Emily Chapman Laing
Fifty-six time award winning Narre Warren high tech business Successful Endeavours has yet again been nominated, hoping to add another shiny frame to their Hall of Fame wall.
Successful Endeavours is run by Endeavour Hills husband and wife duo Ray and Junette Keefe and specialises in electronics design, embedded software and manufacturing.
On 7 June, the couple found out they had been chosen by the Victorian Government Department of Jobs, Skills, Industry and Regions (DJSIR) as a finalist for the Victorian Manufacturing Hall of Fame awards with winners to be announced in August.
In 2022, Ray and Junette were awarded the Best Complex Electronic Technology Business 2022 at the Australian Made Awards.
Successful Endeavours was a finalist for the Endeavour Awards 2022, national manufacturing industry awards in which they ended up taking home Industrial Product of the Year for their Plumb Guard Bluetooth device, which helps prevent plumbers from being electrocuted on the job.
“You connect it to pipes that plumbers are working on, and if a hazardous voltage appears on the pipes, it goes off,” Mr Keefe said.
“Lots of noise, bright flashing LEDs, and it also connects to an app on their phone.”
This year, the Plumb Guard was a finalist for the IoT Impact Awards Health category, but the winning spot was “pipped” by Telstra.
The company works on a variety of different projects, from high voltage power distribution equipment, to cell therapy machines, to digital bagpipes.
The cell therapy machines allow biological samples to be taken and isolated down to a particular cell type.
From this, DNA can be removed and reintroduced to “cure diseases” that come about from having “bugs in your own DNA”.
The cell therapy machine has been used to treat haemophilia, where blood fails to clot properly.
“They can actually replace the broken gene,” Mr Keefe said.
“Our part of the project was the electronics and software pieces in the guts of the machine to the circuit boards.”
Perhaps the most unique project from the company is their digital bagpipes.
“Bagpipe players have three problems,” Mr Keefe said.
“Firstly, the instrument is quite large, secondly, it’s quite loud and thirdly, not everybody likes the sound of them.
“One of our clients is a professional bagpipe player and he was looking for something players could use to practice.”
With the digital bagpipes, players can plug in their headphones and “play away” with real bagpipe sound samples programmed into the device.
But Mr Keefe’s true passion project from the company has been the creation of a world-first IND technology, used to find electricity grid faults to within a few metres, so they can be repaired.
“This is another high voltage power distribution project, and it’s sampling 250 million times per second,” he said.
“It’s looking for signatures of particular events and when a fault is seen by two units we can calculate where the event was happening.
“The idea is you can pick up the signature of these events four to eight weeks before they actually happen, then you can do preventative maintenance before you have a disaster.”
The Victorian Bushfire Amelioration Fund has trialled 62 of the devices, which Mr Keefe said was “an overwhelming success”.
The device has also become incredibly popular in California, where penalties for power companies are higher.
Mr Keefe said he owes much of his success to his business coaching.
“Back in 2006, I realised that the business wasn’t growing the way I wasn’t and wasn’t achieving the goals that I wanted for it,” he said.
“And I realised that I didn’t know what to do to change that, which meant I was lacking in business education.”
When you walk into the Successful Endeavours office suite, you will see awards on almost every wall, spanning over a decade.
To Mr Keefe, it is the continued recognition of his business that helps keep Successful Endeavours above the “noise” of social media and SEO optimisation.
“Every year we look at what we can do to continue to give people the confidence to contact us,” Mr Keefe said.
“One of the jokes we made when we moved into this office was that I was moving for the wall space, not the floor space.”
Having tangible examples of their success also helps to “encourage” the staff “to appreciate who they are and what they’re doing”, Mr Keefe said.
Sustainability is important to Mr Keefe and it shows through the operation of his business.
After the work from home orders of the pandemic, Mr Keefe realised he could contribute to a greener world by offering work from home options after COVID restrictions eased.
“This is keeping people off of the road,” he said.
“With sustainability one of the things we’ve got to do is stop people driving around when they don’t need to drive around.”
Another project one of Mr Keefe’s team members is working on will help to reduce the amount of coal needed to burn in a coal-fired power station by 15 per cent.
The company is also looking to give back to the economy, with their recent venture into manufacturing set to create more jobs.
“Manufacturing creates a lot of other jobs around it,” Mr Keefe said.
“The estimate is that one job in manufacturing directly generates five jobs around it.
“You’ve got office workers, accountants, lawyers, cleaners, suppliers and the guy with the coffee cart.”
Mr Keefe said he also values manufacturing for its ability to “spread wealth more evenly through a community”, as the chain of jobs hires workers at “every level”.
Casey will soon have to say goodbye to Successful Endeavour’s Narre Warren office as the team move to Dandenong South to a larger design office and dedicated factory.
