BUSINESS is booming in the rustic mining town of Boddington, 90 minutes south-east of Perth, as both new and more established businesses exude a quiet confidence about future opportunities.
BUSINESS is booming in the rustic mining town of Boddington, 90 minutes south-east of Perth, as both new and more established businesses exude a quiet confidence about future opportunities.
And the positive spin isn’t just reserved for the mining services and construction outfits that are working on Newmont’s enormous Boddington gold mine (which is expected to eventually outgrow Kalgoorlie’s Superpit as the world’s biggest open-pit gold mine), or Worsley Alumina’s Saddleback bauxite mine.
That said, the fastest developing business in town would probably be Boddington Earthmoving.
The company has ballooned into a multi-million dollar business, growing from just two employees to 90 in less than four years thanks largely to its mining services work, which constitutes about 90 per cent of the company’s jobs book.
Boddington Earthmoving co-owner Matt Roberts bought the company with business partner, Glen Wilson, for about $500,000 in January 2006.
“The gold mine was still in care-and-maintenance at the time,” Mr Roberts told WA Business News.
“About three or four months after we purchased it, it got announced that it [the gold mine] was going to reopen, so things really stated to grow rapidly after that.”
Mr Roberts said the company was poised to hire another operations manager and open a new office in Mandurah within three months.
“We’ve not considered growing the business interstate, but never say never after the growth we’ve had over the last two to four years,” he said.
Another emerging company is six-month-old Boddington Mechanical & Auto Electrical.
The company, which was started by Steven Derrick when he quit his job as part of the construction team at the gold mine, operates out of a shed originally planned to house Mr Derrick’s race car.
Mr Derrick will now extend the shed to include more truck bays and an office while ensuring costs are kept to a minimum in order to reduce risk if the mine-related work disappears.
He recently brought Glenn Stebbings on board as a manager to handle escalating demand, and plans to offer him a share of the company, which he predicts will turn over $2 million in its first year of operations, as staff numbers reached eight this week.
Away from mechanical operations, Boddington has also experienced an increase in commercial offerings usually reserved for metropolitan areas.
This includes Lilly’s Tanning, a mobile spray tanning business established two months ago by Elissa McCullough, who is Mr Stebbings’ partner, as an aside to her regular job doing quality control work with Newmont.
“There’s a lot of women in mining towns as well, where there are miners there are miners’ wives, and a lot of them are bored,” she said.
“So I saw the spray units advertised and thought, ‘why not’.”
Ms McCullough said the reaction had been very positive with the business averaging about four tans per week at $45 for a 15-minute spray.
After Christmas she’s planning to expand the business with her friend, a qualified beautician, into a full service beauty therapy parlor targeting Boddington’s growing female population.
Naughty Cow Café and Restaurant owner, Stuart Sallie, spent a few hundred thousand dollars buying and fitting out the town’s old post office after he, a mechanical supervisor with Newmont, and his partner became annoyed at the lack of places to go for dinner in the sleepy hamlet.
“As a mining town there’s lots of money around, but finding staff has been difficult and retaining them even more so,” Mr Sallie said.
But he agreed with other local operators that there is little extra risk in establishing a business in a town so reliant on mineworkers.
“It’s a business, so there is risk; whether it’s welding or food it works on same basis – money in, money out,” Mr Sallie said.
“Although the gold mine has made a significant difference to the population and ‘tradies’ in the town, essentially, the core business never changed for the farming community and local businesses.
“Looking at it from a Ravensthorpe point of view, as I was at Ravensthorpe when it (BHP Billiton’s nickel mine) closed its doors, we understand there is certain risk there, but we’ve also got a 60-acre farm and other investments, so we sit alright anyway,” Mr Sallie said.
Mr Sallie’s confidence, both in his own business and the future stability of the town on the back of these mining projects, is shared by other local businessmen and women.
However, some have implemented risk reduction strategies, including Mr Roberts’ move to increase the footprint of his operations by targeting the Pilbara for future contracts, as well as the leasing of new gear and machinery (a key cost for his business along with labour and fuel) with an option to purchase after 12 months.
“If contracts don’t pan out or things turn down we’ve got the option of giving that gear back and we don’t have to purchase,” Mr Roberts said.
“And even though we don’t want to go to the Pilbara, we’re looking at trying to reduce risk by trying to get to other areas like iron ore so we’re not stuck with the gold.
“So we spread the risk and don’t have all our eggs in one basket.”
