Family First, Business Second: How Michael Fox Builds for Generations

In this episode of The Quest for Success Podcast we sit down with Michael Fox - veteran property developer, former Toll Holdings executive, and father of two - to unpack a career defined by bold decisions, strategic growth, and a commitment to leaving something that lasts.

Michael traces his journey from modest beginnings to leading the construction of more than 2,000 apartments across Melbourne. He reflects on scaling Toll Holdings, why empowering teams is the only way to achieve sustainable growth, and how relationships built on trust underpin every strong business.

Family remains his guiding force: Michael explains how every project and every risk ultimately ladders back to a legacy for his daughters. We also discuss his Harvard OPM experience, the rise of property-technology, and what the future holds for real-estate development in a rapidly changing world.


Key Takeaways
 • Success is about building something that leaves a legacy.
 • Family values drive long-term vision.
 • Empowered teams create sustainable success.
 • Trust-based relationships are the foundation of great business.
 • Harvard OPM broadened strategic thinking and leadership clarity.
 • Real estate demands resilience, adaptability, and foresight.
 • Innovation in prop-tech is reshaping property’s future.
 • Great leaders prioritise trust, not just transactions.

Connect with Michael Fox

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-fox-654b7122

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Transcript

Michael Fox (00:00.354)
never compromise. can always.

Be compromised, there's always compromises to be made. Don't compromise yourself. Once somebody's got something on you, you go on. I built 2,000 apartments in that seven years. It was an amazing journey. We made a lot of money. 20 years when I'd be able to drive past the buildings that we built and say, I built that building and it looks fucking good. There wasn't really room for two of us. It was absolutely flying. it was all ended in a conversation

one afternoon and after 20 years of working with somebody, know, I was a broken man and my business was taken away from me.

Hey, sorry to interrupt. I just wanted to ask a massive favor of you guys. At the moment, we're putting a big priority on growing our YouTube channel. So if you aren't already subscribed to us there, if you could head over to YouTube, type in the Quest for Success podcast, or just click the link down in the show notes below, head over to our channel and subscribe to us there. You'll get access to all of our video interviews that we do with our guests. And it will do us a massive favor because it will help us grow the show, which means we can get on bigger and better guests.

And with that back to the episode

Dylan Pathirana (01:31.464)
Welcome back to the Quest for Success podcast and thanks so much for tuning in once again. Today we're incredibly excited because we have on another fellow Harvard guest, a friend of the show, Mr. Michael Fox.

Yes, Michael and I know each other for the last three years doing Harvard OPM program. I would class him as one of my good friends. And he's got lots of experience, especially in the property development area. And we are fortunate to have him today to have a chat. Thank you, Michael, for joining us.

Thanks boys. watched a few of your, I've listened to a few of your podcasts. I'm a bit nervous today. Not sure that I'm really in the quest for success era of some of the people that you've had on before. I'm just a humble property developer. We'll see how we go.

I mean, I've heard a lot about you, but I'm keen to sit down and actually delve deep into your story. But before we begin, we need to understand something fundamental and that is what does success mean to you?

I've been dreading the question actually, and now that it's here, it's even more real because the answer is so hard. I've gone back and I've even looked at some of your previous takes with other people and it seems to be a bit of a struggle of a question. Everyone's got a different answer. But I suppose the one that really resonated with me the most was probably around family.

Michael Fox (03:02.734)
You know, I was brought up, you know, humble beginnings. My dad was a plumber. I've got four brothers and sisters. So we're a family of five, Catholic family. Dad worked hard. Mum was a homemaker. And it was, life was really all about family. And, you know, mum's passed 10 years now, but dad's still around and...

you know, for him, his life is just his family and his 15 grandkids. And I look at him and think, you know, he looks back and like.

he thinks his family is the most amazing success of all time. He always says, you know, we've got no dads. All the trouble that people have these days with kids, we've got no issues with any of our kids, in any of the families. It's amazing. And I say, well, my family is the same. I've got three amazing daughters. We don't really know where they are.

where all these people came from, but I've got three girls that are all high 90s, VCE, double degrees and working. It doesn't get much better than that from my point of view. I think that's probably success. then the other one that, the issue that comes up is the legacy. Your legacy, what's your legacy? How are you going to be judged?

lot of people are to think about you. So I think that's still a bit of a work in progress. I've had a few issues of recent times that have probably dented that in some respects, but it's all good now. It's onwards and up upwards.

