About Tungsten
Tungsten Structures set out in July 2015 to create the most sustainable business model ever, one that creates a wealth of personal, professional, and financial opportunities for our loyal team members and customers.
We have a legendary reputation for consistently providing the most efficient, reliable, and compliant structural steelwork designs on the market. Our customers swiftly realise that this is just the tip of the elegant iceberg that is the Tungsten Structures brand.
We are experts in all aspects of industrial structures, including ambient, cold-store, high-bay, food-processing, automated, and retail big-box facilities. Whether a structure has complexities such as fibre or post-tensioned reinforced slabs on ground, is supported on soft, reactive, or challenging ground, has gantry and jib cranes, or has wall panels that are full height, dado height, concrete tilt, or precast—we excel at them all.
We deliver wealth to our customers by simply and consistently doing the things that they expect of us, including the things that they tell us their other service consultants fail to do. We always deliver on our promises.
- Our detailed design quantities never exceed our preliminary designs provided that the building geometry and loads remain consistent.
- We issue documents on the day we say we will, every time.
- We keep our customers well-informed by providing weekly project progress updates.
- We identify, extract, and deliver every last dollar of potential value to our customers through every stage of the project.
- We maintain exceptional quality designs and documents by implementing our well-honed processes.
- We include multiple iterations of meticulous internal quality reviews, leaving no stone unturned.
We deliver wealth to our team members by giving back in equal measure that which they choose to put in, through any or all of the following ways:
- our 108TEN 4-Day Workweeks (five days of pay for just four days of work whilst achieving five days of output)
- our quarterly cash bonus plans for everyone
- our business share ownership scheme for members with more than five years of service
- the flexibility, autonomy, and trust to work from home or the office
- paid mental well-being leave
- no dress code
- encouragement to take personal appointments during the workday
- adoption of our world-class performance enhancement systems, including
- annual setting of personal role objectives and priorities to assist the business in achieving its goals and strategies
- annual development plans
- bi-monthly meetings with leaders
- fitting role accountabilities around members’ strengths and desires
- providing complete business financial performance transparency
- formulation of personal annual salary review offers
- participation in our peer-to-peer recognition system
2015
Our founder, Vince Williams, establishes Tungsten Structures to live and work by his values and drive his own future.
2016 - 2017
Tungsten grows to a team of three engineers as demand for work increases organically. We continue to experience sustainable growth through referrals for our exceptional outcomes and building solid relationships.
2018 - 2019
The Manila office opens, and Team Tungsten grows to nine, including engineers, Tekla technicians, and administration.
2020
Our team more than doubles in size to nineteen with the introduction of a new service offering, steel detailing and shop drawings. We are recognised externally for our excellence as a small business, receiving the Small Firm of the Year award from Consult Australia.
2021
Tungsten launches its Melbourne presence. Whilst we experienced success, we discontinued our expanded service offering, deciding to remain tightly niched in what we do best, which is structural engineering for industrial projects. We also decided to remain ‘lean’ and pared back the administrative functions of the business, reducing our team to fourteen core technical team members.
2022
Tungsten moves its head office from Albion to Teneriffe, and business succession planning commences with the promotion of Elise McDonald and Adam Segrave to co-general managers and then to managing partners. We also introduce the Tungsten Shavings Scheme, offering partnerships to our long-term team members through business shares. Vince Williams commences his transition from managing director to founding director and moves to Salt Lake City, Utah, in the United States. Our team expands again, to twenty-four, larger than ever, as we solidify our niche and focus our attention. We introduce our 108TEN 4-Day Workweek policy and commence our transition to working four days a week while being paid for five.
2023 and beyond
Tungsten launches its Perth presence and establishes a permanent Melbourne office. The team is set to exceed thirty-six members by the end of 2025. The Manila office expands and moves into a larger facility. The firm continues to promote internally and award the status of partner to a growing list of long-tenured (at least five years) loyal team members. Partnership brings with it business ownership and even greater financial rewards. We continue to leverage technology and innovate the world’s best practices as the team increases its efficiency from 124% to 150% and commences the trial period of twenty-seven-hour workweeks. The trial is successful, and the whole company begins knocking off before lunch on Thursdays while still being paid a full-time salary and quarterly bonuses.
The firm is now also the nation’s leader in multi-level industrial structural design. The team members have completed a number of industrial projects for international customers across Southeast Asia. Successfully expanding and adapting their industrial expertise and processes, they are now applying their approach to the mining sector, completing infrastructure and processing structures. The firm also finalises a couple of highly profitable transactions with its investment arm, Tungsten Investments, successfully developing and selling fully tenanted industrial facilities at around 2,500 m2 each. The future continues to look bright for the team at Tungsten Structures.
