Hugo Cutrone.
Hugo Cutrone, Managing Partner, Avenue C
In business, I’ve never loved the whole “we’re a family” thing, or the high-performance footy team metaphor. One’s too sentimental, the other’s too top-down. Neither reflects how teams’ function when things get fast, messy or critical.
For me, culture isn’t built around Friday 4pm drinks or team-building offsites. Culture is designed, and it all starts with who you hire, how you operate, and whether your team holds under pressure or folds at the first corner. The best culture I’ve ever seen is a heist crew.
Every great heist starts with a plan. You don’t cast the crew until you know what you’re stealing, how you’re getting in, and how you’re getting out. The same goes for business. Don’t hire for fit. Hire for what the plan demands. No passengers. No placeholders. Just people who bring something the mission needs and without them, would fail.
In a heist crew everyone has a role - the hacker, the driver, the inside operator - each bringing something different, and each essential to the plan. That’s what high performance looks like. Not five versions of the same person with the same CV and the same point of view. A heist crew requires range, useful friction, and diverse thinking that doesn’t blend into itself.
This only works if the structure allows it. A heist crew isn’t run by a patriarch or a coach yelling from the sideline. It’s flat because in the middle of a metaphorical car chase, the getaway driver doesn’t turn to the safecracker asking what to do next. They drive, They adapt without seeking approval, because decisions need to be made fast for the team to pull off the job.
That’s the mentality we’ve built Avenue C on. A culture designed around clarity, not hierarchy or noise. We’ve shaped a team the way you’d cast a heist crew: diverse thinkers, different strengths, and most importantly, no passengers. If you’re not part of the heist, you’re not on the team. We’re aligned by one mission and one outcome - in our world, it’s not stealing the crown jewels, it’s launching a new superannuation product or getting someone to switch energy providers.
This only works when there’s real trust and I don’t mean the surface-level stuff that shows up in onboarding slides. I mean trust where people feel comfortable speaking up, disagreeing openly, and shifting course when something isn’t working. Teams with that kind of trust move fast, stay sharp, and avoid mistakes that should never happen.
If this industry is going to keep progressing toward smarter ideas, more representative teams, and work that delivers results for our clients we need more crews built this way. Diversity shouldn’t just show up in a spreadsheet. It should show up in the work. Not just diversity of background, but of thinking, working style, and point of view.
So forget the family. Forget the footy team. Build a heist crew that could rob a bank and still make it home for dinner.