An Interview with Brian Lindeman, Managing Director at Valiant

What in your background has been an ongoing influence for you through your life?

An ongoing influence would be the environment and sustainability. My family lived on and off in Papua New Guinea for four generations. My great-grandparents moved there in the early 1900s and our family has been back and forth ever since. I grew up in Lae and my childhood was on the ocean. It was truly nature’s doorstep with crystal clear water where we’d go diving, fishing, snorkelling, wakeboarding – all the ocean activities you can imagine. When you grow up in a pristine environment like that, it gives you a completely different sense of what the world can be like and what a precious resource it is.  

Having these experiences has positively impacted my core values around sustainability and the sustainability lens that I bring to Valiant. At its most fundamental, it’s all about preserving the environment so future generations can have the same experience that I did.  

After school, I did an engineering degree but after a year, I knew it wasn’t for me. I needed something with a bit more pace to it and eventually ended up doing a tourism and business degree. These days, I tell anyone who wonders what they should do after school to have a few years off and figure out what they’re really interested in, instead of going into an area they think they should be interested in. 

I moved back to Brisbane after spending five years in Melbourne and after three months travelling the world with my wife, I reached out to Valiant because I’d been doing some work with their competitor in Melbourne. I ended up taking on the role of State Manager which led me to my position as Managing Director across our three divisions, nationally.  

The hire business must really be ramping up for the Christmas season. How have you and Valiant found emerging from COVID? 

Yes, we’re really in the silly season now! It's actually been an interesting journey. COVID had a huge effect on the hire industry, the business as a whole was on average 70% down on revenue and our national headcount was cut by 50%. But now, everything’s back, bigger than ever before and we can't keep up. We’re dealing with labour shortages in both our sales and operations teams, which can make it trying at times.  

There is a fine line about taking on profitable jobs and being selective around the jobs we don't need to take on. The hire business is quite fortunate in that we've already got a lot of furniture to utilise while supply chains re-establish themselves. Now, it’s understanding what new ranges we can procure and add to our existing stock. 

You’ve been in the hire business for 15 years. What has changed in that time? 

Fifteen years ago, people were generally happy to fill their events with whatever was available and whatever was the cheapest option. Today, it’s completely changed and the notion of “fast fashion” has really moved into our industry, we keep that top of mind when it comes to our procurement. Clients want us to stay at the forefront of design and innovation, whether that’s new products, new materials or the sustainability side of an event.

“As the community has become more aware of sustainability over the past two decades, we’ve slowly seen that education trickling into everyday business. And as it has grown, it has driven sectors like ours to consider it on a more sophisticated level. ”

Both small and large-scale events are now looking at how they can change their business model to be more sustainable in what they're doing. A lot of events, by their very nature, such as motor racing, are harder to shift. However, we have seen the creation of sustainability teams within these major events, whose purpose is to decrease the carbon footprint. This can be anything from waste disposal, which materials can be used onsite for temporary builds, the preferred suppliers to use or as far as ensuring convenient and accessible public transport to the event.

How do you deal with the tension of needing to constantly update your stock while also getting the most use out of each item?

The hire industry is basically built on the circular economy. We want to reuse and recycle as much as we possibly can because that’s our business model. While the term “circular economy” has become a buzz word, we’ve basically been operating in the circular economy for 60 years. At the end of the day, the longer we have furniture in our hire range, the higher the return on investment we get for the product.  

We don’t want products that last a year, we want the furniture to last as long as possible from both a sustainability and investment point of view.  

“In terms of reuse and recycle, we’re involved in a project to chip 5,000 old plastic chairs and remould them locally into stools and ottomans. If we can turn an old product into a whole new product, it’ll be a real game changer and we’re excited. ”

In terms of procurement, we’re working with suppliers who are providing us fabric which is essentially made from all recycled plastics. The new ranges we have launching over the next few months are made from between 70% to 100% recycled plastics.  

We're truly trying to work out how we can do this as best practice because in terms of reuse, as sad as it sounds, it actually costs less to buy a new lounge from overseas than have an existing lounge stripped and recovered in Australia.  

What about changes you can make beyond your hire items that you can do? 

Our warehouses in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne account for over 15,000 square metres of flat roof surfaces. One of the things we're trying to work on in terms of any buildings we lease or renegotiate a lease on is getting the landlords to install solar, water retention and other energy saving devices. 

