Zimi Meka Built Ausenco to a 4,000-Employee Mining Engineering Giant

Zimi Meka started Ausenco in January 1991 with Bob Thorpe and no employees. In 2026 the firm turns 35 with 4,000 people around the world. In this series he tells the stories behind that run, starting with the project in Laos that taught the company how to take a risk.

We ran this interview remotely, Zimi in Melbourne and our team in Toronto. 

That is easy enough to set up and hard to get right. Something about the in-person energy, the connection you get when you sit across from someone, usually gets lost on a call. With Zimi it came through anyway. He is one of the most charismatic leaders I have interviewed and one of the best storytellers I have met: instant charm, a story ready for every question, and the ease of someone who has spent thirty-five years telling them to clients and crews. 

Zimi is the real deal. He founded the company, scaled it globally, and he still runs it. His team had to convince him to get in front of a camera. Once he was there, we agreed the most powerful way to put Ausenco in front of the mining industry was through Zimi himself.

Mining is having its moment. Every data centre, transmission line, battery and chip starts as rock in the ground, and Zimi says he has never been more bullish on the industry. 

How does a company go from two people to 4,000?

In the 90s gold prices were low, capital was scarce and projects were few. North Mara in Tanzania and the Chatree gold mine in Thailand put Ausenco on the map. Everything about the industry has changed since then: the technology, the scale, the place mining holds in the world economy. One thing has held. The business still runs on relationships, and Zimi still runs the company that way.

What does a defining project look like when there are no roads to it?

Zimi admits he was nervous going into Laos. 

Getting there meant a packed ferry across the Mekong in flood season, furniture sliding off the roof into the river, then the Ho Chi Minh Trail, still full of unexploded ordnance, then eight hours of jungle track and eighty creek crossings. Then the rain came. Trucks slid into mud and excavators drowned in creeks. They cleared the land, built the road and delivered the gold project in twelve months, with the copper project close behind. He tells it almost as a short documentary, four minutes on managed risk and on the kind of people who stay when the conditions turn. It set the company’s course for the next three decades.

There are more stories coming from his series, including the one about the lone rat that shut down the commissioning of an entire processing plant. 

Zimi’s own introduction to the series is below.