HISTORY
"The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing." - Walt Disney My story begins on the North Coast of NSW, I was a typical kid, playing footy, belonged to the local surf club and even did a bit of boxing. I was an average student . I was 15 when I left high school and started work as an apprentice carpenter. Work was fairly quiet at the time so you had to be versatile in what you did to keep money coming in. My boss and I would do just about everything ourselves, from carpentry, concreting, steel fixing, scaffolding, rendering, gyprocking, painting and landscaping and when the brickies turned up I would get in there and help them. One day the boss bricklayer asked me “was I interested in working for him?”, as he knew how much I liked working with the brickies, and I was a good worker. Over the next 4 years we traveled between Grafton & the Gold Coast building houses. "Obstacles cannot crush me. Every obstacle yields to stern resolve. He who is fixed to a star does not change his mind." Leonardo da Vinci When I was about 19, my boss said we were going back up the Coast. By this stage I was committed to my boxing career and didn't want to leave. I needed to find a new job and there wasn't much work around, so I asked the bloke who's house we had just finished laying bricks on, would he let me build his driveway, he said "yes". When I finished his driveway he told me his mate needed one to, so I went and did his, and when I finished that driveway the owner of the house next door asked me would I build a new garden for them. Before answering, I start to think, I'm 19 years old with no real job and the way things were, probably not going to get one. I knew I needed money and here is a person offering it to me, but what did I know about gardens?, absolutely nothing. So I said "yes". That afternoon I drove home and asked my mum did she have any gardening books. I found one and started to read, I went back the next day and over a month built a garden. And you'll never guess what happened, well that garden that a 19 year old kid built with no gardening experience, was submitted into the Australian House & Garden magazine. But the funny thing was, I wasn't interested that the garden was in a magazine, I never even bought copy or even looked at the magazine. To me, the only purpose for that garden was for me to get paid. And it had worked. "An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest." - Benjamin Franklin I was 19 and had a business, or so I thought. By word of mouth that business grew over the next few years, I was busy running around building peoples gardens, at one stage I had even employed 4 extra people to help me. And when I wasn't working I was surfing, boxing, rowing surfboats, playing rugby league, touch football and water polo all at the same time. You probably think I'm having you on, but I can assure you that I'm not. I was possessed, every day I was training for sport, sometimes twice a day, a 5k run, or a 1k swim before I went to work and then team training in the afternoon. 7 days a week, training for sport. What do you think I should have been training for, business! And I was doing none. There was no advertising, there was no learning about business, I didn't even offer people maintenance contracts, how could I, I was to busy. My only strategy was do a good job, work hard and you'll get paid. I was soon going to find out that the result from a lack of training in business, is the same as a lack of training in sport. You will lose. "The fight is won or lost far away from any witnesses. It is won or lost behind the scenes, in the gym, and there on the road, long before I dance under these lights." - Muhammad Ali In the late 1980's interest rates were on the climb, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 percent, and of course people had to stop spending. The first thing that people stop spending on when money's tight is luxury's, and a garden designed and built by a professional was a luxury. Everywhere I drove, peoples gardens were bare, some people couldn't even afford grass, there would be just dirt in the front yard. So of course my little business with out any business strategies, ideas or ongoing maintenance work, closed. I was lucky, I had no debts, no money outstanding to suppliers, my employees had all been paid up. Alot of other people had faired far worse, lost there houses, families broken up and even committed suicide. Business failure can be devastating, there was no way I was going to make the same mistake again. "The secret of life is to know what you want, write it down, then commit yourself to accomplishing it." - Joe Girard After my business closed, my old boss had come back from the Gold Coast and I started work with him again. While I was working for him I started to spend more time reading books, books about business. I was still playing sport, so it was just the occasional book here and there, I'd buy books on, how to be in business, how to start a business, how to run a business, how to grow a business, I was learning about business. "You have to have your heart in the business and the business in your heart." - Thomas J. Watson, Sr. It's a great spot to live on the North Coast of NSW, rolling green hills, beautiful unspoiled beaches, the cleanest air and at night millions of stars shining. But work opportunities back then were not as plentiful as in the City. And I wanted to get out and see the world. So I came to Sydney and started a new business Australian Masonry. Since then, we have kept about 20 bricklayers employed full time and work on residential, industrial and commercial construction sites. We enjoy our work and take a lot of pride in what we do.
