I recently chatted to Owen Kerr, who is CEO of Australian forex broker Pepperstone.
Pepperstone is a hot business in a fast growing space. To do the business justice I’m going to quote from a profile piece in The Age earlier this year:
“Owen Kerr and Joe Davenport conceived a new kind of brokerage designed to split open the moribund forex market. Today at just 29 and 30 respectively, they have a business turning over $36 million per year, received numerous industry awards for most accelerated start-up, and may soon announce an ASX listing which could earn each of them around $300 million. Their business, Pepperstone Financial, based in Melbourne, is now the 11th biggest forex broker in the world (outside Japan), and turns over as much as $US70 billion per month – about half the volume of the entire Australian stock exchange in a similar period.”
In this interview Owen and I talk about the challenges of managing an organisation that has been global from birth:
• How Owen has built a scalable management style that he’s convinced will serve the organisation well through growth
• Why the company defaults to automation – and will only add people as absolutely necessary
• Why speed is Pepperstone’s key metric of success
• How Pepperstone does business in “real-time” (including monitoring performance)
• The risks and rewards of increasing workforce specialisation
Interview with Owen Kerr, Peppertstone
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Steve Pell is CEO of Intrascope. Intrascope helps mid-sized knowledge work organisations grow faster, scale up and succeed. We use our deep expertise in technology, finance and people analytics to solve pressing growth challenges and build the processes required for your organisation to take the next step.
Steve publishes a free weekly newsletter covering the best new ideas in management for knowledge work at www.managementdisrupted.com
