a for five years from 2008.  This month he prepares to leave his latest role – group CEO of DFI Retail Group, a multi-category retail group spanning supermarkets, convenience stores, health and beauty chains, Ikea franchises and an interest in Starbucks Coffee chains in multiple Asian markets. On August 1 he will hand over the reins to Scott Price, an executive with 25 years of global experience in retail, logistics and FMCG, most recently as president of international at UPS.  Six years ago, when he arrived at DFI Retail Group – then known as Dairy Farm International – McLeod inherited a group of disparate businesses operating independently across Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Some of the businesses were strong, others were struggling.  “We had to identify where we were going to place our long-term bets, where we needed to address short-term issues that were recoverable and also look strategically at elements of the portfolio that may not be strategic priorities for the future,” he told Inside Retail in an exclusive interview.  “We built a very solid foundation in very difficult circumstances,” he recalled of the past six years. “We knew there were going to be challenges – I’ve faced them before and you kind of get an understanding of what the key levers are that you need to pull in order to sustain change and improve performance. But I didn’t expect mass protests on the streets of Hong Kong or a major global pandemic – and just to add a bit of spice, the odd typhoon, volcano, earthquake and a few floods thrown in for good measure.  “So it’s had its fair share of extraneous challenges. I’ve got to give a lot of credit to the team for the dedication and committed determination to continue to make progress despite everything else that was thrown at them on top of what we needed to do to transform the business.” A juggling act: the now and the long term That team had to juggle managing ever-changing pandemic-related challenges with remaining focused on the long-term vision for the business “to build what is right for tomorrow,” he said.  “The important thing for us was making sure that the organisation maintained the motivation to continue to build the longer-term process and business improvements in the face of that adversity. And it varied from country to country and market to market.” There was no one-size-fits-all solution to running the businesses: “We just had to make sure that we ebbed and flowed with government requirements in each of those individual markets,” he said  “The main thing for us at the start was that we wanted to make sure we protected our people. So we immediately distributed personal protective equipment to all of our teams – we made sure they had hand sanitisers, masks, and maintained distance protection when they needed to. Because they were the ones that were out on the front line every day. “We were talking about them being the fourth emergency service, and I think that was true.” McLeod has many anecdotes of staff going beyond the call of duty to keep stores running during the Covid-19 crisis so consumers could source food, medicines and other essentials in times of severe movement restrictions. But one story stands out: a woman in China who ran a 7-Eleven store who knew that if she left the shop and returned to her family’s apartment she would be locked down there indefinitely.  “She literally lived in the store for three weeks, because it was the only way she could guarantee that it stayed open. That’s the kind of dedication and commitment you meet at the shop floor level,” saidMcLeod, who caught up with the woman earlier this year to present her with an award for caring passionately about her customers.  That story reminds him of signs displayed at Walmart’s Bentonville head office when he worked for the US giant. They quoted founder Sam Walton: ‘Ordinary people doing extraordinary things’.  “We’ve seen that so often in retail, at the shop floor level. So one of the things I always try and do is engage with people in the stores so they feel valued in what they’re doing because I think that’s the best way to motivate people. And also it keeps you close to the customer, because as a retailer, the customer has to be at the heart of everything you do. That absolute passion for the customer is the difference between successful retailers and others.” An ‘amazing’ Coles tenure Prior to DFI Retail Group, McLeod’s time at Coles clearly holds special memories for the Scotsman. “That was a pretty amazing experience in terms of being able to transform an organisation and influence the way Australians shopped and the value that they received. If you are in any sort of mass-market retail, value matters. So making sure you give the best value guarantee to your customers has to be your top priority.” Later in the conversation, he returned to Coles, reflecting on the impact of the turnaround on the company’s archrival Woolworths, which, at the start of McLeod’s tenure, was easily the frontrunner in the Australian supermarket industry.  He believes Woolworths underestimated the potential impact of the changes Coles was making.  “By the time they realised that we were becoming a bit of a force to be reckoned with again, it was almost too late because we had gained momentum. We outperformed the market for something like 60 consecutive months on the back of these changes. But they gave us the window early on,” he said  That turnaround would have seemed a herculean task at the start. As Tony Boyd wrote in the Australian Financial Review in September 2010, McLeod only really realised the magnitude of the mess the business was in when he started visiting stores.  “He walked into a Coles storage area and saw a sign on a large refrigerator door: ‘Warning, this door can fall off’. The hinges on the door were so rusted that if it was not opened carefully it would fall onto the person opening it,” wrote Boyd. “He saw similar examples of lack of investment by the former owners of the chain, including shelves half empty of stock, trolleys missing wheels, dozens of light bulbs not changed and huge checkout queues because of a lack of staff.” McLeod’s first challenge at Coles, he shared at the time, was to rebuild trust in the brand after customer faith had been eroded by poor service and indifference. Swing-door entrances designed to discourage shoplifters were removed to make customers more welcome, the ranks of checkout staff were boosted to reduce queue times, and the out-of-stock problem was addressed. Besides the commitment to value pricing, he led a focus on improving the quality and freshness of produce.   By the end of the 2011 financial year, McLeod had led the development of a new store format – later essentially copied by Woolworths; living proof that imitation is truly a form of flattery – and rolled out 260 of them around the country. During the first two years of his leadership, customer transactions per week increased by 16 per cent to $17.4 million and pre-tax earnings by 15.8 per cent to $962 million.  Why value matters A universally common theme across every market where McLeod has worked his transformational magic is that value matters to all of a retailer’s customers – regardless of how much money they’ve got in their pocket. That’s notable given the differences in economic development and household income in countries as diverse as Singapore and Vietnam, for example.  “When I looked at the price competitiveness of some of our businesses [at DFI Retail], I didn’t believe that we were competitive enough.” An example of that focus being deployed was across the 53 Giant supermarkets DFI Retail operates in Singapore. In late 2020, the company launched a campaign ‘Lower Prices That Last’ reducing the prices of hundreds of everyday grocery products on a long-term basis by an average 20 per cent.  Chris Bush, chief executive of the Southeast Asia food business, said at the time the program was no gimmick. “This is real. This is our largest single investment in lower prices in over a decade. We have listened and acted on what our customers have told us on what matters most to them in these tough times – lower prices, better-quality fresh food and an improved shopping experience.”  The future is engagement Meanwhile, McLeod advocates that strong, successful retailers of the future globally will be those who recognise the many different ways in which customers wish to engage with them and shop with them.  “I’m not going to talk about DFI, because I’m passing the baton, so it’s up to the new leadership to decide how they want to take the business forward. But if I look at it more generally … the retailers that have a customer-centric approach – which really means servicing the customer to the best of their ability in any way that the customer wishes to engage – and who can satisfy those needs quickly and efficiently and successfully: they’re the ones that are going to win.  “There’s no point in having a slick tech system if people can’t navigate it properly or if you can’t deliver orders in full and on time. There’s no point in offering an ability for me to order in store and have it delivered to home if it’s going to take two weeks to get there,” he continued.  “There’s an immediacy, an expectation, a demand from the customer, that we have to use our ingenuity and improved efficiency in the organisation to make sure that we can still satisfy all those needs and deliver an effective return.  “Those are the real challenges that retailers going forward are going to continually face. It’s not binary, it’s neither online or offline. There has to be a sort of holistic, integrated approach – with the customer at the heart of everything you do.”