Future Clicks Podcast: Episode 4—Going Global

Episode 4 of the Industry Growth Centres Initiative podcast series, Future Clicks, shares insights from small and medium enterprise founders whose small ideas started them on a global growth path.

Produced by the Industry Growth Centres Initiative

Going global with your business is more achievable than ever thanks to accessible technology, cheap air fares and friendly trade agreements. Yet, less than 10% of Australian small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are exporting or operating offshore.

In this episode we hear from 3 SME founders whose small ideas started them on a big path.

Host: Bernie Hobbs

Special guests:

  • Emil Tastula, Co-Founder, Universal Site Monitoring
  • Tom Moore, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer, WithYouWithMe
  • Juy Hepner, Founder, Crazy Dragon

Listen to more episodes of the Industry Growth Centres Initiative podcast, Future Clicks

Transcript

Introduction [00:00]

[MUSIC]

Bernie Hobbs, Host: Welcome to Future Clicks, a podcast about the future of Australian industries, produced by the Australian Government's Industry Growth Centre's Initiative. I'm science journalist, Bernie Hobbs and in this four part series, we'll dive into the new opportunities facing Australian businesses, workplace skills of the future, pioneering industries and industry pioneers and why going global is more achievable than ever. Don't forget to subscribe and find out where our Future Clicks can lead you and your business.

Juy Hepner, Founder, Crazy Dragon: So, we've heard of the dining boom for China, whereas in the last 20 years we exported all of our minerals, now we're exporting food.

Tom Moore, Co‑Founder and CEO, WithYouWithMe: I know that in order to achieve the impact that I need to have which to remove the underemployment issue which faces veterans and everyone else, we have to grow quite quickly.

Emil Tastula, Co-Founder, Universal Site Monitoring: There's probably a lot of people like us here with a good idea that comes from being on the shop floor. Organisations like NERA will get you in front of the CEO and the managing director and the upper echelon of some of the companies that you want to get involved with.

Bernie Hobbs, Host: Going global with your business is more achievable than ever thanks to accessible technology, cheap airfares and friendly trade agreements. And yet, less than 10 per cent of Australian SMEs are exporting or operating offshore. Is it too hard when you don't have the manpower or capital? Or do many just not know of the opportunities available to them? This episode we speak to three SME founders whose small ideas started each of them on a big path.

Interview with Juy Hepner, Founder, Crazy Dragon [01:47]

Bernie Hobbs, Host: From kindergarten teacher to exporting dumplings to China, Juy is the founder of Crazy Dragon.

Juy Hepner, Founder, Crazy Dragon: Yeah, well I started off as a kindergarten teacher in Taiwan. I took out some time. I was doing a PhD in English. The whole time I was scratching my head but I was eating dumplings and then one day I thought, "Oh, these would be alright. I should try and Westernise these a little bit and sell them in Australia." I started making them while I was working as a high school teacher in Melbourne and started making them part-time in a mates' pub and they went really well. Then eventually my mum, who had a decent business, said, "Look, I'll back you up," to buy my first dumpling machine. Then about 10 years of attending food shows and all that sort of stuff, we eventually got a contract with Coles and Woolies, and now we've got Aldi.

Selling Dumplings into the Chinese Market [02:36]

Bernie Hobbs, Host: Dumplings are the way of the future. I'm a huge fan of dumplings, so you do not have to do any hard sell to me whatsoever and I love the name Crazy Dragon. But I hear that you're pretty ambitious to get the dumplings into China, like that's always been your focus is the Chinese market. So, I can understand that that's the crazy part of name because who would try to sell dumplings to China?

Juy Hepner, Founder, Crazy Dragon: It'd be impossible to sell prawn or pork dumplings, but they don't really have any beef dumplings or lamb dumplings. At the moment, Australia's got a huge growth in ... You've probably heard of the dining boom for China, whereas in the last 20 years we exported all of our minerals, now we're exporting food. But one of the problems is you can't export value‑added food. The quarantine authorities won't let you. The first time I came here, I tried to bring my dumplings and everyone said, "Yeah well, we'll buy them," but then I discovered through investigation with the quarantines, you can't bring in processed meat products.

