TRADE TALK
DRIVING PASSION IN SPORT AND BUSINESS
From winning an Australian Rally Championship to running a successful family business, Scott Pedder has always been ahead of the pack These days Scott Pedder is the Managing Director of Pedders Suspension and Brakes, and along with his older brother, Mark, is the driving force behind the family-owned business. But, Scott has a much more interesting and exciting background than your average businessman. He is an extremely accomplished rally driver having won the 2014 Australian Rally Championship and competed with some success in the World Rally Championship for a couple of seasons. However, his biggest challenge came in 2019 when he stepped out of serious rallying and slid into the driver’s seat of the business his grandfather, Roy, started and father, Ron, expanded. Scott took over the leadership position in the specialist suspension and brakes franchise organisation from Mark, who had fulfilled the role for a decade and a half. Up until then, Scott’s focus had been more on the marketing side of the business. “I supported Mark whilst he was Managing Director for 15 years doing mostly marketing as well as anything else that needed to be done and then in November 2019, we made the decision that I’d step up to be Managing Director and Mark would fulfill the Director role that I had been doing for 15 years,” Scott said. Mark’s has a lot of strengths that I haven’t got, and I’ve got some strengths that he doesn’t, so we decided that the strengths I possess is maybe what’s needed now (in the business), so we changed roles very amicably. I have never had a fight with Mark in my adult life; we had plenty of fights as children and in our teenage years, but never as adults. It was a very quick and easy decision to swap roles.”
With his family pedigree there was no chance he wasn’t going to end up loving cars. “I didn’t have much choice. My dad took me to a rally when I was about a week old. I grew up with motorsport and with the family business I was always around cars. I probably don’t have the level of passion for cars some in my family have, but I do love cars and I do appreciate good cars and cars that are done up and cars that go fast and handle well and stop well, so yeah, I’m definitely a motorsport and auto tragic,” Scott said. Scott never planned on working on the tools. “I had a different approach to what most in the automotive industry do. I was not technical and I am not a mechanic by a long stretch. I can sort of work my way around spanners, but I went through and did a Bachelor of Commerce at Deakin University and for a time there, I was thinking about being a policeman or a teacher before I got into the business side of things,” Scott explains. “I really enjoy doing accounting and I particularly enjoy the marketing side of things, so it became pretty clear probably in my first or second year of uni when I was 18 or 19 years old, that I wanted to do something in marketing and that just made sense at that time, so I stepped in and ran the marketing department.” Scott was always a talented sportsman and driving rally cars wasn’t the first sport in which he excelled. “My first job was actually as an assistant tennis coach. I was quite a good tennis player as a junior and I started helping my coach. He had a bit of an influx of people wanting to learn to play tennis, so I did some assistant tennis coaching for a couple of years, that was probably when I was 15 or 16,
Scott Pedder and after then I don’t reckon I had a job that wasn’t related to Pedders,” he said. Scott describes his management style as keeping things simple and getting the job done without any fuss. “I’m a little bit old school, probably similar to my dad – just trust your gut,” he said. “A lot of people these days are a little risk averse and want stats and analysis and data and all that sort of stuff and sometimes that gets in the way of making a decision. The worst thing is indecision rather than a bad decision. “Probably the other thing I am noticing quite a lot is that priority of what you would call operational or job skills over human skills and dealing with people and emotional intelligence, so the advice I have would be just to trust your gut and develop you as a person rather than you as an employee. “A strength of mine is not accepting the status quo – just because you’ve always done something doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to do it that way forever. “In the short time that I have been Managing Director, that is what I believe I have added to the business, particularly around management structures and personnel and people. That’s the area I’ve probably done well and done right.” However, Scott is the first to admit that as a management team he and Mark haven’t always got it right. “When we look back eight or nine years, we made the very big decision to enter the brake market. We’ve always been a steering and suspension business and even though for 30 or 40 years, everyone’s thought ‘Pedders are brake people’, we weren’t; in fact we actively stayed out of the brake market for a lot of reasons, but we decided in around 2010 to have a go at brakes,” he explains.
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Australian Automotive Aftermarket Magazine March 2021
