PART 2

Mining People International... a lesson in integrity and being uncompromising about creating a business exactly as you want it to be...

"We were struggling to find new things for them to attend and when we heard Money & You® as back we were just jumping for joy!"

JJ Tell me more about your business now, numbers of employees, your reach?

STEVE I'll give you a quick snapshot. We do 2 things. We source people for the mining industry from senior execs, right through to equipment operators and everything in between - but for the mining industry only. And our view there is that is we focus on one industry we can create leverage around a brand and get the people in the industry talking about what we do and as a result we can get an attention on our product without necessarily having to an army of sales people. The brand and the concentration of work is in one place. So we do 2 things- we find permanent staff for companies and we charge them a recruitment fee - the traditional thing - and we provide contract staff for mining companies that will employ those people and charge the mining company an hourly rate or a daily rate or a weekly rate or whatever it is. We currently work in the blue collar space - we're very much focused on WA. And in the white collar technical space we do work all around AU.

We do a growing amount of work internationally as well. There are a growing number of mining companies around the world that are being seeded by AU execs from AU mining companies so we start working with them here and then we follow them to their new job or their new placement in some other part of the world. On that level it's a traditional concept. The concept itself is not unique - it's a recruitment business.

Some of the things we do differently: we tend to not operate through HR departments. We tend to build relationships directly with managers. We've written a newsletter and publish it 6 times a year and send it to about 18,000 people. 6 times a year shrink wrapped, printed.

JJ Oh a full on hard copy version - well done you!

STEVE Yes we've had to - and we don't really talk about our service in that. It's all about management, leadership communication type tips/ideas.

JJ You're not adding value or anything are you? (Laughs)

STEVE HR related themes, leadership and personal development. If you'd read you'd think "Gee there's a lot of Money & You type things in there"

JJ Excellent. Hey listen that's called Precession...

STEVE We're dealing with an industry that is pretty hard nosed. If you go too out there you've got to kind of pick the middle road.

Yeah well that's it - pretty simple. Got a small office in Adelaide, one in Brisbane, an office in Kalgoorlie, an office in Perth. We have had 50 full time staff and 200 contract staff. We're currently at 36 FT staff and about 170 contract staff.

JJ How did the GFC hit you? How did you handle that?

STEVE Oooh that was tough! We had - of all the permanent recruitment assignments that we had on our books in September 2008, by the time Dec 2008 arrived - so 3 months later ... 85% of them had been canceled. Not 8, not 18 but 85%.

JJ Wow!

STEVE So what helped us through that period was our contract book that remained reasonable, but we basically lost all of our permanent recruitment revenue. But we had to move back from 48-49 staff to 30 staff.

JJ That must have broken your heart?

STEVE That was tough, yeah.

SUE Fortunately we only had to ask a couple of people to go, others deselected or we had 3 people get pregnant which was just a godsend. Funnily enough. But it was a massive thing wasn't it Steve?

STEVE It wasn't easy.

JJ Especially when you create the environment that I know you would have created. Which was that lovely closeness. That you're team's as much your family as it is anything else.

STEVE The context is that is - research through the recruitment industry through that period was - that the recruitment industry Australia wide - and I would suggest it was worse in the mining industry - lost 55% . The industry was decimated - everyone stopped hiring completely. The whole industry was basically cut in half and the mining industry copped the very brunt of that. When it turns around so radically it also comes back very quickly. We resolved to not go anywhere near as savage as that. We resolved to - we bought back our shares from the public company and we decided to fund the business making small offers and small profits. Basically in a break even state. Where we'd come from was extremely profitable so we decided to keep it and keep more people than we probably should have or could have. We wanted to put the attention on profits. We'd put a lot into people we just didn't want to lose anybody we didn't need to. And we wanted to be ready for when it turned around.

JJ And isn't it interesting that that tended to be what SMEs tended to do in Australia. Whereas the huge corporations where the one's who slashed and burned.

STEVE Correct yeah. And as a result when things started to turn around last year things just came absolutely roaring back for us.

JJ Wow!

STEVE But you know after 2 very very difficult years - we basically had our best year ever in 15 yrs followed by our worst year ever in 15 years - and in March just finished we had our best month ever. So this has been a wild 2 years.

SUE One of the interesting things that happened for us during that time was we had to get back to basics, do more 'knitting' and cutting out any rubbish - I'd say we've changed our business dramatically since that time and for the better. And really take a leap to a platform so that we can grow again on a really solid foundation at another level.

STEVE We can see that it's creating opportunities for 2 or 3 of our team and with our current management team - we can see we could have 50 - 60 full time staff in a couple of years and and the 2 team members we sent to Money & You® last will be key parts of the management group - and there'll be another handful - and we may well have another 3 or 4 branch offices around the place. It will actually be no harder that it is now.

JJ So you'll still have quality of life.

STEVE Well we won't do it unless we can.

SUE We still have a view that one day we could become a public company...

JJ But it has to be on your terms.

SUE Absolutely and we also have a dream that we keep growing our people. We have a young woman who started out in reception and now leads a team of people.

JJ Wow that must be gratifying?

SUE We just love having people with passion and drive. She started right out of business college, went into reception, 2 yrs in that role, did a PA role for about a year with us, did a recruitment support role for about a year then moved into consulting and now she leads a team. She's spent 61/2 yrs with us and has grown totally knowing nothing else about that area and still has more to go...

JJ It's interesting - Deming says that one of the big problems of current companies is the mobility of management and that you cannot know a business unless you've been with it for a number of years. And to be constantly employing managers from other companies - directly into senior roles has money become the driving force and not growing the company; and that longevity in a business is more valuable to you than anything else. Results being the unknown and unknowable again - as he often said.

SUE And we totally agree with that.

STEVE: We've gone through the process of employing people into senior roles and just en mass - failed. Just because just as hard as you try - because to get into a leadership role in or business they have to feel the same way we do... and what you find out is that it's all about attitude. We'll give it a go and if they don't take the opportunities we're offering them then they need to find a different place to work. Really bringing people though the company is much more satisfying. Really we've stopped talking to them about their technical learning within the first 6 months and then the rest of the time it's really about personal growth. Our whole revue process is only about personal development...

SUE: We were struggling to find new things for them to attend and when we heard Money & You® as back we were just jumping for joy!

STEVE: We are always looking and we have never found anything that even came remotely close to Money & You®. This is looking for more than 12 years...

SUE: We just really measure our success based on the growth and success of our individual team members.

STEVE: We're also keen to show them how they can share in the financial success of our business as well and as they grow and the company grows they can get equity in the business. We've currently got 7 shareholders. And this becomes a whole new element to their education.