By Paul Raftery, CEO of Projects RH
February 2022
At Projects RH we see a wide spectrum of work- ranging from complex infrastructure to facilitating generational change within family businesses.
For all businesses the last two years have been challenging, to say the least. The challenges not only of how we do the business, but where, and when. Many of our clients are now effectively running their businesses from home and living/breathing on Zoom.
For Projects RH the impact of the lockdowns associated with the Covid-19 pandemic has seen a change in our sector and customer base. It has grown dramatically, as have our strategic alliances. It has also changed, and some would laugh, but we now do more business outside Australia than we do inside and do more business in Melbourne that we do in Sydney!
I often ask myself why this is the case. First, many of our friends in Melbourne could not get the responses they wanted from their consultants, not due to the lockdowns in Melbourne, but rather from the mindset they adopted that they were locked down.
My thinking is that Projects RH and its strategic partners, including those in Melbourne, took a different view that helped us surpass the huge issues that occurred in Europe, India, Hong Kong, Vietnam, and Southeast Asia in general. We were able to work with these countries as they came in and out of lockdown; more importantly, the key people in the organization, by working with or on email and on video. Particularly in our business in Latin America we continue to use WhatsApp both on our phones and on our laptops.
In the end it’s about mindset.
I think the same is true in working with different clients. We welcome the opportunity to work with a diverse group of clients.
Our post Covid “reset”
One of the key features Projects RH has implemented due to Covid-19 is what we recommend for our clients: We undertook a strategic review of our business and updated our business plan and then implemented it. We worked with strategic partners to make bring this about and we will forever be thankful for our teams’ hard efforts (some of our team located in Latin America and USA had their own Covid issues to deal with).
2021 gave Projects RH to the opportunity to restructure our business into 3 units
This also provided to the opportunity for us to restructure our banking. We now have specialised accounts for different parts of the business – for on-line receipting and automated payments, for example. We are seeking to generate on-line income too. We are grateful for the support we received from Sinead and her team at 2CentsWorth Bookkeeping and Sabina Donnolley at Donnolley Rush Chartered Accountants. It is always good to get their independent support for what we are doing with the business.
As we built a new website with sites for each of our business units, we divided them into independent entities with separate presences online and in social media.
Finally, we invested in the investment visa marketplace, SIVIV Pty Ltd which owns www. SIVAustralia.com with our strategic partners RC Migration and Sapien Group.
These steps we see as having established the platform for our activities in 2022 and beyond.
Corporate Finance RH has long been our traditional business basically because is what I spent the last 20 years working in. Much of our work involves understanding and presenting business opportunities so they can be understood by investors and lenders. For the entrepreneur it is often hard to distance themselves from their own enthusiasm and for them to allow the facts to speak for themselves.
Investment Visa RH branches out of our corporate finance activity and reflects our work to assist good people to demonstrate that they can make their future in Australia by being an able BIIP investor. Our work is mostly involved with building the business case for people to get state nomination. We work with people who are seeking
- to invest in a business like they had in their former country
- to invest AUD 2.5m of more if they meet stringent requirements
- to invest AUD 5.0m or more if they meet less stringent requirements
- to invest in and deliver an entrepreneurial solution to a new business opportunity
- purchase and invest in a regional business on very strict criteria.
Technology RH grew out of the need for many of our clients to change their business model or create a new way of doing business, plus the opportunity offered to both existing Australians and new Australians to develop and attract finance a new technology development.
Whilst we seek to keep each as a separate activity is important to understand that in practice they merge.
We are helping many of our clients deal with technology adapting to the new world of Blockchain, machine learning, artificial intelligence and buying assets digitalized form such as coin or crypto coins.
The big fish
Large projects continue to be important to the team at Projects RH -one of the features we have learned to work with is diversity. 2020 – 2021 saw many of the large projects we were working with effectively stop. We got caught up with different lockdowns at different times in different cities and countries. One of our strategic projects is a USD $4 billion merchant oil refinery aiming to supply 200,000 barrels a day of product into Southeast Asia. The investors, the engineers and the host country each in turn suffered lockdowns.
Working with our strategic partner Jaime Fernandez in Cali Colombia we have found two goldmining opportunities and two carbon credit farming opportunities. Using our international network, we have found a buyer for the carbon credits based in Singapore and they have introduced a funding partner from Switzerland. Each of these projects has a number of hurdles which we are currently addressing. Closure time for any of these projects will be mid to late 2022.
One of the complications with big fish is they are surrounded by confidentiality agreements- in ways we can’t even talk about. But I can say we are seeing increasing opportunities in technology in 2022 and beyond as we work with our strategic partners at HandTag based in Colombia SodaTek based in Vietnam with its Australian Managing Director Thomas Vo, and Prodocom with its CEO Paul Edwards based in Sydney.
The small fish
At Projects RH the small fish are fun and run fast. Many of these clients are led by a single entrepreneur willing to bet all they have on the success of their business or the opportunity they bring to us. We get a chance to influence their future business. With right nurturing they sponge information and grow fast like teenagers. I love watching the entrepreneurs gain confidence in their plans and then deliver.
Most of these clients need a business plan and over the years we have shared a number of clients with Dr Warren Harmer of The Business Plan Company. Warren has remained positive during what was a difficult period in Melbourne. We have worked with him on investment Visa and corporate clients across the year.
We do work with a number of small-medium new companies, many are new technology companies with some being able to get their founders a 188E vis. For Projects RH what is critical is that the project is a good project and if the sponsor is eligible for a visa we are pleased for them. What is now self-evident is that under the new rules there are a lot of new opportunities.
We always think when we are working with a smaller client that an oak tree begins with a single seed and that five years ago most of us had not heard of crypto currency and look where BlockChain, artificial intelligence, machine learning and crypto currency are today. Given the rapid pace of growth of technology companies we never know if we are looking at the next AfterPay or AirTasker – we often can only hope.
This pond fits all
At Projects RH we work across a spectrum of opportunities and in a number of countries. We work on large projects and small projects but most importantly we work with people.
Investors and consultants need to make judgements on the people behind projects plus their willingness and passion to deliver. Hopefully we bring to the table a sense of commercial reality and work with our clients to build informed decisions.
We enjoy the spectrum of our work and the people we work with. These people are not only our clients but our team and the consultants we regularly work with which we refer to as our strategic partners. There is a certain magic in the air when we get together, even if in Zoom, to move a project forward.
