Eric Heaney

Following three of my older brothers into the Royal Australian Navy, I joined the service at age 15 and both completed my schooling as well as completing my apprenticeship as a Naval Shipwright and a member of Navy's marine engineering branch.

I served proudly for 10 years as I had planned when I first joined.

In that 10 years, I was trained to operate, maintain and repair most of the engineering systems and structural components on ships, serving at various bases and at sea on destroyer and guided missile frigate type warships, whilst travelling the world, working very hard as well as adventuring and having a huge amount of fun.

During my service, I learned to drive heavy vehicles and was licenced by the Navy to drive any road vehicles up to 8 tonne trucks as well as 22 seat buses, transporting service personnel and 42 seat buses on occasion. I did not follow this up after my service with a civilian heavy vehicle licence as my career was heading into a more corporate environment.

Also during my service, I became heavily involved with photography for the Navy as "Ship's Photographer" on two ships and working on occasion with Navy's photographic branch to cover events such as the Fleet Review celebrations during the Australian visit by the Prince and Princess of Wales and the huge celebration in Sydney of the RAN's 75th Anniversary. This role included a significant level of organising and working with groups of people both service and civilian to create the required results.

Leaving the RAN in my mid 20's and also entering married life and settling in Perth, I sought to build a career in the corporate world.

Leaving my engineering and Shipwright days behind me, at that time, I felt the place to be was "in a suit".

I had attended a number of training programs prior to entering civilian life and found a company in the industry of personal and professional development looking for a new corporate sales executive.

In this role, as an eager and new sales executive, I was a sponge for learning and found that the ability I had developed in the Navy to connect with people from all places and levels of society also lead me quickly to be able to connect with all manner of business people and to achieve significant sales results, taking the company's training packages and international speaker events to Perth's business community.

I quickly became the company's top sales executive and maintained that position until I felt that there was no further scope with the company and their direction for me to grow and began to look elsewhere.

Whilst it was time to move on, I was and remain incredibly grateful and proud of my work their for what I learned, the connections I developed and the positive impact we were able to make for the companies and teams we worked with and provided our services to.

Leaving the business training industry, I personally remained heavily involved in ongoing training and development from both a personal and business standpoint, however I wanted to find a company with a broader potential customer base, scope for advancement and where I could utilise my technical understanding as well as my sales skills.

Consolidated Security Systems offered that opportunity.

CSS designed and installed commercial security systems on a fully maintained and monitored contract basis.

At the time, the company's main customer base were small businesses and once I had earned my stripes, they were very keen with the idea of expanding to larger customers also with more intricately designed systems and larger contracts.

CSS was just the place I was looking for to build my skills and success.

Whilst there, I saw a need for an end to end company training manual which I wrote in my own time. The manual was implemented throughout the company and was also used to assist the company in earning their ISO9002 accreditation.

Whilst working at CSS, I also did some consulting work and designed the first fully integrated, multi camera, touch screen controlled, remote witness video interview system (in 1991) for use in family law and abuse cases in a courthouse in Western Australia (a world first I'm told) which became a design model for other systems around the world.

As the company grew its system offerings and my involvement in the company developed, I was asked to take a temporary role interstate running the sales operation in South Australia. This led to me being asked to move to Melbourne to establish, open and run CSS' new office and operations as the company expanded.

The brand new Melbourne operation of Consolidated Security Systems was owned both, by the directors of the Sydney operation and by the head office company on Perth.

Establishing in an old Commonwealth Bank branch in Northcote, my role was to establish the Sales, Installations, Service, Support and General office operations of the company, with finance operations being run from our Sydney office.

This entailed the full recruiting of all staff, purchase and set up of office furniture and equipment, building supplier relationships etc.

I had already recruited a senior service tech and one of the senior sales team from our Perth head office to relocate and become our service manager large compound sales specialist respectively.

From there, together, we recruited reception and admin staff, built a sales team, and installations and service team and set about establishing our business in Victoria.

With no prior presence in Victoria, within 8 months of opening, we were out performing our main Sydney office, which had been operating for 2 years. 4 months later we were outperforming both Sydney branches combined. In less than 2 years of opening we had reached 50% of the sales of the Perth Head Office, which had been operating for 10 years and had become one of the dominant players in the commercial security industry in the state.

Of course, growth does not come without growing pains and there were aspects of how our Sydney directors ran their business which did not sit well with me. There were also significant changes happening in the industry with a large US security firm buying up independent Australian based operations for their customer bases.

This, combined with my growing desire to step into the field of public speaking, training and consulting led to me resigning my position to step into the world of self employment.

In my first full time foray into owning and running a business, I developed and ran sales, customer service and management training programs suitable for small through to large enterprises.

Marketing these directly and establishing a small and steady customer base, I ran programs both in house and externally, where companies could send either individuals or groups to my weekly training programs.

More and more, companies were requesting in house training programs tailored to their needs as well as asking me to speak at their conferences.

Whilst the business and customer base grew steadily, it was also a very large effort to market, sell, develop, write and present all of the training programs as a sole operator. I was not yet in a position to expand to hiring staff to grow the business and after a couple of rewarding and successful years, I was asked by one of my clients, the tech giant NEC, to join their team and help develop their sales into the as yet very new arena of Business to Business internet system integration.

