HARD work and the occasional risk.
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They have been two of the key ingredients in the recipe for success Eisse Woldhuis has spent decades refining.
The local businessman has done a bit of everything over a restless life that has spanned farming at Condobolin, baking at Wellington and even selling hardware.
But through it all has been an appetite for hard yakka that he inherited from his father, who worked two jobs when he brought his wife and nine children to Australia in 1951.
“And he paid for a house within four years,” Mr Woldhuis said.
Mr Woldhuis recently sold his remaining shares in his shower and toilet partition business CTCI-Waterloo and employees and family gathered to celebrate his retirement and look back on his life.
He was born in Holland during World War Two and remembers how his parents were “able to stretch what little they had to meet the demands of a large family” during his childhood – which, he said, was the driving force behind his ambition to succeed.
Seeing the effects of war in Europe, his father brought the family to Australia for a better life when the young Mr Woldhuis was 11.
After leaving school, he worked in his father’s business, Dural Bakery, north west of Sydney, in the mornings and did the bread run to nearby communities.
He was already showing signs of becoming a businessman: he became a bread vendor, started selling groceries and then added milk and meat. He sold this early business for 200 pounds at age 23 at the same time as his father sold the bakery.
After a period working with his uncle doing kerb and guttering, Mr Woldhuis, who now had a young family, went west.
He took a job at a property near Condobolin thinking it was for a farmer, but when he got there “it was more a farmhand, doing gardening and killing sheep for food for the farmer and his workers”.
He said the family enjoyed a couple of happy years there until tragedy struck with the accidental death of his young son.
The family moved to Wellington, where Mr Woldhuis worked as a baker for seven years, and a move to Bathurst followed. Mr Woldhuis arrived in the city in 1974 with his wife and three young children and worked as the farm manager at an Eglinton property for 12 months and then at an O’Connell Road property for three years.
He said he enjoyed life on the farm, increasing the bales of hay “from 8000 a year to 48,000 a year”, but decided to find other employment because he was working seven days a week.
Mr Woldhuis applied for a job at a local hardware store and went on to manage Kelso Building Supplies for five years, building it from two employees to 15 based on four key rules: “customer service, best quality price, honesty and, above all, buying local”.
He and a work colleague saw an opportunity and started their own kitchen business, which became Kelso Kitchens when Mr Woldhuis was forced to go out on his own.
But another challenge was to follow: when someone who was meant to be helping the business did the wrong thing by him, Mr Woldhuis said he found himself $50,000 in debt and facing a choice.
He chose to go on, negotiating extended payment terms with his major supplier and taking six months to climb out of his financial hole.
He said his sales manager Joe English – who later bought into the business – supported him greatly and, in the years following, the company grew from two to 25 employees.
At the age of 60, Mr Woldhuis took what he describes as the biggest gamble of his life, selling Kelso Kitchens and opening CTCI-Waterloo, a business making toilet and shower cubicles.
The company went from four to 45 employees in the years that followed before Mr Woldhuis sold 80 per cent of his share in the business to Laminex Industries and, recently, decided to sell his remaining shares.
In retirement, he plans to continue his involvement with Glenray Industries, where he provides business advice to the manufacturing sheltered workshop.
He says his father, who died at 96, showed what was possible if you were prepared to have a go.
“He taught us it was all about hard work – about spending $1 to make $3.”
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