CUSTOMER STORY
The people-first road map that built a business worth buying
After thirteen years of growth, from six employees to twenty-two, a hazardous area electrical business had built more than something worth selling to an ASX-listed group. It built a culture worth keeping.
Selling a business is a complicated thing. There is relief and exhaustion and the quiet pride of knowing you built something worth selling. But there is also the grief of handing the keys to someone else and wondering whether the culture you carefully nurtured, the values you agonised over, and your team you invested so much into will survive the transition.
Jenni Grenville, co-founder of EX Engineering, a hazardous area electrical business acquired by ASX-listed IPD Group, reflected on that moment.
“The team’s the best it’s ever been,” Jenni said. “We’ve got a fantastic team and the business is flying. They’re absolutely set up for success.”
Make no mistake, a clean, confident exit after thirteen years of growth was not an accident.
Too busy to work on the business
When EX Engineering was in its early years, Jenni and co-founder Warwick were doing what most small-business owners do: working hard and hoping to keep up.
“As owners, you’re always working in the business rather than on the business,” Jenni said.
The team was small, and the company was lean in the way only founder-led businesses can be. Both principals filled roles that in a larger organisation would be split across entire departments.
It was through trusted contact Gillian, a consultant who would later become their Adapt Coach, that they were first introduced to Adapt. The timing was not ideal. Initially, the Lumia platform felt like more to do, not less.
“It takes a while to get your head around any system and structure. You can’t just understand it in two weeks,” Jenni said.
What changed her mind was the accumulation of wins once they started working with Adapt. The strategy sessions with Gillian gave Jenni and Warwick the discipline to think about where the business was actually going, with someone making them accountable for showing up and doing the work. The Lumia platform let them capture everything and preserve the progress they were making.
Values: moving from “impossible” to becoming the backbone of everything
Among the most important early wins was something that sounds deceptively simple but is much harder to put into practice: articulating the company’s values.
“We tried so many times. It was literally impossible,” Jenni said. “Adapt Coach Gillian helped us put our values down into words in such a positive way. It really integrated into the team.”
Critically, the whole team was involved in creating the values.
“You don’t have to have the same values,” Jenni said, “but you need to connect to them in some way. It gives you an idea of how things are done around here.”
Once established, those values became the backbone of every hiring, onboarding, and development conversation. Having a clear, co-created framework transformed what had previously been improvised and inconsistent into something structured and repeatable.
On company values:
“We tried so many times. It was literally impossible. Adapt Coach Gillian helped us put our values down into words in such a positive way. It really integrated into the team.”
Not just ticking a box
The structured career conversations facilitated through the Lumia platform became one of EX Engineering’s most valued rituals. Held once a year, they were deliberately designed to sit outside the usual performance review cycle. They were focused not on salary or KPIs, but on what mattered most to each person and their career.
“They were genuine conversations,” Jenni said. “You weren’t just ticking a box. You got a lot out of them.”
The format evolved over the years, eventually incorporating career plans and deeper discussions about priorities for the team. An Adapt Coach facilitating the conversations for the leadership team made them more honest than any line-manager meeting could be.
“You think you know everyone because you’re working next to each other,” Jenni said, “Taking the time to really understand what’s important to someone, and then being able to design the business to support that, makes everyone a lot happier.”
Warwick also saw the value clearly. Even though he wasn’t involved in all of the conversations, he wanted to know the results. That buy-in from both founders gave the process credibility across the entire team.
On setting objectives:
“Being able to articulate our objectives to ourselves and then communicate to the team how we were tracking — whether it was good or bad — was really powerful.”
Thirty roles and counting — and that’s just for one founder
As EX Engineering moved towards its eventual sale and transition, the Lumia platform revealed something that might otherwise have stayed invisible. A single snapshot of Warwick’s role profile showed thirty distinct responsibilities sitting against his name.
“We could look in there and say, ‘Warwick’s got thirty roles,’ ” Jenni said. “And then ‘who’s going to do those?’ ”
Jenni had a similar number of diverse responsibilities in the company. The role-clarity mapping built up over years of consistent Lumia platform use had become a critical handover tool. It made apparent the sheer volume of functions that fell, by default, to the founders.
Coaching support from people with the same lived experience
Beyond the Lumia platform, what Jenni credits most is the coaching relationship. Adapt Coaches are all business owners, so they know explicitly what it’s like to grow a business. For the first 12 months, Jenni worked with Gillian, then had a sustained engagement with Adapt Coach Tadhg, who stepped in and quickly built the same level of trust.
“It’s a bit of a lonely job,” Jenni said. “But having someone that’s not involved, that’s external to the business, is really valuable because they can be objective.”
That objectivity mattered most in the moments no business owner likes to talk about:
navigating tensions in the leadership team
staying on strategy when the business was pulling in every direction at once
working through the interpersonal dynamics that any growing organisation inevitably faces.
“You can’t talk to other employees about it,” Jenni said. “Having that trusted relationship, that sounding board — it means so much.”
The ethical foundation of the Adapt approach made that trust possible.
“The whole system is based around looking after people and doing the right thing. So you had that real, trusted relationship. Anything said in that room stays in that room.”
Built for what comes next
EX Engineering grew from six employees to twenty-two full-time staff with additional remote support over thirteen years. It sold to IPD Group, an ASX-listed company with around five entities in the electrical sector. By any measure, that is a success story.
The part Jenni is proudest of is harder to put on a balance sheet. She leaves knowing her team is ready for what comes next.
“The team’s the best it’s ever been,” she said. “I’ll definitely be an advocate for Adapt. I’m not sure who I can tell, but I’ll tell as many people as possible.”