Since officially starting as Endeavour Group’s new CEO and Managing Director at the start of January, Jayne Hrdlicka has been travelling across the company’s network, meeting staff and touring facilities.

The trip has included walking the aisles of Dan Murphy’s and BWS stores, meeting locals at ALH Hotels and visiting Endeavour Group’s production facilities in South Australia.

Hrdlicka also sat down with the Australian Financial Review to discuss her strategy for boosting growth at the liquor giant.

“It’s easy to become complacent because … the pandemic actually brought huge traffic through retail liquor stores, so you had this artificial bubble that meant you could … feel like you were doing a good job when, underneath, your differentiation and the position that you played in the marketplace wasn’t as strong and robust as it had been in the past,” she said.

“When the waterline went down that became very obvious and everybody else was competing fiercely, and we probably weren’t as competitive as we should have been. Being very focused with Dan’s on value is essential, and we’ve probably lost a bit of sharpness over the course of the last period.”

Hrdlicka has hit the ground running in her new role, delivering record sales results for Dan Murphy’s and BWS during December.

Her focus on competitive pricing to improve retail performance for the group resulted in Dan Murphy’s biggest ever trading weeks leading into both Christmas and New Year’s Eve, with Christmas Eve setting a new daily sales record.