Winning awards for his business or his staff is commonplace for David Linke, Manager of Australian Hot Water Inner West, at Belmore.
On 16 September 2015, the Canterbury Local Business Awards for Outstanding Business Person of the Year was announced and David Linke was the worthy winner. In David’s words; “I was so surprised when they called out my name. I was speechless and absolutely shocked”.
David opened his business, Australian Hot Water Inner West, in March 2001, at 617 Canterbury Road Belmore. He had previously experienced a business partnership break up. David says, “Setting up a new Business in a new location was extremely difficult and met with many ups and downs. We built up a fantastic client base by providing prompt, reliable, trustworthy and a competitive service to all types of Hot Water System issues”. David acknowledges that having key staff, as well as up to date training from manufacturers and suppliers, helped assist in building a very reliable brand.
“Leading the way in the Solar Hot Water market helped us provide our customers with energy efficient options and ways to help reduce their energy running costs”, said David. With the internet age upon all businesses David was faced with sinking or swimming. He taught himself about internet solutions and ways to get his business online in the many different social media and web site channels, to gain exposure in a positive way. Spending hours after work uploading business information data and photographs to the website and attending training and business sessions with manufacturers, helped him in the change process.
In early 2014 David’s business moved away from paper records to cloud based solutions. Also changes to the way the business communicated with their service field staff on the road occurred, from 2 way radio controlled vehicles to an online cloud based job allocation and data capture application. The new technology was costly and impacted poorly on business operations. It was a case of short term pain for long term gain.
Loss of staff and difficulties in obtaining new qualified staff is a very strong issue at the moment. David and his business have recently assisted The Canterbury Bulldogs in employing some of their junior Rugby League players in an apprenticeship for plumbing. This has been a ‘win, win’ situation, helping the youth of today and providing David with apprentices.
All businesses are encouraged to support the 2016 Canterbury Local Business Awards. For more information on the 2016 awards, please contact Precedent Productions on 8577 5060. When these local awards are launched, further information will be provided in BizEnews.
