CainCooke

The story opens with a number most founders only dream about. In a single week, the business saw a 460% increase in growth. It arrived so fast that Cain's first instinct wasn't celebration.

“I actually thought someone had hacked our systems.”

Cain Cooke

What followed was an education compressed into days. Every lesson Cain had expected to learn gradually as the company scaled turned up at once, “in a really, really condensed period.” He names exactly where the pressure landed:

• AssemblyBuilding bikes faster
• DispatchGetting bikes out the door faster
• EnquiriesResponding to customers faster
• PaymentsCollating and reconciling them

Everything needed to happen at hyper speed. And the uncomfortable discovery was that the systems built for growth weren't built for this growth.

“Everything that we'd put in place that was kind of designed for ambitious growth just didn't work, or broke, or failed.”

Cain Cooke

They got through it. The business has absorbed that growth and settled into what Cain calls “a new normal.” But he isn't treating the new normal as the destination. He can already see signals that another wave is on the way.

“We can actually see some of the indicators that it's coming.”

Cain Cooke

So his focus has shifted. The highest-value thing he's doing right now, he says, is working on how the business is structured and the systems within it, so they're ready for that next level. He's realistic about it, too: some things will still break, “because nothing's perfect.” The aim is to unlock the value as it starts to compound.

Ten years ago, Cain says, “heavily overweight corporate Cain” would never have believed he'd one day own a gym. Years in corporate life had shaped a lifestyle he didn't fully notice he'd built.

He was living on an airplane and eating out every night. He didn't move his body much. He drank a lot of red wine. He's honest that he was enjoying it, “but I was having a good time, right?”, and just as honest that he'd fostered a really terrible lifestyle without realising it.

The turning point came when Dominique, now his wife, became pregnant. Something clicked, and it changed him completely.

“Right, I've gotta get fit. I can't be a dad at 35 and not keep up.”

Cain Cooke

He took on a challenge and quite literally shed 12 kilos in eight weeks. Then he kept going.

Since then he has completed Hyrox a couple of times, run a few half marathons, and is determined to do a full marathon. His kids, he says, are a great motivator to sort yourself out. But the real insight came quickly and had nothing to do with his legs.

“If I applied the same discipline and the same brain training that I have in business to my body, I could do a Hyrox.”

Cain Cooke

A bloke who couldn't run to the corner of the street could suddenly do a Hyrox, and in a pretty decent time. “That was all my head,” he says. His body has niggles, and running a half marathon hurts. What draws him in is that it's a head game, and the questions he asks himself on the course are the same ones that excite him about business:

1. How far can I push it?
2. What disciplines do I need to put in place?
3. Can my brain take me from here to here?

His conclusion is generous: “Arguably, we can all do that.”

Cain is clear about where innovation comes from in his business, and it isn't the founder's whiteboard.

“The innovation is not necessarily innovation led by what we think is a great idea. It's based on what does the customer want.”

Cain Cooke

Take charging. Riders told the business they needed to deal with range anxiety and to tap into the charging network that already exists. So the bikes got inbuilt Type 2 charging.

Then there's the heated seat. They didn't add it because it sounded like a good idea. One by-product of riding electric is that you lose the ambient engine heat that keeps you a bit warmer on a traditional motorbike. Customers told them they needed a way to keep warm, and Cain had felt it first-hand, coming down Greenhill Road on a four-degree morning. “It's bloody cold.”

It goes beyond features. The next motorbike itself is being shaped by what customers say they want it to look like.

Cain's favourite thing to see? Someone pops up as an enquiry and, within a week, they've bought. “That makes me very happy.” One of the key drivers behind that, he explains, is the business's ability to get bikes out the door.

Here's how fast it moves if you order on a Friday:

1. FridayYou place your order.
2. By WednesdayThe bike is assembled, QA'd and out the door.
3. As early as the following FridayIt arrives, depending on where you are in the country.
4. The week after, at mostFor riders in Far North Queensland or Perth. “That's just logistics-based.”
5. Isolator switch on. Ride.Fully charged, nothing to unpack.

And they pay a premium to make that last step feel right. Bikes travel with a premium bike mover, fully enclosed and dust-proof, and roll off ready to ride. There's no uncrating and no unpackaging. The battery is fully charged; you switch on the isolator and go.

“That's all about how we create great moments for customers, and also reduce that time between ‘wanna buy’ and ‘now I'm riding’.”

Cain Cooke

Before the motorbikes, before the boards, there was real estate. Cain had come out of practising in a real estate business, and the next thing he knew, he was at state office holding the keys to what was then the number three business in South Australia.

