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Manufacturing a Manufacturing Ecosystem on the Sunshine Coast
Season 2, Episode 5
On the fifth episode of Coast and Commerce, season two, Ben Amos interviews Tim Kelly, the leader of the Manufacturing Excellence Forum (MEF) on the Sunshine Coast. Tim discusses the thriving manufacturing industry on the Sunshine Coast, highlighting companies like Country Chef, Protector Aluminium, and Zone RV that are achieving world-class manufacturing. He explains MEF’s role in supporting local manufacturers through networking, events, and connecting them with resources and grants.
The conversation highlights the importance of advanced manufacturing, automation, and attracting top talent to the region while providing job pathways for young people on the coast. Tim emphasises MEF’s efforts to change the perception of manufacturing and create a self-sustaining ecosystem that can position the Sunshine Coast as a manufacturing hub.
Takeaways
- The Sunshine Coast has a robust manufacturing industry with around 1,400 manufacturers employing over 8,500 people and contributing 20% of the region’s total exports.
- Notable companies like Country Chef, Protector Aluminium, Kilcoy Global Foods, Zone RV are doing world-class manufacturing on the Sunshine Coast.
- The Manufacturing Excellence Forum (MEF) supports local manufacturers through networking events, connecting them to resources/grants, and providing advice.
- MEF aims to attract and retain top talent in STEM fields by engaging students through programs like the eVTOL autonomous air taxi project.
- Addressing labour shortages and housing affordability are key challenges, making automation and advanced manufacturing critical for future competitiveness.
- MEF is working to change perceptions that manufacturing jobs are “dirty, dull, dangerous” and position the region as an attractive manufacturing hub.
- With a fun, ‘not taking themselves serious’ attitude as “MEF heads”, the forum tries to make manufacturing engaging and facilitate meaningful connections.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Background
04:30 Supporting Growth and Diversifying the Economy
11:18 Connecting Businesses with Local Suppliers
13:32 Introduction to MEF and its Support for Early-Stage Startup Manufacturers
15:40 Supporting Manufacturing Businesses
19:50 Promoting Manufacturing and Innovation on the Sunshine Coast
24:12 Catalyzing Change and Creating a Self-Sustaining Ecosystem
26:20 Creating Connections and Scaling Good Interactions
28:14 The Need for a Cultural Shift in Perception towards Manufacturing
29:11 Attracting Top Talent for Driving Innovation
30:57 Advocacy for Manufacturing
31:19 Stay Informed
Additional Links
Website: https://www.mefsc.org.au/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/manufacturing-excellence-forum/
Full Transcript
Note: the following transcript was generated by AI and therefore may contain some errors and omissions.
We’re in a situation now where we’ve had labour shortages for a significant amount of time and that’s not really going anywhere. And even if we can find people to bring into the region, we can’t house them often because the housing availability or the cost of housing is just so problematic. So there’s a lot more acceptance of, all right, well, the robots aren’t gonna take my job. The robots are just gonna help me to do more.
G’day and welcome back to the Coast and Commerce podcast. I’m Ben Amos from Innovate Media and on this show we bring inspirational stories from people in business across the Sunshine Coast. And one of those inspirational people that we brought to the show here today is Tim Kelly from the Manufacturing Excellence Forum. And the reason why I brought Tim onto the show here today is because the manufacturing industry on the coast is something that I believe is going a little bit under heard about. And it’s something that I wanted to highlight here on the show here. So we brought Tim because that’s the world that Tim really lives in. But.
Tim, before we get into talking about manufacturing, I’d love to hear a little bit about you. So, you know, what brought you to the Sunshine Coast and into the world of manufacturing here? Yeah, awesome. Thanks for having me, Ben. So I’m an aeronautical engineer. I’ve been very, very fortunate to be able to work on a whole bunch of big civil and military programs in my life. When I graduated in the early 2000s, one of the programs that made its way to Australia was the F -35 Joint Strike Fighter program. So.
