Join us in this episode of Property Investory to hear how Vidler’s role as logistics warfare officer in the Navy, equipped him with the skills to rise in the world of property investing. You’ll learn how his unconventional childhood has shaped who he is today and given him the confidence to take on anything!

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For somebody in property, whether you're a developer or an investor, you're dealing with people and their emotions. You sometimes have to deal with really time sensitive issues and those skills that the military teaches you are so invaluable in being able to deal with that and not go crazy pulling your hair out...overtime. 

This is Property Investory where we talk to successful property investors to find out more about their stories, mindset and strategies.

I’m Tyrone Shum and in this episode we’re speaking with Lachlan Vidler, director of Atlas Property Group and an active investor with a wealth of knowledge. We hear about Vidler’s time in the Royal Australian Navy and how he made the switch to management consultant for some huge global names. We also learn how he used his skills gained in the Navy to succeed in property.

Vidler started out his career as a warfare and logistics officer in the Navy, serving for six years. He then made the move into management consulting where he worked with some big global names and this would ultimately lead him into the property investing space.

I'm the director of Atlas Property Group, which is an exclusive buyer's agency and today I spend most of my time running my buyer's agency as well as focusing on my own property portfolio.

A typical day for Vidler involves a lot of work surrounding his buyers agency. He considers this a full-time job in itself, especially since it is still in its early stages as it was founded in 2019.

It takes a lot of time and effort and although my day varies depending on a number of factors, I’m usually chatting with clients and with agents, prospecting with future clients or future business partners and of course like any good job, lots of admin.

Lately I’ve been learning more about AI and the future of technology and how much it has assisted us but there’s just so much stuff that people don’t see behind the scenes, like admin… it’s always admin. Whether it’s chasing emails, filing paperwork or signing contracts, it just never stops. I think if I could have a full time assistant that could just focus on admin, they would be kept busy all of the time.

I couldn't agree more. AI and technology has helped out so much to the point where we can sign almost all of our documents online. I wonder how much time we’re actually saving by having everything digital, but then it also creates more work because there’s so much more content. I'd love to have a personal assistant come in and be able to help out with the endless admin.

His upbringing differs from many as his parents were quite big in business. This meant that Vidler moved around a lot as a child, as often as his parents got new jobs.

I think I ended up going to 10 primary schools before year five and that was in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Auckland, New Zealand. I went to a couple of those cities more than once as well.

Wow, how does that work? Does that mean that halfway through the school year you'd actually leave and move to another school?

Yeah, sometimes I'd leave to go to Brisbane on a Friday and then I'd be starting school on the Monday in Melbourne or Sydney. 

Vidler followed in his father’s footsteps unintentionally, which meant that he too moved around a lot for business and found it to be character building.

He was in a senior management role in a number of different companies. Sometimes these moves were brought on by him getting a promotion or it might have been that he changed businesses. This was also the case with my mother. We were constantly moving for a lot of my early years and I look back at that time and think back to being that kid who was moving all the time and losing his friends. 

You get a bit unhappy and sad about it, but it taught me so many great skills about being personable and how to be open to making new friendships and relationships. To be honest, it has probably helped out so much in the work that I do now.

Yeah, I can understand. I didn't move as much as you did, but I did move three times when I was in primary school, so I can relate to that. The change in stability was very confronting, but I guess in the bigger scheme of things it was a valuable experience. When I look back at it, I did make a lot of new friends and you learn to adapt extremely quickly to those different environments, especially when you're young. I don't know what it would be like for my kids now because any change for them, they just throw tantrums. 

Lachlan Vidler (05:39):  

I think a little bit of healthy resilience is great for kids. Yeah, I don’t think I would wish those 10 moves on anybody.

After years of moving around the country, Vidler’s family eventually decided to settle down. In the years to come Vidler would experience a similar lifestyle in the Navy.

Although I hadn’t necessarily grown up in Sydney it was good to be back around family members and some of the friends I had had prior to leaving. A lot of people love Sydney, and I certainly love it too, so it was a great place to finally have the waters calm.

