James McPhie

As the commercial director, I am responsible for revenue, gross margin, and EBITDA for the APAC region of Vistaprint. As part of the Senior Leadership Team, I lead multiple teams that include category management, commercial pricing, production partnerships, customer service, purchasing, customer experience, and supply operations.

Key Achievements

• Implemented a JIRA management system to allow cross-functional teams globally to work more effectively together, which led to a +26% increase in productivity.
• I have grown all commercial indicators by +10% each year for the region through effective strategic planning; prior growth was 4.5%.
• Built team structures and processes that are being adopted globally relating to pricing controls, allowing free cash flow to be optimized, and proactive issue identification.
• Developed a team structure to allow the team to scale as the business does, removing key dependencies and risk

I was responsible for all aspects of new vendor selection for Amazon across all of ANZ. I led a team of Vendor Managers to add new vendors and selections efficiently and profitably to the platform to allow Amazon AU to hit its sales, selection, profit, and market segment share goals. I was responsible for the education and reporting programs for Australia and NZ, driving vendor self-service, allowing scalable results, and identifying areas of opportunity and risk within the business.

Achievements

• I led the growth of more than 6x Amazon’s selection to customers and closed the brand parity to competitors by 28.3%. Leading to an increase in sales by 178% year over year, and improved vendor margins of 940 basis points year over year.
• The education team I lead has also trained 3.2 times more vendors year over year. This has led to a reduction in vendor contact cases and frees up vendor manager time to focus on business driving initiatives (4.1 FTE saving).
• I have built processes and guardrails to ensure we add profitable selection quickly. This has allowed my division to be +300 bps margin accretive to the total Amazon business.
• Through my tenure, I have increased the size of my division from 1 to 16, and developed 4 team members to management positions in my team. I have built a strong people development culture, with strong succession planning.

I lead a team consisting of both direct reports and indirect reports cross-functionally that is responsible for the development of multiple categories across Ampol retail nationally. I was tasked with developing new ways and capabilities from the ground up to drive incremental sales, profit, and innovation across the business.

Achievements

• I was responsible for redeveloping the three-year strategy for the national coffee business. This involved completely redeveloping our current offer and putting significant capital investment into launching a new, market-leading offer. The result of this strategy has led to strong, double-digit growth year over year, and it has a forecasted growth in three years of six hundred percent to deliver an incremental $100 million in sales annually.
• Leading my team, we built a new, fresh category offering from the ground up. Completing this involved macro space optimization, range development, and a new pricing model.

I commenced with Caltex in the capacity of National Category Manager for beverages, milk, protein, and meal replacement, frozen beverages, and ice. I led the category worth $400m in annual revenue in Australia.

Achievements

• Developed an initiative to increase revenues while maintaining costs. This involved negotiations and collaboration with multiple stakeholders. The result of this initiative was a multi-million-dollar profit increase.
• I lead a team responsible for securing Frozen Oak, exclusive to Caltex, nationally. This was a big win for the retail business, enabling the category to differentiate in a category that holds little range difference between competitors. This resulted in an incremental four-million-dollar sales increase.
• Successfully identifying trends in the market and implementing initiatives that involved attaining additional CAPEX from the business for implementation. The result was an incremental one hundred and fifty percent increase in the subsegment.

I joined Masters in the role of Category Manager for power tool accessories and tool equipment. Through my success in this category, I then moved over to the doors, hardware, and security category.

Achievements

• I redeveloped a category that had not been managed before. The result from this extension and development of the category was a sales increase of forty percent. It was reviewed by the Boston Consulting Group as 'world-class'.
• Reducing SOH by 12% while being able to maintain a service level of 98.9% to our retail stores. This enabled me to free up working capital for the business to direct to other areas.
• Working with Chinese, German, and Italian vendors to source products for sale in the Australian market. This involved negotiating all terms and hedging currency effectively to ensure our COGS were as low as they could be.

I commenced with Hilti as an Account Manager in the Melbourne office. After being selected and participating in an International Talent Acquisition Program (ITAP), I was promoted to the head office in September 2014 as the retail and digital marketing specialist.

As an account manager, I was responsible for driving sales in my allocated territory. During my time with Hilti, I drove sales by +28% year over year, and as a result, I was promoted to the Sydney Head Office.