Qualified plumbers Peter McDonnell and Guy Considine recognised a gap in the market and in 1996 joined forces to form a company they incorporated in 2000 as McDonnell Considine Contracting. A couple of years later, when a third partner joined, the name was changed to McDonnell Considine Digby Pty Ltd.
The goal from the outset was to provide a professional, dedicated, and competitive service to various plumbing divisions, with the focus switching in more recent years to the commercial, industrial, and facilities plumbing maintenance sector.
The enterprise has grown rapidly since 2000 and now, trading as Australian Facilities Group, is well known throughout the facilities maintenance, plumbing, fire protection, and land management sectors for its willingness to go well beyond its competitors to provide its clients with the best possible service.
”We decided in the late 90s, before starting the company as it is today, we would no longer work within the building sector per se, simply because builders inherently can be challenging to deal with from a subcontract level,” Peter says. We made a strategic decision that we would go in a different direction, which was facilities management and maintenance. So from 2000 on, that’s really all we did facilities maintenance, initially plumbing. In 2006, we changed our trading name to MCD Hydraulics. The catalyst was we didn’t advertise and only worked for a select group of government and commercial clients. We changed our name primarily to stop the public, or domestic sector, calling us because we didn’t work within that area. We purely targeted facilities maintenance.
”That worked quite well because hydraulic is essentially what the plumbing system in commercial and high rise is, and the public didn’t distinguish between the two. We traded as MCD Hydraulics from 2006 through to about February last year. We strategically decided to change our name to Australian Facilities Plumbing. That was surrounding our major Commonwealth contract being up for re-tender across the country. We were successful in re-securing the contract in several states and have continued to establish and develop a great working partnership with our clients, such as Brookfield Integrated Solutions.”
Eventually, the business added supplementary sectors fire protection in 2009 and land management in 2014 and expanded some of its New South Wales operations into Victoria and Tasmania. To encompass the changes, it registered as Australian Facilities Group (AFG).