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After his second year at the University of Adelaide, Alex Wills CA boarded a plane for a summer camp in Maine. Wills was tossing up between doubling down on studying either accounting or marketing and thought a short spell teaching basketball to US teenagers would be just the break he needed. It turned out to be a career-defining move.

“There were some pretty affluent kids at the camp and from that experience I built incredible relationships with camp counsellors, as well as the participants,” says Wills. “The parents of the kids would say, ‘Hey, if you’re ever in Beverly Hills, please pay us a visit’.”

Wills did exactly that: returning to the US in between university semesters, building relationships and watching how these parents navigated the world of business.

“Seeing how they were moving and shaking in their respective fields was what really inspired me to say, ‘I need to be here’,” he says. “It was the fact that nothing seemed impossible to them. The sky was truly the limit.”

Fast-forward 15 years and Wills has not only moved to the US, but is now a mover and shaker in his own right, as the general manager for Nike’s Energy (streetwear and fashion collaborations) business across Asia, Pacific and Latin America.

“It’s a real pinch-me moment,” says Wills. “Being a kid who grew up practising Michael Jordan’s moves in the driveway and being obsessed with basketball, working at Nike felt unattainable.”

Character-building beginnings

Long before he built a life and a career in the US, Wills was a sporty teenager in suburban Adelaide. He collected sneakers – still does – and played basketball and Aussie rules most days.

“I always aspired to be an AFL player, but it didn’t pan out,” says Wills, who is also a keen skateboarder and surfer. “I think I took AFL seriously a little too late and I spent much of my time thinking about what else I could do outside of playing footy. Even though I love sport and it’s a passion, I see sport more as a creative outlet and bridge to connect with people.”

After leaving school, Wills studied for a double degree from the University of Adelaide in both accounting and marketing, which he says reflects two competing parts of his personality.

“I feel like my brain is part-art which is the marketing side and part science, which is the accountancy, and back then I probably leaned more toward the art side than the science,” he says.

“I really had to beat the ‘debits’ and ‘credits’ into my brain. But once I did, I felt like they were truly tattooed there.”

Upon graduation, Wills thought a marketing role would be a natural fit but when an opportunity came up with consultancy firm, PwC, Wills grabbed it.

“It was really fortunate that the job was in Adelaide as it was a smaller office, which meant that we weren’t siloed into looking into one specific business or sector,” he says. “It meant, too, that I never got bored and that every day there was a new challenge.

“I was this fresh-eyed 21-year-old getting put into one-on-one conversations with a CFO and I could pick their brain.”

Having built up his confidence with PwC, Wills was keen to bottle his experience and take it to the US.

“My time at PwC taught me so much about how to connect with anybody, how to ask the right questions and how to garner respect from the jump by showing up professionally, but at the same time personably,” he says.

“As much as those were some of the tougher years of my career with many late nights, I really credit my ability now to speak to any level of executive and treat every single person the same, irrespective of title, because of those early years.

The LA era

Wills’ big break came in 2016, when he was offered a job with the Siegfried group: a large advisory firm in the US. He arrived in LA “knowing next to nobody” with three suitcases to his name. He moved into a share house with three other recent arrivals, two blocks from the beach in Venice, California.

His days were spent working on a financial transformation engagement with Wells Fargo capital finance in Santa Monica and, despite loving the US, the work was stifling.

“It was a very white-shirt-and-tie situation, which isn’t really the norm for LA,” he says, “but I thought, ‘I’ve made it here, I got a visa, so let’s figure out the next move! Every day after work, I was exploring the city and attending networking events.”

It was during one such event that Wills was introduced to a founding member of Tradesy, an ecommerce re-sell platform for luxury goods – think Chanel bags, Louboutin shoes and Rolex watches.

“It was at the peak of startup culture, when venture capital funding through Silicon Valley was flying exponentially,” he says. “I joined as a senior financial analyst but wore many hats, including leading their first-year audit.”

Tradesy, which was later acquired by Vestiaire Collective, felt like home to Wills: a fast-paced startup culture with kombucha on tap and dogs in the office. On his lunch break, Wills would head to the nearby beach at Santa Monica for a quick surf. He assumed he would “stay at Tradesy forever” but then, at another networking event, Wills met the founder and CFO of GOAT sneaker marketplace. Wills snagged the accounting manager role by pitching his passion for sneakers.

“I basically said, ‘Hey, look, I’m a consumer who loves your business. I’ve collected shoes since I was 10 years old. I have a garage in Australia that contains my collection and now I’m working at an ecommerce marketplace business that does exactly what you guys do’,” he says.

