Hard work. Honesty. Integrity. Nicola Enz Quealy understands these are values to live by because she lives by them.
It was her father Albert, a Swiss entrepreneur who introduced her to the wastewater and sewerage solutions segment when she was only a girl, who instilled in her the importance of fairness and reliability and of always telling the truth.
Especially to customers. Her initial calling, it turns out, was down a different path.
She recalls her first professional ambition was to be a travel agent.
At the time in Switzerland travel agents needed to complete an apprenticeship like many other trades. It proved something of a rude awakening.
After undertaking a work experience position at a travel agency, she was soon convinced it was the wrong career for her. Enz Senior manufactured nozzles for cleaning stormwater and sewer pipes.
The internationally recognised Swiss water jetting and water blasting tools of the same name were made in his workshop.
Enz Quealy was not unfamiliar with an environment of working lathes and mills having been brought up around it. An apprenticeship as a machinist or something similar seemed logical.
Only it would have to be in another workshop, that was not her father’s, for the reason she didn’t want to clash with him.
Family being family. Enz Quealy subsequently did two work experience placements, just to make sure it was the right path.
“I absolutely loved it,” she recalled. “It was definitely for me.”
Growing up an hour from Lucerne in Giswil, a small town with a population of around 3,000 people, meant she was one of the first women, if not the first, to undertake a toolmaking apprenticeship in the region.
Official record keeping, in which a government body assigned a gender typical of a budding tradesman, had to change to make way for her entrance. She was 15.
“Back then in Switzerland, you left school in year nine if you wanted to do an apprenticeship,” Enz Quealy told Trenchless Australasia.
“If you wanted to study at university you stayed on.”
With a view to possibly moving into a mechanical engineering degree down the track, Enz Quealy decided to augment her days in the workshop by taking classes for an international bachelorette (IB).
She was, as the Chinese proverb goes, crossing the river by feeling the stones.
Intensely driven as she was, apprenticing in an all-male environment proved a tough experience.
For all that she learnt and discovered, including new ways to lift heavy machinery to keep pace with the men, she encountered bullying and even sexual harassment.
“At the time these things were not dealt with how they are now,” she said.
“That certainly happened to me. What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger.”
She added, “I’m not wishing any girl to go through that. It was, however, what it was at the time.”
But she stuck at it. Finishing her apprenticeship in 1996 Enz Quealy went travelling to Australia and New Zealand for a seven-month sabbatical before she returned to Switzerland ready to work as a toolmaker.
She got bored not soon after. University beckoned.
“Mechanical engineering wasn’t the be-all and end-all for me but I felt somewhat stuck,” she said. “I didn’t want to be on the tools the rest of my life.”
Having the prerequisite to enter university that’s exactly what she did. She specialised in thermal dynamics.
That gave her a lot of insight into flow dynamics and thermal distribution, knowledge she still uses today in her role as co-owner of SECA.
After a two-year stint as an engineer with PanGas a subsidiary of Linde Gas she joined her father’s business working as the international sales manager travelling the world and meeting all of the regional distribution partners.
Here she was given a comprehensive exposure to the industry which eventually led to her meeting Mark Quealy, who was employed as the general manager of SECA. He’s now her partner in every sense of the word — her husband and co-owner of SECA.
She eventually moved to Australia in 2006 and worked for BOC Gases as a Field Engineer.
In 2011 Enz Quealy had a baby girl. She took time off and eventually re-entered the workforce as a planner for Australia’s Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO).
Then Mark and her were presented an offer to buy SECA, which they did.
“It was super interesting because I had to learn so much about people and culture and how sales work here,” said Enz Quealy.
“Because I wasn’t in this industry, I had lost a lot of knowledge, so I took on many different roles to learn the ropes again.”
She worked in people and culture, then on the floor in sales and later on in operations before returning to head up Strategy and People & Culture.
The proverbial full circle.
Social safety was, for Enz Quealy, an issue close to her heart long before the phrase started circulating in HR departments. It was very important to her that people wanted to be at the business.
“Because I had had a really hard time with my apprenticeship and also with one of my previous employers, I have a very strong drive to create a really conducive culture in the business,” she says.
“We have just implemented a recognition program so people can nominate someone who lives our values really well and the impact that has had on the team and the business.”
In fact, there were no business values in place when she took over SECA. After engaging a HR consultant to run a workshop with employees, of which they now have 28, leadership began to refine the strategy so that their people would better understand where Mark and Nicola were trying to take the company.
Even so, four years ago, when the value sets were first adopted, they didn’t resonate with everyone including Mark.
“They have to mean something to the MD,” Enz Quealy said. “So, 18 months ago, we redid the values.”
These values now include ‘Better Together,’ a mantra for reinforcing the importance of teamwork,
“We get Sh!t done’, bias for action, ‘Bring the Love,’ which puts the onus on a happy work environment and ‘Act with Swiss Precision’, whose origins are self-explanatory.
“We’re really trying to embed those values now,” added Enz Quealy. “It’s all about moving the needle in the right direction.”
Employee retention is another point of pride at SECA. There’s staff who have been with the company for 15 and in some cases 20 years.
“They really know their product and that’s why we are the expert in the industry,” said Enz Quealy.
“That expertise anchors the service we provide for our customers so that their performance improves and their downtime and reputational risk is reduced. My husband has been here 33 years.”
That accounts for a lot of knowledge inside the heads of a select few key staff in the business.
One of the current strategic initiatives at SECA is to create a third platform, possibly via an AI agent, so that those vast stores of knowledge can be accessed and made available through a system to others internally.
Another priority underway at the business is growing its training capability inhouse.
Productivities will likely flow downstream from this endeavour to customers.
Enz Quealy, by her own admission, is a straight shooter. She puts that down to her Swiss background.
Hard work. Honesty. Integrity. In that sense those core values have never changed even as her questing spirit has taken her halfway around the world.
All those experiences Enz Quealy has had, both the good and the bad, she insists, have made her empathetic to the plight of others.
“I always have an open ear, and I always try to help in whatever way I can,” she says.
“I will do my best in whatever I do. If I don’t know how to do it, I will find the right people to help me to be the best. And the other thing is I just love learning. Whatever you throw in front of me I will dig my teeth in and learn as much as I can about it.”
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