December 3, 2025 • 27 mins
You may not know it, but you’ve probably used a Ventia service today. Dean Banks, Managing Director and Group CEO, tells us how the essential infrastructure giant manages the assets that power daily life, like water, transport, and telecommunications.
Dean explains the advantages of being a broad portfolio business across Australia and New Zealand, and how the company’s sheer size helps them gather the data to deliver cost savings for customers.
Hear how Ventia hopes to get a bigger piece of the $100 billion energy opportunity, and new five-year contract awards in telecommunications. Dean reveals why in a volatile era, what he terms "boring reliability" is a big advantage, with a focus on keeping their 35,000 employees safe, and defending against cyber threats as a major government contractor.
Plus, how Ventia's telecommunications expertise is being used in space, with telescopes in the deserts of Western Australia to take “pictures of the past".
For more or to watch on YouTube—check out http://linktr.ee/sharedlunch
Shared Lunch is brought to you by Sharesies Australia Limited (ABN 94 648 811 830; AFSL 529893) in Australia and Sharesies Limited (NZ) in New Zealand. It is not financial advice. Information provided is general only and current at the time it’s provided, and does not take into account your objectives, financial situation and needs. We do not provide recommendations and you should always read the disclosure documents available from the product issuer before making a financial decision. Our disclosure documents and terms and conditions—including a Target Market Determination and IDPS Guide for Sharesies Australian customers—can be found on our relevant Australian or NZ website.
Investing involves risk. You might lose the money you start with. If you require financial advice, you should consider speaking with a qualified financial advisor. Past performance is not a guarantee of future performance.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Hi, Welcome to Shared Lunch, brought to you by Shares E's.
At Shares's, we're on a mission to create financial empowerment
for everyone, and that's why these conversations are so important.
It's a chance to peek behind the curtain and learn
more about what's going on in the world of wealth.
I'm Sonya Williams, co founder and co CEO at Shares EA's,
and in today's episode of Shared Lunch, we're in North
(00:24):
Sydney speaking to the CEO of one of Australia and
New Zealand's largest essential infrastructure companies, Ventire. Dean Banks is
a managing director and group CEO of a company that
many of us rely on to keep the water flowing
through our taps, the lights on, and other vital infrastructure
in our community.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Investing involves a risk you might lose the money you
start with. We recommend talking to a licensed financial advisor.
We also recommend reading product disclosure documents before deciding to invest.
Everything you're about to see and here is current at
the time of recording. We acknowledge which is the cameo
regal people of the ur nation, the traditional custodians of
(01:03):
the land, water and sky from where we're filming today
and pay respects to holders past and present.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
So Hidin, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
Hello Sonya.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
So let's start with the basics. What does Vindia and
what do you do?
Speaker 3 (01:17):
Sa Ventire is an essential services company that really manages
the assets that utilize to go through your daily lives.
So if you think about operations, maintenance and service, we
would be looking after the water when you switch on
a tap in the morning. We would be monitoring the
highway and recovering if you broke down on the highway
(01:38):
or in a tunnel. We'd be at the school doing
facilities management or the hospital all the way through until
when you come home and you start to use different media,
we'd be behind the telecommunications that allow you to asset
that particular information very broad. I think that's one of
the advantages of the business. Actually, the portfolio perspective of
it means that we're not driven by one capability and
(02:01):
gives us great agility and flexibility as well.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
You're from England, Liverpool Van. How did you end up
where you are now leading one of Australia's top two
hundred A six listed company.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
Can be a long story or a short story about
how I got here, but essentially quite a few years
ago I got off at a job as a CEO
in Australia. So it was as I would describing an
inch to scratch. And then I was in lockdown in
Covid in the UK and got a call about this opportunity.
And I'll be candid. I live in a very small
village in the UK. There was about six houses within
(02:36):
a five mile radius. Sorry, getting the opportunity to talk
to anybody was really welcome. So started the conversations about Ventire.
Really compelling story, value proposition sold to me, and I
think a lot opportunities come and live here in Australia.
Great life experience, but professionally as well, to become groups
here of a business that had just grown substantially, was
(02:58):
in private equity with plans to move into the listed environment.
It's quite a unique set of circumstances.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
So let's talk about Vintia and results. What are some
of the key takeaways from your most recent financial update.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
Look, I think the great thing about Ventire is we're
only really a business that has been known since listing
in many ways back to still a relatively unknown brand.
Our business have been built up by acquisitions of various companies,
but five years ago, when I did arrive, we decided
to reset the brand, so everything now is called Ventia
(03:34):
rather than the previous trade names that they had, And
over the last four years we've really built up a
track record of reliability and trust in doing what we
say will do. So I think we've looked at our
last set of results. I think broadly we did what
we said we would do. But probably the most exciting
thing in there is that our work in hand, which
(03:55):
obviously gives us longevity of pipeline and work moving forward,
has grown signals dificantly, largely off the back of telecommunications
contract towards which historically have been eighteen months in tenure
so quite short. But the last two that we've worn
with both Telsterra and NBA have been five years. So
that gives both our employees, you know, stability and security
(04:18):
in terms of employment, but also gives our investors great
stability around the performance of the business.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
What was behind the merging of the brands under the one.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
I'm a major believer in simplification and standardization, so I
think that it's really important that hopefully we can get
everybody to be proud and passionate about a brand when
you fragment it, it's very, very difficult. So you'll notice
I'm wearing a vent Your badge. A lot of our
people you'll see invent your branded clothing or wear invent
your badge, and lots of people ask often what is
(04:50):
the badge, which hopefully gives our people an opportunity to
talk with pride and passion about the organization, so helping
to get people to really know Ventre is and what
Ventre is about. So there might be some concession sometimes
in terms of thinking about your own project, your own geography,
and thinking about the greater good of the organization and
(05:13):
one of the big goals for the organization. That's quite
hard culturally as well to drive. If you've been an
organization built up of various different silos, getting everybody to
think at a group level is a real challenge. Now
I'm not saying we're anywhere near the end of that journey,
but it's certainly a journey that we're on.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
You don't work directly with retail customers. Can you tell
us some of the customers you do support, and how
do you stand out from your competitors.
