What you need to know:

• Former Booktopia CMO and retail marketing and digital leader, Steffen Daleng, has switched B2C for B2B, becoming the group-level CMO of Australian infrastructure giant, Jaybro.
• With private equity backing and a five-year growth agenda and strategy underway to get to IPO, Daleng has kicked off an ambitious plan to transform the marketing and digital aspects of the business, including a whopper martech and ecommerce stack overhaul, complete team restructure, expanded customer lens and brand audit.
• Managing change as he transforms processes and shifts a disparate group of marketers into a centralised, group marketing and digital team was an uncomfortable process for some, Daleng admits, but zero attrition six months in and strong employee engagement scores demonstrate the approach is working.
• Investment into Monday.com, a merchandising management platform, playbooks and all the ‘hygiene’ of streamlines process is also starting to pay hefty productivity and efficiency dividends short term, including a 75 per cent reduction in cost in human capital in merchandise management alone.

It’s a big switch from pure-play book selling to a private equity-backed, B2B infrastructure manufacturing and supply company. Steffen Daleng went into this steep learning curve with his eyes wide open.

The former Booktopia CMO, ex-ecommerce / digital marketing leader at The Co-op and one-time Danish Army sergeant made the leap from B2C to B2B last May, joining Jaybro Group as its first executive-level group chief marketing officer.

The company was established in 1996 by Stephen Joyce with aiming to make life easier for infrastructure workers, providing everything from hi-vis vests to digital road signs and barricades. Since then, it’s grown through 10-plus acquisitions and now reportedly chalks up revenue above $400m per year. Now in the hands of private equity firm Quadrant, which bought-in for $620 million in 2021, and with former ASX-listed Reece Group chief, Adrian Palumbo, at the helm, it’s orchestrating a five-year strategic plan to get into shape for an IPO.

Daleng's walked that path before. He was part of the team under founder and former CEO Tony Nash who took the Booktopia from a $110m privately owned ecommerce business to a $240m revenue ASX listed operation. But after the pandemic helped power record revenues in FY 2022, it struggled with profitability. He left the business early last year ahead of a wider restructure.

“I took my time to figure out what the options were,” Daleng comments. “One of the biggest challenges for me was industry change. That was a very big decision that was incredibly difficult to make. It’s funny how you make a decision and people come to you afterwards and say, ‘you were so insightful – you knew retail was going to crash and you got out early, you’re so smart’.

“The reality is sometimes we need to make decisions on where we are, and based on the choices ahead of us at that time. I spent a lot of time meeting with execs and board members and making sure it was a crew of like-minded people. Once I had clarified that, and knew there was a stake for me in driving the business forward, I set out on what’s been a fantastic journey.

“I had been in retail a long time and understood consumers there very well. But I’ve said it before, I don’t really consider myself a marketer, I consider myself a business operator who gets the products, services and brand in front of customers and who finds ways to model perceptions of set products, services and brands. That’s always been my passion, with a deep background in digital.”

Growth agenda: Tackling structure and strategy

Daleng couches his priority list in a growth agenda defined by Jaybro’s strategy and position, with a combination of organic growth and strategic acquisition the big levers. As most who’ve worked for a private equity firm will know, there can be an emphasis on increasing enterprise value through better, more efficient operations. More efficient marketing operation is certainly Daleng's focus.

In practice, this has seen Jaybro elevate technology and marketing to sit at a group level. Looking into team structure, procedures and technology then became Daleng’s first priority. Historically, companies within Jaybro’s portfolio ran their own small marketing teams.

“I did an assessment of people that were there, skills we had available, strategy of the organisation, then my strategy and vision of where we could take this. I spun the wheels for two months, getting to know people and seeing where the hidden gems were, where they could grow personally and having the right conversations,” Daleng says.

“Most were performing as jacks of all trades on small teams doing everything. When incremental work came in, everyone was running around. They got stuff done, but not very well. There were good people who knew how to execute really well but were stretched so thin.

"Most of the value came from looking at how we could introduce new procedures that aligned with where we need to be in the future, and introducing that early on so we are ready and can scale."

