How I brought my company back from the brink of collapse

It sounds like such a simple process, but it was obviously hard work behind the scenes.

That was pretty much what it was. We talked about our specific knowledge areas, and one of them was contractors and suppliers, and procurement. There was a familiarity with that style of work, and I had been involved in procurement for quite some time. Having that natural affinity in that space, we had a look around the market to see what competition we could find, and as it turns out, there was very little. It’s a fairly specialised area.

So we very quickly established basically almost complete market domination, and then we’ve slowly picked up other work in the past few years. The majority is in Queensland, but we also have a lot of work with government departments in both Western Australia and the Northern Territory, to train all their public servants. We’re doing work for some of the largest companies in Australia.

You mentioned this is something plenty of small businesses experience – so what would you say to them in the same situation?

I think in small business, you have to be like that. It takes hard work, you have to take some risks, and you can’t play it safe. You just have to take a chance and come up with some ideas. In our case, it was expanding into this new territory to get more work. Sometimes you have bad ideas, and sometimes you don’t. But you just need to have the drive to keep going.

What’s next for Transformed?

It’s interesting because the vocational training space is going through a massive change at the moment. There’s been a number of things driving that change, and one is the move towards a national regulatory regime away from state-based regulation.

The thing that’s going to be most interesting for us is one of the COAG agenda items that’s been underway for a while, regarding the harmonisation of licensing in 2014. That’s going to be a great change for us, and is going to give us some significant growth.