We recently had our end of financial year recap day as a team, with a bit of a celebration thrown in – last year had a bunch of good results for us, and Andrew and I thought it was time to go and let our collective hair down (yes, that’s a bald joke).

The last financial year saw another evolutionary jump for Gaia Resources, this time really in terms of how we operate as a business.  The main change there was our move of the Perth office to FLUX, a co-working space.  While many (including me, I’ll readily admit) didn’t think much of coworking when it started to appear around 10 years ago, it has turned into a major trend in business and totally suits us at Gaia Resources, both here in Perth and in Brisbane as well.  We are just about to reshuffle our space at FLUX in Perth, to move into a larger section of our floor, and that will be our dedicated space, with plenty of room to grow. Brodie, Kali and the team at FLUX have been very supportive – getting to work is certainly a highlight of my day!

Smoothest moving day ever

As it sometimes happens we said goodbye to a few people this year, but we also hired a few new people along the way.  Behind the scenes, Andrew and I have been doing a lot of work on trying to make the business work even better for our team, and have been working on a range of initiatives, from top-down reviews of our processes and culture to the development of new structures and contracts.  We’ve even started to put together some professional development streams for the team. It’s been a challenging period for me, but I came to a realisation that our team is really strong and we’re all here for the right reasons – so it’s been something I’ve stewed over a lot but we’re seeing benefits and people seem to be pretty happy!

A realistic depiction of Andrew and I at the EOFY event

The numbers (and there are quite a few) do speak for themselves.  We’ve had a good financial year. We don’t put out public numbers about how we’re doing, but we were all pretty happy with the results.  Our productivity was up, we hit a lot of our targets and KPIs that were set during the year, and we have a range of good projects and outcomes to look back on (just scanning through the blog articles for the financial year as I wrote this article was pretty uplifting!).

I asked our team for the highlights from the last year before our workshop day, and there were a bunch of things mentioned, but the four most commonly cited things were:

• Hiring our first dedicated support engineer (Jake T., aka “Jake 2.0” and “New Jake”),
• The work we’ve been doing with Public Records Office Victoria,
• The move to FLUX, as mentioned before, and
• A whole raft of technologies that we’ve been working on lately, revisiting some of our architectural choices in light of changes in the industry and technology base.

The fact that “New Jake” gets a mention in the listing indicates just how well our support processes are working – and we’re still working to improve that even further.  This revamp has been a real benefit to our clients and to us as a business. In our new setup here in FLUX there will be a few new systems and processes around support that we’ll continue to push that further.

Our team are experts in looking serious, and talking while waving their hands around

So what’s coming in the next financial year?

There will be a few changes in terms of structures and roles, like the fact I’m now called the Chief Executive Officer, while Andrew is the Chief Operations Officer.  We’ve started on an organisational structure that I tend to draw “upside down”, indicating that those of us in the managerial positions (what we ironically call the “suits”, even though there’s few suits observed) are there to support those in the operational positions (our “technologists”).

The main thing we always reiterate in our meetings is our mission, and that mission isn’t changing from what I started this company to do.  We have it as a tagline on this web site:

“Gaia Resources is a consultancy that responsibly delivers sustainable technology solutions to companies that work with the environment”

We’ve been thinking hard about this statement, and while the main gist of it still rings true, we’ll be doing a little tweaking of the words in the coming months, to ensure that it really matches what we do – wordsmithing these sorts of statements can take a long time!  But at our core, supporting groups that work with and in the environment, through the sustainable use of technology, remains our core mission.

Over the next financial year, I’m really looking forward to continuing our mission… to explore new environmental issues, seek out solutions to a range of problems, and to boldly go where no company has gone before…

Engage*… with us via our social media feeds at Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, or drop me an email. 

Piers

* Yes, I’m not only a Star Wars fan.