Companies that can overcome high costs, tight regulation and staff scarcity can be rewarded with large contracts, market leadership and loyal customers in the north-west.
A LONG-TIME challenge shared by towns and cities in the north-west, and a work in progress in most, is the need to establish a broader business base.
Karratha, for example, still has an imbalance in its local business makeup, with a strong industrials sector but little in the way of small retail.
Broome, on the other hand, has a thriving tourism ecosystem but large resources support firms are hard to come by.
Some see this for the problem it is.
Others see it for the opportunity it can be.
Despite the costs, remoteness, rules and staffing challenges, the north-west has proved a handy business incubator for some of the state’s most successful companies over the past 100 years.
The range of companies covers everything from resources and construction to fashion and hospitality.
Not on this list, although equally worth a mention, are the empires that had their origins elsewhere but owe their success to the north.
MG Kailis (Dongara), Rio Tinto (Spain), Fortescue (Perth), BHP (Silverton), and the Buntine family (Alice Springs) are among those.
Origin stories
When you run a business you get to give yourself the title you want.
Froth Craft head frother Pete Firth is testament to that.
The brewery founded in Exmouth by Mr Firth, Tyler Little and Phil Gray in 2017 is a great local success story, but it wasn’t plan A.
“With Phil, we moved to Exmouth to try to start an eco-lodge actually … but we just had trouble trying to get land approval,” Mr Firth told Business News.
“We teamed up with Tyler, tasted his beers out in his shed, and thought they were pretty good.
“Luckily, Phil and I didn’t get our idea first, which was a bar called the Palette Bar, just made out of pallets.
“We thought through the pun, and then we didn’t think of anything else.”
The brewery plan filled a niche – at the time there were none between Perth and Broome – but there was no plan to grow beyond Exmouth.
But plans change, and Froth now has venues in Exmouth, Bunbury and North Beach, and employs about 100 staff.
A new pub in Geraldton and expansion of the North Beach site are under consideration.
“We were presented two opportunities from someone who just came into Froth and enjoyed having a beer, and we’ve jumped at it and kept serving them as many beers as we possibly can,” Mr Firth said.
“We might have been a motley crew, but everyone’s skill sets seemed to work well.
“A lot of our opportunistic energy and enthusiasm from our ages and backgrounds and personality types just blended into a perfect storm.”
The ‘Bunbrewery’ was built in the throes of COVID and is now the company’s main production centre.
With that 2,500-litre facility, Froth gained better efficiency and quality control, as well as ample brewing capacity to grow the brewpub model.
Opened a little more than a year after the Bunbury site, the North Beach pub has come with two added bonuses: it is down the road from where Mr Firth and Mr Gray grew up, and signage on West Coast Drive has generated significant exposure.
Lessons learned in the north have been crucial to the success of the business.
“In the north-west, you are faced with some inevitable costs that are just hard to be creative around,” Mr Firth said.
“There are challenges that present themselves from staffing, from costs, from freight, from cost of services and products.
“We just learned from that and learned to be better operators, and that has helped us down here.
“It is having that Donald Bradman ‘golf ball with the cricket [stump]’ approach; if we could do it up there, you can kind of do it anywhere.”
In terms of north-west businesses growing their operations elsewhere, Wrapped Creations is another standout.
The marketing and events agency’s founders, David Yakas and Jason Masters, cut their teeth organising community events in Karratha.
These days they are busy organising prominent functions in Perth, and last year stepped up to put on the National NAIDOC Week awards ceremony.
The Karratha office remains busy managing the Pilbara events calendar.
Looking good
In the north, the word ‘fashion’ is often interpreted in its broadest sense.
Most often what comes to mind is footy shorts and high-vis gear.
As founder of Kader Boot Co, Kara Lauder has no interest in designing thongs (despite this reporter’s repeated attempts to encourage her into the field a few years back).
Kader has its origins in the Rio Tinto mining town of Paraburdoo, in 2017, not the kind of place that has inspired many origin stories in the fashion business.
There have been a handful of successful clothing brands built in the north-west, but Kader is the only one to have gone a step further by establishing a bricks-and-mortar store.
Today, the company is based in Bridgetown and has stockists in the US and New Zealand.
Resources focus
The big companies extracting resources in the Pilbara have stringent safety and service delivery standards.
It’s a business environment Raw Hire has been operating in for 26 years.
Founded in Karratha as McLaren Hire in 1998 by Sean and Lisa Clarke, the vehicle and plant hire firm services the north from its original home and has its main operation centre in Welshpool.
Mr Clarke, Raw Hire’s managing director, said the business was something of a side hustle in the 1990s while he worked as a welder for Clough.
“We saw an opportunity there to really push into that for the safety side, the mine-speccing out of vehicles was pretty new back then,” he said.
“A lot of the successful stories there come from grassroots, seeing the opportunity and then grabbing that and going with it.
“I actually stayed welding for seven years while we built the business on the side, which gave us the stability.”
The business grew rapidly through the 2000s as the resources sector boomed, but there was always an understanding the good times would not last.
Mr Clarke said valuable lessons had come out of starting up in the north.
“The north-west has some amazing opportunities for people to give it a go, but along with that comes the risk and the challenges.
