local business stories
Powerplant Project Services
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POWERPLANT has been in business for over 15 years and have become a leading independent utility infrastructure specialist, with a high-performance culture that delivers outstanding results for clients, business, and industry, achieving recognition in the Casey Business Awards. Their focus on safety, innovation, technical excellence and customer service provides clients with outstanding results - safely, effectively, and economically.
The Business
“Casey for us is the land of opportunity. A growing community is certainly the place for growth in business and, after putting our roots down in Casey over 20 years ago, it is exciting to be thriving from this location now. It all points to Powerplant – and Casey – being in the right place at the right time to make the best of our many opportunities" says Greg Plant, founder and owner of Powerplant Project Services in Hallam.
The Covid pandemic has given rise to a number of buzz words – chief among them, resilience. This is especially relevant to businesses as they’ve forged a path through some of the most unexpected trading scenarios in living memory.
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In the wake of Covid, they upped their game
Mr Plant said Powerplant regularly measures its performance against industry standards and was therefore able to see that it was performing well against these.
When Covid hit, the company looked to its values – people, performance and pride – to see it through. “We adopted a survive to thrive process,” Mr Plant said. “Where there was pain, we shared it and that helped us all keep going.”
Pulling together as a team, staff regularly checked in with each other even over Microsoft Teams. The social side of things was stepped up with daily quizzes and end-of-week drinks as well as a Friday ‘good news’ session.
“Participating in the Casey Business Awards got me on the front foot of what I should do to make this business the best it could be. The awards helped change us for the better. We’ve got a lot to thank the awards program for, for helping us to improve the way we roll and the things that we do.”
He said the team quickly realised they could leverage their capabilities to build a better industry, thanks to the insights provided by the awards process. Mr Plant now encourages other local businesses to enter the Casey Business Awards to see how they too can improve. He congratulated management at Powerplant on forming a strategy and achieving its goals, and the team for finding “ways to perform under pretty challenging circumstances.
“We’ve got a lot to be proud of… we did survive the pandemic and we are thriving now even to the point where we’re recruiting now with opportunities in this area for more jobs,” he said.
The Casey Effect
“Casey for us is the land of opportunity. A growing community is certainly the place for growth in business and, after putting our roots own in Casey over 20 years ago, it is exciting to be thriving from this location now. It all points to Powerplant – and Casey – being in the right place at the right time to make the best of our many opportunities.”
“While many of our employees are based in Casey, it is a delight for us to attract talent from further afield to our Hallam location be part of our story. Many of our staff commute from the city to our Casey location – for them, Peak Hour is not Peak Hour because the heavy traffic is all heading in the other direction making their drive to work a breeze."
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Lessons for others
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1 Make local your strength
"We are in a great location. We are part of a vibrant and growing community, within reach of the CBD and the major infrastructure project works, and well connected to systems that help us service projects all over the country from our Hallam Office."
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2 Access external expertise when you need it
"We bought in a resilience expert to help navigate the uncertainties of covid. There was great value in the strategies our staff learnt to improve their professional and personal resilience"