How Reflections Holiday Parks is leaning-in to sustainable tourism
In this episode of The CMO Show we’re joined by Nick Baker, former CMO at Tourism Australia and current CEO at Reflections Holiday Parks; caretakers of 36 holiday parks and 43 reserves located on NSW Crown land.
Nick spoke to us about leading a growing as a profit-for-purpose enterprise and the unique ways his team are celebrating the natural environments they have the privilege to manage for the people of NSW.
Holidays! We all love them and we could probably all use one, but how do you decide where to go, and what influences your decision?
Price, location, and activities are all important considerations, but there's also been a significant increase in sustainable tourism and visiting destinations that promote positive social impact.
One organisation managing to tick all these boxes is Reflections Holiday Parks, caretaker of 36 holiday parks and 43 reserves located on NSW Crown land.
Nick Baker, the company’s CEO, says Reflections Holiday Parks is not your traditional holiday park and that it offers something different for holiday-makers.
“Traditional holiday parks have all kinds of man-made assets, things like jumpy castles, hair salons, swimming castles. They’re built to keep people inside and to look after them internally,” Nick explains.
“At our parks we want people to go out and explore nature, explore the community and explore the environments they're in.”
A former CMO at Tourism Australia, Nick has transitioned across the C-suite and is leading a team to achieve Reflections Holiday Park’s 2030 goal: deliver $1.3 million in economic value to the communities it operates in, and achieve B Corp certification.
“I believe the sort of five things that a CEO needs to be able to do,” he said.
“First is to build a sound strategy. Second is to build a team to deliver on that strategy. Third is to find the money to execute on that. Fourth is to communicate the shit out of the strategy so everyone knows what you're doing. And fifth is probably to hold people accountable to do that, right?”
Keen to hear how it’s all panning out? Hit play on Nick’s conversation with Mark and enjoy.
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Credits
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The CMO Show production team
Producer – Rian Newman
Audio Engineers – Ed Cheng & Daniel Marr
Got an idea for an upcoming episode or want to be a guest on The CMO Show? We’d love to hear from you: cmoshow@filteredmedia.com.au
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Transcript:
Today we're talking about holidays! We all love them. And let's face it, we could all probably use one. But how do you decide where to go? And what influences your decision? Is it price? Check. Location? Check. Activities? Sure. But in recent years, there's been a significant increase in sustainable tourism in destinations that promote positive social impact. So in this episode, we meet an organisation that's checking all those boxes.
Welcome to the CMO Show. My name is Mark Jones and my guest today is Nick Baker, CEO at Reflections Holiday Parks. Now, if you're thinking Nick's name sounds familiar, you're probably right. He's the former CEO of Red Balloon and the former CMO of Tourism Australia. I talked with Nick about his transition across the C-suite and how his experience is taking Reflections Holiday Parks along an exciting new path.
And aside from being a great place to visit Reflections Holiday Parks are on a mission to boost regional tourism and economies with improved facilities, innovative accommodation, expanded nature based attractions, local Aboriginal experiences, and more food and beverage offerings for guests than you could poke a barbecue tong at. It's a great conversation, so let's get stuck into it.
Mark Jones
How are you, Nick?
Nick Baker
I'm very well, Mark. Thank you.
Mark Jones
Excellent. I'm so glad you could join us. We have an interesting story to talk about today, which is yours, this growth trajectory that you've been on from a career point of view, from marketing and comms all the way up to running an organisation. Do you want to just set the scene for us? What's been the highlight of your career that got you to this point where you are right now?
Nick Baker
It's one of those interesting sort of journeys that you go on and you sort of imagine it when you start out in all different kinds of fields. And I started out actually in operations, in hotels, across different continents, in different places. In fact, actually I started working in summer camps in the US after I graduated and then went into hotels in food and bev and front office and traditional kinds of roles before being transferred out to Hong Kong and then down to Australia. And as I went through that transition to Hong Kong, suddenly became sales marketing orientated and that formed a much bigger part of my world, culminating with me being CMO at Tourism Australia. Then from there made that first leap into being CEO.
Mark Jones
I would've thought the CMO role at Tourism Australia would be an incredible platform in terms of the people that you'd meet and the perspective that you'd get. Just briefly, what was that experience like?
