Made in Australia: Hunter maintenance start-up Safe Gauge raises $1.6m and moves into Beresfield premise

Fast-forward to the present and the 27-year-old's start-up Safe-Gauge, which specialises in "smart maintenance" tech tools to improve safety on mine sites, has secured $1.6 million in a lengthy capital raise.

It has also moved out of industrial prototyping hub The Melt at Warners Bay and into its own facility in Beresfield.

"If you think that not even three, no two years ago, I was still at Mt Arthur, servicing trucks and bulldozers...I've had to learn quickly but I've had good people help me along the way," says the Mr Dawson, once an apprentice plant mechanic with Westrac.

Safe Gauge is the name of the East Maitland-raised entrepreneur's company as well as his first invention: a wireless monitoring device used to test hydraulic pressures on mobile plant machinery. It allows workers to stay clear from the "line of fire" of potential injury, including being crushed by a machine or struck by high pressure hydraulic fluids.

The revolutionary product has been picked up by industry giants including BHP, Glencore, Liebherr, Hitachi and Caterpillar (the latter is expected to add the product to its US catalogue soon).

By mid-2021, Mr Dawson realised that to ensure rapid growth, he needed a funding injection to invest in product development, sales and marketing to ensure rapid growth into new markets.

By then, Safe Gauge had developed another product, DataLink, a tool allowing engineers and technicians to monitor machine performance, storing data and detecting trends limiting performance.

"It has been a big ride, we have got two distributors now, one in Brazil and one in Canada looking after north and south america and also making sales in other countries, Africa, Mongolia, and so on," Mr Dawson says.

With a firm view of getting its products into other heavy machine-reliant sectors including agriculture and defence, Safe-Gauge began the capital raise process, initially helped by The Melt founder Trent Bagnall, a member of not for profit investment body the Sydney Angels.

The four-month process, including three pitching sessions and extensive due diligence, was daunting and rewarding.

"I put together about a 16 slide power point presentation that went for 10 minutes and there was 10 minutes of questions afterwards. On the first pitching there were 80 investors on board over a zoom call," he recalls.

"It was about putting the right things in the presentation that would relate to the investors and their interests. I also learnt a lot about the financials of the company - we did a detailed financial forecast for three years so i had to learn my numbers, forecast sales, and the different products we release and the revenue projections."

On December 30, 2021, Safe-Gauge secured $1.6m, exceeding their target of $1 million.

The funding helped with the fit-out of the company's new Beresfield operations, to employ more sales staff and invest in new products.

These include a tachometer, which measures the engine working speeds on mobile equipment, and a dial indicator, used to measure the amount of wear on the frame of heavy machinery. Both are complementary to the Safe Gauge range and work is also underway on the next phase of DataLink.

"The feedback from our customers pushed us to develop DataLink because instead of just testing machines [with Safe Gauge] they wanted to log and store the data because it's critical for them," Mr Dawson says.

Sage Gauge's client base is almost all in mining but Mr Dawson is hoping to crack markets including marine, construction and defence.

"We are really going to be pushing this year into other sectors as well because we know the machines they test in the same way, they operate similar and have the same systems so our product will fit," he says. "The reason we have been focusing in mining is because that's my background and experience."

The company's decision to move out of The Melt and into its own facility was driven by the need for space to hold stock and test, service and assemble products.

"We have a new testing area for servicing our product which involves the hydraulic calibration and our engineering and R&D for our team of engineers, he says.

Mr Dawson is among the youngest of his 12 staff and he acknowledges that the new facility brings pressure to perform.

"But it's helped us build our own culture and establish processes we needed to put in place as well, it's been positive and the team was excited to move in and do that," he says.

Safe Gauge has a manufacturing partner in Sydney that assembles the printed circuit boards it uses for its products. In Beresfield, his team performs the final assembly of products, and also services them.

"We are really lucky, everything is manufactured here in Australia and I really want to keep it in Australia, that's important to me," Mr Dawson says.

"I've always wanted to work with local companies and keep it here as much as possible to reduce risk and keep control as much as possible and retain the quality," he says.

The only part that Safe Gauge has had to source abroad are the silicon chips for its circuit boards: "Every electronic manufacturer or design company is suffering hard because of the global chip and silicon shortage but we bought a lot up front so we are lucky."

The company is in the process of finalising its board but it has already appointed a chairman in former Seeing Machines CEO Ken Kroeger and Barry Formosa, former BHP Vice president of Safety, is a new director.

Mr Dawson is motivated by what he knows and understands best.

"The most important thing is that I have been in the position and worked on the tools and experienced the danger involved with testing a mobile plant and been aware of injuries and fatalities, so that personal experience and trying to help those I used to work with is what gets me out of bed every morning," he says.