Listen to the segment from 28 May 2024, featuring Val Montagnana-Wallace from Hyphen.
Listen to our segment with Catherine Sayer, FBA CEO here: https://familybusinessassociation.org/article/hear-from-catherine-sayer-on-3aw-australia-overnight-with-tony-mcmanus
Listen to our segment with Michael Stillwell from Stillwell Group and special guest, David Mann here: https://familybusinessassociation.org/article/hear-from-michael-stillwell-from-stillwell-group--and-special-guest-david-mann-on-3aw-australia-overnight-with-tony-mcmanus
Listen to our segment with Emily Hammon from Scenic World here: https://familybusinessassociation.org/article/hear-from-emily-hammon-from-scenic-world-on-3aw-australia-overnight-with-tony-mcmanus
Listen to our segment with Ray Borda from Macro Group Australia here: https://familybusinessassociation.org/article/hear-from-ray-borda-from-macro-group-australia-on-3aw-australia-overnight-with-tony-mcmanus
Listen to our segment with Grant Menzies from Adina Watches here: https://familybusinessassociation.org/article/hear-from-grant-menzies-from-adina-watches-on-3aw-australia-overnight-with-tony-mcmanus
Listen to our segment with Daniel O'Sullivan from Abbe here: https://www.familybusinessassociation.org/article/hear-from-daniel-o-sullivan-from-abbe-on-3aw-australia-overnight-with-tony-mcmanus
Listen to our segment with Rachel Beard from A.H. Beard here: https://familybusinessassociation.org/article/hear-from-rachel-beard-from-a-h--beard-on-3aw-australia-overnight-with-tony-mcmanus
View the transcript here:
Tony McManus
Every couple of weeks, we talk with some of the great family businesses, surely family businesses from around Australia, and I reckon this is as good as we've had on the program.
I want to tell you a little bit about this before we introduce Val more formally. The business is simply called, I hope I get this right, Hyphen. Well, let's just say at this stage it’s Hyphen. They've been doing some really interesting projects for more than 15 years. High end milestone books, if you don't mind, for companies and businesses celebrating anniversaries and lots of other things like corporate history. Let's find out more.
Val Montagnana-Wallace is the CEO of Hyphen. Val, good morning.
Val Montagnana-Wallace
Morning, Tony.
Tony McManus
It's lovely to have you on the program. I read and read, and I'm sort of curious because it seems so... Just reading about it, it felt as if hello, has this not been done before? Why have you masterfully created this business model that really captured the imagination?
Val Montagnana-Wallace
Honestly, it kind of happened by accident. About 20 years ago, my husband and I were out for dinner. We didn't have kids. We didn't have a mortgage. We didn't really have any responsibilities beyond, you know, taking care of ourselves and he didn't super love his job.
Tony McManus
What was he doing at that stage, Val?
Val Montagnana-Wallace
He was doing Marketing for a, he'd done a Marketing degree and he started at BHP and then moved to smaller and smaller and smaller companies. Not really loving the corporate environment, and one night, we were out for dinner, and I said to him, well, what do you want to do? And he said, “Well, actually, I'd really like to write a book,” which was complete news to me, and it turned out that what he really wanted to do was write a book because he was very passionate. He is still very passionate about soccer, and he had worked for a time at the Victorian Soccer Federation, and he had met all these amazing people who had played football for Australia but who weren't born in Australia. And so, he said, I really would like to write about their stories, about what it is to play for your adopted country. And so, I said, well, alright, I think you should quit your job. Do this for two years and at the end of two years.
Tony McManus
That's right. I love you. Now quit your job.
Val Montagnana-Wallace
Yeah, well, I had a job as a teacher at the time. It was very secure, and I really loved it, so I said, “Quit your job, write a book, do it for two years. If at the end of the two years, we're no further along in our, you know, nothing's changed from where we are right now, that's OK. That's the worst case scenario.” So, Neil being Neil, did go off, did write a book, wrote about, I think, 26 of the Socceroos who had played for Australia from the 40s and the 50s right through until that current crop in early 2000, interviewed them all, told all their stories.
