Mike Ellis has found the qualities that made him a Wildcats legend have also served him well in his new career.
Mike Ellis has found the qualities that made him a Wildcats legend have also served him well in his new career.
FORMER Perth Wildcats championship captain Mike Ellis has lost none of his competitive sparkle since hanging up his high-tops in 2004.
But now, instead of dropping three pointers and bamboozling defenders with his silky skills, Mr Ellis is making his mark supplying textas and textbooks, and everything in between, to Western Australia’s schools.
“I just see it as a challenge, and I’ve relished the challenge of trying to make something better,” Mr Ellis says of his role as state manager at Campion Education.
“What I’m trying to do is get to a point where we can be the best that we can be, and do whatever it is that we can to do that.
“The difference for us is we don’t have a grand final at the end of the season to go ‘yeah, we won the championship.’”
Mr Ellis entered the schools supply sector shortly after retiring from the Wildcats, after then-Wooldridges managing director Tim Majors, a keen basketball supporter, offered him a start.
Having no experience in sales or education, Mr Ellis says while he didn’t expect to have a long career with Wooldridges, he decided to give it a crack.
“I must admit I said to my wife when I first started, ‘I’ve got nothing to go to at the moment, I’m going to do this to start with, I’ll try it for 12 months, see how it goes, and then I’ll probably look at something else’,” he says.
“Eight years later, I’m still here [in the business]. I think it’s a difficult industry to get into, but an even more difficult industry to get out of.”
Mr Majors’ strategy in the early days, according to Mr Ellis, was to use the former Wildcat’s still-high public profile to gain a foothold in new markets.
“I didn’t try to sell them anything in the first place, what I did was just get my foot in the door to start forming some sort of relationship with them,” Mr Ellis says.
“I said, ‘I’m not here to try and sell you a textbook, what I want to do is offer you a service that has a holistic approach to it.
“That was my original charter, and I think that’s what I’ve followed through on and that’s what I’ve tried to bring here more than anything else.”
In 2010, Mr Ellis accepted the position at Wooldridges rival Campion Education, a privately owned group that has had a large presence in the eastern states for the past decade, but only entered the WA market last year.
The company has signed up 37 WA schools during the past 12 months, and Mr Ellis says he is expecting Campion’s turnover in the state to double over the 2012 financial year, taking a large chunk out of Wooldridges’ estimated 75 per cent market share in the process.
“When you have the lion’s share of the market, then it’s easy for that to diminish if you don’t stay on your game,” Mr Ellis says.
“We bring something different to the market; all of our processes and the software that we use are without doubt the best in the market, and that’s something that’s been appealing to all of our customers.
“It’s us being in the marketplace … if people are dissatisfied, now we’re giving them somewhere else to go.”
Mr Ellis has relished the move from the basketball court to the boardroom, saying he has been able to identify many commonalities between leading the Wildcats as captain and working at the helm of a statewide organisation.
“In this role, as a state manager, you are responsible for everything underneath you,” he says.
“In a sporting team, if you are the captain of your team then you are responsible for what everyone else is doing.
“I think there is quite a synergy in it. The correlation between what you do on the sporting field, the whole drive and desire to succeed and excel, those are the qualities that are also paramount in business.
“If you have excelled at sport in any way, then you have done those things.
“What you have to work out is how you are then going to use that, in a business sense, and that’s not necessarily an easy transition either.
“It’s a challenge; it’s a whole different set of parameters. But the principles are the same.”
While bullish about the company’s success in such a short time, Mr Ellis says Campion’s strategy is not purely motivated by its bottom line.
Instead, he says, Campion is more concerned with improving its offering, and providing tangible benefits for the education industry while keeping up with the myriad changes brought on by the introduction of electronic books and new publishing formats, and the advent of the Australian National Curriculum.
“The biggest thing from our perspective is to bring a level of service that hasn’t been seen in the industry for a while,” Mr Ellis told WA Business News.
“I think if we’re able to deliver that to the best of our ability, then that means the teachers are able to educate better, the kids are able to learn better, and that’s got to be good for us.
“When I’m old and grey, I want to make sure that the kids that are growing up now are going to be able look after us old people.”
