Can Jayne Hrdlicka save Dan's (and her LTI)?
There is an understandable focus on pay ahead of Endeavour's AGM.
Jayne Hrdlicka is an unlikely purveyor of mass market vice.
The Endeavour Group chief executive's happy place is less the Blacktown Inn and more her $17 million block of land in Noosa – or the front row of Arthur Ashe Stadium or Rod Laver Arena, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Anna Wintour and, less thrillingly, Anthony Albanese.
Hrdlicka likes to remind people such as my colleague Joe Aston – who once accused her of being "stylish" – that she grew up in Kansas "in a pretty simple world and I have no trouble…being on the floor of any of our pubs".
Nobody should question her sincerity. Asked why she took on the Endeavour job after making bucketloads of money running Virgin Australia, the 64-year-old replied without a flicker of a smile, "I have a tonne of fun in life doing challenging things". Hrdlicka's version of fun brings to mind Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 so, if sinking pots with the locals at The Hallam is part of the job, she is going to grit her teeth and order a Carlton.
Endeavour is the perennially underperforming booze and pubs business spun out of Woolworths five years ago, which owns Dan Murphy's, BWS and 351 licensed venues containing almost 13,000 pokies. It should be a grown-up company given it generates more than $12 billion in sales and employs more than 30,000 people. But in reality it's been a rolling cluster. Since listing, Endeavour has employed four chairmen, the share price has more than halved, and it finds itself, to borrow a phrase from MST Marquee analyst Craig Woolford, "delicately balancing debt and equity holders."[["The dividend in FY26 was part funded through debt and we expect this will occur again in FY27", Woolford wrote after the annual results briefing in September.]]
Hrdlicka's appointment was a coup for a business not exactly overrun with candidates after Steve Donohue stepped down. Not many people are confident enough to walk into a burning building where the Mathieson family, Endeavour's second-largest shareholder, decides who gets to use the fire escapes.[[AustralianSuper upped its stake to 16 per cent earlier this month, making it Endeavour's largest shareholder. Bruce Lawrence Mathieson has a little over 15 per cent.]]
