News
Issue No. 37 - October/November 2007
A real Eye-Catcher at Telstra Awards
by Pamela Brombal
Albert Einstein must have been talking about innovation when he said: “any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex…it takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.”
After 36 years in commercial design, Paul Huxtable, MD of Proen Design and sister companies Innovation Central and Eye-Catcher Innovations, has plenty of laurels to rest on, the latest being the Australian Government Micro-Business Award and the AMP Innovation Award in the SA section of the 2007 Telstra Business Awards.
Paul has built a multi-million dollar enterprise and is a world leader with his latest hit, a forklift safety product.
Paul began his career in 1971 at Caroma Industries, and later developed products for Simpson, before deciding to go at it alone. In 1989 he set up a commercial design company around his strengths in design, engineering and marketing. But after three years the company was in financial and organisational turmoil.
“We came close to the edge. The market did not understand what we were trying to do, one of the merging companies pulled out at the last minute, and we changed our business name. That caused confusion amongst clients,” says Paul.
Pulling through the difficult time required much restructuring and a sound business model. Proen Design Australia was created and Paul says he has “never looked back”.
In 2003, he began developing his own products. He realised fee-for-service work was erratic, offered poor shareholder returns and had limited growth potential.
“At the time, Proen was the type of business that was doing well but it wasn’t growing at an incredible rate. I couldn’t really see that it would have the capacity to generate real wealth for the shareholders,” Paul says.
“So we set ourselves a goal to start another business to develop our own products. The constraints were that we must have a robust process to review all our ide...
