Engineering firm TMK unveils five-year growth plan

Four decades after three engineers started TMK in Adelaide, the firm employs over 100 staff and plans to conquer new markets east and west in a bold new growth strategy.

TMK Consulting Engineers directors Michael Talladira, Trevor Kokkinakis and Luigi Ienco at the Seacliff Village site. Picture: Naomi Jellicoe

Four decades after Trevor Kokkinakis, Michael Talladira and Bill Martin joined forces to establish engineering consultancy TMK, the firm is gearing up for a new phase of growth, with a national expansion at the heart of a new five-year strategic plan.

With its headquarters in Adelaide and a second office in Melbourne, TMK is now looking to enter the NSW market, while a move into Western Australia is also on the cards.

From its roots in civil, structural and geotechnical engineering, TMK expanded into building services when Luigi Ienco joined the partnership in the early 1990s, and it has since added fire protection, forensic, transport, temporary works and a suite of other engineering services to its offering.

Projects range from high rise office towers to shopping centres, major housing developments and some of the country’s biggest infrastructure projects.

With a team of more than 100 engineers and support staff in Adelaide and the Riverland, TMK is one of the state’s largest home-grown construction and infrastructure engineering consultancies.

Artist’s impression of the Seacliff Village housing development.

But with the war for talent as intense as ever, Mr Talladira said it was important for the firm – which marks 40 years in business this year – to pursue opportunities for further growth.

“For us to have longevity we have no choice, because to attract the right staff who want to grow, we’ve got to keep growing to be able to feed everyone,” he said.

“There are also clients that are moving interstate and we want to service those clients.

“We’ve got a lot of ambitious, energetic staff, and to keep those people interested they need to see growth. For them to be able to grow individually, the company also has to grow.

“It is competitive out there, but people can sense what companies are on the move. There’s a lot of that word of mouth and hopefully people can see there are actually some really exciting things happening here.”

Following a previous foray into Darwin, TMK opened its Melbourne office just before Covid-19. And the move is paying dividends, with a growing pipeline of work in the Victorian capital, as well as across the border into NSW, where the firm is delivering temporary works design, training and construction support services to the $12bn-plus Snowy Mountains 2.0 renewables project.

Mr Kokkinakis said securing that work was a major coup for the business, and a flagship project that would help to underpin TMK’s planned expansion along the east coast.

“Melbourne and the eastern seaboard is definitely a platform to grow our national footprint,” he said.

“NSW is certainly the next one on the cards, it’s within our strategic plan and in our sights. and then we’ll be on the lookout, quite possibly Perth might be another location that might be within reach.

“We have a very good culture here and we want to make sure that as we expand that culture comes with us.”

Closer to home, TMK is supporting the state’s largest-ever construction project – the $15.4bn Torrens to Darlington upgrade, and it is also involved in some of the state’s largest housing projects like the Seacliff Village development at the former Adelaide Brighton cement works – Cement Hill – in Adelaide’s south.

Mr Kokkinakis said land divisions remained a major part of the business, and the outlook was bright given the push from state and federal governments to ramp up the construction of new housing.

“We do lots of land divisions, that’s a big part of the organisation, and that particular project at Seacliff involves an awkward site, buried tunnels, buried structures. We have to work very closely with the developer and the contractor,” he said.

“And then above ground there we’re involved in the shopping centre design, we’re doing the medical centre, probably the apartments there – that project really does cover all of our disciplines at that one site.”

Originally published as Engineering firm TMK unveils five-year growth plan