Modern Mining November 2018

CONSULTANTS/ PROJECT HOUSES

While it is no secret that some of the big mining consultancies and project houses are finding current conditions in the mining industry to be tough in the extreme, some of the smaller, more nimble players have managed to survive the recession of the past several years quite successfully. One such company is Bara Consulting, with offices in both Johannesburg and the UK. Says Jim Pooley, one of its founding partners: “We’ve managed to keep busy despite market conditions and we’re now even starting to see signs of renewed demand in the mining sector.” Agile Bara remains busy despite mining downturn

B ara was founded in 2013 by Pooley and a colleague Clive Brown, both of them mining engineers and both with a background with the then Turgis Consulting, and they were soon joined by another ex-Turgis colleague, Pat Willis, also a mining engineer, who opened a UK arm of the company. Since those early days, the consultancy has grown quite consid- erably and has now worked on projects in more than 30 countries worldwide, mostly in either Africa or Europe but also including North and South America, SE Asia and Australia. Pooley stresses, however, that Bara has no

ambitions to become a big ‘corporate’. “Growth is fine but only up to a point,” he says. “We founded Bara precisely because we wanted to have the freedom to focus on engineering without all the bureau-

cracy and multiple layers of management that are characteristic of corporate environments. We would actually count it a failure if we were to end up with an HR department. Our model has worked well and we are able to provide very high-quality work for clients at very com- petitive prices precisely because we have kept our overheads low.” The ‘model’ that Pooley refers to is based on the use of highly skilled associates with expertise in particular fields. “We have around twelve full-time engineers but they are backed up by an additional 15 or so associates who we pull in when necessary,” he explains. “In cases where we don’t have specific skills in- house or amongst our associates, we can call on the assistance of several companies who are mostly similar in size to Bara and who work on a similar basis. We have developed close relationships with these companies, who have all made names for themselves in their areas of speciality.” They include Shango Solutions, who are very well-known geological consultants, Prime Resources, which has a range of exper- tise but is especially strong on the tailings and environmental side of mining, and Middindi Consulting, particularly known for its rock engineering and geotechnical skills. The range of work undertaken by Bara is

Clive Brown (left) and Jim Pooley pictured at Bara’s Johannesburg office.

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32  MODERN MINING  November 2018