I was able to work on that for a number of years and it took me over to the US for a while to Los Angeles. And then I worked in Nashville on a large military helicopter for a while. And then over to Germany to work on a large Airbus project and then the Netherlands. And we had our first child over there and we were coming back in mid 2016, something like that. And we really wanted to come back to a regional area. We didn’t want to go to one of the major cities.
And we’re very, very fortunate to find a position at a company called HeliMods in Calandra. They do special missions, fit outs for helicopters like emergency medical and things like that. They do some fantastic work. So yeah, so that was a great, I spent a great four years with them. I finished up there in mid 2020. I’d gotten to know Sunny Coast Council very well in that time. And you know, they’ve got a…
you know, a real focus on building industry groups and wanted to build one in manufacturing and advanced manufacturing to support the fantastic industry that we have here. And I was very fortunate to be asked to lead that. So yeah, it’s kind of how we got here. Excellent. Very cool. I’m interested, you know, when you think about your background in building planes around the world effectively, and then the lifestyle decision to move here to the Sunshine Coast, what was your perception of the manufacturing industry on the coast before you
before you came here, you know, were you thinking that there wasn’t going to be much in manufacturing here? Yeah, I think like most people, I just assumed the Sunshine Coast is really all about retail and tourism and, you know, those kinds of things. But, you know, have been really, really pleasantly surprised about what we found here. There’s some really world -class manufacturing here. There’s a lot of organizations that are in the manufacturing space. So in the Sunshine Coast LGA alone, there’s about 1400 manufacturers.
They contribute something like 20 % of its total regional exports. They employ eight and a half something thousand people in the region. So the economic benefit of the manufacturers here is fantastic. They tend, like most businesses in Queensland and in regional Queensland, they tend to be small businesses. So maybe, you know, up to five people or something like that. And what we’d really like to see is that the ones that want to grow and the ones that can grow.
do grow, we want to support them in that growth so that they can contribute more and diversify our economy nationally, a little bit further out of mining and retail and agriculture and tourism and those kinds of things. Yeah. You moved to the Sunshine Coast and first worked with HeliMods, which is a manufacturing company here on the coast that when I first heard about them, I was blown away by what they do here on the coast. They’re basically doing…
incredible fit outs on helicopters, right? For all sorts of things like snow rescues and ambulances, all that kind of stuff. You probably know more about it, right? But I was blown away. But I’ve also, since I’ve kind of got deeper into the business ecosystem on the Sunshine Coast, been blown away by other companies that I wasn’t even aware that they were here and what they were doing. Can you maybe shed some light on some of these businesses or industries that’s happening here in manufacturing on the Sunshine Coast that…
the average person in business maybe aren’t aware of. Yeah, for sure. So there’s a company called Country Chef that’s just stood up a new headquarters again down here in the Clondra South area. They make all of the banana bread and pavlovas for the entire nation. They go to like, they’re all white labelled. So if you go into Woolies or Coles or whatever and you’re buying pavlovas and it has the Woolworths brand on it, it was made by Country Chef on the Sunshine Coast.
There’s a company called Protector Aluminium in Cunder Park and they make all of the pool fences for Bunnings across the nation. 130 people up there, 200 something people at Country Chef. Kilkoi Global Foods, you know, they obviously are primary producers. They’re growing, well, growing cattle and breeding cattle and then creating, you know, beef products. 3000 people headquartered in Botinia, just off Nicollin Way, have the most amazing commercial kitchen.
in there for, you know, bringing in international clients and those kinds of things. There are big reason that our export figures are as high as they are. Zone RV up in Coulomb, they’ve got the biggest 3D printer in the Southern Hemisphere. It’s 22 meters long and five meters wide and 1 .6 metres high. And they’ll punch out, you know, the tooling for a composite component that’s, you know, say as big as a car, they’ll do that in a day. And then they’ll come back and CNC machine it so it’s smooth and they can lay up composite.
you know, fibreglass, carbon, whatever, into it the next day. Incredible geometries in incredible timeframes. And they’re building boats from there now as well. Boats, caravans, aircraft. Crazy. The whole box and dice. 3D printing an aircraft? Yeah, you 3D print the tooling to lay out the composites into. Clearly I’m not a manufacturer.
