Walk onto a Young Guns site floor at five in the morning and there won’t be a manager behind a clipboard. Instead, it’ll be a team leader at the gate, waiting to greet the newest member of the crew.

Inside, scoreboards line the walls, a huddle is underway and someone is likely being recognized for the day prior’s good performance. By the end of the week, there’s a good chance there’s a team feast to look forward to.

This isn’t incidental. It’s baked straight into Young Guns’ custodian operating model. Built on the principles of high care, high achievement and high trust, the framework has underpinned the company’s growth from a Brisbane startup into a multi-country workforce solutions business with more than 1,500 team members.

For CEO Trent Fuller, it reinforced something he’d long believed – when people thrive, businesses do too.

“When businesses stop asking how do we extract the most value from our people and start asking, how do we create an environment for them to thrive and feel like they belong, the wins are massive,” he tells The CEO Magazine.

Climbing with the right people

Fuller’s decision to join Young Guns was simple. He reached a point in his career where the question became less about work and more about people.

“It wasn’t the mountain I was climbing, but who I was climbing it with,” he says. “I’m a big believer that you become like the five people you spend most of your time with.”

When he first met Young Guns Founders Scott and Trent Young, Fuller knew he was in good company.

“The brothers are beautiful people who care deeply for their people and have an amazing humility about themselves,” he says.

“And at Young Guns, they’ve created a really high-performance culture.”

Unlocking potential

While productivity conversations increasingly revolve around AI and automation, Fuller believes many businesses are overlooking the most significant opportunity already sitting in front of them.

“Research tells us that only 20 percent of people and teams actually reach their full potential,” he says.

Too often, Fuller argues, organizations operate in a way where their people are seen as resources instead of humans.

“The biggest thing is they’re seen as a cost to be minimized rather than potential to be unlocked,” he points out.

“Too many businesses see frontline people as interchangeable labor. So they manage them through control instead of care, and they get exactly what they design for – people who just clock-watch and do the bare minimum.”

Young Guns has spent years doing the opposite.

“Everything in our business starts with genuine care,” he explains.

“As humans, we’re creatures of belonging. So we truly believe that you will not unlock your potential or perform to your best if you don’t feel like you belong.”

Performance through wellbeing

Conventional wisdom often places wellbeing and performance as competing priorities. But Fuller doesn’t buy into that myth. The results of that philosophy have been striking both from a productivity and team wellbeing perspective.

“We see wellbeing and performance as mutually reinforcing, not competing,” he confirms.

“Our entire mindset is based on that. When it comes to the team, absenteeism and turnover is low, they go home safe and engagement is high.

“On the productivity side, we’ve seen some huge gains. One example is a large retail customer who recorded productivity improvements of 400 percent.”

But what makes those figures even more remarkable is what didn’t change.

“There wasn’t a process change, there wasn’t an invention brought in,” he says.

“That 400 percent was based purely on our Young Guns crew going in and replacing the labor hire – combining our unique culture of belonging with expertise in lean principles.”

Beyond a boon for their team, customers across retail, fast-moving consumer goods and logistics have also seen tangible benefits of Young Guns culture.

“Superior productivity obviously brings lower cost, but it also translates into supply continuity and in-stock availability for our customers,” he acknowledges.

Creating opportunities

While success has been plenty, rapid growth has inevitably created challenges. Post the COVID-19 pandemic, Fuller recalls the business investing heavily in specialist functions and systems to support expansion. But somewhere along the way, it started losing its way.

He knew the solution was to return to basics.

“It was about our leaders getting back out on the front line so they could understand what was happening and they could make sure that the culture we were striving for with belonging, care and recognition was genuinely being lived,” he says.

It didn’t take long for Young Guns to get back on track and create some great stories along the way that fill Fuller with a sense of pride.

He lights up as he discusses leaders who’ve gone on to senior roles throughout the supply chain industry. And junior employees who have traveled overseas to help launch operations in new markets.

On future success

As a proud First Nations-owned business, Young Guns has also launched a pathways program designed to support young Indigenous Australians facing barriers to employment.

The program sees participants spending six weeks developing life skills before progressing toward forklift licenses and paid work with culturally trained leaders.

“We’ve now had over 100 young people go through the program,” Fuller says. “And we’ve heard some incredible stories, including where someone has come from living in a caravan park to getting accommodation with people they’ve met at work.”

Looking ahead, he sees opportunities far beyond containers. Distribution centers, ground handling, retail fit-outs, large-scale events and even tree planting have been identified as potential growth areas. And with automation and AI dominating enterprise conversations, Fuller believes Young Guns’ workforce model – built around teams that can work seamlessly alongside new technology – will be key to unlocking the full value of those investments.

But for all the company’s growth ambitions, its success still comes down to its focus on people.

“If you unlock people’s potential, everything else follows – productivity, wellbeing and a culture that people actually want to be a part of.”