The book got bought by Random House. I edited it in the initial edits. My brother owned an ad agency and he designed the book. Neil, with his Marketing background, was constantly calling the guys at Random House and going, “Have you thought about this? Have you thought about that? Have you done this?” and drove them mad I'm sure, and in the end, we all sort of looked at each other and thought, “We could have done that.” And of course, we couldn't have. It was totally naive to think that we could have done what Random House did but it was kind of the seed that led us to starting Hyphen, which at the time was called Bounce Books.
Tony McManus
So, what's intriguing about that, I mean, this is only 15, not even 20 years old as a business and a family business. We'll get back to that in just a moment. But that was at a time when people were moving away from books, as you well know, that stage, bookstores, for example, weren't travelling that well.
Val Montagnana-Wallace
No, but I'm sitting here in my house, and I'm in a room that has a wall to wall, floor to ceiling bookshelf that is crammed full of books. I guess, I never really felt like books would ever disappear, and I don't think they have, and I think that we spend so much of our time staring at a screen that it's kind of nice to be given a gift that is not on a screen. That when something really important happens, a real milestone, I don't necessarily want to keep looking at my screen at the end of the work day but I will look at a book.
Tony McManus
We'll look at a book. It's more than just a publishing business, isn't it? Is probably a nice way to say what you're doing now.
Val Montagnana-Wallace
It is now. We started as coffee table books, and one of the real challenges of our business in the early days was that it was very much project to project. We would find a company or an organisation that was wanting to celebrate a milestone, we would research and write their story, we would tell their story, we would publish it, and then we would have to find another one. And so, it was a bit of a, there were moments where it was a bit of a feast and then a bit of a famine, which was pretty scary, and we realised after a while that we needed to think about how we were going to sort of, I guess, future proof our little business against those peaks and troughs, and make it a little bit more consistent.
And one of the things that we realised was that a lot of our clients, once they had a bit of a taste for storytelling, and they were discovering things about themselves that they didn't even know, they would say to us, “Well, now that we've done a book, we think we might like to do a film or we want to launch our book and have a big timeline on the wall and do some sort of installation,” and often at that point in the project, we knew more about them than they did, and we certainly knew where all the good stories were, where all the best photos were, and who you'd want to interview the camera, all that kind of stuff. So, we thought, well, we better learn how to make films, and we better learn how to do installations, so we did.
Tony McManus
Val, in the early stages of establishing this business, at what point were you thinking or both of you thinking, I guess, what about all that great BHP money? What about all that teaching income? What are we gonna do to make this really viable whilst we survive?
Val Montagnana-Wallace
Well, you know, the thing about our business is that it didn't really need a lot of stuff to get going, and I think the first couple of years I was on maternity leave, and it was paid maternity leave for the first whole year, so that was a nice segway through as well, and I don't know. I guess we never, I never really felt like... Sometimes, it was a bit scary that we had all our eggs in one basket, and definitely, there have been moments in the last 20 years, when the pandemic hit, and I thought, “Oh my goodness, this entire business that we've built over 15 years could be gone in three months.” Definitely scary, but I've never really felt like I wanted to do anything else.
Tony McManus
We'll come back. We'll talk more about that scary part in just a moment. Our very special guest is Val Montagnana-Wallace and she is the CEO of Hyphen. More, the other side of this. It is Australia Overnight.
We're talking Family Business Australia, Val Montagnana, CEO of Hyphen. I just love it, Val, on the basis, the name Hyphen, which I wonder, why we have needs for hyphen anymore, which is a great... How did you arrive at that as a name for what you now do?
Val Montagnana-Wallace
Well, I am a word nerd at heart, and a hyphen is the little dash that connects two things, and I think that a big part of what we do is, the work we do connects our clients with their audience, whether that's their staff or their own clients and customers or their school community. That's what a hyphen does. It connects. So, that's part of where it came from, and then my and my husband's surname is hyphenated, and because it's a massively long double barrelled, Montagnana-Wallace, as you have found out yourself, most of our things, we call our family the Hyphens.