I wish it was as easy as we’re just 3D print. Like there are people 3D printing rockets at the moment over in the US and that’s fine, but it’s very, it’s a very different process to some of the stuff that we’ve got here. Yeah. Yeah. Incredible. And you know, for those businesses, you know, that are achieving kind of world leading stuff here on the Sunshine Coast, you know, what are the, what’s the benefits to the region, to the economy of having businesses like that staying here and growing here in your opinion? Yeah, great. So I think most of it,
really is about the next generation. So the vast majority of our children will typically leave the region to go and find their career. And that just, it just feels like it’s a pretty big waste. I mean, like say from one of the best high schools in the country, to be fair, 90 % of their graduating cohort go to Brisbane or Sydney or Melbourne.
And a lot of that is just because of lack of awareness of the opportunity and to an extent a lack of opportunity. It’s just the opportunity up here still isn’t the same as one of the major cities, but that’s something that certainly in that STEM manufacturing space, we’re trying to turn the tide on that as best we can. So yeah, I mean, obviously for a lot of businesses that come here, it’s a similar kind of a situation to what we faced coming out of the Netherlands where we just wanted something that was a balance between,
lifestyle and good work and career opportunity and those kinds of things. A lot of business owners that are up here are like, well, look, I just love the Sunshine Coast and I’m gonna stay here. We’d like to see that it’s more than just, I’m here just because I love the Sunshine Coast. We’d like to see it as, oh man, the Sunshine Coast is the place to be for these things. The lifestyle benefits are amazing, but the community and the support.
and the other local businesses that are here that are actually willing to, you know, give me a leg up and help me out and get behind me and help to make my manufacturing business a success. That’s really what we’d like to see. Yeah. So, so clearly, you know, there’s benefits to employment and your career possibilities, but also obviously to recruitment as well, like, you know, being here and, you know, the appeal of being able to recruit people to move to the Sunshine Coast to join your business if, if they’re looking for a manufacturing career.
is a good thing as well. That’s right. Yeah. When you think about the businesses here on the Sunshine Coast that are looking for other businesses to do the manufacturing for them, that’s the other side to the coin, right? That’s right. Sometimes you probably think, well, I need to go to one of the big capital city areas or maybe overseas, you know, to find someone who can build the thing that I need. That’s right. But
You think that’s really not the case. I know that it’s not the case. And the reason that I know that is because this is with Sunny Coast Council, we were commissioned to build an online database, you know, supply chain kind of a tool. And so I’ve been personally through 2000 companies in the Sunshine Coast and Noosa LGA’s, you know, 1500 of those are manufacturers and I’ve gone through and manually categorise those into
automotive, maritime, construction, food and beverage, whatever. So, you know, when a company says, oh, hey, look, I need some parts, laser cut. I know that we can do it up here. I can name three companies off the top of my head that can do that. But the amount of work that goes out of our region to the major cities is still significant. And we really want to turn the tide on that. So that database is now…
completely free, completely open. Anyone can go on there and filter by whatever, you know, industry capability, whatever they need. And then they can find a local supplier. And they really should be. I mean, for me, I don’t really think that there’s a whole lot of excuses now, not to where it’s like, oh, it’s too hard or I can’t find them or, you know, I don’t know anyone who would have a relationship with them. You know, we’ve broken the back of a lot of that now. So, and that’s one of the things we’d like to do is just remove as many…
Um, excuses to not buy local and use local as possible. We also want to attract, you know, we want our local manufacturers to be exporting. So when, um, someone in one of the major cities says, I need laser cutting, I would, you know, they can jump onto this database and go, Oh, I’ll just use that one up at the sunny coast. I can find them easily. I can get quotes from three of them, you know, in, in, in a day, whatever it is. Yeah. Yeah. Excellent. Can you shout, shout out where you can find that tool? It’s just on our website. So.
