WE ARE GROWING FUNNY
WE ARE GROWING FUNNY BUSINESS Colin Barnes STORES MELBOURNE I remember back in the Blackburn office, while unloading a container, that we surrounded Robert Stetner’s motorbike with pallets so it hid his bike, and when he came looking for it he could not find it and was looking for a while. We also put Daniel Bloomfield’s bike in a container we were loading and shut the doors with help from Grant Kassell and fellow conspirators. Chris White NORTHERN SALES QUEENSLAND Due to snakes entering the building at our premises around Brisbane Airport from time to time, snake training was organised for the Brisbane staff. The purpose was to basically identify common snakes, and to know what Grant Kassell RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT MELBOURNE Back in Blackburn, we used to have evening drinks on a Friday night with Envirorent. I hate red wine, while John Dal Sasso and Robert Maxwell are connoisseurs. One night, John was called down stairs for a customer, and I replaced his red wine with a glass of undiluted Ribena. He came back, sat down, sipped at his ‘wine’, swallowed it... and only after what seemed an eternity, but was really only seconds with us all watching him, did he react. to do should a snake be encountered. Although a bit scary, it was funny to see everyone take a big step back when the snake catchers brought the brown snake out. We even have a pet snake living in an old brick BBQ at the back of the premises, which is a beautiful non-venomous green tree snake called “Bitey”. 1992 Ecotech establishes branch offices around Australia ACHIEVING THE EXTRAORDINARY David Brown SYSTEMS MELBOURNE Working in the Pilbara region in outback W.A helping to set up monitoring stations around the town of Newman. This was needed for the expanding iron ore mining operations at Mount Whaleback - which is the biggest single-pit open-cut iron ore mine in the world! Chris Fowler SYSTEMS MELBOURNE The Systems department in the early days took on 14 Air Quality Monitoring Stations (AQMS) at once, all with walk-in shelters for gaseous and particulate instruments for export. With only a small staff contingent, the cooperation, skill sets shown and determination to achieve with all involved, left an extraordinary sense of achievement with us all. By meeting this shipment deadline, we proved we could achieve what looked impossible, and set a benchmark for the future. A big achievement for the times! And a credit to all involved. Stefanus Irwanto SOUTHERN SALES MELBOURNE My time at Ecotech has been really rewarding. I have personally developed and enjoyed the journey with Ecotech. Hope to see many more successful years to come. Image by: Chris White Image by: Chris Fowler ECOTECH : TOGETHER
OUR FRIENDS ACROSS THE GLOBE Rob Brown HEALTH, SAFETY, ENVIRONMENT & QUALITY (AND FORMALLY INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY) MELBOURNE If you ever do a Google search for companies called “Ecotech” or “Eco Tech”, you’ll see we aren’t alone in the world; there are even other companies in the Melbourne area calling themselves Ecotech. When I joined Ecotech, our main domain name was “ecotech.com.au” and while this is a familiar name in Australia, if we wanted to stand out in the whole world, we really needed the “ecotech.com” domain. Unfortunately, ecotech.com was already taken by a Russian guy called Pavel Kettig who ran a business called Eco Tech Consulting based in a little town on Vancouver Island in Canada. Juan Luis Steimle REPRESENTACIONES MEXICANAS DE MAQUINARIA Y EQUIPO (REP MEX) MEXICO Rep Mex experience with Ecotech: It all started at an AWMA (Air & Waste Management Association) Show in Vancouver around 1981 when we were both representing Monitor Labs (ML) in a ML cocktail party. I met with Robert Dal Sasso and we started talking about many things and one of them was the need we had to integrate complete units which we had already asked ML to help us with this, but they told us their policy was to sell instruments not integrated products. So we saw in Ecotech a solution because we were already representing the same product lines but in very different territories. This relationship started very well and the next year we placed an order for two complete mobile shelters. Every time we had a problem we were getting the unconditional support of Robert and his associates. This helped us to grow and we started gaining strength. Our friendship grew, Robert came several times to Mexico and we went to Australia and were able to appreciate how Ecotech grew steadily. In parallel, we were also growing. (We started working in 1979 from our home and in 1981 we rented an office too large for us which we outgrew several years later. In 2004 we purchased a house in Polanco and built there the Rep Mex building.) The relationship between Rep Mex and Ecotech was good for both of us. We felt the Ecotech support many times we were getting better answers from Ecotech than from the original equipment manufacturers. For this reason, we decided to team up with Ecotech. We built a close partnership and now that Ecotech is much larger we enjoy the international support of its team headed by Felicity Sharp who is the main contact and coordinates the commercial and technical issues with all the pertinent departments. We admire how Ecotech has grown and now has a manufacturing facility to distribute leading technology worldwide and is looking for innovations. We believe that keeping a good Quality Assurance in the manufacture, and listening to the problems and innovations will keep Ecotech at the head of the technology. Since we have always worked in a true and honest fashion the relationship has been excellent and this is how we would like to see it in the next 40 years. Nicholas Dal Sasso wrote an email to him back in 2009 and offered to buy it from him and eventually he agreed on a very reasonable price. We also had to keep forwarding Pavel’s mail for a year and a half as part of the deal. If we hadn’t bought the domain back then, we could easily be paying 10 times that amount now if anyone was willing to part with it. Felicity Sharp with Juan & Claudia Steimle, owners of Rep Mex Owning that domain name is critical to our brand. 21