Speaker 3 (05:39):
So we're largely a business that is business to government,
business to business, but of course we do touch the
end customer often though in the brand name of one
of our clients. If you look across the four sectors,
so if you looked at telecommunications, all the big telco carriers,
so for us, you'll be looking at Telstra, Opters, t
(06:00):
PG etc. Would work with them. If you move into
our infrastructure services business sort of more of the industrial
so Chevron, blue Scope, et cetera. And then in transport
transurbent probably for major highways and tunnels. And then finally
in defense and social instructure, largely government clients, but also
work with private customers like health Scope as an example.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
You've kind of grouped across the ford just then, but
do you want to tell us a bit more about
the stickers and the breakdowns.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
Yeah, So I think back to great portfolio business really
cover the geography of Australia and New Zealand. About forty
percent of our work is in where the population live,
but then about forty percent in regional remote areas as well,
and that's really critical to our community service in terms
of capabilities. Defense and social instructure largely is facilities management,
(06:53):
and that can be as we would call it soft
and hard, so cleaning and catering on a soft side,
on a hard sided, mechanicalal, electrical support of assets. If
I take defense, then we do a lot of services
for clients, and I think that's really important. So for defense,
we'll do cleaning, catering, will do logistics management, will maintain
(07:14):
assets for them like fire trucks, but also their own
assets as well. The other big thing for our business
is we try to cross sell our capability, so also
for defense, we'll do things like environmental activity to remove
prefas where there's contaminated ground. We'll do telecommunications to put
mesh networks in there so military personnel can be connected.
(07:34):
Because when they come up for renewal, if we're providing
six or seven services, it's hard to replace all of those.
And most of our competitors often do one or two
of our capabilities, or work in one or two of
the geographies. So actually one of our key differentiators is
that ability to do multiple services for our customers.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
What is the kind of reven you break down across
the different sectors.
Speaker 3 (07:58):
Defense, social instructure, which we've just talked as Our biggest
sector infrastructure services. Slightly different sector in that it's really
three component parts, so as we would call it resource
in industrial, which is doing mechanical and electrical engineering on
major infrastructure assets. Also do rigs and well so coal,
seam gas. We do water and water utilities, operations and management. Telecommunications.
(08:22):
Obviously we do telecommunications, but we also work in the
date adjacencies, using that expert capability to do things for
defense as I talked about earlier, but also for things
in space. So we're in wa currently in the middle
of the desert. They're putting up three hundred telescopes so
we can go back to space and start to look
at you know, what created the world. I can't really
(08:44):
explain exactly how it works, but they're going to go
back and take pictures of the past and start to
understand how the universe comes to be in And then finally,
our smallest sector is transport, where we really work in
a niche maintaining and operating major highways and tunnels across
the major cities here in Australia and New Zealand. In
(09:04):
terms of revenue. Back to your question, defense social instructure
is the biggest telco and I then are the next
and transports a smaller niche. But I think the great
thing about being in a portfolio is, of course some
will have growth spurts at different times, so that sort
of balances off the group risk really really nicely.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Yeah, Like if we hone in on the rise in
digital connectivity and how that's really growing at the moment,
and how it translates into supporting the Talco networks, I mean,
how significant can it be for Australia.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
Look, I think it's massive, I will say, And some things,
you know, Australia is really ahead, and then on other
things we're a long way behind. But I think that
promotes opportunity for us. And the great thing about our
business is that old assets are good for us because
they need more operations and maintenance, and new assets are
fantastic for us because a new asset to operate and maintain.
(09:58):
Since COVID everybody wants to be connected everywhere, we need
five G in place, we need fixed fiber in place.
And then of course there's even more security requirements and
so one of the big risks for a business like
ours is cyber But that's also an opportunity because we're
now building closed networks, private networks for people and our
(10:19):
first for data. The growth of technology is going to
be a growth engine for our business. But the big
thing about it as well is there going to be
power required to support that. And of course we do
the power part of it as well, So actually we
can get multiple growth engines from the tail winds that
we've got behind us currently.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
Yeah, so let's hone in on energy or power, because
obviously with all the rise and AI and all the
processing needed, we need more energy. So how does this
affect Vintia's work and how are you thinking about that?
Speaker 3 (10:53):
I would say our biggest market opportunities in the energy space.
If you look at our business today, we do about
six billion as a revenue. We say the market size
is eighty billion dollars growing at about five percent a year,
So by twenty twenty nine is going to be a
over one hundred billion dollar market opportunity for US. Energy
is probably about forty percent of that. So the first
(11:15):
piece of it is really about stabilizing supply of energy,
and then the second piece is really about new energy.
We have the skills to support all of that, but
we're quite a small player in the market today. I
will say one of the problems with renewable energy some
of those assets are not built yet, and for us,
(11:35):
that means there's a bit of a snowball effect of
opportunities being pushed now but continuing to grow. I can't
see anything but growth in that space for our organization.