Nick Baker
It was an incredible experience. It's one of those ones where it's sort of one of those, as a marketer, you go, "Can you imagine marketing the whole country?" And as a pom, it was kind of along with it, "What the hell have we got a pom doing marketing Australia?"
Mark Jones
I didn't want to ask that question. I didn't want to come across as being a bit too obvious.
Nick Baker
I think one of the key things that I always said is that I don't think a lot of Australians realised just how extraordinary this country is and to me, who had come here and sort of big wide googly eyes when I first arrived and started meeting people and exploring the country in various different jobs and my role at Voyages when we had hotels and resorts across the place in all kinds from the centre to the islands to the outback. And I just realised this is just a truly unique place and it is very special. And I think that's what led me to think that I could perhaps talk about it in the voice of a customer from around the world, which is after all Tourism Australia's primary customer.
Mark Jones
That's a great example of that scenario where somebody from outside your sector can often give you the best insights or bring domain expertise or sorts of experiences that allow you to provide additional value. I really do like that.
Mark Jones
I always find this connection between the CMO and the CEO fascinating because when you have that customer perspective that you get from being in marketing and you start applying that to, "Well, what could we do with this in the CEO role?" You start having a bit more agency in terms of vision and direction and thinking possibly a bit more broadly in terms of the organization's capabilities. That intersection I think fascinates a lot of people, I also know that for some marketers they're not sure if they either have what it takes or don't quite know the way forward, and I'd be interested in your Reflections on that. Maybe just sort of speak to it through the lens of the journey that you went on.
Nick Baker
Yeah, look, it is interesting because I think the traditional route to CEO was very much dominated by the ops or finance. Those were the two, CFO, CEO was the traditional route to go into it. The idea of moving a marketing person into it was sort of seen as slightly left. I think the first thing is if you are preparing yourself for that transition and you want to do that, you have to look at customer-centric marketing orientated businesses as your steps going into it. In other words, if the CMO isn't sitting at the C-suite table, at the big table inside an organisation, there's no point you even thinking about moving that transition. You have to be at that level with those consumer facing ones. Obviously as a CMO, elevating the voice of the customer and understanding that everything through the customer lens is really priority and businesses that require that sort of focus are ones where it makes the best jump.
Mark Jones
I guess the cheeky question that just came to mind is did the board think they were getting a CMO and a CEO combined?
Nick Baker
No, I genuinely think that they were thinking they were going to get a customer marketing oriented CEO. We now have somebody in place for doing that for CMO in the organisation and its own department. And I try very carefully to keep myself as much out of that as possible, but believe that ultimately any CEO has come from particular side of it, whether it be finance or operations, it's going to have skew towards it. As a CMO, one of the unique things that you have to do in any organisation is walk a little bit closer to ops and finance than they walk to.
You can't just sit in your office and you can't meet halfway, you have to go 90% of the way into the CFO's office, 90% of the way into the CEO's office, and you have to bring them along on the journey with you and spend a whole lot of time painting the picture of the world that you live in. Yeah, if you don't do that, you will not get things across and you learn very carefully or clearly around consensus building if you're a good marketer and the way to be able to do that. And you have to learn that you have to present things in the terminology. As marketers, we learn about customer language and speaking to customers. Same thing is if you're a CMO, you have to learn about finance language, ops language and translate that and present things in those ways, not in the ways perhaps that you might do with the rest of the marketing department.
Mark Jones
Yeah, I agree.
Mark Jones
I guess keeping that marketing hat on a little bit, let's now talk about the organisation and Reflections Holiday Park. This is effectively an asset of the nation, right?
Nick Baker
Yeah.
Mark Jones
This is sort of owned by the people and being stewarded, guided by yourself. And I'd be interested to hear you help us understand the organisation, but in particular give us your rating as a former of CMO. How well do you reckon you guys are going in terms of telling the story?
Nick Baker
Right, I'll do the first bit, which is we look after 36 holiday parks. We also have 43 reserves. We also have a bunch of unique accommodation as well. And we've got over a half a billion dollars worth of assets that we look after for the people of New South Wales, across 23,000 acres of land. That's all Crown land, which is public land in effect. And in fact, only 6% of the land that we look after is revenue raising. The rest of it is vast tracks of bush and hills and mountains and lakes and dams and waterways that we do on it. And uniquely we look after, I mean, we have about two million people go through our parks every year. But a lot of that also is people that are going for day trips. We're not just a traditional holiday park with, "Here's a bunch of caravans and campsites."