On our website, there’s a bunch of little tabs and the second one along is called manufacturing database. And you just click on that and it takes you there. And it’s, you can either look at it in table form and you can do some filtering or you can look at it as, as like visualisations using power BI and it’s all interactive and you can filter and click. And you know, if you’re a massive data nerd like I am, it’s just heaven. You want to shout out the website real quick? Yeah, it’s our mefsc .org .au. There we go. So everything’s there. Everything’s there. Tim, so let’s talk about the manufacturing excellence forum. So, you know,
You’ve talked about some of the benefits of what you’re hoping to bring and obviously having a database like this is a great tool as well through manufacturing excellence forum. But for businesses that are in manufacturing or interested in the manufacturing industry on the coast, why would they be interested in getting involved in MEF? So really what our job is to help manufacturers here locally to succeed and what success looks like depends on
each manufacturer, they will all define that differently. Some of them really want to grow quite aggressively. Some of them need more, you know, they want to drive sales. Some of them need better suppliers. Some of them need to find better people or just more people. You know, it just depends on what they need. Some of them are very happy just doing what they’re doing and they don’t really need anything at all. Maybe they just want to network with like -minded people and all those things are totally valid and totally fine. We support all of it. So…
you know, there’s a lot of different ways that we can help businesses to both first of all, figure out what they want their strategy to be, if that’s the thing that they need, or to help them to actually execute on those elements of their strategy. And we’re an independent not -for -profit, we don’t work in their business, we just make the connections or, you know, in very small doses, provide advice around things or whatever it is, because so many of us…
that run the MEF have manufacturing backgrounds and those kinds of things. We’re in a good position ourselves to support things and provide advice, but we’re also well positioned to connect people up with other local manufacturers who are either going through or have been through the same kind of thing that they’re going through that are non -competing. So, you know, we wouldn’t connect two kombucha manufacturers up, say, and say just…
We’ll just, you know, can you share all your intimate secrets? But you know, there’s there are other, you know, it might be another health drink manufacturer, or maybe it’s a beer manufacturer or something like that. You connect them up and go, all right, you guys aren’t competing, but you’re facing the same challenges. And here’s someone else that we can connect you to that, that has just been through what you’ve been through. And you can talk to them about how they’ve dealt with that. Really, a lot of it is helping manufacturing businesses to make better decisions more quickly.
Um, because that for the most part is, is one of the biggest bottlenecks to businesses growing and succeeding is choosing where to spend resources, whether it’s energy or it’s time or it’s, or it’s dollars. Yeah. And is there support through MEF across the board from write ups, startup stage companies. Cause there are a lot of those on the coast as well. You know, people that are just having an idea and they’re just trying to get it made and get it out there and get it sold. Right. Yep.
And that’s different challenges that you’re going to have at that stage of a manufacturing business compared to, you know, the bigger end of town, some of those businesses that we talked about before. Very much so. Yeah. So how does Meft support, you know, that early stage, say startup manufacturer? Yeah, great question. So again, a lot of it will come back to Connection. So if someone’s developing a product and it’s a hardware type product, then in particular, like there is an organisation called the Sunshine Coast Makerspace, which is a commercial organisation there in Wirrana, and they’ve got…
just about every capability under the sun that you would want to develop a new product. And we can support that process as much or as little as a company wants. So someone might be like, I want to develop a new, you know, bit of sporting equipment for whatever. So, all right, well, here’s makers, you guys fill your boots, or it might be, all right, we can intermediate this a little bit. Here’s kind of a, here’s an information pack or a design briefing that makers is going to know how to engage with. We’ll help you to develop that, obviously.
at a really, really low effort kind of a rate, right? It’s not like, and we’re not charging for any of that either. It’s just kind of part of what we do. If it’s something around food and beverage, it would be someone else that we might refer them to. And then there’s a bunch of other stuff that we try to help there as well. So there’s a virtual CFO, his name is Vincent, amazing, amazing guy. He provides free operational planning cashflow forecasting.
into our manufacturers. He’s done probably 10 of them over the last three years. And it helps businesses to go, all right, well, now I kind of know operationally what I need to achieve. And that’ll get me, if I hit those targets, that’ll get me this level of cashflow. And with that cashflow, I can invest this or get a loan or buy that equipment and then move into this premises or, you know, whatever the case may be.
