While many Irish backpackers in recent years saw their trip to Australia as a chance to ride out the recession at home, Declan White has turned his time Down Under building a business into a construction juggernaut.
White (30) arrived in Western Australia in 2008 and launched a company called Monford Group in 2010.
In just four years, it has grown to a point where it had a turnover of Aus$50 million (€34.7million) in the 12 months to June 30th and now employs 180 people in six offices across the country.
Originally from Fethard-on-Sea, Co Wexford, White does not come from a business background, but studying construction management at Limerick Institute of Technology helped him get started.
"The downturn was starting to creep in when I left in 2008," he told The Irish Times. "We were on a job in Dublin where I was working as an engineer and there were a lot of rows between subcontractors trying to get money. I could see the economy was starting to turn and decided to get out."
There was never any doubt as to where he would go.
“Australia was the place to go, everybody seemed to be heading there. It has thinned out a bit now, but Irish people are still coming here. I flew into Brisbane first because I had friends there. We applied for a few jobs online and got one in Western Australia doing concreting, so we just flew over,” he said.
Big step forward
So how do you get from concreting and labouring in 2008 to running a company with a $50 million turnover in 2014?
“That’s a good question,” he says with a laugh. “I don’t want to give away too much or they’ll all be at it.
“I was made supervisor after a month and a while later became the project manager on it. I moved from that to a mine site in Karatha (1,545 kilometres from Western Australia’s capital, Perth).
“When the contract finished up there, I decided to start my own company and try to pick up some work on that project. It was a $30 billion project, so there was loads of work there.”
The contractor knew that White had done a good job as project manager for the company that had previously held the contract. “They wanted me on site and that’s how it went from there. That was a lucky break, really, and it turned into a $2 million job.”
The most remarkable part of White’s early success was that there were no banks involved.
“It came down to supply and demand at the time. The project needed a supply of workers and I put up a good negotiation on payment terms. I had $50,000 saved in the bank, which would have covered the wages for less than a week, so I told the contractor ‘I’m going to pay the lads every two weeks, so you have to pay me every two weeks.’
“The contractor needed us, they knew we were doing good work and they were willing to bankroll us,” he says.
“That’s how we got started. They could see we were better workers than the others on the site and wanted us to do more and more.”
For the first two years White did a bit of everything, including accounts, payroll and HR, but the company has grown exponentially since then, with a great many Irish people on the books. “They work hard and they just get on with it,” he says. “They don’t whinge. If you look after them, they look after you. We pay the lads good money.”
The 40 people he originally employed in Karatha are still working for Monford. Although the company has almost five times as many employees now, White still knows a lot of them personally.
“The boys on the ground are the core team that recruits for me. They bring in their friends or their cousins or their brothers. They know what is expected of them to work for us.”
The Monford Group is also very much plugged into the general Irish community in Perth. It sponsors local Gaelic football and hurling teams and donates to an Irish theatre company, the local St Patrick’s Day Parade and the Claddagh Association Irish welfare group.
Diversification
Although there has been a downturn in the construction business in Australia, so far it has not affected Monford.
“I suppose we were lucky,” White says. “We started off in the resources sector, in oil and gas and mining. Some people start off in cities and spend years trying to break into mining. When we started to see the slowdown in the resources sector, we diversified and started to do work in the metro region, doing civil and construction work around the city.
“Now things are beginning to pick up in Perth city and there is work everywhere. Two years ago, 70 per cent of our work was in the northwest of the state, now 60 to 70 per cent of our work is in the city.”
Although the majority of Monford’s work is still based in Western Australia, it is also expanding to other states.
“About two years ago we picked up jobs in Queensland with two of our clients. We had worked with them before in Western Australia and they didn’t want to take a chance on a contractor they didn’t know when they were expanding in Queensland, so they hired us. We’ve kept up a presence there ever since.”
The company also operates in New South Wales and the Northern Territory.
White was initially less than enthusiastic when nominated for the Western Australia business of the year award, which Monford won last June.
“To be honest, I thought it was load of bulls**t when the marketing department nominated me but, after going through it, I can seen the benefit of it,” he says. “Meeting all the other people at the awards was brilliant because they are very good entrepreneurial people with very successful businesses. It was good hearing their stories and listening to them.
“The actual recognition the company got from winning that award was great. It has done wonders for the business. I was very sceptical about it all, I thought it would be wasting too much of my time, but the reality was they were right. It was a good move.”
Did White ever in his wildest dreams imagine he would find this much success in business?
“I always knew I’d have my own construction company; how big it was going to be I didn’t know. You don’t really think about it though. You do your day’s work and go home again. It’s not as if you reflect back, you’re too busy trying to think of what to do next.”
