In Australia, where Gaia Resources was “born” and operates, turning 21 is definitely a milestone! While the formal “age of majority” in Australia has been 18 since the 1970s (each State or Territory had an Age of Majority Act passed across the 1970s that lowered the age from 21 to 18). So while we’ve been able to call Gaia Resources an adult for the last three years, it does feel like this year is really our coming of age.
I always spend a bit of time in these “birthday blogs” reminiscing about how we got to where we are today (like in our 20 year blog) this year I was wondering about statistics that have tracked how we’ve gone along the way. Some of those statistics are a little mind-boggling for me:
- We’ve employed over 140 people,
- We’ve delivered over 750 projects from around 1400 proposals,
- We’ve planted over 2,000 trees as a way of offsetting our emissions.
Our people are the strongest part of our company, and those 140 people across our history has seen us organically grow over time, driven by some longer-term projects we’ve worked on over the years (like the Atlas of Living Australia Citizen Science project in 2010, the 2018 Queensland State Archives Archival Management System, or the Biodiversity Data Repository in 2022). Those 140 people that have come and gone have each left us with insights and learnings that have added to the whole of the company and culture that we have today, and in many ways this has been the result of our integrity value: doing the right thing not just by our customers, but by each other.
Our projects over the years have been really interesting, and we’ve done work in a range of areas, including our main two areas of Environment and Collections. But along the way we’ve also stepped into other areas that fit into our corporate mission (“Gaia Resources is a consultancy that responsibly delivers sustainable technology solutions to make the world a better place”), like helping the Western Australian Department of Health manage mosquito borne diseases, or the Australian Government to improve the national aged care system. All of our projects are ones that we take on carefully and deliberately, and we aim to deliver a holistic solution of high value wherever we go - another one of our key values.
There’s lots of interesting ways to measure progress and how we’re doing as a company, and they’re things that I suspect aren’t the usual Key Performance Indicators. I think of things like our “Soft Skills” training, and our Employee Assistance Program, things that we brought on after COVID converted us to a much more flexible - and productive! - remote-first, hybrid working company. Looking after each other - our empathy value has been a strong part of our success, along with the fact that we also value personal responsibility - so people are also held accountable for their work.
We’ve also retained our focus on open source software throughout the 21 years. For example, our Quantum GIS training course - both the commercial in-person ones that we run around the country, and the freely available online training - has meant that we’ve helped over 850 people with QGIS training, either online or in person since we started in 2019. This is just one of the ways that we give back to the open source communities we work with - and we will continue to do that, and more, in the future - again, this is all about our integrity - giving back where we can.
So now that we’re an “adult” company some of the challenges we face are different than when we were younger. It’s been something weighing heavily on my mind over the last couple of years (especially since I attended the Southstart conference last year) that setting up a company to last for a long time - even forever since we’re working with Archives these days - you need to make a range of different decisions than if you are trying to set up a short-lived business. You need to think about things differently - and so our values around sustainability are really coming to the fore now, and not just from the 2,000-odd trees we’ve planted over the years.
So our values - sustainability, accountability, integrity, holistically and empathy - are all ones that have driven us across the last 21 years, and will continue to shape us into the future - whatever it brings! If you’d like to be part of that - as a client or a staff member - then drop me a line on email, or start a conversation with us on our social media channels - Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.
Piers