So, then I contacted some of the big meat farmers and meat suppliers in Australia and they said, "Oh we'd love to get ... Because with the dumplings, we just use trim, just like minced meat. We don't use prime cuts. You don't put a nice fillet steak in a dumpling. You don't need it. All you need is the fatty bits-

Bernie Hobbs, Host: That's where the flavour is.

Juy Hepner, Founder, Crazy Dragon: That's it. So basically, the feedback I got from the meat industry was that we're not having any luck selling our trim into China. We're selling lots of prime cuts to the food service industry, five star hotels, etc, but we've got no traction in the supermarkets and we've got no traction with the trim because there's about five or six countries in the world who have permission to bring meat into China but it's only a very small list.

Bernie Hobbs, Host: We do. Surely.

Juy Hepner, Founder, Crazy Dragon: We do.

Bernie Hobbs, Host: Yeah, okay. We’re one of them.

Juy Hepner, Founder, Crazy Dragon: We do. We're one of them. Australia, New Zealand, I think Argentina and Brazil, Canada and a couple of other ones. But we're being undercut for the trim by these other countries, so we're not selling any trim into China. So that's number one. We're not selling any trim. Number two, we've got no value‑added products in the supermarkets or ecommerce platforms that have meat in them. So, there's no hamburgers over here from Aussie meat. You might get one in a restaurant, but you won't get one on the supermarket shelves.

Bernie Hobbs, Host: Yep.

Juy Hepner, Founder, Crazy Dragon: My next learning was that the only way I'm going to be able to sell my dumplings here is to buy the meat, get the trim sent over here and then get it processed in a Chinese factory. So, I went around, looked at a bunch of factories. Some of them were horrific. One particular freezer in this factory looked like ... Do you remember the scene in Star Wars: the Empire Strikes Back, where there's a big Yeti and he takes him into his cave?

Bernie Hobbs, Host: Right?

Juy Hepner, Founder, Crazy Dragon: Yeah. The big monster?

Bernie Hobbs, Host: Yeah.

Juy Hepner, Founder, Crazy Dragon: Well, that's what the freezer looked like at this particular factory.

Bernie Hobbs, Host: Excellent. That's not the factory you went with then, I'm hoping.

Juy Hepner, Founder, Crazy Dragon: No. The factory ... Eventually I found a factory which is like the most beautiful factory I've ever seen. It's bigger and cleaner and prettier than anything I've seen in Australia.

Bernie Hobbs, Host: Fantastic.

Viral Videos and QR Codes [05:54]

Juy Hepner, Founder, Crazy Dragon: And then I said to the customers, "Is there going to be any pushback with the fact that it's processed in China? Are they going to trust that it really is Aussie beef and lamb?" So, what I thought is, okay. What do I need to do to create a real signature that can't be copied, is to go and shoot videos at the actual farms where I sourced the meat with the farmer. So the great video with me and Macka from Macka's Meats in Newcastle.

Bernie Hobbs, Host: Not Macca's as in the ‘golden arches’. Actual Macka's, the guy, yeah?

Juy Hepner, Founder, Crazy Dragon: Yeah, a guy called Robert Mackenzie...

Bernie Hobbs, Host: Yeah?

Juy Hepner, Founder, Crazy Dragon: Whose nickname's Macka. Fourth generation farmer from New South Wales with this beautiful Black Angus beef. And shot a big video in his paddock, dubbed it into Chinese and took it to market at this trade show last week and it's now it's sort of gone viral. I've had people get hold of it and they're like, "Oh, this is fantastic." So that's how I overcome the issue of it being processed in China, because we attach that video to the QR code on the back of the packaging.

