Chris Beer: Seeing the company light

Chris Beer, Chief Operating Officer at OPSM, talks to Wealth Creator about his 22 years with OPSM, the changing face of business and the future direction of the company.If an 18-year-old Chris Beer had been asked where he would be in 22 years, it’s unlikely he would have seen himself as the Chief Operating Officer of eye wear company OPSM. Yet Chris now oversees the day to day running of a company, that holds significant market share and enjoys instant recognition.

Chris has witnessed much of the growth of OPSM. With former CEO Jonathan Pinshaw, the pair have been instrumental in OPSM’s impressive growth. In Australia and New Zealand there are 750 stores under the OPSM brand umbrella. OPSM itself is the undoubted leader in the provision of eye care and retail eyewear in the country. Currently there are 300 OPSM stores, which Chris expects will increase to 350 over the next five years. Budget Eyewear will reach 200 stores from its current position of 79. Sunglass Hut presents the most outstanding growth opportunity; Chris expects to build another 30 to 40 Sunglass Hut stores this year in addition to the 30 built over the last six months. This number could easily climb, with another 200 Sunglass Hut stores in place by 2010.

Blind to the potential

The growth has come despite Chris’ original apprehension about establishing a long-term career with the eyewear giant. When he was 20 years old, Chris’ ambition was to become CEO of a publicly listed company. Today, he is content with the work he has done, even though he says there is much more to achieve.

He is happy with his work as COO, yet things may have been vastly different if he had followed his friends into engineering. After finishing his HSC (Higher School Certificate), Chris applied to study engineering because that’s what all his mates were doing. Unsure of any meaningful career path, he admits he wasn’t keen on his friends’ chosen industry, but with the inevitable pressure from his parents, Chris placated them by saying he would look for a job. “I said, look I’ll get a part time job, I might go to university, or I might defer.” As fate would have it, he was called in for an interview with OPSM. On the following Friday night, as he was packing the car with his mates for a holiday in Melbourne’s coastal suburb Portsea, he received a call offering him a position as an Apprentice Optical Mechanic with OPSM. He was to turn up to work on Monday.

In his early days at OPSM, Chris had no intention of staying with the company. “I guess I had the view that I wasn’t going to stay here. I didn’t quite know what it was, but it didn’t really matter because I was going to do something else.” But he gave it a go, and realised the company presented great opportunities for its employees, even though he knew his current role had to change. “I went back to school (to study commerce), while doing all that I had to do at OPSM. All the way through I thought, ‘this is interesting, this is a good business and it has lots of opportunity. I reckon I can make a difference here’. With a newfound ambition and drive, Chris became the youngest Store Manager at the company. He then progressed to become the youngest Retail Area Manager in the company’s history, responsible for 15 stores.

Seeing credibility

Despite the accolades, Chris still failed to see OPSM as a long-term career path, and was open to other opportunities. “I never started out to be with the company that long.” Chris remembers. “But the company’s always provided opportunities, and challenges have presented themselves, so I think it’s been a good marriage. I’ve worked my way through different store sizes, bigger stores, different opportunities.”

Most of the managers at the time, or those in leadership positions, were far older than Chris, and he learned early on how to establish his own credibility and to interact with and influence people who were far more experienced. “You had to earn their credibility,” he says. “Because what did I have to offer – someone who didn’t have anywhere near the experience they had.” Chris soon developed and built his own credibility, and then took to the task of building the company’s credibility.

In the early ’90s, Chris was appointed Assistant State Manager, and a re-engineering process was put in place which eradicated state-based structures. Jeff Kelly, then CEO, organised a team of employees to spend six months in Sydney, in order to restructure and re-engineer the business. Kelly created consistency across the company by abolishing State Manager positions, which created a much better brand leverage across the organisation. Chris remembers that before the overhaul, “the states had a lot of autonomy, which was holding the business back. In principle Sydney would do something different to Melbourne, because whatever Sydney or Melbourne did and vice versa couldn’t possibly be the right thing. There was that parochialism in the business that was happening across other state boundaries as well. It was quite divisive, and being the Assistant State Manager I could see what was going on at the State Manager level, and it was nonsense.”

