Meet Eamon – Rocky Bay’s Equipment Manager supplying affordable options for all

Eamon O'Brien

Eamon and his team are based at Rocky Bay’s Cockburn Central hub, and specialise in equipment maintenance, hire and sales, equipment sterilisation, and Posture Tech.

Rocky Bay Equipment aims to find the right solution for you. To discover what services might best support you, click here.

The team love attending expos and meeting new people, and this August the Rocky Bay Equipment team will be attending the Care & Ageing Well Expo.

We had a chat with Eamon to find out exactly what his role involves, and what exciting projects the team are working on right now. Check out our Q&A below!

Tell us more about your professional background?

I have worked in the mechanical engineering field most of my adult life. I started as an apprentice fitter/machinist and have been fortunate enough to have had a variety of challenging roles on the tools and in supervisory and management positions.

I will clock up three years at Rocky Bay in October.

Describe a typical day for you?

I get to wear a lot of different hats on any given day. There is the financial and people management side of the job, and the emails, quoting and invoicing that comes with business as usual. Then there is exciting stuff like service development, research and design, and even being a refurbished equipment salesman.

As much as I try to control my work days with preventative maintenance schedules and outlook calendars, there is an element to my job that is reactionary. There will always be a customer whose power wheelchair motor has failed in a shopping centre car park, or a similar emergency. This is when the team comes into their element and we pull together to ensure we can respond with the right tools and parts.

It doesn’t happen very often, but some days I can end up on the road attending urgent breakdowns when all the technicians are already out on other jobs.

The range of work we do in equipment is fabulous and no two days are ever the same.

Is the team working on any special projects at the moment you can share?

We are getting ready to go live with the next phase of our online shop for refurbished and hire equipment. We currently have a warehouse full of quality, second hand health equipment, so the online shop will make it really easy for customers to see what’s available and put items on hold for trial or purchase.

The team are also making seven “Dark Dens” for a primary school up in Geraldton. These are teaching aids that consist of a padded and lined sensory dark chamber. They offer children a stimulation free environment that they can crawl into for quiet time. It is great to be involved in a project for the Geraldton community.

If anyone is interested in seeing what we do, I am more than happy to take visitor tours through the workshop. It’s kind of like Q’s technology lair in a James Bond film, but instead of Aston Martins we customise wheelchairs! You can contact the Equipment Administration team direct on 08 6399 4191 to make a time.

What do you love most about your role?

I love making things and I love fixing things. I am enormously proud of the fact that we manufacture our own custom seating components in-house at our Cockburn Central facility.

Throughout my career I have been lucky enough to work on some awesome projects, from being involved with building some of the largest mining machinery on earth, to leading the maintenance team in a premier theme park. But Rocky Bay is by far the most rewarding job I have ever had.

The sense of satisfaction that I get from implementing practical solutions to help improve the lives of our customers is just amazing. I genuinely love this organisation and the opportunities I get to collaborate with passionate, like-minded colleagues to do the work that we do.