Reliability Gang Podcast
Welcome the #Reliabilitygang Podcast! I would like to welcome you all to my reliability journey. I am passionate about reliability and I want to share as much as I can with everyone with my experiences. Stories are powerful and my aim of this outlet is to gather as many insights and experiences and share them with the world. Thanks for joining the #reliabilitygang.
Reliability Gang Podcast
MAINSTREAM - THE POWER OF RELIABILITY NETWORKS - WITH STEVE MORRIS
Reliability doesn’t fail because the maths is wrong. It fails because of people. That’s where we begin this straight-talking conversation with Steve Morris, the driving force behind Mainstream. For more than 30 years he has been building something different: a movement that puts real maintenance leaders on stage, replaces the hero firefighter with predictable performance, and keeps the community alive all year round so practitioners can share what actually works without the sales pitch.
We look back at where it started, from a handful of TPM calls to what has grown into the biggest reliability conference in the Southern Hemisphere. But what makes it stand out is how it protects the quality of the peer group, only puts customers on stage, and is built on research that identifies the real blockers—communicating risk, finding funding, and leading culture change. Steve lifts the lid on innovation theatres, curated networking, and the free online platform that now connects more than 5,000 professionals across industries. From mining and water to food and oil and gas, the challenges are different but the root causes are the same—people, incentives, language, trust, and habits.
We also look ahead to Mainstream UK. This will be a focused two-day event with five concurrent tracks, global storytellers from Woodside to Mars, and pricing that removes the excuses. If you have ever felt your best preventative work goes unseen while the 2am saviour gets all the recognition, this is your chance to flip the script. It is about rewarding prevention, learning how to sell the value in finance’s language, and being in rooms where practitioners lead the conversation.
The next five years are critical for reliability. Teams are ageing, technology is moving fast, and the skills gap is widening. The advantage will go to those who make the time to think, to share, and to adopt what already works.
If this resonates, subscribe for more conversations with reliability leaders, share the episode with your team, and leave a review so others can find it. Most importantly, connect with the Mainstream community and take one idea back to your site this month.
Hello, welcome back to another episode of the Reliability Gang podcast. And today we have a very special guest, Steve. How are we keeping Steve? What's your second what's your full name, Steve?
SPEAKER_02:My full name or my second.
SPEAKER_00:Your full name? You want the whole thing. I want the whole thing.
SPEAKER_02:My name's Steve Morris.
SPEAKER_00:Steve Morris. And Steve, introduce yourself. I think people will know where Steve is. He's been popping up on LinkedIn, popping up through mainstream, haven't you? Through through the LinkedIn feeds. I hope so. Oh, yeah. Well, I knew you before you reached out. Right. So you guys are definitely doing something right, which is great. Then you obviously reached out to me. But Steve, introduce yourself, introduce kind of what you're doing here. And yeah, it would be great to get a bit of an introduction to yourself.
SPEAKER_02:Brilliant. Well, thanks, Will. Firstly, thanks for having me on the podcast. Very exciting.
SPEAKER_00:Absolute pleasure, mate.
SPEAKER_02:Um, mainstream. So uh we're an Aussie business. We've been around for 29 years. We have built a community of practice around the reliability hero, around maintenance leaders all over the world. Mainstream's taken many forms. The easiest way to talk about it is that it's the biggest maintenance and reliability conference in the Southern Hemisphere.
SPEAKER_00:Wow.
SPEAKER_02:We get 1,500 people to mainstream each year, which, you know, if you think about the big maintenance conferences for maintenance leaders around the world, you look at SMRP in the US, they probably a thousand people. You look at Terry O'Hamblin's IMC conference, maybe 800 people. And then there's mainstream. Um 1,500 people, granted, we cheat a bit, it's across two events. We do Melbourne each, late July, early August, and that's the big mainstream, what we call the conference, two days, two days plus an evening. And we do um we do the summit in Perth, which is a one evening plus one day event. That's only five years old, and that's also 750 people.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, that's a lot of people, seeing.
SPEAKER_02:It's a lot of people. And what's interesting about mainstream is that tickets are bought. So the way you keep the quality of the individual in the conversation at the level that's peer-to-peer is you sell tickets.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it is a ticket selling event, isn't it?
SPEAKER_02:It's a ticket selling event. Yeah. There's sponsorship and there's delegate tickets and there's speakers who come along complimentary, because they're speakers, they're telling stories, they're customers. And that's what keeps it at the ratio that it stays at. In Australia, seven of every ten people in the room will be a customer having conversations with customers.
SPEAKER_00:That's interesting. Because I think that's a slightly different element that we get in certain events in the UK. Elaborate how long you've been doing this. When did it start? And how did it start? Was you the idea of thinking of there needs to be something different in terms of how we communicate and network? Take me from the very beginning. Okay.
SPEAKER_02:Look, it predates me. So I'll be completely honest. Yeah. I've only been in the business 25 years.
SPEAKER_00:Only. Only 25.
SPEAKER_02:But Lisa Irving, who's one of my business partners, had the vision. And she was running a TPM workshop with her dad at one point. And she took a list of 15 professionals who came to a TPM workshop in 1995.
SPEAKER_00:Wow, okay.
SPEAKER_02:And she started calling them and asking them what they're battling with.
