On Cloud 9

Today is 9 years to the day myself and Lindsay opened the doors to our small office on the Gold Coast office and looked at each other wondering what we had gotten ourselves into. As I look around today, we’ve got 32 staff across offices (in order of opening) on the Gold Coast, Brisbane, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, and Perth.?

Here’s my reflections on the past 12 months.

We had another great year with the business growing in both our labour hire and permanent recruitment business and it was great to see our overall revenue and hours billed increasing by 25% from the previous year. We re-signed several preferred supplier agreements with our key clients, won several tenders to supply new clients across National and multi-State sites, and of course we’ve kept working and building relationships with all our local clients.

The QLD Team continues to be our largest branch handling the biggest spread of clients from the Gold Coast & Brisbane, right up to Townsville and the NT, running our largest pool of casuals across a number of 24/7 client sites. We moved office this week only a couple of streets across in Springwood and I certainly got my workout helping move furniture up and down stairs and my physiotherapist is on speed dial.

The GC Hospitality Team has continued our long history supplying the major stadiums, hotels and event centres across QLD as well as expanding into laundries, house keeping and FIFO camp work. Lindsay and the Hospo Team finally have some competition as our noisiest branch with the growing Perm Team seated next door to them.

Our Perm Team has seen the biggest growth the past 12 months with Roxy, Catherine & Nicole combining to cover our permanent recruitment in Office Support, Finance and Customer Services roles Nationally, while Mike Owen is very wisely based away from the noise and mayhem in Sydney focussing on Supply Chain and Professional roles. Building our Perm Team has allowed us to add value and recruit top to bottom for our clients who only ever used us for their labour hire work previously.

The NSW team has continued their success from last year, re-signing several preferred supplier contracts and winning new clients. I’ve never seen a team utilise their Kiwi connections as well as Teresa & Vanessa do and fill last minute roles so quickly and they assure me we can open a NZ office at any time.

The girls in the VIC office are finally on point with their pink furniture in vogue with the current Barbie Movie mania. ?Don’t let the pink furniture fool anyone as Sammy and the team handle some of our busiest clients with 24/7 operations and they also cover several clients in Regional VIC, so their coffee machine gets a workout with their early morning starts.

The SA Team maintained their status as our most consistent branch hitting their monthly targets in every single month and they happily brag to their counterparts in VIC, NSW, and QLD. Nathan and the girls will be hosting everyone in a few weeks and are in the running for our Branch of the Year Award.

Lisa joined us in WA during the year as a Team Leader helping service our existing clients from the East Coast and helping to win new clients and help shape the business over in WA.

Our HO Support Team is made up of Payroll, WHS, After Hours, National Operations and……me. The Payroll Team added in Mia to help Veronica and Milena process our growing temp numbers, while Kim and Tara as After Hours continue to be an extension of our Branches liaising with our Night Shift Clients and waking up staff for late night / early morning shifts. Renee heads up WHS and has taken a load of work (and confusion) off me in this area and we’ve already seen great improvements in our safety and injury management. Since Nathan has taken on the National Operations Manager role, we’ve seen great improvements in our processes and performance and my phone rings a whole lot less with technical questions.

In a couple of weeks, we celebrate our anniversary by getting everyone together at our OmniPalooza event which will be held in Adelaide this year. ?It’s another chance to build our team culture, share the company updates and vision for the year ahead, and of course to sample the delicious produce and wines from the SA wineries.

Last year I said it was one of the few updates where we didn’t have any Omni babies born during the last 12 months and that streak was extended to 24 months……. however, I already know we have at least 2 due before Xmas and I’m not making any other predictions at this stage.

Thanks again to all our hard-working candidates, our loyal clients and my dedicated team for a great year and making my job so much easier. Thanks Darren?