With some reports suggesting that just 31% of employees are engaged at work, development of a positive culture where staff are motivated and customers delighted is now a vital aspect of business planning. In South Africa, PROMMAC has developed a positive culture and it is helping the company expand into new markets.
Every company that utilises any form of heavy industrial mechanical machinery has to create a plan for the maintenance and upkeep of that machinery to ensure that it performs to the best of its ability and is not hampered by unexpected breakdowns throughout its life. In many industries, heavy industrial equipment has completely changed the way tasks are performed, making processes quicker, more efficient and cheaper, and so the plant is respected and cared for. The mining and energy industries are just two examples where heavy plant is a key element in the creation of prized products and in these sectors, care for heavy plant and processing equipment is a big but vital expense.
This is where companies like Secunda-based PROMMAC offer a much-needed service. Experts in maintenance, shutdowns, commissioning, projects and drone services, PROMMAC is recognised internationally as a leader in its field and has successfully completed projects, shutdowns and plant maintenance for some of the world’s most prominent petrochemical and energy businesses. CEO, Jason English puts the company’s success down to its unique culture, that has been developed to make the most of employees and opportunities.
“We’re owner-managed, very focussed, with a great team culture and we’re reinvesting into our people. If you have a well-managed business with a great culture and you’re investing in people that work there, the recipe can only lead to a good meal. It’s working for us right now; it’s up to us as leaders to avoid negative sentiment; leadership is the ability to hide your panic from others. We have to make sure our employees feel like they’re part of something even during these challenging times and if they’re involved then they’ll be energised and that shows through to our clients,” he says.
In 2015, global business magazine, Forbes, stated that culture was the ‘hottest topic in business’ and is an issue that business leaders need to get to grips with quickly. Thanks to the ever growing influence of social media, employees have more bargaining power than ever before. LinkedIn, Indeed, Glassdoor and similar sites all help to turn a company’s employment brand into public information so if you’re not a great place to work, people find out fast and this shifts power into the hands of job-seekers. According to Forbes specialist HR contributor, Josh Bersin, “culture is the set of behaviours, values, artifacts, reward systems, and rituals that make up your organisation” and at PROMMAC it’s something that is taken very seriously and the focus on developing a positive culture has led to excellent results.
“There’s an old joke that I always have with my COO and he’ll say ‘what if we invest in the people and they leave?’ and I’ll say ‘what if we don’t invest in the people and they stay?’ so it’s a catch 22,” explains English. “From our perspective, the market is challenging but we focus on two things. Firstly, build a culture where people want to work for you and that way it becomes easier to attract talent. We’ve done a lot of innovative things and I’ve spent a bit of time in New York at Innovation Week as a YPO member accessing the big innovative companies of the world and we’ve bought some creative thinking back to our workplace. We have think rooms with Hi-Fi systems and bean bags, we have a gym to get the endorphins flowing, we have war dances in the mornings to suit the local communities and create fun and enjoyment and a sense of belonging, we have many initiatives to reward good performance and we’re doing things that completely break the status-quo of typical red tape driven construction companies. The second aspect is about believing and investing in people. We have outlaid significant amounts of cash and invested in in-house training programmes which we have designed ourselves in the form of videos so that we can communicate in any language. This means we are able to break down the barriers of reading deficiencies and communicate in a visual way. We have a team that is constantly looking at innovative technologies which we can then use as platforms for training. We’ve also created a robust set of systems so people can fall in line but are not driven by red-tape. All of the necessary procedures are in place for general governance, general flow processes and about how things are done in the company so that people can step straight into it without hesitation. The key for us is to create an environment where employees natural entrepreneurial spirit can flare without risking the business principles”
And to those who consider this type of investment a waste of money and time, an unnecessary expense, and something which is for HR textbooks, just listen to the effect the positive culture has had on the company’s results: “We’ve continued to see annual growth way in excess of the norm year on year for the past four years. In those four years, we’ve grown the business revenue nearly 1000%,” says English.
CULTURE SETS PROMMAC APART
PROMMAC has positioned itself as a partner to its customers; adding value rather than costing money, and of course, always providing service of the highest possible standard. This focus on quality along with an internal culture of excellence mean that PROMMAC is often chosen as an outsource partner, above its competitors, and goes on to build long-term relationships. “We have never lost a term contract that was awarded to us over the past four years and this is testament to our client’s belief in our service,” says English.
“We work predominantly on industrial processing plants carrying out mechanical maintenance and shutdown management activities, but also have numerous divisions focussing on projects, drone operations and electrical and instrumentation. In 2014, the group acquired KUMUNYACK which is a focussed electrical and instrumentation business and is the backbone of the groups E&I strength. A lot of clients are looking at doing maintenance themselves but our approach is slightly different; we focus on keeping their plants running so they can focus on their core business – usually producing some form of commodity,” explains English. “When people undertake maintenance themselves, they employ people and people become complacent over the years, they start taking shortcuts and the plants deteriorate. Injuries become more prevalent and it’s difficult to fire lazy people. When clients have a dedicated service provider carrying out this work, they have an advantage as they can very quickly make changes if the service provider is not performing. Because of this, we always have to be on top of our game and we seldom have complacency setting in – that is where we have made ourselves stand out from the crowd.”
This all comes back to the culture created by the company’s management. People want to go to work at PROMMAC, they want to perform well and they want to work alongside the experienced management team.
“Most of our competitors are big international companies and most are listed businesses. We are one of the very few sizeable businesses that remains privately owned and that gives us a unique cultural advantage as owner-managed businesses are significantly more impactful than big listed companies who are usually run by managers who work for salaries. The owner-managed culture that we have is one of our strengths as this is our bread and butter and determines our salaries. The competition can do the work but they don’t have the culture that we have,” explains English.
