Simon Brady
Ironbark Timber Products was started in my family’s backyard in Buderim in 1980 by my father David Brady and his friend Laurie Morgan says Simon Brady. So, I grew up around timber from the time I was eight years old. Mum and dad were running the tennis centre then. Sunshine Coast Daily
My dad and Laurie put in $500 each to buy a semi-trailer load of sleepers to meet a contract in Melbourne.
The business name came from the fact that the sleepers were ironbark. For five years, the business operated out of our home, with trucks being unloaded in the paddock next to the tennis centre.
As well as dad, I remember mum being there flipping sleepers and loading them on to the back of peoples’ utes.
As sales grew, Ironbark Timber Products took over a small yard in Pike St at Kunda Park. A few years later, it moved again into larger premises at Conara Rd.
I remember that the yard was so small, we would stop the semi-trailers on the road and unload them on to the footpath, then spend the rest of the day moving the timber into the yard.
You could get away with that because there was hardly any traffic in those days – hard to believe now that the Sunshine Coast was ever so quiet.
As a young fellow, I used to love coming into the yard to help. I’d hang out with the truck drivers and wash the forklifts and drive the vehicles around the paddocks – I loved it!
I remember one day a tip-truck turned up loaded with a load of railway sleepers and just dumped them in the yard like a giant pile of fiddlesticks. I had to spend all day shifting these 60kg sleepers into stacks and grading them into the different quality levels.
Of course, I never got paid for any of that weekend and after-school work. I started working in the family business in the mid-1980s while I was still in high school.
When I finished my education in 1989, I headed off to Townville with my new bride Kylie and went to work for Hynes Timber as an estimator.
After a couple of years of outside experience, I came back to the Sunshine Coast and to Ironbark.
The company kept growing and in 2001 we again needed to expand, so moved to a yard in Maroochydore Rd in Kunda Park.
I took over the day-to-day operations of Ironbark Timber in 2002. I got a Diploma in Forestry Management, expanded our product range and increased staff training.
Over the years, I developed relationships with guys who are now some of the Coast’s leading builders and developers.
I’ve known some of them since they were young apprentices and I was the teenager loading timber for them. Others I went to school with at Mooloolaba Primary or Maroochydore High.
Ten years ago, my wife Kylie and I bought out full ownership of the business. One of our biggest challenges was moving premises yet again.
Ironbark had continued to grow and we needed more and more space. In March 2009, we moved into purpose-built premises behind OneSteel in Maroochydore Rd, with a shed three times the size of previous facility.
This allowed us to store all our kiln-dried timber products undercover to preserve the integrity of the timber.
This site is drive in/drive out with good accessibility for utilities and large trucks. That has helped us greatly over the past decade in supplying major civil engineering projects from Tasmania to Darwin.
Ironbark Timber Products is now recognised far and wide as a reliable supplier of high-quality timber. We supplied the decking timber for the pontoons on the Yarra River for the Melbourne Commonwealth Games, for the construction of the Hope Island Marina at Sanctuary Cove and major projects at Taronga Zoo, Western Plains Zoo and Australia Zoo, as well as other icons like Aussie World and the Noosa Beach boardwalk.
Over the decades, we’ve seen a lot of changes in the Sunshine Coast and in the timber industry. Back when I first started, everyone used 75mm hardwood palings for fencing, and we had 20,000 of them on back order – we couldn’t get enough of them. Now everyone uses 100mm palings.
People ask me if my kids are likely to be following in my footsteps, but they’re all too smart for that. They’ve seen the long hours and hard work involved and they’ve chosen other paths. But I still love working with timber every day. It’s a beautiful natural material that can create so many different effects and it suits the Sunshine Coast so well.
And I still love dealing with our customers – from the do-it-yourselfers looking for the right product for their project, to the professional deck builder ordering for his latest job.
