A group with a 30-year pedigree as a leading independent geological consultancy, CSA Global has built high-level capability and become a force in the mining study and operational improvement segments of the market. On the back of a growing pipeline of work in the region, it is expanding its capabilities in the American market by establishing a business base in Toronto to complement its existing office in Vancouver and operations in Nicaragua. The latter came about after being awarded a key advisory role in 2015 in the US$50 billion Nicaragua Canal project.

Elsewhere CSA Global is in the thick of surging gold exploration activity and resource reporting in Australia and other parts of the world such as Africa, central Asia and North America. And it has a busy, renowned specialty minerals team working with a number of the high-profile lithium, graphite and cobalt project proponents.

Despite a significant improvement in equity market sentiment around precious and some other metals, though, CSA Global managing director Jeff Elliott says there is certainly no rush to reintroduce the ‘b-word’ into any CSA Global strategy talks.

“There has been a significant improvement in the availability of risk capital,” he says.

“This has been most prominent on the ASX and started with companies with gold operations or advanced development properties in the second half of 2015.  

“In 2016 it heated up, got coupled with a battery boom – particularly for lithium and graphite projects, but cobalt is also on the shopping list [of companies] – and has now spread to the TSX and benefited the gold and lithium explorers there, too.  

“Lead-zinc projects are also in demand but despite improved prices for the base metals the equity performance has not been anywhere near as remarkable as the gold and lithium companies.   

“Activity levels are definitely up but this has been more around resource evaluation drilling, resource and mining studies, as well as increased corporate and M&A action. Exploration drilling activity is improving, but it [generally] remains at low levels.

“It seems it is very much a case of being very careful with exploration dollars and trying to define the best targets for selective testing rather than large-scale grid-drilling programs. This isn’t a bad thing as hopefully it is a case of quality over quantity and trying to be smarter with investor’s funds.

“It also aligns with our service focus in this sector, which is an integrated geoscience approach rather than simple contract services.”

So while talk of boom conditions in precious and energy minerals markets via some media channels has added to an upbeat investment mood amid some fairly dire global economic warnings, Elliott says the firm is prepared to “take the good sentiment while we can [while bracing for] a bumpy ride for the next 6-12 months”.

“The outlook is far more positive than it was this time last year but with strong volatility remaining,” he says.

“The macro factors driving the gold price are also variably responsible for lower business confidence.

“Political uncertainty and civil unrest is great for the gold price but I think most would prefer to see a return to long term economic growth and investor confidence. Once we get the US elections out of the way … maybe we will be moving towards more stable conditions.”

CSA Global grew like a lot of other firms during the 2003-2012 global mining boom but enhanced its reputation and market position through the subsequent downturn. Its leading position over the past 18 months among independent consulting firms signing off public-company exploration activity and resource reports – some 5-10 times CSA Global’s size – underscores its ascendency.

If there are three core tenets of the business ethos surrounding and complementing CSA Global’s deep technical competencies, they are “care, geological integrity and collaboration”, according to Elliott.

“We genuinely care about what we do and getting positive outcomes for our clients by working with them with a longer term view,” he says.

“We are a geologically-strong mining consultancy that focuses on getting good geology integrated in to evaluation and development studies, and as part of operational improvement. We operate globally as one company, with a collaborative approach to our client’s needs.”

Indepth project reviews and client feedback drive service improvement strategies.

“We target subject matter experts to join our team and we leverage these skills across the business via internal training, mentoring and integrated working groups, across disciplines,” Elliott says.

“By promoting a culture of teamwork and integration across our offices and investing in technology people can more easily collaborate both on client projects and on internal strategic initiatives.

“We started as a geological consultancy and we’ve gradually expanded across the mining value chain, but we’ve always kept the focus on getting the geology right. We do build relationships early, because quite often we get involved at a project review stage, before there is a discovery made, where we’re applying our geological skills and so on, and we are then just leveraging our early relationship into the resource and mining work.

“But we don’t want to stop the integration of good geology at the resource model and then just hand it over to mining engineers. It still has to be integrated. And again the way we operate with our mining team in Perth and the UK, for example, is we bring them in as early as possible to the discussion, even if we’re not getting paid for that component. We introduce them to the exploration managers and see if we can get people thinking early about geometallurgy, or production scale, so that exploration can be targeted accordingly. Or you can do reverse economic analysis to say, what grades are needed if it’s this deep; or there is this type of recovery issue; or we use this type of equipment.

“So we try to get the mets and the engineers into the story as early as possible, and we try to leave the geos in the process as late as possible.

“But despite the growing influence of geostatistics and modern computing over the past 30 years … defining the geological domains is still the single most important part of mineral resource estimation. And we’ve seen some consulting groups forget about that, saying the geostats, or the computer, are smarter than the geologists. And it’s not the case. If you let the computer decide it might decide you’ve got a Rolls Royce when maybe you haven’t, or vice versa.

“So it’s got to be good geology that goes into a model. We’re not just button pressers and we don’t just give you the numbers you want. We try to give the most reliable estimate based on the data available, and classify it based on our confidence in all the components that go into it, not on drill-hole spacing or a box-ticking method.

“People see us as being pragmatic, and having a science base, but we’re also very commercial and entrepreneurial. We’ve had key CSA Global people play important roles in the development of the industry’s significant resource reporting and valuation codes and guidelines over many years, and we understand well the principles underpinning those codes.

“So we know that if results – drilling, resources, etc – are going to be seen in the best light, there has got to be that associated materiality, integrity, and transparency.”

Elliott says CSA Global’s business model and private ownership structure, which have seen it fund organic and corporate expansion internally, with no debt taken on to date, have also left the firm on a strong growth footing.

“Over the last several years we have invested in building our capability and our capacity while market conditions were better for identifying and attracting talent,” he says.

“We implemented strategies to build on our existing precious and base metals capabilities targeting recruitment at the principal consultant level.  

“We have maintained a long term strategy to broaden our global commodity capabilities and for several years now we have been developing our agri, industrial and speciality minerals capabilities, which has given us considerable project experience in commodities requiring specialist knowledge such as potash, phosphate, graphite, lithium, etc.”

Maintaining an extensive network of associates globally is also key to CSA Global’s versatility and adaptability.

It is “absolutely” a good time to be recruiting new key people, says Elliott.  

“We think it is always a good time to recruit talented people but it is definitely more of a buyers’ market at present and therefore it is easier to agree on terms that work for our business model. And while good people are always in demand, good people sometimes get let go by companies who are reacting to market and this can lead to disenchantment with the lack of loyalty shown by such companies.  

“In my experience private companies have more ability to make longer terms decisions about staffing and generally have better staff retention and lower turnover of personnel despite less ability to pay the big bucks.”

Some of CSA Global’s most notable new-starts of recent times include Karl van Olden (mining), Andrew Scogings (industrial and speciality minerals), Marcus Willson (gold, structural geology), Warren Potma (mineral systems, geomet), Ivy Chen (corporate), Belinda van Lente (resources), Matt Cobb (resources), Dale Harris (data systems), Mark Pudovskis (potash), Qingtao Zeng (China), Magda Fimmano (marketing), and Chris Morrissey (technology).

The company has also added a Spanish-speaking country manager in Nicaragua to manage its activities in the region, and is building its associates network and trialling alliances in South America.

“We have boosted our capabilities in our Vancouver office and are progressing with some M&A activity in Toronto to expand our capacity and capability further,” Elliott says.