Steven Joyce always gravitates to where there is action. In true Kiwi businessman style he is a pragmatist. He worries for the country. An economics major, former breakfast radio announcer and at one time, accumulator of radio stations, he is an accomplished entrepreneur with a conscience for giving something back and passionate about supporting businesses –both small and larger sized -and the people in them.. He will soon leave his role as CEO of Jasons Travel Media to seek to make an impact in the political sphere.
I have always had a bit of an interest in politics – not that I was originally planning to do anything about it. Once we had done all our mergers and acquisitions at RadioWorks the Canadians came riding over the hill in 2000 and basically raided us. Over the course a year they bought the company out.
I needed a break. I was disappointed to leave and my initial reaction was a bit negative because we were on a roll, but I overcame it. It wasn’t too painful. They paid good money.
In hindsight, being forced into this major life change was the best thing for me. I felt like I had just got out of a washing machine. I may have gone on for another 20 years and missed out on a whole lot of other things. From 22 to 38, my life was a huge, amazing ride, very focused on business with my personal life always second. I was 38 and suddenly thinking I had never had a family of my own. I was hugely unfit, so I joined the gym and eventually ran a few half-marathons.
I also joined the National Party. I nearly stood at the 2002 election but didn’t feel ready to do anything that all-encompassing, so I pulled out. I wouldn’t have got in anyway because I would have been a fair way down the list and the 2002 result was a bit of a shocker.
I was known to Bill English, then the National leader, who wanted to do a post-election review – I became involved. They wanted somebody who was a bit fresh to the Party but who they could trust to chair. There was a three-person panel – two really good longstanding party people and me – and we had to do this campaign review in six weeks.
I had never done much travelling, and had been planning to go to Europe with my partner at the time, so after the campaign review off we went. Michelle Boag had resigned as president of the National Party board and Judy Kirk had taken over the role. I was halfway around Europe when I got a call from Judy, asking if I wanted to come back and help run the full strategic review of the structure of the organization.
It culminated in a constitutional conference in April 2003 for the National Party. We made about 85 different changes to the party’s constitution. Normally, I think these sorts of exercises in political parties often end up as an exercise in feeling better. Everyone gets together to lick the wounds and regroup. It needed more than that, and together we gave the party the biggest set of changes it had ever had.
I was really aware that I was new and could potentially do some damage. We had to be careful. The organisational structures had grown up over many years and for all the right reasons. The problem was they weren’t suited to nationwide campaigning for MMP, which requires a centralized, focused and managed campaign. We are also now in a nationwide media environment which didn’t exist 30 years ago.
The party then invited me to run the party for a year, and to help find a campaign manager and general manager for the 2005 election. About nine months in they asked me to stay until the election, and I accepted. I always intended to step out after the 2005 election and I did that.
As I was preparing to step down I was approached to join the Jason’s Travel Media board, where I was a director for a year, and then John (Sandford) and I decided to swap places following his decision to retire, with me taking up the CEO role. . We realised that we were going to do a lot of work on the website, and I was really interested in the web from a commercial perspective.
My attitude is that you can only do your best. I tend to lead from the front. My passion is to make things work. I am more than anything else a bit of a mechanic of organizations. I love to fix things up and to make them work better. The zoology degree doesn’t quite fit, but that was more about learning how to learn, and I really enjoyed chasing after fresh-water crayfish in the volcanic plateau. What drives me? Looking at a project that I am interested in making it work better, fixing it up. That is what I love to do.
Many organizations are held back. The people in them are held back. Often it’s a lack of personal ownership, not resources, that affects people’s performance. Most people come to work and want to have enough control over what they do so that they can do a good job. There are way too many good people that can’t because their priorities aren’t set properly, or they are constantly shunted around, or because they are not given a clear understanding of what they are supposed to achieve.
My focus is on people and structures. Take Jasons. Our first strategic issue when I took over was the website, which wasn’t growing. This was right at the time when the web was exploding.
That first year, out of necessity, I became a web-head. Parts of it were way too detailed, but I had to be in a position where I know enough to ask the right questions and know when I’m being flannelled – when you talk to a website developer and they go, blah, blah, blah. You have to know enough to know whether they are telling you the full story.
To me the web will ultimately be just another distribution channel. It will eventually have the same broad rules as all the others. Brand-building and marketing will be very important. Content will be much more important. The techniques are different but the principles behind them are the same. It is all about people and ideas and delivering what people want.
I have goals, but I don’t have a formal goalsetting process. The milestones have moved a bit over the years. When you are young and start your first business, a lot of your identity is wrapped up in that organization. That’s good, but a bit one-dimensional, so now my goals are broader.
It is about my family and making a contribution, and knowing that the company’s not yours – it’s on loan. Everybody is a caretaker. I want to see Jason’s succeed because I think it will be great to have an Australasian travel media company, based in New Zealand, which gives the wotifs and the Fairfaxes of the world a run for their money.
I am normally asleep after 10pm and when I’m in New Zealand I tend to be at the office by about 7am. I bail out at about 4pm and go home and check my emails, and see my daughter and my wife.
