The little monster that grew

As a long time player in Australia’s home entertainment industry, Keran Wicks has developed a reputation as a straight-talking and hard-working business woman.

The bluntness is certainly refreshing though.

“Managing growth is a bitch. It’s a great problem to have though,” Wicks laughed.

For those audiences that missed the prequel, firstly here is the back-story.

Wicks left school early and got a job pumping petrol before talking her way into the fashion industry.

After working her way up to the position of Victorian state manager for one company — and breaking a few sales records along the way — Wicks was sacked.

For being pregnant.

“That was back in the day when there was no such thing as discrimination, but I went to the equal opportunity board and it was going to be the first case tried on the grounds of pregnancy,” she recalled.

“But they settled out of court and I got the princely sum of a month’s wages.”

With sheer necessity as a motivation, Wicks took a job at a local video store before her son was born and fell in love with the industry.

“I had my son and had to go back to work and I thought there had to be a business in selling movies,” she continued.

“The store I worked in found some movies that they wanted to sell, so I put them in the back of my car and went and sold them to another store, which lead to buying stock from them and selling to other stores, so I became a wholesaler.

“I did that for a number of years before I was pregnant again and I thought it was time to scale back. That lasted nine months before I went stir crazy.

“So I bought a run down video shop and I had been telling retailers how to run video shops for years so I thought it would be time to start my own.

“I opened a store called Little Monster video in Kew, which was named after my two sons. We were doing three times the business of other stores, but because they had a shingle hanging outside the door and they were a franchise they paid half the price for stock than what I did.”

But after realising that joining a group would not teach her anything she didn’t already know about the business, Wicks decided to start her own group.

And so Network Video was born with an initial group of 12 independent video store operators in 1993. Within 18 months the group had grown to 100 stores.

“It proved that the business model was wanted and needed in the industry – that people wanted to maintain their independence yet plug into a system that provided them with buying benefits and marketing benefits,” Wicks explaind.

“They could have their own magazine without needing to spend thousands to produce it each month – someone else could do it for them and bring in some efficiency of scale.

“That was 16 years ago now and we are the second largest group in Australia and we are the largest independent group in the world — certainly the only one run by a woman, which makes it interesting because I get asked to play golf quite a lot.”

And as for the future plot of the Network Video story, Wicks said there are plenty of new opportunities available.

“The industry itself is as healthy as it was in the halcyon days, which people would have you believe was in the early 1990s and the late 1980s,” she added.

“The Australian consumer loves to rent. Everyone likes going into their local store and asking what a good movie is. Australians are shoppers, we are an outdoor society and we like going to do things, unlike Americans who get everything delivered. We like to pick up our pizza and we like to go and get a video. All of this talk of the sky falling in and it has never been less true. The industry is as healthy today as it ever was.”

Wicks said her company was leveraging off its internally created IT systems to explore different markets.

“This year we launched an online retail site Done Dirt Cheap DVD – that’s been terrific,” she explained.

“We have been able to do that by plugging into our knowledge of the industry. We also launched an industry portal, for want of a better term, for industry purchasing. Our systems are some of the best in the industry. Our ordering system and B2B systems are terrific so we have developed a hybrid of those and made it available to the whole industry, much to the chagrin of our competitors.

“These are the sort of things that you think of when you are driving along at 3pm on a sunny afternoon and wonder why it hasn’t been done.”

And in an industry that thrives on the entertainment of make-believe characters and fantastical situations, Wicks said there was only one myth left – that of work-life balance.

“I don’t believe in balance and if a woman says she has found balance then she needs to come here and teach me,” she laughed.

“What I do know is that there is compromise. Balance is impossible to achieve, but you do become adept in compromise. When my children started calling me ‘Aunty Mummy’ then it was time to pull back on travelling and when there was a great opportunity at work then I needed to divert more of my attention there.

“It could be that I am just an abject failure at balance but I think also a lot of women kill themselves trying to find that happy nirvana, but end up frustrated and feeling like they’re failures. There really is a superwoman concept in business and you just have to learn to accept that you can’t be all things to all people. With good partners, understanding children and great work people you can divert your attention to where it is needed at the time.”

Although the script is still being written, for the moment the Network Video story continues to look like it will end happily ever after.