Wade Death
Snapshot:
Industry / Sector: Business / Corporate, Hospitality, Retail
Career Type: Business Owner
Education Pathway: University
Mid Coast Connection: Lives on the Mid Coast
The Blurb:
Wade Death is the founder of Jack & Co, a business built around redefining convenience stores through quality, customer focus, and a strong sense of values.
With a background in commerce and corporate leadership, Wade shares how tenacity became his greatest tool in building a successful business — and how he finds the most joy in mentoring young, local staff into leadership roles within the company.
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Current Role: Founder and Managing Director of Jack & Co, overseeing a fast-growing chain of modern convenience stores.
Career Path: From a commerce degree and corporate career at Caltex to launching a values-led business on the Mid Coast.
Key Skills: Tenacity, resilience, customer experience, leadership, long-term vision.
Challenges Shared: Early startup struggles, pushing against industry norms, rebuilding after major downturns, staying committed to a vision despite scepticism.
What He Loves: Watching young or less-experienced staff grow into senior roles through hands-on learning and personal development.
Advice to Younger Self: Do the time. Learn the hard way. Be patient. Passion makes the hard work worth it, and long-term success depends on showing up every day.
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“Being in your own business is hard. It's rewarding, but it is hard. If you're tenacious enough to keep coming back every day, you're 80% of the way there.”
“Consumers want more, they deserve more, and they’ll pay for more.”
“Some of our executive managers started working 10, 15, 20 hours a week as casuals. Now they know more about the company than I do.”
“You can never write your own future—you can only ever write your past and what you're going to do today.”
“If you're passionate about what you do every day, it’s not work.”
“In your 20s you learn a trade, in your 30s you master a trade, and in your 40s you bank a trade.”
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[0:10] Intro
Hi, my name's Hailey. This is the Human Library video series. In this video series we interview people from the local community and hear their stories. Today we met with Wade Death. He's the owner of Jack and Co. Wade talks about the importance of tenacity and how this has helped him in his business. He also talks about how rewarding he finds it to support up-and-coming people in their career journeys.
[0:45] What does your professional life look like at the moment?
Professional life is pretty busy, I have to say, and my personal life is too. I've got three young kids and we live at Wallaby Point, and I spend a lot of time on the road. So that's the reality of where my personal life meets a professional life. I guess the reason why I think my life is busy is I started the business about 12 years ago in Taree, and it's sort of been go, go, go. So we started with our first employee at the time, and I think we're about 150 now, with another couple hundred coming on in the next 12 months. So it's a pretty sort of busy and involved business.
We serve upwards of 1.5 million people a year through our stores now, so every day there's thousands and thousands of people going through our stores. That in itself makes for a pretty busy life, so there's always something going on in terms of staffing, customer interactions, supplier interactions, and then of course just the mechanics of running a business. So that's why my professional life is reasonably hectic. But you know, we get there.
[1:58] Could you please tell us about a skill that has helped you get to where you are at the moment?
I think if I was to point to a skill that's helped me get here, I'd probably say tenacity. Now, I think tenacity can sort of take many forms, and I guess, be it resilience, tenacity, whatever you want to call it. But when I left school, I went to university. I did a Commerce degree. When I finished Commerce, I worked for Caltex Australia Limited, a petroleum and convenience store company, in the convenience, petroleum and alternative energy side. And I then made the decision to go out on my own.
I think I was pretty well skilled and pretty well paid, relatively speaking, and I think my life was relatively simple at the time, certainly looking back on it. But to go out on your own and start a business from scratch and take on that risk and whatnot, it's a really really hard slog. It's a really worthwhile slog and it's really rewarding. But the skill that I draw on now and I did draw on certainly when I started the business is just being tenacious. And I think there are a number of businesses that actually are great businesses that don't come through the other side because it gets you down and you struggle to get back to work every day.
And I think at the end of the day, being in your own business is hard. As I say, it's rewarding, but it is hard. And if you are tenacious enough to keep coming back for more every day, you're 80% of the way there. That's probably the skill that I've drawn on. Like anyone who's founded a business, when you start out things are pretty hard. There are days you're struggling to pay the wages, there are days you're putting stuff on credit cards to get by. I'm no different to anyone else that started a business in that way, so it's certainly a pretty hard slog. I think the skill I draw on the most is being tenacious enough to front up again the next day.