As well as being a bricklayer, one of the other many jobs I have to do in the running of a business, is reading profit and loss reports. My accountant kept on asking, why we were spending so much money on plant & equipment. I would tell him that most of this cost was for replacing plant & equipment that just didn’t last, and this was costing us a heap. Apart from just the initial cost of the tool, it was more the cost of down time that was really FRUSTRATING. Here I was working on a job and bang! Something would break. "Didn’t we buy that last week" I would say to the guy holding the broken tool. "Yeah, but don't worry about it, there so cheap you just go and buy another one" he would say without a care in the world. Well I cared, because now I had to drive to the hardware which was about 20 minutes away, if I had a good run with the traffic. So there's an hour of my day gone, and time is money. Well it's more than money because money can always be replaced, you can earn more money, but once your time is gone, it’s gone. So do you think I’m annoyed, you betcha! "Everything you need for your better future and success has already been written. And guess what? It's all available." Jim Rohn In business, obviously getting paid is the No 1 priority, followed very closely by getting paid on time. Getting paid on time, allows me to pay on time. My employees, the suppliers, landlord, bank, tax office, utilities etc, and lastly my family all like to be paid as well. You try telling your employees or your family who is all depending on you, that there will be no money this week. Think that’s tuff, try telling them the same thing the following week, you’ll have a riot happening at work and a divorce being threatened at home. I cannot stress enough how important time is, it is absolutely critical to the very survival of the business. There have been plenty of businesses that were making fantastic profits on paper, but because they weren’t being paid on time, caused them to go broke. So you try and minimise delays, make sure you order your supplies early, make sure you employ good people, make sure your organised and you have everything under control. You do everything that you possibly could to make sure that you are going to finish on time. Now this is the frustrating part, when something out of your control lets you down. Because a supplier forgot to send you the materials, or a piece of machinery breaks, you are now not going to be paid on time. "It is no use saying, “We are doing our best.” You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary." - Winston Churchill So I drive to the hardware and when I get there I tell the sales assistant my problem, and what do you think the first thing they say is “have you got your receipt” now you know how many receipts you acquire in a week in business and its’ not like you can carry a filing cabinet around on the front seat of your car, so I say “no”. They tell me that they can’t exchange the goods without a receipt, and my fault I don’t keep receipts. I’m standing there listening to this person trying to tell me because of their inferior, poorly made, cheap crap that their happy to sell and make a profit on, that it’s my fault! At this particular point I’m wondering if any sane judge would convict me of murder. I can see I am wasting my time trying to get an exchange, so I ask do you have another one that’s better quality. ''That's the best we've got" they respond, while turning their head ready to serve the next customer in the long line that had queued up and were waiting to ask for advice. Didn't this sales assistant understand that I needed a better quality tool, a tool that would last more than a week, and now because the company he worked for had cost a delay in time, I might not get paid on time. He didn't care, what's it to him? He still gets paid, does the company he works for care? I don't think so, according to the newspapers their making hundreds of millions of dollars, and their so used to having people stand in line, they’ve put in kids playgrounds and cafes to keep people happy. This shop didn't care about me or my business. "An inventor fails 999 times, and if he succeeds once, he’s in. He treats failures simply as practice shots." - Charles Franklin Kettering Driving back to the job, I couldn't help wondering what happens down the track if these big businesses keep on competing on price. Always having to make their prices cheaper and cheaper because that's what their competition is doing, where is it going to stop? A shovel made out of paper? Less & younger people who have no product knowledge working in their stores? But they've got a kids playground and cafe to keep people happy right! Well that might work for some people, but it doesn't work for me. Playgrounds and cafes aren't going to help me get the job finished on time. I needed good quality tools that would last, last like my grandfathers tools he'd had in his shed. His tools lasted a lifetime, when he needed them they were there, ready to go, ready to get the job done. Why couldn't I buy tools like that, where could I get tools like my grandfathers? Where could I get good quality tools that were sold by people who knew what they were talking about, people who offered good old fashioned service?, with no playgrounds and cafes. "Of all the things that can have an effect on your future, I believe personal growth is the greatest. We can talk about sales growth, profit growth, asset growth, but all of this probably will not happen without personal growth." - Jim Rohn Nowhere, could I get them, well not in one store anyway. Some hardware shops would sometimes sell a tool that was good quality, but when you went back