One of the challenges for businesses in that space is
obviously have you got the capabilities to support it? Because
if the opportunity is growing, are the resources available? So
(11:56):
for us, we spend a lot of time looking at
making sure we can get the resources to support I'm
really proud that today our attrition with the people that
are in the business is the lowest it's been during
my tenure, and also the number of applications for roles
Invent is higher than it's ever been, which I think
is back to the brand starting to get some recognition,
(12:16):
good reputation, and people seeing it as a really good
place to work. So hopefully we can continue to attract
the best and brightest.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
How do you think about what the biggest opportunities are
and the biggest challenges for Vinteria right now?
Speaker 3 (12:30):
I'll start with challenges for when you've got thirty five
thousand workforce. Health and safety is a key consideration. Safety
is our license to operate, so it is really important
that we look after the safety of our people and
also their well being. Today there's a lot more consideration
around the well being of our people, and we've got
people from various different backgrounds and upbringings, but they mix
(12:53):
really well in our organization. Second big risk is cyber
which I mentioned earlier. I mean, we do seventy five
percent of our revenue for government. Clearly you know there
are a lot of tax to try and get access
to data that government hold. Now, the first protection for
a business like as is don't hold the data, so
we only hold things we need to hold, and then
we put the appropriate protections in place. On the opportunity side,
(13:15):
I really see four big opportunities. So we've discussed energy.
Energy is I think fundamental to our future success story.
The three others would be digital, infrastructure, water and fourthly defense.
There's additional commitment to expenditship from the Australian Defense Force
(13:37):
as a percentage of GDP. But we're also probably seeing
with a geopolitical situation, more international interest as well in Australia,
and we support both the Australian Defense Force and military
personnel that come to these shores.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
You mentioned thirty five thousand employees and you mentioned health
and safety. With a team that size and in the
industries that you're in, how do you measure that and
make sure it's improving over time.
Speaker 3 (14:04):
It's hard and of course you've got to have great
trust in the managers and supervisors you've got out there
making sure people work to the safe practices and policies
that we've got. Now you need to wrap some verification
around that as well. Trust only takes you so far,
but there's a lot of work on education. So when
people join the business, whether they are a full time
(14:25):
employer or subcontractor, they're treated as part of the family
and get the same education. So again back to that
simplification and standardization, we try and hold the same safety
standards for everybody and make sure we're looking after the
safety and well being of everybody invented.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
And so you touched on earlier coming into the role
and really thinking of the strategy of the business and
that's a big part of the success story to date.
What is it, what is the corporate strategy and how
is it driving the growth and performance for the business.
Speaker 3 (14:57):
I think this business has done great things in the
past to create the platform that we've got today, and
I think that's really really important. One of the things
I would say that when I arrived was I felt
that in a private equity world there was probably quite
a lot of focus on the financial elements of performance
of the business, and I would say a little bit
of hierarchical management. But also the business was driven very
(15:20):
much with the head and it thought very logically. I
felt there was probably a little bit of heart missing
from the organization. They need both. So I'm not in
any way saying that everything can be about heart, and
particularly as a publicly listed business, you know there's an
expectation on you for delivery. But I think we've really
balanced culturally head and heart, and therefore our strategy is
(15:42):
really about behaviors. But our aim, mister Trung, get everybody
pointed in the same direction. So our strategy is to
redefine service excellence and be known as the company that
brings celebrity services. I would call it to all of
our clients, and my point is, well, your customers are
and your salaries, etc. Etcetera. So you should treat them
(16:03):
like celebrities. So we try and, if you like, differentiate
ourselves by that celebrity service across the business. And of
course you can also create a bit of competition there
about talking about celebrity service and celebrating it and then
keep raising the bar in terms of performance. So the
first pillar of redefining service excellence is customer focus. The
(16:25):
second pillar is innovation, and I look at innovation in
two ways. So firstly, we should know the assets that
we look after better than our customers, which means we
are the best informed people and can make the best
decisions about maintaining those assets, even down to simple things.
Because of our scale that we've got a library of information.
(16:45):
So if you're running a hospital and you ask us
to come and look at doing the facilities maintenance, we
might look at the performance and the way you've been
managing it and say, look, we noticed that on the
pumps you've been changing the filters every three months. We
look after one hundred and twenty other hospitals and we've
proven there's no deterioration if you change the filters every
(17:06):
four months. We'd have that knowledge because of our scale,
whereas they wouldn't have that and of course that's a
twenty five percent cost saving straight away, so we can
bring that sort of data to the place. And then
the second part of innovation is of course bringing smart technology,
so you know, robots, AI, all of those sort of
things that you know we're expected to deliver and we're
(17:27):
executed to find and that's important. Then back to that
point of being curious, I really try and tell our
people they should always be looking for best practice and
then bringing it into the business. The first part of
that is we've probably got about two hundred live projects
on the ground today, so we shouldn't really amid you
of deviation between the best and the worst. The tolerance
(17:48):
should be really small, whereas I find the tolerance is
too big for me at the minute. So the first
thing is to try and get everybody to the best
standard we've got internally and then elevate it through continuous
improvement to best practice across the globe. And then the
third tenant of our strategy is around sustainability. So we
serve community. A lot of the people that work for
(18:09):
us live in those communities, so they know the people personally.
So our legacy is to try and leave the community
better when we leave than when we arrived. And I
think that's really really important because we have very long
tenure contracts. Our average contract ten years seven years, so
we tend to be there a long time, and our
innorate on contracts is ninety percent, so the lightlield is
(18:30):
we're going to be there for decades. So it is
really important that we do the right thing. And I
think that we've got a really high moral compass. People
are at the heart of everything we do in safety
is our number one brand promise.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
And so talking on that innovation layer, the second one,
how are you thinking about AI and your business.
