A Decade of Denise

Last week we celebrated Finance Manager Denise Strong as she reached 10 years at Inertia! Denise has been a heart and soul Inertian from the beginning, and we are so pleased to be celebrating this fantastic milestone with her.

In her role as Finance Manager, Denise has assisted with implementing major improvements to our financial structure and project accounting software. As we have grown and technology has evolved, the systems Denise uses daily have undergone a lot of change, and she has remained calm and adaptable throughout.

She was also a founding member of our Social Club (now known as the Cultural Committee) and has been instrumental in maintaining Inertia’s fantastic culture as we grow, from championing 2 minutes of stretching at 10am and 3pm to always attending staff events and having a beer with the team. She embodies Inertia’s values through and through, and the fact that she has been nominated for Inertian of the year twice is a testament to that!

We caught up with Denise to hear her thoughts on the past decade at Inertia.

What is your fondest memory from your time at Inertia?

My favourite memories are back in the early days when we were a small, close-knit team, and were able to do lots of fun challenges together. For example, a health challenge where we were given points for exercising or would lose points for eating junk food,  and we would all go out and exercise together as a team to keep our points up. It was the simple things like this that really brought us all together, and that still influence Inertia’s culture today.

How has Inertia changed over the past 10 years?

Obviously, the growth we have seen over the 10 years has been enormous, which is fantastic, and we started to see a lot of different types of projects increased in size and complexity.  Back in the day, we couldn’t have known we would be completing projects like merging two existing towers on the Midtown Centre or transforming a 101-hectare site into rural home sites over 7 stages on Parklands at Clarendon.

How have you changed throughout your 10 years at Inertia?

With all the changes in systems and processes that we have experienced, I think I have become a lot more adaptable. One that was a particularly challenging but important one was switching from using paper for everything to only using PDFs and digital documents. This definitely took a lot of getting used to, but of course, was for the best!