Hello everyone at Furphy Engineering, Furphy Galvanizing, Albury Galvanizing and Geelong Galvanizing,

I am writing this on Friday 16th October after another eventful week – particularly for staff at J. Furphy & Sons (Furphy Eng and Furphy Galv) in Shepparton with significant disruption to everyone as a result of a Covid cluster which has required widespread testing.  Pleasingly it looks like after some 5000 tests being done in 2 days in Shepparton and 2000 of these returned so far  there have not yet been any further positive cases.  Fingers crossed that this remains the case.  Thank you to the staff who were required to get a test for doing so and alerting us in a timely way.

It has been an unwelcome reminder of the continued threat posed by the virus.  Just as things were really starting to feel a little more positive.  I would like to thank all staff who have helped develop the Covidsafe plans that we have in place on our sites and for everybody’s forbearance in the face of these additional challenges.   As we have seen here this week in Shepparton and also in Augsut and September in Geelong the plans we have and the efforts being made by all staff stand up and have allowed us to continue operations largely unchanged.  Well done everyone and hang in there!

The main takeaway for me this week is just how stressful these events and the ongoing situation with something like Covid can be.  The need to react to rapidly changing situations requires lots of attention and teamwork and chews up an enormous amount of personal energy.   In normal times we can all use time outside of work as a means of decompressing or letting some steam off but with restrictions and a general level of restraint in the community even this has been difficult to do for all of us – thus compounding the problem.  Hopefully on Sunday we will see some easing of restrictions and there will be more things available for us to do but keep up the good job you’re all doing of looking after each other in these crazy times.

It is worth noting that our first quarter of the new financial year (July – Sept) has seen positive results compared to our expectations.  This is tremendously pleasing given the uncertainty that has prevailed in the past few months.  There are still challenges and uncertainty ahead but there are also likely to be some opportunities and I am confident that we are in great shape to take advantage of them where we find them.

In the meantime make use of the weekend as best you can.  Given Victoria has had a particularly tough week i think it is fair to wish the Cats and the Tigers all the best tonight and tomorrow night.  Let’s see if they can set up an all Vic GF!!

Adam Furphy
Managing Director