Member Article

Behind the business with Seatechs

Paul Cave is managing director of offshore recruitment specialists Seatechs, which supplies high calibre contract personnel for offshore oil and gas, telecom and renewable energy projects across the globe. Here, he takes Bdaily behind the business.

What key challenges has your company recently faced?

The offshore industry has its peaks and troughs and we have to manage our business through that.

Currently, there’s rapid expansion and in particular, offshore windfarms, but that means there is a shortage of good quality, experienced people to service these contracts. It is our job to find suitably qualified, skilled and experienced personnel who are up to the demands and rigours of these very demanding projects.

As a business, success is measured by both our ability to match a job requirement quickly and by the skills and professionalism of the personnel we provide. We pride ourselves on being able to both very well.

What is your biggest achievement over the past 12 months?

Increasing our turnover to more than £8million for the financial year ending in 2012 is an incredible achievement particularly as we only started the business in 2007.

The growth of Seatechs has far exceeded my expectations and I’m hopeful that will continue into the future. That is very much down to securing new clients in a very competitive market where there is such a shortage of quality, skilled personnel.

We’re always working hard to keep the business going in the right direction and picking up new clients – but it helps enormously that we have credibility and a good reputation for finding personnel that can make a significant difference to the success of a project.

What is your biggest focus for the coming year?

In this industry, it’s all about finding more experienced people to meet our clients’ demands. We have some very big projects coming up in 2013 including the second phase of a massive offshore project in Brazil.

We proved ourselves on phase one and the challenge will be to find similarly qualified and skilled people to continue that success and make a difference. But we’re tirelessly working to grow our own client base which in turn, increases the turnover.

There’s an incredible amount going on within this industry, particularly the growth of offshore windfarms and it is up to Seatechs to ensure it remains a leading supplier of skilled personnel for these projects.

If you had to choose one top piece of advice for someone just starting out in business, or is currently operating within your industry sector, what would it be?

Always keep your clients informed on how you are progressing with their requirements.

If you can’t fulfil their requirements, inform them immediately, your delay with information could cost them valuable time and money – and it could also cost you their business in the future.

Can you share with us your view of the current landscape of business, in this region or generally and where your organisation sits within it?

The offshore industries are very busy now and will be for the foreseeable future. There are large projects in the oil and gas sector planned for the Asia Pacific region, Brazil and Middle East, which we hope to be involved with.

There are also various projects planned globally in the submarine telecoms cable and submarine power cable sectors.

Offshore windfarms are being planned for installation from now right through until 2020 right across Europe, with some huge projects estimated to take more than five years in the construction stage alone. The USA and China are also planning large offshore windfarms for installation in the near future and the Japanese are also in the early planning stages of offshore renewable energy sources.

All of the above require a huge amount of resources, over the last few years the major offshore construction companies have been building new construction vessels to cope with the demand, and some are still ordering new vessels.

Seatechs aims to be a leading supplier of personnel to these markets, specialising on the subsea construction phases of the projects.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tom Keighley .