Rattling the (safety) cage

Auditz is a Cromwell-based health and safety start-up making waves in the adventure tourism industry. Founder Duncan Faulkner reveals why he has such a passion for making the industry safer.

There’s no question Duncan Faulkner’s life has been action-packed.

He left school in the UK, aged 18, and immediately immersed himself in extreme sports. After a couple of years as a white-water kayaking instructor, he joined the Northamptonshire Police Force, where he rode off-road motorcycles to help catch criminals. He says dealing with the ‘good, the bad and the ugly’ helped give him a good grounding on life.

Then came the pivotal moment. While recovering from a broken leg, the result of a wakeboarding accident in Bulgaria, Duncan was forced to take stock of his life. He decided he didn’t like the drinking, smoking, typical-young-urban-male he saw in the mirror.

“So I Googled ‘international police transfers’, and New Zealand was top of the page.” Six months later he resumed his police career in Queenstown.
But Duncan was still restless. His wife Jenna was pregnant with their first child. He’d always wanted to fly helicopters and figured he had just nine months to learn how. So he left the force, learned to fly choppers, and became involved in agricultural aviation – long regarded as one of the most dangerous jobs in New Zealand. “You’re flying aircraft at the edge of their limitations in a very unforgiving environment. There is a very fine margin for error,” he says.

During that time, Duncan’s employer had to implement a safety management system, and he suddenly realised how inadequate paperwork was in terms of making flying safer.

The firm became involved in New Zealand’s AIRCARE Accreditation Programme, a health and safety and quality assurance scheme developed by the agricultural aviation industry. It was quite complex and once the safety management system was built, required regular auditing, explains Duncan. “If you failed the audit or didn’t get accreditation then effectively you couldn’t operate.”

He says it took several months to build their system using tools such as Word documents, spreadsheets, calendars, and shared Google Drive files, all of which had to talk to each other. And although they built their system and passed the audit, they then struggled to keep it updated. With a business to run and no portable office, following their own safety management system became a challenge – that frustrated the hell out of Duncan.

“The aviation industry was trying to get everyone to follow best practice, but not everyone can produce or maintain nice spreadsheets and documents,” he says. It was time to reinvent the wheel.

Duncan realised the same changes were happening in the adventure tourism and maritime industries, so he set about creating a cloud-delivered software that would refine the safety management process and allow industry associations to work in partnership with operators. “To take all that content, knowledge and expertise and embed that into a safety management software system,” he says.

“What Xero has done for accounting, we wanted Auditz to achieve for health and safety. Keep it simple and intuitive, and as easy to update as Facebook and Twitter.”
In the middle of 2014, Duncan launched Auditz. “Just as the adventure tourism industry was at a desperate stage because it had been unable to get operators through the audit process. At one stage there were just four weeks to audit deadline and only a third of the industry had been audited.”

When Auditz was demonstrated to adventure tourism operators, Duncan recalls audible gasps as they realised here was the answer to their problems. He says through monitoring he can now see clients’ systems are being kept up to date. “They’re using it and engaging with it. It’s actually making a difference.

“It’s communication, the reviewing process, and the ability to identify hazards that will save lives and reduce accidents in the workplace. I strongly believe in that.”
Duncan says Auditz targets all small businesses, but the response from the adventure tourism industry has been especially encouraging. He has been busy partnering with health and safety consultants around the country to customise the Auditz safety management system for their target industries.

Getting it out there
Duncan thought associations would jump at the opportunity to support their industries by utilising Auditz. He was wrong. Health and safety was just as confusing for the associations, he says, and no one really wanted to take a lead on providing a solution. This meant he had to take his solution direct to market (although at the time of writing a couple of industry associations were coming on board).

Going forward, Duncan would like to take Auditz to overseas markets. Its scalability is unlimited, he says. While the content must change for other countries, the system can remain the same. He already has clients in Canada – which also has a large adventure tourism industry.

“The great thing about North America and Europe is their ‘no win, no fee’ blame culture. So the ability to maintain health and safety records is invaluable. Those markets will definitely be targeted once we’re established here.”

Locally, Duncan’s personal goal is to make a dent in health and safety statistics – to cut overall workplace fatalities in half. The 2014 total of 34 deaths is almost twice the rate of Australia, the UK and Canada.

Auditz is his first ‘hands-on’ business, and it hasn’t all been easy. Duncan is dyslexic, so simple tasks such as writing emails can be hard. He’s grateful for his police training which taught him the importance of listening to people and understanding their unique problems and pain points. “In this game I’ve had to learn how to quickly form a mental picture of how businesses operate.”

He advises other start-ups to be patient. “Don’t expect everyone else to be as excited about your product as you are. When you’re releasing a new product and challenging the status quo, it can take a little while for the penny to drop.

“But it’s more than worth the wait.”