IN the two years since Complete Fire Design managing director Richard Welsh won a WA Business News 40under40 award the business has tripled staff numbers, increased profitability by 270 per cent and secured work with some of the state’s largest companies.
In response to the GFC Mr Welsh diversified his business, which had primarily been focused on providing fire safety engineering services to the construction sector.
With a consistent stream of work continuing into 2009, Mr Welsh started employing engineers with experience in the mining and oil and gas sectors who had been made redundant during the worst of the financial crisis.
“At that point a lot of people were being made unemployed by the larger engineering firms and we saw it as an opportunity to take those people and get that expertise on board,” Mr Welsh said.
“Because up to that point, we were really just involved in fire safety engineering and we saw it as an opportunity to move into fire protection, industrial markets and subsequently into the oil and gas arena.”
However, Mr Welsh said it took the company almost six months to start securing work in those new markets.
“We took a calculated risk in moving into those areas and in the first five or six months it was really slow … during the GFC work did dry up and it was quite a challenging time for business, but we stuck to our guns and we didn’t lay anybody off,” Mr Welsh told WA Business News.
This lull in work changed dramatically for the company at the start of 2010 when it won a contract to provide fire safety strategies and protection systems for the operations centre, lab and permanent accommodation at Chevron’s Gorgon LNG project on Barrow Island.
“We went from being quite slow to ridiculously busy … that contract has now led to more offshore work. We have a contract with Apache for an offshore platform and one with Technip helping them with the offshore Wheatstone platform,” Mr Welsh said.
Complete Fire Design has also been contracted to provide its services for the redevelopment of Perth Airport, and is currently providing fire safety strategies and systems to Burswood for the extension of its casino gaming floor.
Having grown from six to 17 staff, the company has recently moved into a larger, purpose-built $1.5 million office on the same site as its previous premises.
Mr Welsh said the company’s revenue had increased by 155 per cent and profitability 270 per cent during the past two years.
“It was that investment in staff in 2009 that really allowed us to leverage what we were doing,” he said.
“During that time when people were laid off, we managed to get people with exceptional skills that weren’t previously available to us during the mining boom.”
Mr Welsh has also employed managers to oversee each arm of the business, enabling the engineers to focus purely on their designs.
“What sets us apart from other engineering firms is that we are really looking to take the administration off the engineers’ shoulders,” he said. “That means the engineers can spend 99 per cent of their time doing what they do best, rather than spending their time filling out Q and A forms or timesheets.”
Mr Welsh is about to embark on a marketing strategy for Complete Fire Design and aims to expand the company’s services into other states and abroad.
He also plans to grow the company by 300 per cent over the next three years.
To nominate for the 2012 awards, go to www.40under40.com.au