I think if I was to give advice to people looking at this or considering what their career plan is, being tenacious gets you a long way.
[4:19] Could you tell us about a specific time where tenacity has helped you achieve a goal?
When I started the business here in Taree — now out of your viewers, some of them would be familiar with Jack and Co, some of them may not. If I digress for a moment — when we started, there was no such thing as good food out of a service station. That was absolutely unheard of.
What I decided to do, the principle of what I wanted to do, was I wanted a convenience store that I wanted to go to as a consumer. So I didn't eat frozen thawed sandwiches that had been on the shelf for two weeks and gas flushed, and I didn't drink instant coffee out of a machine. I didn't like pies out of a wrapper. I liked going to a bakery, a sandwich shop, a coffee shop or whatever. I thought, well, if all of these people are coming into this location and they all probably have the same taste as me, why are we serving people inferior product?
What I found: nine people in ten said to me, "Your concept will never work because people will never buy this stuff out of a service station or a convenience store." And I guess that's what I talk about — fronting up every day. After a couple of months, you start to realize that actually people will do it. You can change consumer behavior and you can change consumer perception. It's not easy, but you can do it.
What actually firstly started out as probably what people thought was a weakness or something that wouldn't work became not only our greatest strength, but became what made our consumers really sticky to us. We found that actually we didn't have a lot of competition in this space. Ultimately, the success of our business has been built on the fact that we never gave up on that principle and we never gave up on that idea that consumers want more, they deserve more, and they'll pay for more. That's what we did.
And I think if I link to the skill, I think being tenacious that first month, two, three, four, five, six months, when you have a huge amount of challenges, that when I saw the way consumers started behaving, I started thinking there is definitely method in this. There is a reason why people are coming back.
We then started having other issues, like we didn’t have enough car spots in our car park. Or when we started to expand, we started to realize that if we don’t have big enough stores to handle as many people as come in every day, then we can’t take that store that otherwise might have been a good location.
So I guess that’s the thought of the skill being tenacious. When people tell you your idea won’t work, it’s pretty disheartening. Being tenacious enough to front up the next day and prove them wrong is both rewarding, but that certainly brings with it a bit of a mental challenge around how to do this every day.
[7:17] What do you love about your work at the moment?
Seeing younger people come through our business, or perhaps less experienced people come through our business. Now, I approached this business when I started it with the blessing, I guess, of a university degree at multiple universities and business school out of Melbourne as well. I also had 12 years of corporate experience with a listed company, so I probably had the pedigree that it takes theoretically to start.
What I get a huge kick out of is seeing people start as someone that works 10, 15, 20, 30 hours a week as a casual eight or 10 or 12 years ago that are now executive managers in our business, that have grown with the business. They came in without education and without particular skill sets, but the attitude to show up every day and work hard — we’ve taught them the rest on the job. They've been able to develop their skills through short courses, through campuses like Taree Uni Campus and things like that.
That’s what I probably get the greatest satisfaction out of. If I look at probably our five most senior people in the business, all of them started on the front line of our stores and they are all now executive managers in our business. They contribute a huge amount to the business, to the point that I would say on many days I refer to them — who know more about my own company than I do — because they have done it from the start. It’s really rewarding to be able to look at your people and realize the loyalty that they’ve built up to the company over time, particularly given they probably didn’t start with the skills that they needed to be in the role they are in now. But by working hard, learning the hard way, they really have progressed, they really have learned a lot, and now they’re extremely valuable to us.
[9:18] Why is it important to you to see these younger people, less experienced people come through your business?
I think — why do I get a kick out of seeing people progress? I think that, you know, I’ve got this saying — sort of the lottery of life — and you never know where you’re going to be born. What I get a kick out of is seeing people who make their own pathway, who find a way to progress, to learn, and to better themselves.
If I look at all of those people, not one of them would have ever entertained the thought of going to do a course or learning something out of a textbook or learning some kind of theoretical base. They came in with practical skills — “I can do what I do with my hands because that’s what I’ve always done.” The reason why I get a kick out of that is they are learning a whole lot of other complementary skills.