Bernie Hobbs, Host: So, customers in China can just scan the QR code with their mobile phone and watch the video on their phone. So, putting QR codes on a product ... Are you the first to that in China or is that something that's routinely done?

Juy Hepner, Founder, Crazy Dragon: There's QR codes on everything. Every taxi you get into, there's a QR code on the seat advertising clothing.

Bernie Hobbs, Host: Wow.

Juy Hepner, Founder, Crazy Dragon: QR codes are almost like a window into a television on your phone, so everything's got QR codes here. But I think that I'm the first person to use it as a provenance tool to show people that ‘farm to plate’ stuff.

Working with Food Innovation Australia Ltd (FIAL) to Expand Globally [07:50]

Bernie Hobbs, Host: I wonder how well that'll be picked up. You might see others doing it but you'll be the only one who's got Macka and his Black Angus cattle there and the happy days on the farm in Newcastle. So, Juy, you've worked with Growth Centre FIAL to expand globally. What have you done with them and how has that helped?

Juy Hepner, Founder, Crazy Dragon: I've attended a lot of seminars in Melbourne with FIAL and then I've attended a couple of food shows with them which have been very successful. I did one at Hofex last year in Hong Kong which was very successful in terms of developing a network and database for future sales and yeah, FIAL were integral in providing an amazing exhibition space.

Bernie Hobbs, Host: Great. Just getting you in front of people you can connect with. And what do you think ... I honestly thought that trying to sell dumplings to China would be a bit cray-cray, but what is your advice for Australian small businesses who think that international markets like China or others are just beyond them?

Juy Hepner, Founder, Crazy Dragon: It depends on what they're selling. I got laughed at by a big supermarket buyer at a seminar in front of 100 people the other day for trying to sell dumplings to China, but I just think that he's small minded because ... The point of difference is that they don't have beef dumplings or lamb dumplings. Australia already has the best reputation for beef and lamb. So why wouldn't you formulate it into a style that they're accustomed to and give it to them?

My advice to anyone going over there wanting to get some traction and maintain and grow some relationships rather than just getting a smile and a handshake and an expression of interest, very often they'll die out and people won't be able to maintain it.

So, there's two steps. I'd say get an interpreter that you've worked with for the long-term and maybe someone who's a business person as well, not just an interpreter, and it's worth paying more money for someone like that, then you keep them working for you after you go home. Get onto WeChat and WhatsApp. WhatsApp's in Hong Kong and WeChat's in mainland China. And get your interpreter working for you to progress the deal after you go back home after the food show.

Bernie Hobbs, Host: Sounds like a great recipe. Find the gap in the market, your point of difference and I think that QR code is a little bit ingenious as well, just quietly, just to mark you out as the bringing together the love for Aussie lamb and beef and dumplings, of course.

[MUSIC]

Interview with Tom Moore, Co-Founder and CEO, WithYouWithMe [10:36]

Bernie Hobbs, Host: From fighting in Afghanistan to setting up cyber security business, Tom Moore has done a lot in his 28 years. Identifying the difficult process many veterans go through transitioning to work outside of defense, Tom set up WithYou,WithMe, dedicated to up-skilling veterans in high demand areas.

Tom Moore, Co-Founder and CEO, WithYouWithMe: I am 28 years old. I currently am the CEO and one of the co-founders of WithYouWithMe, which is a company that helps veterans transition from the military and now is looking at tackling underemployment across a large scale. I grew up in Sydney, from Western Sydney, so you can probably hear a bit of the drawl in my accent.

Bernie Hobbs, Host: Hey mate, I'm from Queensland. We've got the same accent.

Tom Moore, Co-Founder and CEO, WithYouWithMe: Yeah. I joined the army at 18. It's sort of a rite of passage to serve in my family so we've served in every conflict since the Boer War.

Bernie Hobbs, Host: Wow.

