David Baxby met the love of his life at Bond University and rode his degrees to international success. Now he will help shape Bond's future as its ninth Chancellor.
TThe ringing phone jolts David Baxby awake at 2 o’clock in the morning. At least he thinks it’s morning. A double degree from Bond University prepares you to become a global citizen but there’s no course on jetlag, the constant travel companion of the Head of Aviation at Virgin Management. On the other end of the line is Sir Richard Branson and he wants to talk about the passenger in seat 33C.
“We’ve just had an issue with a meal on a plane from London to Delhi, the guy in 33C. Can you work out what went wrong? I think we’ve really let him down,” the Virgin Group founder tells his lieutenant.
“And it’s like, what? We fly 30 million people a year, where do I start!” Mr Baxby says. “So I ring the guy running Virgin Atlantic, find out who the station manager was in New Delhi and ask, what did we do about it? And it turns out we looked after the passenger.
"Richard never rang me to say, what’s going on? He would say, here’s what I’ve heard. That’s granular, but that’s a great entrepreneur - the ability to stay at 40,000 feet and then dive down to one metre and then they go back up to 40,000 feet. I’ve got to say, I enjoyed every single moment I worked with him.”
Annabelle Bennett AC SC and David Baxby.
Annabelle Bennett AC SC and David Baxby.
For someone disqualified from RAAF fighter pilot training – "my head was too big and my body too long" - Mr Baxby (Class of 1992) has spent a lot of his life at 40,000 feet. In a career that includes his formative years with Goldman Sachs and almost a decade with the Virgin Group, including as Co-CEO alongside Sir Richard, he has lived and worked around the world, catching planes the way most people catch Ubers.
His newest role is more down to earth. Recently elected as the ninth Chancellor of Bond University, taking over from the Honourable Dr Annabelle Bennett AC SC, he becomes the first alumni to hold the post.
“I feel like I’m about 10 years too young (for the role) but I am immensely proud,” he says. “I’ve re-focussed a number of other board roles so I’ve got enough headspace and time to give it the attention it deserves. I’m going to lean into it and see if we can get even closer to our alumni.”
Mr Baxby has been leaning in since he was a child, supporting his mother Nanette Carroll on her own rise to the top of the corporate world. Born in Sydney in 1973 as the eldest of three boys, his early years were spent ping-ponging between Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne with his publican parents.
When Ms Carroll moved her sons to Logan in the early 1980s it was as a battling single mother and they lived in an Aspley convent for a year. She found work as a secretary at a recruitment company and began a relentless climb that would eventually take her to an ownership buyout and collecting the 1996 Telstra Business Woman of the Year Business Owner Award.
The drive to provide for her boys and succeed was inspirational to Mr Baxby who took it upon himself to support her in any way he could.
“Mum bought this brand-new 900-watt microwave oven because that was the only way that she felt we could cook without burning the house down. I went along to the microwave cooking classes with her – me and about 40 other women.”
Three adventurous boys home alone meant some afternoons got ‘a little bit out of control’ and their neighbour Dell - who the Baxbys are still close to – occasionally came over to pull them into line.
“Matt fell out of a pine tree one day when he was nine and I was 12 or 13,” Mr Baxby says. “He came down a long way and hit quite a few branches and ended up with a gash in his neck. I’m going, oh my God, I’m in real trouble here, but luckily Dell came across and took care of him.”
Mr Baxby was sports mad; less so on studying. High school took a backseat to rowing, triathlon and cycling. But in Year 11 he borrowed a new book from the Daisy Hill library. Called Barbarians at the Gate, it details the takeover of RJR Nabisco by a private equity firm and is a chronicle of one the largest leveraged buyout transactions of the era. Reading it was a ‘lightning bolt moment’ and Mr Baxby went to see his careers advisor at John Paul College about going to university, en route to the world of high finance. The blunt response: you haven’t worked hard enough - maybe you can become a tradie.
“I said, no, I’ve read this book and I want to do this,” Mr Baxby says. “And (the careers advisor) said, well, you’re going to have to have the most incredible Year 12 ever. And that’s what I did. I got the marks. I think it was probably the hardest year of my life.”
Mr Baxby on his graduation day with mother Nanette Carroll.
Mr Baxby on his graduation day with mother Nanette Carroll.
