As most CEOs head organisations that
are headquartered in city locations, it is
natural that they would take an urban
approach to building business partnerships.
Making friends out in the bush, however,
requires a different approach. Brett points
out that in a small town, everyone talks
to everyone, and that the comfort of
confidence and anonymity disappears.
“If you have a major dispute with a
contractor, it might transpire that the
contractor’s brother also works for you
and the sister knows someone who used
to work for you, and so on,” he says.
“It’s a small town. There might be 30,000
people, but it’s still a small town.”
The importance of long-term
agreements and relationships cannot be
underestimated when in country New
South Wales. As Murrumbidgee Irrigation
is one of the major users of contractors in
the area, Brett is well aware that feedback
spreads quickly and that if a contractor
thinks an employer is a risk, they are
likely to charge a premium for everything
that employer wants to do. “We’re not of a
size or in an area where we can have the
approach, ‘If contractor A doesn’t work,
you go out and talk to contractor B, C, D
or E.’ You simply can’t afford to get a bad
name within the contractor pool because,
at the end of the day, you’ve got to get
your work done somehow,” he explains.
Getting some of that work done is
becoming easier due to increased
automation. Irrigation has been run
manually for more than 100 years, but even
so its processes are not exempt from
technological change. Brett says automation
had already begun when he started in the
CEO role in 2015 and that now, because of
technology, farmers can go out to dinner
or to a party instead of having to work
every night. “One young farmer said to
me, ‘I used to have to get up in the
middle of the night to manually close
off the water, but now I can do this from
my phone,’ ” Brett recalls.Half page advert
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