“I would arguably say now I had no idea what I was doing. But at 21, I thought I did.”

Cain Cooke

He was, in his words, desperate for it. And it was a really exciting time, because he learned a lot, most of all by discovering everything he didn't know. Including how to deal with franchisees who had decades and decades of experience, “and I'd literally finished school.”

At 43, with a business, a gym and a string of board seats, Cain says he has full-blown imposter syndrome. Not occasionally: “I do that all the time.”

“I sit in rooms with people now that teenage Cain probably didn't even know existed. How did this happen?”

Cain Cooke

So why so many boards? The short answer, he says, is simple: “I can't do one thing.” In his late twenties and early thirties he learned that he had to do more than one thing. He has a highly curious brain and can digest a lot of information quickly. For a long time he shied away from that. Now he embraces it.

“That's just the way my brain works, so just let it happen. Don't be afraid of that.”

Cain Cooke

His days at Leki, the motorbike business, are hands-on. Some days he's selling bikes; some days he's putting them together. The board work lets him flex his brain in different ways, learn new things and help steer organisations using the “collection of random knowledge” he's picked up over the years.

• On the floorSelling bikes at Leki
• In the workshopPutting bikes together
• In the boardroomHelping executive teams grow

The skill, as he describes it, is drawing pieces of information and data points from all these businesses, then helping each executive team use them to grow.

“I don't know where it's come from,” Cain says, “but it's just the way I'm wired.” He wants to make himself redundant. He has a set of skills; deploy them, get it done, then get out.

Boards suit that, because every member has a usefulness. He is still on the board of Adelaide Festival Centre because he's still useful there. If he wasn't, he'd be out. And he's already applied the same thinking to his own business.

1. Build itLeki is a three-to-five-year scenario for Cain.
2. Sell it“We'll build it and we'll sell it…”
3. Hand it to the next leader“…for somebody else to take it to the next level, because my usefulness will expire.”

He thinks people often hold on to things too long, falling into a nostalgic idea that you need to be somewhere for twenty years to prove you're good at what you do. For some people that's absolutely great, he says, “hats off to people that can do that.” He can't.

“Sometimes we hold onto things too long.”

Cain Cooke

The corporate career was going well. Then Cain had a moment of clarity that he describes with characteristic bluntness.

“I'm gonna be an old white guy before I'm 30. I can't stay here.”

Cain Cooke

He wanted to do something really fun. He needed to be challenged; his brain needed something new. He also wanted to work out what it was like to be in his mid-twenties, because he'd spent his late teens and early twenties working around the clock. That's the hidden cost of being handed the keys to a $40 million business without knowing what you're doing and pretending you do: you work all hours to be prepared for Monday.

He doesn't regret it. But he reached a point where things were going well and the real question was: who am I going to be, and what am I going to do? So he wrote three letters to three brands. One of them was Boost.

“What have you done, mate? But it was the best thing.”

Cain Cooke

The leap was really a test. At Century 21, they'd hit a market downturn and grown the business anyway. They were having a good time. But there was a little gremlin in his head.

“Is this just luck? I'm a school dropout from the southern suburbs of Adelaide. Am I just a hustler, or can I do this again?”

Cain Cooke

He wanted to validate it to himself, and he went and did, here and there. The interviewer suggests he's probably still validating it. Cain agrees: at 43, full-blown imposter syndrome, “I do that all the time.”

Asked what gives him the buzz, Cain brings everything back to the idea that runs through this whole interview.

“This ability to make yourself redundant, deploy what you have quickly and well, have impact, change the game and then move out to do that: that's probably the kind of adrenaline rush that I enjoy.”

Cain Cooke

Broken down, it's a loop he's run again and again: at a real estate group at 21, at Boost, in the boardroom, and now at Leki.

1. Deploy what you have, quickly and well
2. Have impact
3. Change the game
4. Move out, and do it again

This time the interviewer does the talking, describing what happened the first time he went to Leki's website and looked at the bikes.

“The first thing I thought was, ‘This looks sexy, looks clean, looks modern.’ And then when I saw the advertised price, I thought, ‘Wow.’”

The interviewer

Sexy, clean, modern: the gloss-black fairing that made the first impression.

His next question was simply: how do you do that? He'd looked at motorbikes before, second-hand ones on Marketplace, and his reaction was immediate: for what you're getting, that seems like really good value.

One of the big things Cain took from Specsavers was being really ambitious about growth. It was a shock to the system.

