Lacey Webb didn’t wake up one morning wanting to own a waste management consultancy. Like many in the industry, she fell into it. And she fell into it in a big way. The girl from Ipswich, who loves maths and data, has taken “all the boring stuff that saves money” and grown a waste management consultancy with a focus on waste levies and a reach across Australia.
Four years since its inception, Resource Hub boasts an impressive resume, working with 90 per cent of waste levy zone facilities in Queensland alone, plus more facilities each week across New South Wales, Victoria, and Tasmania, as well as South Australia and Western Australia.
Resource Hub helps them become more financially and operationally effective and comply with waste levy and auditing regulations. That’s more than 300 waste sites visited, and more than 10 million weighbridge transactions audited.
But Lacey is most proud of how quickly Resource Hub has embedded itself in the market – and that it’s not just “the Lacey show” any more.
“One of the measures of success when I started was how quickly the brand would just be known as Resource Hub,” she says.
Image: Wild Rhubarb Photography
“For so long people would say, just call Lacey but within three years, I’d gone from being Lacey at Mandalay Tech to Lacey at Resource Hub, to someone asking, ‘so who owns Resource Hub?’
“I liked that, because it meant we’d grown the right way. It shouldn’t be the Lacey show. We’re more than that. We’re working hard to service the industry. We are not the big four. We are 13 people working across Australia, with one of us even working out of a caravan.”
Ipswich, in southeast Queensland, is a coal mining Labor heartland with an active art and cultural scene. Lacey’s family goes back six generations – they were the first publicans and owned the largest dance studio in town for many years.
Having trained in dance and as a classical opera singer, she admits to being a little different from her family because she was a natural at maths and science as well as music and humanities. But, it wasn’t until she was at university that she decided there was no money to be made as an opera singer in Australia, and instead became a Certified Practising Accountant (CPA).
It was with this focus on her finance career that Lacey took what she thought was a job in property development at BMI Group in Brisbane.
“Four weeks in, I realised property was a tiny piece of what BMI did and I very quickly fell in love with the waste industry and the people,” she says.
Over two decades, Lacey held roles as Financial Controller, Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and later as a Consulting Lead within the waste and resource recovery sector. She says those roles gave her a keen insight into the industry and helped her identify a gap in the market.
While she helped people refine their data and process in her role with software leader, Mandalay, she often spent more time discussing levies, operational efficiency and how to make facilities work.
“There aren’t a lot of organisations that focus on how to make their processes work so they’re being as efficient and profitable as possible while still meeting big strategy commitment,” Lacey says. “All the boring stuff that makes you money.”
Enter Resource Hub. Resource Hub exists to work with local and state governments, and commercial waste organisations, to improve their business processes and their levy management. The team offers project-based consultancy work and ongoing remote support within regulation and waste levy, data administration, and operations.
Lacey describes it as an extra set of hands to help a business work more effectively, whether that’s doing the job for them or upskilling staff to help them perform the task.
“We don’t have a business to deliver work that someone can do on their own; Resource Hub wants to fill a gap to make someone’s life easier,” she says.
While she has set out to make things easier for others, building a successful waste consultancy has its challenges. Surprisingly, one of the biggest was talking to people.
Despite decades of industry experience, Lacey was often the person behind the person and, as such, was relatively out of the spotlight. Since starting Resource Hub, she’s worked hard to build a profile by attending conferences, visiting sites and building networks. The shift in dynamic is not one that she’s always been comfortable with.
“Everyone who knows me knows I can talk,” she says. “But I struggled to talk to people about our brand and services. I’ve learned to focus on other people’s challenges though, and have a chat instead.”
The other challenge was getting the company structure right. Resource Hub works on subscription-based, repeatable services and as-needed projects that tend to be smaller than traditional waste consultancies. While that’s been deliberate so the service offering is highly targeted and the team stays within its wheelhouse, it has been difficult to make it clear to the market what they do, and what they actively chose not to deliver.
But they’ve struck the right balance, and Resource Hub has embedded itself in the market. Most of the work is supporting regional facilities, and the team gets a lot of joy from knowing that it can add a little bit of help or extra time to get some big outcomes, especially for quite rural councils.
