EmStyles Experience:

EmStyles commenced business in August 2007.

The Director, Malcolm Styles has the following experience to offer potential clients:

Expertise built up from working for a wide range of local government in Victoria over a 35 year timeframe. This has included the Cities of Doncaster and Templestowe, Bendigo, and Castlemaine, as well as the Rural City of Wangaratta and the Shire of Mildura.

Malcolm held very senior positions at Director and Acting Chief Executive Officer level for 19 of these years.

Malcolm most recently spent twelve years at the Rural City of Wangaratta, where he was Director principally responsible for the areas of Infrastructure, Engineering, Town Planning, Building Surveying and Environmental Health. Over a number of periods (totalling about two years in time) he was Acting CEO.

His ability and talent to lead was recognised at the Rural City of Wangaratta. For his last three years at Wangaratta, Malcolm held the position of Deputy CEO (as well as his Director responsibilities).

During the years of Compulsory Competitive Tendering in Victoria, where local councils were required to expose their services to external competition, Malcolm ran the provider arm of the Wangaratta Council.

As a result of his leadership during an 18 month period, equity in excess of $500,000 was returned to the Council and its community.

Services that Malcolm was responsible for during that time were disparate and varied. They included home help, family day care, long day childcare, Exhibitions gallery, town hall facilities, buildings maintenance and  public toilets cleaning, aerodrome operations, and the liveweight selling centre. He also led the provision of engineering design services, emergency management, operational and road and drainage maintenance services, parks, gardens and playgrounds, buildings maintenance, town planning, building surveying and environmental health services.

As if this was not enough to keep Malcolm busy, his professional engineering services were engaged on the governance side of the organisation in areas where it was deemed that a conflict of interest did not occur.

In his earlier years as a professional Civil Engineer, Malcolm was responsible for the survey, design and supervision of a wide range of road, bridge, footpath , carparking, and drainage projects. He also designed and retrofitted cattle liveweight selling facilities at the Bendigo Saleyards.

Malcolm is recognised as a standard bearer in flood mitigation planning and implementation, early floodwarning system design and implementation, and municipal emergency management planning.

Malcolm is also recognised for his abilities and work in asset management planning, having been instrumental in the introduction of the application of a systems approach to local government asset management in the late 1990s. He also led the establishment of a cross-functional team that undertook asset management planning that underpinned the Rural City of Wangaratta’s ten year financial planning process.

Malcolm was a driver in the implementation of a Business Excellence framework at the Rural City of Wangaratta. It was labelled the Quality Journey. Malcolm was a champion of the framework’s introduction and application.

Malcolm has embraced the use of such behaviour tools as ‘Organisational Cultural Inventories’ (OCIs), and ‘Leadership Style Inventories’ LSIs). He encouraged the application of OCIs for the various teams under his stewardship. He also encouraged the use of LSIs to assist improvements to leadership by managers reporting to him at Wangaratta.

Malcolm experienced the benefits of being able to access a professional mentor for periods during his career, and has the respect within local government to become a valued professional mentor to others within local government and public works.

Whilst serving under no less than five Chief Executive Officers at Wangaratta, Malcolm is no stranger to organisational structure reviews and reforms. Malcolm is an enthusiastic advocate of the benefits of well-thought out organisational change that occurs on an on-going and planned basis.

In the very short timeframe within which EmStyles has been operating, the business has provided proposals for:

-relief director and manager work in local government in Queensland and Western Australia

-business and marketing planning for an innovative bridge inspection and maintenance design

-design and construct specification documentation for a community centre

-business planning for an aerodrome infrastructure improvement proposal

In addition, EmStyles has established its own business plan and website.