Dylan Pathirana (04:53.634)
And I suppose on that legacy piece, what is the legacy that you want to leave behind?

Well, I suppose it goes back to my three daughters. Everything I do, I do for them. My life is really about them. And I don't know what the legacy piece is, but to leave them something that'll help them along in life and hope them have a great time, I suppose.

Yeah, I don't really know. We've still got a little bit to go yet.

And I suppose for us to understand the man who's sitting in front of us today, we need to go back a little bit. Can you take us through a little bit of your early life? I know you said your dad was a plumber, like how you kind of from young Michael into that kind of early introduction into property.

So young Michael, Catholic primary school, Xavier College private school. Didn't go to university. So pretty much I started going to university, I decided that it wasn't for me. Hence my late comeback to go to Harvard, down the track to prove that I could actually do something. So I pretty much went straight to work and I went into real estate.

Michael Fox (06:19.214)
And I've, I suppose I started as a property manager, driving up and down the streets of Melbourne. I worked for a big company that had like 4,000 flats on their books. And I'd do inspections and in-going reports and outgoing reports.

that led me to see once you're in the property space, know, the sales guys are all, you know, driving around in flashy cars and yes, after school, yeah. So straight after school. So no gap years, no nothing, just went, I went, got a job. And from there I went into residential sales. So I was a real estate salesperson when I was about 19, 20 or something.

This is after school, Michael.

Michael Fox (07:09.774)
My boss put me into a BMW 318i with a full BBS kit on it and I was paying $620 a month in car payments. All young real estate agents too. I still remember the amount. He says, you've got to work hard now. You have to actually pay this thing off. Oh my God. So that was a...

I was sort of blessed along the way. I had good bosses there. From then, once you're in the residential space, you see these commercial deals sort of look a bit bigger than selling houses. That's okay, but these guys over there selling stuff back in the day, five million or 10 million, and I thought, I wouldn't mind a piece of that.

was harder to break into the commercial space, but the old Catholic network worked and I had to go backwards to go forwards, so I went and got a job as a commercial property manager as a junior. I did that for a couple of years until I got on well with the sales and leasing team and then I moved out of commercial property management into commercial sales and leasing and investment sales.

I had a company called McGee's, I was there for over four years. had an amazing boss at the time, legend, Tommy Davis. And there was five of us, we're all still around today, all in various roles in real estate around Victoria. And that was probably the love of it really. Tommy taught us everything about land and values and how to value and things like that.

So I moved out of that company and I went to a bigger company called Night Frank, which was taken over by or Hooker corporate Night Frank back in the day to go and try and do bigger things again. So we were instead of selling property for four million, we were trying to sell properties for 10 million and 20 million. so we mucked around in that space for probably...

Michael Fox (09:19.086)
three to four years again, so had quite a long stint in the commercial sort of real estate. And when you're in that space and you get exposed to the development side of, oh yeah, that looks interesting to go and build a, let's go and build an office building or let's go and start building the warehouses rather than leasing them.

I decided to try and find my way into a development sort of role. So I got a junior, again sort of went backwards to go forward, got a job as a junior development manager working for the Smorgan family, well-known family in Australia as their junior development manager. And I started developing or building these little Smorgan ARC outlets all around Australia.

I was sort of operated on a national basis and I was there until the floating of what is now Smaug and Steel, which was subsequently taken over for two and a half years. Then I joined a company called

Toll Holdings. Given Jamia and the logistics folks, probably know a bit about toll. It's an incredible story. I was the National Property Development Manager. When I started at toll, it was turning over 300 million. Our office was based out in Corley Road in Brooklyn. We had 50 properties and...

the boys were developing a little bit of stuff and so forth. So I took over all those depots. Fast forward 13 years at toll, we went from $300 million turnover to something like 12 billion, something, mark a cap of 12 billion.

Michael Fox (11:09.506)
Yeah, my cap 12 over about 12. We had Patrick's, bought 96 businesses along the way. We bought rails, ports, family businesses, bolt on acquisitions. And every time we took over these companies, I remember we took over, you know, the first medium sized one we did, we bought TNT freight.