SPEAKER_00:That was okay. Lisa's So it kind of came it came from the struggle of implementation of doing it and and it came from the struggle of how do we do this? How do we do this reliability game? What strategies do we need? How do we get people on board? It actually came from that original struggle of of 15 people essentially, trying to figure out all trying to figure out process improvement.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. All leaders who were into TPM at the time, which was the flavor of that month, and and obviously is still part of our vernacular and the world we operate in. And she she called them and she asked them what it was they were grappling with, and they said, come and see me. And she went and drove around Sydney and Melbourne and met with them and realized that when she'd finished interviewing them, they actually had about six or seven real issues that were all common. Everything sort of peripheral. So she published a short report that said, These are the things you want me to solve. And she tested it with them. And they said, yes, if you could solve that stuff, well, we're game. What are you thinking? And she went, I don't know, maybe I can find the people who solved that stuff all over the world. So she started calling into leaders all over. She did read it.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, so it kind of started into that because again, this is one thing that's very apparent in the UK, right? When we're going from different, and obviously we do it, we're we're reliability specialists, we we help a lot of companies out. But one thing that we have noticed is say, for example, we're we're working for a company down south with with a few of our engineers. We may then be introduced to a company up north, same company, okay, but they don't talk to each other. There's no communication. And one thing I've really struggled to get my and wrap my head around is that a lot of companies that have have actually solved somebody's issues are not sharing this information, even with their own people. It's absolutely crazy. So the idea of actually saying, well, do you know what? If we've got some professionals that have solved it in other areas, that's how we can actually network from company and peer-to-peer and actually start to bring people together. And that's the solution that you're kind of offering, right? Is bringing people together to find the solution. Is that kind of the aim?
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, we we really, for years, we spoke about selling access to people who've solved challenges you're grappling with.
SPEAKER_00:Right, okay, very interesting.
SPEAKER_02:And I suppose it depends um how competitive the environment is.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:If you've got if you've got the head of sales for two motor manufacturers, they might might not want to share their best practice tips and tricks with each other because it's IP.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I get it.
SPEAKER_02:But when you're talking about a mine site that is uh is mining gold and a water utility that's moving and providing water to a population on the other side of the country, if they share what's what worked best for them, it's uh it's a non-issue.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I get it. It's not it's not a conflict of interest there, really, is it? But they everyone's a winner, aren't they, within that social kind of not experiment, but environment.
SPEAKER_02:Even if they are competitors, we very often will get the head of six or seven major mining businesses, top of the food chain, sitting in a conversation with each other, sharing how they think differently about how they're employing people who are into Oh really?
SPEAKER_00:So they they will they will they will speak to each other?
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. There's only positive to be gained by tapping into the collective wisdom of an ecosystem. And so while mainstream began as a little research project of Lisa's, turned into a conference, it's actually become much more than that. So back to back to the answer. Um Mainstream's become a year-round community of practice. And that's the kind of thing people say as a throwaway line. We're not a conference, we're a community. But we are. We've got 5,000 people already in the online community. We've got a publication that comes out every month. We've got a platform that people meet in and download content through online that people are members of. We've got a conference that runs three times a year, and we've got research groups. And if you look at what I'm doing in the UK right now, I'm here to build community. So last night we had 28 leaders in maintenance from across industry, some serious players and some serious vendors in a pub, having beers, having a drink, having having a you picked a good environment for that, Steve.
SPEAKER_00:I can't lie.
SPEAKER_02:I mean, you know, isn't that the epicentral English culture?
SPEAKER_00:Have a beer and you know what I mean. Try to down the pub and try to figure out problems, you know what I mean? And uh beer, you and then you're then you're ready to share all of your knowledge, aren't you? You know what I mean?
SPEAKER_02:Well, that's exactly what happened last night. In fact, this tour that I'm on, um the one I did three months ago was about bringing community together. So that's monetized. That's not part of mainstream's revenue stream. That's if anything, I mean, if you look at it in pure cold fact, is a is a cost to the mainstream community organization, but it's a cost that's worth bearing because it's about showing people the power of sharing ideas. And the number of people that came to me at the end of the night last night to say, mate, what a great event. Wow. Yeah. I had such and we we orchestrated some dialogue. So there was actually some formal conversation in groups of six or seven, and then there was just freestyling and having a chat in the pub.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And we made sure that it was a balance of those two things, and we threw in a few topics. Like one of the big topics that came out of our research is this notion of trying to break this reactive firefighting cycle and become more predictive and more preventative and drive towards reliability rather than, you know, uh, even if and it might be as broad a topic as we EPI, we pay more to the guy or lady who comes in and solves the problem in the nick of time. We go, you're the hero.
SPEAKER_00:We put a cape on them, don't we? And we we give them lots of praise as well.
SPEAKER_02:How do you break that cycle if you're really hunting for long-term reliability and sustainable reliability? How do you break that from a cultural perspective? And there was a half-hour conversation at four tables of six people going for it. And I just I loved watching them talk because a penny dropped for a few, and someone went, Hey, just send it again. How did how how did you get them to do that? And you can just see the cogs turning. And when I say we're a community of practice that is year-round, we run research groups, we run chapter meetups, we have an online community, we publish publications, and then we monetize three conferences. One in Perth, which is primarily a mining-centric conference because there's so much mining in WA, one in Melbourne, which is sort of cross-industry, people come from all over the world. And as of next month, I'm UK.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, which we're I'm excited to be there. You know, uh like as as well, one exciting thing to be able to announce really on this podcast as well is that I am ambassador for mainstream. Uh, we had a great conversation with Steve, and I just loved what it stood for. Do you know what I mean? Like, we don't do many kind of deals with many people in terms of affiliations because we kind of run our own reliability gang podcast and have our own community. But when I spoke to Steve, it made so much sense because both both business kind of goals aligned quite, quite, quite, quite thoroughly. Do you know what I mean? And it was quite uncanny. So we're really excited as well to be kind of, you know what, working together to a degree just to be able to give more awareness to the industry and and also be able to say, do you know what? Reliability is not just one little thing, it's lots of different other things that can be shared. And there's a lot of knowledge out there that can help people. Because right now within the industry, I think we need that help, Steve, if I'm honest. Do you know what I mean? In terms of where we're at. For yourself, obviously, you've had a lot of conversations, you've had a lot of dialogue between people and experts within this industry. You've had a lot of guys on research teams and stuff like that. What do you see in terms of the differences between the UK and Australia?