Tom Moore, Co-Founder and CEO, WithYouWithMe: We've always been in sort of combat roles, so we're never folding blankets or anything else. We're sort of out in the front doing it, so it's a bit of a journey to do it as a young man in our family. I did my degree at night and then went to Duntroon. I left Duntroon about 2012 and led a 60 man combat team into Afghanistan in 2013, which for me, I guess was an eye-opening experience. I definitely learnt a lot at a young age.

After that time in the military, I got injured, moved into transition in the military, transitioned myself and got medically discharged, unfortunately, which sort of broke me a little bit at the time. Then wandered out into industry because I couldn't get a job. I ended up doing phone sales for about 60 calls a day, cold calling-

Bernie Hobbs, Host: So, you would have met a lot of actors at that time working the phones. And film students.

Tom Moore, Co-Founder and CEO, WithYouWithMe: Yeah, yeah. Everyone that's trying to get somewhere. Then after 12 months of that I sort of rose quite quickly in that tech space and thought it was time to do something new and have a bit of an impact. So, we, me and a mate of mine, launched the company and then just sort of started from there about two and a half years ago.

WithYouWithMe – Helping Veterans to Transition [12:43]

Bernie Hobbs, Host: Wow. So just tell us a bit about WithYouWithMe.

Tom Moore, Co-Founder and CEO, WithYouWithMe: Okay. So, the aim of the organisation is to essentially help people work out what they're good at, train them and then deploy them into the market. That was the best solution we came for transitioning veterans. They were highly skilled. The average soldier has about 124 hard skills in just the tech space that could be easily applicable across a number of different jobs and they just weren't breaking through.

A good example is that I did about 100 job applications, I did about 15 interviews and I couldn't get a job and I'm a junior officer that's managed a few hundred people with a degree. How is everyone else faring?

So, when we looked into the issue, it was about a 26.6 per cent veteran unemployment rate. It’s around 26 per cent to 30 per cent at the time, we looked into it, and we thought, well, this doesn't work. Then as we've gone further into it, we've also worked out that veterans transitioning are facing the same issue a lot of people are, so athletes leaving sport, parents returning to work after a certain amount of time ... And it's really an impact of probably the ‘future of work’ situation.

So, what we did was rather than sort of whinge about it, we built an organisation that predicts the labour market, matches people to what they're good at, trains them in that skill set for free, and then rolls them out into the workplace in areas that businesses highly demand them. So, then it's not about experience, it's about you having the skill and no one else has them so they have to hire you.

From there we started with two companies, two or three companies I would say, at the end of 2016, so in December, and now we work with over 147 Australian businesses. We're in Washington DC, we're about to go into New Zealand and Fiji to do the same thing.

Bernie Hobbs, Host:  Whoa. You don't like to do things in halves, do you? You don't like to take it slow.

Tom Moore, Co-Founder and CEO, WithYouWithMe: No. So, I guess for me, I don't really care too much about business. I know that in order to achieve the impact that I need to have which is remove the underemployment issue which faces veterans and everyone else, we have to grow quite quickly and have a lot of impact and build an effective business model which we have, and now it's about scaling aggressively to combat the issue before ... You know, things like the ‘future of work’ start to push people out of companies.

Bernie Hobbs, Host: So, the thing that's really interested me in what you've done, instead of just matching existing skills with ... Instead of just being a job placement service, you didn't do that. You actually looked at the market and saw where the gaps were and then offered training. So, you were custom equipping, I guess, veterans to ... Or custom training them, to match these skills. It's a genius break that you did.

Tom Moore, Co-Founder and CEO, WithYouWithMe: Yeah, and it definitely didn't start that way. I think this is something you really have to learn if you're trying to build a pretty good product. The only way you learn is by putting your hand on the stove and then taking if off again.

Overcoming Early Setbacks [15:45]

Bernie Hobbs, Host: Hopefully just the once, yeah.