If we had a 10,000 litre water tank, for example, we could run most of our furniture cleaning and washing from this water source. One small shower of rain with the roof sizes we have would go a long way in keeping up with our usage. It’s an enormous opportunity and I hope that we’ll be able to work with our landlords to recognise the difference it could make. Not just in a sustainability sense, but also for all the economic reasons. 

While individuals will force the change, business like us have the opportunity to drive change by saying we’re not moving into a facility that doesn’t have solar or water retention devices. The government also needs to provide regulations and incentives to help push that change. If we could insulate ourselves against rising power prices, it makes so much economic sense, whilst also making a positive contribution to our environment.  

Has recycling always been a component of your business?

When we started on our sustainability journey about seven years ago, we really needed to understand what we were working with. We've got 25 trucks on the road every single day, thousands of kilometres between jobs and the warehouses, 125 staff traveling to and from work, water for cleaning and all the wrapping for deliveries. It was a bit daunting! 

Since I joined Valiant we had always recycled all of our plastic wrap and had both water and electrical saving initiatives in place. In 2018 we started the journey of moving our entire inventory system to the cloud, which was completed in mid-2020. This shift resulted in Valiant saving 83,000 sheets of paper being printed each year and a substantial cost reduction in energy costs as a result of dropping two servers. This really got us thinking about how far we could take this.   

Then in 2021, we started working with a company called Trace to understand what our carbon footprint is and how we can reduce it. It was both a data capture exercise as well as educational. They came back and told us – and the number is still staggering to me – that the CO2 we produce was 802.6 tonnes which equates to 13,565 shipping containers full of waste. On our behalf, 4,575 trees have been planted and we are extremely proud to be partnered with Trace. 

“Trace helped us offset our carbon emissions through projects we’re involved in, with a focus on projects in Australia and the Asia Pacific region. It was important for us to have high levels of visibility and transparency of these projects to ensure that what we’re actually investing in is clearly defined. Trace set up a dashboard so that we could see exactly what Valiant is invested in and how our emissions were being offset by those projects. ”

Some things we will struggle to change in the near term, for example the transport emissions or the need to use cling wrap. But we can think about reducing our energy and water usage as well as our waste and eventually look to solutions like electric vehicles.

Has this sustainability effort had a flow on effect through to the staff and clients?

We recently ran an engagement survey and part of that asked employees what they liked about working at Valiant. We received a whole heap of feedback from our team saying, unprompted, that they were proud to be working for a company that's a hundred percent carbon offset. It has been really well received and it’s also become so important for our staff retention and recruitment. Employees are starting to look for companies that have the same values and the same beliefs that they have. 

In terms of clients, a lot of times it comes down to the individual making the decision. Even if a company says it’s committed to working sustainably, often the person we’re talking to won’t care as much as, say, a sustainability team member would about the item they’re hiring.  

Having said that, we’re definitely seeing things move in the right direction but there’s still that last 20 percent of people that we need to change. It’s all about making sure that if sustainability is a core value, that the procurement, events and marketing and all of our teams are driven by that as well.  

We’re actually in the midst of a companywide refocus on our purpose, values and beliefs. That’s everyone from Valiant’s executive team to the casual offsider out in the field. We’re only going to be as good as our weakest link so we’re putting reminders of our values, purpose and sustainability ethos throughout our offices, showrooms and warehouses. It means every team member can see what our expectations are – the constant reminders are important, as we go about our day-to-day business.  

What would you want to see happening ten years from now?

Personally, and professionally, I think everyone should want to work for a business that's people-focused first and foremost. I’d love to see our business, and other businesses as well, building a family culture where people want to get involved in improving their place of work, as well as the planet. If you have the right product and the right people, the business will be successful. It's that simple.  

We're super family-orientated here. Family always comes first. If someone needs time out to deal with any issue big or small, we don't even need to know why. We'll make it work. If you're that reliant on your staff to be there 24/7, every single day, you've got the wrong business model going on. 

The flip side is that it’s important for me to have time to spend with my family, my kids, and wife. I want to have the time to see them fulfill their dreams and goals. That alone would be the dream for the next ten years and beyond, striking that perfect balance of being passionate about the work you do and living a fulfilling life.   

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