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Entrepreneur: Brian Harrison, Managing Director
Company: Harrow Engineering Pty Ltd
Business type: Mild steel fabricators & general engineers
Turnover: $2M - $10M
Head office: Albury-Wodonga, New South Wales
Contact details: +61 2 6024 4766
The Harrow Engineering Story
Harrow Engineering’s Managing Director, Brian Harrison, has become a remarkably successful absentee manager since 1989. He lives on the Gold Coast - 1200 km from the business he manages in the NSW-Victoria border cities of Albury-Wodonga.
Harrison says: “It had always been my dream to own four or five businesses, become chairman of the group, and float around these businesses.” His dream of developing a business group materialised after a move to South-East Queensland. He purchased three related businesses - and interests in others - in Queensland and the twin border cities.
After early success - when turnover trebled - his dream began to fade during the early 1990s recession, which led to a collapse of the building industry particularly in Queensland. However, Harrow Engineering managed to struggle on, survive, and eventually expand to a second location in the Riverina.
Harrison says that during his first year as an absentee manager he spent a lot of time commuting - swapping alternate weeks between Queensland and Albury-Wodonga. But he says he needed to find another way of managing if he was to enjoy a family lifestyle in Queensland while making Harrow into a successful business. In the key learning points (below), Harrison outlines what he has learnt about being an absentee manager.
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Key learning points:
- Leadership - Regular contact and direction from the top is crucial to maintain accountability.
- Manager incentives - Have the right people in place running the business in each location. Managers should be trustworthy and prepared to carry a financial interest in the business over and above their pay cheque. A profit-sharing scheme that distributes both profits and losses to key staff in reasonable shares over and above a modest base salary can create a sufficient incentive. Staff soon learn that if they want to do well, the business must also do well. If they don’t work hard together as a team, they’re not going to get anything out of it.
- Profit reinvestment - Ensure that profit-share levels preserve sufficient funds remain for business development and expansion. Reinvesting the majority of profits over time is a good rule of thumb.
- Cost control - Consistently encourage staff to keep overheads to a minimum and keep costs under control.
- Customer relationships - Building a relationship with your customers and developing that is a key to successful business.
- Delegation - Strive to be ever more professional in what you do. Recognise that you can’t be an expert in every aspect of business management. Accept that you will need to hire outside consultants who are experts in various matters - tax, insurance, occupational health and safety, finance, industrial relations. Building long-term relationships with these people is just as important as relationships with customers.
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