How to Build a Billion-Dollar Business

CHAPTER 20CULTURE AND COMMUNICATION

Yoga. Massage. Complimentary gym membership. Personal trainer. Chef-cooked meals. Fully stocked pantry. In-house dietician. Meditation coach. Naturopath. Celebrity VIP events.

This reads like a blurb from the brochure of a five-star luxury health resort. It was in fact a slice of life in the day of a Swisse team member. We wanted to keep our team happy and knew that providing perks like these would make work feel more like home. Productivity experts talk about work–life balance. We preferred to call it work–life integration. We wanted people to feel as comfortable at work as they did at home, so we did everything we could to make work feel more like home. The heritage of this largesse began over a decade earlier.

It all started with lunch.

A home away from home

The tradition of providing the team with a daily meal began when Swisse consisted of just Michael, Stephen and a handful of people working out of the office in Airport West. Michael's parents ran the takeaway shop across the road and when Michael started work at Swisse, his mother would cook up a beautiful hot lunch of Lebanese delights like baba ghanouj, tabbouleh, falafel and shawarma and bring it over to feed the Swisse team. They all stopped work, sat down at a communal table, broke bread and talked about things other than work.

Michael told me what an impact these small but incredibly powerful gestures had on the team, so when I took over as the leader at Swisse, we made sure ...