Nigel O’Neil has joined the Barry Plant Corporate Office as Head of Strategic Growth.
His role is to drive the development of business strategy to leverage data, technology and innovative practices to keep the Barry Plant Group ahead of the curve and cement their place as Victoria’s most successful real estate network.
Mr O’Neil was previously CEO of Hocking Stuart real estate group for almost a decade and also spent a couple of years at Buxton real estate as an Executive Director, but it is his career pre-real estate that drives his passion for building and growing businesses to deliver benefits to clients, business owners and their teams.
“I started my career as a Chartered Accountant,” Mr O’Neil explained.
“But I was never a traditional accountant. It was a job at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) working as a ‘Corporate Doctor’ that lit my passion for finding the strategies that will take a business to the next level.”
His experience at PwC saw him work to improve the bottom line of all size businesses across a range of industries. It was followed by 10 years at ANZ, significantly improving the performance of large established businesses and also developing greenfield businesses in both Australia and overseas.
When he was offered the opportunity to bring his considerable strategic business skills to Barry Plant, he leapt at the chance.
“I’ve always admired Barry Plant,” he said. “Their culture is outstanding and the opportunity to leverage the size of the network to further enhance the client experience through measured transformation, was too good to pass up.”
With Barry Plant already well progressed in reviewing, critically assessing and implementing innovative technology into its business, one of Mr O’Neil’s challenges is to harness the value of technology investments by driving adoption to deliver better business outcomes for agents, property managers and customers.
“The challenge will be to bring the teams along on the journey to embrace the change. I anticipate this will involve a lot of hand holding and nurturing,” Mr O’Neil said.
Barry Plant CEO and Director, Mike McCarthy, said he was thrilled to have Mr O’Neil join the Group.
“Nigel is an energetic, innovative thinker. He has the ability to generate excitement about the future and its possibilities – which is something we look forward to embracing for the benefit of the entire group.”
