McGregor Coxall Australia
McGregor Coxall Australia (Trading as McGregor Coxall) is an interdisciplinary design firm that offers a range of services, including landscape architecture, urban design, engineering, and city intelligence and design research.
Need
To support the delivery of a large contract for an international client, McGregor Coxall needed a working capital solution to cover the design work behind the project, with a particular focus on its environmental and social aspects.
Solution
We provided McGregor Coxall with an Export Line of Credit, which helped enable the business to continue providing its design services to its international client and deliver ground-breaking and potentially industry-changing work.
After winning a major global contract to provide design and biourbanism support, a central design philosophy used to holistically analyse cities and identify interventions that contribute to more resilient, vibrant public spaces, McGregor Coxall needed to find a finance solution to support its global growth.
Founded in 1998, McGregor Coxall has grown from a single office based in the Northern Beaches of Sydney into an interdisciplinary design firm with offices in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Bristol in the UK.
Offering a range of services, including landscape architecture, urban design, environmental consultancy and biourbanism, the team at McGregor Coxall prides itself on research-led design, ensuring that behind its aesthetically beautiful designs is the research into the environmental impacts of design.
This finance is going to have a massive impact on the trajectory of the business. The work that we're doing, it's so ground-breaking and inspirational. This could be the start of something hugely exciting both for McGregor Coxall and for the design community at large.
Leon Stone
Chief Operating Officer, McGregor Coxall
“Whether they're small or large, from a park to a city, the environment is key when we're looking at our design work,” Leon Stone, Chief Operating Officer at McGregor Coxall said.
“We've always had an international aspect to what we've done,” he explained “But we’ve found that there's a real appetite for the kind of design services that we're offering overseas.”
With its bank providing finance solutions to support ongoing operations in Australia, McGregor Coxall needed to secure export finance to support its global growth. Leon highlighted that for export, the business environment was very different from what McGregor Coxall had experienced within Australia, particularly around the payment terms, which meant securing export finance was crucial.
“As we expanded overseas, it became impossible for us to finance our export work through our normal working capital, that just wasn't an option anymore.”
“We just needed something extra because the contracts that we get with work overseas tend to be quite onerous in terms of cash flows and working capital. We weren't able to manage that through our normal overdraft facilities that we've got in Australia.”
Financing the future of design around the globe
We provided McGregor Coxall with an Export Line of Credit to support the delivery of its large international contract. This finance is helping enable the business to carry out ground-breaking work that could influence the way cities are designed across the world.
Leon explained that working with our team felt like a partnership and that we helped McGregor Coxall every step of the way to help secure the finance it needed and find solutions to any problems that arose throughout the process.
“It was great that we had Export Finance Australia’s support. We were able to work together to make this happen and we really felt that it was a partnership.”
“While our reputation and our previous work enabled us to win the first contract, we wouldn't have been able to carry on and do all of the additional work that we've been asked to do if we hadn't had support from Export Finance Australia. So, it's really enabled us to push further into that marketplace than we would have been able to do otherwise.”
Looking forward, Leon shared that the business is excited to see what is next in its export journey.
“While working overseas can have its challenges and it can be quite frustrating at times, it's been an incredible journey. The work that we're doing is amazing, and we're incredibly proud of that – thank you to Export Finance Australia for enabling us to carry on.”
