Podcast: Sara Johnson, CEO ITM
[E24]In 1991, 19 independent timber merchants came together with a practical problem to solve: how could they remain independently owned while gaining the scale and collective strength to compete with much larger corporate building merchants?
Thirty-five years later, ITM has grown into a nationwide cooperative of more than 90 independently owned businesses. Along the way, its members have navigated recessions and building booms, the Global Financial Crisis, the Christchurch earthquakes and rebuild, COVID and supply chain disruption, and the latest construction downturn. Through all of that change, the cooperative model has remained at the heart of the business.
In this episode of Co-op Leader Conversations, Cooperative Business New Zealand CEO Saya Wahrlich is joined by ITM CEO Sara Johnson to explore the cooperative behind the brand and what 35 years have taught ITM about independence, collective strength and long-term leadership.
Together they discuss:
how cooperation enables independent businesses to retain their local agility and entrepreneurial character while gaining national scale, buying power and shared capability
what it takes to lead a cooperative whose members are themselves business owners, including building consensus and embracing constructive disagreement
the role of member directors, succession and the next generation in protecting the purpose and longevity of the cooperative.
The conversation explores some of the less visible benefits of cooperation too. Sara describes the knowledge, mentoring and support shared between members, including businesses that may technically compete with one another, and why those who contribute most strongly to the collective often gain the greatest value in return.
Sara also shares a fascinating perspective on cooperative leadership. For her, leading ITM is about the guardianship of an organisation built to endure well beyond any individual CEO. That requires strategic thinking, emotional intelligence, humility and, above all, the ability to listen. The same long-term perspective is shaping ITM's approach to succession, including its NextGen programme and the high-trust conversations with individual owners about the future of their businesses.
As ITM celebrates its first 35 years, its story demonstrates how cooperation and independence can reinforce rather than compete with each other: locally owned businesses retaining the freedom to respond to their customers and communities, backed by the collective scale, knowledge and capability of a national cooperative.
“We need them to think beyond their own store. We need them to think about what they are doing to make the cooperative great, and to help it for the future as well, because it's not a one-way street.”
sara johnson, CEO ITM
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