SPEAKER_02:Gosh, that's a great question.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and i I it might be a little bit different. You might I'll give you much of time than you want to.
SPEAKER_02:No, I I you know what? There aren't any differences. I would if if I were to pick a horse I'm gonna back in answering in one way and just put my you know, go behind an answer and say I'm sticking with that one, I would say that look, you can talk about whether one country's five years ahead of the other in terms of this or that technique, but I don't think that's the point. Everybody's a human. And you know, the truth is this whole game is about people.
SPEAKER_00:Of course, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:So whether you you've you've 10% better or from a process perspective, or you've adopted 20% more technology, isn't that significant relative to the people leadership, the culture piece of it?
SPEAKER_00:So would you say that there's no difference in culture between these countries?
SPEAKER_02:Yes, I'd say that the that the Aussies have probably been working at this preventative, predictive bit for longer, would be my guess.
SPEAKER_00:That's interesting.
SPEAKER_02:Um but there's no difference in a bunch of humans who come into a workforce because they love working with their hands, because they want to be in the trades, because they want to be technicians, because they love to be they love to fix things, don't they? You know, and and how they get led and how they get taught. So I'll give you an example. One of the things that sets mainstream apart is our research, which you alluded to earlier. And it all began with Lisa doing a research project.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, 25 years ago.
SPEAKER_02:Become a secret source. 29 years ago. She did it in 1990. Wow.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:In fact, mainstream turns 30 in Melbourne in July.
SPEAKER_00:Wow, okay. 30th anniversary did it.
SPEAKER_02:Massive process. Incredible. And there are people who who will be at their 30th next year.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, okay. So people read it from the very beginning. It's spanned out the whole thing. Yeah, well. Make sure you read that.
SPEAKER_02:Um, it's downloadable, it's for you, it's a gift, it's something that a lot of people have consumed.
SPEAKER_00:What we'll do, we'll we'll link that in the in the podcast comments here so you can actually have a look at our research because it's it's really, really interesting. Because one thing I do like about you guys as well, you're almost finding this information that people seek, and you're putting a lot of work and time and effort, and it costs money to do this, guys. Like, research isn't just something that pops up on your screen. It takes time, it takes a lot of you know evaluation and a lot of sources to be able to create documents like this. So, guys, utilize this stuff, you know, it's there for you to be able to use if you're within the industry or you're a reliability professional or you're a maintenance manager. It is definitely in your in your remit to read this stuff, you know what I mean? So sorry, I just thought I plugged that for you there.
SPEAKER_02:Thank you. Thanks for the plug. So we went out and we interviewed 200 heads of maintenance, and we uh and we asked them, what are you challenged by? And we ran six think tanks, face-to-face and online, where we had 15 heads of maintenance in each of them. And then we did another hundred one-on-one interviews. So no reading ChatGPT or Gartner or McKinsey reports to say this is what they say.
SPEAKER_00:This is face-to-face-mouth, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Face-to-face. And when we aggregated it, we found 10 topics. And for me, the most telling, and going back to your question about what's different, the most telling set of topics is that engineers are generally quite good at engineering. Yeah. So it turns out. I wish I was better at TPM. They don't say those things because they trained in that stuff. What they say is I don't know how to get the head of finance to give me money for something that's so obvious to me because it's such a significant risk in our business, that if we don't do it, the impact could be catastrophic. And I don't know how to get them to give me the money because they want to give it to the sales guy or the marketer or the project person to build a new plant or whatever. And that's because they haven't been trained in selling. Okay, so take communication as a topic or the capacity to sell a vision to get this funding for this initiative. These are the things they're asking mainstream to be about. How do I get better at that? I'm good at engineering. So that's, you know, when you ask what's the difference? The difference is that you've just got a bunch of humans who studied or are sort of oriented towards fixing stuff, grappling with building a culture, selling a vision, communicating better. I'm a supervisor. I used to be a trade on the shop floor. I've now been promoted to supervisor. Management expects me to behave in a different way to what I always was expected to behave, but my mates still want to have a beer at the pub and they think I'm changing.
SPEAKER_00:How do we be a chameleon? Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:These two forces. These are the people aspects, the cultural piece that mainstreamers always seek to address. Now I'm not saying it's not a conference focused on OEE and work management and planning and scheduling and everything you would imagine a maintenance conference is going to be about. Of course it is. It's also a conference focused on adopting AI and new technologies and innovation and ITOT integration and a CMMS that works and history that's being recorded and data that's accurate and so on, right?
SPEAKER_00:Of course, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:It's always really cared about people. So I'll say one more time. What's different? Nothing, because we're all humans grappling with the same stuff, and we've solved this all over the world, or we've helped be part of a solution. You know, the the why, the reason that you and I have headed off, and the reason why you looked at our business and went, we don't align with a lot of people, but shit, this sounds good.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, definitely. Hence why we're here now, right? You know, we're having these conversations, you know.
SPEAKER_02:We have a similar why. At the core, we want to take the reliability discipline, these reliability heroes, as we call them in our podcast, which is called reliability heroes, and we want to showcase that without them, industry would crumble, I suppose. You know, that the these are the people who keep the lights on. These are the people that keep industry happening and they do it quietly and in the background, and you don't know they're there when they do a great job, like a good referee in a sports team.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And and we want to support them because they deserve our support and they deserve the kudos.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I agree.
SPEAKER_02:So, you know, that's at the essence of what mainstream's about. So I hope that answers your question.
SPEAKER_00:No, that's an incredible answer. In terms of mainstream, obviously, you started off in Australia. When did you start to actually know we're onto something here? This is starting to become really successful. When did you have that first inkling? Was it when when did you start, Steve, in terms of where you were and and when you what did you do before that? And what made you think, do you know what? This is this is it for me. I really want to push this, and I really want to move it forward. Do you know what I mean? At what point did you did you come into the team and then actually realize, yeah, this is gonna be a hit? Do you know what I mean? Yeah, success.
