11,000 staff in 27 countries: Don Braid's got a lot on his plate

Mainfreight trucks may broadcast drivers' uplifting (or irritating) messages of cod-psychology and inspiration, but the company's veteran managing director, Don Braid, says – almost literally — there is no “I” in "team".

When BusinessDesk asked the trucker to talk about his approach to leadership, his response was both a cliché from management textbooks and almost ostentatiously humble.

“There is not an 'I’ in leadership at Mainfreight; it is about us and our ambitions,” he says.

Or as one of the Mainfreight trucks says on its rear: "The secret to getting ahead is getting started." Or: "Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it."

Braid is a finalist in the listed company category of the inaugural BusinessDesk CEO Index, hence our discussion with him about leadership.

Homespun wisdom

His reticence to brag won’t surprise anyone who knows him. For the past 29 years, he has led the Auckland-headquartered business founded by Bruce Plested in 1978. The company now has 10,984 people in 333 branches in 27 countries.

Its blue and white trucks and offices shout homespun wisdom chosen by its drivers – for example, "A truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery on a detour". Those messages were Plested's idea.

Knowing Braid's aversion to the spotlight, Andy Bowley, head of research at Forsyth Barr, chose his words carefully when BusinessDesk asked for his thoughts on the Mainfreight managing director's leadership.

“Where Don and Mainfreight have clearly had an influence in the New Zealand transport industry has been as a training ground at the depot, or floor level. A lot of people in the broader industry have learned their craft at Mainfreight,” he says.

'Pretty impressive'

And while, if you look at parts of the transport space in various geographies, M&A tends to be a key driver of consolidation with these kinds of businesses, it’s a true testament to Mainfreight over the past 20 years that it’s grown organically, says Bowley. 

“They are a very large player in the domestic transport industry, and they’ve done that through expanding their own network rather than buying other networks, which is pretty impressive.”

The independent panel judging the BusinessDesk CEO Index was unanimous in its assessment of the Mainfreight leader: “Don Braid pulses with all the qualities which make us proud to be Kiwis – humble, human, quietly and successfully ambitious. He respects people … He is a people's leader – to some extent, low profile but a high achiever.”

BusinessDesk asked Braid for his approach to our judges’ key criteria: vision, impact, innovation, resilience, and influence.

Vision: Mainfreight doesn’t have a strategic plan as such, but certainly understands its strategic direction, says Braid. “And we live our vision and our desires every day.”

Collectively, the Mainfreight team are an ambitious bunch of so-and-so’s, he adds. 

Mainfreight is active in 27 countries, including Australia and the United States.

“We’re trying to behave a little bit like pirates and make headway against some pretty big competitors,” says Braid. “And to do that, you need to have a really dedicated team of people who share the same vision and also the capability of the business.”

Teams in the Mainfreight branches communicate that vision and strategy to customers and each other in their everyday culture, he says.

“I don’t think our team would be working as hard or as enthusiastically about where we’re going without them understanding what we want to achieve, and knowing what we want to achieve as a team.”

And they’re communicating that vision and strategy to wider stakeholders “by the way we present ourselves, the way we service our customers, the relationships we have with those working alongside us, the suppliers of service,” says Braid.

He and his team are leading by example in the way they want their people to behave, he adds.

Or, as another Mainfreight truck says: "Aim for the stars."

Impact: Measuring the organisation’s impact is done on a couple of levels at Mainfreight, says Braid.

They gauge revenue and profitability every week in comparison with what they did the same week before, but they are thinking longer term, he says.

“But we think about being around 100 years from today, so we’re trying to make long-term decisions that make enough money in the meantime to actually achieve those long-term goals,” he explains.

Innovation: Braid’s first thought when asked about innovation relates to being customer-centric and responding quickly and well to anything that comes up.

“Innovation for our customers happens on a daily basis. It’s about providing great levels of service for our customers, and if we trip up and don’t provide a level of service that we and our customers expect, then it’s about how we fix it and how the customer feels about the fix,” he says.

For the bigger-picture innovation in Mainfreight’s world, it’s about AI and robotics, for instance.

“I’m thinking about sustainability initiatives, electric trucks, and hydrogen-powered trucks,” says Braid.

He likes to think Mainfreight has an innovative mindset about decision-making when something goes wrong. The approach is: “Don’t live in a question mark, and certainly don’t push it upstairs.”

Mainfreight regularly has positive action team (PAT) meetings at every branch, a decentralised approach that allows the team to discuss what they could do better, he says.

“Each time, it’s a small group of people – no more than seven – who each have responsibility for activities within the branch.

“It’s led by a different chairperson every time and has a different minute-taker every time,” says Braid, who adds that this kind of initiative has been there since day one at Mainfreight.

The PAT meetings raise issues that need to be fixed and who’s going to fix it, but they also raise issues that they’d like to change or improve, and then take the responsibility to do so, says the group MD.

Resilience: As that Mainfreight truck slogan mentioned earlier says, "Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it."

Many shortlisted finalists in the CEO Index cited covid as one of their biggest tests, and it is remembered as one of Mainfreight’s biggest challenges in recent years.

“And you know, we made one decision: once we knew there was going to be a lockdown, we would not make anybody redundant during that time,” says Braid.

The Mainfreight team were on the dock helping to “feed and water” the nation, and other nations where the business had a presence, he says.

“We worked tirelessly to make sure that we were able to deliver freight as best we could at every chance, and honestly, even post-covid, with the volume of the freight that moved, the way our team responded was just magnificent,” he says.

People were under all sorts of different forms of stress, whether it was family, travel, or being in isolation, he remembers.

“But the branches were regularly meeting – we were splitting shifts, we were taking lessons from one branch to another, and to another country, to let them know what we’d done to overcome those problems,” he says.

What did they learn? The importance of “lots of communication, open communication between everybody, and it got us through.”

A good book: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … and Others Don’t by Jim Collins. Says Braid: “It’s about successful businesses and why they are successful over longer periods of time. They’ve found a mindset, tweaking culture, building long-term careers both at the board table and within the business. And customer satisfaction is the be-all and end-all of being successful. It’s such a great book with such great lessons that don’t date.”

Sliding doors: The Mainfreight group MD has never thought about what else he might have done or still do for a living: “We have such a vibrant, interesting job across logistics that you get exposed to all sorts of opportunities and other businesses.”

Or, as the sign on the back of one of the Mainfreight trucks says: "The best is yet to come."

● Don Braid is a finalist in the listed company category of the inaugural BusinessDesk CEO Index. The category winner will be announced on Nov 18. BusinessDesk will publish a profile of the overall winner on Nov 19.

Read more of the BusinessDesk CEO Index here.