Inside the Triguboff succession

Every Friday afternoon, staff at billionaire Harry Triguboff’s Meriton office in the Sydney CBD run around frantically preparing and printing what are known as “Harry’s sheets.”
A collection of A3 pieces of paper about 10 inches thick and with thousands of numbers and financial information on each, the sheets are the nerve centre of Triguboff’s $20 billion property empire.
They are also his compulsory weekend reading.
Every Saturday and Sunday, Triguboff sits down in his Vaucluse mansion in Sydney’s east to begin pouring over the sheets so that he knows what is happening in each part of the business that started in 1963.
Meriton now employs about more than 900 people building up to 2000 apartments annually, managing 19 services apartment locations with about 5200 suites, as well as the 4500 units Triguboff owns himself with another almost 2000 in the pipeline.
Property sales, building material costs, hotel occupancy rates, even the number of workers attending construction sites. It is all there on the sheets.
They even had to be printed locally and delivered to Triguboff’s hotel on a recent trip to Israel, from where he called his executives at all hours to tweak sales, marketing, leading and hotel rate strategies based on what he was reading.
The sheets also form a central part of the 89-year-old Triguboff’s succession plans – which looms as one of the most crucial transfers of power and one of the biggest transfers of wealth in Australian history.
Triguboff has almost single-handedly built a $20bn fortune, in a manner that is unlikely to be ever replicated. What he eventually does next and what happens after he vacates the Meriton throne will have huge repercussions for his family’s wealth, the Australian property sector and the power and responsibility that comes with being the best in the country that what he does.
While he says he has no plans to retire – “I might last another 10 years! As long as I can think, as long as I am healthy, I will work” – Triguboff has been handing down lessons and teaching his management techniques and methods to a small group of family members and hand-picked executives who will run Meriton when he eventually cannot.
Grandson Daniel Hendler, a rising executive at Meriton, has started taking home his own copies of the sheets each weekend. And like the family patriarch, Hendler has also begun calling Meriton’s sales agents each Saturday to get the latest in-depth information about buyer habits and market movements.
“Harry has taught me the importance of these sheets and the information in them, and then what you do with them,” Daniel Hendler tells The Australian. “But it is also about getting out to our sites, dealing with our sales people every week, getting around to other parts of the business like the serviced apartments, residential leasing, the hotel rooms. That is the great thing about Harry, he does all this and knows every part of the business.”

Next in line

But as Meriton gets set to celebrate its 60th anniversary in 2023, a year when Triguboff himself turns 90 in March, the question of succession planning looms.
Hendler, 32, looms as the most likely to have the biggest role among anyone from his family, according to Triguboff. Another grandson, Ariel Hendler, is also a Meriton executive.
“Daniel’s strength is that he understands figures well,” says Triguboff. “Ariel is not as ambitious but he watches the properties. As the business gets older some of the buildings we have get older too, so someone has to watch them. Serviced apartments get knocked around more than residential apartments. He is more interested in that. Looking after the assets. That is important.”
Triguboff also has chief financial officer Brad Goodman as a confidant and three executives in their 40s, residential sales director James Sialepis, Matthew Thomas, group general manager – Meriton Suites, and national construction manager David Cremona, on the Meriton board. Thirty six-year-old deputy managing director Albert Chan is also a director, though Triguboff’s daughters, Orna and Sharon will inherit Meriton.
“The daughters will own it and the others will run it,” Triguboff explains. “For me the important thing is that the company should remain together. That to me is more important than anything else. So I hope they keep it together.”
Triguboff is described as “the best control freak in Australia” by another prominent billionaire on The List – Australia’s Richest 250. It is meant to be a compliment about how Triguboff always knows what is happening in every part of his business empire. He is considered the ultimate hands-on boss.
Triguboff also has a fearsome reputation and temper but when asked if he is a tough boss, he gesticulates around his office and says “they’re (his staff) all still here, aren’t they?”
“You can yell at them, you can even swear at them. But the worst thing you can do is ignore them. I show an interest in all of them,” he adds firmly.
“It doesn’t mean some of them don’t leave sometimes,” Triguboff says, noting that the average tenure for many of his executives stretches into a decade or more.
“I remember once someone left because they wanted to build apartments and took five or six of my good people. I was disappointed. But I am still friends with the people who left. The guy, I ignore him though. He’s a schmuck. So that happens.”
There have been other examples of that toughness. Meriton was embroiled in legal action against former senior legal adviser Joseph Callahan in 2020, who alleged he had been asked to lie in an affidavit about development application approvals and then sacked when he refused to do so.
Triguboff was alleged to have said to Callahan: “Listen my friend, you write it my way or you can f … off”, and “F … you. I pay you to win cases do you understand?”.
Meriton and Triguboff called the allegations “obviously untenable and a fiction”, and that Meriton executives had “longstanding” concerns about his suitability and he had handed Triguboff an “entirely inadequate piece of work.”
The two parties later settled the dispute, saying the unfair dismissal case arose from a “misunderstanding.” Triguboff wished Callahan “every success in the future,” and Callahan said he was grateful to have been able to work with “a business leader of the calibre of Mr Triguboff.”