SPEAKER_02:So my journey with Lisa and Chris, who's her husband, and they they were in the business initially, was about four years after they began. I I happened upon, I mean, I've known Chris my whole life, but I happened to start doing some work for them and realized they were onto something seriously impressive because they were having such an impact on so many industries, and people at very senior levels were taking the work very, very seriously, and it just was pretty cool. Wow. I was in sports marketing, so I was swallowing about, having a great time, involved in rugby and cricket, and and okay, cool. You know, I was a player agent. I, you know, I did a lot of cool stuff, but I was drawn to the impact they were having. And so when I came in back into the business after having spent a six-month period doing some work as I backpacked through Australia, eventually I came back 25 years ago. And the whole idea was how do we take this recipe and make it bigger? And so we built, over time, we built 30 different communities. Mainstream was three of them. And we built mainstream in New Zealand, and we built mainstream in South Africa, and we took mainstream to the US. But we had we're building other things alongside it. We built a whole slew of technology events using the exact same recipe. So to answer your question, it was obvious that if you took this thing, that this this embryonic notion of helping maintenance leaders share best practice with each other with the way we do it, because the way we do it's quite unique, and I'll tell you about that too. If you could take it to New Zealand and do it exactly as well as you could do it in Australia, and then you could take it to South Africa and do it there too, well, then you're onto something because all these people will say they've got different challenges, some are in oil and gas, some are in manufacturing, some are mining, you know, and yet they're all the same. They've all got the same problems. And once you can work that out, and you can work out how to understand exactly what they need and then give it to them in the way that they need it.
SPEAKER_00:Obviously, your transition was like from sports, you know, agency and all that. What was it about reliability that that you fell in love with? Because us reliability guys are a little bit weird, I'm not gonna lie. We we we we really geek out on this. It's a bit of a niche thing within the industry. We know everyone who they are and the ones that are really passionate about it. But for me, it's it's weird because I didn't realise I loved it until I was in it, and then when I was in it, I loved it. It was a weird kind of pull that reliability brought into me. And I don't I can't even explain why I'm passionate about it, I just am. It's just a thing. What when you changed over from like sport, it's very different to reliability. What was it that pulled you in?
SPEAKER_02:Salt of the earthness. I loved how honest these people were, these, these are. Sincere honest and sincere and genuinely trying to solve things, no glitz, no glamour, didn't you?
SPEAKER_00:Not looking for the clown, not looking for yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Yes, they were just happy to do it and do it well, and they were disenfranchised, like they never had a voice as well. They were doing it despite the fact that the business was calling them a cost center and giving them less money next month, next resource, less resource next year, more than cutting costs, you know. And yet they were still doing it. They were doing it on the sniff of an oil rag, and and they weren't, I mean, I won't I won't say they weren't complaining about it, they were complaining to trust me, they probably were complaining, but they were still there. They were still in keeping the lights on and keeping industry running. And it's it's that honesty of the maintenance community and the reliability community that's very endearing. And it makes you want to help. And we've sort of become part of the fabric now as well. So it's, you know, we always said, even when we had these other communities, some were HR, some were legal, some were a bunch of lawyers, some were um, some were technologists. We always said to each other, but they're not our favourites. We the maintenance guys are our favourites.
SPEAKER_00:I love that. The sincerity of people is is I think it is quite endearing, and I think that kind of taps into again what mainstream for me, what it's about, and it's about people. Obviously, it's not just about people, it's also about the information and the value that people's knowledge and what they know can bring into one certain place. How do you make an event so you bring this knowledge to the table where all the industries can benefit from it? Because it must be a bit of a challenge, you know, bringing so many. How do you logistically think out a strategy to say, well, do you know what we want to do the event, for example, in the UK? How do we build this in terms of making sure that we get the right people involved and also have a good balance between, you know, customers talking on on there and sharing that knowledge? How do you navigate that?
SPEAKER_02:Well, that's a great question. It's actually entirely the right question. It's it's it's the difference.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:So so you do it inch by inch. You do it by step call. Conversation by conversation, individual. You speak to someone, and he goes, You've got to speak to Will Ocean. You speak to Will Ocean, he says, You've got to speak to uh Richard Jeffers. You speak to Richard, he says, Let me connect you to my mate Phil White. And you just it just grows. Every conversation you say, if I were able to help with this, what do you think? Oh, I love that. You should do more of this, you should do more of that, and you've got to talk to Joe Blow.
SPEAKER_00:And it just generally grows as a networking.
SPEAKER_02:So that's one of the answers is you do it inch by inch. We used to make prescribed reading or prescribed watching any given Sunday with El Pacino. I don't know if you've ever seen the movie, and if you haven't, you absolutely should. There's the most beautiful speech about inch by inch around foot American football in that movie, and that and that's always been the I love that saying though.