And the culture at PROMMAC is not designed as a marketing tool to enhance reputation, it’s developed so that the company can continually perform excellent work for its clients while remaining committed to the people that carry out that work. Over the years, the company has entered many of its employees into training and development schemes and KPI incentive programs and it is seeing the benefit.
“We’ve taken colleagues from IT and turned them into onsite project coordinators and they now run jobs which are 150 man strong. We’ve taken employees who were working in the air-conditioning business and we’ve sent them through the system and they now work in project coordinator roles. We’ve had general workers who started with us sweeping floors who are at the point of becoming artisans and executing important work on-site. It’s not always the perfect result, but it’s certainly aiding the culture of building within,” says English.
This type of upskilling is not only good for PROMMAC and its customers but it’s also good for the wider industry and South Africa as a whole, bringing new skills and a capable labour force to the market. With the current economic climate making grim reading for most company directors, upskilling and development of the labour market is hugely beneficial and provides a platform for economic growth.
“There’s definitely been a knock-on effect from an economic point of view but, as businesses, it’s how we look at these things,” says English. “I always think that in times of crisis there’s lots of opportunity. We don’t look at the crisis; I have a saying ‘worry about the things that you can control and don’t worry about the things you can’t’ so we can’t control the economy but we can control the direction of our business. Although we are under a constant challenge, we haven’t been impacted in a major way by the economy as we’ve changed strategy along the way by offering different types of solutions or reengineering our solutions to meet the changing needs of the clients and we achieved significant sales growth which has helped offset the negative economy. Our clients are under tremendous cost-cutting pressure so we look at where they’re spending significant cash in their own business and see if there are opportunities where we could better manage that area for them.”
11 YEARS OF GROWTH
As mentioned, PROMMAC has achieved phenomenal growth in the past four years. “The company was founded in 2005 by Ray Walters,” explains English. “He had a single client base and was operating in local regions in South Africa.
“In 2012, I left the corporate world to become the CEO of this company back in South Africa after spending 14 years with a large international oil and gas engineering services business. The business was small – it had a turnover of R30 million and around 200 employees. Four years later, we have in excess of R300 million turnover, 2000 employees and a diversified client base right across Africa.”
Where some organisations might see the achievements made by PROMMAC as ‘enough’, English details plans for further growth, both in Africa and internationally – this is not a business that is happy to stand still and again ties back to the company culture of continuous improvement.
One of the targets that will be keenly pursued in the coming months and years will be expanding businesses that PROMMAC has recently acquired in the Middle East – a region known for infrastructure, energy and petrochemical industry developments and a region in which the IMF has recently upwardly revised its growth predictions.
“In the past four years, we’ve completed a couple of acquisitions and those have helped us expand. Through those acquisitions we’ve extended our client base very nicely,” says the CEO.
“We have two businesses in the Middle East, both within the shareholder group of companies which are based out of Dubai with offices in Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi… Projeco which is focussed on shutdowns is fairly small but we are starting to see some movement in the market. Our other affiliated company, Al Laith, is focussed on industrial services for construction and events in the Middle East and that’s a little diversified from the usual oil and gas work that we do. It’s a big business with around 700 people and it’s involved in some big projects like the Dubai Classic Golf Tournament and various large concerts amongst others. We are still learning and understanding a lot about the business and I believe we will learn a lot about the team, the core of the business, and how we as Prommac can learn from our affiliated businesses during the coming events season,” says English.
While logistically, PROMMAC’s Middle Eastern businesses are more than 7000 miles away from the head office in Mpumalanga, there are many similarities between the leadership strategies in the different regions and English is keen to install a similar culture in Projeco to the one that has proven so successful in South Africa.
“Sheikh Mohammed’s vision for Dubai is very similar to the vision we have for our business. He’s a visionary leader that sees times of challenge as times of opportunity and we believe in that. I’ve attended a private function with him where he has detailed his plans for Dubai and for us, it’s very exciting. He wants to grow the Middle East to the number one tourist destination in the world with the biggest airport and huge infrastructure and that’s why our shareholder group entered the events space in that region,” he says.
PROMMAC will also be focussing on its home market and expanding what is already a solid base in South Africa and a strong pipeline on the continent.
“We’ve got an extensive operation with Sasol Chemicals and Sasol Synthetic Fuels, we have worked with Chevron and we’ve just finished our first shut down in the mining space,” says English. “The mining space has been in dire straits but we actively pursued that industry when everyone said we were mad and ended up landing a shutdown with a large blue-chip client. We’re actively involved in the mining industry and we’re trying to expand there, we’re trying to expand in refineries in SA, and in terms of Africa, we’re looking to see out the projects that we’re busy with such as Puma Energy in the DRC, Sherritt in Madagascar and it’s about consolidation with instability with the Dollar and the Rand in Africa.”
Being a multi-disciplined, multi-service organisation, PROMMAC’s expansion is not just geographical; the company is also looking at add to its already large service repertoire by offering another unique packages: “We’re also focussed on expanding our Remotely Piloted Aircraft (drone) operations locally where we have a lot of backup support from another affiliated company (IRIS Group) who carries out work in Europe and Asia,” says English.
With all of these expansion strategies in place, and with a strong business model building success in PROMMAC’s core markets in Africa, this is a company that is extremely well positioned. With the culture that has been installed propelling this one-time small company towards internationally recognised status, much credit has to go to the leadership and, of course, the employees. For English, the future is clear: “For PROMMAC, we want to grow our SA operations and gain more presence in Africa. From a group perspective, the shareholders want to pursue the opportunities in the Middle East and Europe, and share learnings from our larger group of businesses. We have made good progress so far, but this is just the beginning of something new, something exciting, and something fresh in our industry space,” he concludes.