Greg Healy spent more than 30 years inside the global surf and action sports industry, most of that time with Quiksilver and Boardriders, running regions across Asia Pacific, North America, and Europe. Before any of that, he was the youngest ever captain of an AFL football club in Australia, leading a team out onto the Melbourne Cricket Ground in front of 100,000 people. This conversation covers a lot of ground, and it’s worth your time.
I start by asking Greg about sport, because it matters. The lessons Greg carried from football into business are not the motivational poster kind. They are practical. You learn to handle losing because you lose a lot. You learn to celebrate wins without getting ahead of yourself. You learn that resilience is not a personality trait so much as a habit you build through repetition, through injuries, through team conflict, through showing up the next day regardless. Greg puts it simply:
“There can be only one winner, there can be only one loser. To expect that every week you’re going to come off the arena with a high, it’s just not realistic. You’ve got to enjoy and celebrate the wins, regroup after a loss, and get back on the horse.”
From there we get into Greg’s time fixing the North American business at Quiksilver. He and his colleague Pierre had been vocal critics of that region from the outside, arguing it was dragging down the global business. The board eventually handed them the keys. Greg talks honestly about the moment driving the Pacific Coast Highway from Laguna to Huntington Beach where it hit him that he might have taken on more than he could handle:
“I always used to take the PCH so I could see the ocean and just be at peace with myself before I walked into the chaos at work. It was one of the few times that I actually thought: Greg, you might have bitten off more than you can chew. But that thought lasted for five or ten minutes. I picked myself up, dusted myself off, and got into the office and got on with business.”
That moment is worth listening to closely, not because it’s dramatic, but because it’s the opposite of dramatic. It’s just a person talking themselves back into the room.
We give the Chapter 11 period a proper discussion. Greg does not frame it as a disaster or a triumph, but as a reset that gave the business a real chance. He talks about working with Oaktree Capital, specifically Dave Tanner and Tom Casarella, and what he learned from them about the difference between chasing top line revenue and actually building a healthy business. He also speaks candidly about the acquisition of Rossignol and what that decision, made at the peak of the company’s confidence, ultimately cost them. He does not point fingers:
“Sometimes it’s never as good as you think it is. Alternatively, it’s never as bad as you think it is. Stay humble, stay level set, don’t get ahead of yourself, because you’re only one bad decision away from life being in a very different position than it was yesterday.”
The lesson around quality growth over growth for its own sake is something Greg carries with him. Within two years of the restructure, the team took the top line down deliberately while growing EBITDA by 19 million globally. He describes it as learning to question every dollar rather than just chasing the number that makes a board presentation look good.
The Billabong acquisition is another chapter we dig into that is genuinely interesting. Quiksilver went from near collapse to acquiring one of its biggest competitors, and Greg was in the middle of integrating the two businesses across Asia Pacific. The cultural friction between two organisations that had spent years trying to beat each other in the market was real. Greg captures it well:
“Two weeks beforehand, the person sitting next to me was trying to kick my brand out of the best shop in Newport Beach. And now they’re sitting alongside us saying: how can we work together? That was a huge cultural shift for all of us.”
He ran an offsite with a leadership coach named Ben Crow, where people from both sides of the merger sat in a room together and got uncomfortable and honest. Some of the Billabong team members told Greg afterwards it was one of the best days they had experienced in their working lives, not because it was easy, but because no one had ever asked them to show up as full human beings at work before.
COVID gets its own section, and it is probably the most honest part of our conversation. Greg was in Victoria, one of the most locked down places in the world during that period, running morning calls with Asia Pacific and evening calls with Europe, projecting confidence he did not always feel. He is straightforward about the gap between what he was saying and what he was privately thinking. And then he shares what one of his team members told him afterward:
“Your coach’s talks every morning just got us through. We just needed to hear someone say: we’re going to be right, keep on path, just keep doing what you’re doing, and we’ll get through.”
When I push him on where the line is between reassurance and self-deception, his answer is worth hearing in full. He talks about leadership as carrying certain burdens so your team does not have to, and being honest enough to know which burdens belong to you alone.
Later in our conversation we get into founder dynamics, brand fragmentation, the challenge small brands face entering markets where the major players own the retail channels, and what Greg is actually doing now. He is 60, still training hard, still wants to be in the game. When I ask him why, given that he does not need to work financially, he is direct:
“Financially, I don’t need to work, but emotionally, I certainly do. I need to feel the highs and lows. I need to have a team I’m working with. I’m not ready to hang the boots up yet.”
He is advising startups and growing brands, sharing what he has learned from 30 years of mistakes and wins in equal measure. He talks about wanting to leave brands in a healthy state, a phrase his early Quiksilver team used to write on the office walls: healthy enough for our children’s children.
If you are building something, running something, or trying to figure out when to ask for help, there is a lot in this one.
Greg Healy spent nearly 30 years with Quiksilver and Boardriders, running Asia Pacific while regularly stepping into other regions when the business needed it, including the Americas and Europe.
His tenure covered some of the most significant moments in action sports industry history: the restructuring of Quiksilver’s Americas business, the Chapter 11 process and transition to Oaktree Capital ownership, and the integration of Billabong into the Boardriders platform. Former Boardriders CEO Dave Tanner described him as a natural leader, culture carrier, and talent builder who was always willing to take on whatever was needed. He stepped down from his role as CEO of APAC at Liberated Brands in August 2024.