SPEAKER_00:I love the I'm I'm I'm here for these gems as well, you know, these little uh Well, check this movie out, it's unbelievable. Yeah, nice speech is like it's it's like a like a change in moment. Oh my god.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it's as good as as sensible woman uh who hace that Vicino speech. But um the other answer is once we'd run the research with real people and published this research paper like the one I was talking about, we then hold that up as true north, and that becomes the blueprint for the conference. And we then go hunt for storytellers who have solved each of those topics or sub-bullet points. Sometimes have solved a whole category, sometimes I've solved three, sometimes have solved one bullet. But we find them again, call by call by call. So we hear that someone's doing incredible work at Toyota North America, and we speak to them and they go, No, it actually that guy moved on. He's now at Mars, uh, you know, confectionary, and we find the guy, and he says he'd love to come and speak. What he did was he managed to get budget for initiatives that were hard to get because he came up with a playbook and he'd like to share it with other reliability leaders. So you bring him on the agenda, you buy his flight, you get him to write an abstract. And and the thing about being completely independent is that, and that's the other part of our secret source, we don't have any barrow to push. So we're not gonna try to sell a software, we're not going to try to fit into a a broader conference landscape. We're just doing something that's unashamably what it is, and we don't have any agenda. So we can find the best stories because they're just the best stories, but we stick to all the speakers must be customers. So one of the things that that stops conferences from from moving from good to excellent is they they go where the money is, and and when the money is with the partner, with the vendor community, then what follows that is it takes a couple of years and they'll break their own rules about who can speak, and then eventually you blink and you watch ten years later, and you've just got a uh partners all over the program. And I'm not saying they don't know as much as anyone else.
SPEAKER_00:I'm just saying unless it comes to competition, then for attention.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it's quite salesy, and the customers tell us they want very happy for our sponsors to speak, but they want our sponsors to put a customer on the stage and talk through the lens of the customer.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, not the lens of a sales kind of opportunity or the lens of a CMMS system or the lens of a supplier as well. Because, you know, I think when you've created that environment where there's nothing to sell, especially in engineering, because I think people just inherently, especially in the UK, are very pessimistic about people trying to send them anything. It's just it's just our culture. It's global. It probably is global as well, but especially in the UK when it comes down to like like this this saying when whenever you type anything in, people purposely miss the first two ads because they feel like they get it, even if it has a solution to them. But what I think mainstream brings is that it's not about that, it's about real stories from real people.
SPEAKER_02:That's it. So so that's what you do. You you you resist the temptation to get all the money from the partners.
SPEAKER_00:Of course, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:That's why you sell tickets, because then you then you have the right to not if if it was all vendor-led and you ended up having vendors all over the program, you would erode the product over time.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it wouldn't be what it is.
SPEAKER_02:My partners don't mind me saying this because they agree with me.
SPEAKER_00:No, I 100% agree.
SPEAKER_02:So you talk to any of our sponsors and they're excited to put a customer on stage talking about what's and all, this is a problem we had, this is how we solved it. Part of the solution, not all of it, was this partner's good work, but we didn't solve everything. We've still got this to fix. And they tell a story that people can relate to in the audience, goes back to that notion of authentic, honest storytelling.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And so I think what makes mainstream unique is that you will find all the content is delivered by customers. So it's end users talking. And then we're also not shy to bring in the best from all over the world. Like to us, that's part of the charm, is that you can listen to, for example, we're bringing in Perea Parisha from Woodside Petroleum, who's the head of reliability for Woodside, which is the biggest oil and gas business in Australia. And she's got a brilliant story.
SPEAKER_00:Wow, yeah. Brilliant for some of it.
SPEAKER_02:Drew Hellier from Horizon, which is the biggest train network, rail network that moves all the minerals up and down um the coast and to the ports. And who's responsible for asset reliability and large capital projects? And he's coming to talk about how they fixed some challenges they had. So we'll bring people like that and we're bringing in um a chap called Ron Riga from Mars, who's the head of reliability on Mars and Kingdom.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's really interesting because we do a lot of work with Mars and Kings Lynn, uh, where we are.
SPEAKER_02:So um that's where Chris Hellam lives.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, it is where he lives. So yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Really, really remote.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so um Catherine, Catherine, shout out to Catherine as well. She's a technical lead there, was like, oh wow, this is great, great, great news that you know, talked to her about it, and she was like, Oh, this is amazing. So, you know, unfortunately, one of the other guys couldn't make it, was interesting to come in as well, but obviously down to work commitments in terms of the mainstream event. But you know, I am talking to a lot of customers about it, and they're very interested, they find it very interesting. Do you know what I mean? They find it very, very refreshing, and and I think they've not seen anything like it before. And also, this is another question that that's kind of got me in my mind as well a little bit. These reliability professionals, like you said before, they've never really. Had a voice, right? They've kind of done these things, they're kind of unsung heroes, they're kind of heroes that have been hidden from the world. Do you think what you're doing is putting them on a bit of a pedestal, giving them a bit of a big up? Because do you know what? If I was someone like that and and I've been doing all this great work and no one really knew about apart from obviously my company, isn't it nice sometimes to have a bit of a boost to say, this is what I've done? Do you know what I mean? And and and have a little bit of I don't know what you'd call it.
SPEAKER_02:Honestly, no bullshit. The best part of my job and our job.
SPEAKER_00:I mean To give someone a platform.
SPEAKER_02:I remember a man standing at mainstream in Johannesburg after year one who came to me and was in tears saying, No one's ever listened to me before. And he told his story about his little area of this world.
SPEAKER_00:He's so proud of it, you know.
SPEAKER_02:He fixed some stuff and people heard and they asked him questions and they were interested, and he was in tears.
SPEAKER_00:Wow, that's incredible. And that's what I do think. I do think a lot of these reliability professionals, maintenance managers, without them, what what do we have? You know, like it's such an important role. Do you know what I mean? Especially now when energy prices are rising, economies are changing, parts are hard to get in the UK now because of Brexit and all of these other constraints and these difficulties that are happening.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:We we have to change the narrative in the way that we're doing reliability. We we we're almost being forced to do it because if we if we don't, there's going to be a huge implication in terms of you know how effective them plants are running. So now more than ever, we need people to be able to not glorify the job, but actually make this job attractive to have. Do you know what I mean? Absolutely. And I don't think it has been for many years. I I don't think people really understood what reliability engineer even means, let alone, you know, you've got maintenance managers and maintenance engineers and stuff, and and their role is very important to the reliability function. But again, people have not really ever understood what it is. And and and people that are you know fixing things have usually had the hero culture of getting that dopamine response of I've done something, I feel valuable. And now the reliability engineer's job is to be able to almost do that in their way to say, Oh, I prevented that from happening. Now that needs to be kind of put into a pedestal. But again, until we start talking about it, the culture won't change. Yeah. So things like mainstream, I suppose, are giving people that good feeling about some of the problems they've solved and almost changing the narrative on what hero culture actually means. Because all we need to do really is shift it to this, and then people are gonna want to be a part of it, if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_02:It's very powerful when people realize they're part of an industry.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and a group of people.
