In a modern world where moving from company to company in the hopes of climbing the ladder is becoming more commonplace, C.H. Robinson Vice President of APAC Andrew Coldrey has bucked the trend and risen through the ranks of one of the world’s largest transport and logistics companies.
Coldrey has spent over 30 years embedded in Australia and New Zealand’s supply chain landscape after, by his own admission, falling into the industry following the completion of his university studies due to his desire to work for a smaller enterprise.
Over his journey he has seen his company evolve from a small private company to a large private company, then, following its acquisition by C.H. Robinson, into a publicly listed global superpower of the transport and logistics space.
He offered insights into his career so far, how he navigated the unique challenges presented to sector by the COVID pandemic and what he’s learned over his one-company journey in the interview below.
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The thing that stuck out to me when researching your career so far is the fact you’ve spent over 30 years with the same company.
There seems to be a perception that ‘job hopping’ is the best way to progress a career in the modern age, but are there any particular benefits that have stuck out to you in staying with the same organisation for this long and rising with it as it grows?
There’s no one way, right? Part of it depends on the individual and part of it depends on the company. If some organisations remain the same and don’t grow, then that can restrict the ability for someone to have different experiences to grow and progress. Therefore, you might be forced to leave when you know there are no opportunities internally.
Other times it’s the individual that says, ‘I can’t get different experiences within the same place, so I’m better off moving’. Part of that ability to stay in one place depends on making sure the company encourages that. For 30-odd years we’ve very much had a culture of developing our people and promoting from within if we can. There have always been opportunities for anyone if you’re prepared to work hard enough, take on risks and try new things – but that doesn’t mean that’s for everyone.
We’ve had people who have left and come back, sometimes in a short time and sometimes more than 10 years later. For me, one of the benefits of being in an organisation for a long time is, like any team, organisations are just groups of people that decide to do something together. Knowing the people and knowing how they get things done, and knowing all the informal networks within an organisation benefits you over time. You know what the shortcuts are, when to push things, when not to push things, but I wouldn’t say there’s one way that’s better than any other.
You’ll talk to some people who have had career journeys going to 10 different companies and they probably had a really great experience. For me, I’d say in 33 years here I haven’t had two years that have been remotely the same. Either the company has changed, or the industry has changed. We’ve had people who’ve worked for us for 20 years doing the one job and their experience is probably very different to mine, but I’ve been lucky to have done lots of different things in an industry that has changed so much.
When we started talking more about careers needing to be more mobile, at the time a lot of that was driven by personnel agencies who want to pick someone up and move them around, but that might not necessarily be what’s best for you.
Often people might say ‘the reason I want to take another job is I didn’t have an opportunity where I was, or I want to take a more challenging role and earn more money’.
You can do that internally or externally, and internally it’s much easier to do because you’re already settled, but if you don’t like it internally and don’t like the company then it doesn’t matter if it’s a promotion.
There’s no right or wrong. I feel that most companies are pretty volatile, so if you’re willing to take chances then you don’t need to move around.
Like every company that’s been around for this long, C.H. Robinson is remarkably different to what it was when you started in the logistics sector.
Are there any lessons you have taken from those early stages in your career that can still be applied now despite the company, and your role in it, looking so different to when you first started?
One thing is that good decisions still need to be made, and that doesn’t matter what it is.
Different company structures have different ways of making decisions. Some people think in a private company you can make a decision fast, but you can make a decision fast in big companies too if you structure the correct way.
What I really learned was being clear about what you do for the customer. There are things that a small, nimble company can do for a customer that a bigger company can’t, and there are things a big company can do that a smaller company can’t.
It’s not different to if you’re an accountant. A local accountant – a one-person shop – can give you a really high level of service, but they don’t have a corporate tax team like one of the big four do. It’s horses for courses.
Then it becomes a case of getting comfortable in whatever the situation is to say, ‘this is who we are, and this is what we do, and we’re going to do it the best we possibly can’. The key is making sure you align with the customer you’re targeting, and then figuring out what you can deliver for them? Then, you have to make sure you execute.
What’s been interesting is, as this company has grown, it has brought different challenges. What works for a company of 10 people doesn’t work for a company of 100. As we’ve become bigger, we’ve become more specialised – like a production line.
That enabled us to maintain quality as we grew, but then you get to a size where you start breaking off so much that no one really sees the whole picture.
