How I grew my business with in-house training

Evolution Traffic Control began when founders David Schramm and Peter Stahlhut felt they could beat the efforts of a previous employer. Now, the traffic control and road management company turns over more than $45 million a year and counts hundreds of employees.

But Schramm has been able to grow the business by not only investing in new opportunities, but by registering the company as a training organisation. Now equipping his employers is much cheaper than before, and Evolution Traffic has even gained revenue by starting an external training program.

How’s the business been travelling?

My brother-in-law started it back in June 2004, and we only started with five guys and two trucks. We’re now at over 900 people and 400 vehicles, and there is a fair amount of growth there.

They’re all employees, but we probably have about 25% of them on a permanent part-time basis. The rest of the workforce is casual.

Can you explain a little of what you do?

We do a lot of the stuff the civil contractors don’t want to do. So, a company will contact us and we’ll work on many of the smaller suburban back roads and so on.

Why are so many of your workers on a casual basis?

Because of the weather, believe it or not. If you have 800 people needing to go out and work, they can’t do that when it’s raining. You can’t lay road works during the rain, so the work drops off. If they’re on a permanent basis there are hundreds of people that still need to be paid.

So you became an RTO a few years ago. How did that happen?

Stepping back a bit, what happened when traffic management as an industry was born was after the Fitzgerald inquiry in Queensland determined that policeman doing road works needed to be paid at a special rate because we were being employed as an external resource.

After that inquiry came out, the idea was that policemen were professionals, they should be paid as professionals. So we went from costing about $25 an hour to $75 an hour.

The Brisbane City Council then tried to do private contracting.

How did that turn out?

The way it worked was you go to a traffic control company, do a one-day course, and then get a ticket laminated that says you’re able to do certain activities. That course was organised by Main Roads, and you took your certificate and off you go.

So what made you switch to doing your own training?

What happened was that two years ago, Main Roads introduced four levels of traffic control. They told us all in the industry that they were going to start these training courses, and they were going to be delivered by registered training organisations.

Were you worried about the cost of that?

We’d initially done some training internally for our own business and processes, and we found we get good quality employees that way. But after I heard what Main Roads said, I thought that we had to become a registered training organisation.

My idea was that we need to become an RTO initially just to train our own staff. I had close to 250 staff that I needed to train, and I just can’t take them off the road and do a course at some training academy. The cost was too high and it needed to be something we could manage internally.

Do you feel it adds value to your business?

The second thread to all of this is that not only is the training a necessity, but it’s a good investment. We can upskill our own staff. We’re looking at things like Certificate IV, doing first aid and so on. We can upskill internally and hopefully we’ll get to a stage where everyone in our company is first aid trained.

But you also use your RTO qualification as an opportunity to gain revenue, is that right?

The other part of this is the external training, yes. Many of the companies we like to work with on the roads need to understand what our traffic controllers do, so if our guys need to take a required break someone can stand-in for them.

Initially all I wanted to do was cover the cost of becoming a training organisation by doing external training, and we’ve achieved that.

Do you use that as a pitching tool when you bid for work?

We can add value to our clients’ businesses as well, yes. You have two guys on a job site, and they’re doing traffic management. They need to go and take breaks, etc, but they can’t just leave and go and do something else without having a stand-in.

So we go and say to these businesses – we’ll train four of your guys who are doing road works in how to do traffic control. This means that whenever our guys go on a break, they fill in, and we don’t need to have a third person there working on the day to make up for it all.

Do you find that training increases morale among staff?

From a personnel perspective, I think it makes people feel better about themselves. They’re getting skills, a qualification, and so on.

The guys enjoy it. It’s not necessarily a career path for them, but it’s improving their skills. That having been said, we had a team leader on the road who is now in a supervisory role within management. It does allow career paths for some.

Can you attract staff this way?

Yes, I think we can.

Should other businesses consider becoming an RTO, or external training?

I think so, but it depends on the size. We had 250 staff, but in order to train those we want out and actually performed other levels of training for others. It was a mandate for us in the start, but it provides advantages for us and really creates value within the business.