As Good as Gold: The Chemistry of Life, Love, and Business
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As Good as Gold: The Chemistry of Life, Love, and Business
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Overview
Bob W. Killick, an organic chemist, shares his extraordinary journey from unemployment to unlikely entrepreneur in this inspiring memoir.
After losing his job and being told repeatedly he was too qualified to be hired, he came up with a creative solution — team up with his wife to buy, mainly on borrowed money, a fifty-year old decrepit chemical factory.
The venture meant getting up at five o’clock each morning and traveling across town to work with a team determined to build a multi-million dollar business in a cutthroat industry. Along the way, they developed environmentally-sound products and with sweat and tears obtained several international patents.
At the helm of the Victorian Chemical Company, he’d take a proactive approach to growing a business—never letting a good, clean joke get in the way of an international business deal.
Join Bob, his wife, and his team on an exciting ride that proves that you can achieve extraordinary business success while maintaining your integrity and adhering to Christian principles.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504307062 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Balboa Press AU |
| Publication date: | 04/03/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 334 |
| File size: | 11 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Can a Soufflé Rise Twice?
No man steps into the same river twice?
It was 2003. I was sixty-five years old, happily married to Judy for forty-three years, healthy, and ignoring retirement. We had three children, all of whom were either approaching or already past forty. They were all married and — wonderfully for us — had produced six super grandchildren. We were the owners of the comfortably prosperous Victorian Chemical Company (Vicchem), which provided everything material that we needed. There were also the added extras, like twice yearly round-the-world trips to liaise with business partners and promote our products. And, most importantly, we belonged to a vibrant church community, where we could express our thankfulness to God for all His goodness to us. If this was not success, then I didn't know what was.
Perhaps facetiously, the publishing world advises that in order to double book sales, you must make sure that the word success is in the title. There are many who crave success in their lives and seem willing to pay whatever price to learn how to achieve it. I am reluctant to say that this book holds the gold-plated secret to success. All I can do is recount how I got to where I have in life, and from that, you may discern signposts to provide guidance for your own life's journey.
Anyone looking at our Vicchem chemical business today might presume that we came from a well-credentialed business family with an impeccable and impressive history of wealth production. But that is not how it happened. I would like to tell you about our rock-solid, platinum-class business pedigree, but it just isn't there. The fact is that we have had to work hard to turn difficulty and disadvantage into accomplishment and success. (The story of our purchase of Vicchem in 1983 is recounted in chapter 2.) The major challenge we faced in 2003 was to transform our seventy-year-old company, whose inner-city factory in Richmond was well past its use-by date, into a productive and profitable enterprise. We had looked around spasmodically, but nothing had come to hand — it was crunch time for our business. Providentially and out of the blue, we heard that a 3.5-hectare, 35,000-square-metre chemical manufacturing site situated at Coolaroo, Melbourne, might be available to purchase. It was the Golden Ball of Opportunity. The photo of the factory, below, was taken around 1990.
Let me say from the outset that I enjoy the challenge of competition, and I suddenly got hungry to win this manufacturing site. I might be the "Old Boy," but it could still be said that I had "it" in me. It would be the so-called icing on the cake of my life's work. The breakthrough came after a long and frustrating nine-month series of negotiations with Cognis, the multinational German owners of the site. It had taken persistence, above all, with a touch of bravado on our part, as a small and fledgling enterprise, to get so far. However, a small steamroller is still a steamroller, and Cognis indicated that we would be given one hour to present our case for the purchase to one of their company's top three directors, who happened to be passing through Melbourne in coming weeks. Yet, as we prepared our presentation for the German director's visit, advisers from our family and senior management gave Counsel that, during the meetings, I should hold myself in check and not tell any of the quirky jokes for which I am well known. "Germans are serious people!" they said. Was I so whimsical that when convention demanded a serious approach to life, I would break into a series of jokes? This book tells the life story that leads up to and follows this life-changing one-hour meeting, which represents one of the most challenging and exhilarating moments, not only of my life personally, but also of the Victorian Chemical Company.
Some Background
One of the earliest motivating points in my younger life was when my mum pushed hard to get me to go to university: "At least one year, Bob; it will be a good experience for you." That one year started in 1955 and ended seven years later, in early 1963. I drifted out of Sydney University with my doctor of philosophy (PhD) degree in organic chemistry. By that time, Judy and I were married, and daughter Jenni was learning to walk. Judy had been my typist for the 223-page thesis, which was crammed full of chemical technical jargon, most of which she had never previously heard. I already knew I did not want to stay in academia, as many of my friends had done. Instead, I chose to go into business, which offered a more conducive environment for my creative and innovative tendencies to flourish. What followed was my eighteen-year-long apprenticeship in the Unilever Company, which I joined almost literally as a walk-in off the street. I started with two years at their Port Sunlight Research Laboratories on the Wirral, Cheshire, England.