We are quite different. Most of ours are much larger and diverse and spread out and they'll also, a lot of them have day trippers coming in and using the dams for instance. We've got nine parks are on big inland dams and people keep it for instance, so people from Gunnedah and Tamworth will come there and use that as their recreation area. That's a very different way about how you provision for that and how you market to those locally. And that connection with community becomes much stronger. Firstly, we're a Crown land manager, so we've got to look after these assets and we've got to build them and look after them such that they're better for the future. The second inherent in that is we have to be much more focused and are much more focused on the communities and the councils in which we operate.
The other element makes us difference is we have very strongly attached to a quadruple bottom line and nature driven. By that I mean, when I came in, part of the strategic plan building and our goal, our 2030 goal was to deliver$1.3 million in economic value to the communities in which we operate in. The second goal was to be B Corp at the highest level of certification globally in this space, that we are going to achieve that. And the board and Crown Lands have come along on board that. That's what we drive everything to it.
And again, what makes us a bit different for that, is we focus on people coming into our parks and then going out and exploring nature and communities around us, and maybe that's with the indigenous operators, whether it's local operators. Our relationship with councils is very much that we have a charter whereby we don't compete with them versus other holiday parts which have lots of man-made built assets. They'll have jumpy pillows, swimming castles, all kinds of hair salons, restaurants, cafes, all that kind of stuff. They build them to keep the people inside and to look after them internally, which is great. We want them to go out and explore nature, explore the community and explore the environments they're in.
Mark Jones
So. I guess the question is from a community perspective, do you get the sense through your research that that message is getting through or do you have more room to go? I suspect it's the latter.
Nick Baker
It's very much the latter, very much the latter. And in fact there was quite an interesting point there as a marketer. We already had started to drive the message around nature, but this notion of public lands, public use, Crown Lands attachment, we were unsure. I mean, how much do you ramp that up? Now one of the things that COVID as an accelerant did was it really sort of pushed open that notion of caring about the world and things that are on our watch and there's a belief inside the organisation, this is our watch and this is the land that we have to look after. We can't keep spewing 59 gigatons of CO into the open sewer we call the sky and get away with it.
So we've got to look after that. I thought, well, if we're talking like that and we believe this, then we've got to be about public ownership, which means that we've got to look at how we price the products that we look after, how we open to people. We decided to ramp up that message around quadruple bottom line, the social enterprise. And we got certified as a social enterprise and did it because people inside that COVID saw this nature as an accelerant and public good as actually been something good, not necessarily bad and can be done better elsewhere. And that connection between social good and what we did and the reality inside that to do well, we have to do good became the watch word.
Mark Jones
And I'd love to talk a bit more about social enterprise, but before we do that, it just strikes me that we should touch on a bit of, if you like, marketing tactics here, which is quite simply messaging and speaking as a dad and got kids and we book holidays and all that sort of stuff. I don't ever go, "You know what? I'd really love to stay in some Crown land," right? No one ever says that. You might say, "Oh, we stayed in this really great to a national park or near a national park," but Crown land is not part of the Aussie vernacular, at least to my reading of it.
Nick Baker
And could in fact start jarring if you weren't careful with it.
Mark Jones
Yeah, correct. And actually in the part of this of course is a really important conversation around First Australians and the role of being on country and how you negotiate that whole context as well. I think the positioning here is a really fascinating one.
Nick Baker
Yep, very much so. We position it and look at it as public lands. These are the lands the public own for New South Wales and as such our commitment is to the public to look after these lands. And I think that's how we sort of try and frame that. The positioning of it has to be around social good and the fact that we are more than just that. And one of the ways that we are going to do this, and this is a classic sort of marketers approach to it, is we can message the heck out of whatever we want to do, but unless we have some halo products that illustrate the care and attention we're taking over the land, we won't get that message across. The intent this year is in building some halo products.
