Building Foodmach's regional team in Echuca

Foodmach is an Australian-owned automation and packaging equipment manufacturer, founded in 1972 and headquartered in Echuca, Victoria. It designs, builds and integrates factory automation and packaging lines for the food, beverage and industrial manufacturing sectors - precise, bespoke, highly technical products for a demanding market.

The engagement rests on a relationship built over years. We have worked with Foodmach's CEO, Rob Niggl, for two decades, a professional partnership that long predates this programme and that Foodmach trusted us to bring to the business. When the company set out to strengthen its team, they appointed us to run the search.

The programme was driven by two things at once: uplifting capability in key functions and scaling for growth. Most of the roles sat in Echuca, an hour from the nearest regional centre - which meant the search came down to finding specialist and senior leaders with a real reason to be there, over the quietest hiring window of the year, Christmas.

The Challenge

The roles spanned a wide range, from deeply technical to commercial and functional, and each asked for something different:

• Site and operations leadership - a blend of hands-on technical capability and people leadership, from precision, automated industrial environments
• Engineering and commissioning - specific engineering exposure to support install and commissioning
• Commercial and general management - the network, relationships and delivery record to sell into blue-chip clients from an SME base
• Functional depth across procurement and finance

Location sat underneath all of it. Echuca is an hour from Shepparton, the nearest town, and the automation market is tight - a world where people know people, which made discretion hard to hold. At least one appointment was confidential, so keeping candidates engaged while we couldn't name the client added a further layer. And the whole programme ran over Christmas.

The brief came down to depth in a shallow market: specialist and senior people, matched to a precise technical culture, willing to commit to a regional base, found discreetly and found over summer.

Our Approach

We ran the programme as a single working group rather than a set of separate searches:

• A weekly session with the CEO, reviewing candidates in real time - showing the work, and sharpening the read on who could and couldn't do each role
• Direct headhunting through established networks, with no open advertising on the most sensitive briefs
• Where we did advertise, we ran it blind and away from the local area, so the search couldn't be traced back to the client
• Cultural fit weighted alongside technical and process skill - people who could work with a long-tenured workforce and the incoming leadership while bringing newer capability
• Clear, agreed assessment criteria, applied consistently across every role so each candidate was measured against the same standard

For the technical roles, we searched on the environment a candidate had come from rather than the job title - precision, automation, bespoke manufacturing. For the commercial roles, the test was whether someone could operate inside an SME while selling into blue-chip clients. That distinction is what widened the field without lowering the bar.

The Outcome

We filled every role in the initial programme. Appointments included:

• Operations Manager (Echuca)
• General Manager, Sales (Melbourne)
• Procurement Manager (Echuca)
• Junior Accountant (Echuca)
• Site Project Manager (New South Wales)

With the programme complete, Foodmach is positioned to meet its commercial project targets, pursue new business and diversify.

The operations appointment shows what the search was reaching for. He came from the right kind of industrial setting, at the point in his career where he was stepping into site leadership for the first time, with a mix of trade-level, hands-on skill and people leadership capability - and he had worked for a business Foodmach supplies. The CEO bought into the leader he was hiring rather than the qualification on the CV. Three months in, he is settling with the team. The leader he replaced moved into a role better matched to their strengths inside the business, so Foodmach kept capability it valued on both sides of the transition.

The initial programme reached a 100% fill rate, and the partnership has continued - four further roles across engineering and B2B, in Melbourne and Sydney, from April onward.

Hiring at this depth in a regional market rests on a relationship built over years. Knowing the business well enough to place across every function at once, and the market well enough to reach specialist people discreetly, is what convinced a set of senior candidates that a regional base was worth the move.