We left Sydney in April 1962, with our little family. Jenni was then sixteen months old, and our parents doubted they would ever see her again. Andrew was born in May 1963, in our rented three-bedroom English terrace house in Port Sunlight. We had another stint in England for eighteen months, from 1969 to 1971, which by then included Peter, a two-year-old, living in Bromley, Kent, thirty minutes by train to the London head office. Our return to Australia took me to work in Melbourne, but after eight years, I was pushed out into the wide, wild world. After eighteen months, I spent a three-month-long sojourn among the unemployed. My personality is such that I didn't fall into depression or hysteria, but instead took it philosophically as something I could mark down to experience. Indeed, in later years, that period of unemployment provided me with the great story of how an unemployed chemist was able to buy an entire chemical company while he was out of work!
In 1983 — by a series of events that still amaze me even today — I was able to buy a company called the Victorian Chemical Company (Vicchem) based in Richmond, Melbourne, Australia. (The story of the purchase of that company will be explored in chapter 2, as noted previously.) The task of this chapter is to provide an overview of how all the various parts of the story fit together. The thing to note about the purchase of the Victorian Chemical Company is that it represented our first glimpse of possibilities that lay some years ahead of us. It tantalized us with the prospect of the possibility of owning our own business, yet the very deep challenges we faced in establishing a functional base for production, market share, and, most important of all, a financially sustainable future. Thus, almost out of the blue, I was able to buy a chemical company that represented our first soufflé, in the form of the acquisition of the Victorian Chemical Company, along with its manufacturing plant, warehouses, laboratory, and offices of 1,612 square metres in Richmond. The factory had been built around 1933 to 1935, and was now in need of urgent and extensive repair and upgrading. We all joked that the factory, if not the whole company had "one foot in the grave, the other on a banana skin!" In its later years of production, it had received no regular maintenance, and was now rapidly turning into a pile of junk. The photo, below, shows just some of the decaying ambience of the plant.
Malcolm Fraser, the Australian Liberal prime minister during the 1980s, is famous for observing that, "Life wasn't meant to be easy!" Our experience of owning a chemical factory bears that out. Nothing was easy for us, and those early days were particularly challenging. We often consoled ourselves by observing that "We were happy little rabbits living six feet underground, digging for bronze with streaks of silver" — because there was always the warning — "for when you find gold, the vultures gather!" We hoped that one day we would find some streaks of gold, but we never dreamt we would strike the mother lode. But, through hard work and perseverance, we were able to turn the enterprise around in the first ten years under our management regime, and had generated enough income to purchase the adjoining properties to our factory in 1992, from a distressed mortgage sale. This additional land also offered us some all-important breathing space in the form of a warehouse where our additional stock could be housed. This was particularly important at a time when sales were picking up. The total size of our factory complex was now at 5,175 square metres. However, by 2000, it was becoming increasingly obvious to everyone, even those with a cork eye, that our capacity to sustain our rising levels of demand for production and sales out of our Richmond factory was impossible. We had to find new facilities, and we had to find them fast.
A Plant, a Plant, My Kingdom for a Plant
With that kind of pressure weighing on us, the meeting with Cognis was crucial to our survival. When we bought the Richmond factory years before for a steal, even though it was a pile of junk, we were minnows in business terms. But our dealings with Cognis meant that we were moving into the big league. On the one hand, it meant we could develop a larger and more sustainable manufacturing complex. But on the other hand, it represented a serious threat to our financial base, and we wondered if we could pull it off. If we were to survive into the future, we believed we only had two options available to us. Both would require us to move away from the existing Richmond plant. The first option was to design and build a brand-new manufacturing complex from the ground up on a new green-field site. The second option was to purchase an existing industrial complex that suited our purposes exactly.
The first option was daunting. Even though commercial land was available for building a new manufacturing complex, the enormity of the project was overwhelming, and the cost was likely to be prohibitive. Peter Wrigley, our general manager, our son Andrew, who was the company's marketing director, and I visited several sites in Melbourne's western industrial corridor. The immediate concern was the high level of capital required and the knowledge that we would be paying top dollar for the kind of development we needed. Compounding this was the time and energy required to obtain the regulatory approvals we needed from the various governmental bodies, such as obtaining council planning permits, the stringent Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) requirements, WorkSafe and Water Board permissions.
The second option was equally daunting. The problem for us was that we simply did not know of any manufacturing companies that could be approached. There were a few smaller companies whose manufacturing processes only had a few chemical reactors as the main drivers of their production base. In our case, the Richmond factory was already running ten different-sized reactors, and we knew we needed more capacity. We had identified four or five larger enterprises, but such was their size and volume of production that we thought it a joke to approach them in a takeover bid. But then, as the old hymn states, "God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform." South Australian academic Stuart Devenish expanded this, saying, "As Christians we 'read' circumstances in such a way that we attribute events and circumstances to the purposeful actions of a loving God rather than to a meaningless unfolding of random events." We found ourselves in the market for a property we could not possibly afford, with a budget we could only describe as less-than-satisfactory. It was impossible; it couldn't be done.