This change in lifestyle was brought on by a lull of sorts in the business world. Vidler’s parents had found roles that they were able to settle into and were less affected by the erratic nature of business.

I think my parents had just gotten to the point where they said, ‘Not only are we sick of moving, but we’re sick of moving the kids’, and decided that it would be for the best to have some stability back in all of our lives. 

I can totally understand from a parent's point of view as well because it is quite challenging moving with kids. I’ve moved a few times already with my kids and my child who's now six, has probably moved houses about four times in the last six years. Being a rent investor, sometimes places just decide that they want to sell the property so it's going to be a long term tenancy. So it’s those external impacts that move you around I guess. Did you jump straight into the workforce after high school or did you go the university route?

I actually did both. When I joined the Navy at 18 years old, I was studying at the same time. I really enjoyed it and I was young so I was happy to be out there working also.

When it came time to enter the workforce after high school, joining the Navy just felt like the right choice for Vidler. The valuable lessons and skills that he had learnt as a child would aid him in this role.

I never wanted to dig holes and knowing that would be something you were likely to do in the army, I knew it wasn’t for me. I didn't know whether I wanted to be a pilot or not and if you don't fly planes in the air force, what else are you going to do? After we settled down in Sydney I loved being by the water and I always enjoyed it when we would go to Queensland for holidays because we would spend all of our time at the beach. When I thought about these things the Navy made the most sense to me and so I jumped on that.

The application process for Vidler when joining the Navy didn’t largely differ from other regular jobs. However, because he was signing up to become an officer, it certainly made it a lengthier process.

It’s like most jobs, you go in and you have an interview, you do an aptitude test which will give them an idea of what jobs you may or may not have the capacity to do. Then from the jobs that you get told you can do, you then pick the ones that you want to do further interviews for or further testing. This leads to more maths testing, more physics, more coordination, things like that. After this you keep interviewing like a normal job process, but because I was joining as an officer, I had to do my last interview in Canberra. 

So a group of us got flown from Sydney down to Canberra and we sat on a board which had three Senior Navy officers in front of us. We were all 16, 17, 18 year old kids and they just drilled us with questions for an hour to an hour and a half. This was to understand what we were about, what we're motivated by, why we were looking to join the Navy and then you were either recommended or you weren't.

That must have been quite intimidating, especially at that age. I can see it being a completely different experience for 30 or 40 years olds, but when you’re that young it’s almost like you’ve got a roundtable of parents interrogating you.

Oh, absolutely. But even chatting with you now, I sort of think back on it because it was so many years ago, I have to credit some of the ability to do that from moving around so much. I could go into a room, even at 17 or 18 years old and be able to talk with people that I didn't know and that might be 20 or 30 years older than me. Obviously you still feel uncomfortable, but I think I probably felt more comfortable than some of my peers who might not have had the opportunity to develop some of those skills as much as I had.

Yeah and it really does go to show because I think when you’re tested like that, considering you travelled so much at a young age, you realise just how much you’ve developed all of these great communication and social skills that really help you in the long term. Why did you choose to become an officer, considering it was a much more rigorous process?

So in the military you've usually got two pathways, you join as an enlisted person or you join as an officer. Very broadly speaking, the most junior ranked officer is technically a higher rank than the most senior enlisted person. So you can imagine that you're going to have people like I was at 18 years old, who would technically have a higher rank than people who might be 40, 50 or 60 years old. 

That's why the application process is a little bit more intense for officers, because they want to make sure that they're getting people who can lead or have the capacity to be able to learn how to do that, and have the ability to learn how to do it. So that's the main difference between an officer and an enlisted person. 

The reason why I wanted to go down that pathway was because I always enjoyed leading in sports or at school. I always felt I could communicate quite well and speak to people and I liked being able to be someone who made decisions and wasn't necessarily someone who always had to follow as much. That’s a very simple explanation about the dynamics of rank in the military. But for me, that was why I made the decision to go down the officer pathway, as opposed to the enlisted pathway.

