Newsletter August 2017

The focus will be on ensuring that we embed safety and wellbeing in to everything we offer to our clients in ensuring that we are putting our people front and centre in the delivery of better infrastructure projects.

The new service line will be led by Dave Hansen who has terrific experience in the key areas above.  We look forward to you reading more about Dave below and how he will be assisting our clients in the future.  Stay tuned over the course of the coming months when we outline more about our safety and wellbeing services to our clients.

To learn more about our new Safety & Wellbeing service line, please click here.

Dave Hansen

We are pleased to welcome David Hansen to the BRS Team working out of our Adelaide office. David has over 25 years’ experience working within the area of health and safety across a wide range of industries including the mining, retail, state and local government sectors, where he has worked as both the client and the consultant.

Prior to BRS, David most recently has been providing high level Health and Safety consultancy services and before that worked in a number of senior health and safety positions with global miner, BHP Billiton. David’s passion lies around working with business’s to ensure strategies align to business requirements and energies are focussed in the right areas.

Happily married with 3 children, David enjoys nothing more than travelling with his family, going to or watching the footy or enjoying a glass of red after a game of golf.

David has been with BRS for over 12 months now in a secondment role, but he is also joining the BRS team in a broader role in leading the new BRS Service Line for Safety & Wellbeing across Australia and New Zealand.

To learn more about Dave and his experience, please click here.

Suzanne Bourke

Based in Melbourne, Suzanne has been part of the BRS family for a number of years, but over recent months she has decided that she would like to take on a more active role working with both our clients and within the BRS team. Suzanne is passionate about working with leaders and teams to coach and facilitate them to achieve their very best; through partnering with executive leaders looking to transform performance through leaders, teams and culture, she applies her experience and expertise, tailoring her approach each time. Suzanne’s interest, knowledge and qualifications in the neuroscience field applicable to leaders, teams and culture, has supported her clients to become more innovative in their approach in areas such as cross functional collaboration, engagement, motivation, change management, performance management based on the latest, fascinating neuroscience.  Suzanne is all about embracing life-long learning and sharing!

Suzanne has had the privilege of working with many and varied executive leadership teams, assisting them on their high performance journey. With experience across a broad range of industries, her real passion is in working in Operations, where she has developed a well-grounded appreciation of the issues & challenges in these dynamic and fast moving environments.  Suzanne also has significant experience within the health, finance, infrastructure and government sectors.

Suzanne has immersed into the neuroscience field over the past few years, completing a Diploma Neuroscience Leadership and becoming certified in Conversational Intelligence. Suzanne ‘s enthusiasm for the latest and greatest research and insights about the brain, human connection and motivation, is applied in fun and practical ways in her high performance team coaching, innovation workshops, executive coaching and leadership skills programs.

Living in Bali last year with her family, her two teen daughters’ attendance at the progressive Green School in Ubud spurred on a revitalised personal passion for the environment, yoga and mindfulness and saying ‘no’ to plastic.  Back in Australia with 2 feet back on the ground, she is a bit of a movie buff, keen bushwalker, and enjoys just staying home after regular bouts of travelling for work.  Back in the corporate gear now, she still admits to yearning for the Ubud hippie ‘look’ on a regular basis!

To learn more about Suzanne and her experience, please click here.

Natalie Johnston

Natalie has recently joined BRS as an Associate in Adelaide. Natalie has just completed an 18-year stint at EY where she worked with Kym Williams many years ago.  Natalie commenced her EY career as a graduate in Assurance and after eight years moved into the then newly formed Advisory division of EY.  Over the last two years Natalie was an Oceania Advisory Operations Associate Director where she supported the EY Advisory executive leadership team to identify and implement initiatives and projects to improve business performance and protect reputation risk.

Throughout her career Natalie has assisted government and private sector organisations identify improvement opportunities in order to better manage risk, enhance operational controls or transform business processes to reduce organisational costs. Natalie has been responsible for the preparation and delivery of risk based internal audit services to a portfolio of clients that include both State and Local Government as well as the private sector.  Natalie’s Chartered Accounting background has also seen her act as a Finance Manager for a SA Government agency as well as develop and implement project plans within tight timeframes for other SA Government agencies.  Natalie has also delivered SOX engagements for US based clients and obtained international experience from working in Canada for two years as well as being part of global internal audit teams based in the US and New Zealand.

Natalie is passionate about assisting her clients to reach their full potential.  She believes that in order to create a high performing team, individuals must identify and play to their strengths.  Natalie loves working with organisations to ascertain their challenges in achieving their strategic goals and then develop solutions in order to optimise and enhance the performance of both the team and individuals.

Natalie will predominately work with our South Australian clients in the areas of governance, leadership coaching, team building, business reviews, strategy development and 90 day planning.

Natalie spends her time outside of work being Mum to Mitchell and Isabella, enjoying the odd gym work out and heading to Adelaide Oval to support the Crows. Natalie also makes sure she takes full advantage of living in Adelaide by regularly enjoying the local food and wine on offer in the company of good friends.

To learn more about Natalie and her experience please click here.

Nathan Hayes

Prior to consulting, Nathan worked in the education sector for almost 20 years in schools and at university level.  Most of this time was spent in a range of Executive Leadership roles in large school environments.

His education background enables Nathan to identify the variety of learning styles in clients, differentiate accordingly and effectively distil concepts and information.   Nathan’s experience leading large, complex school environments has developed strengths in identifying and developing leadership capacity, establishing effective teams, facilitating change management, system, and process implementation, facilitating performance development, managing industrial relation issues, and understanding the inputs that optimise employee engagement and wellbeing in organisations.

Nathan’s passion for learning and ‘paying it forward’ by developing the leaders of tomorrow were significant factors influencing his decision to move into independent consultancy.  This shift has enabled Nathan to grow as a leader and work in his areas of strength, broadening his contribution to the education sector and beyond.

Nathan is committed to maintaining an ongoing involvement in working with teenagers to support the development of a positive self-concept, self-esteem, and resilience to develop intrinsic self-worth to thrive in life.

Growing up in mid-north South Australia, Nathan has a strong sense of community and has always enjoyed spending time with family and friends.  Nathan enjoys cooking, and loves to bring people together through the joy of sharing great food and conversation.

With limited athletic ability but high levels of enthusiasm, Nathan has slowly accepted his time has passed and now enjoys keeping active with his three young kids and supporting them in their various interests.

To learn more about Nathan and his experience please click here.