2 | Easy Living
Easy Living | 3 Easy Living Home Elevators is Australia’s leading elevator and lift specialist. They are passionate about improving their client’s home value and liveability, and are unrivalled in the industry when it comes to flexibility, quality, and service. The company was established in 1998 byManaging Director Robert Pizzie and his business partner, who designed the business with those values in mind. The inspiration for Easy Living struck the two of them after the passing of one of Pizzie’s friends. At the time, Pizzie was a senior sales consultant with Otis Elevator Company – he realised “life’s too short,” and decided to forge his own path. “I looked at buying a pub and I looked a buying a dive shop, but none of those stacked up financially,” Pizzie explains. “I was always sort of gravitating back to what I knew and that was lifts. I was a lift industry-trained technician straight out of school.” While the typical clientele for Easy Living include end users, architects and builders, the company’s showrooms “really identify us as a retail business,” Pizzie says. “Even though builders may place the order, we try and create the desire in the end user as well.” Today, Easy Living Home Elevators works Australia wide, and is capable of servicing the whole country. Their displays and operational showrooms are located in most major capital cities. Perth, Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane have operational showrooms whilst Adelaide and Canberra have operational displays. NO. 1 QUALITY When it comes to brands, speed and quality, no
4 | Easy Living other lift company can compete with Easy Living Home Elevators. Their equipment is sourced from 100-per-cent European quality across design, manufacture, installation and parts. They are the exclusive dealers of the DomusLift and Easy Step brands in Australia. According to Pizzie, others may try to copy their designs, but none can match their performance. “We’ve never been tempted by the low-priced Chinese equipment,” Pizzie says.“We always buy high quality and reliable equipment from Europe.” Easy Living ensures high quality in each lift and elevator not only through the “culture of buying the best products available,” Pizzie adds, but also by buying from ISO and CE-certified manufacturers. “The customer benefits by the products reliability and longevity. We have been presented with opportunities in the market to maintain existing lifts, but if they’re not good quality we don’t take the business on.” Relationships with their quality suppliers are paramount to Easy Living’s business, Pizzie explains. He credits a large part of the company’s success to the longstanding relationship they’ve sustained with their main supplier, IGV Group SPA – who make lifts in Italy, and have allowed Easy Living to sell their product line in Australia since 2000. “They’re the market leader in Europe. We were lucky enough to secure the agency for that product many years ago,” Pizzie says. “We’ve sold about 700 this year. Each year the numbers are growing significantly.” Recently, one of the owners from the IGVV Group SPA was invited to present an award at
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6 | Easy Living
Easy Living | 7 Easy Living’s annual gala to recognise the top sales employees, installation and maintenance technicians. He gladly accepted. “We value the relationships with all of our supply chain,” Pizzie says. “They’re all integral to our business.” Other important relationships for Easy Living include the ones they’ve maintained with their customers. Those relationships starts with their salespeople, Pizzie says, because “selling a lift isn’t like selling a chocolate bar – once you sell the lift, it commences what we hope to be a 20 or 25-year relationship with that customer in some way because of the ongoing servicing.” “At every point in the chain – whether it’s in the sales division or in the project administration or in the service section – people deal with people,” he adds. “There’s no automated system that gets you through to a keypad that requires you to put in some options.” Easy Living Home Elevators stays in touch with their customers in several ways, including face-to-face contact, email, monthly newsletters and soon through a customer portal. “It will give us another way of keeping contact with our customers,” he says. Additionally, once the company has made a sale, they back up their claims of quality with more than simply words. Since inception, they have supplied more than 22,000 years’ worth of warranties on the 6,000 plus lifts they’ve built and installed. Easy Living Home Elevators also enjoys positive relationships with their other key stakeholders – their employees. Every year they conduct an employee satisfaction survey and come out a
8 | Easy Living
Easy Living | 9 “gold-medal performer every time,” Pizzie says. “That also gives us insight into areas where we can improve, and provides us feedback for our different corporate strategies.” GAP IN THE MARKET At the moment, Easy Living Home Elevators is in a growth phase. Their plan is to open a full office in Adelaide, while looking to expand their small commercial coverage internationally, because Pizzie feels there is a “gap in the market” they could fill. “We’re already the No. 1 lift and elevator company in Australia,” he says. Currently, Pizzie describes Easy Living as a $30-35-million-a-year company, but within the next five years, he says they are looking to grow to a $50-million company. “The formula of success for this business has been very simple. We’ve always selected the best products available, and not the cheapest. We’ve always invested in our people and we’ve managed to retain the best people,” he concludes. “By continuing to operate by those principles, I foresee us achieving only more success in the future.”
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