Tom Moore, Co-Founder and CEO, WithYouWithMe: Yeah, yeah. Only once. I don't think you get more than one. So, we built a skills translator, right? Because everyone kept telling us that veterans didn't have the skills, so I was like, well, I'll prove you wrong in our skills translator and then no one wanted to buy that. So, we were like, alright. Well, we need to build a recruiting company to get them jobs and we were getting a few veterans a job a month and it wasn't really working, and wasn’t really having an impoact.

Bernie Hobbs, Host:  Why do you think it wasn't working?

Tom Moore, Co-Founder and CEO, WithYouWithMe: Look, there's two issues: one thing in Australia is that the higher education market for tech careers as well as the vocational market is really struggling to train people that are employable to industry that industry wants, so even if you did a course and you had that on there, it probably wouldn't be the right skills or the right match for that organisation.

The second issue is that our recruitment processes are quite flawed. We run a highly driven referral model for Australian jobs, which makes it really, really hard if you don't look like the person they last had [do] that job on a CV. So that generally means that you never get past that CV point. So, we were having all these great people come through, we'd translate their CV ... At the end of the day, the Australian organisations didn't want to take that much risk. They were very much about hiring veterans, but in order to solve the problem, you can just get them to hire one or two. You need to get them to hire 100 over a period of time, so that meant about adjusting it so they get a return on investment.

So, we went from doing a few recruiting, then we were like, well, this isn't working. So, what we started to do was to test people across their learning style, their aptitude, their intelligence, their psychometrics.

And then we started testing organisations. Then we started to figure out, well, they need to be in a job that they like and a company that they like because you can retrain someone for a new career and they could get to an organisation but they might be slightly smarter than them, or they might not be culturally aligned to, and they'd think it'd be a bad idea anyway.

Bernie Hobbs, Host: Miserable, yeah.

Tom Moore, Co-Founder and CEO, WithYouWithMe: Yeah, which is one of the issues that US veteran market has with that. Most veterans don't last by 12 months in their first job.

So, we did that, and then we worked out, alright. Well, if we train them for that immediate position, then they would be more confident when they went in. You'd be able to test their ability to do it really at a hard skill level before they started, and companies would think they're getting a better resource because they're deployable straightaway. So, total productivity's higher and they're just getting a better platform.

When we looked at it, that made a lot of sense, so we looked at the market and went, okay. Who could we use to train? And it turned out the market really wasn't right in a lot of areas and we thought, you know what? Why can't we just build our own training? We did it in the military. We were an RTO [Registered Training Organisation]. We're all qualified instructors, so we just built our own, and that's allowed our cyber program to work with about 35 Australian organisations that you would consider in critical infrastructure, and hiring veterans and people that you would never consider for a tech role with no tech background in roles like cyber analysts and everything else. Yeah.

Working with AustCyber [18:43]

Bernie Hobbs, Host: So, it was a long journey. You've basically creating a cybersecurity business and training centre without meaning to start that way. Along the way you've worked with Growth Centre, AustCyber. Can you tell us a bit about what you've done with them and how that's helped?

Tom Moore, Co-Founder and CEO, WithYouWithMe: Well, I think the cyber security market's quite interesting. There's a massive shortfall of skills and I think the easiest way to overcome them is diversity of thought and thinking.

So, to give you a quick example, the best hackers or pen testers [penetration testers] that we've got are actually return to work mums and you would never consider them from a piece of paper saying they've never done anything tech before, but they're absolutely brilliant.

So, what I found with our AustCyber is that they completely have a diverse way of thinking as well. To be honest, they took a chance on me with open arms when I was still working out of a garage, I’d say 10 months ago, with my team, and got me in to present and they’ve supported me in a number of engagements since.

I've found it awesome because I'm not a cyber security business per se. So, it's been interesting for me to interact in that community and if I… AustrCyber’s been very instrumental in forming the relationships with the ecosystem, guiding me through it and giving me the opportunity to tell the story and really identify that veterans are one part of diverse layer of cyber security, but there's a lot of other brilliant people out there that could easily transition across, and it's time to drop those CV barriers.