SPEAKER_02:It actually um isn't as intuitive as you think. Like if you think what we do, we've recently, in the last two years, become part of a media owner's industry where people who own conferences and magazines and what have you come together, and you sort of have this epiphany, like, oh, we're actually sort of not just in a vacuum operating on our own doing one thing. We're part of a group of people who are making this happen all over the world, and it's yeah, it's powerful. And I think a platform like Mainstream and other conferences give it to give it that voice. There was two things I wanted to say that that I thought of. The one was you know, industries are ebb and flow. So if you talk to the guys in automotive right now, and I spoke to one last night, you know, they're grappling with, let's say, tariffs with the US, luxury British cars going into the US, and they anticipated producing X number and they're producing less than that because, you know, it's a it's a it's a compressed market because of the tariffs. You talk to the guys up in Aberdeen, like I did on Monday night, and oil and gas and the taxation, one company was telling me they did like a hundred million in they did a billion in in uh net profit and paid a hundred and nine percent tax and lost nineteen million as a result. What? How is that even possible? How it's possible, but that's what Brad was telling me. And they seem very depressed up in Aberdeen, that you know, it's all coming to an end and Aberdeen's gonna change shape again. It used to be fisheries and textiles, and then a bit of oil and gas and that took over and it's gonna change, you know? And so while this is all changing and people are going, where's my crust gonna come from? Where am I gonna work next? When you can bring people together and say, yes, cyclical cycles in your industry, but you're actually in a much bigger industry. Yes, you're in oil and gas. But the truth is that green, clean energy that you could invest your time and effort into.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, exactly. And I think that's that's the beautiful thing about reliability. It works everywhere. It's it's you know, you might be in that industry, and you know what? You're like, we can't control as human beings what happens in these events. A lot of external things happen and a lot of unfortunate things happen in certain industries. But one beautiful thing is if you are involved with reliability in general, you're gonna have a job anywhere. Do you know what I mean? It's just about applying the different them different techniques to another industry, and I think that's what a lot of people also have to have to recognise and realise. We are in a very beautiful part of this industry now, and now the future for the next five years for reliability is so bright. It's why I keep telling everyone. We're in such a bright kind of place. But another thing for me was really alarming is we also do an ARPE course, and it basically we it's a Mobius course, and it's very good about roadmap and everything. But Mobius did some research, and one of the things was that within the UK alone, that only a very small percentage, under 10%, have actually got any official reliability training, and that can be any training, it's not just their training as well. If you look where we are and how many people there are out there and how many people haven't been trained, look at what the next five years, ten years is gonna be able to bring. We this is we are actually at the start of the revolution now, aren't we?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Absolutely. And when you look at our research, two of the ten topics in our research is about the changing landscape of the workforce.
SPEAKER_00:Right.
SPEAKER_02:And this is driven by age. We've got a lesson of the city. Of course, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:A lot of people retire. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:People retiring are gonna take all this knowledge um out the door with them.
SPEAKER_00:Yep.
SPEAKER_02:And then we've got technologies that are changing so rapidly that in two years. You can't keep up. Yeah, 10% of the jobs that are gonna be available in two years. Not gonna be here.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's just not gonna be here.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so um so there's so much flux that we are on the precipice of the need for major change. And so, just back to mainstream, all those innovations that you know, I speak about all these customers sharing their stories of how they fix things, but we've also got these innovation theaters all over the show floor. So as you walk through the vendors and the partners and you go talk with them at their booths, there's also two or three innovation theaters where every 10 minutes during the breaks, there's another piece of tech being shown. So that's pretty cool. I like that. So the partners do get a voice, they get a voice through their customer, or they get a voice by showcasing innovation that they bring into the market. And you put on a silent disco headset and you catch 10 minutes while having your lunch or having a drink, and then you move on and you carry on in the in the expo, or you watch the next one. There's 24 of those across Main Street, which um, you know, i is is now six and a half weeks away, mainstream.
SPEAKER_00:I know, yeah, and we're we're gonna be there, can't wait for the event and everything like that. Um, what can we expect from Mainstream? You know, it's the first UK event. Yes. Yeah, it's a big one for you guys, you know. You you what the UK is a huge market in terms of uh of reliability and what what it what it means. What does this mean to you guys, this UK event? What does it mean?
SPEAKER_02:Well, it's a it's a massive opportunity for us. We we've been talking to English and Scottish speakers who've come out to mainstream over the years, and there have been many of them who've said you've got to come and do this.
SPEAKER_00:Really?
SPEAKER_02:I came out last year and I went to main tech and I went to the Institute of Asset Management conference last June, May June, 2024. And I thought they were both terrific, but they weren't what we're doing. There's something different to that. The one is one focused on sort of strategic whole of life asset management asset strategy, which is great, and it's got a place, and that's why they're successful. The other is a trade show for manufacturing. Of course, yeah, which is embedded in something else. It used to stand alone, I think it got acquired, and now it's within that manufacturing week. Yes. We're talking about taking only the maintenance piece of the pie, the reliability piece of the pie, and magnifying it. So that's all there is. It is 100% focused only on that world. It's not part of anything else. So the first thing you can expect is complete and utter focus. But um, the opportunity is massive for us because we believe mainstream will start this year at about 300 and I'll take a while, I'll fly at a number, 330 people will be there, maybe 350 if the ball bounces the right way. Um but year two, it's gonna grow to a bigger event or grow possibly to a two-day event. I've looked at venues in Manchester just uh just today. In fact, I was at um I was at Old Trafford, I was at uh Manchester Central, which is very cool.