Coming up after the break we hear about how Vidler completed his masters in finance while in the Navy out at sea.

I was doing a little bit of study for my finance masters and I was actually deployed in the Southeast Asia region... It's still quite safe and everything's fine but there are a lot of ships from different countries up there that feel that they deserve the rights to some of the ocean. 

His role as a logistics officer...

I think most people will probably have an understanding of what this role entailed, but simply put it's dealing with all the moving parts on the ship. 

His switch to management consulting…

Consulting was such a natural fit for me because you weren't doing the same job for 12, 18 or 24 months. There is a lot of variation and you get to meet such interesting people.

And that’s next. I’m Tyrone Shum and you’re listening to Property Investory.

Vidler explains that in order to become an officer in the Navy he needed to have completed a few criterias.

Many people think of joining the military as a trade, but I could never have started that job in the Navy while I was still in high school. I didn’t officially join until after I finished the HSC.

Wow, there's so much involved in this. I've spoken to at least three people who I’ve had on the podcast, who have been in the military and they've had some amazing stories to tell. A lot of them have also been very successful in what they do because of the discipline they learnt in the training of the Navy or the army. You can see that it definitely impacted how they've been able to live their life as well, especially when getting involved in the property investing and developing space. 

There's so many moving parts in their training and careers in the military that have helped them to be able to achieve the success that they've had. In most cases that I’ve seen they've actually been able to perform at a much higher level than most of us has, because I think that training is so intense that it helps you get those skills. Did you find that too when leaving the Navy?

Yeah absolutely, but I want to make clear It’s certainly not like in the movies where we’re all trained like Navy SEALS. But when I look back on a lot of the training and a lot of the experiences that I had, I can trace so much of my success back to what I learned there. From my perspective, you're not always going 100% in the outside world or even in the military. 

Something that the military is really good at training and teaching you how to do is when you have to turn on and raise your level of performance, or take on those really high levels of stress. You learn really great methods of dealing with [these high stress situations], how to break down problems, how to think up solutions. For me, I think those skills are probably the biggest things that I've taken away from my career in the Navy. 

For somebody in property, whether you're a developer or an investor, you're dealing with people and their emotions. You sometimes have to deal with really time sensitive issues and those skills that the military teaches you are so invaluable in being able to deal with that and not go crazy pulling your hair out...overtime. 

Although Vidler enjoyed his time in the Navy and values the training and experiences he gained throughout, he always intended to leave at some stage. 

I originally joined as a maritime warfare officer and the easiest way to describe that role  is they're the person who drives the ship, they don't physically have their hand on the wheel, they're the person standing behind that gives the directions to that person on where to go, things like that. So that was where I first started. I have a business degree from UNSW and I wanted to utilise that a little bit more. 

Although I didn’t plan on leaving after six years, I knew that I wasn’t going to stay on for 30 or 40 years. I wanted to move into a role that was going to be able to give me better skills that were more transferable on the outside and so I became a logistics officer. I think most people will probably have an understanding of what this role entailed, but simply put it's dealing with all the moving parts on the ship. 

This included food and fuel and moving the ships to different ports, all the logistical elements that go into that. So it was amazing for my planning skills and my problem solving skills and I had some great experiences while I was in this role. I deployed on two operations and I served on four different ships that were out of Sydney and out of Darwin.

I was doing a little bit of study for my finance masters and I was actually deployed in the Southeast Asia region. We were going through the South China Sea and it's a little bit of a contested area, it's still quite safe and everything's fine but there are a lot of ships from different countries up there that feel that they deserve the rights to some of the ocean. 

Looking back, it’s interesting because I’m on that ship and in those kinds of situations and then I’d have to go back to my rack and do a bit of math study and deal with problems like how to work out the price of a bond or how to work out how to value a property. They’re such polar opposite experiences, one minute of the day to the other. So that's probably one of the big memories that sticks out for me.

