Son of a business gun Ben Beck carves his own property and water niche after securing a $150m deal

For 18 years, Ben Beck was reluctant to trade on his dad’s property legend status. Not anymore. He’s now sold his firm and has a key role in the Beck empire with grand plans to disrupt.

Ben Beck is moving into the water infrastructure business with Beck Water.

There was a time when Ben Beck was reluctant to use his family name in business.

It wasn’t that Beck was ashamed of his background or wanted to disown his parents, but as the son of legendary Melbourne property doyen Max Beck, he was conscious of trying to plot his own entrepreneurial path.

After successfully building and recently selling his own business, embedded electricity and utility network operator Active Utilities, for about $150m to superannuation fund Prime Super, Beck is ready to finally embrace the family moniker.

The sale of Active, which will be managed by German infrastructure manager Patrizia on behalf of the super fund, marks a stepping stone for Beck, who founded the business in 2006 and sold a 25 per cent stake to Macquarie in 2019.

He will concentrate on a new property development business with his father, BeckDev, which has industrial and residential projects planned or under way in Queensland, and Beck Water, a water infrastructure business.

“I’ve jumped on to being proud of the Beck name the past few years,” Beck explains. “When I started Active it was about stepping aside from the old man and that’s why I chose the name of the business – it was far removed from the Beck name.

“None of the customers were Beck-related for a long time. It was about not taking the easy path. It was about carving out my own reputation, and in business your reputation is your biggest asset, and it was important to me.”

Beck, the youngest of four children, is also looking after the family’s share of the billion-dollar asset it owns with Lindsay Fox and his family, the Essendon Fields development at Melbourne’s Essendon Airport.

The Beck and Fox families are only 20 years into a 99-year lease for the airport, where they have developed dozens of office and industrial buildings, a hotel and shopping centre and the largest car yard precinct in the southern hemisphere.

Melbourne developer and Ben’s father, Max Beck. Picture: Josh Robenstone

While Beck manages that as an investor and board director, he is also overseeing the growth of Beck Water and BeckDev.

Beck Water is a pure infrastructure business, dealing with water pumps, pipes, tanks and other assets that support council projects and business to business arrangements.

“I was thinking Active was going to be coming to an end for me; almost 18 years is a long time to be in business. So I thought what was the next industry I could disrupt … and wanting to stay in the infrastructure business, so that’s when I looked at water,” Beck tells The Australian.

“There’s a lot of monopolies in the water industry, similar to energy, even from a supplier industry most of the councils only deal with a handful of pump suppliers, they are having to accept no or poor customer service for what are pretty critical pieces of infrastructure, so we thought it’s a good opportunity to come in and disrupt that.”

Beck Water has secured exclusive distribution rights for equipment from the US, Asia and Europe – “finding best of breed technology to come and look at changing things in the water industry” – and longer term Beck wants to clinch deals to manage water assets such as treatment and sewerage plants and also use technology to help reduce evaporation in trench networks.

Beck says he has had some potential investors get in touch about his next deal after the Active sale was revealed last month.

“It took me 18 years to grow Active, and part of that was learning on the tools,” says Beck. “What my next venture will involve is hopefully a smarter and faster approach. I know what to do and what not to do, and I’m pretty excited about that opportunity.”

Beck established Active in 2006, after working in the then family construction business Becton (his brother Sam now runs offshoot Beck Property Group, which has projects including the Caulfield Village precinct in Melbourne) and then a stint at what is now the timeshare company Accor Vacation Club.

As an embedded network firm, Active buys energy and other utilities such as internet broadband and water from a retailer and then onsells the energy and services to the different customers at a site, such as tenants in strata residential buildings.

By 2019, it was billing about $100m worth of electricity, internet, water and other utilities to its customers annually, mostly in large residential strata buildings and increasingly for shopping centre owners and commercial properties.

In the four years since Macquarie bought into Active, it made bolt-on acquisitions including Watts Energy in Queensland, where it was managing 700 buildings, and also focused more on renewable energy infrastructure for its buildings and other jobs such as removing gas cooking facilities in apartments and retrofitting buildings. “Percentage wise, we probably doubled in business in that time,” Beck says.

He will now find a chief executive to take over from him at Active and plans to exit the business, which has about 65 staff with offices in Melbourne, Queensland and Manila, by about the end of this year. Next comes helping oversee more growth at Essendon Fields and the fledging BeckDev business with father Max.

BeckDev has already undertaken industrial property projects in Queensland, and has a luxury apartment project planned at Coolangatta’s historic Jazzland Dance Palais building.

“To be able to have my father trust me enough to start a business together has been really important to me,” Beck says. “And to be able to come in with credentials and now with a history of achieving things is important as well.”