Speaker 3 (18:49):
We've introduced co pilots, so for a lot of the
management team, they're probably producing better emails than they ever
did before, and they're producing documents with data in they
probably knew nothing about it before, and that does make
a difference. Of course, then you want to try and
get more specific and tangible benefits into the organization. So
we have a large call center supporting a lot of
(19:12):
our customers, and in the call center, now we've got
AI running there that'll know the person on the call,
We'll know the previous calls they've made. We'll show us
other people who rang in with similar topic, so we
can be a lot better educated in our answer to
an individual when they call in. And if you think
about telecommunications, a lot of our responses are about technical
(19:33):
fixes to reactive problems in the field. Again, if we
can have all that data, we can have real insights
into the asset and explain to them very simply how
we can fix it. We're using it across a plethora
of other things, but I think we're still educating people
around it. We're actually just signed up to a partnership
with Melbourne Business School to go and do some education
(19:53):
for our next one hundred managers. So we try and
make sure we spread best practice, as I said, across
our oldation. We've just introduced something called ven Spark. Ven
Spark is a system that's built with AI embedded where
you can put employee suggestion scheme in and then we
can start to capture understanding around our business about how
(20:15):
that works and also then generically spread best practice across
the organization and that's available to our people. They can
see it. It's a collaborative tool, but it's very transparent
tool as well. And how about robotics, A lot of
robotics in many tenures are not right for us. Where
we've seen particular advantages is particularly in land management, so
(20:38):
simple things like cutting grass, a traditional sort of diesel
lawma is not there anymore. You'll probably see a robotic
electronic lawnmower. A great advantage for that is less noise.
On the other side of that, you look at things
like cleaning for schools. A lot of the robotics there
we won't use, and one of the reasons is that
(21:00):
people like people to people connectivity. But if you think
of a school, sports or often people leave things out,
and one of the things our claimers do first is
remove the things and put them to the edges, whereas
a robot just cleans around them. With future iterations that
may change. And then of course we robotics, we're using
things like agents. It's very much we look for new technology.
(21:23):
But also we really really are proud that we are
a people business, and I think the connection with people
is really important and I don't think anything will lose
over the long term in our organization.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
I like to think of it as the human competitive advantage,
you know, like, what what's the competitive advantage of being human?
And bringing that into business.
Speaker 3 (21:43):
As I said, robots can help us in many ways,
but I think the biggest thing for me at this
point in time is data to make better informed decisions,
do things more productively. But largely people still doing that,
and of course people asking the right questions as well.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
And so looking ahead, what are your biggest part for
the interior in the next three to five years?
Speaker 3 (22:03):
The big thing for me is to try and create
a burning ambition in the organization, and you can only
do that if people buy into what you do in today,
but also are very passionate about improving the performance of
the business. So improving every day is fundamental to our
future success. A lot of our customers they're challenged today
with the economy and they want to do things at
(22:26):
the lowest possible cost. Moving forward, it is about working
collaboratively in a strategic partnership to find smarter ways of
doing things. So often with some entities, they'll say to us,
we want you to provide all the services, but we
can't necessarily pay you the inflationary in cost year on year,
so we need you to find smart ways of driving
(22:46):
that simple things can make a big difference in this organization.
So it really is about daily incremental gains, getting everybody
pointed in the same direction. And I also believe that
I'm really pass I'm really proud and privileged with the
CEO of this organization, but I get to represent all
the people and what they do. So sharing their stories
(23:08):
a success. Asking them to be passionate about the brand
and talking passionately about the brand is infectious and I
think it makes a real difference.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
And so if you wanted to leave one message with invistors,
what would it be.
Speaker 3 (23:20):
Every investor looks at their investment in different ways, but
I think with Ventire, what you've got is a business
that has already built up a reputation for delivering on
what it will say or do almost to the degree
of being and delivering boring reliability. And I think when
you look at everything that's going on the world today,
(23:41):
boring reliability is actually quite a good selling point. And
the great thing is I'm really boring. So I promise
you that we will bring boring reliability to the organization.
I think a lot of time in businesses, when they
are successful, they start to find that's not exciting, so
they can start to look for things that bring more
(24:01):
excitement to the organization. I really believe in staying within
our circles of trust where we perform really well. And
I go back to there's lots of headroom for us
to grow, so we can really focus on quality of
growth rather than quantity of growth. And I think that
is in today's world a very very good value proposition
(24:23):
for investors looking to get that annuity style performance out
of their portfolio.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
To wrap up, do you have a favorite piece of
I guess leadership wisdom it has really stuck with you.
Speaker 3 (24:36):
Well, the biggest thing for me is forever learning. Well,
I love to learn from people. We as a business
bring lots of people in from different backgrounds and different
perspectives to share their stories, and I think that's really
really important because we want to educate, we want to share,
so for me that forever learning piece and remember as
(24:57):
a business that we want to see all all of
the people in our organization grow and develop and become
the best version of themselves. And we want them to
talk fondly about ventire. But I think in terms of
being successful, the person that cares the most about their
careers is them and therefore we just say to them,
grasp every opportunity that comes, and you never make a
(25:18):
bad decision. You know, every decision is a learning decision
to go with it and make it successful and hopefully
we can help educate them and experience them such that
on the most the decisions are really good decisions.
Speaker 1 (25:32):
So we know investing infrastructure is key for economies to thrive.
Is there enough hitting at a national level or why
that's so important When you look.
