E2A 106 Writing Mining for Value: Frameworks, Feedback, and a Two-Week First Draft 

In this episode of The Entrepreneur to Author Podcast, your host Scott MacMillan interviews chartered engineer and consultant Alex Franklin, Managing Director at First Principles Consulting and author of Mining for Value. Alex shares how years of notes, client work, and reflection on operational chaos in mining became the raw material for his book. When he stepped into the Managing Director role, he used writing as a way to clarify who the firm serves, what problems they solve, and how they create value—essentially turning the book into a strategic thinking tool for himself and a translation layer between site leaders and executive decision-makers.

 
Alex explains that much of the first draft came together in about two weeks because he’d already been mentally working on the ideas for a long time. The real work was in iterating: shaping the manuscript around a proven nonfiction structure (problem → big idea → how-to), refining and renaming his consulting frameworks so they were simple and communicable on the page, and testing concepts through beta readers and a keynote talk. The result is a book that not only captures hard-won industry knowledge at a time of brain drain in mining, but also serves as a practical, educational asset for his business and a way to scale his expertise to a broader audience.

SHOW LINKS

Free operational performance assessment: https://firstprinciplesconsulting.com/score

GUEST BIO

Alex Franklin is a Chartered Engineer, Managing Director at First Principles Consulting and author of Mining For Value, A Blueprint to Eliminate Chaos, Scale Production, and Unlock Latent Capacity. Alex pairs his diverse, global expertise across sectors with a value investor’s mindset to help bridge the gap between the boardroom and the blast site. He is focused on changing the conversation in mining from reactive to proactive; believing operational risk can be minimised, not just managed, creating resilient growth, whilst leaving less money left on the table.

CONNECT WITH ALEX

Book Website: firstprinciplesconsulting.com/book

Website: firstprinciplesconsulting.com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/alex-j-franklin

YouTube: @alex.j.franklin

CONNECT WITH SCOTT

Episode Transcript

Please note: The transcript is produced by a third-party company from an audio recording and may include transcription errors.

Scott MacMillan:

You're listening to the Entrepreneur to Author podcast. 

Announcer

Welcome to the Entrepreneur to Author podcast, the podcast that brings you practical strategies for building authority and growing your business. And now, here's your host, Scott MacMillan.

Scott:

My guest today is Alex Franklin. Alex is a chartered engineer, managing director at First Principles Consulting, and author of Mining for Value, a blueprint to eliminate chaos, scale production, and unlock latent capacity. Alex combines global expertise with a value investors mindset to help mining leaders reduce operational risk, build resilience, and unlock greater value.

Alex, welcome to the pod.

Alex Franklin:

Great to be here. Thanks for having me, Scott.

Scott:

I shared a little bit about you in the introduction, but it would be really helpful for listeners to get it from you. Can you give us a quick overview of your work at First Principles and the kind of problems that you help people solve?

Alex:

Yeah, sure. We would have historically been described as a management consultancy, but I find that a lot of people either don't know what that is or the people that do have had a bad experience with it.

So I tend to describe us more as a firm. We specialize in operational improvement and we do that specifically in the mining sector. And what does that mean?

If you've ever worked in an organization or a team that was too chaotic, it didn't have enough structure or discipline, or was potentially too bureaucratic. You wanted to do things, but you couldn't. Everything was reactive.

Everything was always on fire, always firefighting. And there's never enough time to do your day job because you're always chasing things up. Effectively, that's what we help do is come in and create that operational structure and that operational discipline.

So things just work and you can get on with your day job. And so that's what we focus on for tier two mines or mid-tier mines. And that, for people not in the mining industry, just means that mines that are producing a commodity.

Scott:

Right. Okay, very good. Very good.

That's really helpful context. And for someone who's never set foot on a mine site, paint the picture. What's actually going wrong, say, in the industry right now that is sort of top of mind for you and for those that are working in the industry?

Alex:

Mining as a primary industry is exposed to pretty much all of the big external forces. And so the business 101 acronym is PESTEL, P-E-S-T-E-L, political, economic, social, technological, environmental and legal. And if you think about mining, pretty much all of those are hitting the industry at the same time.

So there's a lot of external factors that are going on. And we're seeing this a lot in the news with the supply and demand where countries are scrambling to get resources for data centres, for defence, for all of these different purposes. Copper wire for our electrical grids is also in a lot of demand at the moment.

And so we've got this huge supply demand imbalance in the market, in our economies and in our countries as well. And that's happening with a background of mining's really struggling to produce that. And 20 years ago, mining was actually 25% more efficient.