Tony McManus
The Hyphen, hence, the brand which is going along beautifully. So, how do people find your, do you approach other businesses? And, if you have a look at the website, our listeners can do that because it is fascinating. The people with whom you've dealt or for whom you've produced some amazing work, do they come to you or do you approach them and say, look, you've got this momentous occasion coming up, we'd like to help you with producing a history of your particular business.
Val Montagnana-Wallace
Yeah, a bit of both. I definitely do a lot of research into who's approaching a milestone birthday in the near future and reach out to them and say, “Have you thought about what you're gonna do?” And also, sometimes, people just see our books or they might have worked for a company that gave them a book and then, they've moved on to another company that's turning 50 or 75 or whatever, and then they contact us. So a bit of both.
Tony McManus
Some of the great businesses with which I'm probably more familiar would be in WA of late, where those great businesses that really start with very little, similar to yours in a sense, they start with very little, and then build into these amazing businesses that people would be very familiar with. But those stories need to be told for a range of reasons, a, for everyone, but certainly for our staff, and the heritage of those businesses to be told and be remembered.
Val Montagnana-Wallace
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the things I really love about our work is that you find out so many amazing and interesting things about so many different organisations and industries. I always tell people I don't believe there's any such thing as a boring story. And when you start getting into the nitty gritty of how some of these companies were founded, where they've come from, what they've endured. If you've been around for 100 years, that means 2 pandemics, 2 world wars, numerous depressions. It's amazing. Absolutely amazing.
Tony McManus
And they deserve to be told, and so, they should be. Even the people that we've spoken to on this little segment, which ends up as a podcast on the Family Business Australia website, as you well know, has been intriguing. Whether you're talking about your great motor car businesses in Australia, whether you're talking about a company like for example, Haymes Paint, based in Ballarat all those years ago or one of the great brewery manufacturers coming out of South Australia. Those stories and people, and even when I say it, people say, “I did not know that that was a family business.”
Val Montagnana-Wallace
Yeah, well, I think family businesses are probably the backbone of Australian.
Tony McManus
In many ways, they are.
Val Montagnana-Wallace
Employment. So many businesses, family businesses, and I think a lot of people make the mistake of thinking that a family business is a husband and wife at the milk bar. And they definitely are that but they're also, Toyota is a family business. Mars is a family business.
Tony McManus
Yep, sure. Great businesses in a global sense. Where do you see things going now, Val?
Val Montagnana-Wallace
Well, we're working on growing the film side of our business and looking to do more work in that space. We are upskilling our own internal staff so that we can have a stronger digital offering. A lot of people's company websites have digital timelines and interesting storytelling elements on their website, and I think we are moving into that space as well because again, once we've done a book, we have all this information at our fingertips and I think it's nice to be able to offer our clients the chance to use it in lots of different ways, not just one way. So that's where we're heading, and I have this amazing team of people that I work with who are incredibly hardworking, and dedicated and creative, and it's just, yeah, every day is interesting.
Tony McManus
Val, you mentioned those challenges around COVID, which as you know, was a massive challenge for every business really in a sense. Well, I shouldn't say every business, but most businesses, it was a real challenge. How did you survive that? What strategy did you have to adopt to be able to continue and not at some point to say, well, look, we can't do this anymore?
Val Montagnana-Wallace
Yeah. Well, at that time, we had probably 25 projects on the go, and we were really lucky because hardly any of our clients wanted to stop. They all just wanted to slow things down just to sort of see how things were going to unfold, and that suited us perfectly because we also had to slow things down to see how things were gonna unfold.
I think the JobKeeper was crucial for us, I don't think we would have made it through without it. So I was, we were just so, so grateful for that help, and it meant that we could just say to our team, “Okay, just work the hours that JobKeeper is paying you to work and obviously Neil and I worked, we worked a lot more hours than that, but our team was able to juggle all the challenges that everyone juggled during COVID with small children and home schooling and all the rest of it, and isolation and all sorts of things, so they all were dealing with that. They all continued to work from home, we kept working and because our clients didn't want everything done as quickly as they had originally wanted it done, we were able to just keep on going and just manage our way through it until we got to the other side.