Speaker 3 (25:41):
At infrastructure investment, there are lots of examples that data
shows it helps the economy to grow. As an organization ourselves,
we menasure social value, so e g. Every dollar you
spend with vent her, how much gets returned and reinvest
in the local community. And if you look at how
winds in the country, things are quite simple in terms
(26:02):
of legislation, regulation, population growth. I mean the assets we serve, roads, hospitals, schools,
they're going to need investment, and of course the investment
into those assets means jobs and then it becomes a
circular economy. So from our perspective, we are advocates of investment.
But I would also say, as I said earlier, the
(26:22):
great thing about our business and the boringness of our business,
is that if we don't invest as a country the
old assets. If the population growth will be used more
need more maintenance, and if new assets come online, that's
new opportunity for us to drive revenue for the country.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
Thanks for joining us, Dean, and thanks everyone for tuning in.
You can watch you at lunch on YouTube or follow
along on your favorite podcast step leave us a rating
or a comment about what you'd like to hear about
next
Hi, Welcome to Shared Lunch, brought to you by Shares E's.
At Shares's, we're on a mission to create financial empowerment
for everyone, and that's why these conversations are so important.
It's a chance to peek behind the curtain and learn
more about what's going on in the world of wealth.
I'm Sonya Williams, co founder and co CEO at Shares EA's,
and in today's episode of Shared Lunch, we're in North
(00:24):
Sydney speaking to the CEO of one of Australia and
New Zealand's largest essential infrastructure companies, Ventire. Dean Banks is
a managing director and group CEO of a company that
many of us rely on to keep the water flowing
through our taps, the lights on, and other vital infrastructure
in our community.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Investing involves a risk you might lose the money you
start with. We recommend talking to a licensed financial advisor.
We also recommend reading product disclosure documents before deciding to invest.
Everything you're about to see and here is current at
the time of recording. We acknowledge which is the cameo
regal people of the ur nation, the traditional custodians of
(01:03):
the land, water and sky from where we're filming today
and pay respects to holders past and present.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
So Hidin, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
Hello Sonya.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
So let's start with the basics. What does Vindia and
what do you do?
Speaker 3 (01:17):
Sa Ventire is an essential services company that really manages
the assets that utilize to go through your daily lives.
So if you think about operations, maintenance and service, we
would be looking after the water when you switch on
a tap in the morning. We would be monitoring the
highway and recovering if you broke down on the highway
(01:38):
or in a tunnel. We'd be at the school doing
facilities management or the hospital all the way through until
when you come home and you start to use different media,
we'd be behind the telecommunications that allow you to asset
that particular information very broad. I think that's one of
the advantages of the business. Actually, the portfolio perspective of
it means that we're not driven by one capability and
(02:01):
gives us great agility and flexibility as well.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
You're from England, Liverpool Van. How did you end up
where you are now leading one of Australia's top two
hundred A six listed company.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
Can be a long story or a short story about
how I got here, but essentially quite a few years
ago I got off at a job as a CEO
in Australia. So it was as I would describing an
inch to scratch. And then I was in lockdown in
Covid in the UK and got a call about this opportunity.
And I'll be candid. I live in a very small
village in the UK. There was about six houses within
(02:36):
a five mile radius. Sorry, getting the opportunity to talk
to anybody was really welcome. So started the conversations about Ventire.
Really compelling story, value proposition sold to me, and I
think a lot opportunities come and live here in Australia.
Great life experience, but professionally as well, to become groups
here of a business that had just grown substantially, was
(02:58):
in private equity with plans to move into the listed environment.
It's quite a unique set of circumstances.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
So let's talk about Vintia and results. What are some
of the key takeaways from your most recent financial update.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
Look, I think the great thing about Ventire is we're
only really a business that has been known since listing
in many ways back to still a relatively unknown brand.
Our business have been built up by acquisitions of various companies,
but five years ago, when I did arrive, we decided
to reset the brand, so everything now is called Ventia
(03:34):
rather than the previous trade names that they had, And
over the last four years we've really built up a
track record of reliability and trust in doing what we
say will do. So I think we've looked at our
last set of results. I think broadly we did what
we said we would do. But probably the most exciting
thing in there is that our work in hand, which
(03:55):
obviously gives us longevity of pipeline and work moving forward,
has grown signals dificantly, largely off the back of telecommunications
contract towards which historically have been eighteen months in tenure
so quite short. But the last two that we've worn
with both Telsterra and NBA have been five years. So
that gives both our employees, you know, stability and security
(04:18):
in terms of employment, but also gives our investors great
stability around the performance of the business.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
What was behind the merging of the brands under the one.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
I'm a major believer in simplification and standardization, so I
think that it's really important that hopefully we can get
everybody to be proud and passionate about a brand when
you fragment it, it's very, very difficult. So you'll notice
I'm wearing a vent Your badge. A lot of our
people you'll see invent your branded clothing or wear invent
your badge, and lots of people ask often what is
(04:50):
the badge, which hopefully gives our people an opportunity to
talk with pride and passion about the organization, so helping
to get people to really know Ventre is and what
Ventre is about. So there might be some concession sometimes
in terms of thinking about your own project, your own geography,
and thinking about the greater good of the organization and
(05:13):
one of the big goals for the organization. That's quite
hard culturally as well to drive. If you've been an
organization built up of various different silos, getting everybody to
think at a group level is a real challenge. Now
I'm not saying we're anywhere near the end of that journey,
but it's certainly a journey that we're on.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
You don't work directly with retail customers. Can you tell
us some of the customers you do support, and how
do you stand out from your competitors.
