Page 48 - Australian Defence Magazine June 2022

48 SMALL TO MEDIUM ENTERPRISES AIDN
JUNE 2022 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
SUPPORTING
THE DEFENCE
SME SECTOR
The Australian Industry and Defence Network (AIDN) has been providing a voice for small to medium enterprises in the defence sector for many years and with the recent growth in government spending on Defence, its advocacy has arguably become even more important.
JULIAN KERR | SYDNEY
BRENT Clark has spent more than three decades in varie- gated roles – 12 years as a submarine officer in the Royal Australian Navy, followed by wide experience and increas- ingly prominent roles in industry. These have ranged from Vice President Thales Naval Business Group and Head of Business Development, Strategy and Communications Maritime at BAE Systems Australia, to Chief Operating Officer and Interim CEO of Naval Group Australia.
Now, as CEO of AIDN he’s putting that hard-won ex- perience to good use on behalf of Australian SMEs, as he explains to Senior Correspondent Julian Kerr.
ADM: How is that time at the Big End of Town helping you to help SMEs?
CLARK: When I left the Navy, I went to Sonartech before it became Sonartech Atlas, so an Australian SME that was acquired by a major overseas player. And my experience of Naval Group was basically going from an organisation
of five people to getting a major business up and running. That’s given me the ability to understand precisely how client contractors think and what drives their thought processes. I’ve been able to translate that into competent outcomes for members. You can also pass on some prime contractor thinking to SMEs to help them formulate strat- egies and plans in terms of how they might want to ap- proach things.
ADM: AIDN has more than 1,000 members, geographi- cally dispersed. How do you assist, guide and nurture what will clearly be diverse entities?
CLARK: There’s nothing stopping primes becoming AIDN members – Thales is one – but our primary focus is on SMEs. Our membership is as diverse as defence industry because it includes so much of defence industry. It’s ‘a broad church’. We work very closely with the larger com- panies to help them understand our SMEs, but the only
AIDN