And that was 170 properties came with that from seabed leases, licences to ports, wharves, trains, warehouses, offices. And so my job as part of the executive team was to integrate all that sort of stuff into the facilities. And if it didn't fit into one facility, we'd go and build another one, which then we then became pretty sharp at building our own facilities. I then built warehouses pretty much all around Australia.

talking big sheds like Nike distribution centers and Arnott's biscuits and all new Tull Express, NQX. I did a 40,000 meter warehouse for Nike in Shang, Shang-Zhen province in Shanghai. Because we bought international businesses, so we had properties in Hong Kong, China, Japan.

So by the time I was leaving Toll, I think the property portfolio was in the order of 900 or something like that. Wow. And so we managed, well my team managed all the leases, the building, the buying, the selling, the developing, the integration.

How old were you at that point?

Michael Fox (12:48.686)
That was 20 odd years ago now, probably.

So where does where does that like that self belief and like self confidence comes from? Because I'll be honest, if you threw me in a pit like that, and said, you know, you got to be managing $900 million worth of buildings, you'd be so blown away.

It just happens, you you just roll with it. It was a smaller business and we grew with the business. It was frenetic. We basically didn't have a holiday for five years. It's an amazing story. It should be a Harvard business case because its downside was what a few years ago was sold to Japan Post for, know, a pittance of what it eventually, Japan Post bought it for about four and a half billion and then I think it got sold again for about 500 million or something.

were broken up into various bits only a few years ago. So it's quite a tragedy from where we got it and where we took it. An amazing group of people and leaders and it was a behemoth. People say, you know, Lynne Fox was the biggest company in Australia. We were double that size. And it was probably just an amazing journey. And so along from there...

you

Michael Fox (14:08.302)
The rest of the journey was, I worked under the managing director of Tolt for my 13 years, Paul Little. along the way, Paul and I would of muck around and do a few things on the side. And we bought a bigger site in Richmond and it was, that side business was starting to get...

Okay, well we can't do this anymore, I've got to go and manage it. So we had people managing it externally, but then I went in to become managing director of a little project, I founded that with Paul. We then, we went... Yeah, it'll be construction projects, so...

construction project.

And what was the vision there? Like, what were you doing different to other players?

It was just a great time in Melbourne or Australia where we didn't have all the bureaucracy and everything that we had now. had foreign investments, we had first-time owner grants, had federal government grants, we had...

Michael Fox (15:18.349)
All these other all these other incentives going on and we capitalized on that and built and I built 2,000 apartments in that seven years around Melbourne and It was an amazing amazing journey. We made a lot of money We had great fun. I did all my sales trips. We sold sold apartments We'd go on the road and we would go Hong Kong Singapore Beijing Shanghai

Malaysia, we had a small office in Hong Kong, we were selling to foreign investors. Taiwan, and we were booming, we were just building great towers in great locations and we had a pretty good reputation.

That was an amazing journey. We built office buildings and Bunnings warehouses and all sorts of stuff. I was running a fully integrated real estate operation as well at the time. Had something like 80 or 90 people under me then. Then we broke out the property management because we were managing all these things and Paul was buying bolts. He couldn't help himself. He'd buy bolt on acquisitions and so forth. And then...

Yeah, unfortunately that all came to an end after a pretty spectacular run. Paul decided that he wanted to get back involved with that business and there wasn't really room for two of us and we'd been, it was absolutely flying. So it was all ended in a conversation one afternoon and after 20 years of working with somebody, I was a broken man and my business was taken away from me.

Wow.

Michael Fox (17:01.94)
It still hurts today. So anyway, the story continued with, I then had to go and find another capital partner. So I walked the streets of Melbourne and spoke to people and we'd had a pretty good run. So I found another capital sponsor in the Costa family, Robert Costa. And so the journey continued. We...

started with me and him and we built it to a team of about eight or ten. And we did all sorts of things, again made good money, bought great sites and then Robert decided that he wanted to exit.

He wanted to take control back of the business, because once we're high net worth, we've got a couple hundred million dollars out there. That was an interesting transition, so it was handled very well. My previous experience wasn't that Robert was a nature's gentleman, and it was all done and dusted, and that was two and a half years ago that ended, which was...

you know, very fortuitous, because it's right at the turning of the market. And for me to be busy in that business, I wanted to be buying something, you know, every three months and getting a new project going. And back then that wasn't going to be happening two and a half years ago. And now you can see the property market, particularly Melbourne's pretty, you know, it's pretty stuff. So the only players are the big BTR guys around. Most of the developers are still hitting the wall or in the process of,

There's no DM fees left. Land prices still to be affected. Construction costs post-COVID through the roof. So it's not a great market. I had a pretty good time. was when I was, I started enrolled to go to Harvard. Because it was part of that business at cost. I went to see one of my mentors and said, well,