Speaker 3 (05:39):
So we're largely a business that is business to government,
business to business, but of course we do touch the
end customer often though in the brand name of one
of our clients. If you look across the four sectors,
so if you looked at telecommunications, all the big telco carriers,
so for us, you'll be looking at Telstra, Opters, t
(06:00):
PG etc. Would work with them. If you move into
our infrastructure services business sort of more of the industrial
so Chevron, blue Scope, et cetera. And then in transport
transurbent probably for major highways and tunnels. And then finally
in defense and social instructure, largely government clients, but also
work with private customers like health Scope as an example.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
You've kind of grouped across the ford just then, but
do you want to tell us a bit more about
the stickers and the breakdowns.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
Yeah, So I think back to great portfolio business really
cover the geography of Australia and New Zealand. About forty
percent of our work is in where the population live,
but then about forty percent in regional remote areas as well,
and that's really critical to our community service in terms
of capabilities. Defense and social instructure largely is facilities management,
(06:53):
and that can be as we would call it soft
and hard, so cleaning and catering on a soft side,
on a hard sided, mechanicalal, electrical support of assets. If
I take defense, then we do a lot of services
for clients, and I think that's really important. So for defense,
we'll do cleaning, catering, will do logistics management, will maintain
(07:14):
assets for them like fire trucks, but also their own
assets as well. The other big thing for our business
is we try to cross sell our capability, so also
for defense, we'll do things like environmental activity to remove
prefas where there's contaminated ground. We'll do telecommunications to put
mesh networks in there so military personnel can be connected.
(07:34):
Because when they come up for renewal, if we're providing
six or seven services, it's hard to replace all of those.
And most of our competitors often do one or two
of our capabilities, or work in one or two of
the geographies. So actually one of our key differentiators is
that ability to do multiple services for our customers.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
What is the kind of reven you break down across
the different sectors.
Speaker 3 (07:58):
Defense, social instructure, which we've just talked as Our biggest
sector infrastructure services. Slightly different sector in that it's really
three component parts, so as we would call it resource
in industrial, which is doing mechanical and electrical engineering on
major infrastructure assets. Also do rigs and well so coal,
seam gas. We do water and water utilities, operations and management. Telecommunications.
(08:22):
Obviously we do telecommunications, but we also work in the
date adjacencies, using that expert capability to do things for
defense as I talked about earlier, but also for things
in space. So we're in wa currently in the middle
of the desert. They're putting up three hundred telescopes so
we can go back to space and start to look
at you know, what created the world. I can't really
(08:44):
explain exactly how it works, but they're going to go
back and take pictures of the past and start to
understand how the universe comes to be in And then finally,
our smallest sector is transport, where we really work in
a niche maintaining and operating major highways and tunnels across
the major cities here in Australia and New Zealand. In
(09:04):
terms of revenue. Back to your question, defense social instructure
is the biggest telco and I then are the next
and transports a smaller niche. But I think the great
thing about being in a portfolio is, of course some
will have growth spurts at different times, so that sort
of balances off the group risk really really nicely.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Yeah, Like if we hone in on the rise in
digital connectivity and how that's really growing at the moment,
and how it translates into supporting the Talco networks, I mean,
how significant can it be for Australia.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
Look, I think it's massive, I will say, And some things,
you know, Australia is really ahead, and then on other
things we're a long way behind. But I think that
promotes opportunity for us. And the great thing about our
business is that old assets are good for us because
they need more operations and maintenance, and new assets are
fantastic for us because a new asset to operate and maintain.
(09:58):
Since COVID everybody wants to be connected everywhere, we need
five G in place, we need fixed fiber in place.
And then of course there's even more security requirements and
so one of the big risks for a business like
ours is cyber But that's also an opportunity because we're
now building closed networks, private networks for people and our
(10:19):
first for data. The growth of technology is going to
be a growth engine for our business. But the big
thing about it as well is there going to be
power required to support that. And of course we do
the power part of it as well, So actually we
can get multiple growth engines from the tail winds that
we've got behind us currently.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
Yeah, so let's hone in on energy or power, because
obviously with all the rise and AI and all the
processing needed, we need more energy. So how does this
affect Vintia's work and how are you thinking about that?
Speaker 3 (10:53):
I would say our biggest market opportunities in the energy space.
If you look at our business today, we do about
six billion as a revenue. We say the market size
is eighty billion dollars growing at about five percent a year,
So by twenty twenty nine is going to be a
over one hundred billion dollar market opportunity for US. Energy
is probably about forty percent of that. So the first
(11:15):
piece of it is really about stabilizing supply of energy,
and then the second piece is really about new energy.
We have the skills to support all of that, but
we're quite a small player in the market today. I
will say one of the problems with renewable energy some
of those assets are not built yet, and for us,
(11:35):
that means there's a bit of a snowball effect of
opportunities being pushed now but continuing to grow. I can't
see anything but growth in that space for our organization.
One of the challenges for businesses in that space is
obviously have you got the capabilities to support it? Because
if the opportunity is growing, are the resources available? So
(11:56):
for us, we spend a lot of time looking at
making sure we can get the resources to support I'm
really proud that today our attrition with the people that
are in the business is the lowest it's been during
my tenure, and also the number of applications for roles
Invent is higher than it's ever been, which I think
is back to the brand starting to get some recognition,
(12:16):
good reputation, and people seeing it as a really good
place to work. So hopefully we can continue to attract
the best and brightest.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
How do you think about what the biggest opportunities are
and the biggest challenges for Vinteria right now?
