Christchurch’s Rachel Shearer seemed to have it all, but something was missing.
Working in the rock’n’roll town of Los Angeles in the music industry was the opportunity of a lifetime and everyone’s dream.
And for a while it was.
After being raised on a North Canterbury farm and graduating with an honours degree in journalism and political science at the University of Canterbury, she headed off for her OE.
That took her to Sydney in 2000, where she began a career in recruitment and then on to an HR and recruitment role for investment banks in London.
When her LA-based brother took bands he managed to European tours and festivals she would fly out to catch up with him.
Backstage tickets and meeting the artists up close was heaven sent for the music lover.
Sensing she wasn’t fully happy at the prospect of a lifetime career in banking, her brother suggested she work for him in LA where he had lived since the mid-1990s.
"One day he said to me, ‘Rach what are you doing? You are not enjoying the investment banking world, you love music and my business is growing so I need someone I can trust to come and help me run my business’," recalls PGG Wrightson’s (PGW) new general manager of its wool division. "I went ‘sure, if that’s going to work, what do I have to lose?"’
A visit to New Zealand reinforced she wanted to be closer to family and she left London at short notice to work alongside her brother.
In California she was part of a music management business working on behalf of solo artists and bands signed up to companies such as Warner Records.
Bands they managed would go on tour to support the likes of Nickelback, but changes were afoot that would alter the business side of the music industry.
"I lived in LA for two and a-half years and this is where the parallels of what I do now come in. The music business in the early to mid-2000s was before Facebook. This was when MySpace was really big and we were just starting to get into music streaming and CDs were starting to go by the wayside. It was a period of massive change. The record labels and everybody else were going ‘what’s all this live streaming about?’. So, working for my brother, we reshaped the business. We had to accept the end of CDs and understand the way bands could make money which was different than previously. It was a great time of my life because my brother and I got the chance to spend a lot of time together as adults, do something very different and I got to have a career break as well as an eye-opening experience that taught me a huge amount."
Eventually, the sunny skies and veneer-like laid-back vibe of California began to pale.
Returning home again one Christmas reinforced she was seeing this seemingly idyllic experience in a different light. The shallowness of the entertainment industry and Hollywood wasn’t her reality.
"I think it was the time when Britney Spears shaved her head. The whole of LA was talking about it and it was out of control, crazy. It was when some global event happened with massive loss of life and Britney Spears was the only person on the front cover of the news and I went ‘this was not real’. It seems like everybody in LA are the prettiest and most talented people from small towns in America and they go there to try to make themselves, make connections with people to get ahead because everybody is a waitress/movie star. I just missed the authenticity of life and came home."
On reflection, she can see now her time in LA opened her up to disruptive forces and the opportunities they can bring.
As the general manager of wool for a large stock and station company, it is her job to lead a team in an industry dealing with change coming from many directions.
Just as the music industry had to adapt to live-streaming and waning CD sales, the wider wool industry is reconciling to a shrinking sheep flock and plotting a way forward against changing demand, well-heeled competitors and shifting trends.
"That’s where I see the significance of an industry going through change and needing to do things differently, but being respectful of the past as music is music and wool is wool, but the way to market there are similarities. Even the channel to becoming a musician changed. The A and R guys (reps signing up new artists for record labels or music publishers) used to go to clubs and band venues looking for new talent and then suddenly Justin Bieber or somebody put a video up on YouTube and became discovered and talent shows started coming along. So it was a pretty significant period of change. You also learn about how important it is to be yourself and to trust in your self."
Returning home to Christchurch, she got an HR role for a mining company, progressing to become HR general manger before it ended up going into voluntary administration a few years later.
As tough as this experience was, it was also a career-defining moment for her. She credits a young chief executive from Australia — one of her mentors — for passing on the value of understanding how critical authenticity and honesty is in leadership.
Ms Shearer — the irony of her surname isn’t lost on her — grew up with her siblings on a sheep and beef farm in North Canterbury’s Okuku, near Ashley River.
She watched her progressive farming father always be on the look-out for the next positive change and explore new ways to improve his land, stock and business.
From an early age she and her brothers would help out on the farm with hay making, tailing, shearing and working the lambing beat.
The wool shed he built with rimu floors was, when the corriedale and coopworth ewes weren’t being shorn, a venue for live bands and community dances. Her job was sweeping and tidying up around the bench and she remembers jumping up and down in the wool press.
Then one day in the early 1990s the decision was made to sell the farm, since subdivided into lifestyle blocks. In her early teens, she was so distraught she tried to chain herself to the front gate in protest.
It was her father who would be the catalyst for her return to the wider farming sector.
As a girl, the Pyne Gould Guinness store in their local town of Rangiora was her favourite place to go with her dad.
When visiting her parents many years later for a Sunday roast, her father brought out a job advertisement from the newspaper for the role of people and safety general manager at PGW.
That’s the next job for her, she was told.
Successfully applying for the role in 2016, she spent the next eight years on the executive leadership team for the company.
Her brief was to manage the people, payroll, HR and health and safety-related activities for the nearly 2000 team members across the country.
A few years into the job, chief executive Stephen Guerin began investing in her strategic leadership and governance development.
This was put into practice when she began working in the background with late wool manager Grant Edwards to develop a revised strategy for the wool business until his early death last April.
