Leading Young, Leading Strong: WOW’s Co-founder Emily McLeod

Leading a team of 25 at age 19? Co-founding a company by 22?

It’s certainly an impressive feat – and one WOW’s co-founder and director, Emily McLeod, achieved right at the beginning of her career.

Here, Emily shares her leadership journey, one that took her from engineering to sales and finally recruitment. She provides key insights into the challenges she’s faced, the lessons she’s learned, as well as some great leadership advice for current and emerging leaders in Australia.

Emily’s Leadership Journey

Straight out of high school, Emily began studying for an engineering degree, as according to her career advisor, that’s where her strengths lay.

“But I absolutely hated it. It was so dry, and I just didn’t enjoy the process. I was also the only girl in my class,” she explains.

Knowing she couldn’t face becoming an engineer, Emily scouted around for something totally different. She landed a sales job under the leadership of Daniel Tonkin, who went on to become a colleague, a friend but most importantly, her eventual co-founder of WOW.

“When I started in the sales job, I was 18. Within six months, I was promoted to a leadership role. Within 12 months, I was managing a team of 25 sales reps. It was my first taste of leadership and leading a performance- and results-driven organisation,” she says.

“As it was an entry-level sales organisation, we had a lot of young travellers and students who didn’t know what they wanted from their career yet. My one-on-one sessions focused on coaching them through what they actually wanted to do with their career, and I really enjoyed that aspect,” she says.

After spending a few years at the company, Emily began looking for another sales role, hoping for something with a corporate focus. But as she interviewed with a recruiter, they asked her a question she wasn’t expecting.

“They said ‘Have you thought about going into recruitment?’ And I replied, ‘I have no idea what recruiters even do!’. In the meantime, the CEO came into the meeting room to join the conversation and gave me more food for thought. I went home, mulled it over and ended up accepting the role as I felt like it would really suit my skillset. And I was right!” she laughs.

After spending a few years at the recruitment agency and getting a further taste of coaching others, she and Daniel decided to make a go of it themselves. They founded WOW when Emily was just 22.

“And I guess the rest is history,” she says.

Overcoming Challenges and Embracing Authenticity

In just eight years of working professionally, Emily has managed to achieve what others have worked at for decades. But that doesn’t mean it was easy. During this time, she’s faced many challenges and learned a number of valuable lessons that have continued to empower her throughout her career.

Misalignment when internal recruiting

As any leader will tell you, finding the right people for your team is one of the most crucial (and often most difficult) parts of establishing and growing your business, and Emily is no stranger to this struggle.

“When we first founded WOW, the biggest challenge we faced was hiring the right people. I found that so frustrating because I’m a recruiter – I’m supposed to be able to hire good people!” she laughs.

“In those early days, we hired people who didn’t have a lot of experience so I had to spend chunks of my time training them. It was difficult to balance because I was also the only one generating the business revenue.”

“After making the mistake of recruiting rookies with our first three or four hires, we realised we didn’t have the systems and processes in place to train them. We rejigged our budget and put more money into salaries to bring on experienced professionals. It’s only now we’re in a position where we can train rookies because we have the right framework in place.”

Emily explains that a big part of establishing a successful hiring framework is understanding the ‘why’ behind your business, and the driving forces behind it.

“Another mistake we made was not adequately defining our vision, mission and values before interviewing. We just hired based on our gut instincts. After getting it wrong those first few times, we sat down and nutted out our values and our vision of what we were trying to create with WOW. We then focused our interviews on ensuring our candidates aligned with these. Once we did that, we made some awesome hiring decisions and started to build a very powerful team .”