The Lighter Note

Catching on

Ever since the joke about a ‘see food’ diet was first cracked, the capture of fish and other water-dwelling species has provided fodder for opportunistic wordsmiths.

Thus, when The Note received a prospectus from Marine Produce Australia we could not help using a little literary licence when it came to the otherwise-serious topic of raising money in this tough market.

For the straight-laced among you, Marine Produce is seeking up to $4.5 million to fund the expansion of its barramundi aquaculture business based at Cone Bay near Broome.

Miner Miles Kennedy chairs the company, while the Hutton family and an entity called Lasborough Investments dominate the shareholders register.

Marine Produce was listed on the ASX until 2010, when it was removed for a numbers of reasons, including a lack of liquidity – never that helpful in the fish rearing game (cue uproarious laughter).

A key plank in its expansion plan is a desire to increase production from around 1,000 tonnes to 2,500 tonnes by 2017. Being on message, Marine Produce calls it ‘economies of scale’ (boom boom).

Like any good fishing company it has net assets (someone stop me), nearly $13.8 million prior to the offer, but it has yet to make a net profit – that is something that it hopes will occur in the very near future.

Net result

These days you can preview and review anything online from food to movies; so why not employers?

The Note has become aware of two new websites offering this service to potential employees and, having been out of the job market for a while, we can only presume this stuff is new – though our own due diligence brought up Employer Scorecard in the US and RateMyEmployer from Canada.

This month, Australian sites JobAdvisor and InsideTrak announced their own versions of this concept, a form of due diligence for many in the job market that companies in the war for talent might find frightening.

Both offer anonymous informants the opportunity to provide pros and cons of working at that particular company as well as rankings over a series of criteria used to calculate an overall score.

Sydney-based JobAdviser seemed to have more reviews of national companies but, at a glance, was thinner on the ground from a WA perspective than InsideTrak, whose founder Mike Larsen originally heralds from Perth.

However, it is clearly earlier days at Inside Trak, with most companies receiving just the single review and some of those looking desperately like the boss wrote it.

Take, for example, this little gem about the pros of Rio Tinto in Perth.

“Rio Tinto is a disciplined business run efficiently with a strong focus upon creating value in all facets of its operations. It attracts the highest calibre of employees as the work you are exposed to is at the cutting edge of bulk commodity mining and development. The opportunity to work at Rio Tinto Iron ore is one not to be missed if you have the opportunity.”

Rio’s Aussie chief Sam Walsh could not have written it better if he tried.