Three Warnings
When trying to explain how we find guidance, it is easier to start with a story. Preachers often tell the story as follows: It was reported that a man in Bangladesh was in his village, listening to the cricket on the radio, when the commentary was interrupted with the warning that a flood was coming and everyone in his village should leave immediately. Not to worry, he thinks to himself. God will look after me! The next time we see him, he is standing on the kitchen table, with the water lapping its edges. Rescuers come to his door in a boat and call out, "Come on board, we'll save you." "Not to worry," he tells them. "God will look after me!" The next time, he is on the roof, with the water lapping at his feet, when a helicopter hovers over him. "Climb up the ladder; we'll save you." "Not to worry," he tells them. "God will look after me!" The last time we hear of him, he is standing before God, complaining, "Why didn't you look after me?" To which God replies, "You had the radio warning, the boat, and the helicopter! What more did you want?"
This story about far-off places and unlikely people became our own story in 2002. We experienced three events that helped concentrate our minds on the reality that our Richmond days were over. The first event took place in August, with the collapse of a full thousand-litre tank spilling one of our products onto David Street. Over the years, David Street had been our private loading dock on account of its lack of use by the general public. The incident took place when loading a truck with a one-tonne IBC shipping container. As the result of rotten wood in the base pallet, the container fell off the forklift, the plastic walls of the container split, and the industrial fluid spread across the road. Fortunately, the product was viscous, and our staff was able to contain the spill before any materials entered the storm-water drains. This was critical because, once in the drains, there was nothing to stop the product reaching the Yarra River to become an oil pollutant, the bête noire of the EPA. When the shouting and tumult had died, we contacted the EPA to report the incident. The EPA complimented us for stopping a significant incident, but they queried how long we thought we were going to continue manufacturing on the Richmond site, which was experiencing residential encroachment into the previously industrial eastern end of the suburb. The radio had given its message.
The second realization was that Richmond was no longer an industrial suburb — it was now a desirable blue-ribbon suburb. The gentrification process came as a result of large numbers of educated and articulate yuppies moving into Richmond for the purposes of living adjacent to the city centre, within easy reach of employment, education, entertainment, and restaurant facilities. Houses that had sold for $250,000.00 ten years before and which were considered to be an unbelievable price at the time, were now selling for more than $1 million. Of more immediate concern was the construction of the large Victoria Gardens shopping complex that backed onto the other side of Doonside Street, which meant they were in effect our neighbours. As we sarcastically used to say, we couldn't understand why anyone would object to having a filthy, as described by them, chemical manufacturing plant next to a new pristine shopping complex. This was our second warning. The boat had been sent to tell us something important.
The third warning came as a result of an industrial accident. It could have been tragic but fortuitously was not. Engineering works had been authorized for the back warehouse to be undertaken on August 20. However, when the ordered pumps did not arrive at the designated time, the engineer charged with the responsibility of carrying out the work decided to save time on the next day's work. Without the appropriate authorization, he proceeded to service the next vessel on the list. He began cutting with an angle grinder through one of the vessel's external pipes. But the vessel was live from the reaction underway in the pot, and the whole vessel exploded. The pressure was such that the top lid had all its thirty bolts, each the thickness of an index finger, sheared apart. The top lid then lifted several inches, with such force that the worker was thrust onto the gantry a few feet below. He was knocked around as if he had been involved in a really bad football stoush. Thankfully, he recovered, and returned to work after some time off to allow his bruises to heal. We were fortunate there was no fatality. This was our next warning. Our helicopter had passed through.
The backwash of the work accident was the partial closure of the Richmond factory by WorkSafe, under its government-sponsored legislative requirements. In order to supplement our limited production, we commissioned another third-party company to produce and supply our product. One of those companies was Cognis, which became a supplier of products for our company from their Coolaroo factory. The first ethyl oleate was received from Coolaroo on September 4, 2002. Later, during the purchase negotiations, Cognis indicated that the ester would only be available until Christmas, as the Coolaroo factory was slated to be mothballed. There were muted discussions among our brains trust as to whether there might be any chance of buying out the Cognis plant, but we had picked up negative vibes that Cognis would rather "put a screwdriver" through the plant to destroy it than sell it to another chemical company. This may have been a passing comment. It should have sent warning signals to proceed no further, but it did not. One thing was certain — if the factory was to be ours, it would not be delivered on a silver platter.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "As Good as Gold"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Dr. Bob Killick.
Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword, xv,
Preface, xix,
Acknowledgements, xxi,
Biographical Introduction, xxv,
Chronology of a Life, xxvii,
Introduction, xxxi,
1. Can a Soufflé Rise Twice?, 1,
2. To Buy a Wasted Gold Mine, 19,
3. In the Tailing Dumps, 44,
4. Our Ancestors, 64,
5. The Year Bob Came Good, 104,
6. Formation of The Punch and Judy Travelling Show, 130,
7. End of Training, 148,
8. Ee-muls-oyle Kept Us in Business, 177,
9. As Good as Gold, 199,
10. The Sheepfolds, 215,
11. To a Land Flowing with Milk and Honey., 236,
12. Much Shall Be Given, 251,
13. Growing Family, 256,
14. Heading for Home, 267,
Notes, 271,