Hands on

Some former Meriton staff approached by The Australian did not want to talk about their former boss. One even said he’d need to seek Triguboff’s permission.
David Hynes, a former in-house legal counsel for Triguboff, jokes that he is one of a handful of former Meriton executives who left of his own volition.
“There’s lots of stories about Harry but one thing he does do is he likes to surround himself with people who are good at what they do. He says go out and find what you are good at and you will be a success here.
“And he never lets things lie. He won’t just put in a DA (development application), for example, and just let it sit there. He is always chasing up and checking on how things are going.”
Angelo Mantsis, a former acquisitions manager who worked 19 years for Meriton, says Triguboff “is tough, but fair.”
“He might not do things by the textbook, but he is very successful,” he says.
“You have to remember that property is a high-stakes game. He controls every aspect of that business and knows what is going on everywhere.”
Triguboff visits a Meriton site every day and then charges from meeting to meeting in the company’s headquarters each afternoon, checking on sales prices, room occupancy rates and other pressing matters.
He says he has to see Meriton’s building sites with his own eyes to understand how they are progressing, and then how they will sell. “You must keep looking at it. It is one thing to see it on a piece of paper. It’s another thing to see when they build it. “And the market moves. So to make the right decisions for future projects, you must go there all the time. And then you can see what needs to be changed.”
Triguboff’s personal style has its quirks. He never uses a calculator and will do long division and multiplication in his head, surprising executives with the accuracy of his answers.
But the phone calls he makes to the Meriton sales agents across Sydney and in Queensland each Saturday between noon and 1pm, means he is acutely aware of market trends and buyer preferences before official statistics are collated.
“He will say ‘update me, what sort of people are you seeing’. He’s ahead of the market every single time because he’s getting that feedback literally from buyers,” Sialepis says.
“People aren’t afraid to say ‘oh it‘s dead’, or ‘I’ve seen 10 people all from overseas.’ There’s a lot of misconceptions about property (statistics). It does lag. He just giggles because he has a two or three months advantage over competitors because he’s getting information from Parramatta, Chatswood or wherever.”
Triguboff says having access to that information straight away has meant he can tweak a project to more family-friendly three or four bedroom apartments when the market calls for it, or build more one and two bedroom units when demand is higher for those.
In recent years he has surprised many inside the company and outside it by having Meriton build childcare centres and retail space, and some office space, in their new developments to meet market demand for more facilities closer to homes.