Michael Fox (19:16.366)
I don't know what to do with this business. I I've got 10 people, I don't know whether to make it 20 or 50 or do we go back to 80 or 100? Do we have 200 projects? And this mentor, I'd guide never, it was Michael Buxton at the time, he just goes, you gotta go and do Harvard or OPM. I said, what's that? And he says, yeah, just don't worry about it, just go and do it. And you'll understand the rest from there. And so I did. It took a while, but he was one of the,

Michael and Andrew have legacy business here and they're ex-OPMers. So yeah, I went and did it and met you, Jam, and 70 other amazing people from around the world.

and videos.

Michael Fox (20:01.622)
And now I'm just sort of the rest of the journey is just on hold while we, I'm just helping somebody in a little environmental and tech business that you can see behind me that's quite interesting. It's a disruptor. In not a very sexy market, exit signs and so forth. But you know, it's, when you think of the exit signs in how many there are around the world, every one of them has a battery backup. We've taken the battery out of them. The market is enormous and

we're having a crack at it from here in Australia. So yeah, that's sort of my employment journey and everything, I guess.

It's a very fascinating story, Michael. I know you went very fast with 35 years of amazing story. Tell me, property, right? Why did you get into property? Any reason initially you thought of getting into property?

Yeah, you know, I used to sit with my mother on Saturday mornings and read the age newspaper about houses for sale and then I always looked at the auction results the next day and so forth. So I just, I don't know what it was, I just had an inkling. Yeah, when I left school, which I mean I wasn't very good at school.

interest.

Michael Fox (21:23.414)
I tried university and it just wasn't for me. Subsequently realised, know, it's on ADHD diagnose and everything. No wonder I couldn't concentrate on school and whatever. So I'm more the bigger picture guy, I suppose, than the detailed guy.

Yeah. And you went into to sales. Do you have any any like advice for people in sales? Like what is your your hot tips to sales?

Yeah.

Michael Fox (21:51.79)
always find the common ground. So don't try and don't try and sell.

be warm with somebody, find out about them. If you're going for the kill too early, it's never gonna work. It's all about long-term relationships and building trust. It's probably the biggest takeaway. I've read some pretty ambitious, there's been some pretty ambitious people on other quests for success who are dynamite sales guys. But no, just slowly, slowly, slowly build trust. Have good product, I think is also the main thing.

I believe in the product, you're wasting time. I believe in the product here.

when we were building our towers and everything, I always said to people, there was a lot of property developers out there who were building shit, right? And just cheap crap and you've seen what's happened to some of those buildings lately and so forth. There's been issues with apartments. But I always said to people, I wanna be able to drive past, in 20 years I wanna be able to drive past the buildings that we built and say, I built that building, it looks fucking good. And I actually live in one of my buildings now and I it.

some people, funny story, I drove to, I went to stay with a friend in Broken Hill over Easter and there's another couple sitting there, the parents of these people. They said, oh where do live? She says, oh I live in Bay Street. I oh yeah, I built some apartments in Bay Street, 101.

Jamitha Pathirana (23:24.622)
Yeah, that's where we live. I say, oh shit. I hope it's alright. Is it alright?

We love it, it's fantastic. And that's sort of the stuff that you want to hear.

And why do you think the industry has shifted so much to, because I agree there is so much just push for volume that quality has of gone out the window. No one's really thinking for the long term.

I think the governments have got it.

got it all wrong in many respects. I we were building apartments in South Yarra on top of the railway station and selling them for 340 grand. They were 40 square metres. So it's like a New York one bedroom, okay. So they're small and everyone arced up and they said, no, no, we can't have 40 square metre apartments in Melbourne anymore. We've got to have 50 square metres and they've all got to have their own bedroom and their own light and their own, you know, access to this and that, blah, blah, blah. So that took the, that meant

Michael Fox (24:24.972)
the smallest apartment in Melbourne would have to be 55 square metres. So if you said it was $10,000 a metre, we went from 400 grand to 550. It was different price point. it then made everybody compete. We were then competing with people overseas or whatever who would want to buy, could buy a house for the same price. So house and land was a dream.

and the government came and taxed the foreigners. said, we can't have all the Chinese and the Malaysians and the Cantonese and everyone owning our properties. Let's put a foreign tax on them. Well, that stopped the industry. I they were the ones who were creating the stock. They were creating the houses for everybody to live in, but they owned them overseas. Who cares? I you can't take it with you, right? It's there. And so the...

