Waller is no flash in the pan. Like the other two Executive of the Year finalists, he has long association with the company he leads, having been its chief executive for the past 23 years. Over time, he has steadily built Ebos Group into billion-dollar success story and medical market leader.
Under Waller’s leadership, Ebos has consistently turned in outstanding performances while growing to become truly Australasian enterprise, the Top 200 judges said. “His understanding of organisational culture and how to successfully integrate new acquisitions into the group is exceptional,” they said.
Under Waller’s stewardship, Ebos Group has become the major supplier in New Zealand of medical consumable products and pharmaceuticals to the total health industry, including public hospitals, GPs, aged care centres, and retail pharmacies. Having established strong position in New Zealand, Ebos is now endeavouring to emulate that success in the Australia market.
Waller, who follows last year’s winner Rob Fyfe as the Deloitte/Management magazine Executive of the Year, says Ebos recognised back in the early 1990s that it couldn’t be “product-centric” company. Instead it focused on bridging gap in the health market between what patients require through the various stages of their lives and how health providers deliver what is needed at the right time to service their customers. Embracing new technology has been an important part of that and Ebos has become one of this country’s largest e-commerce trading organisations, with every pharmacy and hospitals able to order online.
“We’re quite unique in having multitude of channels to market, where we have the flexibility to shift,” says Waller. “So if the government decided, for example, to have more aged care in homes, we have the capability to actually deliver more of that, right now.”
Waller says Ebos has also recognised that what is successful today is unlikely to be so in five years’ time. “Life is moving so quickly in so many areas today, you probably only get two or three-year time frame before the game moves on and you have to do things differently. Every five years or so we reinvent the organisation and reshape it. I think every organisation in dynamic field – and healthcare certainly is – has to do that.”
For Mark Waller, success is all about building and creating things through people. For more information on how he goes about achieving that, and his management style, scroll down this newsletter to the Last Word.
Other finalists:
• Alan Clarke, Managing Director of Abano Healthcare Group
• John Fellet, Chief Executive of Sky Network Television