to purchase another, the sales assistant would say "sorry that line has been discontinued, don't know why they keep doing that". I did, must have had too much metal in it. I had identified a gap in the market, it was more than a gap, it was a need and I wanted to sell to & help people like me. I wanted to sell good quality, make that, the best quality plant, equipment & tools that would last a life time and if by some chance something did go wrong, I’d replace it with no receipt, hell I’d even deliver it to you. I wanted my sales staff to be older experienced tradesmen, who knows exactly what the customer needs and wants. When people came into my store there would be advice on safety, advice on how to get the job done quicker and how to make more money. I wanted to build a world class company where we would help people WORK SAFER, FASTER, SMARTER. People could depend on us and we would never let them down. "If you’re not a risk taker, you should get the hell out of business." - Ray Kroc And that's when I started Australian Scaffold. You must be wondering what's scaffold got do with it. Well I had to start somewhere and since we had a bricklaying business that used a lot of scaffold, it made sense to find a good quality bricklayers scaffold that not only we could use, but we could sell it ourselves and sell it with good old fashioned service and advice by people who knew what they were talking about. This story is a work in progress so come back and I'll keep you up to date. "You don't drown by falling in the water; you drown by staying there." - Edwin Louis Cole We have recently moved our business out to Riverstone which is near Windsor, Sydney NSW. My brother Daniel Butlin has come back from England having worked over their for the past 7 years. Daniel was working in the events industry, putting up staging and scaffolds for the big festivals. Daniel is now our scaffold manager and looks after all scaffold sales and hire. "We need men who can dream of things that never were" - John F. Kennedy I'm a big believer in great customer service, too many businesses today have none at all! Can you believe all the businesses today that have automated telephone answering machines, dial 1 for sales, dial 2 for accounts, dial 3 for this, dial 4 for that. By the time you get to opton 9 you can't remember what option 1 was. And when you finally get to speak to someone they tell you that you have come through to the wrong department.It's insane that some of these businesses are making billions of dollars a year and they treat their customers who are giving them their profitslike dirt! How often do you walk into a shop and pay for something and the person behind the counter hands you the change and grunts. That is just plain rude and it really annoys me and i don't think I'm the only one. You have just handed over your hard earned cash and they couldn't care less. "You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand." - President Woodrow Wilson - 28th President of The United States At Australian Scaffold we do, we know your hard earned cash is paying for a roof over our heads and putting food on our table and I truly do appreciate that. I want to show big business how customer service should be. We are only a small business but I believe with good products backed up by experienced sales people with great customer service we will grow and beat big businesses. Just recently my wife Lisa started working at Australian Scaffold, Lisa's primary role is to make sure our customers stay our customers. Starting from this September 2008 every single customer of ours receives a thankyou card posted to them with a little surprise in it. Every month our customer gets a card saying "we value your business, I like you" - Scott Butlin. For the rest of my customers life, every month they will get a card thanking them. "You will be in five years the sum total of the books you read and the people you are around." - Charlie "Tremendous" Jones
Just before we moved I received a phone call one day from a lady who was shopping around for prices on scaffolding on behalf of her husband who was a cement renderer. I gave her a price for the order and she asked me "do I price match". At first I didn't know what she meant, then I realised that she wanted to know if I would match the price of from a competitor.The competitors price was about $100 cheaper, I didn't know what to say, I thought about the business that sold the shovel that was practically made of paint, they priced matched, they even beat any written quote by 10%, but their products were crap and their was no service. So I said "no", but what I will do is give you advice on how to get the best value out of what I was selling. Remember when I said ealier in my story how I wanted to help our customers with advice on how to get the job done quicker and how to make more money.Well I did, I told the lady how much to charge for the scaffold and gave her a free safe work method statement. 2 weeks later the lady rings me back up and tells me that they made more money out of the scaffold than they did out of the cement rendering and wanted to place another order. I was happy and she was happy. "If you aren't fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm." - Vince Lombardi "I try to learn from the past, but I plan for the future by focusing exclusively on the present. That's were the fun is." - Donald J. Trump "Don't ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive." - Howard Thurman Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strength. When you go through hardship and decide not to surrender, that is strength." - Arnold Schwarzenegger
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