policy was just wrong. Victoria in particular, they put a 7 % tax on, there's taxes on now. like we just killed that foreign foreign market. where once you do that, you know, we were building at one stage, we were building up to 25,000 apartments a year. And now we're, we're lucky to be doing 5,000 and we're, five years behind and we need, you know, 25,000, or we used to need 25, we now need 30,000 apartments and 30,000 house and land packages.

a year just to keep up with the current migration. It's actually 80,000 and we're just miles behind it. Government bureaucracy is just crazy with planning and all the other bullshit that goes on now. It's so hard. It's a young man's game. It's patience or it's a big man's game. It's hard for the middle guy now. Capital's tight.

And what do you think? What do think?

Michael Fox (26:11.022)
construction costs are high. We haven't seen much relief in those and with construction prices being so high that when we needed $10,000 a square metre, we now need $15,000 a square metre. So it means your one bedroom apartment's gone from 400 to 550 to 700,000. It's not affordable. And some of the other rules they brought in, so don't get me going on too much.

So Michael you mentioned before that you didn't have the chance to go to university and have that education But you you over the years you gone through step by step you develop yourself into a very significant person in the industry and and do you my question How did you do that? Like I mean, I mean education is a one important part, but obviously you bring a lot of other personal skills

to get into that, you know, what's the secret behind it?

I actually don't really know what the secret is. It's sort something that just happened, I suppose. I don't know. It's, you know, I think I got away with everything because I built good teams.

So my team at Little Projects was amazing, my team at Toll Holdings was amazing, my team at Costa Fox was so good I could walk out the door and they didn't even need to replace me.

Michael Fox (27:41.442)
You know, think that's all I, that's been my secret really is to have a, build a really good team. And I've always had one or two people that have been able to clean up after me. So I go in with my big picture, make mess and everything, then other people tidy it all up in the background. And, you know, generally it works. haven't had too many misses over the journey. So.

We'll see while we sit it out on the sidelines what awaits.

I guess that that's probably your secret. you know, you have the power of empowering others. I mean, you could, I always tell, right, you can be the dumbest guy in the room, as long as there's a smarter people to do stuff for you. Right. So you empower them, great things. Probably that's your secret. And how do you, my follow up question to it, right. So when you have a room full of smarter people and you always thinking, Hey,

Exactly. It was. Yeah.

Jamitha Pathirana (28:41.134)
I'm not saying that you're not smart, but you're thinking, I haven't gone to university. mean, these guys are probably got engineering degrees, et cetera. How do you manage that kind of people?

I think in the end it comes down to your experience and being given the opportunity at a younger age to show a bit of leadership. I was given pretty broad reins at Smoorgan, at Toll. We were doing big deals. We would have done a billion dollars worth of new industrial facilities with Goodman at the time. We were building and we were given free

rain, we were trusted, we weren't micromanaged. I always believed that if you hired somebody to do a job that they could do it and that I didn't need to sit over the top of you and check. So I would never micromanage anybody. was all, know, this is your job, just go and do it. Get it done.

And you probably don't really think about that sort of stuff until you go to do the Harvard course and you go, yeah, know, I probably did do that and I probably did do that. Yeah, I was pretty lacking on, shit, I never did that. There were bits and pieces that you like as a leader and bits and pieces that you don't like. So you get somebody that can do those jobs. I suppose I always live by the motto from a couple of people.

zero tolerance for lies and dickheads. Life goes on.

Dylan Pathirana (30:22.838)
And did you have any like mentors, I suppose, that like imparted some wisdom on you that you think is you've taken with you?

Look, in my career I've been blessed with the people that I've worked with. I've worked with some incredible people, some really smart people as well that would help with some of the deals and some of the structures and so forth.

some of the people that built warehouses and who trusted me. mean, we were building rail terminals and ports and a $300 million development in Singapore. I couldn't do that on my own, but I would find the people that were capable of actually doing it and then get those jobs done. I had a great old construction manager down here in Melbourne and he would go everywhere

And he was old school, know, back in the day, you know, everyone's like, get on with it, get off my side. But yeah, you know, I was just having good people. I was blessed with, I had so many good bosses.

over the, nearly every one of my bosses has been a great person or a great mentor. I go back to all of them and think they were all really good and the teams that we had in some of those businesses, they some pretty incredible people that we worked with. So, I'm in my own rule.

