2 | General Trade Industries
General Trade Industries | 3 General Trade Industries (GTI) is one of the leading remote area specialists and general service providers for energy producers and remote site operation in inland Australia. With their highly skilled, multidiscipline workforce, they can deliver complete onsite installation of utility equipment, camp establishment services, and a variety of operation services. Since forming roughly 13 years ago, in the outback town of Thargomindah – population 200 – GTI has developed a list of longstanding client relationships, and has earned an unrivalled reputation for providing reliable service for remote site utility infrastructure. GTI’s staff possesses an extensive skillset, allowing them to offer a wide range of consolidated services. Many of these services are vertically integrated, enabling GTI to have expressive quality control over their projects. This range of skills
4 | General Trade Industries also make things simpler on the client – rather than hiring and managing multiple contractors, they can simply hire GTI to provide a one-stop, cost-effective, and lowrisk solution. GTI’S EXTENSIVE CAPABILITIES INCLUDE: • Project management and project integrity management. • Civil works for site establishment, access ways, lease pad clearing, hard stand and laydown areas. • Mechanical services for piping installations and operations. • Electrical contracting. • Construction preparation – including precast concrete slabs, footings and piling. • Specialist welding capabilities for pressure piping, pipelines and structural needs. • Camp establishment, management and catering services for up to 150 person camps. The actual origins of General Trade Industries begin in 2001, with the company’s founder and managing director Geoff Pike. “I started off the business in plumbing, but the town size in Thargomindah was only 150 people,” Geoff says. “In 2003 I ex
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General Trade Industries | 7 panded into the electrical side of things just to stay busy. From there we’ve had about 70 percent growth every year.” “The reason for that growth is perseverance,” he explains. “Perseverance and determination to overcome the adverse conditions we’ve had to face – and to use them to our advantage wherever we can. I know there’s not much to take advantage when you live that far away from anything, so we try our hardest at everything.” Since 2003, GTI has branched out from Thargomindah and established major support bases in Toowoomba and Miles. They have also formed their own mobile camps and workshops, and have achieved the ability to mobilise teams quickly, and deploy them to even the most remote sites in inland Australia. Over the years, their projects have stretched throughout the Cooper, Eromanga, Surat, Bowen, Gunnedah & Amadeus Basins. CUSTOMERS FIRST Due to their expertise and experience in outback Queensland – combined with their belief in excellence – General Trade Industries is a low-risk project performer. According to Geoff, they have achieved the success they have due to their dedication to clients. On each and every single one of their projects, their team makes it a point
8 | General Trade Industries of pride to deliver on their promises, and to reach above and beyond expectations. “The key to customer relationships is knowing what they want,” Geoff explains. “That’s the most obvious principle to me, and it’s necessary todeliver the customer the product that they want. If you understand that principle, then you can be successful. In any industry, getting what the customer wants is the most important thing.” “Every customer to us is important,” he continues. “We’ll always try not to go too broad, to have too many customers that you can’t always ensure that all of them get what they want. In that, we haven’t grown too quick, so that our customers remain happy – the customers are everything.” “We’ve got about ten main customers right now,” he says. “We’ve had about five of those for a number of years. And as a result
General Trade Industries | 9 of our attitude we haven’t lost a customer yet, which we’re pretty fortunate for.” AWARD RECOGNITION General Trade Industries has worked hard to be acknowledged as an industry leader and contributor. Over the years, that hard work has earned them controlled growth, as well as a number of notable accomplishments and industry accolades. Today, GTI’s list of accomplishments include awards for AIMQueensland Rural & Remote Project Manager of the Year, DETIR Regional Small Employer of the Year, DETIR Queensland Finalist Small Employer of the Year, and BCITF Queensland Employer of the Year. They also won a PIA Queensland Medium Project Award. Since 2003, GTI has additionally achieved a number of internal milestones.
10 | General Trade Industries For example, they have stayed injury free over 250,000 man hour, have reached a yearly turnover in excess of $20 million, and have engaged over 100 personnel at a single time. This year, GTI achieved another major milestone when they won the Regional Award for the 2013 Queensland Telstra Business Awards. “It was an excellent process,” says Geoff. “We weren’t going into it to win anything, the thought never occurred to us. It was
General Trade Industries | 11 merely an attempt to gauge our company’s health relative to the whole industry, which we got a lot out of.” “To actually get to a point where we got some recognition – that was a huge step forward for us, a big pat on the back for everyone,” he continues. “It’s one more piece of recognition for our team to reflect on, because if it wasn’t for everyone on the team we would have never of gotten it.” Moving forward, General Trade Industries wishes to continue to achieve its objectives and stable growth. “We’ve grown the company significantly,” Geoff says. “I want tomaintain that now, and not to grow any further until we have control over what we’ve got, and can still ensure the customer always gets what they want.” “As for where we want to go in the longterm, it’s all about achieving world’s best practice,” he says. “We want to achieve best practice at deliverables, best practice in document systems and processes, best practice in safety and environment, and best practice with being able to maintain a good profit margin with a limited amount of work.” “We also want to be the preferred supplier to all our customers, even to international customers,” he concludes. “So really, in short, we want to be the best.”
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