Speaker 3 (12:30):
I'll start with challenges for when you've got thirty five
thousand workforce. Health and safety is a key consideration. Safety
is our license to operate, so it is really important
that we look after the safety of our people and
also their well being. Today there's a lot more consideration
around the well being of our people, and we've got
people from various different backgrounds and upbringings, but they mix
(12:53):
really well in our organization. Second big risk is cyber
which I mentioned earlier. I mean, we do seventy five
percent of our revenue for government. Clearly you know there
are a lot of tax to try and get access
to data that government hold. Now, the first protection for
a business like as is don't hold the data, so
we only hold things we need to hold, and then
we put the appropriate protections in place. On the opportunity side,
(13:15):
I really see four big opportunities. So we've discussed energy.
Energy is I think fundamental to our future success story.
The three others would be digital, infrastructure, water and fourthly defense.
There's additional commitment to expenditship from the Australian Defense Force
(13:37):
as a percentage of GDP. But we're also probably seeing
with a geopolitical situation, more international interest as well in Australia,
and we support both the Australian Defense Force and military
personnel that come to these shores.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
You mentioned thirty five thousand employees and you mentioned health
and safety. With a team that size and in the
industries that you're in, how do you measure that and
make sure it's improving over time.
Speaker 3 (14:04):
It's hard and of course you've got to have great
trust in the managers and supervisors you've got out there
making sure people work to the safe practices and policies
that we've got. Now you need to wrap some verification
around that as well. Trust only takes you so far,
but there's a lot of work on education. So when
people join the business, whether they are a full time
(14:25):
employer or subcontractor, they're treated as part of the family
and get the same education. So again back to that
simplification and standardization, we try and hold the same safety
standards for everybody and make sure we're looking after the
safety and well being of everybody invented.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
And so you touched on earlier coming into the role
and really thinking of the strategy of the business and
that's a big part of the success story to date.
What is it, what is the corporate strategy and how
is it driving the growth and performance for the business.
Speaker 3 (14:57):
I think this business has done great things in the
past to create the platform that we've got today, and
I think that's really really important. One of the things
I would say that when I arrived was I felt
that in a private equity world there was probably quite
a lot of focus on the financial elements of performance
of the business, and I would say a little bit
of hierarchical management. But also the business was driven very
(15:20):
much with the head and it thought very logically. I
felt there was probably a little bit of heart missing
from the organization. They need both. So I'm not in
any way saying that everything can be about heart, and
particularly as a publicly listed business, you know there's an
expectation on you for delivery. But I think we've really
balanced culturally head and heart, and therefore our strategy is
(15:42):
really about behaviors. But our aim, mister Trung, get everybody
pointed in the same direction. So our strategy is to
redefine service excellence and be known as the company that
brings celebrity services. I would call it to all of
our clients, and my point is, well, your customers are
and your salaries, etc. Etcetera. So you should treat them
(16:03):
like celebrities. So we try and, if you like, differentiate
ourselves by that celebrity service across the business. And of
course you can also create a bit of competition there
about talking about celebrity service and celebrating it and then
keep raising the bar in terms of performance. So the
first pillar of redefining service excellence is customer focus. The
(16:25):
second pillar is innovation, and I look at innovation in
two ways. So firstly, we should know the assets that
we look after better than our customers, which means we
are the best informed people and can make the best
decisions about maintaining those assets, even down to simple things.
Because of our scale that we've got a library of information.
(16:45):
So if you're running a hospital and you ask us
to come and look at doing the facilities maintenance, we
might look at the performance and the way you've been
managing it and say, look, we noticed that on the
pumps you've been changing the filters every three months. We
look after one hundred and twenty other hospitals and we've
proven there's no deterioration if you change the filters every
(17:06):
four months. We'd have that knowledge because of our scale,
whereas they wouldn't have that and of course that's a
twenty five percent cost saving straight away, so we can
bring that sort of data to the place. And then
the second part of innovation is of course bringing smart technology,
so you know, robots, AI, all of those sort of
things that you know we're expected to deliver and we're
(17:27):
executed to find and that's important. Then back to that
point of being curious, I really try and tell our
people they should always be looking for best practice and
then bringing it into the business. The first part of
that is we've probably got about two hundred live projects
on the ground today, so we shouldn't really amid you
of deviation between the best and the worst. The tolerance
(17:48):
should be really small, whereas I find the tolerance is
too big for me at the minute. So the first
thing is to try and get everybody to the best
standard we've got internally and then elevate it through continuous
improvement to best practice across the globe. And then the
third tenant of our strategy is around sustainability. So we
serve community. A lot of the people that work for
(18:09):
us live in those communities, so they know the people personally.
So our legacy is to try and leave the community
better when we leave than when we arrived. And I
think that's really really important because we have very long
tenure contracts. Our average contract ten years seven years, so
we tend to be there a long time, and our
innorate on contracts is ninety percent, so the lightlield is
(18:30):
we're going to be there for decades. So it is
really important that we do the right thing. And I
think that we've got a really high moral compass. People
are at the heart of everything we do in safety
is our number one brand promise.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
And so talking on that innovation layer, the second one,
how are you thinking about AI and your business.
