Rhys joined Trace as a Manager in 2025, bringing nearly two decades of operational experience across retail and hospitality. Most recently at The Star Entertainment Group, he led strategy, process improvement, and stakeholder engagement across one of Australia's most complex hospitality environments—and as a founding member of The Star's Modern Slavery Working Group, championed dignity and transparency across their supply chains.
We sat down with Rhys to talk about what nearly two decades in operations taught him about consulting, why credibility matters more than methodology, and wher e he sees the biggest opportunities for organisations to improve experience and performance at the same time.
You spent almost 20 years inside businesses before moving into consulting. What does that background change about the way you work with clients?
RE: It makes me instinctively sceptical of solutions that look good on paper but haven’t been stress-tested against operational reality. I’ve worked across import, procurement, supply chain, and hospitality transformation — environments where the gap between a well-designed recommendation and what’s implementable can be significant. That sits with me when I’m building work for a client.
It also shapes how I enter a problem. I’m not leading with methodology, but with curiosity about what’s actually happening: where the friction is, what the team is working around, what the data is telling us. The guiding principle across my career has been understanding a system from the inside before trying to change it. In consulting, that instinct turns out to be a genuine asset.
The more industry-specific crafts of structuring problems, communicating recommendations, and managing engagements with rigour, is something I’ve continued to focus on over the last 18 months. But the underlying orientation was already there, and I think that combination is what led to my role here at Trace.
Your career has sat the intersection of customer experience and operational efficiency, which are often talked about as competing priorities. Do you see them that way?
RE: The tension is usually more apparent than real. When you trace most customer experience failures back to their root cause, you find an operational problem—a process gap, an inventory issue, a workflow creating inconsistency at the point of service. Improving the operation tends to improve the experience.
What makes it feel like a trade-off is usually a time horizon issue. The customer impact of an operational gap compounds until it shows up as a complaint, a lost regular, or a revenue trend. My approach has always been to make that linkage explicit early. Once it’s visible, the “balance” tends to resolve itself.
Hospitality is one of the most operationally pressured environments there is. How do you get people to engage with improvement work when they're already flat out?
RE: You must start with the problems people are already feeling. Walking into a busy hospitality operation with a pre-determined transformation roadmap is a fast way to lose credibility. What works is listening first—understanding the workarounds, the friction points, the things that make people's days harder—and building improvement work around those, rather than arriving with a pre-formed agenda. In my experience, the most effective work comes from building strong relationships across all levels, from frontline teams through to the C-suite. In hospitality operations, you earn credibility and buy-in by proving your solutions hold up on the floor under pressure, not just in a workshop..
As a founding member of The Star's Modern Slavery Working Group, you focused on dignity and respect across supply chains. What drove you to get involved in that work, and what did you learn about the gap between policy and practice?
RE: Having spent almost a decade in both local and international procurement and supply chain, I had a clear view of how far removed conditions at the end of a supply chain can be from the values in a head office policy document. That visibility made it hard to stay on the sidelines.
What I learned is that the gap between policy and practice is rarely about bad intent, it’s structural. The commercial pressures flowing down through a supply chain don’t always carry the same values that sit in a sustainability framework. Closing that gap requires real visibility before it requires better policy; and that’s something I carry into supply chain advisory work now.
Treating people in supply chains with dignity creates better business outcomes, not just better ethics, that's something you've advocated for. Can you give an example of where you've seen that play out in practice?
RE: One place it starts is procurement decisions. Chasing the lowest price sounds rational, but it often just transfers cost pressure onto the supplier, and I’ve seen firsthand how that pressure creates the conditions for underpayment and poor working conditions further down the chain. The cheapest option frequently isn’t the best one when you account for what it costs elsewhere.
More broadly, supplier relationships built on transparency rather than pressure mean problems such as capacity constraints or quality risks surface earlier and get resolved before they become expensive. The alternative produces failures that are costly when they eventually land: disruptions, reputational damage, compliance issues.
It also shows up internally. The way people within an operation are treated shapes the culture guests encounter. Teams that feel respected bring a different quality of attention to the work, and customers notice, even when they can’t articulate why. Dignity isn’t separate from performance; it’s a driver of it.
Looking ahead, where do you see the biggest opportunities for organisations to improve customer experience and operational performance at the same time?
RE: Visibility is key. Most organisations are generating operational data they’re not utilising effectively: demand patterns, process flow times, where and when things fail. When that data is properly structured and accessible to decision-makers, improvements follow naturally because you’re working on evidence rather than assumption.
Closely related is the smart use of AI to reduce administrative burden on employees, such as reporting, scheduling, and coordination tasks that consume time without directly serving a customer. Deploying that time back toward the guest experience is a meaningful gain; it’s about using existing resources better, not reducing headcount.
The third is supply chain resilience. The last few years exposed how brittle lean, cost-optimised supply chains can be. The redesign work happening now, in diversifying sources, building in redundancy, and improving responsiveness, has a direct customer benefit when done well. Fewer stockouts, fewer service failures, fewer moments where the business can’t deliver on what it’s promised.
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