1)     Please introduce yourself and tell us the name of your business:

My name is David Dorigotti, and I am the founder of Pentrigon.

I started my manufacturing career with a British-owned rapid prototyping company based in the Pearl River Delta region in China, which is considered the World’s workshop.

Here I was responsible for growing our Australian and New Zealand markets and I helped my customers from all industries to develop thousands of beautiful and innovative products.

I moved back to Australia with my wife and kids in 2017 and started my company Pentrigon as a manufacturing consultancy. From here I formed a strong collaboration with Dragon Metal Manufacturing, which is a Brisbane-based company that specialises in offshore production solutions. With Dragon Metal, I help many Australian manufacturers across several industries to become competitive globally, helping them streamline their production processes, reduce costs, and scale production.

My goal now is to complement this production-focused offering with a more product development-oriented business and grow Pentrigon into the go-to supplier for all offshore manufacturing and fabrication solutions.

2)     What did you learn from the business planning course and what benefited you the most?

I certainly learnt to be humble. Despite having a Masters of Business Administration (MBA) and being familiar with most of the core concepts we touched on, I found that I really needed to put everything aside and start my business plan from scratch to build a stronger foundation for my company. I think it was extremely helpful to meet all the other participants and learn about their business paths and journeys. Wayne and the team were all extremely supportive as well.

3)     What changes have you made to your business so far as a direct result of what you learnt in the business planning course?

Being still in its initial stages, I didn’t come to the course with a complete ready-to-implement business plan, but I did have a “good” idea of what I wanted to achieve and how I was going to achieve it. As I was working through the business plan, however, I was forced to find answers to questions I had not yet considered. These have led to a complete change of direction with respect to the business idea I started off with, but I feel completely energised about this because now my business has stronger foundations.

 4)     What changes do you expect to make in your business in the future as a direct result of what you learnt in the business planning course?

Now that I have a clearer direction, and my business is more structured, I feel I can roll out my marketing strategy sooner than I had intended. Also, instead of trying to initially cover many roles, I now intend to focus mainly on the services aspect of the business and start bringing marketing, sales, finance and administration roles into the business as soon as viable.

Registrations are now open for the August 2021 intake of the Business Planning Course. If you are interested, find out more here.