So 2005, you're 20% more efficient than you were in 2025. And so despite the technological advances that have happened in those 20 years, despite all the money that's been thrown at this industry, we're still going backwards. And so you've got these two sort of competing forces.

We need mines to produce more and they're becoming less effective and less efficient. So that's the big productivity paradox that's happening. And to put that in financial terms, Accenture did a five year study where they looked at all of the predicted returns for mining companies globally.

And over the five years, they found that the industry in aggregate lost $64 billion over those five years. And that's predicted revenue. So that's a significant shortfall.

And that's obviously having a knock on effect through all of our supply chains and then the broader economies and countries.

Scott:

Wow, that's an incredible amount of value at stake. To sort of help address this, you've published Mining for Value. Could you share a little bit about what the book is about, who it's for and what do you want it to do for your reader?

Alex:

Ideally, I want it to help solve this problem on the productivity, on the supply side. So mines can be more effective and more efficient. We can get rid of the excess bureaucracy.

We can get rid of this chaos. And you read the title of the book. It's Mining for Value.

It's about eliminating chaos, scaling up production and unlocking capacity. And so what we find is a lot of mines, a lot of sites have all of this available capacity that they just can't use in their production. So they don't actually have to spend more money to produce more.

We just need to improve some basic operational fundamentals. So that's that's the goal. And one of the one of the challenges is mining's had this big brain drain every time that we've had an economic downturn.

So it was the dotcom, the boom and bust in the early 2000s, the GFC. Then we had a commodity super cycle in the last decade. Every time one of these big events sort of happens, the middle management and a lot of the grey hair is the first to leave.

And they've taken decades and decades of hard won experience with them. And one of the interesting things I found out when I was when I was researching this book, I was speaking to a mining recruiter and they said in Australia we used to graduate about 300 mining engineers a year. And then in 2025, that dropped to 75.

And so you've had this huge reduction. And so we're not getting we've got more people leaving the industry and we've got less people coming in. And so what we find when we go to sites is you have roles, senior roles.

People would have 10 to 15 years experience. They've seen these cycles, they've kicked over the rocks, they've seen the problems. And you're now getting people in the three to five year experience coming in into those senior positions.

And so one of the big things for the book was how do we this emerging leadership cohort or generation, how can we pass that knowledge on? What we know, what good looks like, how do we capture that and pass that on? And so I've been fortunate as part of this business to be exposed to a lot of that, to have some really great mentors with 20, 30 years experience.

And so a big part of it was that realisation for me is how do I capture that information, that knowledge, that wisdom that's been really hard won and and make it available to more people that can't go and work in a specialist consultancy like I can.

Scott:

Yeah. And it's funny because a lot of the things that you're talking about doesn't have to do specifically with resources in the ground, right? It ties into what I think is a pretty clever tagline that you've used, which is your greatest asset isn't in the ground.

Can you share with our audience, what are you getting at with that statement? Because I think it's a very clever way of communicating the idea behind the book.

Alex:

What I found, so I have an engineering background, I've worked in a lot of different engineering sectors, I've done infrastructure, transport, telecoms, defence, a lot of government work. And coming into mining, there's this this real bias towards the tangible. And it all starts with the ore body.

And the ore body is basically what has been determined to be in the ground. And there's a lot of rules that govern how this is modelled and how this is described to the public. All of these companies are publicly listed.

So it all has to be quite well audited and defendable. And so if you think about how a mine starts and what it does is you have a small team, a small company, they raise a few million dollars. They go out and buy a lease, they get access to some land and they do some drilling and they go, yep, there's some gold or copper or lithium, whatever here.

And then they go to market and they raise more money. And then it takes about 10 to 20 years to actually build a mine and get into production. And that's that mid tier space that I was talking about before.

So there's this long lag time, but it's all centred around the ore body. And that makes sense, because if there's nothing in the ground, there's nothing to mine, there's no mine. And that's a really persistent sort of mindset that I've discovered in this industry.

It's there's such a focus on what's in the ground and there's less of a focus on how do we extract it. And mining, it's literally a commodity. You're selling a commodity to market prices.

So the market sets the price, the ore body sets the potential of how much is in the ground, how much can we pull out and at what it's called grade, but effectively what concentration. So gold, for example, use grams per tonne. And so an early mine might have a really high grade.

It might be nine to 11 grams per tonne, which when you think about it, not a lot of gold per tonne of dirt you're moving. And then over time that that generally reduces and you might only get two to four grams per tonne. And so it's all about the efficiency of how well you can bring it out.