Finder on the pulse

Cremona says when Triguboff visits sites he will “test the blokes to make sure they aren’t just taking him where they want him to see. He will remember the colour of tiles. We might have selected it six months ago but he will remember and say that’s not right. He has an eye for detail.”
Triguboff also tries to speak to a wide range of people on site, from site managers to traffic controllers who has been known to share a sneaky cigarette with, absorbing the information he is told.
It also helps create an inclusive culture where no-one is afraid to talk to the boss, Triguboff claims.
“It is a combined effort. I can‘t do it by myself. It helps that I am in love with the company. That is important. For other people, family is more important, hobbies are more important. Here, it is 100 per cent concentration on the company. When I do that, then I influence everyone. Because if I don’t care, or I care less, then they care less too.”
Basic in-person communication, phone calls, and printed out sheets of paper full of facts and figures. It all might all sound old fashioned, but maybe the 89-year-old apartment magnate has always been ahead of his time.
“All the talk these days of vast collections of data and analysis of it to make business decisions. Harry has been doing it with his sheets for 60 years,” explains Hendler.
“Another big thing people talk about is project management software, keeping people accountable and knowing what management is doing.
“This is his own system that he has developed. He was Atlassian before Atlassian.”
Thousands of textbooks have been written about management theories and techniques, from Jack Welch’s cutting of the bottom 10 per cent of GE’s workforce, “Chainsaw” Al Dunlap’s ruthless cost cutting to the efficiency of Toyota’s Lean Management.
Very few big corporations have the flat structure Meriton does though, and therefore Triguboff’s style is different to more hierarchical and traditional corporate leaders.
“He keeps things pretty simple,” says Goodman. “But one day his family will look at the (sheets) and understand what is in there. When he looks at things now, he says ‘I have got to make sure people understand it’. And I think what he does is he tries to train everyone else to think like that as well.”
Thomas says of Triguboff: “he doesn’t just tell you what to do. He teaches you how it’s done and he teaches you his logic. It’s not always right but he doesn’t just dictate what he expects. He teaches you why he thinks.”

Constant energy

Chan calls Meriton “a small business on steroids” and that its “market cap is probably bigger than a Lendlease or whoever. But we do it with one-tenth the headcount probably. So you’re expected to be across every detail, get involved in other departments and know what other people are doing.”
Cremona jokes this means he gets advice on apartment fit outs and design from Meriton’s in-house lawyers. Hendler talks about the “constant pace, constant energy” around Triguboff. “He has managed to maintain the same intensity for 60 years.”
Triguboff says he has three basic mantras that underpin the business: “build what people want, build what people can afford. And build so you can make a profit. That is all.”
He says he started Meriton almost 60 years ago, rivals would laugh at him because he didn’t know the building trade. He says he at least knew how to pay the bills on time, which is something other builders weren’t proficient at.
He learnt the building side of things by employing people who knew what they were doing, while he kept an eye on the finances.
“I said whoever I employed, I hope they are better than I am. Otherwise, why would I pay them? I have never tried to show how clever I am. This way, they (staff) are happy to say how clever they are. And I’m very happy they say that!”
Triguboff is famous for berating Prime Ministers, hectoring Reserve Bank officials at any hint of an interest rate rise. He still locks horns with council officials all over town, hating the glacial pace of their zoning changes and building approval processes.
He reminisces with some fondness about hiring Kings Cross bouncers to protect him from union officials in the 1970s during early morning stoushes on building sites. And he definitely isn’t adverse to taking legal action to get his way.
Is the sometimes truculent billionaire finally mellowing at 89? He clearly doesn’t want to retire, and recalls when he got an offer from Chinese firm Country Garden to buy Meriton in 2014 – well before the Chinese property downturn of the past year.
“I remember they came onto my sites and started acting like they already owned it. I didn’t like that and I could see the staff didn’t like it.
“In the end, I only had one question for him (the owner). I asked him to show me where your money is coming from. They didn’t have an answer and that was that. Today, the poor bastard is probably worth 10 per cent of me.”
Triguboff speaks more warmly of his employees though, and the subcontractors that have stuck with Meriton over the years, including some in their third generation of working with his firm – which he says always pays on time and ensures there’s a steady pipeline of work.
“They like the atmosphere here. The biggest proof is when (Covid) arrived and they all still came to the office. I didn’t make them or ask them. I think one of the reasons they stayed is because they like each other.
“The building industry is like football, it has to be a team effort. He lays the brick, I do the paint, they do the plumbing, and if one of us is no good then it stuffs up the lot. So it is important to be always working together. Talking, looking, fixing, changing. Together.”

*The story by John Stensholt first appeared on The Australian.