Business View Oceania | January 2021

43 44 BUSINESS VIEW OCEANIA JANUARY 2021 BUSINESS VIEW OCEANIA JANUARY 2021 wanting to repair roads as much as possible, to making the repairs last as long as possible. “One of our suppliers recommended us to a major roading company in Australasia who then approached us with a view to doing some very innovative work around how roads are built. This relationship has really made us realise that we’re a company that has a strong knowledge library. A lot of our development staff have been here for 25 or 30 years. It’s allowed us to cross industries and develop bespoke solutions for major customers. That’s a focus right now, cultivating relationships where we become a technology partner. We do the development work, which our customer validates, and we basically end up directly supplying large volumes of bespoke material to this client.” BVO: How does your approach to product development differ from that of other companies? Jones: “A lot of the development work we’ve “And that’s what’s happening in roading. If a road has to be resealed every two or three years and you can make it last three times longer, then you’ve got a huge saving. Not just cost, but also less traffic congestion and those sorts of things. And it’s global. I’ve driven around America and Europe quite a bit and the roads are full of potholes and badly need resealing. What we’ve come up with is a much better way of doing those very traditional industry-type activities. We constantly marvel that someone hasn’t done this before.” BVO: Why would someone want to work for Uroxsys? Waddingham: “For our R&D, we have a number of staff who are trained chemists. We put one of them through Auckland University and they received a PhD. There is a strong team who do the development work here onsite. All our offices and manufacturing facility are also onsite so all the staff are interacting and know each other well. Approximately a quarter of our staff are R&D based, which I think is quite disproportionate to a lot of companies these days. We have very low staff turnover and I think that’s an extension of the fact that we’re a family-owned business. We insist on our staff not working long hours, even telling them to go home at times. We want staff to have a good work life balance. And the payoff for us as a company is that people want to stay here. If you can keep your staff on board, it benefits the business massively. So, we’ve consciously done that.” Jones: “Getting skilled labour is always a problem. In fact, we’re better off by getting people in who have the right attitude and training them than trying to find people who would come in with preconceptions. Even if it’s been in a similar sort of industry. We are so different to the normal way of operating a paint company. One other thing we observed working with customers, some for over 30 years, is that we have found more institutional memory of UROXSYS LTD done has been solving a problem for a particular customer and then finding it’s an industry-wide problem. And we’ve been able to be effective because, coming in from the outside with no preconceptions and being very analytical, you often come up with a completely different strategy and approach. Once you convert people to the benefits of changing the traditional way for something that performs a lot better, then you’ve got products that really sell themselves. “To build on the point of environmental advantages, one thing we focus on is durability. Because even if a product has the same VOCs as other products, if it lasts two or three times longer then it’s better than coming up with something that has less VOCs but doesn’t perform as well and has to be redone more often. That’s the sort of approach we take. Being able to come into an industry without the blinding effect of ‘this is how we’ve always done it’ has let us come up with much more insightful and effective solutions.