Politics will be challenging again. The huge challenge in politics is travel. I commuted to Wellington for two-and-a-half years to be the General Manager of the National Party. Every week for two nights a week, and it just sucks it out of you.
My wife worked in politics before she met me, so she has an understanding of what it is all about. It’s a chance to help and do some positive things for New Zealand with a set of skills that I have built up in business, marketing, and politics. I have a real passion about New Zealand doing better. I worry for the country, I really do, because I spend a bit of time in Australia and that gives a perspective of how big a job it is to get New Zealand into the position where people who are entrepreneurial want to live here in greater numbers.
I think we should be using our advantages of smallness to help with that, rather than try and build the same bureaucracy that everybody else has. There are only four million people. It can’t be that hard. We don’t need the bureaucracy on an equivalent basis as the UK or Europe. Isn’t there an advantage of being smaller, and if so why are we not taking it? I think the national conversation hasn’t much been about encouraging entrepreneurs. Some people will do it anyway, no matter who the government is, but we need more of them.
That is my passion, probably because I have a small business history myself. My dad was a grocer. I know what it’s like to work 14 hours a day and all weekend. I know what it is to be answerable to the bank manager.
In terms of decision-making I am a great believer in putting hard stuff on the back-burner for a day or two. Sometimes if you worry about something too much you just end up getting more confused – you have to slip it on the back-burner and wait for the answer to suggest itself.
Back in the early days, my master plan was to be a vet. I went to Massey University in Palmerston North – there were about 160 of us first, general-science year, and 45 places. I missed out.
The zoology degree was sort of a holding pattern. It has been a lot of fun since, but I’ve never used it in my career.
I discovered economics, and that was my major. I loved the way markets worked. I was also interested in radio, so I got into student radio. I went along to do the news initially and the next year I was the programme director and the year after that I was running it. It just sort of happened because I hung around.
In 1984, there was a bunch of us that were interested in radio. I suppose we had an entrepreneurial bent. At the time, the accepted means of progressing in the industry was either a support role or announcer training on Radio New Zealand or a midnight-to-dawn shift on a private radio station for a few years to earn your stripes. None of us were into that.
We knew the market, so five of us decided we would start our own radio station. One was Jeremy Corbett, who’s now on More FM. They allowed us to set up short-term broadcasts over the summer. So we did that for three or four years and during the process of we applied for a warrant, which involved a full court hearing. For four years of our lives we just argued the case and were poor as church mice because we were only allowed to be on air for seven weeks a year.
We finally went on air in late 1987. I was 24. The average age of the station staff was about 20 or 21. We had one guy that we nicknamed Granddad – he was 32.
After a few years, the senior businesspeople we had on our board were smart and saw we needed to grow. Radio Otago from Dunedin were hoovering up all the stations at that point and we were struggling to find anything to buy. We ended up buying a station in Tauranga called Coastline FM in 1992.
The market had just been deregulated and nobody knew quite what that meant. In 1993 we had been told by the Ministry that ran the frequencies that there weren’t going to be many more frequencies, so we aimed to get as many as possible.
We bought three frequencies in Rotorua with 20-year licenses, for $15,000 each. We bought three in Palmerston North for about $100,000 each. In Tauranga we bought a couple, and in New Plymouth and Hamilton, and rebranded the company as RadioWorks.
We merged RadioWorks into Radio Pacific around 1997, which gave us a listing on the stockmarket, and I was the CEO of the music stations at that point, and then of the whole company when Derek Lowe retired. When we started out in radio I was the drive announcer. I did the breakfast show for a year-and-a-half. That was quite exhausting, joking about putting cream pies in people’s faces on the breakfast show, and then putting on a suit at 9am to go and talk to the bank manager or your big clients.
Steven Joyce at a Glance
· Completed a zoology degree at Massey University.
· Started his first radio station, Energy FM, in his home town of New Plymouth, at age 21.
· Retired as Managing Director in April 2001 on his 38th birthday after RadioWorks was purchased by Canadian’s Canwest In 2000/2001.
· He chaired the National Party’s three person Campaign Review after the 2002 election, and then its major Strategic Review which led to a full reorganisation of the Party in April 2003.
· Was the National Party’s first General Manager and he managed the 2005 election campaign for the Party.
· For the last two years, Steven has been Chief Executive of NZAX-listed Jasons Travel Media Limited
· Spends his spare time developing his 7 acre lifestyle property at Albany, north of Auckland, where he lives with his wife Suzanne, their one year old daughter Amelia, Gemma the Retrodoodle, two cattle, and assorted ducks, geese and wild rabbits.
Goalgetting Tips For Today
- Do put 120 percent into everything you do, but don’t put your whole identity into your work. Be more than what you do.
- Find a way to be empowered in what you do – it will make you more effective
- Don’t wait. Start your exercise regime today.
- Opportunities come wrapped in the strangest disguises. When you face a major crisis at work – try to identify what your learning should be.
- Avoid the traffic – go in to work earlier and leave earlier (or vice versa) – that way you get to achieve more out of each day
What will you do today to make an impact on your industry? Do you keep an eye on balance, family and health?