Michael Fox (31:58.528)
My real thing in life, I suppose, was Toll. know, Toll was just the most amazing job. We worked so hard. We built a behemoth, you know, and I was part of it. You it was one of those great things. You look back on it now and go, wow, what a journey. What a journey that was. You know, we were on airplanes day in, day out, going, we're here, there and everywhere. But it was an amazing company.

You know, now you've done your Harvard OPM course. Would you do anything differently when you were in tools days if you had this course earlier?

Look, it's interesting question, Jam. And I keep going back to the Harvard thing. Because when I did it, I was actually unemployed. I was one of the few that didn't really have a business to apply it to until I came across this business that I'm in now, what I did halfway through. So that was good. But I'd sort of just exited when we started. So it was hard to apply it.

I probably would have done a lot more, maybe bit more on the leadership and the culture I think. I think that was one of things that really came out of Harvard was building, though we built good teams and we had good times.

You know, we probably weren't aware of it so much back then. Like it wasn't drilled into you. You know, we had a company of, I don't know, we got to about four and a half billion dollars. We only had one HR person. The philosophy was like, you know, well, if you don't have a HR person, if you don't have a HR department, you've got no one to complain to. So everyone just has to do their own thing and you you get by.

Jamitha Pathirana (33:33.315)
What?

Michael Fox (33:48.43)
No, I think the thing, I was thinking about it last night, knowing we were having this chat today, is that I haven't yet, I don't think put the Harvard, what I've learned at Harvard is still bubbling away in the background. I haven't put that to use yet. So I'm here doing something that I quite enjoy, but wondering, should I be?

you know, or could I be, what else could I be doing using my previous career history plus, you know, my Harvard OPM skills and so forth to do something else. But yeah, I haven't addressed that. I'm sort of, things in my life have normally just have happened by chance.

And so I figure that the next thing will happen by chance. I don't know what that, I don't really know what that is. I sort of got an idea of what I would like to do, but I've still, I've promised to go and roof this business and I'd stay around, but I think there's still options that I can stay here and do some other things as well.

So tell us bit more about what you do currently with this Polar.

Polar Enviro. So we have a photoluminescence technology which replaces a battery and the market that we've sort of gone after, it's not a sexy market but it's exit signs in buildings. So if you think about, you know, in Australia there's a hundred million, we've drilled this down, there's about hundred million exit signs in Australia in buildings. There's a 25 % failure rate every year. So that's...

Michael Fox (35:28.078)
And when you, we'd started up those 25 million exit signs with batteries in them going to landfill. So the batteries are bad. There's all these, you see there's truck fires and everything now. So with the ESG initiatives and so forth, we've been able to take the battery out of the exit sign.

So this is a startup, it's had a lot of money poured into it. The technology's there, we've been winning big customers. We've just done Telstra, we've done Department of Defence, we're doing Harvey Norman. It has global potential. I'm using my skills to open doors to the bigger companies. It's surprisingly with the bigger REITs and everything that they're not probably more on board as yet. They all have five pages of ESG on their website.

Our signs last four times long, they use 85 % less electricity and we can't get them to engage. It's actually money for jam because they're spending money replacing their other ones with old technology when there's a new technology. Trying to apply all those things that we learned at Harvard and some more to try and get this thing up and running. It's basically called Smarter Light, environmental exit signs.

but we also do road markings, make things glow in the dark once it's exposed to, once the photoluminescence is exposed to light, creates energy which becomes the base.

Yeah, I suppose like, you know, this is an innovation but in the construction industry as a whole and your experience What do you think the trends are going towards the future?

Michael Fox (37:11.224)
So the construction industry is probably the least impacted or changed industry out of anything, out of any industry that you could possibly think of. There's been hardly any innovation in the last 50 years. We still build buildings pretty much the same way, maybe a little bit different. We've changed form works, we've changed the way we do, we've changed the way we do our structures and something and so forth. But there's very little

there's been talk of being able to get your whole set of documents or plans off the internet. You hit Google and it's gonna give me a three bedroom house with a full design and all the structural engineering take off and everything. That sort of hasn't happened yet. They talk about printing buildings and houses. Well, that's great, but you can only print one at a time.

