the most. For Huon, staff with Japanese language capabilities have also been a major asset in helping to communicate effectively with key stakeholders.
As the business grows, Ms Bender acknowledges that it will be important for Huon to have a stable of in-house talent with strong Asia capabilities to maximise opportunities. She says small-to-medium businesses that feel they lack the resources to hire Asia capable talent must find ways of sourcing advice or services that help to improve their overall capacity to do business in Asia.
She adds that while it’s important to recruit Asia capabilities into a business, it is also possible to build and grow these capabilities in existing employees. The Huon co-founders have done this by making frequent visits to Japan and dealing directly with their Japanese distributor. Their goal now is to ensure
that these capabilities are leveraged to skill up the rest of the senior leadership team as they explore new markets in China, Indonesia and Singapore. Supply chain challenges in particular vary greatly between each market and it is critical for the team to spend time in-market to build local market-specific knowledge and relationships.
“We talk about Asia as one place and it’s not,” says Ms Bender. “It’s a lot of different countries with very different cultures, so being able to understand those cultures and relate, as people, to your customers in those areas is really important. That’s something that we pride ourselves on – developing real people-to-people relationships.”
Ms Bender says that initially, the team’s Asia capabilities tended to grow in an organic way. Australians with Japanese language skills were attracted to the business as it offered them a chance to work for a business directly engaged with Japanese distributors and customers. A senior member of Huon’s sales and marketing team, who now leads their export business, had spent five years living and working in Japan, albeit in an unrelated industry. “He has a strong understanding of the business culture and can easily adapt to it. Even some of his connections in-market proved to be useful to us,” Ms Bender says.
Additionally, their Japanese partner visits the farm in Tasmania regularly, operating almost as an extension of the Huon team in Japan. Ms Bender is emphatic that understanding their Japanese partner’s business is critical to their long-term success in Japan. She explains that in growing their Japanese business through new distributors, it is critical for senior members of the customer and sales teams to have a deep understanding of the market and different consumer segments to ensure that they aren’t signing deals with their existing partners’ competitors.
As Huon grows its business to China, Singapore and Indonesia, the need to have staff and external advisors with the relevant capabilities to facilitate effective relationships with potential partners in each country, as they currently have in Japan, is clear. The company has plans for more senior staff to spend time in key export markets, to build their knowledge of the market and its customers, and operational challenges and considerations there, as well as build relationships with senior counterparts at local partner organisations.
“While we plan for volume growth and placement in each of the export markets we are considering, we need to match the requisite growth in skills and capabilities to be able to service those markets effectively. There’s no use for us in growing lots of fish if we don’t have the capability amongst the people around us to be able to sell that product,” she says.
She argues that Asia capabilities need to exist at the senior level of any organisation interacting with Asia. “Our Deputy CEO is in Japan and has been meeting with our customers [distributors] there. That’s our way of upskilling him, allowing him to establish the strong understanding and relationships that Peter and I have built up over 30 years.”
Huon understands that the success of introducing new products to market, be it their traditional export market, Japan, or other markets in Asia, relies on a team that has a deep understanding of consumers in these markets, as well as other critical operational aspects of exporting. The breadth of Asia-relevant capabilities across the business will therefore need to grow to mirror the company’s growth strategy.
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