We’ve been doing a lot of work recently to change the way we do that at scale, to have more people learn the business in a more end-to-end capacity, and if you get the right people who can do that then it’s definitely scalable.
Did you always have ambitions of working in the logistics sector, or is that something that came about through opportunities at the end of your university studies?
I did economics and when I finished, I had graduate offers at Commonwealth Bank and BHP. I had worked at Commonwealth Bank as an undergrad and I didn’t really like the big corporate environment.
I knew the owner of this company at the time and he said, ‘why don’t you come and be a go-for for a couple of months over the summer until you get a proper job?’. That was just running around and taking documents, going to quarantine and customs to write a cheque and pay, so I started at the very bottom, but I liked the people I worked with, I was learning, and I never left.
For me, the funny situation is I didn’t want to work for a big corporate back then, but after 25 years we became a big private company, then our owners sold out to C.H. Robinson, so I ended up working for a big public company. It took 25 years to get there, but maybe I was ready for it then.
I’ve loved working for a small private company, I loved it when we grew and became a big private company, and I’ve loved working for a big public company.
Our industry is quite an unknown quantity in that it’s huge, but people don’t really have a concept of it. Some of our competitors have 25,000 people working for them. The DHLs of the world including courier have half a million people, yet it’s not something that’s really spoken about in schools.
You think about freight forwarding or logistics, maybe you think about trucks and warehouses, but us as basically a middleman – no one thinks of it. With a lot of the jobs you end up doing, your idea of what a job is can often be very different once you get there. Most people find their way into something, that’s what I’ve done, and I love it.
In our industry you need to know a little bit about lots of industries. We have such a diversified customer base, and I love that. I love knowing each day I need to know about oil and gas, I need to know something about supermarket chains, I need to know about manufacturing.
We’re doing charters at the moment for Bitcoin mining in North America, so everywhere you turn you have to learn something different.
But it’s certainly something I never would have heard of when I was at school.
I feel like that lack of awareness of the transport and logistics industry among professionals is creating a pinch through the whole sector, and I know it’s a massive issue for road transport companies – just getting people on the ground to drive the trucks and work in the warehouses is a huge issue around the world.
It’s an issue that transcends any one section of the industry, so how has C.H. Robinson gone about trying to recruit as wide a range of people as possible and showcase the logistics sector as an industry that is worth staying in?
I think we have a certain attraction in that where we’re big enough that even if you’re agnostic to the industry you have some idea about starting in something international or supply chain, and we’re a US company which has a different attraction than working for your local business.
Once you get people talking and then they meet our team, if you want to be marketing or media – we have that. If you want to be in finance – we have that. If you want to be in sales – we have that. The fact is we have lots of different career paths, similar to a big manufacturer.
Once you get to a certain sized business you get people in the door, and when they’re in they realise if it’s right for them or not. It’s a pretty chaotic industry so It’s not for everyone, but we don’t really have a problem attracting people to our sector.
The two big areas where the industry is struggling is truck drivers and customs brokers. Everyone thought the need for brokers would die off because everything would become free trade and automated. We really doubled down on customs, so now not only are we one of Australia’s largest brokers, but we’re a broker farm. We develop our own in-house brokers, and we get more people through customs school than anywhere else.
We’ve got people who are studying the course, who are waiting to do the exam, who have got their licence and now are waiting for a role with us or with someone else as a broker.
We’re in a position to do that because we have so many brokers working for us. It’s a role that does need mentoring and it is quite tough to get your licence, so we’ve done that on our side.
We haven’t found a solution for the trucker side, but at least we’ve been able to solve for the brokerage side.
Over the last few years, you’ve changed roles from VP of Australia, to VP of Oceania, and now VP of APAC. Those are roles that have continued to have a widening scope.
Given you’ve been at this company for so long and have so much experience in how everything here works, has there been any added expectations placed on you as you’ve continued to progress your career?
The way you approach it doesn’t change. If you’re having to think strategically, a lot of the role is change management. Yes, there are different geographies involved but the role leading teams is kind of the same. Yes, there are more people, but your immediate team is still pretty tight and small, and the people you work with on a day-to-day basis doesn’t change significantly, but maybe the people that work with them does.
Then it becomes about influencing more broadly rather than directly controlling things. I enjoy that we’ve always worked so closely with the region anyway. We’ve always had great exposure to the whole APAC region and Europe and North America as well.