Chris moved his family to Sydney in 1996 and became the HR Manager for OPSM. After five years, he decided to move back to Melbourne, disappointed that “some promises made by the organisation hadn’t been delivered,” due to miscommunication through the company. Chris was in Kelly’s office for five hours as the CEO tried to convince him to stay. Just as a contract was about to be signed, making Chris the National Operations Manager, Kelly left the business and was replaced by Jonathan Pinshaw as CEO in 2000.

“I told Jonathan ‘this is what’s been offered to me, here’s my contract, but if you don’t want me to come back to Sydney, or if you have any reservations, don’t waste my time, because I don’t want to put my family through the move again’.” Chris says that the new CEO spoke ‘straight from the hip’. He told him that Chris’ latest promotion had been Jeff’s call, but that he trusted Jeff’s judgement and wanted to go with it.

Under Pinshaw’s leadership and Chris’ direction, OPSM brought in several customer-focused business strategies. The turn of the century saw the business become far more retail oriented and customer focused. Throughout these years of growth Chris oversaw and implemented many of the necessary changes to turn OPSM into a world-class business. “In 2001 we launched a new store concept which was more about fashion. In 2002 we were about ‘the way people look’, and 2005 became about ‘the way people look and feel’.” Thus a new sales philosophy was introduced which centered on an emotional connection with the customer. The stores were repositioned and refurbished so that the fashion brands were displayed prominently in the front, and the stores had more of a retail environment feel than a pharmacy or pseudo-medical feel. Notwithstanding, Chris affirms the quality of eye care continued to improve as well as the look of the shop, because the accuracy of the eye testing is fundamental.

Looking into the business

Chris says his ‘mission in life’ is to drive performance in the organisation, and to make sure that OPSM is “continually listening to customers in the marketplace and looking for innovation and creativity.”

Chris has made some courageous decisions during his time at OPSM. He counts turning OPSM into a three-brand strategy as his biggest jump, which he admits ‘paid off in spades.’ He says, “There was an opportunity, but there was a big write off cost in trade marks. There was risk attached to the goodwill of different brands in different states. But we did our homework, our team believed it was the right thing to do, we made the call and we did it, and it’s been fantastic. I guess we had the courage to do what others were concerned about doing.”

Chris is also passionate about empowering people and choosing the right people for the job. He’s passionate about raising the bar in performance, and says “sometimes you have to make those calls for people who were good, but who are now great.
So it’s best to just tell it as it is.” He does this through clean communication. According to Chris, this is “unbiased, unprejudiced
feedback, without fear or favour.” In short, it’s the feedback that helps people achieve their full potential.

He believes that feedback is crucial to success. As a young guy trying to find his way, Chris says he used to “walk into people’s offices and say ‘I would like to know the two things you think that I need to improve on’. And they’d start saying ‘well I think you do this really well …’ I’d say ‘yeah okay, let’s agree on that, I don’t really care what I do well, I really care what you think I don’t do well and what I can do to improve’.”

Another thing Chris says he used to do as a youngster that he still does today, is “the day I get promoted I sit down with my boss and I say ‘I know the only way to improve is to do what I do well, and show that, but at some point in time I want your job and I’d like to know what you think I need to do to get it’.”

He believes in leading by example, and is good at building trust. “I say what I do and I do what I say.” Chris builds excellent rapport within his team who share a sense of camaraderie. He asks himself about each of his team members: “Would I go to battle with this person, or would they go to battle with me.”

When a new team member is introduced, Chris tells them candidly “you didn’t get here because I don’t think you can do the job, I think you can. But my objective is to make you the best you can be and take over my role at some point in time.”
This makes his job easier, and he says, “if it means they can eventually get my job, then that’s fantastic. Then I’ve succeeded
in helping people realise their potential. People say it, but if you really believe it, it’s a no-brainer thing to do. Too many people say it but don’t deliver on it.”

Chris expects that in five years time, OPSM, Budget Eyewear and Sunglass Hut will have a network of between 1,200 and 1,500 stores. He says, “there is certainly the potential for us to do that in the marketplace, so it’s pretty exciting.” The company already has the capital to achieve such figures, and there are plans and programs in place to organise the human resources. As for Chris, he can now see himself working with OPSM for another 22 years – so long as it continues to provide him with challenges and growth opportunities. “It’s a very exciting place to be. Of course there are challenges, but in the end, that’s what makes it all fun.” 

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