Open House Guest Speakers

With over 25 years of experience leading teams to build partnerships between retailers and suppliers, Steve has a wealth of knowledge on successful business-to-business collaboration and is a passionate advocate of the benefits of adopting a collaborative approach with trading partners. He emphasises that collaboration trumps negotiation for sustainable growth.

A wealth of experience across FMCG blue-chip businesses including L’Oreal, Heinz and Simplot has instilled in Darcie a strong passion for strategic category planning. Leading teams in Category Development to leverage shopper insight and create data-driven growth plans, she is an advocate for building internal collaboration to foster a category centric organisation and working with customers to build alignment around shared category opportunities.

With experience gained across category development, analytics consulting, revenue growth management and other strategic roles, Melinda now leads Category, Revenue Growth Management and Performance Analytics at Lion.
Mel believes Revenue Management is truly at the centre of a business’ success: When it’s going well, customer relationships are productive, profitability is positive and there is a clear roadmap to continuous improvement.

David brings over 20 years of experience across Sales, Category & Revenue Growth Management together, to lead the development of the Revenue Growth Management discipline at Real World Marketing, helping clients to leverage RGM for Joint Value Creation & growth.
Through his experience working across diverse businesses, Dave champions the integration of RGM into the ongoing drumbeat of FMCG organisations, critical for fuelling profitable growth in an environment where price is constantly under pressure from consumers, retailers & external forces

A highly-accomplished commercial leader who started-out in electronics and moved into FMCG 14 years ago, Craig has always kept his customer’s needs front and centre. Realising that his customer’s shoppers were moving online, he decided he needed to be there too.
Describing himself as “not overly techy” Craig believes that eCommerce is no longer a niche skill, but an essential for commercial professionals and leaders. He asserts that you don’t need to know how to build websites or cutting-edge technologies – you just need to know how to make your product look good, how to be visible to potential shoppers and how to talk to customers about improving their shopper journey.

Guy started his career as a Supply Chain Graduate at Sainsburys Supermarkets in the UK before progressing to Senior Buying roles across Dairy, Meat and Fresh Produce. He moved to Australia in 2008 to join Coles, where he leveraged his commercial skills and technical knowledge to drive strategic change across several fresh areas. As Head of Fresh Strategy and then BCM for Dairy, Guy led teams to meet both commercial and sustainability goals, partnering with key suppliers to deliver multi-year industry leading results.

After more than a decade with Coles, Guy joined George Weston Foods combining Category and Sales responsibilities to manage a strategic growth agenda at Don Smallgoods. He observes that both as a retailer, and now as a manufacturer, he has seen JBPs transform categories and deliver great outcomes for consumers, retailers, manufacturers and in some cases primary producers as well. He asserts that a great JBP allows businesses to invest for the long term and ensures effort and resources are directed to initiatives which add the most value. A strategically aligned JBP is essential for a strong growth agenda and brings the cross-functional supplier and retailer teams closer together.