SGESCO-MAX: How Training Became a Sales Asset, Safeguard and Point of Difference

About the company 

From auto-electric services to Australian-first safety tech: SGESCO-MAX is a Brisbane-based safety technology company and maker of the MAX-SAFE range of intelligent safety systems for heavy vehicles. It started in 1962 as an auto-electrical service business, and over six decades grew into designing and manufacturing its own safety technology.

For the past 25 years, under one conviction (prevent accidents before they happen), the company has built a series of Australian-first systems, from the MAX-SAFE Anti-Rollaway Brake System to its Protect 360 AI active-braking technology.

Today more than 25,000 vehicles worldwide run on MAX-SAFE systems, across civil construction, logistics, mining, waste, emergency services and transport. Under Managing Director Scott McPherson, who came on board in 2020, the company has expanded from its Australian base into New Zealand and the US, with early opportunities opening in South Africa and South America. SGESCO-MAX runs on a team of 21, and delivers enterprise-scale training across three countries, month after month.

For SGESCO-MAX, training was never just an internal function. It’s how the company equips the customers, suppliers and installers who put its safety products into service, in every market MAX-SAFE reaches.

The Challenge: Growing into new international markets

By the time SGESCO-MAX looked at markets beyond Australia and New Zealand, training external people wasn’t new territory. Tribal Habits had already been training the company’s AU and NZ customers, installers and suppliers, none of them SGESCO-MAX employees, for years. What growth changed was the distance and the scale: expanding further afield meant testing whether that same model could hold up in a market where SGESCO-MAX had no presence of its own at all.

Training that many people face to face wasn’t realistic, not at the speed of growth demanded.

Why Tribal Habits? A platform that kept up!

Scott had used Tribal Habits in a previous business before he brought it into SGESCO-MAX. Six years on, what’s keeping him as a loyal customer is the fact the platform hasn’t stood still. New features ship regularly, and when he asks for something, it gets added to the roadmap.

Reliability matters just as much. Since 2020, Scott can’t recall a single outage, for a tool that customers and suppliers around the world depend on to get trained and certified.

There’s a philosophical fit, too. Scott describes Tribal Habits as built on a different idea: capture how an organisation works, and turn that into training, which is exactly what he wanted to build.

The Shift That Mattered Most: Scaling into the US, without adding headcount

The real test came when SGESCO-MAX grew into the US. A major online retail and logistics customer drove a sudden spike in installs, and with it, a wave of people who needed training.
The scale wasn’t subtle: the number of kits installed in a single week in the US was close to what SGESCO-MAX would install in 2 months in Australia.

The advantage was that they weren’t starting from scratch. Tribal Habits had already been running training across the AU and NZ markets for years, so when US demand hit, there was nothing new to build under pressure. Tribal Habits simply extended SGESCO-MAX’s existing training to a delivery model it had already proven in AU and NZ.

The alternative would have meant having people in the US to deliver training in person, or running live online sessions and hoping people showed up or sending out recorded videos with no way to know who’d watched them, let alone understood them.

The day when 96 people registered for training within 24 hours, was the moment Scott saw exactly how valuable Tribal Habits is for the company’s growth.

One person managing it all

Behind the Tribal Habits training platform sits one person. SGESCO-MAX’s technical writer builds the training content, manages every enrolment, and maintains the company’s document library, videos and online store alongside it. Building new content takes time, but once it’s live, keeping it all running requires minimal resources, so one person can manage it all.

Across internal policy, technical training and customer-facing content, SGESCO-MAX runs roughly 40 internal policy and procedure modules, 40 knowledge modules, and 15 technical training modules, all sequenced into pathways, so people get the right training in the right order, automatically.

Paying for use, not for storage

Training a growing number of external people could easily have driven costs up. This is where the pricing model matters. Tribal Habits uses monthly active user pricing, so SGESCO-MAX only pays for people who log in that month.

For a network that trains in bursts, that model keeps cost tied to real use. Hundreds of installers and operators can be onboarded, certified and stored at no ongoing cost when they don’t log in to the platform.

On a per-seat model, every one of those stored users would be an ongoing cost to the company, even if they weren’t logging into the platform.  And as the company grew into new markets, the costs would have significantly increased.

An Unexpected Advantage: Training became part of the pitch

The Tribal Habits platform ended up doing something SGESCO-MAX never intended. It became a sales asset.

When the company pitches large enterprise buyers, training is part of the story in what they call the MAX-SAFE ecosystem. It signals SGESCO-MAX has thought past the hardware to how a customer adopts, uses and maintains it over time. In Scott’s experience, no one else in the industry offers this.

For fleet operators, that adoption story carries legal weight too. Under Chain of Responsibility law, a business running heavy vehicles has obligations around how safety solutions are understood, used and maintained. SGESCO-MAX’s training platform helps its customers meet those duties, one more reason for a fleet buyer to choose MAX-SAFE over a competitor.

A quality gatekeeper

Quizzes run throughout the training, with three attempts allowed on key checks before a learner is locked out. Someone who repeatedly fails an assessment is flagging themselves as an installer SGESCO-MAX doesn’t want to fitting its safety hardware. The training screens for competence before someone works on a vehicle, not just for a completed checkbox.

Accountability across the chain

Because completion is tracked by company, SGESCO-MAX can hand its enterprise customers a regular breakdown of how many of each supplier’s people are trained. The customer then holds its own contractors to account and pushes them to close the gap. Training data becomes a contractual lever, not just a record.

What’s Next? Built for scale, with room to grow

Training stopped being only an internal function for SGESCO-MAX a while ago. It sells the product, protects the brand, and proves someone is competent before they touch a customer’s fleet. And it holds SGESCO-MAX’s own supplier network to the standard the company sets.

The company isn’t standing still, either.

The next project is new internal induction training, built for every role in the business, so a new starter gets company policy plus the specific tools and process for their job.

They’re also planning a content refresh, to keep evolving how the training looks and feels.

Once that refreshed content is in the platform, Scott wants to push further: a touchscreen workspace on the factory floor, where someone can run a module, watch a video, and work through questions on how to do a specific task, on the spot. Built digitally, it can scale and repeat across every site.

The team is also looking at integrations, so enrolments and course assignments happen automatically to reduce manual admin.

Additional Resource: Download the Customer Story PDF