And so the ore body, that's your potential. The market sets the price, that's your top line revenue. And then your efficiency is your performance and that's your margin.

And it's all about how do we look at all of the other factors outside of the ore body that contribute to a mine being profitable. And there's not just shareholders, there's a lot of stakeholders involved. These are often in remote communities.

So there's schools and a different infrastructure in place. How do we make sure that everyone is considered and everyone benefits? And it's not just about the financial impact of the ore body.

Scott:

All right. Very good. You talk about this in the book, the idea of an execution gap and the idea of an invisible engine, I believe you call it, inside operations.

Can you explain that a little bit more for the listener?

Alex:

So the execution gap isn't a new concept in terms of industry. And I've come across it since writing the book that McKinsey's called it the strategy to performance gap in different areas, not in mining. Companies are quite ambitious in what they want to set out and achieve.

Yet they're struggling to actually execute their strategy. They're struggling to deliver it. And that comes back to that, those stats that I said before in the 64 billion dollars of lost forecast revenue was these companies said we're going to deliver 64 billion dollars worth of product to the market and simply couldn't.

And there are some some factors out of their control. So there's sometimes weather events and we've had supply chain issues with the different things. Covid is probably the most notable where mines simply couldn't get enough commodity.

But these sorry, enough enough supplies to site. But these events, they are quite small compared to the total loss of that total disconnect. And so the execution gap is really this increasing chasm between what the market is promised and what these sites can actually deliver.

And we're getting to a point, I think, where it's going to become critical, where we can no longer bridge this gap. And what's happening is you'll see C companies are having they'll have a few good quarters and then everything will fall over and they basically spend three months trying to get everything back together. And then they'll have a few good quarters and they fall over.

And and that's starting to get OK, it's fallen over for one quarter. Now it's fallen over for two. And you can get up to I've seen up to nine nine quarters.

And that makes a lot of people nervous. It becomes a really hard business to continue justify running. And so that's the execution gap.

How do we bring this this ambition and this capability back together? And there's two ways. One, you can lower your ambition, which we know from from all previous business is not a good idea.

And Kodiak's a really good example of the camera company. They they developed the digital camera in 1975. And then by the early 2010s, they were bankrupt because they had all of this technology, but they didn't want to use it.

So we can't lower the ambitions. The only thing we can do is raise the the level of capability, our ability to execute on that on that ambition. And so that's what we call the invisible engine.

And these are the the tangible and the non tangible things that actually deliver on a mindset. And when you think about it, you probably think of big trucks and diggers and crushers and all of those things. Those are all the tangible bits of equipment.

But we have people that run it. We need data that sits behind it to to create informed decisions. And as we move more to AI and automation, that data to actually to inform the systems that are that are actually operating and running.

And so the invisible engine is the entire system that delivers value rather than just thinking of the old body or the individual bits of plant or equipment on site. Got it.

Scott:

Got it. Thank you for explaining that. I think that's really helpful to understand the idea behind that.

I'd love to shift gears a little bit and talk about the writing process itself. How did you find the writing? Particularly, you know, we've got a lot of people listening who certainly come from a consulting background, probably some from an engineering background.

You have both an engineering and a consulting background. How did how did your way of thinking sort of play into writing and perhaps how you approached it, whether you found it easy or difficult? Talk to us a little bit about that.

Alex:

I was quite surprised by the writing process because it was something all of these things were things that I'd been thinking about for a long time. And I'd kind of been making notes in a note app on my phone. And by the time I got to sit down and write it, I think I'd write this the this version in about two weeks because it was all kind of there.

It was just this big brain dump. And then it was a matter of going through and iterating through it to improve and build upon it. So I think a lot of people in engineering, consulting background probably have been thinking a lot about these things for a while.

And it's just a matter of getting it out of your head and onto the page. So that that was a big part of the the initial process. I've read probably like a lot of people is the different sort of personal and professional self-help or the development kind of books.

And I was thinking I always kind of had in the back of my mind, what was the the structure they followed? How did they the ones that really stuck with me? What what did they do?

What did they do differently? What did they do well? And what I realized is you have the generally description of the current state of things.

And then you have the big idea, the big insight, the disrupt, the disconnect. Here's a new paradigm. Here's a way to think about it.

And then here's how you do it. Here are examples of how it works. And so that was that was roughly the process that I followed was big brain dump of key ideas and frameworks and all of this stuff.

And then how do I put this into something that I know and I've seen work before?