Some of the other grants we do with one of our partners, SRJ Walker Whalen, and it’s around an R &D tax return and they actually do a free R & D tax return for a local business. So if they’re a bit further beyond that very, very early startup, they’ve actually spent resources on developing a product and they’ve not done an R &D tax return before. They can get a whole bunch of money back and it’s a self -assessment. So it’s not like a grant where you got to wait for six months to a year. You just get the money back and off you go.
And then you can reinvest that in your business and grow it further. So there’s a whole bunch of different mechanisms, I guess, that we use depending on the life cycle of the business. Yeah. Yeah. So in my opinion, the benefit of this manufacturing ecosystem that you’re building around MEF and that MEF is really lifting up is it’s that idea of a rising tide lifts or boats, right? Very much so. And it’s not about competition. It’s about everybody supporting each other to build a better industry across the Sunshine Coast. That’s right.
So what would you say to that manufacturing business of whatever scale who thinks, you know, I’m just focused on doing what I do and I don’t want to kind of look outside my four walls of my factory or whatever. What would you say to that person? Look, it’s a really, really good point. The vast majority of manufacturers tend to be like that. And then, you know, for whatever it’s worth, the ones that actually make the effort to engage with the MEF, they just keep coming back because they get so much from it.
And again, it’s going to depend on the person. So, you know, whether or not it’s our weekly emails and the community notice board, which has, you know, all of the, you know, this person is available. They’ve got this skillset. We know them. We can vouch for them, whatever. Get in touch. Here’s their CV. Or it’s this grant is available. You know, different manufacturers benefit from those kinds of bits of information that come through. A lot of the time it’s coming to our events, which we run every month.
And at those events, they kind of, they get to see behind the scenes at a manufacturer. They get to hear the story of the manufacturer. So last month it was Koyo. They make coconut yoghourt. They’re just next to the big pineapple. Amazing, amazing business. Next month, sorry, this month it’ll be AnyQuest. They make diesel generators. They’re just here in Caloundra South as well. And their generators go into everything from Domino’s pizza vans to the Bushmasters that are serving over in the Ukraine at the moment, all made, designed and made here on the Sunshine Coast.
So you get to see their workshop and walk through it and hear their journey and hear the struggles and the bad stuff, but also the good stuff and what’s went well and what the future looks like. And for so many of the manufacturers, it tend to be a little bit, I’m so busy working in my business that I can’t work on my business. It’s almost like a fun, easy, intuitive way to spend time thinking about working on the business and being more strategic without it feeling like,
you know, we need to sit down and have a strategy session, which for most manufacturers just makes their face cave in. Yeah. So yeah, we try to make it a nice, easy, um, you know, beer field. When we provide beer at our events, a beer field way to work on your business for a little while. Nothing better than fueling things with beer. I agree. Yeah. That’s why we do it. So you talked a lot about how Mef is supporting the ecosystem here on the Sunshine Coast, but how is Mef kind of leading the charge in?
in spreading the word further afield around what is happening here on the Sunshine Coast? Like what’s the mission there? Yeah, good question. So, I mean, obviously there’s only so much that we can influence with the resource that we’ve got and Sunshine Coast Council has been instrumental in us being able to do what we do. We’re very fortunate to have support from NUSA Council now as well and GIMPE Council too, which is great. I’d like us to be able to do more, more broadly.
but we need to have the funding to manage all of that and to manage that scale. I think at a minimum, what we can do is make enough noise about manufacturing here that it permeates and resonates in other parts of the country. And we’ve had requests like, is there an MEF in Brisbane? Is there an MEF in Melbourne? And that kind of thing. It’s like, well, no, not at the moment.
One of the programs that we run is this eVTOL student team program with the university. So that’s to design and develop and eventually fly an autonomous air taxi. And the purpose of that really is to try to provide very industry relevant experience to students in an extracurricular manner. Most of the team is high school students, probably about 60%, something like that. The youngest is 12. Obviously they come along with their parents every week.
