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This Friday, Eddie De Rivera will leave Mipac after 30 years with the company – the last 18 of them as Managing Director and the person who, from the inside out, shaped much of what the business became.
Eddie joined Mipac in the second half of 1997, only months after the company was formed. He didn’t come from nowhere. Like many of the early Mipac team, he’d come up through Mount Isa Mines, where he’d worked in the MIMIS division (Mt Isa Mines Instrument Services) alongside people who would go on to build Mipac with him. After a scholarship took him to Brisbane to finish his engineering degree, and a short stint with a software company building telecommunications billing systems, a former MIM colleague kept calling.
We need you at Mipac! Eddie made the move, and as he puts it now, simply: “I never looked back, actually, or sideways.”
His first project was Ernest Henry Mine – possibly the very first project Mipac ever delivered. Three decades later, Ernest Henry is still a Mipac customer. Eddie is quick to point out that’s not down to him: “Certainly because of the team we’ve got here that have maintained the ability to service that business for 30 years.”
A family business, long before it was a big one
Ask Eddie what made people stay at Mipac for decades, and the answer comes without hesitation: culture.
“When Mipac first started, it didn’t matter whether you were the managing director or the project manager or the engineer – if work needed to be done, you did it,” he says. “There was no hierarchy. We really didn’t have a lot of titles in the business… no one cared. We just got the job done.”
He means that literally. Shortly after stepping up to the MD role Eddie once spent three weeks in Mount Isa working as an electrician – a sparky – because the project needed licensed tradespeople on site, who knew the site, and he happened to hold the ticket. It’s a small story, but it says everything about how Mipac operated from the start: titles mattered less than getting the work done, and everyone pitched in where they were needed.
That family feeling has had to evolve as the business has grown. “It does get a little more difficult as you grow – you bring in new employees, the employees don’t necessarily know other people in the business,” Eddie reflects. The result, he says, is a culture that’s become “extremely multicultural,” with all the advantages that brings. But the underlying philosophy – Mipac as family, not hierarchy – is one he hopes the business holds onto as he hands it over. “It takes work, especially when you get bigger, to try and keep that philosophy going.”
The projects that stuck
Across 29 years, Mipac has successfully delivered hundreds of greenfield and brownfield projects: smelters, concentrators, refineries, on nearly every continent, making it genuinely hard to pick standouts. But two have stayed particularly close to Eddie, not because they outrank the rest, but because they came from his years as a hands-on engineer, when he lived and breathed a single project every day for months, sometimes years, at a time.
The first was a major copper smelter upgrade for Mount Isa Mines, starting around 1998–99, where Mipac held the instrumentation and control scope under Fluor as principal contract manager. “The amount of comments that come from Fluor to say they were blown away at the teamwork that they saw within Mipac,” Eddie recalls. “Even during commissioning, they said they’d see us arguing, and all of a sudden a decision would get made and off we’d go and we just get the job done.”
The second was an outlier entirely – a six-year paper mill upgrade for Norske Skog in Albury, one of the few projects in Mipac’s history that took the company outside mining altogether. Eddie relocated his family to Albury for the job, alongside several colleagues who made the same move. “Quite a significant project in my life, in my family’s life,” he says.
Learning to lead
Eddie is candid about the leadership lessons that came the hard way. Early in his time running the business, he assumed the job meant solving every problem and making every major decision himself.
“I soon learnt that doesn’t get you very far,” he says. “If you don’t take everyone on a journey, you’re not going to succeed. There’ll be people pulling in different directions and you just create confusion.” The shift, he says, was learning to bring the team together around a shared vision rather than trying to carry it alone – a lesson that, by his own admission, took some unlearning of his early instincts.
Win a customer, keep a customer
If there’s a single commercial philosophy that defines Eddie’s three decades at Mipac, it’s this: “We didn’t go chasing projects, we went chasing customers.” The distinction matters. Win a customer, deliver above and beyond, and retain that relationship for the long term – then go find the next one, without ever letting go of the ones you already have.
The numbers back it up. Glencore Technology has been a Mipac customer for the full 30 years, surviving a number of corporate name changes along the way. Mount Isa Mines – through its evolution from MIM to Xstrata to Glencore – has stayed a customer for Eddie’s entire tenure. Ok Tedi has been a client since around 2014, and MMG’s Dugald River, delivered as a greenfield project the same year, remains one today.
“That’s one of the philosophies I’ve always held,” Eddie says. “We win a customer and we keep that customer for life.”
It’s a principle he’s leaving behind in good shape. As he hands over the business, Mipac’s project portfolio includes two new greenfield projects in Queensland, Australia, work with Hudbay in the US, and the prospect of further international work with FQM (First Quantum Minerals) – a pipeline he credits to the same approach: look after the customer, retain the relationship, and let the next opportunity follow from it.
Passing it on
Among the people Eddie has met in his final week is Will Marshall, a new undergraduate engineer who joins the business just as Eddie was preparing to leave it. His advice for engineers starting out echoes the lesson that shaped his own career: get out of the office.
“Engineering alone in the office only teaches you a very small component of what you need to know,” he says. “Going to site and seeing how that design applies, what works and what doesn’t – that’s 70% of engineering knowledge.” He encourages younger engineers to chase the trips, the commissioning work, the projects with technology worth learning on. “He’ll learn a tremendous amount with Mipac, particularly in the mining industry.”
A global career
Three decades of mining and industrial projects took Eddie everywhere from the Democratic Republic of Congo – “everyone says they would never go,” he says, “I found it fascinating” – to Vancouver, which he describes simply as a favourite, to Chile, and to India, a country that left enough of an impression that he still hopes to bring his wife Tracy to see it one day. (“Not a country I’m comfortable going to without a guide,” he admits. “It was so chaotic – but it was great.”)
What comes next
After almost thirty years, Eddie isn’t chasing a five-year plan. He’s planning family time first – holidays with his wife Tracy, his kids, and his grandkids, after years in which travel for work meant time away from the people closest to him. There’s talk of taking up golf, despite not being a golfer. There’s a long-held interest in becoming fluent in Spanish beyond what he already speaks. And there’s a bucket list of travel still to work through, India among them.
Asked whether there’ll be a ceremony to mark deleting Teams off his phone, Eddie doesn’t hesitate: “Yes. Teams – it’s annoying. I’ll keep everything else probably running for a bit, but yes.”
Underneath the joke is something more genuine. “As great as Mipac has been, and I love Mipac and the people,” he says, “It’s time for a break and some fresh hands on the Mipac reins. I‘m looking forward to do nothing, or a little relaxing, for a while – without stressing out about anything else.”
Eddie De Rivera leaves Mipac on Friday, 29 years almost to the day since he joined a small, ambitious company built on family, teamwork, and a genuine belief in looking after the customer. The business he leaves behind is shaped, more than almost anything else, by those same principles.
Thank you, Eddie - and enjoy every minute of what’s next.
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