A four-week launch plan, delivered in four days.

Ben Barnes came to GeoNet after ten years as a state director in Australian real estate and started as COO six weeks before this interview. He began the same week the operating layer went in, which he counts as luck: he understood what the business needed to do and was handed the tools to deliver it at the same time. A developer with several projects moving at once hands a new COO a multitude of workstreams from day one.

The first big deliverable was the G-PLAN strategy: launching a broker platform across Australia so brokers could have better conversations, scoped as a four-week plan. Rather than cascading the work out across the team and waiting for it to come back, Ben ran it through the operating system and had it done in about four days, then cascaded the finished plan instead.

Ben Barnes on the G-PLAN launch1 min

0:46 to 1:46Watch the full interview →

The next piece was how GeoNet presents future projects to clients, investors and family offices. Chris, the Chief Commercial Officer, was bogged down doing all the maths behind them. His models were brought into the operating system, which freed him and gave Ben access to the same numbers, so a deck for everyday Australian investors or for a family office could be tailored and made personal at the push of a button. In the old world that was multiple days, if not weeks. The team had already tried generic AI tools for this, and a generic slide deck in front of that level of investor was, in Ben's words, not acceptable.

The old world ran on spreadsheets, slides and all the tools. What changed for Ben was that the system knew the organisation: the key insights were already loaded, so on anything he was not yet the expert in, he could ask the system while he was still onboarding himself. That is how a six-week-old COO landed multiple streams of work at once, across areas of the business he had not run before.

His own count: where he would have finished one piece of work in a day, he did five, six or seven, then ran things overnight so the next morning started further ahead. The impact was noted by the CEO and the managing director as part of his onboarding.

The part Ben cares about as an operator is the average. Ask people to rate themselves one to ten on AI and GeoNet had ones sitting next to sevens and eights. The operating system brings everyone up to a standard quickly, and it comes with gateways: someone in investor relations gets the tools that role needs, the COO gets more. The tools are only as good as the person behind the wheel, and who the gatekeepers are, and what senior leadership still signs off, are questions he keeps in his own hands.

GeoNet will keep hiring, and the next hires are senior specialists at general-manager level. What it will not do is take on fifty marketing specialists, a third more finance staff or another forty people in settlements, because the system covers those skills and existing people can move to where the business is finding challenges. The wins differ by department, marketing and contracts had their own, but for the COO the win was individual efficiency: across every task, every email and every complex problem that needed his attention.