By then he had about 12 years in franchising, where there's a franchising code and you have to be conservative: you can't overpromise. Then he walked into a business that said, plainly, “We are gonna get 30% growth this year.” His first reaction: you can't say that.

“We would stand in front of our franchisees and say, ‘We're chasing 30%. That's what we're gonna do.’ And then we would do 40%, or we would do 50%.”

Cain Cooke

It worked, he says, because it was relentless, and because it was about capturing the market quickly in service of a clear mission: best-value eye care for everyone. Young, old, rich, poor, whatever your cultural background. It was for everyone, and everyone was on that bandwagon.

So how does Leki deliver that value? Cain walks through what you get for your money in the current model.

• Type 2 chargerBuilt in
• Heated seatsStandard
• Heated gripsStandard
• Up to 110 kmRange on a single charge
• About $2Cost of that charge
• 100 km/hWhen you need it

It's a really good quality bike that will do 100 km/h if you need it to, and will also get you around the city. Competitors, he says, sit anywhere from $25,000 to $60,000 Australian. You might get a bit more range or a bit more power with them, but that's not the game Leki is playing.

1. Deliver valueA quality product at a price that surprises people.
2. Create volume“That creates a volume-based pressure.”
3. Drive mass adoptionMore people riding electric.

“If we can deliver a product into market that is value, then we can create volume, which means we can drive mass adoption. That's how the Specsavers translates.”

Cain Cooke

This short clip revisits the moment from chapter 2 where Cain explains why running and Hyrox appeal to him. His body has niggles; running a half marathon hurts. That isn't the point.

“It's a head game. It's exactly the same principles that make me excited about business, make me excited about fitness.”

Cain Cooke

How far can I push it? What disciplines do I need to put in place? Can my brain take me from here to here? And, as he says, “arguably, we can all do that.” The lessons from this idea are in chapter 2.

Cain sees electric motorbikes as a change for most riders, so Leki treats the sale as discovery. They're not forcing anyone to ride an electric motorbike.

“Ride one. Super cool, instant torque, really fast, super efficient way to get around. Come and experience it, and your eyes might be open to a new way of riding.”

Cain Cooke

He contrasts that with the friction points of a traditional brand or OEM, often working through a traditional dealership. Leki's message is simpler: just come and discover, have a ride, and then make a decision. And there's a reason they're confident in that approach.

One of the things Cain loves about high-volume retail is that you get real-time data and insight every single day. If you capture it correctly, you can almost pair sales revenue against what your customers are telling you.

Specsavers, he says, was beautiful at it. And it gave him what he calls genuinely one of the best lessons he learned there.

Get in, look at the feedback, and hone in on what you need to improve today. As leaders, he explains, we're always looking at the top line and the bottom line: are we doing enough sales, and is that turning into profit? Great. But go to the customer first, and look at what they're telling you.

“Then you can understand how that draws a correlation to those two numbers. You are absolutely gonna be on fire.”

Cain Cooke

Both Boost and Specsavers were super fun, Cain says. But it was only towards the end of his Specsavers years that he understood something about himself he wouldn't have recognised when he started.

“I'm a builder. I enjoy the chaos of things when it's time to build.”

Cain Cooke

Rolling up your sleeves, things not working, experimenting, trialling, pursuing growth: that's where he gets really excited. But brands mature, and when they move into maintenance mode, he's blunt about it.

When you're in one business, Cain says, you can become very siloed and very focused. When you're across multiple businesses, in whatever form, you pick up new skills, new insights, new data points and new lessons that you can feed into your own business, or into others.

• Animal Welfare LeagueBoard work
• Carrick Hill TrustChair
• Real estate industryBoard work
• Adelaide Festival CentreBoard work

What the Animal Welfare League needs, what Carrick Hill Trust needs and what the real estate industry needs are all completely different, he says, “but also kind of the same.” There are strategic challenges you're solving for each of them that you might then apply to your own business. “100%.”

The interviewer points out that Cain likes doing hard things and getting things done, and that board roles put him right at the pinnacle of that. The Festival Centre alone has had a whole bunch of challenges to overcome, from demographics to refurbishments. It's scratching that itch, and it's benefiting his businesses too.

“There's so much reward in doing that work.”

Cain Cooke

For all the ambition and the 30% targets, Cain is clear about what actually made mass growth possible at Specsavers.

“We could deliver mass growth at Specsavers because we had great people, and we loved on those people really hard.”