She became the acting manager and was then asked to take on the responsibilities permanently a month ago.
In addition to the wide-reaching wool role, she’s also the executive director of Bidr, an online livestock trading platform, and director of other PGW subsidiaries.
Ms Shearer said Mr Edwards’ leadership and the legacy he and recently retired stalwarts left had helped her transition during an unsettling time.
Her team was carrying forward many of his thoughts and ideas to put together a plan for the future direction of the company’s wool division, she said.
"I kind of feel like I’ve come home. It’s a role I feel at home in maybe because of my background or being a sheep farmer’s daughter, but there is something about working where the real work happens."
Fresh eyes and fresh thinking she brings to the job have been welcomed to help bring new direction.
"I can’t reveal the exact numbers of wool bales we deal with, but as is the case with our competitors, it is diminishing. We have to recognise with the declining sheep numbers there comes a declining clip so there’s less wool coming through for New Zealand these days. So part of my role is to work out what role does PGW play in the wool industry, what can we be the best at for the sale of this amazing fibre from New Zealand growers through to the world. It is a work in progress, but since stepping into this seat I’ve realigned our leadership team and brought in a couple of fresh faces. So together as a new team, we’ve regrouped to set ourselves up and I’m incredibly encouraged by the depth of talent in our team. There’s a real excitement about wanting to contemplate doing things differently and changing the mindset of: this is the way we’ve always done it. We’d always been led to believe that’s what the wool business was like, but I found it to be the complete opposite — people want to see this cool fibre proceed and want to find new ways of doing things."
Exactly how this will shape up remains unknown.
Mrs Shearer said they were looking at new opportunities and channels to markets and to be as efficient as possible.
A large part of the business was in logistics, buying wool from farms, processing and testing it, putting it through the auction rooms or making it available to exporters.
She said wool was hard to fault in this area and the company was looking at how its handling and distribution could be made more sustainable.
On a simple level it could be replacing plastic bags with alternative storage for core samples and already electric forklifts had been brought into the fleet to strengthen the sustainable story.
Bidr was going well for bull, on-farm and other livestock sales and was picking up for machinery, dog and other farm-related sales.
More opportunities could exist for online buying or trading of wool. Improvements could be made to existing activities or adding new avenues sought by clients, she said.
Her new working base is the company’s Christchurch wool store.
Each morning the door opens to the unmistakable smell of lanolin wafting from rows and rows of wool bales or lines being tested and classed or presented for auction or sale.
Still new to the national role, one of her priorities is to meet the many representatives in the field, forklift drivers, wool classers and other staff at PGW’s other wool stores in Invercargill, Mosgiel and Napier.
Once the dust settles, she would like to accompany the reps on farm visits.
Ms Shearer said she had been fortunate throughout her career to have many strong mentors — including her father, brother, consulting managers, Solid Energy CEO Dan Clifford, Mr Guerin and previous PGW CEOs.
They had helped open doors for her and reinforced the importance of being authentic, upfront and honest and that it was OK to not have all the answers, and separate work from home, she said.
Her team knows they can call or text her in the evenings if it’s an emergency, otherwise it can wait. She isn’t a follower of working all the hours around the clock.
Rather, she wants to be the best person when focused at work, the best mother and wife when she’s at home and being productive in the hours assigned, while finding time for herself to recharge the batteries.
As the first woman to head up the role and be a general manager of a PGW operating business unit, she would like to think it might inspire other women to follow suit.
That said, gender talk sits somewhat uncomfortably with her.
"I truly believe and understand from Stephen (Guerin) and the board I’m not in this role because I’m a woman, I’m in this role based on the merit of my strategic thought leadership and whatever else the role requires.
I don’t want to be seen as a token female appointment, but likewise people have opened the door to me and I want to open the door so women can see you can be a mum and a GM and be a good wife and all these things."
From her "cheerleader" dad she’s become a legacy-driven person, wanting to leave a job or anything else she does in a better place than when she found it.
Ms Shearer said her father was a great believer that she and her brothers could do anything if they put their mind to it and be open to new challenges.
She knows she doesn’t need to be an expert in every field, but does need expertise in a high performing team to succeed.
"I definitely get this from my dad and have always had an open mind to someone presenting an opportunity to me. Over the years when someone has made a suggestion I’ve walked through a door. Potentially, I haven’t always seen that myself, but someone else has seen something in me. Stephen and previous CEOs have always planted a seed in my mind about being open to being a general manager or director in businesses. I’m not one for standing still, I like to embrace new things."
The way ahead for PGG Wool was striking a balance of respecting the work that had been done and being open to change and challenges, she said.
"You have to stay relevant for the current regulations and the macro-economic or geo-political events, whatever it is. My dad always said if you don’t like change you’re going to like irrelevancy even less. That’s really pertinent to the wool industry, but the encouraging thing is people seem to be ripe to it, as long as it makes sense. My fear is if everyone is waiting for the big, hairy audacious outcome, sometimes it’s too hard to get started. If we are continuously improving what we are doing, seeking new efficiencies, channels and opportunities and we’re doing what we do well the best we possibly can and trying to bring in some productivity and efficiency initiatives and embracing technology then that lays that foundation to be agile when the markets start to shift or something new gets thrown at us."
