AFTER working for recruitment giant Integrated for seven years and opening its Melbourne office, Tim Brady decided to start his own business.
AFTER working for recruitment giant Integrated for seven years and opening its Melbourne office, Tim Brady decided to start his own business.
He was living in Melbourne when he launched Credo Group, which started as a recruitment agent operating in the retail sector.
Mr Brady didn’t muck around; his first client was hardware giant Bunnings, quickly followed by other retail giants such as Target, Coles, Woolworths and Repco.
“Bunnings had acquired the BBC hardware chain and they were having to refurb all of those stores. I was sitting in the lounge room with my wife and sister and brother-in-law and the call came through, they needed 25 people for this refurbishment,” Mr Brady said.
“That was it, that started it for us. Still to this day we have a very strong relationship with Bunnings.
“We introduced a managed workforce, so rather than have them worry about our team and its performance, we drove our team to the performance they wanted.”
Mr Brady, who is a WA Business News 40under40 Award winner, said he wouldn’t describe Credo solely as a recruitment firm; in the early stages of the business he was trying to push Credo into project management.
Being classed as a recruiter by its clients but offering project management services meant a discrepancy in the fee structure of the business, however.
“The retailers weren’t letting us project manage in the true sense. They were sucking us for the IP, not necessarily paying us for it; we weren’t always getting the kudos for it and when you cut it back, we were basically providing the labour to do that,” Mr Brady said.
“Recruiters just provide bodies, we were providing a solution around how you actually got better performance from that group of people ... leading to significant project timeline efficiencies, which led to significant cost savings and an increase in sales capabilities.”
Mr Brady said he could see the business was exposed – Credo’s clients wanted fixed fees for the services but they were causing project management bottlenecks.
He redirected the business from its progression to project management to focus on general recruitment across the business and industrial sectors.
“We went and set up an occupational health and safety and workers’ compensation division. I went and set up an IR division and if you bundle that together with our recruitment capabilities, we could be an outsourced HR department for companies. That had a lot of merit,” Mr Brady told WA Business News.
As time went on, the challenges of running the specialist consultant areas of the business started to emerge.
“Ultimately I found the consultancy businesses were very difficult to sustain or create a sustainable business. By that stage our revenues had grown to about $18 million or 19 million in about a five-year time frame. We really weren’t making the money we wanted to or should have been making for that level of revenue so we just readjusted our business,” he said.
“We weren’t getting the return, we were gearing for growth but it wasn’t coming in as quickly as we needed it to.”
At that stage, Credo had three offices in Melbourne, one in Adelaide and one in Perth and after again assessing the direction of the company, Mr Brady decided to recalibrate the business by closing down one of the Melbourne offices and the office in South Australia.
“We looked at what organisational structure we needed to service the clients in the business right now, and from that find the right people if we had them internally and if we didn’t, whether we needed to change any of those roles,” he said.
After restructuring the business, Mr Brady said it quickly started making money again.
Mr Brady, originally from the west, moved back to Perth in 2007 and has since then continued to work on the direction of his business.
He said running a company in a state where the economy was steered by the mining industry had opened up a raft of opportunity.
“We looked at what we do well, it is enabling clients to deliver on their projects through the provision of a managed workforce. That model that we have been applying for seven years in the retail space has exactly the same application in the mining space, they’re just bigger projects,” Mr Brady said.
Credo started doing ad-hoc work for mining company MCC on the Sino Iron project at Cape Preston and is now managing the workforce on one of the company’s batching plants at the site.
Not having a background in the mining industry, Mr Brady recently assembled an advisory panel of five industry leaders (including ex-Sydney airport chief Alan Mulgrew and ex-Alinta chief development officer Chris Indermaur) for Credo with the help of John Poynton, who he met at a networking function.
“What I wanted to do was make sure we didn’t make the same mistakes we had in the past. We did grow too aggressively, in hindsight I wouldn’t have done some of the things we did,” Mr Brady said.
“I really wanted to reach out. There are four shareholders in this business but we haven’t got all the answers.”
