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In The Spotlight: Symal Group Ltd (ASX: SYL)
The word Symal means “together” in the Latin language.
Growing up in working class Werribee, on the edge of Melbourne suburbia, Joe Bartolo’s father would regularly converse with his son in the family’s native Maltese tongue, often repeating a key life motto: “If you eat alone, you will die alone.”
“That has always stayed in my head. So I talk a lot about family values and my whole mentality in this business is about doing things together,” Bartolo junior says of the Symal construction company he founded 24 years ago.
Bartolo is proud of his heritage and has visited Malta, an archipelago in the central Mediterranean between Sicily and the North African coast, several times. There he learned to appreciate the spirit of its people.
“I came away thinking ‘I know why I am the way I am’. The Maltese people are about never giving up in life. What they have been through over their history teaches you resilience,” he says.
It is now corporate folklore that Joe Bartolo started his own landscaping business in 2001 with just a borrowed wheelbarrow and a shovel borrowed from his father.
“Late last year that same firm, today a major construction and equipment hire company, listed on the Australian Securities Exchange with a $437 million market capitalisation after raising $136 million from investors."
But less is known about the entrepreneurial spirit that shaped him.
Decades ago his parents, Joe senior and Monica, started their own retail and wholesale garden nursery business, where he was asked to work as a teenager.
He left school at year 10 and did an apprenticeship in his parents' businesses for the next three years.
“They were quite happy with what they did and sticking to their knitting, but that drove me crazy. I really wanted to grow the business. At the time my brother had a cake manufacturing business. I saw him building that and wanted to do the same,” Bartolo junior says.
“That is the reason I set up my own business.”
But the family business experience ingrained in him a tireless work ethic and the basic fundamentals of running an enterprise.
While working for his parents, Bartolo also developed an unusual hobby: collecting snakes.
For years he had been told by his parents to fear the reptiles, but it only made him more intrigued.
Eventually he developed an infatuation with snakes and owned over 70 at one stage - tigers, taipans, death adders and other breeds, and even a couple of crocodiles - which he kept in a bungalow in the backyard of his parent’s Werribee home.
When he left their nursery business, he even started his own firm that he named Venomous Australia.
“I was the youngest snake catcher in Victoria and did wildlife shows for schools and kindergartens and occasionally birthday parties on weekends. When I worked for mum and dad, I was making $18,000 a year. Doing these shows I was making $1800 a week,” he says.
It only lasted a year, but the Venomous Australia experiment highlighted that being an entrepreneur was in Bartolo’s blood.
His fledgling landscaping business initially expanded into concrete paving and structural work in 2003 and by 2010, Ray Dando and Andrew Fairbairn had joined as directors, each taking a 25 per cent stake in the business. In the years that followed the firm was re-named Symal.
Bartolo recalls that in the early years of building the business, he used to lie about his age,
“We wanted to be respected, we always wanted to be a bigger firm than what we were. I always felt like a young kid trying to work in a man’s world. I didn’t want to be dismissed. I knew I had the skills and the smarts,” he says.
He has also retained the family values and spirit in the Symal business.
His wife, Olivia, is Symal’s Chief people and culture officer and one of its longest serving employees. They have been married for 21 years.
“Liv and I met when she was a school teacher. I was doing landscaping and concreting and I convinced her to come and do the book work at the business. She has brought so much to Symal. She is great with culture and the development of our people through our learning and development programs,” he says.
“For us, it has been very easy working together. The hardest part is going home and trying to keep work out of that. But we have done it very well.”
Today, Symal operates in Victoria, NSW, South Australia and Queensland, and employs 1270 staff. It does major civil construction, concreting, drainage, landscaping, hires out major plant and equipment, runs a recycling arm and three quarries which supply building materials.
Bartolo says about three-quarters of Symal’s revenue comes from the private sector, so will not be affected by any significant changes to government infrastructure programs.
He describes his leadership style as “collaborative”.
“It is all about our teams and achieving greatness together. But I am also decisive on what I want and I know how to explain that to our people to help them deliver. I expect a high performing culture with our people,” he says.
“I am also big on values. My European heritage is so important to me in terms of driving the culture of the business.”
As managing director, he leaves CEO Nabeel Sadaka to run the day-to-day operations, while he focuses on strategy, governance, investments, acquisitions and culture.
He says the secret sauce of Symal has been bringing the team along the journey,
“It is our journey - that is my wife, the CEO, my two business partners, the rest of the executive team and the staff as a whole. We have this relentless want to be better each day. We have a winning culture, we just don’t know how to lose,” he says.
Symal has a policy that no staff member can eat alone at their desk at lunchtime, which forges a culture of friendship and collaboration.
There is also half a day allocated each month to new staff named “How we roll”. Bartolo and his wife Olivia attend these sessions, where they explain the history and values of the firm and what they mean, as well as the company strategy and why it runs a diversified, self-performing and vertically integrated business.
“I find this to be so important, so everyone gets to learn what makes me tick,” Bartolo says.
Going forward, he sees significant growth opportunities nationally in government spending on major infrastructure projects, the transition to renewables and emerging opportunities in industries like defense.
“Our organic growth will continue in four states but the big growth will come from acquisitions. We want to grow our market share through that,” he says. The firm currently has a net cash position of around $30m.
While the free float of the business is only about 30 per cent, Bartolo makes no apologies.
“With that owner-manager mindset, we have a sense of pride that we don’t want to let go of. It is also this gut feeling you have as an owner. You are full of scars from the past, but you learn from them. I have cuts all over me, but I never cut myself in the same place twice,” he says.
“As time goes on, as we grow by acquisition, we may release more free float.”
November 2024 will forever be a day etched in his memory: His parents were with him at the ASX in Melbourne when he rang the bell for the opening day of trading in Symal shares.
“Going for an IPO was a time to look over our shoulder and reflect on what we had created. That was very special and very emotional,” he says, admitting he had tears in his eyes in the same way he did the days his two children were born.
“With your kids, you wait nine months before you get that bundle of joy. But with Symal, it had been 24 years. So it meant so much to me. It definitely touches your heart. Having that bell ringing ceremony was one of the proudest moments of my life.”
About Symal Group Ltd
Symal Group Limited provides construction contracting, equipment hires, material sales,recycling, and remediation services to the civil construction industry in Australia. The company offers civil infrastructure services, including civil construction, concrete work, drainage systems, and surveying for public and private infrastructures, as well as hard and soft landscaping services; and wet and dry plant, earthmoving plant, equipment hire, and logistics services for government and private sector infrastructures. It also engages in the sale of construction material, including sand and gravel, as well as repurposed construction materials for government, landscaping suppliers, civil contractors, and renewable energy operators. The company provides recycling and repurposing, landfill and waste management, construction and demolition recycling, materials transportation, site remediation work, and disaster recovery services. It serves transport infrastructure, including roads and bridges, railways, harbors, and airports; and water, energy, education, health, entertainment, justice and recreation, defence sectors.
Board and Management
- Peter Richards, Independent Chair
- Joe Bartolo, Group Managing Director
- Andrew Fairbairn, Executive Director
- Ray Dando, Executive Director
- Ken Poutakidis, Independent Non-Executive Director
- Anne Lockwood, Independent Non-Executive Director
- Shane Gannon, Independent Non-Executive Director