Many now have new roles, separated across brand, communications, digital and tactical executions. Jaybro also runs an in-house creative team of four people. On the digital side, Daleng has hired new talent including ex-Efficient Media and former Haute House Co head of ecommerce, Andre Robertson, to help deliver an ecommerce rebuild.

“It’s brand on one side and digital on the other to match up against where we need to go, but also what skills we had in the business and retaining people in the business,” Daleng says. “Now, our businesses have access to incrementally better technology, people and roles within the organisation and a group that understand that vertical very well. They have the people in-house to execute against that as well.”

Six months later, Daleng claims zero attrition and staff who are “growing nicely” into their roles. He points to quarterly employee engagement survey scores being “better than they have been before”, with key indicators such as people feeling empowered, and believing in the business’s growth agenda.

“It’s been a lot of change in terms of bringing in new processes, new operations and new ways of executing at scale. That’s uncomfortable for everyone at the beginning, as you need to learn something new but you don’t feel comfortable about what it is and how it’s going to work,” Daleng says. “People have these premonitions it’s not going to be great and there was a bit of that at the beginning. But it manifested in a positive way here – it wasn’t critiquing, negativity or being resistant to the change, it was more people feeling a bit uncomfortable with all these new ways of doing things. But the team embraced the ideas and made them theirs, and it only improved the outcome.”

Jaybro operates a number of standalone companies with their own brand and brand perceptions in market, and many more divisions operate as their own companies. Another part of Daleng’s role is to delineate what is a unit, division, company, category, branch or product.

Helping Daleng attain buy-in is what he describes as a set of “good founder retail principles of getting products at a decent price”. What becomes clear through the interview is the need to change was the structure.

“The journey we’re on now is about maturing staff as marketers... Confidence is probably the biggest thing now; ensuring people have the confidence to say no and to share their views, experiences and thoughts on things,” he says.

Overhauling and optimising the martech and ecommerce stack

Confidence plus a seriously ambitious digital and martech overhaul. Daleng is redeveloping the group’s entire ecommerce and martech stack. Right now, Jaybro has two ecommerce stores and over 20 websites, most sitting on disparate CRMs and ecommerce platforms including Magento, Craft Commerce CMS and WordPress.

“If someone needs to upload a banner, there are many different ways because each site is different and has different criteria. There’s no centralised way of doing this and that’s a mess because no one can scale like that,” Daleng says. “We hired a new project manager who has significant experience across more than 18 ecommerce projects as a leading force in getting us over the line there.”

Plans include rebuilding the CMS, launching a new merchandising platform plus centralised product information management (PIM) with integrated ecommerce and CMS components. All has been board approved, budget approved and audited.

“We’re going to execute an old vision I had many years ago and what I was striving to build with The Co-Op in 2015-2016, which is now the de facto for the industry. One of my dreams was to have a platform that would become a central point for everything,” Daleng explains.

"We're going to take a customer and operational-first approach to looking at how we improve the customer-facing technology across ecommerce, websites and marketing stack, purpose built to enable the scaling of multiple B2B companies to efficiently and effectively add, change and optimise content across all the sites powered by a headless architecture and modular build approach."

This is especially important given Jaybro has a lot of IP across its manufacturing businesses. Among its biggest jobs are $50m+ tenders for large government and enterprise projects, such as the Warringah Freeway and Sydney Airport.

Daleng nevertheless brings a healthy degree of scepticism to achieving his ambitions, agreeing marketing and tech teams can exhibit a tendency to “overcook things and make things too complicated”.

“I have spent a lot of time on sanity checking it wasn’t vanity, bias or ego driving this approach but rather the right approach to tackling this at Jaybro. Due to complexity in the structure of the organisation and how we need to present the products and operate, it fits perfectly into it,” he says.  

“A digital stack can either become incredibly efficient for an organisation that’s scaling, or you mess it up because of a bad build as there are too many failure points within the flow of data coming through. That’s the balancing act we need to strike. Within that, you need to spend time on sharpening the axe on how data needs to flow, how to operate the stack, and predict how you’ll need to orchestrate data flows now and into the future. It's a super exciting project and when we’re done it’s hopefully going to be the pièce de résistance in terms of data management.”