“That role was the turning point for my career. Sneaker culture was at an all-time high. Resale became a hustle for a lot of kids in America and around the globe, and we had raised close to US$500 million in venture capital funding.”

Showing authenticity

In 2021, Nike advertised for a global finance manager role in the company’s Jordan Brand. A friend of Wills’ wife who worked at Nike encouraged him to apply. Despite being a keen basketballer, a sneaker aficionado and completely qualified for the role, Wills didn’t think he stood a chance.

“I thought there was no way I could get a job at Nike, let alone Jordan Brand. Surely, I thought, they are looking for people who went to Harvard or Stanford, so it didn’t even feel real,” he says.

Wills approached the interview with a plan: he would highlight how he was different from other candidates.

“I showed up with authenticity and said to the hiring manager, ‘Hey, I’m sure you have a lot of incredible internal candidates, but I’m confident I’ve seen and experienced sneaker culture through a very unique lens. Being a consumer who was purchasing shoes from the other side of the world for years, to then learning the ins and outs of the grey market at the largest sneaker resale platform in the world – I have a deep understanding of this culture and what’s driven it.”

To this day, Wills maintains he was never a shoo-in. “I think they had a tough call to make: do we take a chance on this guy or do we bet on the other hundreds of candidates who want this job? I am just fortunate that [then-global finance director, Jordan Brand] Brittany Bode and [then-VP/CFO Jordan Brand] Andy Muir took a chance on me.”

Wills was promoted last year to GM of Nike’s Energy business, where he manages a cross-functional team working on product, merchandising, brand marketing, demand planning and sales.

“Our job is to put the hottest product Nike makes in our consumers’ hands, where and when they need it,” says Wills. “Our responsibility is to create locally relevant and disruptive product storytelling through interesting collaborators in the world of sport, art and fashion culture.

“And it’s also my job to find, serve and nurture relationships with our boutiques – the people, the accounts who actually sell our product – but also try to identify new potential collaborators and catalyst partners that we think should work with Nike.”

Learnings and leadership

Such a wide remit of geographical coverage calls for diverse experiences, something Wills – a proud Ghanaian/Australian – champions within his team.

“I’m a firm believer that diverse experiences create stronger, more creative teams and a more global point of view,” he says. “In my current role I’m looking after nearly 50 countries, some of which I’ve not been able to travel to yet, so I love having teammates who are representative of Japan, Korea, Mexico, Argentina, Australia, etc.

“It means that when we come together as a team, we all have strong, nuanced perspectives but it allows us to find that commonality and understand where we want to place our bets and ask, ‘What is the best way to serve the greatest number of these consumers?’ versus coming at it from a narrow-minded perspective.”

Wills also credits the CA Program – its rigours and educational focus – with providing an indispensable foundation to his career.

“First and foremost, it trains you in the discipline of juggling multiple, competing priorities. For a lot of young professionals working through the CA Program, they’re not only staying up late at night and making sacrifices on the weekend to study, but they’re often working busy day jobs.”

Wills says the program has also helped build tolerance for the demands of his current role.

“My role includes a lot of fun and travel but at the same time, there is also a lot of grind and hard work,” he says. “Being able to get through those early years of competing with the best of the best at a place like PwC, while learning the technical chops of the CA Program, set me up for my current role.

“And you can never underestimate the ability to understand the fundamental ins and outs of how a business works.”

A career overseas

Wills encourages other ambitious chartered accountants to venture beyond the Antipodes to test themselves in bigger markets, such as the US.

“It’s easier than you think,” he says. “The barrier between you and that overseas opportunity is a plane ticket and a potentially long flight. The worst that can happen is you go over and give it a shot, and it’s not for you, then you come back to the most beautiful country in the world. You only live once.”

Like most leaders, Wills has suffered from imposter syndrome as he has moved up the career rungs, but notes that “everybody’s human at the end of the day and it’s a more even playing field than you think”.

The informality and non-hierarchical approach of Aussie and Kiwi workers is also greatly valued in the US.

“I have received feedback at Nike that I always treat every person at the company the same, irrespective of whether I’m having a conversation with the president of the Jordan Brand or a junior accountant on my team,” says Wills.

“I think a lot of that has to do with being born and raised in Australia, with a more laid-back approach and recognising, yes, it’s an important role but at the end of the day, we’re just selling T-shirts and sneakers, albeit millions of them.”

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