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A chance conversation with a trainer in the early 2000’s led Harold to setting up a Registered Training Organisation (RTO) and offering trainer qualifications. A well networked recruiter for many years, the RTO grew fast and now Harold has one of the largest RTO’s in the country offering TAE and Safety related quals. Find out how he did it here.
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TRANSCRIPT
Unknown Speaker
This is an ohs.com.au production
Brendan Torazzi
Welcome to Episode 43 of the Australian Health and Safety Business Podcast. I'm Brendan Torazzi, the host of the show, and today I'm with Harold Baldry from HBA learning centers. Hi, Harold.
Unknown Speaker
Hey, Brendan, how are you?
Brendan Torazzi
I'm very well. Now you, I see you as kind of like the leader of Australian Health and Safety qualifications. Do you think that's an accurate portrayal?
Unknown Speaker
Look, I think I'd like to think that but I'm not necessarily sure it's 100%. True, right. I mean, we're one of the reasonably major players, but who knows? Nobody, nobody actually broadcasts, how many people are enrolling in there?
Brendan Torazzi
Yeah. So how long has HBA been around for?
Unknown Speaker
Well, it's an interesting story. HPI. I mean, if you go back in time, I had a successful recruitment business, which involved labor hire, and also involved executive recruitment. I was a corporate Headhunter for many years and still actually do that. In about 2000, and for a dear friend of mine came to me and said, Hey, how would you say, I'd like you to check my salary for me? He said, I'm working for not for profit RTO, in the wonderful state of Queensland. He said, and I think I'm not being paid appropriately. So this, this man then explained to me what his duties were, which was basically running an RTO doing, facilitating, doing assessing, etc. And when I asked him what he was being paid, he said, $40,000, and I still didn't look I'm sorry, I think you're being absolutely done over. He said, I thought I was. He said, can you tell me? Do you know anybody who might want to have an RTO? I said, I don't, I'm afraid because I travel in more corporate circles, bigger businesses, and they don't have an interest. He said, Well, what about you, is going back in time you had a training business, which you sold. And Brendan, I used to have a soft skills training business, which did sales, training, and presentations and those sorts of things. And I started in 1990, because I heard these things called RTOS, becoming de rigueur, and I wasn't sure what that meant to non RTOS. So I said, I'll never forget, I said to this guy, who was a dear friend, and still remains a friend, I said, what were the costs? And how long will it take? And he said, I don't know, probably three or $4,000 in fees, and I don't know, maybe five or six weeks, I often laughed random, because $108,000 needed 11 months later, we became an RTO. Well, we will one of those lucky RTOS Brynden. You know, in business, somebody who's very wealthy businessman, businessman once told me, If you do well in business, you've either got to be very lucky, or you've got to be dishonest. So we were lucky, because the first thing that we stuck on our scope was called to a 40104, which was a certificate for in training and assessment. And it had just been released. Well, all of a sudden, we were going crazy. And we were only doing this in Queensland, because I thought I'd opened something from a mate to have a job. And this thing was going crazy. It went national. And then with the progression of time, I was reading about some changes that were coming in the Work Health Safety Act of 2015. And when I looked at some of the changes, and I looked at the the creation of people who were in charge with business undertaking called police of the US, when I had a look at what the fines were going to move to, which was $660,000 Plus custodial sentences, I thought, you know, I think we should go into work or safety. So
Brendan Torazzi
I that would have been what 2010, something like that, or it's
Unknown Speaker
probably their 2013 I'm guessing it was
Brendan Torazzi
after the WHS Act.
Unknown Speaker
The WHS act? Maybe you're right, maybe it was closer to 10, because the WHS Act had been discussed. And they were negotiating, trying to negotiate the states to accept all of the common legislation. So maybe it was closer to 10 and 13. Anyway, cut a long story short, we develop the certificate for we developed the diploma and we develop the Advanced Diploma of occupational health and safety as it was at the time. And since then, we've marketed as best we can, through work health and safety. We have some very substantial corporate accounts, which take safety very seriously for their their particular employees.
