Meet Greg!

Growing up on a small Jersey farm in Warragul West, young Greg Cole knew his way around a dairy. But like many farm kids, he took a major career detour before rounding back to the industry.
Greg first qualified as a sparky and spent five years at Toyota in Melbourne, focused on industrial breakdowns where minutes would cost the business thousands. “We had push bikes we used to race to jobs”, says Greg. “It was go, go, go.”

He soon decided to start his own business back in Warragul.
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Greg was awarded the Leadership and Innovation Award at the 2022 Australian Community Achievement Awards.
“All the sparkies around here were domestic sparkies, typically”, he says. “No one had an industrial background.” Greg figured if he could provide local industry with the kind of support he saw at Toyota, businesses could be more confident investing in new technologies.

He started Cutting Edge Electrical in 1996 out of his hay shed on a dirt road. With no toilet, no staff, and more importantly, no customers to speak of. Fast forward 25 years and a couple of premises later, and Greg built Cutting Edge into an award-winning team of around 30 people with clients including Flavorite, Gippsland Water, Drouin West Timber and more.

Greg enjoyed working with local dairy farms again through Cutting Edge, so when the opportunity came up in 2004 to purchase a fledgling business producing milk meters designed by the Ellinbank Research Farm, he said “I’d like to have a crack at manufacturing!”

Greg took on a wayward prototype, debtors, and legal action from unhappy customers when he purchased Eli Innovation. But he worked closely with Nils Netzer as engineer, and with local farmers who’d installed the prototype, to turn the product and business around. Greg and Nils went on to develop a range of Australian-made milk harvesting products that have sold tens of thousands of units worldwide.
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Greg and wife Julie with staff from Cutting Edge Electrical, Eli Innovation and Lely Center Gippsland.
“With Eli, we were servicing the market of cup removers and milk meters and herd management software, but I just felt that the future is robots”, says Greg. “That is where the technology will go, where the industry will go.”

Not one to sit still, in 2016 Greg brought Lely Center Gippsland to life.

“When Lely installed the Hammond family’s robots in Buln Buln in 2016, we did the electrical work. So that’s how it came about; we were interested in robots to future-proof our business, they were looking for a new dealer… Bang! Within a month we were fortunate enough to be given Lely distribution."

Since then, Greg has built a highly qualified team of 20 people who have installed more than 80 Lely milking robots on Gippsland farms, plus automatic calf feeders, automatic feed pushers, and more. They are specialists in dairy automation and are based on the ground in Gippsland, providing technical and farm management support to customers to help them get the most out of their robots - now and into the future.

"These are relationships that we’re going to have for a long, long time. So customer service is paramount. My goal is to build a reputation that our customers know they can rely on."

And when it comes to the robots themselves, Greg says it’s a no brainer.

“Robotics help ensure that farmers are running their systems efficiently. They've got all the data they could possibly want, to make changes on the fly, to react to situations quickly. And they're no longer relying on staff to turn up to milk cows. So staff availability, staffing costs, are one massive variable out of their system.

“When we first started pricing robots, doing that cost analysis on the payback of robots, we were talking about a labour unit to milk cows being $25 to $30 per hour. Now it's more like $50 to $60 per hour. And that's only five years ago. What's it going to do in the next five years?”

But beyond the practical benefits of the technology, Greg gets a lot of personal satisfaction out of the job.

“The best part is, we're involved in changing people’s lives for the better. People who were going to get out of the industry, or not sure what they were going to do, they've put robots in and have stayed in the industry. And they see themselves staying there.

“Some of the other stuff that’s not measurable is just the amount of good people we've worked with. The relationships we've built with our long term customers. All the apprentices we've trained and maybe nurtured over the years, from Cutting Edge to Lely. The friendships. The network that you build. Without actually knowing it, just by dealing with customers, staff, suppliers.

“What's really nice is to hear people in the industry talk about us in a very positive way. That's quite pleasing, that we're respected as a business. That's hard to earn.”
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Greg with the team at Lely Center Gippsland
Having built a solid team at Lely Gippsland, including Dale Serong as Center Manager, Greg is now able to step back to steer the ship and focus on other passions. He’s known for investing his time in the local community, holding long term volunteer positions with groups like the Drouin & District Racing Club and Warragul Cemetery Trust, and more recently joining the Gippsland Community Leadership Program through the Gardiner Foundation.

“It takes a little bit of your time, but the rewards, the personal satisfaction, is tenfold. So I'm trying to lead by example and encourage our staff to volunteer.”

In 2022 Greg was recognised for his contributions, being awarded with the Regional Development Victoria Leadership and Innovation Award at the 2022 Australian Community Achievement Awards.

But if you ask him, he’s got Gippsland to thank for much of it. “The best spot in Australia!”, he exclaims.

“You've got good rainfall. You've got good sun. Good access to the city, the mountains, the beaches. It's a beautiful landscape. And it's financially quite stable, because it's such a diverse area, it's not reliant on one industry.

“Where else can you go to get all that?”

Greg, we couldn’t agree more!

Interested in robots?

Learn about our customers' experiences installing robots on their Gippsland dairy farms.