Joel Phillips, Director & Principal Consultant

Joel’s background as a process engineer and designer of water treatment plants gives him the ability to link the technical, commercial, and contractual objectives related to water, process, and energy across a range of industries including minerals, municipal, oil & gas, food and beverage, and power. He has an ability to identify and manage commercial and technical risks, with an understanding of multidisciplinary engineering relationships. Joel’s experience in applying process technologies across many industries enables him to effectively communicate client requirements to project teams, ensuring the success of projects. Joel’s international experience in design and consulting will benefit growing businesses looking to optimise and improve their production processes.

Dr Chris Colby, Managing Director & Principal Consultant

With 25 years of experience, Chris delivers trusted advice on infrastructure delivery, process improvement, innovation and sustainability. He has worked across all sectors of government, business, industry, and with the not-for-profit sector. This includes with major consulting firms GHD and Arup, delivering infrastructure, sustainability and climate adaption projects, as well 9 years providing applied product/process research and development for industry. Chris has also co-developed and co-managed a successful new consulting firm, specializing in waste management and recycling. His experience bridges all Australia’s major industry sectors, including food and wine, renewable fuels, pharmaceutical, manufacturing, petrochemicals, water, energy, waste & recycling, and defence. His engineering qualifications, real-life business experience, and industry knowledge, enable him to provide balanced, practical, technically informed but commercially-insightful advice. Chris thrives on a personal approach that ensures client expectations are met and often exceeded. He specializes in helping clients scope the problem to be solved and building them an expert team of people to deliver a solution. Chris retains a formal affiliation with Arup and continues to work with them in waste and recycling and water fields.

Bronwyn Colby, Senior Analyst & Researcher, Finance Manager

With a background in marketing, governance, project management and more recently energy market policy and regulation Bronwyn brings to Colby Phillips Advisory a wealth of diverse knowledge and skills. She has worked with a multitude of stakeholders from government, private business and the not-for-profit sector to deliver local and nationally based projects. These include a Better Practice Guideline for Energy Retailers (endorsed by the Energy Retailers of Australia Association) - a collaborative approach in supporting vulnerable energy consumers; a national Hardship and Affordability Annual Conference for energy retailers and consumer advocates; an intranet redevelopment and business process mapping project for the largest NFP in SA; and the development and implementation of a SharePoint software project to over 100 employees.

Bronwyn’s social science qualifications enable her to plan, implement and execute all projects with a people orientated approach – ensuring client needs and expectations are met and often exceeded. She thrives on delivering exceptional project planning and execution, research analysis focused on client need and outcomes and high-level analytical and problem solving methodologies. Bronwyn’s passion to deliver high quality outcomes for all clients is supported by her natural ability to think laterally and creatively and her capacity to communicate across all stakeholder groups.

Borvin Kracman, Principal Consultant

Formerly Australasia Mining Leader and Australasia Water Leader for Arup, Borvin has a strong technical and operational background and over 30 years’ experience in infrastructure and project development. His early career with the E&WS Department (now SA Water) dealt with design and operational issues covering Adelaide’s major municipal water and wastewater treatment plants. From 1993 to 2000 he was an executive in the South Australian public sector including several years in the Major Projects Group. Over his 12 years with Arup, Borvin delivered in a wide variety of infrastructure projects including (among others) Barossa Irrigation Scheme, Clare Valley Water Supply, Broken Hill Desalination Plant, The Creeks (Langhorne and Currency) Pipeline and Adelaide Desalination Transfer Pipeline. Borvin’s strength is working with all stakeholders to deliver value adding, holistic solutions and win-win outcomes. He has a strong belief that a critical ingredient to sustainable development is good design – that considers the full project life cycle, present and future risks, their consequences and mitigation strategies.

Dr Vince O’Brien, Associate Consultant

Vince enjoys helping businesses make more money. He has expertise in growing profitability through high price point sales and developing high premium channels. Vince draws on a unique combination of skills developed over a 30 year career including luxury business strategy, branding strategy, design thinking, new product development, lean manufacturing, market testing and intellectual property management. With experience across the whole supply chain and a range of industries including textiles, food and beverage production, jewellery and tourism, Vince can help your business effectively differentiate and grow new markets. Vince is a professional engineer with many years of commercial management experience, so not only can he help businesses understand how to design premium products and services to maximise sales and revenue, he can guide businesses on how to successfully set up to supply and/or manufacture them in the most sustainable and affordable way.