Bernie Hobbs, Host: You've mentioned the US before. You said you've got an office in DC. So obviously if you think of transitioning veterans, the US would have to have a massive population of veterans. So is that… How big is the opportunity for you there and to go further global? You mentioned New Zealand as well.

Tom Moore, Co-Founder and CEO, WithYouWithMe: So, we do a lot of stuff outside of cyber security, so we offer about 15 different training programs-

Bernie Hobbs, Host: Are they all in the tech sphere?

Tom Moore, Co-Founder and CEO, WithYouWithMe: Critical infrastructure or tech. So, rail and telecomm[unications] are two of our other big ones that you'll find there, because they're obviously growing and they'll need to grow over the next 10 to 20 years.

But it was quite interesting. So, I actually deployed with the US army into Afghanistan. It was a bit of a joint platoon so I had 10 US soldiers, so I've always had an affiliation to their military. What happened was we started to have a lot of US veterans sign up, and to be honest it was costing me a fair bit of money because I don't charge them for the training. I make my money back off getting them a job in the market. So, we sort of had to launch.

Bernie Hobbs, Host: Right.

Tom Moore, Co-Founder and CEO, WithYouWithMe: So, what we looked at was – alright, so where do we want to launch, and then some of our partners that we have and we're lucky to have AWS, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and all that sort of stuff, they all operate quite big shops in the US and they're all struggling to find people in cybersecurity at the entry level with a security clearance.

So, we set up a shop in DC about I'd say four months ago. One of the co-founders was there for about 10 to figure it out. Now we've just started working with our first two clients in DC and training US military veterans as cybersecurity analysts and rolling them in there. So, we're start with that and go from there.

Then by chance, we bumped into the New Zealand team and AustCyber connected me to the [Department of[ Prime Minister and Cabinet in New Zealand about our program and they're sort of at the early stage, so it looks like we'll be able to run the exact same stuff we do here over there, if the Kiwis let us. But I think we've got a pretty good relationship with them.

[MUSIC]

Interview with Emil Tastula, Co-Founder, Universal Site Monitoring [22:30]

Bernie Hobbs, Host: Born and bred in Darwin, Emil Tastula joined with some industry mates to create Universal Site Monitoring after seeing how many serious workplace accidents could have been prevented with the right technology in place. So, can you tell us a bit about Universal Site Monitoring and how it came about?

Emil Tastula, Co-Founder, Universal Site Monitoring: Universal Site Monitoring is a business developed in Darwin. Three of us teamed up together. We're all old mates from Darwin High School and we're basically are all sort of been in either the mining industry or on the peripheral for quite a long time. We noticed three and half, four years ago that there was a bit of a gap in the safety equipment marketplace in most minerals processing facilities, refineries, and that we wanted to fill that gap with a bit of technology that we came up with and developed here locally in Darwin. That's the hardware worn in the field and also the significant software package that backs it up.

Bernie Hobbs, Host: Right. So, it's for workers to actually wear on them while they're at the plant or while they're working around doing operations, maintenance, anything.

Emil Tastula, Co-Founder, Universal Site Monitoring: Correct, yes. It's a personal safety monitor so it's basically a real‑time communication device. It has ‘four gas’ gas detection, operational intelligence, so it delivers fairly high level visible analytics to manage a situation in a processing plant. It has location sensing in the form of a GPS. It recognises slips, trips and falls through basically having an accelerometer built into the device and it also does biometric monitoring via Bluetooth. So, it sort of packs all of that into one device about the size of your mobile phone but about three and a half times thicker.

Bernie Hobbs, Host: So, without your system, without your all‑in‑one monitoring device and the supporting software, what are the options for monitoring workers at a plant or on a site? How do you know if they're safe or not?

