“We haven’t had a single professional employee leave the company in our 10-year history,” he said recently.

So why did Phillips, a fit and dynamic 52 year old, working at the peak of his and the company’s powers, render this achievement void by walking away from AWE last month?

Sitting in AWE’s North Sydney office, Phillips admits that when he announced his resignation in November last year, many told him he was “stark raving mad”.

But after a decade of leading the company, he is keen to start a new phase in his life, pursuing a range of private interests. Even so, he has mixed feelings.

“You don’t start something like I have here and walk away from it after 10 years and not feel some pangs of remorse about not being there to take it to the next level,” he says.

However, that remorse has been eased by knowing AWE has found a capable new managing director, former Delhi Petroleum chief executive Bruce Wood.

“Bruce is an extremely competent individual,” Phillips says. “He’s got the fire in the belly and he’s looking forward to taking it forward to the next level, and I’m confident he will.”

Under Phillips, AWE has grown from a junior explorer into Australia’s sixth-largest petroleum producing company. The company has a market capitalisation of about $1.5 billion and recently posted record annual sales revenue of $143 million, up nearly 500% from the previous corresponding period and record annual production of 3.93 million barrels of oil, an increase of 310%.

Phillips’ departure was timed to coincide with the start of commercial production from AWE’s first development as operator at the Tui Area Oil Project off the coast of Taranaki, New Zealand.

AWE’s four cornerstone projects – the Casino gas field and the BassGas Project in Victoria, the Cliff Head oil project in Western Australia, and Tui – are all producing routinely and are expected to generate stable, long-term cash flows.

But AWE’s success also means it is entering a time of transition, and Wood is seen as having the skills to take the company to the next level.

While Phillips is a geophysicist, Wood is an engineer. Before becoming Delhi CEO, he also held senior management positions at BHP Petroleum, Shell, Triton Energy, his own consultancy Gas Strategies, and Santos, and he has had more than 30 years in the industry.

Phillips says one of the reasons Wood was appointed was his experience in gas commercialisation, an important area of expertise now that BassGas and Casino are in production, especially as the company believes there is still significant exploration upside in AWE-held acreage near those projects.

Wood acknowledges this but also says the company must continue its winning ways in exploration and project management, while also using its balance sheet for strategic investments.

“When you bring successful explorations, successful commercialisation and successful [merger and acquisition] activity together under one umbrella, there is a very solid base here in the company from which to actually move forward,” he says.

“The cornerstone projects are now up and running at full capacity. Three of them at least are long-term projects and that brings with it questions of the future and where to go with the company from now.

“After we have expanded to the maximum around each of our asset bases, we’ve then got to go and deliver new cornerstone assets.

“We will certainly be looking to try and acquire assets that we can commercialise. We may also be looking at an additional geographic area.”

While the company has investments in Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia and Argentina, Wood says India and other parts of Asia are of particular interest.

But any approach will occur in a “very disciplined fashion”.

“We had a scouting office in Indonesia for 15 to 18 months before we made the first investment,” he says.

Change and continuity

Wood has been with the company since early April, overseeing business development and familiarising himself with the company and the people who work for it, but Phillips and he agree the AWE team as a whole is more important than the managing director.

“There’s a very talented workforce here and they’re the people who are generating new projects and evaluating and making new operations go ahead smoothly,” Phillips says.

“So, while there’s no doubt that Bruce Wood will be the driving force in this company going forward, like me, no one person is indispensable and it’s the team that he will have around him that will help him grow the company to that next level.”

“If you can attract good people then they will make you money – it’s the only business truism that I know,” he says.

An emphasis on the importance of the welfare and happiness of employees underpins AWE’s corporate culture. Phillips and his early colleagues strove to create a company that differed from the large multinationals they had all spent their early careers working for.

This has led to a relaxed and informal workplace where staff are not required to front up to the office 9 to 5 if they don’t wish to.

“It doesn’t matter whether people come to work during the day, as long as the work gets done,” Phillips says.

“As long as they’re available when you need them to be available and they don’t abuse that, then it works well – and no one here has abused that. Over a 10-year period, it’s worked exceptionally well.”

While Phillips counts AWE’s first oil discovery in Argentina and the achievement of driving the company to where it is today as important career highlights, he maintains the fondest memories he will take away involve seeing the impact the company’s success has had on its employees.

It is an AWE policy for every employee to own share options, so the company’s strong performance in the stock market has reverberated throughout the organisation. Five years after the company was listed the share price had trebled and one secretary had made enough money to buy her grandmother a new car.

Phillips describes that event as meaningful to him as finding a gas discovery.

“Sure, I do all of those things for the shareholders and that’s what drives us as a corporate entity,” he says.

“But as a person, nothing gives you greater pleasure than having a secretary come up to you and give you a big hug and say thank you on behalf of grandma.

It’s a much greater highlight than the dollars and cents.”

Having happy employees has led to AWE becoming known in the industry as an employer of choice, something that has helped it enormously during the climate of chronic skilled labour shortages, Phillips says.

“We probably provide the very best lifestyle for our people,” he says.

“The family comes first for us. No person’s indispensable. You can take time off and someone will cover for you. I took a two-month holiday two years ago. You tell me, what CEO can do that?”

Wood says AWE has “by far the best team atmosphere” he’s ever experienced.

“It’s the wonderful way the team works together and the support it gives. It’s something that I’m committed to keeping.”

Another legacy he wants to preserve is AWE’s investment in the communities near its projects.

“Every place we go, every place we have an operation in, must be better for us having been there,” Wood says.

In line with this policy, AWE has recently allocated a quarter of a million dollars to be channelled into community projects in New Plymouth, the base for near its Taranaki, New Zealand operations.

“There’ll be something for hospitals and we’re sponsoring a rescue helicopter,” Phillips says.

“We’re going to make good money in NZ and we’ve got to put something back.”

While experiencing mixed feelings about his departure, Phillips is proud of his and AWE’s achievements.

“I can put my hand on my heart and say we’ve achieved what we set out to when we floated the company 10 years ago.”

Phillips in the meantime has been approached by several different companies with offers of non-executive director roles – of which, he says, one or two are “of interest”. He has already joined the board of AGL Energy and is considering other invitations.

“I guess it’s ‘watch this space’ in that regard,” he says, laughing. “I’d like to take on a couple of guiding roles.”

“That will keep my interest in the industry, because after all, this is an industry that has been just sensational to me, both financially and personally. The people I’ve met and the places I’ve seen – what better industry could you work in?”