By that I mean that if we can help people when they come along inside the parks to help us look after it and help us understand their sense of ownership and therefore a reason to look after it better, we will win. And at the moment we're only at the beginning of that journey, I guess Mark, because we've only just sort of put that in. One of the things that we had to do very early doors when coming on board was to completely reshape ... Well, if I just go back to I believe the sort of five things that a CEO needs to be able to do. First is to build a sound strategy. Second is a build a team to deliver on that strategy. Third is to find the money to execute on that. Fourth is to communicate the shit out of the strategy so everyone knows what you're doing. And fifth is probably to hold people accountable to do that, right?
Mark Jones
Yeah.
Nick Baker
We built the strategy, we had to reform and reshape completely the team, the leadership team to bring the right people on to be able to do the job. We worked on through the money. And again, one of the things that makes us slightly different and again is we are profit for purpose. All of the profits and monies that we make goes back into the capital looking after the assets that we've got, the land that we've got and what we do. Therefore the more we make, the more we put back into the properties and the local communities and as a consequence proportionally we spend a huge amount of money and capital expenditure and restoring and maintaining the parks.
And we've got some of our parks which are very large, expansive ones, which are loss making every year just because of the scale and work that we need to do on them. We put that money back in and then now we are just starting the journey to tell everybody. And Pete Chapman, who leads up marketing for the organisation, has come out of an 18 year background as being an MD inside a agency land, so is really sort of suited to be able to do that and he's sort of put a fantastic team around him to be able to bring that together.
***
Mark Jones
Tell me about your customers, people like me who book holiday places and how many of them do you think are booking based on availability versus environmental considerations or anything else? Well, maybe it's both.
Nick Baker
I think one of the things that I set out is that I wanted to stop us being a geographic location based business and becoming more of an inspiration business. I know that sounds marketing and I'm on a marketing show, but there's a truth in that, in that a lot of people were choosing us because they loved Urunga and they loved the Reflections Park at Urunga or Moonee or Bonny Hills or wherever.
We've got to shift that into terms of how people think about them in terms of the kind of experience and holiday they want. Now we've got very defined customer segments and cohorts as you could imagine. And we've got at one end, these sort of what we call our regional tourists, which are people that go with caravans and tour around the country. And this is a much changing cohort. It used to be the sort of domain, you used to call them the grey nomads and you'd see them sitting on the side of the road with their caravan and a cup of tea and a chair laid out. Very different now. These are the people going around, they've got e-bikes, they've got standup paddle boards, they're out there living their best life travelling around the country and they want to be in places where they can get involved and touch nature.
And this is actually an important segment for us is that ...slight aside, so I was brought up in hotels and I started in hotels and everything up to super luxury, all the way through. If you go and stay in a hotel and you were there and you were with your family and you were room 137, there is absolutely zero chance that you'd go and knock on 136's door and say, "Hey. G'Day, I'm next to you and what's your room like? Can we come and see it?" You would hardly even speak to them if you met them in the lobby, let alone the elevator.
When you go camping and caravaning, it is a social activity and if you are parked next to somebody else, you do say G'Day and you are very likely to say, "Oh, that's interesting. What are you doing with that? What's that bit of kit you've brought here?" And this is a community that's brought up. It's actually also a very safe environment for people to be able to go and do that. It's a very different construct and going away in a sort of sterile hotel, apartments type of thing.
Mark Jones
Got it.
Nick Baker
The other side that's changed dramatically is the younger group, the #vanlifers, who are coming out and finding that camping and caravaning as a way to get out to events and do stuff has become cool again.
Mark Jones
Yes, it has, and driven in part by I think TikTok videos showing people kitting out their vans and all that stuff, which is quite fun. I guess the marketing term we're talking about here is brand preference and that hearts and minds engagement with your stakeholder groups. I find that quite fascinating and it seems to me particularly if you think about those five aspects of being a CEO that you referred to earlier, if you can really capture that vision and tell the story in a compelling way, presumably over time you start to move the dial a bit. I'm interested from a measurement point of view, how are you looking to measure your progress? What are the KPIs you're working against as an organisation but also within that marketing team? You're obviously holding some marketers to account now, which must be fun.