SPEAKER_00:I was Manchester's a lovely city, by the way. It's a great city. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:We spent the night there last night, as you know, and uh looked at a lot of venues. We're in Birmingham for year one. We took a flyer that Birmingham was the right sort of.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, Birmingham's a great place, and and I think a lot of people go there because it is central, it's essential to everything, isn't it?
SPEAKER_02:So we started in Birmingham. So what they can expect is they show up on the 20th, uh, the evening of the 20th, and we have uh for the VIP and the steering committee and the speakers, we have a uh kind of big welcome for them. So that's quite um uh exclusive. And we've also got a brilliant keynote in that session for them, that's just for them, and it's unbelievable. The guy's the chief operating officer of a business called Climbworks out of Iceland.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, okay, interesting.
SPEAKER_02:And I'll tell you about that later if we have time, but stunning. So he'll do a quick 20-minute cameo as well. They're doing amazing work, and um and then we go into the Welcome Drinks, which is our jump start, and we've got a sponsor for that. That's One River, uh, a software vendor who sponsored the jump start. And that's in the past museum, which has got Spitfires and um old trains and racing cars, a bit of history in there. It's amazing, and it's like an homage to the Industrial Revolution, which happened around Birmingham, Manchester, you know, the the the middle of England. Um and uh so that's what we kick off with on night one. Just a welcome drinks, 90 minutes cocktail party, really cool, all included, obviously. Um, and then we wake up and it's an early start. So 7:30, the conference kicks off.
SPEAKER_00:Straight in.
SPEAKER_02:Straight in because you know, down to business, man. That's that's that's uh that's late. That's late, you know. That's a lot.
SPEAKER_00:So um seven five. Oh, come on, at least six o'clock.
SPEAKER_02:Tons of content, and we finish with the with the main cocktail party, also sponsored by Navium, who used to be BPD Zenith, the the system integrator around Maximo. Navium are sponsoring the main evening cocktail party, and that will run until about seven. So it's a 12-hour day. Everything's included in your ticket price from lunch and tea break and coffee break and all the drinks and all the canopies and all the music and all the content. Um, so that's what people can expect. A jam-packed day of five tracks of content. So at any moment in time, you get to choose between five storytellers, um, three keynote, four keynotes, and um a lot of good food, and a shit ton of networking and conversation.
SPEAKER_00:A good finding good proper networking, proper networking. Because I think this is proper networking. Yeah, I've I've been to a lot of events, Steve, and I get invited a lot of the time. But when you go there, it's it's it's not authentic. You can just feel it's not, you know, there's there's there's sales agendas behind it, there's a lot of things here. The one thing that I do know about mainstream as well, guys, and this is something I you know I'm putting out there as well. I've not even been to one of these events yet, but I can I can feel like I know what this is about, and and I guarantee that I will be proven right with my first assumption. Well, I I'm pretty 100% sure that will happen, but is the authenticity of something what of what this can bring. Do you know what I mean? So if you are a maintenance professional, you're in a reliability game, like have a look at the website, we'll we'll link it below and have a look at some of the speakers speaking at this event. Do you know what I mean? These speakers know what they're doing, you know, they're the highest kind of you know platform within their sector, you know, and these guys have uh had a lot of experience. It is in your nature to be able to go to your head or or whoever it is above and say, I need a day off for this and I need you to pay for it because the knowledge I can bring back, you know, to what we've got is not just one person's knowledge, it's a in it's it's it's hundreds of different other people, do you know, and that gonna be there to be able to potentially give them some knowledge as well. Real quickly before we end the podcast, Steve, talk about the community. So, mainstream have an area where you can log on, you know, talk about that community and what can be done, talk about what you're doing to promote that, have a chat about how people can can set something up online and also communicate with people through the networking channels of mainstream community.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. So um I I'm so desperate to comment on something you just said.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, sorry. You you can you can do that first if you want. Yeah, do that first, it's fine.
SPEAKER_02:All right. Um I'll come back to it. So um the community is free of charge. You jump online at mainstreamcommunity.com, you go to our community uh section, you join now, and you fill in your details, and you remember. And once you remember, you have entree to all the content from all the Aussie stuff that gets published, all the conferences. Um we have a monthly podcast, we have a monthly webinar where we get the best of the best from all over the world solving particular things live where you can ask them questions, brilliant webinars. We're doing two a month at the moment. It's all there and it's all yours, and there's no strings attached. And that sounds like a bullshit story, but it's true. We've grown 5,000 people over less than two years into our community. And there's also groups you can join, and there's cool stuff that happens. Like four or five different water utilities showed up in mainstream for five or six years in a row. And about two years ago, they said, Do you guys have a place where we can meet online? And we went, sure, jump onto the community. We'll build you a closed water utility group.
SPEAKER_00:And these groups are growing, aren't they, Steve? So obviously, the more people that join, the more opportunity are us groups to be able to be made. So almost think of it like uh almost like a forum where you can have your profile, you can go online. I've got a profile, I've made one as well within mainstream, and um, you know, I've got an ambassador badge on there as well, which is really, really cool to have as well. But also, it's a great place to actually start building some relationships that go outside the scope of your work and go outside. Uh imagine it as a more of a social network, but more attributed to what you're doing. What I do like about it is the groups and and and how they can form, but they can only be formed if you sign up. So if you are a reliability professional, get yourself on there, sign up. It's free, it's literally free.
SPEAKER_02:We'll send you um the upstream publication has got a bunch of really cool articles, yeah, and free information, right?