That makes it really interesting. So you were concurrently getting your masters in finance at UNSW and serving in the Navy?

I was in the tail end of my masters and I had a couple of subjects to go. I thought, ‘Oh, I'm going to be away for a while, do I wait and prolong the degree even more, or do I just try to do it while I’m out there?’. I'm glad that I did try to do it out there because it saved me a lot of time. It was certainly hard switching between Navy stuff to finance and investment stuff.

Oh I could imagine. So how long were you out on sea normally, because there'd be a proportion of time that you'd be back on land, and then the other time you'd be out on the water?

It really depended on what was going on. So for one trip the ship was gone for months and months and months, but the ship is only as good as its people and people need food and things like that. So this is where my role as a logistics officer came into play because usually, from a Navy perspective, ships can actually go a lot longer than their people can.  You often need to stop in different ports every few weeks because of things like food, to be able to resupply the ship. It really depended on that, but it was usually every two, three or four weeks. I think the longest I ever spent between ports was about six weeks and when we came in, we certainly needed some food then.

That's a long time to be out there. I'm assuming submarines and naval ships are very similar, or would they be a different thing altogether? When you're underwater it's quite hard to come back up all the time and dock. Are they about the same in between ports?

I'll just have to speak a bit anecdotally because I was never on subs, but it's the same constraints, it's always about food and things like that. So in that regard submarines are the exact same, they've got to make port every so often as well to be able to resupply. But they have a much more stealthy role in the world, so they're set up so that they can do their role a little bit better than we can when we float on top of the water.

Like any other job, Vidler’s day to day on the ship varied. He managed his day according to a number of factors, but focussed on his priorities.

You might have to deal with contractors at the next port, for example, when you’re stopping at a port in Malaysia, you're going to need cranes, food, water and power. You'll then have some admin to follow up on or you may need to check in on your people and deal with any issues that they may have. You'll want to have a bit of chill out time after five or 6pm, around dinnertime to regain some sanity. I used to have to spend whole days on admin sometimes, or whole days preparing for the next port. It was always so different. 

So it sounds like you were given set responsibilities and you were taught the skills on how to plan and manage and accomplish goals. But, you also had the freedom to get done what you needed to, without having a set routine everyday.

Definitely, It was 100% like that. In the military there’s a saying, ‘the left and rights of Arc’, which means that the gap between the left and the right of an Ark is where each member of a group has their own positions and is responsible for. You weren't necessarily told how to do the things in that area of responsibility, but they'd say, ‘You just need to get them done’. You always had support and had someone you could talk to which was so invaluable, being able to bounce ideas off of people. I'm a big believer in collective thought and group thinking, I think you get such a better result. If you don't know the answer then you’re able to take on the thoughts of a team and we always had that.

Yeah, I love that. I'm the same I, I think having a collaborative approach is so important, especially in the kind of role that I’m in as a project manager. There's no way that I'd be able to come up with all of the solutions and that's why I have teams of people around me, like buyers agents, architects and so forth. To be able to tap off their expertise and then get the support to be able to come together and finalise the project and basically just guide them in the right direction. So when the internet was not as advanced as it is today, maybe 20 or so years ago, how did people in your position deal when out at sea?

It was definitely not as good. You certainly cannot sit there on YouTube or Netflix and watch a show. Not at all. But there is the internet, but you get it from satellites. So as you're moving throughout the world, you'll get better reception and get worse reception. When we would leave the Australian coastal area, maybe a couple hundred nautical miles off the coast, you would notice that there was often a massive drop in connectivity. It always made it difficult, but it’s the nature of the beast. 

You can do emails, that's usually fine but trying to get on the web to be able to see different things could be challenging, It's something that I think will always be an issue for boats everywhere. You could be on a cruise ship and you're going to have similar issues, but with technology going at the pace that it is, I don't think it'll be too long before we get to a point where people can at least exist somewhat happily with the connection. 