Tony McManus
Those projects, or those companies with which you worked, are they short-term relationships or do they continue post-publication, if you like, or post-film or post whatever the project is that you're doing for them?
Val Montagnana-Wallace
Yeah, for some of it, they are short-term relationships, but at the moment, we're doing a project for Thiess, which for those listeners that don't know, is a construction company that was founded in Queensland 90 years ago by five brothers.
Tony McManus
Yeah, Thiess Brothers.
Val Montagnana-Wallace
Yeah, the Thiess Brothers. So, it started as a family business. It's now a publicly listed company and not a family-owned company anymore.
Tony McManus
If memory serves, I think they were one of the very early importers of Toyota cars.
Val Montagnana-Wallace
They were. You know your stuff.
Tony McManus
And it's a great story in itself.
Val Montagnana-Wallace
Yeah, so they imported Toyotas, Toyota Land Cruisers, because they were involved in Snowy Hydro Electric Scheme, and they'd seen the Land Cruisers, and thought, “We need them in the Great Dividing Range,” so, they imported them.
Tony McManus
So, it's a great story to be told there.
Val Montagnana-Wallace
Yeah, so we had done a book for them when they turned 75. Then when they turned 80, they came back to us and said, “We want to tell our story again, but in a different way.” So, we did another book for them that was quite a different book from the first one. Somewhere in the middle there, we did a book for them that was celebrating a particular project that they had worked on that was a very successful one, and then now, they're turning 90, so we are back again.
Tony McManus
Well, so would you say the future is looking pretty good for you then, your business and to work on those projects going forward is an exciting time?
Val Montagnana-Wallace
Yeah, it is. It's really interesting work. It's really challenging work. I think you get to learn a lot about how, I guess, you get to have a perspective when you're working with companies that have been around for a long time, and I must say, I mean, we work with lots of companies that aren't family businesses, but the work we do with family businesses is particularly rewarding because family businesses usually have just such a beautiful and strong culture that really shines through in all the stories that we get to tell about them. So yeah, I like my job. I like the work we do, and I'm excited to keep doing it for a really long time.
Tony McManus
Just a final question from me, Val. Family business does bring challenges. I mean, you work very closely with your husband. Do you ever have a fight? Do you sit down and discuss it and how do you remove the business side from relationship and family side?
Val Montagnana-Wallace
That is an excellent question. I actually think working together really kept our relationships stronger when our kids were little. You know, when you go through those phases where all you're talking about is kid logistics but because we worked together, we could go out for lunch without kids often and talk about things that weren't kids often. So, I think that for me, and it was a real benefit to work with my husband, and when we disagree, what do we do? We talk through it, we give each other the look to say... If our staff is there, we give each other the look to say we will be discussing this later. That look that all husbands and wives have, all married couples have for each other, but for the most part, I think it works because we have quite different roles in the business and we don't tend to get in each other's way. He values my opinion, I very much value his but when we're doing our day-to-day jobs, we're just, you know, I do mine and he does his so.
Tony McManus
Your children are probably still too young to understand the idea of working in family business I would have thought, but is there any interest and at what point do you gauge any interest from certainly your teaching background and that of your husband's background in Marketing and PR?
Val Montagnana-Wallace
Well, our kids are 15 and 17. I would say that the 17 year old will never have a desk job. That is absolutely not his bag. The 15 year old, he might, and he might be interested in taking over this business, eventually, one day, very far down the track. But I feel really lucky that I got to decide what I want to do with nobody telling me that I had to do something in particular, so I want that for him as well. He can decide, and if he doesn't want to work at Hyphen and it doesn't interest him, well, that's okay.
Tony McManus
It's lovely to talk to you, Val. Continued success.
Val Montagnana-Wallace
Thank you very much.
Tony McManus
I'm sure it would be wonderful. If people want to find out more about you, they can go online and have a look at?
Val Montagnana-Wallace
Yes, thehyphen.com.au.
Tony McManus
The, one word, thehyphen.com.au. I hope we talk again, Val.
Val Montagnana-Wallace
Thank you so much, Tony.
Tony McManus
Val Montagnana-Wallace, talking all things Family Business Australia.