Brendan Torazzi
Yep. Yeah. So I'm interested to hear what it was like. Like you said it was 11 months to become an RTO in 2008 2004. Yeah. So there was a lot of I'm not going to say bureaucracy, but there was a bit of a process of even back then to become an RTO
Unknown Speaker
ya know? I think there was two things on foot. I mean, the first thing was that we were, we had very little knowledge about what we were doing. Yeah. My friend had worked for an archer but had never established
Brendan Torazzi
to. He was your lead trainer. I take it.
Unknown Speaker
Well, he was our only person. Yeah. Only employee in the company. Yes, HPA learning centers. And so to that extent, I think we were sort of flying fairly blind. And as we were under a state regulator at the time, rather than ask, Well, we, in fact, then were told we had to have premises. So we had to go out find premises product bombed by equipment, then we had to employ a staff member to support him. I just, it went on and on and on. And I'm sitting there shaking my head all through it. And
Brendan Torazzi
so was there any point where you thought this is too hard? I'm going to I'm going to pull the pin or you're already committed. Now, financially,
Unknown Speaker
yeah, it was committed financially. But I was also committed, personally, because I told my friend, I was going to do this for him to do it, and that's what I did do.
Brendan Torazzi
And then what happened to the recruitment businesses that still going on
Unknown Speaker
the recruitment business, the the labor high business was then sold off to the staff. Yep. And the executive recruitment business. I left that dwindle, just reminding me and even to this day, when I worked for some of the very large corporates, recruiting most senior people, my very senior executives.
Brendan Torazzi
Okay, so that's like a, I guess, an extension of your network over the years. So
Unknown Speaker
it is I mean, you know, my whole history from 1986 through to now. recruitment. So to the extent, clients have worked, and I've traveled the world many, many times recruiting out of overseas countries for Australian organizations, mostly large public companies.
Brendan Torazzi
Yeah, right. Okay, so HBA today. Tell us about your footprint. You started in Queensland, and then what was the next step after that?
Unknown Speaker
Well, one day or after about four months, our accountant came to me and she said, how this thing that's happening in Queensland do, you know, we're making more money out of that than what we are out at the labour hire business? And I said, I took a look at the numbers. So I phoned up my friend, and I said, Hey, can you tell me Can we do this thing anyway? And he said, Of course, it's a national license. But I said, Okay, I'll run some advertisement. So I put three little line ads in the back of the Daily Telegraph under the training area. And within one week, we had sold 36 seats on through 12 on each of three courses. So I signed you up, and I said, Hey, look, you'll need to put these dates in and come down to Sydney to run them. And he said, Well, I can't because I've got dates, which conflict with that, which people booked on them. I said, What will we do? He said, it's very easy. You'll come up here, and I'll put you through the qualification. I said, Brendan, I got on a plane that went up there. And I went through, let's say, several hours of tuition. Yeah. And then he said, Okay, you've got enough knowledge, you'll be fine. Off you go. And I never forget. And that first course I'm running the course. And people are asking questions, and I'm going, I'll come back to that now afternoon. I'll get to that one this afternoon. And every time we took a break, I found Hey, I've just had this question, what's the answer to it? So Sydney was our next port of call. And then after that, we tried so hard to break into Melbourne. It took me three years to be able to get a foothold in Melbourne. It didn't work, then all of a sudden, I don't know whether we were just accepted or what have you. But suddenly Melbourne went well for us. Along the way, we opened up in Adelaide, and in Perth, and a couple of other branches in Sydney, one in Newcastle. And then with the progression of time, I saw some changes. So for example, when the car industry was was built, was withdrawing out of Adelaide. Yep, I decided my lease there was expiring I decided to pull out of that lease and to close out the lake branch down and simply have somebody service that out of our Melbourne office. So we still go to Adelaide. In fact, Work Health Safety is extremely in demand over in Adelaide as far as we're concerned. Okay. We're in the mining industry hit the downturn hit. I had I closed down and Newcastle branch because the Hunter Valley was very heavily hit back in those days. Yeah. So today we sit with Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Gold Coast and Perth as branches of HPI.