Cain Cooke

• Investedin them
• Cheeredthem on
• Picked them upwhen they fell over
• Pushedwhen they needed it
• Pulled backwhen they needed that

The other thing Cain learned from those two businesses is about brand. Both were system-based businesses that let you do a lot almost automatically and deliver volume, and both were haloed by a brand.

His example is Boost's Banana Buzz, without taking anything away from it. It's been the number one seller for decades, and you could make one at home.

People don't buy the Banana Buzz for the recipe, he says; they buy it because of the brand, the location, what it means and the experience that comes with it. And the same logic applies to Leki.

“We could take an electric motorbike, give it an average brand, and it will be an average electric motorbike, because of the way that people perceive it.”

Cain Cooke

So Leki spends a lot of time on brand: what it means, who the target market is and how it resonates with them. Then the system flows off that.

The relationships Cain built back in real estate have lasted. Today he chairs the real estate industry body locally and sits on its national board, and some of the relationships he built 25 years ago are still highly valuable.

“That's why I get to chair the industry now, because there's a trust bridge that was created all that time ago.”

Cain Cooke

There are clever marketing tactics, Cain says, and a lot of intelligence goes into opening a location and all those sorts of things. But that's not what decides the outcome.

“You live and die by the people that lead those businesses.”

Cain Cooke

Just as important is how you structure the business around them, so that the people in it can do the things they're really good at, and none of the things they're not. Every business he's been involved with, he says, would tell you the same: people first, hands down.

Specsavers' growth wasn't polite. Cain describes a business that simply did whatever it had to do to win.

• Buy an independentto get open in a location
• Open across the roadwhen a competitor was too slow
• Pour more into marketingto drive volume into stores
• Expand a storewhen demand called for it

They even had a war room where they would literally strategise. The target was Luxottica, the major competitor at the time, which held most of the market share in Australia, and its CEO.

“The remit was: make sure when he opens the paper in the morning, he chokes on his cornflakes, because Specsavers is doing something that he can't believe.”

Cain Cooke

And that's what they did, he says, every day.

This clip revisits a moment from chapter 8. Cain's team at Century 21 had hit a market downturn and grown the business anyway. Things were good. And still, the doubt crept in.

“Is this just luck? I'm a school dropout from the southern suburbs of Adelaide. Am I just a hustler, or can I do this again?”

Cain Cooke

His answer was a leap of faith: go and find out whether he could do it somewhere else. The lessons from that leap are in chapter 8.

Here the interviewer rewinds all the way. Cain was an executive at Century 21 at 21. Then at 25, at the top of his game, he decided he didn't want to stay in real estate.

“Why not just do that for the next 20, 30 years and have a very comfortable life? What was the driving factor to completely uproot everything you know and you're good at, and go to a new industry and forge a new pathway?”

The interviewer

It's the question every successful person faces at some point: why give up a sure thing? Cain's answer, from the old-white-guy-before-30 moment to three letters and a month of cutting oranges at Boost, is told in chapter 8.

The bikes are “away” at the warehouse, where the next model will be revealed. But Leki also runs what Cain calls a little experiment: a small shop in the city, and a completely non-traditional approach to selling motorbikes.

They took a tiny shop in Ebenezer Place, a much more traditional retail and hospitality precinct, and “quite cool in there.” They call it a discovery centre.

1. See the bikeWalk in off the street.
2. Touch and feel itGet up close.
3. Take it for a rideThe step that changes minds.
4. Understand how it worksThen decide, with no hard sell.

And here's the twist: the people in the shop are not salespeople. They're not allowed to sell.

“I get really cranky if they do the hard sell, because this has to be a process of learning and discovery. We know that the bike will sell itself once you've ridden it.”

Cain Cooke

Asked who he is at his core, Cain says there are probably ten different answers. But over 25 years of corporate life, he's worked out who the honest person is underneath the different hats.

• The “yes” guy“I say yes to probably too much, arguably.”
• People and kindness“I always lead with people and with kindness.”
• Gets things done“The guy that will push through and make things happen.”

He's also genuinely passionate about things, and that shapes how he takes on commitments.

“When I do say yes to things, I wanna do them really well. I'm all in. I'm not a half-in kind of guy.”

Cain Cooke

When you're younger, everyone tells you to eat the elephant first: do the hard thing first, don't just tick off the easy things. Cain applies a different lens.

And not necessarily the highest-value thing for today. The question is: what's the high-value thing that will set me up for later?

• TomorrowWhat sets me up?
• Next weekWhat sets me up?
• Next monthWhat sets me up?
• Next yearWhat sets me up?

Those are often the things we shy away from. Instead we go, “I've done this, I've sent that email, I've got my beautiful little tick-box list.” It makes us feel productive.

