How ex-NRL star Wes Maas built a billion-dollar business in Dubbo
Wes Maas and Roger Fletcher are collectively worth about $2bn. They also work just a few minutes apart in Dubbo where they have built lucrative firms from the ground up.
Wes Maas says the best thing about living in Dubbo is time.
The 45-year-old professional rugby league player-turned-construction materials and property giant CEO lives in the regional NSW city where his Maas Group is headquartered, and says it means he can drive the company and also raise his family.
“I work a lot. And I think the greatest wealth builder is compounding money or compounding time,” Maas says.
“So, if I’m in Dubbo and I do 12 hours work, it takes me about six minutes to get home and six minutes to get to work,” he says.
“Bringing up a family in the country, with support from both sides of the family, you can do so much more. I’ve got four kids – two boys, two girls – and they all play two sports. You just couldn’t do that in a capital city.”
Weighing in on running a massively successful business also from Dubbo, billionaire Roger Fletcher – whose agricultural business exports lamb, wool, wheat and cotton, among other goods – goes further.
Making us an instant cup of Moccona coffee at his Fletcher International abattoir in Dubbo, when asked what living and working in the regional town is like, the 79-year-old responds dryly: “Well, it’s better than in Sydney.
“We had an office in Sydney in 1992. Didn’t need it. It was a waste of time. We can run the whole world from here.”
For Maas, despite the short commute, priorities can still clash. “I obviously love work a lot. So I’m lucky, I’ve got a very supportive wife. I’ve got a great team. But everything comes with sacrifice,” he says.
“I set some points that I won’t miss. I don’t miss any of the kids’ sports. I don’t miss any of their special school events.”
While the majority of the Richest 250 live in big cities including Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Perth, there are regional success stories. Like the Casella family of wine fame in Griffith, NSW; mining machinery magnate Dale Elphinstone from Burnie on Tasmania’s north-west coast; and the billionaire Borg brothers who make panelling and joinery products on the NSW Central Coast. Dubbo is unique in the Richest 250 this year, providing two regional members.
Maas founded his company back in 2002 in the NSW Western Plains city where he grew up – about 400km from Sydney – with a few thousand dollars’ worth of savings for a bobcat and a tipper truck.
More than two decades later, Maas Group is valued at more than $1.6bn on the ASX, having roughly doubled in value since its December 2020 float.
Just out the back of Maas headquarters, about a 10-minute drive from town, lies one of the company’s quarries where many more than those two original machines now crush concrete pieces under a blazing sun.
After meeting at his office, Maas agrees to be photographed in the quarry.
He turns to give a thumbs-up to skilled machinery personnel operating giant yellow beasts while standing in the middle of a pile of dark rocks that are making the 40C day feel more like 45C.
In turn, more than a few of the friendly Maas Group machine operators on site speak highly about their boss’s success story and the company they work for, which has sponsored community sport and other events over the years.
Maas is the biggest shareholder in his company, and has an estimated fortune of $821m this year.
Maas Group now has five major divisions including construction materials, civil construction and hire, manufacturing and equipment sales, and separate commercial and residential real estate arms.
The 2025 edition of The List – Australia’s Richest 250 is published on Friday in The Australian and online at www.richest250.com.au
The company has benefitted from working on large infrastructure projects including the Snowy Hydro 2.0, West Connex and the Inland Rail, and has expanded to regional and capital city hubs in NSW including Tamworth, Newcastle, Orange and Sydney, and in Queensland in Rockhampton and Brisbane.
Late in 2024, the company announced it had acquired a NSW construction materials and quarry business in Wollongong and Nowra called Cleary Bros, a 75 per cent stake in ACT asphalt and spray-seal product supplier Capital Asphalt, and a large hard rock quarry in western Melbourne.
“We’ve strengthened the Melbourne market with the quarry. We’ve entered a new market in Canberra,” Maas says.
“We’ve entered the Wollongong and fringe Sydney market. In time we can grow the Wollongong [market] and push into Sydney. So, from that sense, they’re the most strategic assets that we’ve bought, and in the future it’ll just continue with more of the same.”
It’s hard to argue that Maas has taken his foot off the gas since launching the business as a 22-year-old who left Sydney and returned to Dubbo.
Maas says he first bandied about the idea of floating the company in 2018. “We were being presented a number of [acquisition] opportunities, and we didn’t have the financial capacity to take advantage of all the opportunities,” he says.
“I wanted to grow at the velocity of the opportunities that were being presented.”
As well, Maas wanted to continue to personally learn and grow. “I wanted to broaden my horizon and have more sounding boards that I could bounce things off,” he says.
When Maas Group first contemplated going public, Maas says the investment bankers with whom he was dealing hadn’t heard of the company, and the two-year pursuit included flying to Sydney and Brisbane.
“We went to see 13 investment banks initially. We organised the meetings, but it was like doorknocking,” he says. “We went and presented what we are and where we’re going, and this was sort of the proposition.
“Thirteen banks gave us a proposal, and then we shortlisted it to four. And then we had four banks come out to Dubbo and [then] did a roadshow.”