“The biggest one would be the commodity prices and the cyclical market … it doesn’t stay up all the way forever.
“The key to having a sustainable business operating in the Pilbara is to have a lazy balance sheet, making sure your debt-to-equity ratio is strong.
“This allows the business to make proactive financial decisions in the event of market downturn.”
Like Froth, dealing with high staff turnover, cost-of-living expenses, housing restrictions, and high business costs meant the Clarkes had to learn quickly how to run a tight ship.
For a company wanting resources contracts, a strong safety focus was also key.
“The expectation from big corporates or the mining companies to meet those standards is quite high, so you build your business around that,” Mr Clarke said.
“We instill that in our team through our induction process. We rotate team up there to make sure that they understand the Pilbara, the challenges, the harshness and the distances.
“It is important to us that we don’t lose sight of that.”
Raw Hire’s core operational team is now based in Perth, a move that has vastly improved staff attraction and retention and is credited as a key to the brand’s success.
About 60 per cent of the business’s profit still comes from the north-west.
“It gets in your blood, that red dirt,” Mr Clarke said. “We are very proud of what we have done there.”
In the Kimberley, an abundant resource of a different kind was the inspiration for GenOffGrid.
The John Davidson-led solar company started in Broome and has operations in Kununurra, Darwin, and Papua New Guinea.
GenOffGrid is focused on replacing diesel power sources with solar and battery, which made the Kimberley, a region home to numerous off-grid power systems, a natural fit.
“Broome was chosen because of its beautiful disposition. It has quite a high density of cattle stations, and has a high density of Indigenous communities,” Mr Davidson said.
“People aren’t going to spend half a million dollars on a piece of kit that is installed by somebody from Perth and who isn’t going to be there when it needs to be maintained.
“Our market is north of the Tropic of Capricorn.
“We will do stuff below it, but that is where the solar radiation is best, [and] it is where more diesel gets burned.”
State and federal government support has been central to GenOffGrid’s overseas expansion into the Pacific, where the company is eyeing a $40 million pipeline of work.
A Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade tender for an aid project got the company’s foot in the door in Papua New Guinea, where a model of setting up subsidiaries, licensing them and gaining a royalty in return, is now being established.
GenOffGrid sold a 50 per cent stake in its first PNG subsidiary for $2 million to gas developer HGDC, which has helped fund further expansion plans.
The north-west remains a strong focus and, as with many businesses, has provided some tough lessons for GenOffGrid.
“Everything we deploy has to come by truck from somewhere,” Mr Davidson told Business News.
“We have had to use helicopters, barges, planes, trucks, river crossings, we have bogged trucks; all of that stuff is what gets thrown at you in the north-west.
“In the Kimberley, still, we haven’t scratched the surface, really.”
It is worth mentioning a couple of high-flyers who can trace their business roots back to the north-west.
Chris Ellison’s pathway to becoming the wealthy owner of Mineral Resources started in Karratha 1979, where he founded a rigging company.
And what is today one of the world’s largest goldminers, Northern Star Resources got its start poking around the east Kimberley for nickel, copper, gold and diamonds in 2003.
Through the ages
Many north-west business success stories pre-date sealed roads and high-vis.
Perhaps the north’s best origin story involves the Pilbara’s most famous resident, a mangy, dust-covered kelpie that rocked up in Dampier one day in 1972 and helped give rise to a veterinary business with the most clinics and staff, and servicing the largest area of any in the state.
Red Dog was a regular visitor to Rick Fenny’s vet outpost in Roebourne and became central to brand Fenny, as his business interests expanded across the state and, briefly, overseas.
“With our younger generations, [the legend of] Red Dog is slowly easing off, but it is still very much part and parcel of the Pets & Vets Group, and very much is synonymous with Rick,” group general manager Celeste Holtzhausen said.
“Red Dog had a definite influence with us, as has the Pilbara: the red dog is in our logo, and our colouring is the red dirt of the Pilbara.”
Pets & Vets Group now has 14 clinics across the state, services remote towns, and is part of a broader family portfolio spanning pastoral, property, publishing, and tourism interests.
Its genesis in the outback perhaps goes some way to explaining why Pets & Vets Group services locales no other agency has deemed feasible to cover: tiny towns such as Denham, Mount Magnet, Pannawonica, and its spiritual home of Roebourne.
“We call it the milk run, and Rick normally does that,” Ms Holtzhausen said.
“These are all the small little towns with very few inhabitants.
“He will visit them maybe once a month, or if we have enough bookings, one of our vets will go out and have a look at these areas and service that a couple of times a month.
“Those smaller areas where there are still people and pets, they are quite desperate for veterinary care, so it is just a matter of looking after those people.”
Like many north-west businesses that have evolved, Pets & Vets Group’s backroom operations are now undertaken in Perth.
Head office takes care of the payroll, accounts, recruitment and HR, leaving the local clinics to take care of service delivery.
Ms Holtzhausen said the nature of the business meant each clinic was managed differently.
“My Perth practices I cannot run the same way I run Karratha or Hedland,” she said.
“You have also got to consider the personalities of your staff, what their limits are, what they require to run successfully.
“Starting in the Pilbara and starting out of a caravan has always kept us very grounded, as a group.
“We don’t ever want to get to the point where we are so big that we forget who we really are.”
