Sydney Employment Development Service
Cowan Creek
In this interview, Fiona Bridger is talking to Michael Coles of Cowan Creek Consulting. Cowan Creek operates as a sales and marketing company, working with mid-range to large businesses. In particular, it has found a niche building and developing websites.
How many years have you been building websites?
I have been building websites for a long time. I initially became involved in digital imaging in the late 1980’s where I worked with a number of press agencies at the Barcelona Olympics to send images back to Asia and Australia. From there, my interest in all things digital started which naturally led to building websites. I built my first website using Microsoft Word, can you believe it? These days I use a range of products which are much better suited to web design.
I have been building websites professional since 2000 and now work with about a dozen companies at a time on various web projects.
What type of companies do you work for today?
I have been quite successful with manufacturers and professional services businesses, although I have worked with a range of other companies. Generally, the companies that I work with are mid-range to large businesses, although I also work with some small business start-ups. At the moment I am working with a couple of smallish start-ups that recently listed on the Australian Stock Exchange, as well as a large blue-chip manufacturer which has had a large website for a long time. Each has quite particular needs, but overall they require creative input and marketing analysis as well as website construction or maintenance. That’s the sort of mix that I like as well so it is a happy marriage.
What do you think of people with a disability in this area of work?
When I am considering someone for a role, I see skills and talents that someone can bring; therefore it is their creativity or their technical abilities which really count. Sue Werner from SEDs introduced me to Simon Kim and he worked with me for a year or more on several projects because of his great creative skills and ability to translate a customer’s brief in to a good looking website. The fact that he was in a wheel chair was irrelevant to the position.
On a daily basis, most of our work arrives by telephone or by email where a client requests a change or update to their site. We then expedite the work and show the client in staged or private environment via the internet. Once they approve the work we can flip it in to the production environment almost instantaneously, which they love. And we can do all of this from a desk with a PC and internet connection in almost any location.
So if I consider Simon, our company might receive a work request which I would email to him. Simon would then expedite that request and let me know when it was complete. I’d then call or email the client and walk them through the work. Once approved, Simon would then move the work in to the production environment. Although we worked together a lot of the time, often on the same thing, we were in different locations. Simon found it simpler and easier to work from his brother’s shop in Lindfield with its familiar surroundings, and I worked from my office in St Ives. I made sure that we met several times per week, just so that we stayed in tune with the priorities of the day.
The fact that we weren’t sitting beside each other didn’t hinder our ability to deliver work to our customer’s satisfaction.
Are you employing any people with a disability in your company?
At present, I am not employing anyone at all at the moment. The sort of work I do is project-based and that means I have to expand and contract the number of people that I work with, depending on the projects at hand. We are in the maintenance phase with most of our clients, which is pretty simple, it is during the design and build phase of a website that we need assistance.
We have a major client which will require a substantial site build later this year and we will require people at that time.
Would you consider hiring a person with a disability again?
Yes.
As I referred to earlier, building websites relies on creative talent and technical ability. Therefore it relies on mental agility, not physical ability. So if the right person came along, I would certainly consider them.
Do you enjoy your work? If so, why?
Yes, I enjoy my work.
I love the ground-breaking, getting-to-know-you phase of a relationship, especially business relationships. So, having to find out about a company and build a solution that represents them to their market is ideal for me. It gives me the ability to discover stuff about the company and help them talk to their clients and other interested parties in new ways. It’s very exciting watching a website get built and gain momentum in its market. That is, people start to visit the site, they want to look at specific areas of content and they will begin to drive the website for themselves. It’s all about building communities of interest and I love it!