During that year, David Baxby took a bus bound to the Gold Coast to visit a new university he had seen on a brochure at school. He looked around and noticed something about the other kids taking the trip. Like him, they seemed … focussed. Like-minded. He quickly realised he could do a Bachelor of Commerce/Bachelor of Laws in just three years and is offered a half scholarship to boot.
Nanette was rising through the ranks at this point but paying the remaining Bond fees was still a struggle, and on weekends Mr Baxby worked as a hospital cleaner from 4am to midday. The pay was good; the commute, not so much. At Bond he met Selina Page (Class of 1991) in the subterranean Bat Lab, filled with rows of computers for students. The future Mrs Baxby also flourished at Bond and forged a successful career in banking, HR and recruitment. Thirty-two years and three daughters later, they’re still together.
“We’ve lived in six or seven countries and the kids have been to 10 schools and speak two languages,” Mr Baxby says. “Through it all, Selina has been this absolute rock while I’ve been bouncing around being Mr Important. She sacrificed her career to make all of that happen.”
Today Mrs Baxby has resumed her career as the founder of NurtureLab which coaches leadership and team-building. Mr Baxby says his strongest memories of Bond other than meeting his wife was the camaraderie of his cohort.
“There wasn’t a lot of development around the campus which created this little world we could call our own,” he says. “The parties would go on and so it was better just to crash there and people would bunk up. You knew everyone and it was a lot of fun.”
Life, Mr Baxby says, is 50 per cent good timing - what others might call luck. “I think that you put yourself in positions to be lucky,” he says. “I call it timing, which is putting yourself in the game and allowing yourself to have opportunities come along.”
One such opportunity arose not long after the Baxbys returned to Australia from London for the birth of their twins Imogen (Class of 2021) and Zara (Class of 2020). Mr Baxby made a fateful call to Sir Richard after first coming into the orbit of the charismatic billionaire while working for Goldman Sachs. (Mr Baxby was Goldman’s fourth hire in Australia, becoming Partner and Executive Director and moving to the firm’s UK office).
“I said, I did a bit of work with you when I was in London. I’m back in Australia where you’ve got an investment in this airline (Virgin Blue). Can I help? And it was a classic case of raising $20 million to expand the airline, to selling half of it for $520 million, to IPO-ing all of it for $2.6 billion 18 months later. I got to see a business go from four planes to 80. Right place, right time. And that cemented my relationship with Richard.”
Leaving Goldman to work directly for Virgin began a rollercoaster ride around the world, culminating in becoming Co-CEO responsible for 300 businesses ranging from airlines to trains and space travel.
Richard taught me that human beings power businesses - they’re the most important things. He would much rather go and talk to the baggage handler or the cabin attendant and find out what’s really going right or wrong.
You fix the customer, you look after the people, and the business runs itself.”
Not quite, as it turns out. Living in Geneva at this point, Mr Baxby’s punishing schedule was hard on family life. On Sunday night he would fly out for a week in Australia, returning Friday night. Then a week on the West Coast of the US, then New York, London, repeat.
“I was very absent a lot of the time,” he says. “Didn’t see a lot of kids’ soccer practices. I’d get home and I’d be cooked. But quality over quantity is what we learned. I would train myself as I came off all of that to say, for the next 18 hours I’m going to try and be present.”
Vice Chancellor and President Professor Tim Brailsford places a mortarboard on the Chancellor's head at his investiture ceremony.
Zara Baxby, Selina Baxby, Chancellor David Baxby, Amelia Baxby and the Chancellor's mother Nanette Carroll.
These days, there’s more family time to be had. After returning to Australia and a stint as Managing Director of Wesfarmers’ industrial division, Mr Baxby co-founded his own private equity company, Coogee Capital, with Tom Hardwick, founder of the Guardian Early Learning group. Daughters Imogen (Bachelor of Biomedical Science) and Zara (Bachelor of Commerce/Bachelor of Laws (Hons)) – have graduated from Bond University while the Baxbys’ youngest daughter Amelia is forging her own path at the University of Technology Sydney. With four Bondies in the family, the new Chancellor plans to draw heavily on the University’s alumni network during his term.
“The one thing that I can do quite well is to better connect the University with the alumni community, because it’s the one thing I am that no one else has been before,” he says. “I’d like to energise that community, get them coming back for Homecoming, hosting internships, just connecting again. If you look at the great universities around the world, they are powered by their alumni.”
David Baxby timeline
Stories from Bond