Nick Baker
I'm not sure how that much fun they would say it is, but I like to believe that on one side I can help them on the other side of them, at least I keep them going. There's a number of different ways. Repeat business, so our loyalty programme generated something like 48% of our business. That's huge, and that's growing all the time at the moment. Measuring that, the impact of a loyalty programme. A lot of people have strong loyalty and affiliation to one particular park and they'll go there every Easter or every Christmas. Repeat visitation to other parks is another method of doing this. We've just had some brand health where we put ourselves up against our other park competitor groups. Whether that be Discovery Parks or it'd be NRMA Parks or whatever, and we track how we're sitting from a brand recognition recall, all the kind of traditional marketing ways of looking at how we are seen and being seen and people's views towards us.
We're doing that, but really what we want to get to is that point where people see us as different from everybody else, that sense of differentiation. One of the things that, again, going back to what I mentioned before is productising that. How do we do that in terms of place? We are looking at from an indigenous perspective in terms of how we connect with people and place in country. We are across nine different countries in so of our 36 parts, we're in nine different First Nations peoples' countries and we recognise that and we talk to that and we bring that into play. We also bring the environment into play a lot more and we're trying to get people to feel that passion and that connection with Reflections knowing that it's a nature-based environment and it's a connected place.
We won a grant for instance, and we're working on a project for Big Sky Dreaming up at Lake Keepit to be able to do a night sky dreaming one that's going to be a marriage between a cultural First Nations people view of the night sky and a western sort of cosmic view of the night sky. And tell that story through some incredibly architecturally designed tents that really bring the night sky up and sit in this beautiful area of no light pollution, noise pollution.
Nick Baker
And that's a great way to show off the land. It's a great way to show off us as a brand and how we sit and also get people that chance to have that connection to some places in the country that they probably don't go.
Mark Jones
What are the social outcomes you are measuring and looking at, I guess reporting on over time? Because I guess we've touched on the E in the ESG, which of course here at Impact Institute we care a lot about that. How does the work we do benefit people and communities?
Nick Baker
Very much so. We are building a charter to work with councils and that's basically a non-compete locally so that we will procure and buy locally of all our goods and services or the vast majority of our goods and services. We will employ locally and we will push out and recommend locally. We're not going to be building loads of cafes and restaurants and hairdressers and all these other kind of things. We're going to point to that. That's our first commitment to community in that we're going to do that and open up the parks for the communities as I've mentioned. That's sort of that side of it. Then the cultural side of it is obviously a lot of Crown Lands also has native title claims over it or pending claims over it. Working with indigenous groups in the particular area around the experiences that we offer.
We just had our conference and we talked about cultural burning and how we can deploy those kind of things on our lands as well. And procurement, all those kind of things are starting to come together and I just have to say here we are at the beginning of this journey and we have got to stop just talking about it but actually do it and we're starting to doing part now and we know we're not where we need to be and I recognise that. But we have started a journey and it is one in earnest and it is one that's deeply believed by the board and Crown Lands and all the senior leadership of the organisation. It's not just token.
Mark Jones
Yeah, look, and I would say that that's probably a whole other podcast around what I think will be some impact washing in the future where people will say they're doing a bunch of things that are driving this long term change, but they're not quite there yet. And I think the courage that's needed, particularly in a role such as yours, is being able to be open and a little bit vulnerable to say, "This is where we're at right now, but we'd rather take you on the journey than try and pretend where something we're not," right? Is that how you see it?
Nick Baker
Yes.
Mark Jones
That's what I'm hearing
Nick Baker
It's how, and that's why we decided to go with B Corp. The thing about B Corp is everything has to be measurable. I mean, it's an exhaustive process. It takes years to do.
Mark Jones
Oh, I know. We're re-certifying at the moment, as we speak.
Nick Baker
Well, then yes.
Mark Jones
You're among friends.
Nick Baker
Oh, super. Well, then you've been through it. We are sort of into year two of this and it just puts the card on the table because it basically says you've got to do this, right?
Mark Jones
Right.
Nick Baker
Once we said that our 2030 vision is 1.3 billion in economic value to the communities in which we operate in and B Corp certification, that's it. That's our 2030 vision. We have to do that. Now everything is in the same, we our work on operation based on here are our big 10 things we've got to do. One of those things is how do we make that difference inside B Corp so that we continue to grow those points, the 80 points scale to get to that and so that we can be in that position? And people like Intrepid obviously have done this journey extremely well. It sounds like you have as well, if you're re-certifying, that means you're well and truly embedded in it. And we are at the beginning of that and we're just applying those things about what we do. It's just that we have a lot of land and space and stuff to do it over and supply chains that that's going to be interesting.
