It’s been a wild ride for Skilled. Its own ups and downs have many similarities with the broader Australian economy as the demand for contract labour now shrinks in resources. Frank Hargraves, who handed over the reigns as chief executive to son Greg in 2004, always had a pragmatic approach befitting his early days as a sparky.
“In those first few years, you just kept your head down and your arse up,” Frank Hargrave told The Age in an interview in 2004 when he retired from the business.
“I started out as a 24-year-old kid with just 100 quid in the bank,” he said at the time.
The Hargrave family were regulars on the BRW Rich 200 List and depending on the Skilled share price, their fortune was as high as $544 million just a few years ago. It had been trimmed to an estimated $340 million last year.
Greg Hargrave had a tougher time and in 2010 exited from the top job after two profit warnings and some acquisitions which pushed gearing to high levels. Greg Hargrave still holds 7.37 per cent of Skilled through a range of entities, but trimmed his holding on May 11 this year, from 8.38 per cent.
The company then recruited former Coles supermarkets chief operating officer Mick McMahon who ran the company for several years until January this year, when Angus McKay, a former chief financial officer of Foster’s Group and a managing director of Asciano’s Pacific National Rail division, took the helm.
Skilled’s workforce services division specialises in blue collar trades and generates about half of the company’s total revenues as its workers are hired out to industries including mining, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, transport and logistic, defence and utilities.
Those donning the overalls and Hi-Vis vests will still be on the tools, but at a corporate level the businesses which are heavily leveraged to the prevailing economic cycles have succumbed to the realities that the golden days of the Australian economy are over.
source:- www.smh.com.au
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