SPEAKER_00:How can you say no to that? Do you know what I mean? And and these are the places I think that us reliability professionals need to be. We need to be in these networking places because you know, you meet a few people on there as well, it, you know, and it widens your network. Do you know what I mean? Imagine that we talked about peaks and troughs, and we imagine industry doesn't do so well, and then you know, you do need a job elsewhere. You've got a network there you can you can you can actually build in for your own personal growth as well.
SPEAKER_02:The hundreds and hundreds of people who, as I said earlier, have found new gigs or found consulting together. Just from networking. Just from networking in a mainstream context.
SPEAKER_00:100%. We don't do it enough, Steve. We don't. We need to network more. And and in general, I get it, a lot of reliability maintenance managers are very kind of reserved. You know, then the people yeah, they are introverts. But now's the time, and you don't have to turn into an extrovert overnight. But what we're saying is that we can do it in a controlled way, and you can have a presence, and and it's going to benefit you, you know what I mean, in within your career from where you start to where you finish as well.
SPEAKER_02:So absolutely. I mean, one of the best networkers that I know who's been around forever, you might have read some of his stuff, is Krista Eidhammer, who's like the don of maintenance. Um, comes out of the paper industry, IDCon, which is his business that he built and sold recently, is our diamond or platinum sponsor. And Krista's doing a mini keynote to open the conference. Lovely.
SPEAKER_00:That'd be good to see what he says about that.
SPEAKER_02:And yeah, exactly. And he and he and he does talk about that kind of stuff. There's there's so much goodness. And the one thing I wanted to say when you said earlier, say you have a day off. You know, it's uh with respect, it's not a day off. It's a day on of learning in a massive, massive, massive way. You can have your head in a trench, fixing stuff, doing your work all year, but it takes that sort of to come out of it from another perspective. Turn your phone off and spend a day and a half just listening and talking, observing as well, and thinking about the problems you've got and how you're gonna solve them, and then you go back and you're so invigorate.
SPEAKER_00:But it's that goes down to that saying though, you can't uh you can't solve the same problem with the same way of thinking, and sometimes you have to take yourself out of the pro of the process to be able to solve it externally. Do you know what I mean? And that is such a good saying for that particular particular line as well, because I do feel we get very insular within with the processes that we're doing, and we get very in the problem. Yeah, sometimes we have to find answers not inside there, they've got to come externally.
SPEAKER_02:We say you've got to you've got to uh take time to make time, take time to make time.
SPEAKER_00:I love that saying.
SPEAKER_02:Pull your head out and just take some time because breathe. Yeah, things will solve themselves for you if you get a different perspective sometimes.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, definitely. If you're if you're searching for it and you're seeing you're desperate for it, it's like trying to find your keys when they're right in front of you and you're really stressing. Yeah, yeah. You can't see the keys. But if you're calm and you're like, right, do you know what? Maybe a bit late. It's okay, right?
SPEAKER_01:Suddenly there they are.
SPEAKER_00:They appear, and then you're probably not gonna be late.
SPEAKER_01:So my wife who finds them then.
SPEAKER_00:I know, to be fair, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:I know I can't see things that are sufficiently.
SPEAKER_00:And I'm losing my stuff all the time. You know what I mean? But yeah, that goes for an aside for advice from me, you know, just chill, just take a deal. But it's just a good analogy. I feel sometimes people are so fixated within their own process that events like this people probably do want to go to. They probably find it. I mean, anyone that hears about mainstream is gonna be interested in what we've just had to talk about. But what is it gonna take for them to actually make the move and buy a ticket? Do you know what I mean? So so for me, it's about just you know, whoever does listen to this, and I know a lot of maintenance professionals are. Do you know what I mean? We are gonna link this below and you know, really think about what we just said there about having making time for this to be able to really save some time in the future.
SPEAKER_02:You know, because the Aussies know the power of mainstream and they pay what they pay to come. We we're charging ten times less in the UK for mainstream.
SPEAKER_00:It is very, very cheap, to be fair, in terms of the ticket costs.
SPEAKER_02:All the international speakers and all the food and drink and whatever you're gonna get. It's there's hardly anything left, but that's okay. We want people to see it once because they'll always value in in the future.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, they'll come back, they have the experience and they'll come back. Well, Steve, this has been such an insightful podcast. We usually do kind of 45 max, but we've gone over to 50, which is fine. Yeah, I know, because we just talk and talk and talk, and this is the problem when you're having fun. But guys, just want to say a huge thank you to Steve. We're going out tonight in Leeds, aren't we, to to have uh have a few drinks and stuff like that and network again. But I would like just to say, you know, Steve's a breath of fresh air. Since he reached out to us, I've kind of researched in terms of what he's doing and everything, and it does align with what we're doing, and we're really proud to be working alongside you. I've got to say thank you for for for your time.
SPEAKER_02:Thanks for yours, and thanks for your advocacy and your support and what the work you do.
SPEAKER_00:Do you know what it is? Do you know what it is? It's hard to find authenticity through this game. It really is, Steve. And sometimes it is demoralizing because a lot of companies we're seeing is very sales, it's very much, and it's not really driven towards strategy or knowledge, it's driven towards selling a product. I get it, because business is business. But one reason why we are very and we're doing this and when we're we're we're engaged with it, is the visions do align. And and and I do honestly, when it is morally right to be able to do this, we will we will partner up and we will push it and we will promote it just as much as we feel is right. So keep doing what you're doing at the mainstream, guys. All of the links and everything will be in below's podcast. Make sure you get yourself to the event if you if you can make it, we will put everything in there. And uh, thank you for tuning in.
SPEAKER_02:Thank you. Fantastic, really good to talk. Well, thanks for having me and look forward to the seeing next.
SPEAKER_00:Take care, Steve.
SPEAKER_02:Thanks, brother.
