Conpower

Two people. One start date. Two decades later, their careers read like a history of CPP itself.

On 31 July 2006, Steve Drefke and Martin Walsh walked through CPP’s doors on the very same day, back when the company was a fraction of the size it is today. As CPP passes 800 employees, it’s worth pausing on the fact that Martin was Employee #20 and Steve was Employee #21 — two of the earliest bricks in what’s become a very large building. Twenty years on, both are still here, still delivering, and between them they’ve had a hand in almost everything CPP has built.

Steve Drefke: the man who’s done it all

There’s hardly a project in CPP’s last twenty years that Steve hasn’t had a hand in. Since day one, he’s managed and delivered work across almost every discipline, in every state — from early utility work with ElectraNet, to leading some of CPP’s first wind farm projects more than 15 years ago, to more recently steering a string of BESS projects. There’s barely a corner of CPP’s current business that doesn’t carry his fingerprints.

Winning that early work was no easy feat. For the first five to eight years of his career at CPP, Steve was relentless — chasing every opportunity that came along, no matter how small or difficult, and steadily building the trust and credibility that CPP still trades on today. CPP wouldn’t be where it is with some of its most important clients without the groundwork Steve laid back then.

He did the same for wind farms, helping build CPP’s capability in the space almost from scratch and often juggling two or three major projects at once. The standout is Coopers Gap Wind Farm — at the time, the biggest contract CPP had ever executed, by size and by value. Partway through, the original project manager left, and the business needed someone to step in and keep it on track. Steve did exactly that, steering the project to a successful outcome for CPP.

Twenty years, countless projects, and one constant throughout — Steve. Congratulations on a milestone that’s thoroughly deserved.

Martin Walsh: the quiet architect of clever design

Martin’s twenty years tell a different kind of story — one about how far CPP’s design work has come, and the steady hand that helped shape it.

He still remembers his first day with a laugh. “Steve Drefke had to start at 7:30am for his induction. I was able to sleep in, mine didn’t start until 9:00am,” he says. “I’d say I got the better deal.” What drew him to CPP wasn’t size or scale, back then it was a small company — but reputation: clever designers who got the job done.

Staying twenty years was never the plan. In the early days, work came in bursts, and the team simply found the next job before the last one ran dry. ” There was always another job on the go, and we had a knack for lining up the next one just before the last one wrapped,” Martin says. Those lean years turned him into the kind of engineer who could do it all — design drawings, protection settings, commissioning, even construction support when a project called for it. CPP’s work has since grown too large and too complex for any one person to cover that much ground, and design has become its own full-time craft.

Ask Martin what he’s proudest of, and the answer comes fast: Coopers Gap Wind Farm — the same project that tested Steve. Martin handled the secondary design, factory acceptance testing and site commissioning on a job with a challenging timeline and no shortage of technical complexity. It’s a fitting overlap: two colleagues, two decades in, both pointing to the same project as a career highlight.

The biggest change he’s seen in twenty years is the people, CPP has grown from a company with a narrow demographic into one that’s genuinely diverse. What hasn’t changed is the standard: do the job properly, and if something goes wrong, fix it without fuss. “That’s how you keep existing clients and gain new ones,” he says.

In the end, what’s kept Martin around is simple: good workmates and interesting work. People at CPP are friendly and knowledgeable, he says, and that’s what he’s enjoyed most about being here. It’s a people-first outlook he picked up before his time at CPP, from his first manager, who he credits as the biggest influence on his career. “He always showed faith in us youngsters and allocated us jobs that were at or even just beyond our experience level, which forced us to work out answers for ourselves. If we messed up, he would always help out so that we learnt from our mistakes.”

His advice for anyone starting out is just as straightforward: “Take every opportunity that comes your way. Be proud of your work and always do it to the best of your ability. Learn something every day.” And he’s optimistic about what’s ahead for CPP. “There is a huge pipeline of electrical network construction that needs to be undertaken over the next 20 or so years, and CPP are well placed to win much of it.”

Two men, one start date, twenty years, and a shared project that pushed them both. Congratulations to Steve and Martin on two remarkable decades with CPP — here’s to what comes next.