By Claire Reilly

While the merger of Retravision will necessarily result in the loss of administration and company office staff, the streamlining of the business is “the most positive thing that has happened to Retravision for years” and a step that “will ensure the future of Retravision”.

That’s according to the new national chairman of Retravision Australia Ltd, Ian Ray, who spoke to Current.com.au about recent unification talks held by the regional heads of the company.

This week, Retravision CEO Paul Holt sent a letter to members announcing that the company’s control hub would be relocated to Perth and that the process of uniting the three disparate regional offices would begin immediately.

Speaking about the board’s discussions and the new initiatives that were borne out of these talks, Ian Ray said the next step was to keep members informed about the changes in the company.

“We’ve had discussions with all the staff in the offices and we’re going to have discussions with all our members throughout February. We’ll be giving the members the opportunity to talk to us and to get the facts, because a lot of information gets out there without any facts at all.”

In addition to the member briefings – which will be held in Brisbane, Townsville, Sydney, Melbourne, Bendigo, Perth and Adelaide – Ray and Holt will meet with Retravision’s “top 12 suppliers” early next week to bring them “up to date on what’s going on”.

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As reported by Current.com.au yesterday, Holt confirmed that the streamlining of the business would result in necessary redundancies. However, Ray would not confirm just how many staff members would be lost.

“We spoke with the people in each of the state offices explained [the decisions] to them. Now, we couldn’t tell them which ones would be there and which ones wouldn’t be. The same question was asked by a staff member, and it was answered in this way: That we don’t know the answer to that yet. We need to sit down with the management team in each state and work out who we will keep.

“But in the offices, the people that work for us, we will unfortunately lose a number of them. We spoke to them all about exactly that and it was fairly emotional quite frankly.”

Although the decision to unite Retravision was made last year, the CEO and several company directors have been absent overseas since the announcement, resulting in “a limbo time, which has not been ideal” for the company.

However, Ray said that now everyone was “on deck and going” the process of unification was set to “accelerate very quickly”.

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“Paul and myself will be going to each of the states to sit down with the members, and we will be there to answer the questions. And there are plenty of questions. But at least when they go away from those meetings, they will have the facts and that’s what’s important.

“The main concern that a lot of our members have is the buying and the relationship with suppliers. Now we are going to protect those relationships, we’re not silly – we’re in the business of doing the right thing for Retravision, and we will protect those relationships.

“If we need to have offices in each of the states, we will have it. We haven’t made those decisions, we haven’t sat down with suppliers and talked to them about the best way to do it.”

And as far as the head office goes, Ray sees no problem with running the business out of one of the most remote cities in the world. “The administration being in Perth is not a problem today, you could have the administration in India if you wanted to,” he quipped.