The Local Integrator – Fredon

Fredon is a 100% Australian owned electrical, data, HVAC, security, technology, and asset services company, though we at CX know and love them for their work in AV. With offices in every Aussie territory except Tasmania and the NT, and even a presence in Auckland, they have their finger on the pulse of the local market. I spoke with Director Nick Orsatti about navigating through the straits of COVID, and where the growth might be in 2021…

The good news is Fredon have managed to stay relatively healthy through the crisis, with the obvious exception of Melbourne. “Our big challenge is that a lot of our work has a long lead time,” explains Nick.

“As an integrator, if you had a lot of projects running or signed up pre-COVID, you kept running. Since then, it’s all gotten leaner. We work across corporate, government, education and performing arts, with the balance varying from region to region.

“In NSW, we’re involved in the Walsh Bay Arts Precinct redevelopment, which is entering its second phase with another year of work in front of us. At the moment, the QLD office is working on the Cairns Convention Centre.

“Projects you thought would halt have continued, while others have stopped or postponed. As a result, we’re seeing integration businesses looking outside of their traditional sectors for work.”

Staying Competitive
With a steady pipeline of projects keeping them on the tools, Fredon are happy to report no wholesale redundancies.

“We didn’t qualify for JobKeeper for a long time, and the majority of the business still doesn’t,” reports Nick. “What we’re seeing now is the lag in project deliveries catching up, and everything becoming much more competitive.

“We’re pleased to see that everyone seems to be keeping their skill base in the workforce and doing the right thing by their people. There will be casualties, but we’ve not seen them yet.”

With Melbourne enduring one of the longest and strictest lockdowns in the world, it was unavoidable that Fredon would be worst affected in Victoria.

“That’s where the majority of our temporary standdowns were, after Level 4 restrictions were instated in August,” Nick conveys. “We’d been remote work enabled for a while, but the biggest effect on our staff was social and cultural.

“When Stage 4 restrictions were placed on the construction industry, that’s when it really bit us. A lot of projects dramatically slowed or stopped. It’s been very tough on our Victorian team.”

I believe companies like ours have a moral obligation to keep their staff on and protect their livelihoods

Since the industry has come back to life, with Melbourne slowly opening at time of publication, everyone is sharpening their pencils as jobs become available.

“From our perspective, we’re seeing what we would have regarded as tier two or three fitout companies bidding against the big tier one builders,” observes Nick.

“There’s now a fervour in competition. Adding to the workload, we’re also seeing designs to be quoted on going from one or two iterations up to six or ten.

“A lot of this is clients rescoping fitouts as the ongoing delays and changing COVID requirements means their meeting facilities have to keep re-adapting.”

Support Your Team(s)
It’s not all downside, though. “We do a lot of unified comms, and that’s one market segment that’s gone absolutely ballistic. The leader is Microsoft, as they’re present in so many businesses already.

“Microsoft had a 70% lift in active users of their services in Q1 2020 alone. The reason is most Office365 subscribers already had Teams as part of their package, and they just turned it on.

“Zoom tended to be the alternative for non-Microsoft houses. We were ahead of the curve here, as we’d started the journey to become a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner well before COVID.”

With a lot of Teams and other remote work systems rushed into service, Nick sees some remedial work needed in the near future.

“It’s about understanding security implications. A lot of clients were in a hurry to get something up and have bypassed the normal IT security concerns. There’s going to be a lot of work to fix that retroactively.

“Fredon will now be more proactive and aligned in our ICT capabilities publicly; we’ve always provided those services, but not as visibly as we do now.”

While organisations and staff have settled into using platforms like Teams comfortably, they’ve now been using them long enough to want improvements and add-ons, while expecting their remote capability to be added to existing facilities.

“Clients that have collaboration and presentation rooms that are not necessarily remote conference enabled want them brought online. There’s also now a big emphasis on contactless tech, enabling BYOD, and converting existing four-person huddle spaces into ‘two in and two remote’.

“With the amount that’s been going on, if you tried to get a Logitech web cam in March or April, you were out of luck!”

Show Me The Money
With almost every university in maintenance mode for the foreseeable future, Fredon still sees activity in the K-12 sector. “You have to follow the government stimulus,” advises Nick. “Where are they spending? Government funding of the tertiary sector is pretty much gone.

“In what there is left in tertiary, we’re seeing a lot of ‘value engineering’ where they’re trying to wring every last bit of life out of their existing systems.”

“Nationally, we have cautious optimism,” Nick continues. “Queensland is healthy, Sydney is doing alright, as is the ACT. Melbourne has a long road out, and it all depends how it comes out of restrictions.

“I can see opportunities off the back of infrastructure spending, though they’re not necessarily traditional. Because we’re a multi-service company, we have a wide lens.

“For example, command and control rooms – there’s demand there across a number of sectors. Emergency facilities, some corporates, network operations facilities, and data centres, for example.”

Our inherent nature as a social species should also be a growth vector.

“Sport can provide the social interaction people are yearning for,” predicts Nick. “Health and K-12 education will also likely expand in both the private and government sectors.

“NSW have a lot of design and build projects in both happening right now. We’ve also seen a lot in corrections in recent years, which is tied to population growth, as is road and rail.”

The Year Ahead
“Every business is going to have to tweak what they do,” posits Nick. “There’s going to be both direct and indirect government spending on a global scale. I think 2021 is going to get tougher, and you need to figure out how to navigate that.

I think 2021 is going to get tougher, and you need to figure out how to navigate that

“I believe companies like ours have a moral obligation to keep their staff on and protect their livelihoods. I think all companies should make sure they can both retain and grow their skill sets and value proposition.

“Do your best to come out victorious.”


Fredon
fredon.com.au

CX Magazine – November 2020   

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