With a background in small business, Anthony Galimi is used to taking chances, but the biggest risk of his career is when he and his family backers at Novon Lighting took the plunge to invest in new state of the art Swiss robotic equipment and high spec sustainable operations in new premises at Arndell Park in Western Sydney.
The business had already been operating for about 15 years. It was not long after COVID when a big government contract came its way, for 320,000 luminaires – as the lighting modules are called – to be delivered in just 10 months.
It was a “do or die” moment.
The company had previously imported components and assembled them in Australia.
But now, if it was to meet their commitments, it was an opportunity to change the game. The possibility was to fully onshore the products, bring testing in-house, and become environmentally friendly through recycled water and a bunch of other technologies.
In an interview with The Fifth Estate, Galimi, along with general manager of product strategy and marketing Carlo Cesta and marketing and brand manager Nick Grieco, recounted the risks and challenges that underpinned the decision to move forward with a significant leap in investment and positioning.
It involved a jump from being a regular importer of lighting equipment with about 15 staff to a business that could claim to be a high end sophisticated manufacturer taking part in the Future Made in Australia vision with a staff of around 87 today.
Cesta recalls: “It was an unprecedented and ambitious upgrade the government had embarked on.
“The scale of the project, variation, and the speed we had to deliver at was the greatest challenge.”
It wasn’t just producing new lights; the lighting fixtures had to be upgraded and retrofitted to a variety of lights that already existed, so the new lights often had to be wider and support different mounting requirements.
Some of the lights were so old, they were “well and truly below standard and needed to be brought back up to adequate lighting output,” Cesta said. Older technologies were harder to replace, with many parts no longer manufactured.
The need for raw materials during that period was paramount – and not too easy to source, he recalls.
The company at one point bought out the entire stock of the appropriate sheet metal that BHP and BlueScope manufactured. (It didn’t go down so well with customers who missed out.) There was also the need to buy out entire stocks of transformers and leads from suppliers across countries such as Italy, Germany and Austria.
Skills were another big component of the project.
The company had to train contractors to work around the legacy wiring in the client’s premises and needed to train manufacturing contractors pretty much from scratch – from how to wire a luminaire to packaging and everything to dispatch.
At the time, there were around 15 staff in-house. Galimi had to call on family support to meet the workload.
The growth spurt also meant taking on specialist recruits to implement an enterprise management system (ERP) that could manage the contract work.
“Layer that with developmental work, it was a challenging exercise to get that all together,” Galimi said. “We look back and think ‘we can do anything from now’.”
Novon now has up to 87 staff working across different areas. According to Nick Grieco, Novon is now one of the only lighting manufacturers, “this big and Australian owned”.
Becoming sustainable
It’s a big step from the company’s previous incarnation of “supplying mum and dad corner stores” to big institutions and government departments.
Part of that was to critically assess its sustainability profile, Cesta says.
“When we first embarked on sustainability, we saw a lot of greenwashing. We were onshoring production to Australia, and we want to do it in the most responsible way. In doing so, we made a large investment not just for environmental sustainability but business sustainability – so that we are continuing our legacy into the future.
“We don’t want to take materials out of the ground and put them back in the worst way possible.
“Sustainability plays a big part in the business; it’s very costly to be sustainable. We recycle our water, we take back fittings, but it’s a big plus for us.”
The punt cost millions of dollars. Galimi declines to delve into details, except to roll his eyes at the risk he took on – and that, so far, has paid off.
He names a raft of new high calibre clients such as TAFE NSW, government projects, education, and hospitals. Sustainability and investment have been crucial.
But another element that Galimi brought to the business in its early days has remained – the habit of providing a good Italian lunch every Wednesday for the entire team.
The company’s commercial size kitchen and eating spaces suggest this is no idle ambition and an appreciation of how culture and “tone” are as big a part of a growth strategy as financial investment.
Staying competitive
But the market is the market and needs a fierce competitive spirit to stay ahead.
Galimi knew that while the products were at a slight premium, automation and improved workflows would allow the company to deliver products more efficiently and cost-effectively, making it competitive with Chinese imports.
And faster.
“We can get it to our clients within four weeks as opposed to importing it over 10-12 weeks,” Galimi says.
Scouring the globe for the best inputs
The team scoured Europe and Asia to find the right ecosystem design necessary to deliver what they wanted. This included software from Italy, mechanical laser cutting and bending processes from Switzerland, a high precision Japanese welder, and an Australian made powder coat booth with a trademarked waste disposal system.
Current production is about 3000 to 4000 luminaires a week, but with continual improvement underway, the capacity can go to 7000 units a week.
In fact, says Galimi, this is just the first of three stages.
“People can’t fathom that what we’ve achieved in our factory is actually done in Australia. They are not used to this level of automation and factory capability.”
Educating others
Novon has also been working with Western Sydney University, running small projects using LIDAR scanning. It is building a side of the business to help educate others about automation in manufacturing, which will launch this year. The program will see Novon staff visit mining?? contractors and specifiers to educate on a range of topics.
“We need more Australian made competitors, it stimulates the economy far greater, we’re not here to do it alone, we want to see this resonate across the industry,”
But for now, it wants to see the Australian government put down in pencil and actually provide beneficial procurement policies for Australian made products rather than imports.
“They are talking about changing, and we are waiting on that to happen.”
The secrets to success
“People start a business and expect to be making money from day one,” Galimi. “It doesn’t work because they don’t really believe in their cause.”
“But money comes after. Like paint off the wall, for the first five years, there’s no money in small business.”
He jokes that at first, he could barely turn on a computer, which is why it was important to surround himself with “good people who are smarter than you…people with the same business values as you”, and then “you guide them on what you want.”
Another important lesson he discovered is that it’s important to “keep evolving” and “keep moving, otherwise you dissolve”.
Cesta jumps in: “I can certainly attest that Tony sees beyond the sharp view of an eagle. He can see something that we all don’t understand until we jump on the journey, then start to understand his mindset.”
Novon Lighting was a major sponsor at The Fifth Estate’s Circular Disruption event in November last year.