But then, you know, we’ve got a lot of university students in there as well. We should be doing our first flight test. It’s really just a little hover test of a very small scale vehicle in the next couple of weeks, which is great. The team hasn’t even been going for a year yet. But the reason we started this in the first place was that, you know, when I’ve done recruiting over the years, I found that the best candidates came from the student teams at the universities, whether it was…
the rocketry teams or like the formula SAE, which is a bit like a kind of a formula one, but you know, scale down team Mars Rover, you know, there’s a lot of really, really good student teams at the universities and they tend to be really, really engaged. And on the sunny coast, we didn’t have a university student team. Also wanted it to be a little bit broader, more community based in the student team, which is very specific to university students. So we’ve got high school students, we’ve got like,
15 to 20 industry mentors that come and lend their expertise voluntarily into the team. So that’s a program then that council and the region can kind of rally around. And it’s very focused on STEM and engineering and manufacturing. And as a result of that, it tends to create more awareness of what manufacturing is. And if we can do it on the Sunshine Coast, then…
A lot of the sentiment is if you can do it here, you can almost do it anywhere. Because we’ve got the natural beauty and all this other kind of stuff and it’s like, well, it’s not fair if you’re also good at all these other things. But I think we should be. We should be good at all of it. Yeah. So with that project, what’s the end game there? Is it to get an air taxi up in the air or is it more around the experience? Look, it’s about the experience for students.
And we’ve already had one student at the Australian Industry Trade College. He’s doing work experience up at ZonaV and he runs the 3D printer up there sometimes, which is just crazy. It’s awesome. Really, really good kid as well. And so that’s, we want to do thousands of those. We do thousands of those and then we create this critical mass of talent here on the coast where local businesses just have this amazing pool.
of really talented, really driven and really with really contemporary knowledge and experience. Just, you know, coming out of high schools and universities and, you know, trades and all those kinds of things. Because it’s really the quality of the people that powers businesses over time. Better people, better businesses, more businesses become a bit of a talent hotspot, which brings more talent in.
And then we kind of become this manufacturing Silicon Valley kind of a place. So it’s like, oh, you want to do advanced manufacturing in Australia, you should just go to the sunny coast because that’s, that’s what all the cool kids do. Yeah. And then, you know, and then we’ve got this thing and it’s, and it’s self -sustaining at that point too. And that’s really, we’re just trying to be the catalyst if you like, because the ingredients for the most part are here. We’ve got some amazing schools, we’ve got some amazing industry and yet our kids still go elsewhere.
So we’re trying to reverse the tide on that and catalyze that change to the point where the ecosystem becomes self -sustaining. That’s part of the reason we made the database as well, is because people like myself and Nicole that run FAN, we’re happy to make connections all day. It’s just that we run out of capacity and we just can’t. So if people can find that information out for themselves and make the connections themselves, or even if they go, hey, I’ve used the tool, I found these companies I’d like to work with, can you tell me anything about them?
Oh yeah, look, they’re part of fan, they’re excellent. We don’t know anything about those guys. They might be good. We just, we’ve never dealt with them before. And that, you know, it just helps that process and it helps the scale. And really what we want to do is scale as many good interactions as we can. Yeah. Such an important vision and you know, something that I think is, is critical to the Sunshine Coast as a whole. You know, you, you’ve got the manufacturing excellence forum or MEF, you mentioned fan there, food and agribusiness network. You know, the,
The idea that we talked about before of the rising tide lifting all boats. I think, you know, as these industries, the food and agribusiness, manufacturing industries, other industries across, across the coast, as they all rise up, it helps every business. For sure. For sure. And then you’ve got, um, you know, higher, what’s the right way to say it? You’ve got, I guess, higher skilled jobs, you know, and it’s nothing against anyone that’s working in a, in an unskilled profession. It’s totally fine. And it’s totally noble and there’s nothing against any of it. Um,
I know that in terms of being very future focused and protecting ourselves in our region and our national prosperity, we need to probably be doing more things like mechatronics engineering, where it’s to do with automation, robotics and computer vision and AI and those kinds of things. And whether that’s from a products perspective or whether it’s from a high volume advanced manufacturing production systems perspective, you know, those are…
The purpose of the technology really is to help humans to leverage themselves to do more with less. So that, you know, really it’s our productivity that we’d really like to change. We’re in a situation now where we’ve had labor shortages for a significant amount of time and that’s not really going anywhere. And even if we confine people to bring into the region, we can’t house them often because the housing availability or the cost of housing,
is just so problematic. So there’s a lot more acceptance of, all right, well, the robots aren’t going to take my job. The robots are just going to help me to do more. And whether it’s robot or it’s AI or some of the kind of automation, I don’t think it really matters. But if we’re going to be competitive as a region going forward, then culturally, we need to be pushing that.
