Lake Macquarie Business Excellence Awards Winners Profile
Excellence in Innovation
Winning a Lake Macquarie Business Excellence Award is more than just a moment in the spotlight, for many, it’s an opportunity to grow, evolve, and inspire. For Brad Woollett and the Definiti team, the impact has been tangible across every corner of the business, from external credibility to internal culture, and from strategic direction to broader community influence.
Credibility That Converts
“For any company, and even more so for a professional services company, credibility is a critical factor in a customer’s decision-making process,” says Brad. “Winning this award significantly adds to our credibility.”
The recognition has become a core part of the company’s identity and marketing. It’s featured on the website, embedded into email signatures, highlighted in presentations, and mentioned in proposals.
Celebrating Success to Build Stronger Teams
Internally, the award has served as a powerful morale booster. “Everyone loves to be part of a winning team,” Brad says. “It increases morale and positively impacts our culture.”
With a culture of promoting good news stories at their weekly stand-up meeting the Definiti team announced their win and again celebrated it at the company’s quarterly gathering. These moments of recognition, Brad believes, reinforce a culture of excellence and shared purpose.
Excellence as a Constant
While the award marks a milestone, for Brad, excellence is something the business must continuously pursue. For over a decade, the company has benchmarked its operations against an international standard for professional service organisations developed by Service Performance Insight. With more than 200 measures across leadership, client relationships, talent, service execution, and finance and operations. This benchmark is now the industry leading performance tool that over 50,000 service and project-oriented organisations use to chart their course to service excellence. This benchmark provides a blueprint for continual improvement as we strive to stay in the ‘best of the best’ category.
Strategic Clarity Through Focus
Reflecting on the past year, Brad shares a lesson in strategic discipline. While the company’s service offerings span multiple sectors, broader horizontal marketing approaches didn’t yield the expected results.
“Our real traction has come from targeting a few vertical markets and then going after adjacencies,” he explains.
His advice? “Strategy is just as much about what you say ‘no’ to as what you say ‘yes’ to. Choose your customers, narrow your focus, dominate your market.”
Shaping the Future, Locally and Nationally
Beyond business success, Brad is passionate about contributing to the broader economic landscape. He highlights Australia’s ongoing productivity challenges and believes technology, particularly AI and automation, has a key role to play.
Brad noted, Ed Husic, outgoing Minister for Industry and Science, is on record stating “Robotics and automation technologies have enormous potential to combat workforce shortages and create safer and more productive work environments for Australians.” [These technologies] could add up to $600 billion p.a. to our GDP and increase productivity growth by up to 150 per cent.”
He also notes there is still a lot of Fear, Uncertainty, & Doubt (FUD) in the marketplace when it comes to using these technologies (especially AI) in business.
Definiti’s approach, “We strip away the FUD with a pragmatic approach to AI adoption. The approach has been distilled from what we have seen work with our clients. Educate and pick some simple but impactful candidates for low complexity AI, implement and measure results, and promote the success. Rinse & Repeat. Getting the runs on the board creates the confidence and the funding to tackle greater complexity. Definiti can share many AI use cases to help organisations take the 1st step”.
As a past winner of the Lake Macquarie Business Excellence Awards, Brad sees a responsibility to lead by example not just in innovation, but in helping others take their first step.
Click here for more information on the Lake Macquarie Business Excellence Awards.