Emil Tastula, Co-Founder, Universal Site Monitoring: Well it was very difficult. My time in a supervisory role, or working basically in the control room of large processing facilities, you would rely very heavily on the operator to answer a call from the control room. If they didn't answer the radio, then you'd have very little idea of where they were, how they were, what the atmosphere around them was like.

Bernie Hobbs, Host: It's ironic, isn't it, that you've got all of this real-time data for the machinery, for, as you say, for the health of the machinery and effectively you hope that the workers answer the phone because that's the only way you've got of knowing if they're well or not. So, it sounds like a really great idea to have the real-time data feeding back to you from each worker who's wearing one of these.

Emil Tastula, Co-Founder, Universal Site Monitoring: The whole idea is to not wait for the data to become an incident. The idea is to pick the trends up early and potentially prevent the incident before it happens.

Bernie Hobbs, Host: Emil, I've heard that one of the catalysts for you and your mates to develop Universal Site Monitoring was the Pike River disaster in New Zealand.

Emil Tastula, Co-Founder, Universal Site Monitoring: Yeah, correct. It was about that time where we were trying around the idea of developing this conceptually that the Pike River disaster happened. It was a catalyst where we said, "This shouldn't happen in these modern times." The guys walking into a high risk area of any mining or processing operation, there should be some data flow real-time to know very quickly if there's an atmospheric problem or a really high noise issue or a high ambient air temperature issue or any sort of data from the field.

Working with National Energy Resources Australia (NERA) [26:30]

Bernie Hobbs, Host: Great. Now you've worked with the Growth Centre, NERA, throughout your journey with Universal Site Monitoring. Can you tell us what you've done with them and how that's helped?

Emil Tastula, Co-Founder, Universal Site Monitoring: From what I've seen, they're a great mechanism to get your product out there, to introduce you to people that you should be talking to and you should be working with.

Bernie Hobbs, Host: Was networking you and your team were naturally good at or was this a real boon to you to be able to get the product out there?

Emil Tastula, Co-Founder, Universal Site Monitoring: Yeah, at a certain level we were guys that were connected across middle management to operation teams level, whereas NERA, when we were introduced to them and we started to do some stuff with them, you could see that there were connected to the higher level. So, there's probably a lot of people like us out here with a good idea that comes from being on the shop floor and you can discuss with a lot of people that you know in the group that you are in that might have moved around the world or around Australia, but still maintain that middle management level, and then organisations like NERA gets you in front of the CEO and the managing director, and I think the upper echelon of some of the companies that you want to get involved with.

Bernie Hobbs, Host: And do you have any advice for other Australians looking to innovate and start their own business like you three have?

Emil Tastula, Co-Founder, Universal Site Monitoring: Oh, I think, yeah, it's all about if you see an opportunity or you see a gap and you believe that you've got something that might fill that gap or make a positive change or impact on the industry as a whole going forward, you should have confidence. When you start thinking, oh, it can't be done here or it can't be done with this group of people or it can't be done with the amount of money that we have at the start of process ... Go out and get the resources you need and be confident and just keep on fighting all the way. A lot of people that we've bumped into, especially in Europe that we deal with quite a lot, they're still completely amazed that this software and hardware has been developed in the Northern Territory of Australia. They looked at it, we do demos for them, we show them how it all works. They're quite taken aback at how advanced it is and then we tell them it was completely done 100 per cent in Darwin in the Northern Territory, they sort of don't believe it at first.

Bernie Hobbs, Host: It's a great story that involves zero crocodiles whatsoever coming out of Darwin, so well done to you Emil, and your colleagues as well.

Thanks for listening. The Industry Growth Centre's Initiative is an industry‑led approach supported by the Australian Government to foster growth and help create the jobs of the future. Don't forget to subscribe to receive the latest episodes and find ‘Industry Growth Centres’ online and on Facebook for all the latest news and opportunities for Australian businesses.

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