pretty hard, I would say, again, not to take jobs, but to help people to leverage themselves to do more. Yeah. Yeah. So we’re trying to help create that awareness and to help change the perception and the culture, not just around advanced manufacturing, but around manufacturing broadly, that it’s not dirty, dull, dangerous, that a factory job is the last thing that you’d fall into it if you tried everything else. That’s just not.
where we need to be. We need the top talent coming in to drive all this stuff. So we’re just trying to help change perception around that and help bring on top talent into the ecosystem. Yeah. Yeah, it’s very cool. And, you know, great to have the councils and Nusa and Gimpy as well supporting what MEF is doing here. Just in closing here, Tim, I hear that you guys refer to yourselves as MEF heads. Yes. Is that right? Yeah. Fueled by beer MEF heads. Correct. Sounds like a very…
That’s super healthy. Serious industry. Yeah, that’s right. Now, I think, you know, having worked in engineering in particular, but then, you know, on the production line in America and Europe and in manufacturing in Australia, you know, in Australia, taking yourself seriously, seriously, generally frowned upon in a manufacturing context, taking yourself seriously is very, very frowned upon. And so.
One of the things we try to bring to our events is a really good sense of humor and a good self -depreciating sense of humor as well So, you know when when we initially we were gonna call ourselves the Sunshine Coast Advanced Manufacturing Network But that that acronym is scam and SCA MN and I’m not in my here in marketing, right? I’m not in marketing even I thought that was a bad idea. Yeah So we ended up going for the manufacturing excellence forum, but then that’s you know meth, which is pretty close to meth
And then we’re like, all right, well, let’s lean into that. And we made a bunch of hats that say has the meth logo and then the word head under it. So people that just want to use meth head hats around, which is great. You know, it’s good branding. Well, yeah, I mean, I, I’m biased because I came up with it, but at the same time, like we, we try to do heaps of that stuff. Like we did a bottle opener recently, fully 3d printed design manufactured on the sunshine coast. And it has a Valentine’s day poem on it, which is like, the iron is red.
Cobalt is blue, we love manufacturing and so should you. Like just stupid stuff like that. So we try to do that as much as we can. We put a lot of banter into our events. Mostly it’s us making fun of ourselves. That tends to go down really, really well. And like it’s not just about banter for banter’s sake. When you’ve got people that can be sometimes a bit stuffy or dry and sometimes the topics can be a little bit stuffy, they’re still important, but they can be a bit stuffy or dry.
The banter breaks down the barriers. It helps people to engage with it. It makes it fun and interesting. And it’s more likely that they’ll ask questions and take something away from it. And that’s really the point. The banter is just a means of helping to facilitate that. We also really enjoy the banter. So it’s not like we do it under duress. But yeah, it’s an important part, I think, of what we do and who we are.
Yeah, I love it. So that website again, mefsc.org.au. .org.au. Thank you. mefsc.org.au. That’s where to go to find everything about, about manufacturing excellence forum. Tim, you’re a real advocate for manufacturing here on the coast. And, you know, I’ve personally been fascinated by hearing what’s going on on the coast. Cause you know, obviously working in marketing, it’s not something that we’re deep into, but that rising tide is lifting all boats. So thanks very much for what you’re doing and thanks for coming on to share your story here.
today. Awesome. Thanks for having me, Ben. Appreciate it. And for you guys, obviously, if you’re interested in the Manufacturing Excellence Forum, then mefsc.org.au is the place to go. And hit subscribe, hit follow on your podcast player, and don’t miss the next episode of the Coast and Commerce podcast.