Hickory, Michael Ardrew, of our Harvard brothers, he's probably leading the way with some of his technology with bathroom pods and so forth where we build a bathroom off site and we ship it into a tower.

and some of their technology and jump forms and so forth to get buildings out of the ground. But other than that, there really hasn't been that much. We're working with a lot of the builders now on our technology, but they're still of the mindset that they'd rather put a $50 cheap Chinese fitting in that gets them over the line and the building finished and they hand it over and they walk away rather than something that's environmentally friendly going to last 16 years. So builders traditionally haven't been our friend.

we are and our friend because they want something cheap and quick and safe also. We're dealing with institutions and know, reits and large property owners. I think they'll come around.

Dylan Pathirana (39:08.108)
And how do you change that mindset, that kind of throwaway mindset?

Well, I mean, was saying before we go to meetings, know, like everybody loves our technology. They're blown away by it. It's fantastic. Trying to get it implemented. Do you know who is responsible for an exit sign in a building? It can be the building manager, it be the property manager, it could be the facilities manager, it could be the owner, it could be the electrician. You've got to cover off so many different people. then, you only need one blockage and we get blocked. You need someone to drive it from the top right down.

and then from the bottom right up.

Do you think this industry, the whole construction industry is a very bureaucratic industry?

Yeah, I think, well, we're governed in Australia, particularly Melbourne. I mean, we're governed very heavily by unions, union costs, building costs, the amount of RDOs that we have. Safety's improved with unions, been great. But the cost here is just...

Jamitha Pathirana (40:15.704)
So crazy.

prohibitive, know, in Dubai they're building towers for, you know, one third of the price that we're building them here for. I mean, that's using different labour obviously, but you we wouldn't be able to do that in Australia, but that's why it's an expensive place to live here.

Yeah, because I heard that you guys were talking like I mean for our perception, construction industry is a very profitable business, right? and the

More builders gone broke in the last two years.

The margins are like single digits.

Michael Fox (40:51.022)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're lucky. wouldn't want to think you'd know what no one wants to be a builder anymore. It's crazy. know, and developers always put the hard, the hard, hard word on them. During COVID when prices are increased, you know, the builders have to go and beg their clients for more money. Some would help others would just say, No, we've got a contract is bad luck. So the bill would hit the wall. Yeah, things like that. It's like, it's a it's a hard game. But once all those contracts

pre-COVID washout. think going forward the construction guys that have survived will have pretty strong businesses. But we won't have as big a choice, particularly to build towers and so forth.

Yeah, so Michael, what's your plan for you? you mentioned you want to still stay in the property development area or you want to look at different industry altogether?

No, think property is where my head and my heart are. I've been in it for a long time. I think I could go and change or do anything else, although I am in an innovative and technical business now. But it's still property-related, is what I'm doing.

No, think I'm here, Jam. Is there something else? Could I a role on a board or some boards helping younger people? That's probably the key. was really why I did Harvard, because there was an education piece missing in my life. And I thought, when I retire, if I would like to sit on a board, no one's going to be employing me because everyone's got two degrees or something. These days I've got nothing except experience. And unfortunately, when you're

Michael Fox (42:39.516)
for jobs these days, AI knocks you, if you don't have a degree, AI knocks you out. You don't even get to first base unless you know the people that you actually can ring up and say, I wouldn't mind talking to you, I've got lots of experience. But you don't get through the AI walls.

Would you consider starting a new business again?

Contemplated it, probably not. To go and rattle the can again, raise capital, employ people. I think I'm done. I've done it twice and I think that's enough. Yeah, I'll leave it for there. There for now, I suppose. My skills are in demand somewhere. I've just got to find the right person.

Yeah.

Michael Fox (43:30.232)
But I'm not hanging the shingle out the door either. I've been having a pretty good time.

Plus you have so much experience that you can share. You could very nicely fit into advisory role.

Yeah, well, that's probably where I pursue some more work. Whilst I love it here, I've got capacity to do more. I can only play so much golf. I think I'm ready for something else as well as doing this. But what that is, I don't know yet.

And like while you were working, you mentioned family is really important. How did you go about the balance between work and family?

yeah, I had a, well, I was married for, what, 30 odd years, that recently. And, you know, my wife was very good with my kids. But, you know, we would always have holidays together. You know, we'd always try and be home. Probably wasn't always there. But, you know, we made the best of it when we both...