Brendan Torazzi
And then how has like the whole global pandemic, how's that changed things for you?
Unknown Speaker
Well, it really had hit us upfront. If you look at our business, probably 65% of our business is corporate business, which is large corporates. Like you know, we provide training to people like cleaner home to bore Australia, Australian Federal Police and so it goes on. So what we saw when the pandemic hit was all over Sudden the corporate business died. It just died overnight. So they're 65% of the business flying out the window. So I'm sitting there thinking, This isn't looking good.
Brendan Torazzi
What sort of South numbers did you have? Like?
Unknown Speaker
We were sitting them with something short of 40 people?
Brendan Torazzi
Yeah, yeah. So it's a lot of a lot of mouths to feed.
Unknown Speaker
It is a lot of mouths. It's a lot of overhead. And then, of course, what happened was something we hadn't anticipated. Within three weeks, we were getting phone calls from every state saying, Hey, I've been wanting to do this course for ages. And now I'm sent home, I've got the opportunity to do it. So we saw the retail business climb, and we saw the corporate business die. Now the climb in retail was not as strong and not as big as the decline in corporate. But we we managed with the with the drop keeper supplement, we managed to, to drive our way through then we got October of last year. And the corporate business came back. Right now. You know, in March of 2021. We've got a board that they're filled with in house courses all over the country at the moment.
Brendan Torazzi
Yeah. And so have you just sort of stuck with Qualls like you've got Tia and all the work health and safety? Is there any other area that you work in? Yeah, we
Unknown Speaker
do the diploma of quality auditing. Yep. And which is a popular qualification. And we do the early childhood education and care certificate three and diploma. Along the way, I've touched a few qualifications. We had a friend and I, I tossed the leadership and management certificate for which ahead, nobody here really loved it as a course. And without a champion, there's no way that thing is going to survive. I had a diploma, I think it was a project manager. Once again, nobody cared about it here. So we just left the thing, I just took it off of the scope. In work health and safety, when they bought half the work, WHS calls the latest ones in 2019, the Advanced Diploma has got such a dramatic change to it. I haven't bothered to put the new advanced diploma on our scope, it was such a tiny part of our business, the majority of work your safety requirements is the certificate for and to a lesser extent that diploma, I could count on one hand the numbers of people who enrolled in an Advanced Diploma in any given month, it just was not worth the trouble.
Brendan Torazzi
And I mean, that's a thing, isn't it? It's like all those qualities you mentioned, like ta e is a big driver to do that. Because you have to have that if you want to be a trainer. A lot of the work health and safety ones, I guess industry is demanding that you have some vague vocational training. What's the point where it I guess splits over to tertiary education? Like how does I guess how does vocational calls? Why are they different to say tertiary achievements? Well,
Unknown Speaker
it's the it's the AQa F level. Mainly, if you think about vit at the moment, we got to aycliffe level eight. And there is a move at the moment, the IETF is going through a remodeling to reduce the numbers of levels. And if you look really at what does the university provide, they're really interested in people who are doing degrees and above masters, PhDs, etc. And so the unusual and weird thing is there's no articulation between university qualifications and VIP qualifications. And there are many varied reasons for that, which I won't go into because it's too laborious. But successive governments have always said they'll create a learning pathway or an articulation pathway between uni down but they haven't done it. So I mean, we get this situation we try and many of the trainers in universities because they a lot of them have qualifications to supplement their business. And I've sat in a particular university running training and assessment course, where I've got seven PhDs who are the people that actually design the courses for the university. And they don't think they should be there. And it can make that a very difficult course to run, I assure you.