I guess the reason why I asked that question is, is it a necessity to have that connection? Obviously we're connected by cable in the suburbs and mobile reception is fantastic here. It's like the norm, you click on something and instantly your message is sent off to wherever it is and you can get a response back just as quick. But when you're out on the water and acting as a logistics officer, you've got to plan for contractors and what not. Is it a necessity to be able to communicate this quickly? Or is it whenever you get close reception you just send a message or call somebody then?

It's a mixed bag, there are phones all around the ship and most of the phones are for the internals of the ship, so you can call another phone, but you can't call out. But there are always a few phones that can dial out, that use the satellite connection. For example, someone that does logistics or maybe the ship's captain, might have a need to be able to speak with those people, so you could do it that way. 

When it comes to the internet, It's more about keeping the crew happy, regarding their mental health. When you leave home, people just want to be able to chat with their friends and family and emails are not instantaneous. The crew members want to be able to get on their phone, for example, go on Facebook Messenger and be able to just have a chat with their loved ones. As I said, with technology improving the way it is, we can deliver a better service in that aspect and I think it will really help people dealing with the isolation of being away from home for so long. 

When leaving the Navy and finishing his masters in finance, Vidler ventured into management consulting. Similar to his role as a logistics officer in the Navy, this role had an unpredictable nature.

Consulting was such a natural fit for me because you weren't doing the same job for 12, 18 or 24 months. There is a lot of variation and you get to meet such interesting people. Deloitte was the first company that I went to and it was such a great opportunity to get to work with them. 

I interviewed a couple of times and they kept inviting me back for more interviews, so when I got the offer to join them I thought, ‘Deloitte is a global name and I'm about to go from being in the military, which has a bit of prestige about it and is respected, to then having my first job as a management consultant with such a big name. I couldn't pass that up, I had to jump at it.

So what exactly is a management consultant?

My role as a management consultant is to help solve problems that some organisations, companies or the government are having. It may not even be a problem that they are having but something that they need help with or want to do better. So you obviously  have a bit of expertise in the area that you deal with, but you end up being a jack of all trades, master of none, and you get really good at problem solving. You also become really good at dealing with people at a senior level within organisations because you're essentially there to help them solve their issues.

That's great. I'm really curious, what skills from the navy were you able to transfer across into management consulting? Or did you actually pick up these new skills while working at Deloitte and learn on the job?

I was able to utilise skills that I had gained from the Navy but also learnt on the job at Deloitte. To me, problem solving is a pretty simple task, there are so many different methods and different frameworks but at the core of it, for example, problem solving is about breaking down a problem, working out the different parts, and then working on a solution for those parts, it's a pretty simple concept. 

Coming out of the military, I had so many of those skills which was great, but then going to a company like Deloitte, they have their own frameworks, like intellectual property frameworks on how they like to deal with problems, or how they might want to present solutions to problems. So I took what I knew, I adapted it for working in business and just went from there.

Excellent, how long were you at Deloitte's for?

I only had a short six month stint with them before I moved to my current company, Accenture, which is another really big name where I’m doing similar work. It’s been really interesting seeing the way different companies work, even when working within the same industry. But it's been such an interesting ride so far.

So you’re doing the same work at Accenture?

Yes, doing management consulting and I do quite a bit of the same work with the government. I look at problems that they may have, break them down and help organisations be better, more efficient and more effective. 

So inspired by Lachlan Vidler’s  journey, we will keep the conversation going in a future episode of Property Investory. We will discuss the first property he invested in with the help of a buyer's agent.

I was presented with properties and I did due diligence on top of their due diligence, but being able to have that help for my first property taught me so much that I didn't know beforehand. 

We’ll also hear about his work in the development space...

So the development we're in currently is a syndicated investment, so we’re doing it with a couple of other people. But that was more so to be able to leverage into a very, very high value lucrative development that we couldn't fund by ourselves. 

His most memorable investing moment...

The tenant had called the property manager quite a number of times saying that the lights weren't working, but it turns out they just didn't know how to turn the lights on. 

And that’s next time in a future episode of Property Investory.