With the change in that scope, the fundamentals don’t really change that much. It’s still about identifying the customer, delivering, executing, getting paid for it and developing people along the way.
I don’t see a lot of differences in the core principals of management, regardless of the size or the scale. When you’re leading a bigger team and more experienced people a lot of the time those people are eminently capable and more experienced that you, and that’s a great thing.
You learn from the people you work with, you learn from the people you lead, you learn from the people you work for. You can learn from everyone.
You mentioned it can be a very chaotic industry, so this question might be tough to verbalise, but what does your standard day-to-day or week-to-week look like, if such a thing exists?
We have a reasonably structured approach in terms of a cadence of meetings. There are some I have daily, like I have a daily stand-up with our leadership team which we implemented during COVID where it became a ‘what the hell is going on?’ talk every day.
We’ve kept that going because it works really well. Then I do a weekly catchup with most of our other direct reports, then there are other weekly, monthly or quarterly meetings. It’s a mixture of that, a big chunk of time on the phone, a big chunk of time on emails, and then I try and break out into some thinking time as well.
A lot of that is trying to problem solve and respond to what is happening. We plan as much as we can, but fundamentally we have a lot of people whose day consists of planning and doing, and part of my role is to support when things come up, that’s what I have to be there for. A fair chunk of the day is then reasonably unstructured.
Our global leadership team used to try and meet quarterly in the US. What we learned through COVID is we don’t need to travel anywhere near as much. So maybe now we meet once a year, but we meet monthly online instead. So, we’re actually talking more often than we ever did before.
I’d been in the industry for over 20 years when COVID hit, and I thought I had seen everything. We’d seen strikes, legislation changes, technological advancement, but we hadn’t seen anything like that.
Probably the biggest impact is shipping lines have consolidated a lot, and when the prices went through the roof in COVID carriers realised there is almost no price that is too high, that manufacturing has moved so much that it’s impossible to change quickly. Now, the carriers are much more in control of the market than what they used to be.
Our role as a middleman, if you like, is always to adapt. Things go wrong all the time. We exist because something is missing. If you place an import order today and in 120 days it gets delivered, there are hundreds of people who either touch a little bit of information or physically touch the freight along the way. At each one of those points in time, something goes wrong.
Whether it be COVID, or the Red Sea crisis, or a ship getting stuck in the Suez Canal, weather, strikes, it’s always changing.
Part of that is you have to try and look forward and see around corners to assess what you think is going to happen, and part of it is just adapting to what’s happening, especially in terms of how we’re going to advance our customer interests.
So, one of those things we found during COVID is when supply chains were broken those who could adapt and find solutions to keep things moving did really well, so a lot of our customers did incredibly well in COVID when whoever had stock available sold it.
Our role in a difficult time is that getting the stock on the shelf is enough. When things are smooth and easy that role moves to trying to get it there more cheaply.
It doesn’t matter the circumstance, if it’s hard or easy our role is still to advance our customers’ needs and interests more than their competitors.
One final question is, quite simply, where do you see your journey with C.H. Robinson taking you over the next few years and over the rest of your career?
I’m not sure, to be honest. I’ve always tried to focus on the job I’m doing and do that as well as I possibly can and make sure I’m developing people, so I’ve always tried to make myself redundant in any role I’m in as fast as I can. We’ve got an unbelievable team and there are people ready to take on challenges if need be.
If the company needs me to do something else, then I can do it. I think that approach of just trying to always be curious and always be interested in learning new things sets you up. If I were to look at the individual jobs and role changes I’ve had in my 33 years here I would have had 14 or 15 different roles in that time. Then, within those roles, it’s changed a lot.
This is an industry that changes all the time, and I love that, and I’m open to whatever comes next. I just want to keep trying to make this company as successful as it can be.
A group of us were talking yesterday about when things get really hard, particularly a few of us who are in our mid-50s, and we said ‘what does it look like when things get hard? Does it make you want to stop?’. I think that pressure is more the pressure you put on yourself.
I worked at Maccas when I was a kid and I put that same pressure on myself back then, I had to do the job properly and to the best of my ability.
Turning up to work here, I’ve found just as much pressure, because that’s what I put on myself.
You just want to strive to be as good as you can, and you don’t want to let people down. That’s been my approach, and it’s worked pretty well so far.
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