More than lip service

Gillian Franklin’s cosmetics company, the Heat Group, has proved that providing employees with flexible working conditions is completely compatible with fast growth. By Andrea O’Driscoll.

GILLIAN FRANKLIN, the founder and Managing Director of the Heat Group, is a woman who likes to walk her talk. A long-time advocate of women in business she was prompted to start her own company by a series of programs she ran to encourage more women to assume control of their financial destinies.

“In around 1998 I was doing a lot of research on young women as part of my work at Creative Brands,” she explains. “One of the things I learned was that most women still had this concept that ultimately they would marry the prince. In fact, only one woman in 12 is financially taken care of by a male partner today.”

Her findings led her to launch a series of programs for young women to teach them the importance of financial independence called the ‘Australis Self-Made Girl’, which she ran in conjunction with her role as General Manager at Creative Brands.

“At some point I thought, here I am encouraging young women to become financially independent and to start their own businesses, while I enjoy the comfort of corporate life,” says Franklin. “I started thinking that maybe I should be building up some assets for myself rather than for other people, so I decided to leave corporate life and form my own company.”

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The bulk of Franklin’s career had been spent working for cosmetics companies such as Revlon and Creative Brands, so, deciding to stick with what she knew best, she wrote a business plan around the development of her own cosmetic brand. She formed the Heat Group in May 2000 with a skeleton staff of five, but not long after the business was incorporated Franklin was presented with an opportunity that was simply too good to pass up.

“Someone called me and said Proctor & Gamble are looking to change their business model in Australia from a subsidiary model to a distributor model and your name has come up as a person who might be able to take this on,” explains Franklin. “I hadn’t anticipated becoming a distributor for other brands, but much to everyone’s surprise we won Proctor & Gamble’s business. Even in those days it was worth $26 million.”

Franklin’s experience and reputation in the industry might have helped her win the business, but it was her hard work and dedication that made it possible for her to deliver on her promises. “We were just a start up, we didn’t even have an office,” she recalls. “Very quickly we were propelled from being a start-up to being a medium-sized business. I had to secure warehousing, logistics, I had to get an office, computers and employ more people. The first 12 months was barely organised chaos.”

Gillian Franklin’s Heat Group has grown rapidly as a distributor of well known cosmetic brands, and she attributes much of the company’s success to its flexible and sympathetic approach to the needs of its staff including maternity leave.