Michael Fox (44:45.262)
We had twin girls when we were, I don't know, 28 or 29 or something, and life was just frenetic. It was crazy. And we were both working, so we made a decision then that we would...

she would stay home and look after the kids and I would look after everything else. that relationship's all done and dusted now, but we got our three kids through school and through university and it all worked and they're fantastic and I credit their mother, to be honest, with all that.

And I suppose looking back on your journey, do you feel successful?

How do I feel successful? Yeah, to a certain extent, I think. Yeah, I've got, you know, I think I've got a reasonably good name out there from a business point of view. Personally, it's taken a bit of a beating lately, but from a business point of view, you know, I've always said to always be the better man, you know, and never compromise. You can always...

be compromised, there's always compromises to be made, don't compromise yourself. Once somebody's got something on you, you're gone. So I would say just, don't blemish yourself.

Michael Fox (46:09.068)
just and just always be always be the better man sometimes you got to walk away I've learnt that you know in in the school of hard knocks is that not everybody thinks like you you know I think I'm a nice guy I think everybody's a nice guy and then again every now again you come across an asshole pardon the French but

you know, with other people think completely opposite. some people think everybody's an asshole and every now and again, it's a good person. And so you've got to be wary of those people because they don't care. And I got taught that lesson and it hit hard that, you know, not everybody's actually what you expect, who you think they are. And it's quite devastating when that happens.

Well, Michael, this has been a fantastic discussion and I know we we could stay here for a lot longer. But I suppose, looking back on your journey, I was jotting down a few things which I think have been part of your success. I'd like to share them with you. The first one is I feel like one of the core traits is you you prioritize experience and learning from others. Like we talked a lot through your journey, you went and kind of found mentors and

found on the job experience and kind of worked your way through so that you had an understanding of kind of the entire process. And so when it came time for you to, you know, go and start your own businesses, it was, you had that full kind of end to end understanding. And I think having the experience, it makes it lot easier when you're building teams as well, because you have an appreciation of what your team's going through and they know that you've been in their shoes as well.

And so it kind of makes that kind of building trust a lot easier.

Michael Fox (47:54.734)
and I would agree with that.

And then the next one is you go with the flow. You mentioned there, know, like, I'll see what's next for me. Like I know something will come. And I think, you know, there's, I'm definitely the opposite. Like I always try and overanalyze, overplan, but there's a beauty in just like going with the flow and knowing that you've worked hard, you've built all of this experience and that tomorrow something will come and that kind of.

It frees you of a lot of head noise, I think, and it just lets you get the task at hand done. The next one is empowering teams. And I think kind of goes to that first point. You said that your success is because you are able to empower and build great teams. And I think, again, that comes to that respect point. And you can only do so much by yourself, but with a team, you can go and exponentially scale.

And I think that goes to the last point, which is you're incredibly relationship driven. Even throughout the work you're doing now, it's all about the relationships that you've had in the past and how do you open doors with them now. you know, obviously that's come from years of experience building relationships. And even when in sales, as you said, you've got to work on that trust first.

It is funny though, sometimes the ones that you've helped on the way up, they don't want to talk to you when you're down here now.

Jamitha Pathirana (49:16.046)
I don't know what I'm talking

Jamitha Pathirana (49:20.322)
That's always the case. But just add to what Dylan was saying, we heard this word on and on, it's trust. I think we talked about what's your secret ingredient. I think that's purely what I can see, it's just trust. So you actually give trust to others, pretty much empower them to do what they're good at. And also you gain trust.

by doing empowering them and also delivering what you promise to deliver, right? So I think that's your pretty much secret ingredient, Michael. And knowing you as well, you know, you someone that you can all rely on, know, so. That's it, that's it. Any time, good or bad, you know, you're there, you know, you're happy to support your mates. And thank you so much for your time, Michael.

Thanks, Jim. I'm always there.

Dylan Pathirana (50:13.026)
Yeah.

Jamitha Pathirana (50:16.78)
I know with a very quick notice and we had this opportunity to talk to you.

It was a pleasure to be on. It's great to see you both. And I look back on my Harvard experience as probably one of the best things that, one of my biggest achievements in life, if not for my children. Probably Harvard for me was that big. And meeting you and the crew has just been the most amazing thing. So thank you and thanks for having me on Quest for Success.

Thank you. And if you found something insightful from today's episode, if you could do us a massive favor and go and like and follow us on whichever platform you're listening to this on right now. And you can see all of our inspiring episodes over on our website, the quest for success podcast.com. And with that, catch you guys in the next episode. Thanks for listening.