stuart midgley

Having decided to close the business it seemed pretty clear I needed something at least moderately remunerative to move on to for a couple of years while I stabilised my life post business failure (and a serious long-term relationship break-up).

I was investigating working in the mining industry (having a heavy truck licence from my first real job way back at age 18), talked to a contact out at Kalgoorlie and even started applying for a few positions when my second-last ever customer walked into my office to buy a spare part and walked out having sold me his concrete agitator truck.

The bloke was in his 60’s and looking to retire and over the next three months we organised the finance, went through all the setup processess and on 1 August 2010 I started hauling ready-mixed concrete for Holcim Australia.

[Short technical bulletin (since I get asked this all the time) - concrete is what you get when you mix sand, gravel, cement powder and water together. Mix, place, level and allow to set. From your house slab to your driveway to the pilings, slabs and columns in the tallest CBD office towers, they all use concrete. Since cement power is made by burning limestone and all the other ingredients are rock of one form or another, concrete is considered ‘reconstituted stone’. Think of it as rock that is temporarily turned into a liquid format for easy shaping before it hardens again.]

Holcim is one of the world’s two major cement and concrete companies, operating in any country you care to name. My truck has the big rotating mixer barrel on the back and at the plant they drop about 14 tonnes of gravel, sand, cement and water into the barrel via a big loading hopper at the top. A few minutes of high speed mixing in the barrel mushes it all up nicely, I visually check that it all looks okay and then drive to whatever building site has ordered the stuff and ask them where they want it.

Since the chemical setting process starts as soon as the water is added you really only have about two hours to get the mix out of the barrel before it starts to set rapidly. (The chemical setting rate follows an steep bell curve over time) Because of this limitation Holcim (and every other concrete company) have a dozen or so plants across greater Sydney so that most deliveries are only 15-30 minutes away from a given plant. On an average day I might mix and deliver 5-8 loads, all local. Some days I might get sent to work out of one of the other plants if they have a lot of loads booked in and we don’t.

I own the truck and contract to Holcim to carry out the deliveries but I wear their uniform and the truck is painted in their colours so as to present a corporate face to the clients.

It has now been 20 months since I started and it’s a nice, easy job in many ways. The most important thing is that you get weekends and evenings free and it pays ok. Which is what I needed back in 2010 and still need now while I work out what will come next.

My apologies for the self-centred nature of these last couple of posts - once past events are brought up to date I promise to stop talking about myself so much!

How much can happen in fourteen months? Quite a lot.

Last time I posted here I was running my own small business selling consumer electronics spare parts.That business is now long gone.

AEA (as it was called) failed to succeed for a variety of reasons, the largest one being that the spare parts industry evaporated in the space of eighteen months. Perhaps the process had been even longer than that (with its genesis in the 1980’s and the introduction of the first integrated circuit boards into consumer computers) but in 2009-10 the price of new consumer electronic devices went into freefall. Global oversupply, a rising Australian dollar and rapid technological advances all combined to push the retail price of all categories of consumer devices through the floor – but the same did not happen to the spare parts for those devices.

By early 2010 the situation was dire. A premium brand compact digital still camera could be bought for $95 from a major chain; a replacement charger for that same camera had a wholesale cost price for a parts trader like me of $80. Add on some margin and freight costs and customers could buy a brand new camera for $30 less than I could sell them a charger for their old one. The same price discrepancies were developing in category after category – laptops, projectors, video cameras, phones… the future was not in spare parts. After watching several competitors go under the decision to close before incurring huge losses was easy.

Making the decision was quite emotionally racking. When you’ve put three years of 70-hour weeks and quite a lot of money into a business it’s hard to accept that it has no future. However, the writing was on the wall for the spare parts industry and that was that. The only real question was, what next?

Just finished educating myself about XHTML and CSS - thoroughly recommend the book ‘Head First HTML with XHTML and CSS’ for anyone else trying to understand the underpinnings of web design.

In celebration I’ve given this tumble blog a new theme. The old one has been in use since I first signed up, nearly two years ago now. It’s also amazing to see how far tumblr has come - at that time there were only a dozen themes to choose between, now they have hundreds.

Now, all I’ve got to do is learn basic programming, then learn the popular server and client-side languages, and then I can finally relaunch my business website!

Should all happen by 2015…

I made the most of the fine weather we had this week and got out into the Royal National Park.

Leaving my motor scooter at Wattamolla car park I headed south along the Coast Track to the broken, rocky inlet of Curracurrang. A hidden gem there is the natural waterfall-fed swimming pool about 200m upstream of the cove. Delightfully cold, yet the water cascading down the waterfall is warm from the heat of the sun-exposed rocky stream bed above.

I’ve seen up to a dozen Water Dragons at this swimming hole in the past, sometimes sunning themselves on the flat rocks that people swim off but mostly inhabiting the shelves of the waterfall rock-face.

This time, as I sat reading my book quietly in the shade for an hour, one particular dragon got very curious about this strange creature sitting on her rock, so she slowly proceeded to get closer and closer to investigate. By the end of the hour she was sitting only eight inches away from my face as I lay on my towel, peering into my eyes and watching me watching her.

Eventually I continued my walk south to Curracurrong and the spectacular cliffs and waterfall at Eagle Rock, before a hard slog up the hill over the Curra Moors Trail to the main road and a return to the carpark.

An adult echidna, cliffs, ocean, native flora… click on any of the following photos to see the full gallery. Enjoy!

My business, AEA, has grown enough that the time to leave the spare bedroom at home has come!

The spare room has served me well since February 2008 - although of late it has gotten altogether too crowded for comfort! Stock in cartons everywhere, two desks jammed in, several bookcases of files and catalogues and a big rack of hanging stock in the corner. Also, too many customers and deliveries are now coming to the house each week; a more professional look is required.

After several weeks of searching for suitable premises (and there isn’t much out there at the entry level, let me tell you) I found a newly-refurbished building in Marrickville that ticked all the right boxes.

It’s cheap, clean, carpeted, well lit, solid brick construction, the landlord is friendly and - bonus - the old air conditioner in the window still works. A lease was duly signed, phone and internet connections are underway and the moving day is fixed for this coming Friday. (Try and have friends with utes if you can - it makes life much easier!).

It’ll be sad to say goodbye to the old office after almost two years. Still, onward and upwards!

I sure am looking forward to working in air conditioning this summer.