We put all our young managers through what we call business philosophies. We put them through courses about how we determine our pricing strategies and why we promote certain products and why we move certain products in certain areas. Some products sell better at eye height. Some products sell better when you make people walk through a store. These are the things that, when they come in on their first day and they’re standing at a register, are a world away from them.
But once they’ve worked in the business for a while and they start learning some theory that goes with the practical skills they’ve already got, they become really powerful people in your business. That’s what I get a kick out of — they’re now educating me. They’re saying, “We did this and this is what worked,” or “I’ve analyzed the results, and when we put it there this happens; when we put it there, we sell twice as much.” Or “These are the sorts of deals that we should put together for our consumers so that they get good value.” That’s not the skills they arrived with, but they’re certainly the skills they’ve developed over time — a combination of learning on the job, and certainly learning through some theory as well.
[11:26] What is one piece of advice you would give your younger self when you were first starting out?
If I think of the challenge in starting out my own business, it's probably not that dissimilar to even when I started working for a, you know, listed corporate entity. I talked about the skill of being tenacious and fronting up, and I guess sort of the next thing on from that—what I would tell my younger self—is you have to do the time, you have to learn the hard way.
There's an irritating saying to younger people that you can't put an old head on young shoulders, and in some ways the same is true tomorrow as it was true yesterday. You have to do your time to learn these things. And I think what we often find is people want to progress really quickly—and that's great—and ambition is extremely important. But there is no substitute for being in the right place at the right time and learning the hard way.
When you've learned that the hard way, and you've done your time—and you know, in our particular instance it's doing time on the shop floor or things like that—you become a much more powerful leader because you know it. You've got the right amount of sort of context to a problem to make sure that you're really valuable.
I think probably the other thing that I've always been really thankful for is I've always been passionate about my work. And I think if you're passionate about what you do every day, it's not work. I think that's an extremely powerful thing to tell people who are considering what their career paths are. I'm regularly asked to go back to, you know, my high school and talk to kids and whatnot, and—find something you're passionate in. Because if you're doing something under sufferance, you're actually not going to be as valuable.
You're not going to front up early. You're not going to think about it at night. You're probably not going to want to go on and further yourself with further education. If you've got a subject matter or an area of work that you're really passionate about, you're tenacious enough to turn up, and you're happy to do the hard yards and learn things on the go as you go—then you become pretty bulletproof. And you become a real specialist.
You know, some people had said to me, in your 20s you learn a trade, in your 30s you master a trade, in your 40s you bank a trade. I think if that holds true—and I believe it does—you have to have learned those stages through a particular career. And if you're not passionate about an industry, you're probably not going to stick around and do the time. I think if you can do the time, and you can be passionate, you’ll go a long way.
[14:12] What do you think it would have meant to your younger self if you'd have heard this advice?
If I'd have heard my own advice many years ago... Look, I think everyone has probably an inner ability that when you go and you start out or whatnot, you think "I can do this" and, you know, "this is pretty easy and I'm getting the hang of it." But, you know, there's kind of an old saying about "you don't know what you don't know," and I think it's pretty true.
If I was to go back and think about my headspace when I started work or when I started my own business, you know, you think you've probably—you've considered so many options. In actual fact, the world just takes you down so many paths and so many adventurous roads.
If I think to COVID now—we think of COVID now having come out of the other side—but whatever it was, three or four years ago when that hit as a business, that was extraordinarily challenging. We dropped 90% of our turnover overnight, and we had to work out a way really quickly: what do we need to do to survive? And it became survival.
Every business hit their moment of "how do I survive?" I think having done the time and learning the business and learning your trade and whatnot, I wouldn't have appreciated—twenty-something years ago—how important it was to understand so much about what you do. Because when you come into, call it a really sort of challenging situation, knowing your trade backwards makes a huge difference—to come out the other side, or deal with adversity, or deal with whatever the challenge is.
Let's face it: you can never write your own future. You can only ever write your past, and you can only ever write what you're going to do today. But you can't write the future that's going to be in front of you. And I think if you've acquired the skills by learning the hard way, being patient and whatnot, I think you come through whatever adversity is thrown your way.
Please note: All content is correct at the time of recording.
