Making Your Business Successful

From economics to fashion, then to hotels and restaurants, this dynamic businesswoman knows how to stay ahead of the competition, writes Rebecca Spicer

On the way to a serious career some people don’t get round to having a life. But fun, variety, and romance have been crucial factors in Judith Crawley’s serious career success.

The Sydney-based, Austrian-born entrepreneur started off with an economics degree but decided to combine budgets with the more glamorous world of fashion. Working as a fashion buyer for a major company in Vienna, Crawley spent her twenties travelling the world and attending fashion shows. That’s not to say her job wasn’t a challenge. Being a young woman, doing such serious buying, meant she constantly had to prove herself, which she did until fate stepped in.

Crawley was on a trip to Manila when she met her husband, Christopher Crawley. They fell in love, and as Crawley was leaving for the next leg of her buying trip in Asia she told Christopher if he wanted to be with her, he’d have to come and get her. It took him only a month to return to Europe and bring Crawley back to Australia in 1988, where she’d never stepped foot before.

"So when I came here, the first thing I had to do was get to know the customs, the country and the people, and I learned as much as I could, including improving on my language," she explains of this erratic, yet romantic time in her life.

Plans to get back into fashion fell through because, as Crawley says, 20 years ago fashion was very different in Australia than it is today. Christopher was managing director and co-founder of J & J O’Brien Hoteliers Group, which owned and operated a handful of hotels in Sydney’s CBD. Stemming from her buying experience, Crawley saw an opportunity for the group to take advantage of bulk buying. "So I said to my husband, my partner at the time, ‘if I can buy garments then I can buy anything, so give me a go’.

"And I’m still here," she says proudly. "So I must have done something right but Christopher would have been the first to sack me if I wasn’t doing the right thing," she laughs.

J & J O’Brien was established in the early 80s, with Crawley joining the company in 1990. The directors at the time owned a number of venues, and Crawley recognised the potential for those to work together rather than independently. "It was just the simple principle of bulk buying," she explains, which hadn’t really been embraced 17 years ago.

While bulk-buying beverages was the starting point, Crawley rolled this out throughout the whole business. "We did bulk buying for food, any service contracts and everything from the tablecloths right through to the glassware."

While this is obvious economy of scale today, Crawley says there weren’t big groups around back then, so it was a bit of a breakthrough at the time. "It was challenging because in those days the computer system wasn’t as sophisticated as it is today, in fact it wasn’t even around, so there was a lot of resistance from the suppliers because they didn’t really understand the benefits the group could provide them with, and vice versa. So it was very challenging, but rewarding and interesting."

Another major challenge for Crawley was adapting to family life. In the move to Australia, she took on two teenage stepdaughters, creating an instant family she had little experience catering for. A self-confessed ‘dud’ in the kitchen, she says one of her biggest challenges was getting a decent, cooked meal on the table every night. "I definitely had lots of help from the likes of Maggi, but we made it and we’re all healthy people," she laughs.