Shane Harmon, thank you so much for joining me for this interview and taking some time out of your very busy schedule. I'm excited about this. We have a long term relationship and I'm just very, very excited about this interview.
Absolutely.
Fantastic. Shane, we're going to take a stroll through your life and your career. My very first question is, can you tell us a little bit about your very first paying job and how old were you?
Those that have met me will know I'm Irish. I grew up in rural Ireland and my first paying job was picking potatoes from around the age of 12. I reckon I earned around 50 cents for every 50-pound bag that I picked and I may have ended up with $10 at the end of the day if I was lucky. It was hard work, but I enjoyed it and $10 was a decent chuck of change to a 12 year old in the early 80s.
What did your parents do for work while you were growing up?
My dad spent his whole career working in mental health services with people born with intellectual disabilities. He was a man who had great empathy for people and he saw his career as a vocation rather than job. With four small kids quite close in age, my Mum was a fulltime homemaker.
I have great memories of growing up in the 70s and 80s in rural Ireland. During the summer months we'd be out of the house first thing in the morning and as long as we were back by sunset there weren’t any issues. They were more innocent times when PlayStations and smart phones didn’t exist and we had to make our own fun.
Yes they were. Those were the good times [laugh]. Tell me a little bit about what were you like in high school.
I hope my kids excel more in high school than I did Christine. I was very young and easily distracted. I was still only 16 when I completed high school and had still a lot of maturing to do. I just took a little more time than most! I loved my college days however. I ended up spending six years completing a commerce degree and a master's degree. My dad would often say that I should have gone to med school instead given the amount of time I took to get through college.
But the fact that you actually knew at that young age that you wanted to do something in marketing.
Marketing drew me in early on and I’m fortunate that the choices I made at a young age formed the basis of my career.
I had a passion for it early on. Early part time jobs such as working in bars and restaurants while in university taught me an understanding of caring for customers and being able to sell. Through my early work experience and study I knew that was going to be the career for me.
If we look back on your career, you’ve had some amazing career changing opportunities and you worked with incredible organizations.
Let's step back in time, was your first role in sports at the Sydney Swans?
Yes it was Christine. I moved to Australia in the mid-90s as a young man. I had intended to travel the world for a year, but I got to Australia and pretty much didn't do the traveling thing. I got a job with Citibank and worked there for five years mainly in cards marketing.
This was during the glory days of direct marketing and direct mail. Database marketing was increasing in importance and the internet was in its infancy as a customer engagement and an acquisition tool. I developed strengths in database and direct marketing, which as it turned out were the two key skills that the Sydney Swans were looking for in 2000 when I joined them as Membership and Direct Marketing Manager.
That was my entry into sports, and 18 years later I'm still in an industry that I feel very lucky to work in.
From the outside looking in, sports can seem much more glamorous than it is in reality. It’s hard work and long hours, but it’s also a wonderful and very rewarding industry to work in.