Page 49 - Australian Defence Magazine June 2022

JUNE 2022 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
SMALL TO MEDIUM ENTERPRISES AIDN 49
way you can manage the diversity is to spend time with the company and understand what they want. We try to treat all our members as individuals. When AIDN moved to a national model in 2020 we kept all the state and Terri- tory committees in place so we have people on the ground who can work very closely with members and provide very individual service. When I’m contacted by a member our conversations can take a couple of hours because I need to understand their business, what they’re doing, the kind of things from a defence perspective that they’re chasing, how they operate, the level of sophistication in the business, and things like that. You need to understand the organisation itself before you can help it.
ADM: And how do you provide that help?
CLARK: AIDN runs on the funding of its members. This is based on size of turnover and personnel. We’re happy for a company to provide sponsorship for a dinner or to put on
ABOVE: A range of SMEs participated in Indo Pacific 2022 ABOVE LEFT: Brent Clark spent significant time in industry
before taking on the role of CEO of AIDN
an event but we don’t take sponsorship to run our organisa- tion. That allows us to focus 100 per cent on our members without worrying about funding being taken from us. At the moment most of the interaction with members when they’re seeking advice or assistance is coming directly from me. Our four other full time staff tend to focus on man- aging finances, databases, and organising and running events. We try to get members talking to members.
By and large the SME community is very willing to as- sist, we don’t have those patch-protecting issues. Unasham- edly my knowledge of contractual issues is fairly high and
ROYA GHODSI