As featured in CQ News by Kristen Booth.
A LOCAL company is reaping the rewards of persistence in business, growing more than 150 per cent in the past year.
Family-owned business Activ Civil Construction Services has been successfully budding since it began in Emerald in 2011, with business really starting to boom since 2017.
Managing director Stuart Curtis said he bought an office last year, rather than running the business from home, and "by the time we got the site office installed and up and running, we had grown that much, we just did not fit at all”.
Since the beginning of 2017, the business has expanded from fewer than 10 employees to now having about 32 constant employees specialising in all aspects of civil works including road construction, civil plumbing and drainage, traffic management and control, demolition and asbestos removal.
In order to accommodate the growth, Mr Curtis and his wife Katlin recently purchased the old Emerald Home Hardware site, which hadn't been used in about three years according to Adam and Jones Property Specialists.
"(We are) absolutely flat out. In the last 12 months we had 156 per cent growth in gross turnover,” Mr Curtis said.
"It took a lot of work to make that happen, but that's what we were doing all that work for.
"There were plenty of times where we could've said 'that's too much' and backed away from it, but we didn't and now it's showing.
"We started business here in Emerald in 2011 and just put every cent back in, so there wasn't much profit, but now the profit is starting to show.”
Mr and Mrs Curtis are confident the new site will accommodate the future growth of the business.
"We have various projects and job sites around the region and if we bring everything back to the yard we have now, we will have gear parked all down the street,” Mr Curtis said.
"There's no room left, but the new premise will allow us to have that growth.”
The large block and plentiful shed space allows Activ Civil to lease out part of the property for use to other businesses, while still providing room to move.
Mr Curtis said regardless of how the economy performed in coming years, they were confident in their future.
"I don't see our growth as something that was pushed by the mining boom,” he said.
"We deal so much with council infrastructure, roadworks infrastructure and things like that, and those things aren't going to go away.
"We are still the reminisce of a small family business. Employing locals is one of our main goals and everyone that is working for us is local.
"It's all about keep on going, don't give up - that's sort of the main thing.”