“I don’t think there’s anyone in Queensland who doesn’t know who to ring about a waste levy,” Lacey says. “More importantly, it’s not ‘ring Lacey’, it’s ring Resource Hub. I like that. It speaks to the breadth of knowledge that our team has. I like the trust the industry has, and that this is now expanding to the service offering and team.”
And team is clearly a priority as Resource Hub is all about the people. While the team has broad industry experience, personality and the right fit are foremost. That doesn’t mean being another Lacey, or being super outgoing. It does mean actively wanting to help someone make their day a little easier and take the pressure off. Team members have come from local government areas, industry and even from the regulatory authorities.
Image: Resource Hub
As Resource Hub continues to grow, Lacey seeks out people from within the industry who want to make someone’s day job easier.
Case in point: In 2023 Resource Hub delivered waste levy and gatehouse best practice training to more than 60 local government teams in addition to commercial operators, and it prepared waste levy returns every month for more than 100 facilities.
It also worked closely with a client for 18 months to define a new data approach for their region.
“It’s taken a lot of time, effort and money, but now, nearly two years on, that customer has more than three million dollars in funding coming back from the state because we’ve been able to fix the data, build a story around why an issue happened and support why the funds should come back,” Lacey says. “We’ve done that 15 times over with our client base.
“Last year, we managed $9 million of local government adjustments relating to the waste levy or contractual or financial risk – that’s only local governments. We’ve also had some big wins for commercial operators because we take the time to look at the boring data. It’s the boring stuff. But it’s critical.
“We undertake operational efficiency audits, take what facilities do well and set that as a benchmark.”
Lacey says there’s meaning in seeing the value you can have in changing a process. That resonates within the company through a people-first approach.
The aim is to make work as suitable as possible for whatever life an employee needs, including flexible hours or a change of role. Lacey’s seen the challenge parents, particularly women, struggle with when they aren’t afforded the flexibility they need in a job.
“There’s great talent out there that can’t work full-time hours, and I’ll be flexible to get that,” Lacey says. “Those people are my people.”
When it comes to talent, the waste and resource recovery sector is in good hands. There’s always been a depth of female talent within the industry, and those women are now breaking through the glass ceiling and taking on more leadership and chief executive roles. That is inspiring the next generation of women to view the industry as a growth sector with many opportunities.
Lacey describes her own journey as a baptism of fire. There were some tough conversations and plenty of times when she was the only woman at the table and undervalued herself.
But she says she’s also had people who pointed out her value.
“There is a piece that exists being a woman in this industry; you can’t escape it,” she says. “But regardless of who you are, our industry is hugely accepting.”
Resource Hub has grown quickly, and the team has worked hard to ensure that any growth doesn’t affect the clients who have been with them from the start.
But that growth has also afforded new opportunities. At the 2024 Waste Conference in Coffs Harbour, Lacey and Resource Hub unveiled AUDRRI, a new software program that analyses a facility’s processes and benchmarks them against best practice standards of operational and regulatory efficiency and effectiveness.
While AUDRRI is still only for internal use, a new service offering, AUDRRI Onsite, is in development to allow facilities to self serve, and improve their own outcomes.
Lacey says Resource Hub will always be there as a helping hand. But she may not.
“One of the reasons I’ve been successful is that I like to have a plan,” she says.
“As Resource Hub continues to grow and provide services, there will come a point where I want a new challenge, and there are team members here who want the opportunity to lead. I want someone else to have the opportunity to be the face for a while and maybe I will go and solve something else.”
And does that something else involve singing?
Until this year, Lacey’s father was the president of his RSL chapter, so she performed at the occasional Anzac Day dawn service in Brunswick Heads, but there’s no time for rehearsals anymore. Resource Hub instead sponsors several dance and music events.
“Despite leaving Ipswich – the home of Queensland’s largest waste volumes – I now own a company servicing those major landfills, and I sponsor the Ipswich dancing Eisteddfod,” she says. “You can take the girl out of Ipswich, but you sure can’t take Ipswich out of the girl.”
For more information, visit: www.resourcehub.com.au