Mark Jones
Yeah, look, I suspect your journey's probably far more complicated than ours. In fact, I know it is. But I think it's really about the mindset that you take to this. Getting back to that leadership idea for both marketers and CEOs, how you push forward, and I think to sort of start wrapping up the conversation, what mindset do you think is required by both marketers and CEOs to start realising the sorts of outcomes that you're picturing? Clearly you've just painted a really big picture here. And forgive me for a little creative aside as part of this big question, right? Do you remember that play called Away by Michael Gow?
Nick Baker
Oh yes. Yes.
Mark Jones
I've just been thinking about that the whole time we've been talking, right? And if the listener hasn't heard, if you've not seen the play at Sydney Theatre Company, but it's also a famous play, and they talk about going away right up the coast, the family goes up the coast and it's the same place that we go away up the coast. And in fact, I've got family members who have a similar mindset around we always go to this spot and we stay in the same spot. There's a mindset in the psyche around place, around behaviour and what it means to remove yourself from one context and go to another. I think that's an interesting little way of reflecting the leadership story here, which is what's the mindset that's required to realise change and progress? Because the away story is actually about the resistance to change, in my view, if I was to summarise it, whereas what you are talking about is quite a progressive view of positive environmental and social development, but at the same time affirming that sense of going away.
Nick Baker
There is, and we have people that literally, we have one person that's spent 60 years going to the same park. She's been there since she was a child every year and there's a great connection to the place. I do understand that sort of tie, that anchor. I think with marketers you have to adapt. You're constantly reiterating, testing, learning, and reiterating if you're in a good space where you can do that. The same thing is as a good leader, you have to be able to do that. And whether you've been hit by fires, floods or COVID in the last couple of years. That ability to adapt and to iterate, I think is vital component that marketers really often have in spades. The second part of that is the ability to communicate what you're doing, which not necessarily is the same but is really important.
One of the things that when you spoke about you as a family person, one of the things that really I liked about this job was since my son, my son's 16, was in year three, we've had a dads and lads camping trip every year, and we've gone away to a different place and we've taken the kids out to be able to go and do something with it, riding bikes, learning how to fish, swim, throwing a ball, all that kind of stuff in nature. And I think there's a really important element of that connection of learning with kids in nature that you can do.
Whether it's taking it out for the fire for the first time, going on a hike for the first time, that feeling that nature is out there, that feeling that life's better outside, plug for us. But it's also that sense of we don't remember the days, but we remember the moments. And I think one of the things that going out camping and caravaning, or staying in our cabins and staying in these places we've got, by golly, we want to create those moments for people's lives. And I think that we are uniquely positioned to be able to do that in some of the most breathtaking places in New South Wales, if not Australia.
Mark Jones
Well, look, it's quite an inspiring story and I think one of the things I've also enjoyed about this conversation is how you've been able to tie together the marketing and the leadership world of being a CEO. I think to be able to I think also bring alive that vision in the way that you just did quite clearly is helping steer this organisation in a great direction. Thank you again for your time. Lots of food for thought for me and I think for our listeners. And look, I appreciate it. Thanks for being so open as well.
Nick Baker
And thanks for listening, Mark. The jobs that are out there for people to transition and just, I would encourage anybody who wants to do it to have a go at it because I think business now more than ever need marketers.
Mark Jones
Yeah, that's fantastic. All right, well thanks, Nick, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.
Nick Baker
Super. Cheerio.
Didn't that make you want to pack up the car and get back in touch with nature? Maybe even book a holiday?
It was great to hear from Nick on how Reflections Holiday Parks is growing as a profit for purpose enterprise and how they're celebrating the unique natural environments they have the privilege to manage for the people of New South Wales.
There were also some really fantastic insights and tips for marketers who might be eyeing a path to the CEO. I particularly loved his clarity around that and the five things that a CEO needs to be able to do.
So I hope you found a lot to unpack from that conversation, if you see what I just did there. And we will have a new episode for you in a fortnight's time. That's it for me today. Take care, see you soon.