Business success against all odds

ALTHOUGH this year’s pandemic brought widespread job loss, industry collapses and a national recession, there were also some silver lining stories of triumph.

Ballarat based cleaning company Steamatic was one of the businesses that’s been able to increase their demand, revenue and staff intake during 2020.

Once the pandemic hit, regional manager Paul Hudson said other businesses even turned to his team for advice about biohazard

cleaning, infection control and deep cleaning jobs.

“We’re a cleaning company but we’re more focused in disaster recovery than cleaning, about 80 to 90 per cent of our business is related to insurance or disaster related work,” he said.

“Largely, we were really busy in the heart of stage 3 and stage 4 lockdown so we were really lucky … we went into aged care homes, all the metro areas and in and around Ballarat.

“July and August this year were probably record months, which is saying something.”

Although tweaks to the company’s operational systems were implemented to ensure the safety of staff and customers, Mr Hudson said it was nice to be busy and create work opportunities for the wider community.

“We added an admin person, we’ve needed one for quite a while but they’ve only joined recently, and we put on two technicians as well and one more in Melbourne as well, so probably hired four full time staff during COVID,” he said.

“We had the work and we were fortunate enough to give people some more work as well.

“I don’t anticipate that we’ll shrink, we’ll consolidate again and grow our services even further.”

While it might not be unexpected for a company like Steamatic, whose core business is large scale cleaning and hygiene service to see growth during a global pandemic, there are some perhaps unexpected success stories.

Sutherlands Creek based Austins Wines was another regional business that came out of the other side of lockdown bigger and better than before.

Co-operator and head of marketing Belinda Austin said not only did the winemaker expand during the pandemic but the company just had their biggest month in sales since opening.

“We were very quick to adapt to the change, I feel that that’s probably a strength of our business is we read the market, we read people’s buying habits and we adapt our business,” she said.

“We increased our existing staff’s hours, hired a full-time accountant because we needed more assistance there and hired someone else for admin and marketing, we had someone else return from leave and then we hired a full-time person in the winery and vineyard, so we’ve gone from about 14 staff to around 17.

“Our business structure and strategy changed because we were no longer supplying to restaurants and we saw the opportunity for online which is where our orders significantly increased.”

In addition to the business’ strong online sales base, Ms Austin said their success was a product of taking advantage of opportunities that presented themselves well as the support of the regional community.

“We’ve had a lot of great initiatives come our way, our wine has become predominantly wholesale in major chains… we started delivering our wine and cheese packs with a local cheese producer and we were even approached by Gary Ablett Jr to do a limited-edition wine collaboration,” she said.

“I feel really lucky to have the locals support, I think that’s what has really kept us alive because people are looking to support local, family owned businesses and that’s really impacted our business.

“If we can get through this year, we can get through anything.”