The shortlisted group to inspect Maas Group’s operations and people comprised Macquarie, Credit Suisse, Morgans Financial and Moelis Australia. The company ended up choosing Morgans and Moelis.
After the company listed in December 2020, Maas didn’t feel pressure to relocate headquarters away from Dubbo to Sydney or another capital city.
“The business has evolved and grown significantly from 2020 to today. We have a number of offices in capital cities and other regional centres, and we’ve become very flexible,” he says.
“I think Covid taught us a lot of that, that we could work remotely. It probably taught more so myself than everyone else, because I used to think everyone had to be in Dubbo, but they actually don’t.”
He says key staff are roughly equally spread across Dubbo, Sydney and Brisbane. And Newcastle is growing. The company has strong business ties to the region surrounding Dubbo, but Maas is not locked in to living in the locality forever.
“We talk about a hub-and-spoke model. Dubbo is the centre of the spokes,” he says.
“Then you’ve always got your family ties. We’ve got a strong family on both sides of the family, and kids’ support.
“I travel a lot, so I’m very mobile. Dubbo is well connected with the airport. It’s well connected for transport. It’s got a lot of regional support services
“We mightn’t stay in Dubbo forever. It depends where our kids take us as well.
“Dubbo has been a great place for us to build the business from. We haven’t expanded our investment really too much in this region in the past five years, because the business is so big we would only be competing with ourselves.
“So the business has expanded externally away, and it will continue to expand further and further away. I’m not saying we’re going to downgrade what we’re doing in this region, but there’s only so much investment that we can do in this region.”
He says he travels between two and four days per week, and is typically home on the weekend and either a Friday or Monday.
“It goes in spurts. So if we’ve got a new start-up business or we’re really active in acquisitions, I’m always heavily involved in that phase,” he says. “Then it’ll settle down to a steady state.”
Maas is positive about Dubbo’s potential for personal and professional opportunities.
“Dubbo has always been growing as a regional centre. It has a 42,000-person population, but it’s got a 150,000-person draw, so it has a lot of services,” he says.
“There’s always been a lot of work and a lot of opportunity here, if you want to work and you want to have a go.
“Dubbo hasn’t really changed. For me as a person, from a business sense, I’ve grown and I’ve learned so much. I’ve been learning off people that I’ve employed and learning off the funds and the investment banks.
“My abilities would have doubled [over] five years. That’s been exciting.”
Asked if he will remain as Maas Group CEO for the next 20 years, Maas says he intends to carry on because he enjoys it. “I’m not working just for money. Money is the outcome of the game,” he says.
“If I’m enjoying the game and I’ve got the support of my team, then I’ll just keep doing it.
“I’m very much about growing parts of the business, or growing as a person, or growing other parts of our team.”
Recalling some work Maas did for him years back, Fletcher – whose business is about a 15-minute drive from Maas Group’s – praises the younger man’s “hard yakka”.
“When he was first starting, we did a lot of earthworks, especially with the railway down there. And then we did an industrial development,” Fletcher says from the shared kitchen table in an office at the Fletcher International abattoir in Dubbo.
“Plus, down on the farms; he did some work down there. This is where towns grow.”
Like Maas, Fletcher – who went from droving sheep across Australia’s east coast with no cash, to helming one of the country’s most successful export businesses – looks set to lead his company for years to come.
“Well, I enjoy it; it’s a challenge. We’ve got a great team of employees,” he says.
“I’m in the company every day. We own three stations, big farms. We’ve got feedlots, cotton farms, so I get to them every two or three weeks.”
As for the Richest 250, Fletcher says he’d rather not be included, and insists he is a battler.
“We’ve done well, but, you know, we started with nothing. We’ve always been private with partners. What a great life,” he says, wearing a white coat bearing his name and a few scuffs from a day spent around the sprawling acreage.
“But look, it’s only a sport. It’s only a game of football. You try and do it better than anyone else. It’s no different.
“I left home and went droving. I had no money. I didn’t own a thing. Couldn’t borrow one cent. (Then I) got a bit of cash, that’s how I got going.
“We just keep going forward each year. We put our money back into the business, the family business.”
Fletcher drives around the property in a dusty white ute, where beyond the abattoir, an open field is loaded with containers ready for transporting grains, cotton and meat. Nearby, two trucks are loaded with sheep.
He opened his own Fletcher rail freight terminal at Dubbo in 2015, and it makes regular runs to Sydney with his goods.
He confirms he has travelled it himself: “Whatever businesses I’m in, I’m hands on. Yeah, and I’d like to see what it does, see how it goes.”
Fletcher is immensely proud of the number of nationalities represented among the 1400 staff across Australia’s east and west coast. He says there are at least 30.
But unlike Maas, Fletcher has never wanted to take his company, which he runs with his wife Gail and children, public.
“It’s been good fun. My wife and I, we started with nothing,” he says.
Before we wrap up, Fletcher asks one favour: “You’ve got to promise, don’t say we’re rich. We’re just battlers.”
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