Harry the hirer

Harry the hirer talks resilience and innovation

Harry the hirer CEO, Gab Robinson, tells how the company survived shutdown to be back stronger for the event sector’s rebound.

In March 2020, we were in a business with a huge amount of momentum.

We’d been around for 45 years with a workforce of 1,200 people. When COVID-19 hit, every bit of our work dropped away. We went from a business with a strong pipeline of upcoming work to a business where our full workforce had to be stood down. So the impact of the pandemic could not have been any more severe.

Much of Australia had a reduction in revenue, where our events and exhibition industry suffered a complete shutdown. Our energy went into looking after our people in the most difficult of circumstances. The worst you ever think of is that potentially your revenue doesn’t hit budget, or maybe you drop five or 10 percent,

“The HRIA has been fantastic in opening the doors to Federal Government.”

or maybe we lose a major event or exhibition. But at no point do you ever consider that you may lose your entire business. Our fantastic, experienced and talented people easily found work in other industries. And if you consider that it took 40 years for us to get to where we were, it might take another five to find that level of expertise that gets us back to where we want to go.

Reinvention

Through COVID-19, it’s been years of learning condensed into one year. Our management team has developed so much skill, resilience, and ability to deal with all the unknowns and people issues. Our skilled workforce has been constantly talking with clients to understand what industry needs, to rebound. This has led to innovations that now form part of our ongoing business.

We now have online streaming studios that used to be our furniture warehouses, we’ve developed a product called Smart Badge, which offers live contact tracing, social distance, and room capacity alerts, which is now an international product. We’ve developed our drawing and rendering 3D animation skills to show what an exhibition might look like in the future.

Being connected

The HRIA has been fantastic in opening the doors to Federal Government. We’ve had several discussions with the government, which have brought together the ideas of our industry to let them know how they can best support us.

Culture

Our culture of “fight” has really come to the fore. This COVID-19 won’t beat us, but it will certainly be a challenge. For me, it’s a moment in time, which we will look back on with pride because we found a way through it; and it will bond our people and our businesses, and we’ll come out stronger than we otherwise would.

Building back

We have a business scaled to deliver a huge amount of work and we have 300 people back in the business preparing for that: we’re currently ready for the work and encouraging clients back to the sector.