Hand-in-hand with tech is broadening the customer lens. Originally, the group’s primary customer was ‘Pat / Patricia’, Daleng says – the person in the hard hat onsite. Over time, focus has extended to project influencers and stakeholders, such as architects and designers.

“In doing that, we get ahead of the curve of the infrastructure worker by finding the person making the decision on what products they use,” he says. “I’d argue our point of influence and persuasion lies in lots of different levels: Those creating these projects down to those needing to choose vendors to some extent.”

Yet there’s more than internal and customer improvement at stake. Daleng is well-aware a company Jaybro may look to acquire could be swayed by modernised infrastructure and operating model, fuelling growth.

“Any potential new company we’re looking to acquire, should be able to immediately see the value in the marketing technology and the value it unlocks for them and the value to their businesses. It should be an obvious accelerant to growth by coming into this ecosystem,” he says. “So the value of what we’re doing goes across customers and internal operational efficiency, but also potential new companies that would be interesting to acquire.”

Quick wins: Workflow management and knowing how to say no

As these hefty plans materialise, Daleng has been busy finding quick wins. Many come from twisting the dial from reactive to streamlined processes.

“A lot of problems the team had were from supporting many business units – with many company and category managers, there wasn’t really a clear marketing plan for any of them,” Daleng says. “We have built an efficient workflow management and a ticketing system. We created proper briefing documents and online forms to reduce the revision and amount of dictating around what needs to be done on getting creative work executed. They’re bread and butter things many other organisations will take for granted, but they needed to be introduced, built and perfected over time.”

Jaybro introduced Monday.com across the broader business, and Daleng’s team have crafted playbooks covering go-to-market timings, distribution mechanics by vertical or category and acquired company onboarding.

“It was a multi-pronged approach of how we be more efficient, how I make life better for that person in that role, and improving job satisfaction,” Daleng says.  

While there’s centralisation, automation and consistency plans being pursued here, one area Daleng hasn’t mandated one way or the other is agency partnerships. A case-by-case decision is made on companies acquired with an agency already in place on whether to retain them.

“We have some companies in the group where I’ve sat down with the legacy agencies and they’re just better than our internal team,” Daleng says. “One company grew up with the same agency over 18 years. That agency had the same person sitting on their paid account for 15 years. Talk about knowing the company, products and its customers.

“You also don’t want a situation where a company feels handcuffed. So there are two options if you’re me: Either you build the best in the industry; or you accept when something else is better for a company and given that, make sure they have the right tools to succeed.”

Given much of this is still being rolled out, hard ROI is still coming. But Daleng has calculated estimated return on investment on a forthcoming merchandise platform rolling out in March as an example of chunky short-term payback and says “I’m usually not wrong on these things”.

Right now, up to 30 per cent of the week is spent managing branded merchandise across the organisation and for each company, something Daleng sees as “insanely inefficient”. With its new platform, time savings are expected to be between 50-60 per cent the first quarter, and even higher longer term.

“Whenever someone requested something, they just got it. Merchandise was floating around the buildings… there was no governance or clear view around how much we had, inventory value or when we needed to reorder,” he says. “We expect to land on a 75 per cent cost reduction in human capital and time allocation. We’re introducing everything from pre-defined products and merchandise in each of the companies, minimum and maximum levels, automated ordering, vendor allocation.

“Sometimes you need to create the plan and stick to the plan, then better get buy-in and consensus when you make the plan and roll that out.”

Commonalities of B2C and B2B

Daleng might be navigating his first B2B CMO gig, but he’s clear on what marketing must do at Jaybro.

“My primary job is to make sure whenever our sales crew goes out and knocks on the door, that customer opens the door. And when they ask themselves the question of whether or not to do business with us, they know who we are, and they say yes because they like what they have seen and how we resonate in market,” he says.  

“To do that, we need to ensure we spend as much of our time as possible bringing the right perception of the companies, their products and service in front of prospective customers. Every 1 per cent reduction in time or effort in a non-sales / brand driving activity can be reallocated to support the sales team in getting the customers to say yes."