Family resilience with Matthews Brothers Engineering

Matthews Brothers Engineering’s Australian-made road construction solutions are built on more than 100 years of expertise, passed down through generations.

Since 1921, Matthews Brothers Engineering (MBE) has specialised in road making equipment and machinery – designed and manufactured locally for Australian businesses.

From its Altona North headquarters in Melbourne’s west, the family business supplies a range of bitumen sprayers and trailers, aggregate spreaders, melting tanks, and more.

According to Sales and Operations Manager Sally Rolfe, MBE owes the longevity of the business to its family values.

“Matthews Brothers Engineering is a third-generation family business,” Rolfe says. “It’s been family owned and operated for 102 years.”

She says the business began a transition into a new era in 2019 when Paul Matthews stepped into the Managing Director role following the passing of brothers Noel and Ray Matthews – son and nephew of original co-founders Roy and Vic Matthews respectively.

Richard Bailey had come on board a few years earlier as an understudy to Ray – formerly MBE’s Chief Engineer – prior to Ray’s passing.

Bailey then took on a dual General Manager and Design Manager role when Paul Matthews became Managing Director, which Bailey says triggered a big reshuffle in how the business worked.

“Paul traditionally ran the shop floor – he’s very hands on, a real technical guru,” Bailey says.

With Rolfe since coming on board to help manage operations, MBE is now powering ahead as efficiently as ever before, with its Altona North headquarters constantly abuzz with activity.

“We run the business out of here, we’ve got design teams here, and then there’s the actual shop floor where we manufacture everything,” Bailey says. “We also do service and maintenance here, and any general upkeep of our sprayers.”

MBE also runs a second site down the road in Williamstown, where the tanks themselves are manufactured and water tested, before being fitted onto vehicles in Altona North.

“A couple of years ago, we invested quite a bit in new equipment for the Williamstown site,” Bailey says. “We built two brand new tank rotators – for a total of three – to increase our production capacity.

“We had been looking into the business to find where our bottlenecks were. Because we originally had just a single rotator, we could have a million orders and a million staff and still only be able to manufacture one tank at a time.

“And since making the decision to address this, the business has gone from strength to strength.”

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Local support

This dedication to local manufacturing has been at the core of MBE’s values from the start.

“We take pride in what we produce,” Bailey says. “We will go out of the way to support our product because we believe in it, and we want it to be the market leader.”

Rolfe adds that the business always endeavours to support other Australian businesses wherever possible.

“We’re very proud of our Australian-made registration, and the fact that we build our products to meet Australian standards, and for Australian conditions,” she says.

“We’re a unique country. Our customers are out there building roads in the middle of outback Australia, so we have to supply something that can operate in extreme conditions.”

MBE’s dog trailer bitumen tankers are the latest example of a product engineered not just for the specific needs of local customers, but also for an evolving road industry.

These trailers offer additional payload capacity for bitumen sprayers – especially helpful for work in regional and remote areas.

Rolfe says MBE prioritises family values and local manufacturing.

“The most basic model is essentially just a big bitumen tank with its own heating system – so it can independently get the product up to temperature,” Bailey says.

From here, the range scales gradually up until you reach MBE’s premium dog trailer – what Rolfe calls “the king of bitumen tankers”.

“This has a big engine on the front that drives a system of paddle agitators as well as the burner system,” she says.

Combined with its own dedicated pump system, these features make MBE’s premium dog trailer suitable for managing bitumen blends containing crumb rubber, which Bailey says are becoming increasingly popular due to its sustainability benefits.

“For crumb rubber blends, it’s very important that you keep it equally distributed,” he says. “You can’t allow it to settle because it starts to separate.

“Our agitator paddles can keep it moving and at the right temperature so that it’s ready for use at any moment.”

Like all MBE products, the dog trailers can also be tailored to suit a customer’s needs – whether it’s different tank sizes, axle configurations, or something less conventional.

“We’re not just a manufacturing business – we’re an engineering business,” Bailey says. “We have our range of typical designs, but if you come to us with something completely new, we can respond to that too.”

Rolfe says each standard design also has around 30 optional extras, so nothing ever goes out the door exactly the same.

“Our products are always evolving and improving due to our ability to customise,” she says. “Because if a bespoke feature for one client works really well and gets great feedback, it can become an option for others.”

Family strong

MBE has also recently invested in the modernisation of other operations within the business to “bring it into the 21st century”.

“This meant updating systems, bringing in tighter internal procedures – all that sort of stuff,” Bailey says.

He says these efforts have paid off with MBE’s customer relationships.

“We’re a lot more organised with documentation – user manuals are now digitised and easily accessible, and we’re even doing instructional videos,” Bailey says.

“It’s a lot of stuff we’ve never really tapped into before, and I think that’s valuable for our customers.”

Rolfe says it’s all about using technology to streamline business operations, while maintaining that customer-focused “family business” approach that MBE has always taken pride in.

“We want to keep that relationship management side very strong, but built on a more robust, better documented, procedural foundation,” she says.

“The Matthews Brothers name has been around for a long time, and our customers expect us to be accessible, direct, and flexible. There’s not a lot of red tape when you need to reach out to us – you’ll be talking to the people making the decisions. So, we can be very reactive and proactive to our customers’ needs.”

Bailey says MBE has also taken care to maintain a positive and family-friendly work culture.

“I have four daughters, and Sally has a son and daughter too,” he says. “We understand life goes on outside of work, and we’re very accommodating because of that.

“It’s an underlying culture that the everyday customer may not see, but I think it trickles down and helps improve the overall quality of what we produce.”

Despite these big changes, MBE has naturally not been immune to the challenges of the past few years, and the supply chain chaos that continues to plague many industries.

“For example, we’re waiting on chassis that are just doing circles out in the bay as we speak,” Bailey says. “There’s just so much stuff coming into the country at the moment.”

Bailey says that for himself and Rolfe, stepping into their respective roles was something of a baptism by fire.

“It’s been challenging – but in a fun way,” he says. “As they say – smooth seas never made for a skilled sailor.

“But navigating these challenges together gives us the confidence to say: we’ve made it through COVID, now we feel like we can take on anything that’s thrown at us.”

This article was originally published in the April edition of our magazine. To read the magazine, click here.