Strahan Wallis: from farm boy to International CEO

There must have been lots of next things, but maybe an example that sort of, you know, you take away now when you look back on, you know, on that time with the bank.

You know, what was one of those next things, one of those opportunities?

At the time, like BNZ Marketing was like the hottest thing.

kind of marketing team in the country.

I don't really know any of this.

So I was around all this phenomenal talent around me and they all sort of, you know, were like mother hens to me as a new grad and really looked after me.

And again, I'm still in touch with a lot of these folks.

and they were all just phenomenal marketers have all gone on to do these cool things so just being in that environment i think was just incredible for me and seeing what good looks like and so i got to do things like i helped the bank prepare for y2k you know i was in charge of the backup website for y2k for the bank

These are the days when we were worried that once the clock hit 1st of January 2000 that technology systems might get wiped out.

Exactly right.

Yeah, yeah.

For those who remember that.

So that was an amazing opportunity to work on that crisis preparedness thing.

I got, you know, within two weeks I was sitting with the CEO of the bank going off to a speech.

you know, supporting him.

So one of the things you get in a public relations career is you get exposed to leadership at a very young age, younger than most.

You know, if you're an accountant, you don't get to see the CEO for 10 years probably.

But yeah, you do because, you know, communications is such an important thing at a high level.

So you kind of can glean leadership lessons and advice.

And, you know, that CEO gave me advice early in my career, which was really useful, sitting in the back of the cab on the way home from the presentation that he was doing to I think it was Chamber of Commerce so that's one of the benefits and you know I got given things like no one in the marketing team wanted to deal with local advertising so I picked that up and redesigned their local advertising because everyone was kind of just doing whatever they wanted out in the regions yes yes and so but that was really interesting for me because you know I got to have a little look at advertising what does advertising look like and what does good look like and how do we create a system that everyone can use but has enough flexibility for people to have a bit of you know local I guess reflect local values in their advertising if you were like a mobile mortgage manager or a rural manager on Invercargill or something.

And then we got to produce a TV show, which was amazing, you know.

So we did this internal TV show that I got to work on in Australia.

We had a mothership, which was National Australia Bank, and they had a live broadcast studio that they could then broadcast to everyone in the bank.

And we were like, oh, we're not going to get out done.

So we started this thing called BNZ TV.