Cobild, a 100-plus-person builder of high-end residential, commercial and mixed-use real estate in Melbourne, Australia, has ranked in Australia’s Great Place to Work Award for 10 years in a row.

Ninety-four percent of employees considered it a great place to work in 2025, compared with an average of 60 percent of employees surveyed at typical companies based in Australia, thanks to its commitment to initiatives such as job sharing, awards and recognition programs, ‘Not Your Typical’ learning and development activities like its leadership acceleration program, ‘Einstein Hours’ and ‘all ideas matter’ hack sessions to spark innovation.

Its onboarding program has achieved 99 percent overall satisfaction, with 98 percent of the team members saying they were set up for success within six months of employment.

Building a workplace where the best talent in the industry wants to work has allowed Cobild to confidently pursue projects like One Toorak Place, a US$280 million, eight-story luxury mixed-use development project in Toorak, where developer Orchard Piper announced the partnership in February.

“Cobild’s understanding of our commitment to design excellence, as well as our expectations around quality and execution, gives us confidence in the delivery of this project,” Rick Gronow, Director at Orchard Piper, said when the deal was announced.

CEOs who want to scale up successfully need to get four decisions right: people, strategy, execution and cash.

As Cobild’s CEO, Rotem Rotenberg understands the foundation of these four decisions is people. Unless you know how to attract and keep A+ players, you won’t be able to master the other three.

Here’s how to attract and keep A+ players in your own company.

Build a great culture

Cobild has attracted and retained great people, whom it calls Cobildians, at a rate that is above the industry average through a culture that prioritizes fun, energy and enthusiasm – one that makes it stand out when it applies for awards like Great Place to Work.

It received its first Great Place to Work award in 2016, when it had just 35 employees, and made it to the top three for Australia in 2023. Applying for this type of award early and often is a key to attracting A+ players.

Operating on the premise that a healthy, happy team will excel at decision-making, creative problem-solving and innovative thinking, the company prioritizes the physical and mental wellbeing of its team through activities like beach volleyball in Byron Bay, where it played recently against a team from a dining destination it built, and its Annual Family Day, held this year at Werribee Open Range Zoo.

At its annual Christmas party, the Cobild Bucket List wheel spins and makes a dream come true for a team member, such as a lucky winner who was awarded a trip to Japan last year.

Its Head of People Culture, Adriarna Nunn, shares highlights on social media to spread the word to others who might be interested in joining the team and position Cobild as an employer of choice for high-caliber talent.

They’re onto something. Gallup research shows that having a ‘best friend’ at work contributes significantly to the likelihood that a team member will recommend their company as a great place to work and want to stay in their current job, as well as overall satisfaction.

Fun interactive activities can help create these kinds of friendships, especially among remote workers. Investing in fun activities that build friendships can go a long way toward retaining talent.

The company is also a certified Family Friendly Workplace. It introduced its ‘Un-Typical Parental Leave Program’, which uses a customized approach built on the premise that ‘parenting is not a one-size-fits-all journey’, in 2021. Its 12-week paid parental leave program, available to both men and women, has achieved a 100 percent return-to-work rate.

Make sure team members know they matter

As Jennifer Breheny Wallace, author of Mattering, pointed out at a recent Scaling Up + Learning Summit, every team member needs to have an opportunity to add value and feel valued. They need to know their significance and feel appreciated, invested in and depended on.

At one nonprofit organization Wallace studied, social workers covered their doors with Post-it notes filled with messages from grateful clients.

The CEO got inspired to put up a bulletin board that said, “Tell someone why they made a difference.” She got the ball rolling by sharing why her assistant matters so much. As the bulletin board filled up, engagement in the organization soared.

Engagement was low at a manufacturing plant Wallace observed in Phillips, Wisconsin, until the new owners turned things around by showing employees how much they mattered.

They started out by entrusting all team members with privileges once reserved for the administrative and office staff, such as making phone calls home and setting up doctors’ appointments when needed.

They increased engagement by adding a ‘story card’ to each piece of machinery the factory produced, featuring details like a photo of the person who would someday use the machine.

“These story cards told workers they weren’t just assembling parts – they were building something meaningful that a very real person was actually betting their livelihood on having that machine work for them,” she said.

Compensate competitively

How you compensate people is one of the most strategic decisions your company will ever make, as I discussed in my book with Sebastian Ross, Scaling Up Compensation: 5 Design Principles for Turning Your Largest Expense into a Strategic Advantage.

A+ players will have all kinds of opportunities at other firms, so if you want to attract and retain the best people, you need to compensate them accordingly.

This is particularly true if your team is becoming leaner in the age of AI, with considerably fewer people doing considerably more. The future will favor CEOs who can create the right team and put people-driven systems in place that power change.

One of our clients in the United Kingdom recently reduced its team from 50 programmers to five. These ‘All Stars’ are outperforming the other 45 by three times in the number of releases per week.

The company now pays them US$333,000 apiece, or roughly two-to-three times the US$105,000 to US$186,000 the others earned – reducing payroll by four times while increasing output by three times, for a 12 times gain in what our organization calls Return on Payroll.

Even if the owner has to pay them US$1.3 million each in the future, as he predicts, the company’s payroll will remain the same at US$6.65 million.

Even better, the team is being led by a liberal arts major who is good at discerning what the customer wants. She writes the initial prompts to generate the code the five programmers clean up and integrate into their solution. And that investment will pay off when it comes to scaling up.

If this approach sounds familiar, it probably is. It’s the same model used in pro sports. Every team has two or three players they must pay inordinate amounts to – often more than the coach.

That doesn’t mean the owners aren’t worth more in the end. If you can hold onto the right people by treating them right, scaling up will be exponentially easier and far more rewarding.

Ready to build a team of A+ players? To download Scaling Up’s free Growth Tools and start sharpening your people, strategy, execution and cash decisions, click here. To find a Scaling Up coach who can help you put these principles into action, click here.