Brendan Torazzi
So you must have really like, I didn't realize that HBA stated in the training sector, like the TAs, Tas gone through substantial changes in the last few years. How have you gone managing that? Because we recently had a trainer that went through and, you know, I reckon it's harder than going through a master's degree.
Unknown Speaker
I hear that very often. Brendan, the training assessment cert four is more difficult than the masters. I hear it more times than you could imagine. We've seen we've seen an enormous change from the days of Bessette 40198. And we still have people phoning us here and say I have a qualification I just need to update it. And when you talk to them, it's you know, 22 or 23 year old qualification. It went to TAA then Denta T A 40110. And now 216, I would say that the one six is a particularly, let's just say challenging qualification both to run as an RTO. And to also do as a learner, it's, if you look at the introduction of the assessment 502 unit, which is designed and develop assessment tools, that that is a very difficult unit they've taken out of the diploma. And what was very strange is that same unit under a different code used to exist in the TA, back in the early days of Ta ra, the 401 K four they had a unit in that was pretty much the same as that they took it out because they said it was too difficult.
Brendan Torazzi
So this might be a bit of a controversial question. But do you think that the new coal spits out a better quality of trainer?
Unknown Speaker
That's a tough question to answer? You know, I do think that the quality of the trainer depends on several elements. I think the process people go through number one, is what's going to determine in largely as to whether they are better or not the years gone by, I mean, I still hear today, stories of people who have are doing ta 40116 In totem over seven days. Now, I sit down, I wonder how is that possible? Because I look at our processes, our various ways of running that course. And the good Lord himself couldn't possibly complete that course in seven days, unless you can appeal it. Yeah, I get people phone our organization every week. And they're saying things like, Hey, I'm doing this course with such and such. I've got no support, can I transition to you? Because we've got 24/7 support for people. It's a difficult course. I guess if I had to answer your question, I'd say I think they do. But I'm not sure everybody needs what they do. Yeah, what I see Brynden is organizations getting smarter. You take the company, for example, called Cleanaway. It's one of our major accounts, their people or their drivers do a skill set. Now I'm seeing a move towards skill sets in corporates, as distinct from them during the whole of the TA. NOC was put in some,
Brendan Torazzi
yeah, well, that makes sense. Like learn the stuff that you actually need for the job not as opposed to getting a you know, a call behind the name for the sake of it.
Unknown Speaker
This word rent, I mean, the numbers of times I've heard people say to me, but how I don't do this stuff will work. Why do I need to do this to get the qualification, and I understand their perspective. But unfortunately, the qualification requires what the qualification requires.
Brendan Torazzi
So it seems like this, a lot of this has come out of, you know, the training system being broken in you know, that education blows up every few years, there's not there's some something that happens that, you know, that causes the bureaucracy to or the the tightening of management around training.
Unknown Speaker
I think I'll give you a case history without the name of the organization, a very large international business headquartered in Australia out of Brisbane, we do its ta training, they're involved in the mining industry, and their people need to have TA to walk onto site, and the learning and development manager there. She said to me how I and five of my colleagues signed up to do Tae as 40110. She said, we paid $2,000 Each we stood in line, we signed seven pieces of paper each and we walk out the other end, and we held the qualification. And I think that typifies why they've made 116 so hard to get, you know, there was 130, something RTOS that had 401101 scope. Last time I looked, there's something around 100 People with the one month organizations rather with the 116 months ago, I did far more difficult to actually have it on your scope. And I can tell you, the audits are very tough on that qualification, Brendan.
Brendan Torazzi
Yeah, yeah. How long does it take you guys to get it? Actually, I remember, a few years back now you were I was over in your office, and you were saying how tough it was just to get it on scope.