“Some of the things that create better long-term prosperity or outcomes for you are the high-value things, and if you can tackle those first, it becomes easier over time.”

Cain Cooke

This clip revisits chapter 8: from a corner office and a suit every day to a month working in a Boost shop in a black T-shirt, making smoothies and cutting oranges.

“What have you done, mate? But it was the best thing.”

Cain Cooke

The lessons from that leap are in chapter 8.

Asked what's next, Cain comes back to something from chapter 2. Ten years ago, “heavily overweight corporate Cain” would never have thought he'd own a gym.

Now they've secured the rights to The Yard gym in the Adelaide Hills. And he's clear about why.

“Not because that's gonna be the thing that makes us rich, but because actually we've got a great community up there.”

Cain Cooke

• A great communityIn the Adelaide Hills
• Somewhere great to trainFor themselves too
• A local partnerAnother great local family
• A ready cohortPeople who'll want to be part of it

Cain holds up one business as a great example: entirely privately owned and entirely privately funded, with an incredible business model.

It cares deeply about growth and about outcomes. And when it decides to move, there's no hesitation.

“We are going to go and get them. Tell us what you need to make that happen.”

Cain Cooke, describing the owners' attitude

That, he says, is a really exciting thing to be part of.

This clip revisits chapter 2: 12 kilos gone in an eight-week challenge, another 25 over the period that followed, and about 90-odd kilos today.

“I've now done Hyrox a couple of times, I've run a few half marathons. I'm determined to do a full marathon.”

Cain Cooke

The lessons from his transformation are in chapter 2.

Some of Cain's boards, he says, are genuinely just passion. He has been on the Adelaide Festival Centre Foundation for nine years. The arts are super important to him: “They say jump, I say how high.”

He has to retire in September, and he's devastated about it. But he's the one who argued for it.

“I'm also a proponent for tenure. I said, ‘We've got to have tenure, because people stay forever.’”

Cain Cooke

The board work, he says, really allows him to flex some of the muscles in his brain.

Cain joined Boost in 2008, just as it was really starting to take off. He still remembers the market research from that time, around when Apple's white corded earphones were everywhere.

“It was as cool to be wearing a pair of Apple earphones back then as it was to have a Boost cup in your hand.”

Cain Cooke

Kids would steal Boost cups from the shops and walk around with nothing in them, because it was street cred. “It was ridiculous.” The brand was ballooning, and Cain was right in the middle of it as national operations manager.

• 2008Joins Boost as it takes off
• National ops managerHis role
• Company-owned + franchiseA huge network of both
• Every WestfieldA deal to open in every centre around the country

“It was a really dynamic brand.”

It was a long time ago, Cain says, but the fronts of Boost stores used to be like mosh pits: dozens and dozens of people, queues going out the door. So they had a rule.

Shops were crammed full of kids smashing out smoothies, playing tunes, flipping jugs and throwing ice in the air. By the end of the day they'd be a complete mess. “It was nuts.”

“But they were really, really fun.”

Cain Cooke

This clip returns to chapter 2 and the moment Dominique, now Cain's wife, became pregnant. Something clicked and completely changed him.

“Right, I've gotta get fit. I can't be a dad at 35 and not be able to keep up.”

Cain Cooke

The lessons from that turning point are in chapter 2.

Leki always knew stock availability mattered, Cain says, and it doubled down on it when demand exploded. The reason is the way people buy.

He describes the bikes as a value item, but for a lot of people they're still a big investment. If you're going to hand over $13,000 for a motorbike, you want to be sure about it.

1. Dip inA first look at the website or the bikes.
2. Dip out, and back in againVarying touch points over three or four months.
3. DecideFinally ready to buy.
4. The bike is in stockNo waiting at the moment of yes.

“Often people dip in and out on varying touch points over three or four months before they actually finally purchase.”

Cain Cooke

This clip revisits chapter 6, where Cain describes what he brings to a board.

“How do I draw pieces of information and data points from all these businesses, and then help the executive team, through that board engagement, to utilise those things to grow a business?”

Cain Cooke

The lessons on borrowing data points from other businesses are in chapter 6.

Back in chapter 8, Cain wrote three letters to three brands. He still has a copy of the one he sent to Boost, and he laughs about it now: “I don't know what I was thinking.”

Here's what he offered them:

• My energyAll of it
• My daggy dance movesSeriously
• My franchising experienceThe serious part

It got him an interview. And, he says, it was a real moment of clarity for himself that change was going to be a good thing.