Chief Executive Officer: I'd like to start by welcoming everyone to our annual meeting and thanking you all for your hard work. It's been a great year for us in terms of expansion and optimising business opportunities, and I'm pleased to say that Benchmark Consulting is a thriving, successful company.
I'd like to take this opportunity to give you an overview of where the company began and where we'll be going in the next ten years. For those of you who've been with the company since the start, sorry if you already know all this, but we have so many new staff members that I thought it would be worth filling in some background information.
1Benchmark Consulting was set up in 2000 by James Cox, a local entrepreneur who opened the first office in Melbourne. His real achievement was to create a new consultancy system which enabled clients to see which of the key areas of their business needed strengthening. James was incredibly successful with his system, and started the company off on a journey of expansion. He retired in 2006, and was succeeded by Fred Montgomery. 2Fred shared James's views on consulting, and continued the expansion: he increased revenue to $5 million and opened a new office in Perth. Soon the Benchmark Consulting system had become just that - the benchmark for many other consulting firms, and Fred took the opportunity to sell Benchmark for $10 million in 2008.
3Our new owners are, as you know, TFB Group Ltd., and their investment has allowed us to build our brand new headquarters here in Sydney. TFB Group have brought us more exposure at a national level, and our most recent success has been winning a contract with the government of Australia, advising on management restructuring.
Now we ourselves have done a little reorganisation over the last year to maximise our productivity. We've thought long and hard about the best location for the Marketing Department as this is the key to facilitating our future business. 4Although Perth has a large number of marketing companies, which enables us to learn from our competitors, it's Melbourne that's the gateway to international connections, and therefore we've decided to move all marketing operations there.
In terms of professional development, we wanted to optimise the training programmes available to our staff because training is vital if we want to remain competitive. 5As a result, staff training will no longer be here in Sydney but instead will take place in the Perth office, where new facilities have been installed.
Finally, we've looked at how to optimise our back office administrative functions. 6Currently, each office has its own admin department. However, this is proving to be less efficient than we would like. In order to resolve this situation, all these functions will now be centralised here in Sydney.
Chief Executive Officer: So what does all this mean for the future? Well, after ten years, 7I've decided that Benchmark needs a new vision for the future. I think it's time for us to divide up parts of the business into smaller units. Therefore, over the next five years I aim to set up two small subsidiary companies in order to focus on international expansion in Europe and Asia. There are many organisations in emerging markets which could benefit from our experience and skills.
Which leads me to the next point for future development: that of increasing our workforce. 8It's become clear that all our departments are understaffed, so we'll be taking on more employees over the next year. 9And the really good news is that to make us a desirable employer, all positions, current and future, will receive a salary increase of ten per cent.
Lastly, 10I know that some people are worried about the financial aspects of having to move to another city as part of the restructure, so Benchmark will be providing a relocation package to all employees thus affected. This is because we would like you all to remain with the company for the foreseeable future.
