ANNA KAVELJ
MD, ELITE WOODHAMS RELOCATION
BUILDING AUTHENTIC RELATIONSHIPS IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT
Anna Kavelj is the MD of multi-award winning Elite Woodhams Relocation, a destination services provider covering Australia and beyond. A regular speaker and panellist at global mobility events, Anna’s collaborative approach is raising the bar for values-driven support for relocating families.
A 50
decision at 18, a few career twists and turns and a move to Australia via China – three times – have paved the way for Anna Kavelj to her current role as managing director
of leading-edge relocation company, Elite Woodhams Relocation. But it wasn’t just these geographical moves that got
Anna here. A global mindset and genuine interest in people have been the foundation for Anna’s inspirational career path. Anna navigated the successful merger between
Elite Executive under Services and Woodhams
Relocation Centre to create Elite Woodhams Relocation (EWR) just weeks before the Covid pandemic in early 2020 and during the sector’s toughest of times. Yet
Anna’s authentic, people-focused
leadership, EWR rode out the global crisis by taking care of its team and clients, innovating new services, and building the business from scratch to come out of the pandemic poised for further growth.
GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP Reflecting her credentials as a global leader, Anna is based in Australia, British born and has extensive experience in China. Before studying for a degree in linguistics, Anna, aged just 18, left the UK to teach English in China’s second-tier city of Suzhou, west of Shanghai. Anna returned to China during her university placement year to study at Shanghai University, then again after she had graduated in 2004. “When I graduated, I hotfooted it back to Shanghai
and kind of fell into the destination service provider [DSP] world. This was the time when all the leading global companies thought ‘Quick, we’d better be in China; we don’t know what we’re going to do when we get there, but we need to be there.’ “Companies like IBM, Dell and Unilever were sending hundreds of expats in and so we were really trailblazers at that time. The relocation industry was very much in its infancy here. As foreigners, people clung on to the idea of ‘help, goodness me, where do I start?’” Anna rose to the role
of country manager for
destination service provider, Orientations, started by Beverley Mayhew. “I was running her China operation,” says Anna. “I was sitting in business meetings, speaking in Mandarin, reading Chinese contracts and dealing with a lot of complex issues.” But after ten years, Anna was also ready to take on
new challenges and moved to Australia; first to Sydney, then to Melbourne, where she is now based. Despite the invaluable experience life in China offered and the abundant transferable skills the decade had provided, “when I landed in Sydney, I could not find a job,” says Anna. “I had people saying to me ‘but you don’t have any Australian experience, you don’t understand our local markets’ and I didn’t know anyone in Sydney.” Anna persevered to overcome the obstacles, thinking
differently about how she was going to secure work. “At first, I was just going through the standard channels of websites trying to get a job. It was a real eye-opener and
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