Our why
As people, we are passionate. We are competitive. We are winners. We love getting out of bed in the morning to work at this company. We share a purpose bigger than ourselves and will succeed in realising that purpose.
We aren't your standard engineers. We're outside the box. We think differently. We maximise potential. We achieve exceptional outcomes. We create innovative solutions. We push boundaries. We go above and beyond. We save and deliver an insane amount of value in construction dollars on all our projects. We positively impact the environment through efforts to reduce your use of construction materials.
We are Australia’s best-performing and most reliable team, delivering the most consistent industrial-sector structural engineering product ever. We are the national leaders and experts in efficient structural steelwork and fibre-reinforced slab-on-ground designs. We have been recognised by Telstra, Consult Australia, the Australian Steel Institute, and Tekla as a team of exceptional and innovative managers, designers, and documenters.
Tungsten is no longer the new kid on the block. We’ve been around since 2015, and we aren’t going anywhere but up. So, it’s now time for us to move even further beyond those plaudits and transition to the next phase of our journey.
We have consolidated our niche and future strategy. We will be increasing our efficiencies beyond what the industry or even we ourselves thought possible. We will change the structural engineering game in new ways. And we will do all of this in pursuit of our sole purpose of fulfilling our mission to give back to our loyal team members and their families and to our customers.
We are striving...
to grow our team internationally to 36 and our sales to $6M with a 35% net profit margin by the end of 2025 to enhance our prospects of achieving our mission.
Our purpose and reason for existing...
is to create a sustainable business that provides a wealth of personal, professional, and financial opportunities for our loyal team members and customers.
Our core values are…
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Reliable
doing what we say we’ll do and when, always delivering on our promises
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Adaptable
driving change through innovation and being early-adopters
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Integrity
being honest and fair so as to remain trusted
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Supportive
being each other’s cheerleaders
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Excellence
remaining self-driven, competitive, successful, and motivated to win
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Relatable
maintaining engaging conversations with real people
How we make our values a reality
These words are not simply a set of corporate aspirations—they represent who we are. In December 2020, we met as a team to refine and evolve our founders’ initial 2015 values for the company. We recorded our refined values as a reflection and observation of ourselves as a team. These are our behaviours, our truths, our beliefs.
As such, it is only natural that we hold these values in the highest regard. And we don’t need to alter who we are in order to comply. Our values form the basis for all our designs, dealings and decisions and conforming to them takes our highest priority.
We recognise that, in order for us to remain market leaders, these values need to steer us on our path to success. They set us apart, making Tungsten Structures an exceptional company to work with and for.
Our Pillars for success
Our current strategy consists of
Sustainable practices
- creating and introducing formal sustainable business practice systems, policies, and processes
- increasing team efficiencies even further to sustain reduced workweeks
Business succession
- creating opportunities for team leadership and internal promotions
- distributing responsibilities and accountabilities effectively and sensibly across the team as a whole
Business growth
- doubling the size of our team from 18 to 36 by the end of 2025
- growing our annual sales to $6M with a 35% net profit by the end of 2025
OUR MISSION: "TO CREATE A SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS THAT PROVIDES A WEALTH OF OPPORTUNITIES FOR OUR TEAM & CUSTOMERS”
Behind the Name
An element
Tungsten, also known as wolfram, is a chemical element with the symbol W and atomic number 74 that was identified as a metal in 1783. It is remarkable for its robustness; thus, of all metals in their pure forms, tungsten has the highest melting point and greatest tensile strength. It has valuable applications thanks to its hardness and density. Even when very pure, tungsten becomes sufficiently malleable to be worked easily while retaining its hardness. Likewise, alloying just small amounts of tungsten with steel greatly increases its toughness.
[Source: Tungsten – https://en.wikipedia.org]
A business
In light of these properties, our founders named their new business Tungsten Structures. Our logo depicts the chemical symbol W, and our branding and letterhead carry the atomic number 74, standard atomic weight of 183.84, and electron configuration per shell of 2, 8, 18, 32, 12, and 2. We also noted that, when the symbol W is written with certain two-tone brush strokes, as in the case of our logo, our founders' initials, VW, become apparent. The metal was also discovered exactly 200 years before his birth year.
Astonishingly, before our 4-Day Workweek was even then a blip on the radar, tungsten may have carried a symbolic meaning regarding our destiny. That is, our element’s atomic number of 74 perhaps predicted that, eventually, in a 7-day week, we would only be working 4 days!
The description of Tungsten’s physical properties extend to some of the values that echo through our business:
Tungsten The Metal
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remarkable robustness
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highest melting point
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highest tensile strength
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valuable applications
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easy to work with
Tungsten The Company
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resilient, solid, stable
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reliable, even under pressure
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exceptionally strong and enduring
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value-adding
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hassle-free
“alloy some Tungsten into your project to greatly increase its potential”