Scott:

Yeah, you mentioned frameworks, and I want to double click on that a little bit because they can be so important to a book like this, and your book is in many parts built around your frameworks. To what extent? You know, it sounds like you had some existing frameworks.

Did the the writing help clarify those or were those already well formed? And it was just a matter of sort of capturing that and and explaining it on the page.

Alex:

It was a it was a bit of both. And so the the frameworks from our perspective were well formed, but they weren't easily communicated and they probably weren't well named and described.

And so it was what what is this framework actually trying to achieve or to describe? And so there was a there was definitely sort of a naming element. There was a graphical design element.

What's the easiest way to communicate this in a book where you're often limited to black and white and you can't have very detailed images? So how do you condense and simplify it down? And then to your second point, it was definitely about this is this is intuitive for us.

But for someone that's never come across this, how do you explain these different concepts in a way that's easy to understand and to to take on board? And so there was a lot of research into different stories or where does this fit or how where different examples happened in different industries or in different business scenarios that people can relate to. So that was for our established frameworks.

But the process of writing also led me to create new ones as well. And so these new ideas and some of those were what people really, really latched on to in our beta reading phase, which gives you that positive reinforcement. So to jump back a step or a question is that part of that reading, the writing process was about having beta readers.

It was about interviewing people, getting feedback on ideas. And one of the things I did was I was lucky to give a keynote speech around the time I was writing the book. So I could take a lot of those big ideas and then test them in the market.

And I got some good feedback. And afterwards, people said, oh, I was thinking about this. What if you described it like that instead?

And so that was really helpful in the writing part, but also in the sharpening and really getting concise frameworks as well.

Scott:

What are your goals for the book now that it's launching and how are you thinking about leveraging it within your business and within the work that you do?

Alex:

The biggest benefit for me has been writing the book. And there's that saying, the book that changes your life isn't the one you read, it's the one you write. And I came across that as I was writing this book.

And I think that's been very true. It's held true for me. And so the big value has been sort of the frameworks and understanding it.

One of the reasons I wrote the book in the first place was I stepped into the managing director role. And this company has been around since 2007. I've been in the business for a few years before that, but it was a big shift away from sort of the founder and their decades of experience.

And we've mentioned all of those different forces acting on the industry. How do we take those into account? And the AI, the agentic era is probably the big and topical one at the moment.

How do we incorporate all of this in? So that was one of the big benefits for me. And so that's basically helped me really focus and articulate who we are, what we do, who we do it for, how we help our clients.

So that that's sort of where it starts for me in terms of how to leverage the book. I hope it is a translational layer between that chasm that I described before, between the site leadership trying to to execute and between, I call them the boardroom, but basically anyone at an executive level making decisions. And so it's primarily written for the the operational side.

But it's got, as you've seen it, it's got key takeaways for the boardroom. And so here are some things that have changed since you've been working on site. And here are some things you need to be aware of so that they can they can come together.

So ultimately, I hope it's an educational tool. It's captured a lot of that that knowledge. And it's something that we can we can share with the industry.

So that's primarily how I plan to position that is here's how we think about it. Here's what we've seen works and what doesn't. Here are the big trends and things you need to be aware of.

And this is how you can use this to to get the benefits that that are on the on the cover of the book.

Scott:

Yeah, perfect. If people want to learn more about you, maybe get in touch and learn about the work that you do, where's the best place to send them?

Alex:

I'm quite active on LinkedIn, so that's generally the best best place to find me. Our website is also all the W's dot first principles consulting dot com. So you can go.

There will be a link to the book on there as well as on my LinkedIn. So I hope that's that should be live soon. The I was hoping to have the physical copy this morning.

It's being delivered later today. But those are generally the best places to find me.

Scott:

Excellent. Well, we'll be sure to put those links in the show notes as well, so it's easy for people to access. Alex, thank you again for being here and for being so generous with your time and your insights.

I really enjoyed this conversation and I appreciate you sharing both the ideas behind Mining for Value, as well as the journey of bringing the book to life, because I think there's a lot here that will resonate not just with people in the mining industry, but also with other leaders who are thinking about operational performance, execution and and building stronger businesses more broadly. So thank you.

Alex:

Thank you for having me.

I'm really passionate about this stuff if it didn't come across. So any chance I get to talk about it, I certainly jump at. So thank you for your time.

Scott:

As we wrap up this episode of Entrepreneur to Author, remember this. Now is the time, time to write, time to publish and time to grow. I'm Scott MacMillan.

Until next time.