In this testimonial, Anthony Peluso, CEO of Dynamic 8—a residential property development firm in Melbourne—describes the staffing challenges his company faced before partnering with Performia. With only three employees and a high turnover rate, Peluso struggled to find and retain productive staff. He turned to Performia for a data‑driven recruiting system and attended their seminars to understand their hiring methodology. Peluso emphasizes the importance of treating employees as unique individuals, using a football‑position analogy to illustrate the need for role‑fit. After implementing Performia’s approach, his team became more productive, morale improved, and the business expanded from three to fifteen staff across multiple divisions. He highlights the certainty Performia provides in hiring decisions, the cost‑effectiveness of investing in the right people, and the overall positive impact on his company’s growth and culture.
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Hi, I'm Anthony Peluso. I'm the CEO of Dynamic 8. We're a property development company specializing in residential projects in Melbourne and all across Australia. We had a very small business before we met Performio. I think it was 3 staff, and that catered to the amount of work that we, we had on our books at the time. I had a huge turnover of staff, so I wanted to find the right staff, productive staff, and keep them. Problems I wanted to resolve using Performio were really to take the guesswork, I suppose, out of hiring. staff for an organisation. Any CEO or any director of an organisation will tell me that— will tell you that staff are their biggest asset and usually one of their biggest costs. So, you know, I'd always— I'd love to know that the people I'm hiring are the people that I'm going to be working with long-term, especially if I'm going to be investing so much money in them, in training them, in getting them ready for our business. It's good to have some certainty around that. I'd had very little experience with other HR and recruiting companies in the past. I knew that a lot of the staff that I hired didn't hang around long. So what I was looking for was really getting effective staff. I've got a huge focus on production in my organisation and there seemed to be a lot of synergies between us and Performia because they were marketing themselves as hiring productive and effective employees for companies. So that was very attractive to me, and the staff that I've been able to hire through Performia have been just that— very productive. What I did with Performia was attend a number of their seminars and training cycles, and that enabled me to really understand their system, how they went about recruiting staff, and how they went about getting the best staff for the employers that they were working with. Because as managers and CEOs, We sometimes make the mistake of managing everybody in exactly the same way, and as you know, individuals— people are individuals and they're unique in themselves, so you've got to— you can't paint everyone with the same brush. So each person needs to be managed in their own way to get the best out of them. If I can use an analogy of, say, football, for instance, you know, you want to make sure that you're not getting someone— you're not getting a full forward playing full back and expecting him to do a great job on the ground. You know, you want to know that if a guy's a full forward, you play him in that position because that's where you're going to get the best from him. That's where you're going to create the biggest win-win for both the coach and the player. And if I liken that to business, you know, it helps you understand the strengths of the individual and the weaknesses, and you just play on their strengths and minimise their weakness. The business is doing quite well, doing some restructuring at the moment, but the staff are very productive. They know what their product is. They know what they're doing when they come into the organisation. And there's a very, very good morale in there. As a CEO, it's great to be able to sit on the other side of a table from a potential candidate, an employee, and know whether these people are actually going to produce for your organisation or not before you spend any time and money on them. I think that's the most important thing. As a director, you know, we hire staff, we bring them on board, we train them, we invest quite a lot of time and money in them, and you want to know that you're going to get something in return for that. Well, we've expanded. We had 3 staff before we met Performia. We've now got 15 staff across different parts of our business, and we're doing quite well.