Unknown Speaker
It was very tough, we actually took two chances to get it or two actions are getting it. One of the trick questions the regulator likes to ask is, how did you determine the volume of learning? Learning really is a theoretical figure, as you know. And if your answer is anything other than by the AQ f, then you can't get through in days gone by the regulator would not tell you what was wrong with your application. I understand what the change is to ask what now that they're actually going to change from I think it's April, how they deal with such things using common language so everybody can understand what they're trying to say. Yeah,
Brendan Torazzi
yeah. Well, I mean, that's sounds sensible. Then it's a you know, it's a shared. We're trying to we're working together with regulators to make the training outcomes better for students. So that that all makes sense. So you've been going for, what, 14 About 16 years now with HBA a bit longer, so it might be 17 years.
Unknown Speaker
I think we were actually got our license, I believe, I think it was 2005 something like,
Brendan Torazzi
Oh, okay. Okay, so what are the plans for the future? Well, to
Unknown Speaker
continue just head down. And I don't intend to put any additional qualifications on scope, all of our qualifications are required by legislation in the vocation they're designed to do. And that's why I got rid of one of the reasons I got rid of things like project management, and leadership and management, those things are not required. So So you have to do what we have, if you're in those industry segments, we are right now just finishing. And it's taken us six months, just finishing the putting together all of the new course for the new quality auditing qualification. Now, that makes a huge qualification compared to the to the 51615. It's absolutely huge. We will be running our external validation on it over the course of next week. And hopefully, we'll be putting that in. For addition to scope over the next month, it's it's a real job, there's also significant changes to the early childhood education and care qualifications, they are about to be superseded. But interestingly enough, I see the Carraig signed off on the certificate three, that refused to sign off on the diploma last week. So to that extent, they won't bring in the new cert three until they've signed off the diploma, but the changes in those that manifest and it's going to be very difficult to run those courses, but we will continue to run them.
Brendan Torazzi
So does that mean you need you? I mean, with that particular qual, you'd need some work, workplaces to do practice and stuff like that.
Unknown Speaker
So absolutely. I mean, at the moment, with the three I think it's 120 hours you need in the work practice, which just signed off from the logbook, that diplomas, 240 hours, and we there were certain things you have to do. And we have to see and we have to at the moment, we're having people video those things. But it's it's a challenge as a qualification is to challenge. And we have a certain marketplace in there, Brandon, it's not like everybody all and sundry come to us, because there is government funding for those qualifications. The people that we get are the people that have just moved to Australia, from, you know, some of the continents of most probably the main content or the sub continents, they come here and we've got a known name, to run it the most those people and it works for us, you know, it's not a major part of our business, but it's there. And I believe that the new course there'll be very few RTOS capable of running it. Yep. compliantly. And we will be able to do it. But the price is escalate by a multiple of three or four over the current price structure.
Brendan Torazzi
Yep. So you must have a huge compliance team in there. Just to keep on top of things here.
Unknown Speaker
Well, it's actually not we have a compliance manager. I put on a compliance hat quite often. Yeah. Trainers are more senior trainers put on a role of product designer. Yeah, so we will form a team. And we're going to design things or when we're sitting down, and we're going to validate things. And so we all support the compliance manager, but she, she really does the whole box and dice.
Brendan Torazzi
So it's sort of like it sounds like it's like building a house. If you get the foundation's right to the qualifications, then everything goes smoothly because they're built right in the first place. But we
Unknown Speaker
were unrelenting in our desire for it to be compliant. We just really are. You give a situation sometimes we learn as we go, Oh, you're so angled. You're so detail minded. But what happens is you get the corporates, the corporates love us because of that. I mean, one of the bigger corporates is the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. You don't get to deal with people like that and KFC and McDonald's. Unless you are doing the right thing.
Brendan Torazzi
Yeah. Yeah. Now, though, that'll that'll make sense. Okay. hearable. I think that's, that gives us a great overview of HPA and what's your website if people want to check in?
Unknown Speaker
It's hba.edu.au.
Brendan Torazzi
Excellent. All right, Harold. Thank you very much.
Unknown Speaker
Thank you, Brendan. All the best to all of your listeners. Bye bye.
Unknown Speaker
You've been listening to an ohs.com.au production.
Brendan Torazzi
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