Speaker 3 (18:49):
We've introduced co pilots, so for a lot of the
management team, they're probably producing better emails than they ever
did before, and they're producing documents with data in they
probably knew nothing about it before, and that does make
a difference. Of course, then you want to try and
get more specific and tangible benefits into the organization. So
we have a large call center supporting a lot of
(19:12):
our customers, and in the call center, now we've got
AI running there that'll know the person on the call,
We'll know the previous calls they've made. We'll show us
other people who rang in with similar topic, so we
can be a lot better educated in our answer to
an individual when they call in. And if you think
about telecommunications, a lot of our responses are about technical
(19:33):
fixes to reactive problems in the field. Again, if we
can have all that data, we can have real insights
into the asset and explain to them very simply how
we can fix it. We're using it across a plethora
of other things, but I think we're still educating people
around it. We're actually just signed up to a partnership
with Melbourne Business School to go and do some education
(19:53):
for our next one hundred managers. So we try and
make sure we spread best practice, as I said, across
our oldation. We've just introduced something called ven Spark. Ven
Spark is a system that's built with AI embedded where
you can put employee suggestion scheme in and then we
can start to capture understanding around our business about how
(20:15):
that works and also then generically spread best practice across
the organization and that's available to our people. They can
see it. It's a collaborative tool, but it's very transparent
tool as well. And how about robotics, A lot of
robotics in many tenures are not right for us. Where
we've seen particular advantages is particularly in land management, so
(20:38):
simple things like cutting grass, a traditional sort of diesel
lawma is not there anymore. You'll probably see a robotic
electronic lawnmower. A great advantage for that is less noise.
On the other side of that, you look at things
like cleaning for schools. A lot of the robotics there
we won't use, and one of the reasons is that
(21:00):
people like people to people connectivity. But if you think
of a school, sports or often people leave things out,
and one of the things our claimers do first is
remove the things and put them to the edges, whereas
a robot just cleans around them. With future iterations that
may change. And then of course we robotics, we're using
things like agents. It's very much we look for new technology.
(21:23):
But also we really really are proud that we are
a people business, and I think the connection with people
is really important and I don't think anything will lose
over the long term in our organization.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
I like to think of it as the human competitive advantage,
you know, like, what what's the competitive advantage of being human?
And bringing that into business.
Speaker 3 (21:43):
As I said, robots can help us in many ways,
but I think the biggest thing for me at this
point in time is data to make better informed decisions,
do things more productively. But largely people still doing that,
and of course people asking the right questions as well.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
And so looking ahead, what are your biggest part for
the interior in the next three to five years?
Speaker 3 (22:03):
The big thing for me is to try and create
a burning ambition in the organization, and you can only
do that if people buy into what you do in today,
but also are very passionate about improving the performance of
the business. So improving every day is fundamental to our
future success. A lot of our customers they're challenged today
with the economy and they want to do things at
(22:26):
the lowest possible cost. Moving forward, it is about working
collaboratively in a strategic partnership to find smarter ways of
doing things. So often with some entities, they'll say to us,
we want you to provide all the services, but we
can't necessarily pay you the inflationary in cost year on year,
so we need you to find smart ways of driving
(22:46):
that simple things can make a big difference in this organization.
So it really is about daily incremental gains, getting everybody
pointed in the same direction. And I also believe that
I'm really pass I'm really proud and privileged with the
CEO of this organization, but I get to represent all
the people and what they do. So sharing their stories
(23:08):
a success. Asking them to be passionate about the brand
and talking passionately about the brand is infectious and I
think it makes a real difference.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
And so if you wanted to leave one message with invistors,
what would it be.
Speaker 3 (23:20):
Every investor looks at their investment in different ways, but
I think with Ventire, what you've got is a business
that has already built up a reputation for delivering on
what it will say or do almost to the degree
of being and delivering boring reliability. And I think when
you look at everything that's going on the world today,
(23:41):
boring reliability is actually quite a good selling point. And
the great thing is I'm really boring. So I promise
you that we will bring boring reliability to the organization.
I think a lot of time in businesses, when they
are successful, they start to find that's not exciting, so
they can start to look for things that bring more
(24:01):
excitement to the organization. I really believe in staying within
our circles of trust where we perform really well. And
I go back to there's lots of headroom for us
to grow, so we can really focus on quality of
growth rather than quantity of growth. And I think that
is in today's world a very very good value proposition
(24:23):
for investors looking to get that annuity style performance out
of their portfolio.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
To wrap up, do you have a favorite piece of
I guess leadership wisdom it has really stuck with you.
Speaker 3 (24:36):
Well, the biggest thing for me is forever learning. Well,
I love to learn from people. We as a business
bring lots of people in from different backgrounds and different
perspectives to share their stories, and I think that's really
really important because we want to educate, we want to share,
so for me that forever learning piece and remember as
(24:57):
a business that we want to see all all of
the people in our organization grow and develop and become
the best version of themselves. And we want them to
talk fondly about ventire. But I think in terms of
being successful, the person that cares the most about their
careers is them and therefore we just say to them,
grasp every opportunity that comes, and you never make a
(25:18):
bad decision. You know, every decision is a learning decision
to go with it and make it successful and hopefully
we can help educate them and experience them such that
on the most the decisions are really good decisions.
Speaker 1 (25:32):
So we know investing infrastructure is key for economies to thrive.
Is there enough hitting at a national level or why
that's so important When you look.
Speaker 3 (25:41):
At infrastructure investment, there are lots of examples that data
shows it helps the economy to grow. As an organization ourselves,
we menasure social value, so e g. Every dollar you
spend with vent her, how much gets returned and reinvest
in the local community. And if you look at how
winds in the country, things are quite simple in terms
(26:02):
of legislation, regulation, population growth. I mean the assets we serve, roads, hospitals, schools,
they're going to need investment, and of course the investment
into those assets means jobs and then it becomes a
circular economy. So from our perspective, we are advocates of investment.
But I would also say, as I said earlier, the
(26:22):
great thing about our business and the boringness of our business,
is that if we don't invest as a country the
old assets. If the population growth will be used more
need more maintenance, and if new assets come online, that's
new opportunity for us to drive revenue for the country.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
Thanks for joining us, Dean, and thanks everyone for tuning in.
You can watch you at lunch on YouTube or follow
along on your favorite podcast step leave us a rating
or a comment about what you'd like to hear about
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