Case Study

Alison Taylor – “The beauty of the program is that there’s a lot of accountability, and we are expected to implement what we learned. For example, we now know if, when and how to generate more income before appointing new staff members. We now have a plan of what we want to achieve over the next three years, and we now understand what is required to fund that plan.”

PUMPNSEAL Australia

PUMPNSEAL Australia

Accountability and planning have been key to the recent growth of PUMPNSEAL Australia – a West Australian pump and seal distributor.? In February 2019, sales were already 46% ahead of last year, and 26% above their FY19 forecast. The company is setting aggressive goals and seeing big results. The PUMPNSEAL team now numbers 24 people, with three new hires last year and four new employees set to be added in 2019.

The company sells engineering maintenance products, specifically pumps, and seals for mining industry applications. General Manager, Alison Taylor, says that the company has continually grown since it began operating in 2000, but it’s experienced rapid growth this year, as a result of their participation in the ANZ Business Growth Program delivered by the Australian Centre for Business Growth.

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obstacle

The Challenge

“A wise person once told me ‘never waste a crisis’,” said Taylor. “Back in 2012 there was a drop in mining in WA, which meant the market demand for our products dropped as well. Instead of cutting costs, we identified areas of the business where we needed to invest so that when things turned around, we’d be ready to hit the ground running,” Taylor said. “That turned out to be a good strategy for us. During the extended mining downturn, many of our competitors fell by the wayside, but we have been able to keep growing.”

PUMPNSEAL Australia
approach

The Approach

In 2018 Taylor flew from Perth to Adelaide to attend the ANZ Assessment Clinic delivered by the Australian Centre for Business Growth. When PUMPNSEAL was selected to participate in the next stage of the ANZ Business Growth Program, she had to convince her business partners to attend, which meant they had to fly to Adelaide for Module 1 and Melbourne for Modules 2 and 3.

She says that the program took them outside their comfort zone, challenged them to take calculated risks and stretch the company’s resources into new markets. During the program CEOs, MDs and executive team members were expected to apply all the concepts they were learning to their own companies and identify what they needed to stop doing, start doing and keep doing in order to accelerate growth. At the end of each module they had to present a plan for implementing what they had learned.

“The beauty of the program is that there’s a lot of accountability, and we are expected to implement what we learned. For example, we now know if, when and how to generate more income before appointing new staff members. We now have a plan of what we want to achieve over the next three years, and we now understand what is required to fund that plan.”

“After the initial one-day Clinic, we had a one-hour phone call with Dr Jana Matthews from the Centre which was extremely valuable in terms of assessing whether the Modules would be useful. Since there was no such program in WA, three of us had to fly to Adelaide and Melbourne to participate in the three-day Growth Modules,” Taylor said. “But it was worth the time and expense. Learning how to grow, and then presenting our future plans to Growth Experts and other companies in the program has made us incredibly focused and driven to achieve the goals we set for ourselves. And we’ve already seen some great growth.”

 

Pumpnseal Australia
outcome

The Outcome

“We’ve grown our numbers of employees and have plans for more. We just hired a new application engineer to work alongside another person in that role, and we’re probably looking at three or four more hires by the end of the calendar year.”

“We’ve accessed some new funding, we’ve made some investments in equipment, and we’re saving time and money by bringing tasks in-house that we’ve previously had sub-contracted out.”

Taylor says that the Australian Centre for Business Growth’s programs were invaluable to PUMPNSEAL, and she hopes that more WA companies can benefit from the knowledge, frameworks, and tools the Centre makes available, through its business growth programs.

 

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PUMPNSEAL Australia