Peter Wilkinson is Chairman and Director at Quickway, Founder and Director of his own business SamWilko Advisory, a published author, and a member of the CCF NSW Board.
He says right now is an important time for civil construction to be engaging with the Government.
“This is a time of great change and construction tends to be at the bleeding edge of great change,” Peter says.
“I think the industry’s got some work to do with government in improving the chances of good businesses in the industry being able to thrive sustainably.
“The government needs to consider how we develop a healthy construction industry in Australia.
“That’s the challenge and CCF is doing its best to inform the government,” he says.
Complicating this, Peter says, is that civil contracting is not often well understood by politicians.
“The industry gets criticised for having low productivity and, I think, that’s probably something to do with the measure of productivity that’s applied.
“If you’re trying to get a project team together and they turn up to a site that’s different every time, it’s an environment that has an obvious effect on an ability to drive good productivity.
“You’re essentially solving a different problem every time,” and he says this makes usual approaches to and measures of productivity less useful when talking about civil construction.
CCF NSW’s work with government through its advocacy is related to Peter’s strongest recommendation to people who are considering joining the CCF – members are better informed.
“I don’t think we’ve had a time where the internationals have been so strong in the industry and this has implications for locally developed small and medium businesses.
“Small and medium businesses need to understand that and the CCF can inform them about the risks in the industry,” he says.
In helping lead CCF NSW, Peter says he relies on his range of experience, developed over 40 years, both in civil and asset management.
“I’ve worked for corporate businesses, now working for Quickway construction, so I’ve seen the corporate and SME side.
“I was a consultant for a period of time.
“So, I’ve got a wide range of industry experiences that I bring to the Board,” he says.
It was his move to civil contracting that prompted Peter to write his book, The Steel Ceiling: Achieving Sustainable Growth in Engineering and Construction.
“When I got involved in the industry, I had moved from corporate to SME and I wanted to figure out how the industry worked.
“I certainly learned a lot from working with Quickway and Derek, the CEO there and the founder of the business, and I needed to make sense of all that in my mind.
“So, the book was very helpful to do that, because I believe that you should be able to grow a sustainable business in the industry, and there’s a lot of challenges that get in the way of that.”
With all this experience, Peter says his primary reason for wanting to join the Board was to learn from different approaches to challenges facing the industry.
“It’s harder than it should be to grow a business in engineering and construction, and CCF members have done this, so I think it’s fantastic,” he says.
Peter adds CCF has a role in helping its members surmount the same challenges he and the other Board members see.