The key to Thirdi is our people

Luke Berry Thirdi Group | May 15, 2018

Recently at the launch of our Stella Apartments in Newcastle, I was lucky enough to share in a conversation with one of our contractors, highlighting how grateful he was for our continued investment in Newcastle as it was allowing him to provide financial security to his family.

I can't tell you how proud this made me feel, knowing that our little business was allowing his family to grow and prosper and it reminded me of a little known ‘Profit = People Target' that Bob, Ron & myself set ourselves back around 2014, specifically on how many people we could employ, at any one time, across our entire business.

Before I get into the numbers, let me start with the story on how this target came about as it’s a bit of a laugh…. 

About 4 years ago, we were invited to a private NAB dinner of about 40 guests hosted by Andrew Thorburn, the incoming Group CEO of National Australia Bank. Sitting amongst the titans of industry I remember leaning into Ronny Dadd saying:

"Ronny, I think they stuffed the invites up mate, as there is no way the NAB would have wasted an invite to an event like this on the likes of us" 

There we were, breaking bread with the head of Woolworths, Wesfarmers, SunSuper and a range of other industry heavyweights and Andrew, with that amazing energy of his, standing up to introduce himself and open the floor to discussion on how the room felt about the economic future of Australia.  

Luckily for us, the mic was passed to Grant O’Brien, the head of Woolworths at the time, stating that his business was focusing on maintaining employment as he believed in creating and maintaining jobs, even in tough times, was the only way an economy can thrive, ensuring people have money to spend and continue to consume…  

His comments and underlying pride in this message about focusing on people as well as profit had a massive impact on us…. 

So, after half a dozen reds, I said to Ron, “That’s it, we are going to do our bit too… By 2020 let's aim to employ more people across our developments than that are currently employed in Gunnedah" (Being the home town of Ron and I, this was easier for us to quantify) ….  

The only problem was, at the time we only had about 10 direct employees and only 2 active developments in Sydney and Newcastle underway... Hardly the 5000 jobs we needed to create to hit our target…  

So like Ronny does with his numbers… he worked it out… Based on the National Average wage and allocating around a 30% share of our total development costs (excluding land value) for human resources (Labourers, Concreters, Creative Agencies and so on) we worked out that we need to have around $2billion under development to hit our target.  

I agree, the numbers are a bit broad, but Ronny still hasn’t approved the fee proposal for Ernst & Young to run the full report yet, so in the meantime, $2billion under development is our target and we intend to reach it! 

I am thrilled to say our ‘Profit = People’ tracker is currently sitting at 1656, Something Ron, Bob Huxley and I are very proud of and look forward to amplifying later this year when ThirdAge takes off (some exciting announcements coming soon).

I hope you enjoyed the sentiments of our update and that our approach to employment inspires you to create your own ‘Profit = People’ target in the future to create jobs in your community, wherever that may be. 

Thanks for tuning in, please check our latest news updates or simply ask me a question if you would like to touch base. 

Until next time, take care!

Regards 

Luke