With a young family to provide for the timing was excellent and I joined their team.

Joining the one time major tech giant NEC, aside from my service in the RAN, the first time I had worked in a very large organisation. NEC had grown from a very small manufacturer of telephone switches in the Japan in the late 1800's into one of the world's major IT companies, being the 4th largest manufacturer of computers by 1990.

My role was in a new department which became known as "iSolutions" and we were tasked with building and marketing a platform which would allow large companies to replace their paper invoicing processes with an integrated end to end online invoicing system powered by NEC's large data centre as the platform. Whist a quarter of a century later, this seems like a straightforward process, in the year 2000, this seemed to most large corporates like sending rocket to the moon in the 1960's.

We did have some successes in pilot programs, with the potential to become a major player in the new B2B internet space, however NEC was also very large, traditional computer and telephone company and there was a massive corporate resistance internally to entering this new internet business space and the department struggled to get the support needed to succeed.

I was a part of a large 300 plus employee redundancy in March 2002 as the corporation struggled to restructure and remain relevant in the rapidly developing IT market at the time.

As soon as I left NEC, a friend who had worked for me at Consolidated Security contacted me about joining a company he had recently worked for and had recommended me to their CEO.

Essential Utilities Corporation provided price benchmarking services for large corporate and industrial users of both electricity and telecommunications, assisting companies in achieving cost savings in these areas by benchmarking their contract pricing with the best in market pricing as seen by our analysts during other pricing negotiations.

My role was as a direct to market sales executive, finding, contacting and selling to companies operating in Victoria.

This was a highly successful role and I also established a significant client base in Western Australia, which saw me travel to Perth on a semi regular basis, allowing me to see my elderly mother and other family in WA which was a real bonus.

EUC's Melbourne office was specifically a small sales operation located on St Kilda Road. Our small sales team consisted of my and two colleagues and we successfully grew the company's revenue by more than double with our clients in Melbourne and Perth.

Our Melbourne customer base was mainly very large corporates, with our focus on the telecommunications, spending more than 1 million dollars per annum across landline, mobile and data services.

Over time and with market contracts changing in their make up, the benchmarking work became less relevant to telecomunications contracts and EUC's market became focused more on the electricity contract business.

At this time, as EUC began to step away from the work we were involved in, our senior telecommunications analyst relocated to Melbourne and I along with another member of the Melbourne sales team, decided to keep working with our telecommunications customers with a different focus, identifying errors and anomalies in their billing and started our own company to meet the needs of that market.

Establishing a three partner company, Telco Bill Reporting Solutions (TBRS) focused on identifying errors and anomalies in the telecommunications spends of very large corporate and industrial clients.

Our customers were companies such as BHP, Toyota, Kraft, Western Mining, Healthscope, etc.

My main role at TBRS entailed developing relationships often with senior executives such as the Chief Financial Officer of a company and identifying potential cost savings to be found through our billing analysis, looking for errors and anomalies such as redundant services, services not being charges correctly and we also included the benchmarking of their costs in comparison to similar large corporate clients.

This was very rewarding and profitable work in many respects, however I became very frustrated with the internal politics of many of the large corporate clients we worked with, including some who would limit our ability to complete our projects for their company as they seemed to feel that they would not look good if we found savings that they hadn't found themselves. As our fees were dependent on the levels of savings we achieved for our clients, this began to severely impact our company revenues.

Also, after 7 years, we identified that one of our partners had some major gambling and tax issues which were likely to derail our whole business.

At this time, my wife suggested that I get back to my hand on trade skills and excellent customer service and interactions to buy and build a local handyman business with the Hire A Hubby franchise group. She's always been the smart one!

It was fantastic timing for us as, coincidentally, our local Eltham franchise territory had just come on the market with the existing owners looking to move interstate.

We bought the franchise and I resigned as a director and shareholder in TBRS.

In one month, I went from saving millions for large corporates to fixing and renovating homes in our local community and I could not have been happier!

Hire A Hubby is Australia's leading property maintenance/handyman franchise and in joining this network of small business owners dedicated to helping people in their local communities around the country, I truly felt like I had come home to family.

In our ten years or running our small business, we have helped well over 1100 customers with well over 800 of those becoming regular repeat customers with our average repeat customer engaging us 5 times to work at their home.

In our first full year, we were awarded New Franchise of the Year in our annual awards and have been category finalists in 7 of our other 9 years.

Smiling customer service and exemplary work have been hallmarks of how we have built and grown our business through this decade.

Our business and team grew rapidly, requiring our first employee within 8 weeks of starting our franchise and growing to include 4 full time and 2 part time employees "on the tools" with myself and my wife Andrea working side be side to run the business.

Within 15 months we had more than outgrown running our business from home and leased a local commercial premises as our workshop and office and we had a fleet of 5 fully sign written vehicles on the road plus our non-signed office vehicle.

Over the Covid period our we operated as we could with 2 full time tradesmen on staff leaning down to ourselves and 1 full time trade staff member who has worked for us for 6 1/2 years and is trusted like a family member.

We have loved running our very successful Hire A Hubby franchise for this last decade, however at 61 years old, and with my darling bride having recently beaten cancer, it's time to step into the next phase of life and step back from running our business to enjoy more of what life has to offer with adventure travel high on our list of priorities.