The Importance of Blood, Sweat, Tears and no D!ckHe@ds
by Darren Cave
Starting a business is scary. It’s a bit like jumping off a cliff into the unknown and hoping that the knowledge, experience, plans, and ideas you have come up with will lead to a smooth ascent rather than a headlong plummet to the rocks below.
About 5 years ago, Lachie and I jumped off the cliff together, and so far, so good. Of course, our ascent has not been without its moments of turbulence, the odd challenge, an occasional touch of doubt and uncertainty. But as we start a new financial year, we are heading on the right trajectory, so it seems like an appropriate time to look back at what got us here.
Luck? Yes.
Were people prepared to take a chance on us? Absolutely.
Experience and knowledge? Most definitely.
But above all else, it was a precise series of values, underpinned by blood, sweat, tears and no d!ckhe@ds.
In the Beginning
When we set up Lidiar Group, we decided that we wanted to provide expert project management services for pre-contract, tendering and project execution phases of infrastructure construction projects. We were a couple of project managers collaborating on a business model that would solve the complex problems our clients faced.
In the early days, the sense of loneliness and self-doubt was difficult to push through. But, as any business owner can tell you, impostor syndrome is real, self-doubt is continual and asking people for money for what you do is hard.
Our values are central to overcoming this as, for us, they act as a reference point for all we do. They are a commitment to our people and shareholders around our actions and behaviours. For our clients, they guarantee a level of service and expectation that they will receive from us. In many ways, we treat our values as the glue that binds our client partnerships together.
We developed the business values of Lidiar Group to engage our stakeholders consistently and to maintain a high level of integrity, transparency and accountability.
We recognised that to develop positive relationships with a wide range of external stakeholders; we must be clear about the values of Lidiar Group. Our behaviour must be consistent with the message we give to stakeholders. We have to live, breathe and act our values.
It wasn’t a simple copy and paste undertaking. Instead, we wanted to understand each value intimately and interrogate what behaviours reflected living up to those values.
We wanted to understand how to develop our employees and contractors to demonstrate these behaviours daily and attract people who naturally uphold similar values in their professional lives.
They are also non-negotiable. You often hear the phrase ‘everything is negotiable’, but for us and our values, that really isn’t the case.
Lidiar Group Values
We have four values:
- Fair Exchange – could be interpreted as money, and we do want to get paid, but Fair Exchange for us also means recognising, sharing and participating as a team.
- Continual Accountability – means doing everything possible within my power to make our goals a reality. I hold myself accountable; our clients hold us accountable, and as a team, we are accountable to each other. We put ourselves out there to be tested and assessed in high-pressure environments. I am confident in our people to provide excellent work outputs because we are answerable on a number of levels.
- Leading Edge Creativity – This is essential in our business, We want to push and expand beyond the boundaries. This value underpins our solution-focused philosophy, always striving for better ways to:
- Meet our client’s needs – whether they know them yet or not.
- Help our clients. We hear what they need, and we deliver.
- Help our clients solve their toughest growth problems.
- Help our clients take their ideas and turn their dreams into reality.
- Help our clients succeed.
- Help our clients navigate through the complex resource industry.
- Active Participation – Our involvement with a client’s project to be as completely self-driven, active and engaged contributors. We are not going to accept being passengers riding along as passive members of a team. All Lidiar Group people have something to offer, and at all appropriate times, they offer it.
No D!ckhe@ds
Throughout our professional careers, we collect people and contacts along the way, people with whom we have had positive interactions, whom we respect as business people or who have a craft or skill we admire. Thank you, LinkedIn, for allowing me to collate them in one place. I look at those contacts and try to identify their values, assessing if our core values are aligned. It hasn’t always been a structured process. In the very early days of Lidiar Group, we called it the ‘no d%$khead’ rule. The same thought process applies now, just with a different name.
I’ve met some excellent people along my journey that I now get to work alongside at Lidiar Group. I have always described Lidiar Group as a collective, growing our numbers and lengthening our range of services. I read an article some time ago that a friend wrote about making it ‘Flow’ which he described a company with a good flow as being when the customers get what they need, when they need it, with the right quality, and they are also satisfied with their experience in dealing with the company – Operational Excellence. Lidiar Group aspires to work as a team to ‘Flow’.
Over the years, Lachie, Niall and I have gladly offered our blood, sweat and tears to building our business. And we will continue to do so. We are on a journey to constantly improve ourselves, to improve the lives of the people that we interact with on a daily basis and our industry peers. I hope that throughout my journey, each of you can recognise my values because Lidiar Group is not the product—it’s the people.
We will also continue not to tolerate d!ckhe@ds because, at the end of the day, life is too short.
About Lidiar Group
Lidiar Group is a collective of key individuals across a diverse range of management, professional and engineering backgrounds offering services in the energy, resources and infrastructure sectors.
Our mission: to connect and empower our clients by energising and strengthening their capabilities.
Our flexible, scalable service offering supports companies to provide their own services at a higher level without commitment to a large quantity and cost of overheads.