Based in Western Southland, Wayne Williams of Transport Services Ltd (TSL) is a humble kind of a guy who “likes to see people succeed.”

Better time management is what got him into the industry, and he’s an ideas man with a “work hard, treat people equally and respectfully” attitude. And that’s why he’s a Southpac Legend.

His parents owned a 365-hectare farm in Opio, Southland and from an early age Wayne had a vision of owning a farm in the area. Upon leaving school he started out as a shearer; however, the insightful teen soon discovered it was not the way to achieve his goal.

Wayne recalls: “I started as an apprentice shearer, but I used to live 16km away from work. So, I’d spend the first three hours of my day driving from Opio to Nightcaps and Ohai having to drag drunk people out of bed and not get paid until seven o’clock, when I pulled the first sheep over the board. I thought `this career isn’t gonna last too long’.”

He decided to find a career that paid when you start. “Obviously when you turn the key of a truck on, that’s when your wages start,” he says. 

With his new career in mind, Wayne went out and picked up his heavy traffic licence in Ohai, driving a truck from the State Coal mine. 

“As soon as I was 18, I was on it. And then I got my trailer licence with a tractor and a single axle hay trailer. It’s a bit unique because most people have to use a proper truck and trailer.”

Wayne joined TSL in 1984, (at that time it was a branch of Freight Haulage) driving bulk trucks while also helping out on his parent’s farm. When he wasn’t driving, he was in the local pub giving the other FHL drivers `stick’.

“I used to tease the old fellas and old management, saying that if they didn’t put some young blood into the place it would fall on its knees, with everybody retiring at the same time.”

Wayne’s driving prowess came to the fore one Sunday when he was asked to drive a stock truck for the business.

“I arrived at work and there were two other guys there with seven loads to do, so one person had to do three loads. I thought, `well those guys are more senior, they’ll fight over the extra load’. 

“But they said, ‘we’ll toss a coin to see who gets the extra load’. I was like, really? I’m only starting out.”

He recalls they tossed the coin and Geoff Gilbert ended up doing the third load. But Wayne’s takeaway was that they were already thinking of him as an equal; “which was quite humbling.”

Within a few months Wayne got rung by the manager, offering him a livestock truck to drive.

“I was sort of blown away really, I’d only been there a few months and I was only 18 years old. Next minute, I was driving a Leyland Mammoth and then a Volvo N10.”

He says that it was daunting for a local kid that had never really left the province. 

“But I had a great bunch of stock drivers around me. They were a lot older, and I was lucky that they were very welcoming. You were there to help them out, you weren’t taking some of the work, but I had no idea where anything was.”

Wayne mainly worked in Canterbury, and the system was basically run by the drivers: “They had the odd dispatcher and manager put up there to help us, but they were more of a bloody hindrance,” he says.

That’s where he started to learn about organising stuff and about being an equal. 

The system was devised so the first truck that got up to the Canterbury area would go to the local hotel where the stock agents had left all the information.

“You’d have to take this information to your room and work out all the loads, (make 500-600 tallys) and then ring all the farmers (obviously this was well before cell phones) and let them know about the trucks that would be picking up all the stock. So, you were in your room for a long time.”

He says that typically the system would be that the last person to arrive that night got the best load out the next morning. 

“So, if you were the first there and organised it, you were one that got the last load out, the worst load.

“You’re trying to keep everybody caught up. If someone’s had a bad day, and you give him a good one, he gets to catch up. So, it was a real sense of camaraderie.”

Wayne recalls that most times there would be about 10 trucks to organise loads for. 

“So, I went from a little place in Opio, to organising all these loads for all these guys. It was a baptism of fire, you worked out very quickly that if you screwed it up, you’ve got drivers down your throat saying, ‘why did you make me go to that area and then make me drive to the other area?’ Because that’s what happened when we had managers up there doing it.” 

Wayne drove a livestock truck until 1998, travelling the length of the country moving cows and sheep and deer; “you name it, we carted it.”

He says it was a tough job, but he enjoyed it. 

“I used to say, I saw New Zealand at my boss’s expense. I drove a Foden, which was 350hp. It had the torque of a 400 Cummins at the time, it was a 3406 B Caterpillar engine, 9-speed gearbox, I spent most of my livestock career in that.”

Wayne adds: “Back in the day we had limited RT coverage, phones were a case of stopping at a shop or hotel and asking. You had to use manual maps, there was none of this Google stuff.

“It used to make me laugh, on our RT system we’d have long haul freight trucks saying, ‘oh I don’t know where that is, I don’t have time to turn off the main road.’ They were townies as far as we were concerned.”

In 1989 Freight Haulage had become part of Transpac. Then Transpac went into receivership and nine working shareholders - including Wayne and five clients - bought the business and they named it Transport Services. 

“I was a shareholder and driver right through that period. But in late 1998 Bill Richardson approached me and said ‘find a business partner and I’ll sell you half the business’. Prior to this, all of the older shareholders that I had given a hard time to in the pub about retiring, were retiring and they wanted their money out.”

Back then Wayne was the youngest one and couldn’t afford to buy the other guys out. Bill ended up buying all the shares in the business. They had a manager for a few months; “that didn’t go so well,” and that’s when Bill told Wayne to find a business partner. 

“In 1999, myself and Dean Carleton [Carleton and Williams Ltd] purchased 50% of Transport Services. And now we’ve done 25 years in that venture with the Richardson Group.”

When they [Wayne and Dean] bought the business, it had 15 trucks. Today there’s 40 trucks across five divisions and they are all company owned. There are eight spreaders in the sowing division, six permanent livestock trucks, five auger trucks, a local freight truck and the rest (around 20) are bulk. It’s a mix of Scania, Mercedes, Volvo, DAFs, and other Southpac trucks depending on the divisions. There are also 50 staff now.

“I’m very very grateful to Southpac New Zealand. We bought into their product after we had a couple of other trucks that didn’t go well for us. We had a lot of Fodens in our fleet back in the day and when they stopped making them, we moved to Kenworth then DAFs. We never thought we’d be DAF people but started buying the Kenworths and got involved with the Southpac family and DAFs became part of our business.”

Wayne says that as the business grew, dispatching became more and more involved, so he moved into the management side of it. 

“We have two great office ladies and share a couple of staff in Invercargill. The Richardson Group side has a big input into the accountancy, payroll, and H&S. It works really well.”

Like many, Wayne’s journey within the industry has been a mix of good mixed with ‘challenges. He says that the deterioration in the amount of quality staff that’s available now is an issue, along with the increase in compliance. 

“We used to pride ourselves on having a list of people that were itching to get in here, nowadays you’ve got just one or two. And just the compliance side of everything, the Health & Safety Act came along and caught everybody out. It’s been a good thing; it’s added real value to us all. But like most people, none of us like change.”

On the positive side, as he said earlier, he got to see New Zealand at his boss’s expense and now he’s the boss, he’s returning the favour.

“I get a lot of joy out of making sure that every bit of kit in the fleet is good. It doesn’t matter if it’s a ute for people to get to work, or it’s the highest value unit we have, none of them are pigs, or poorly designed.

“It’s specific to its needs. I’m not an engineer by trade, but I put a lot into how we design stuff, and how we squeak the best tare weights and greatest payloads.”

He says that over the years he’s been told some of his ideas would fall apart and ‘they’ll be left dragging on the road looking like a bit of a silly prick’. That hasn’t been the case.

“We’ve been very lucky with our local engineers, Transport Engineering, Stephen Keast, and also Chris Ward from Transtech Dynamics. Those people will really listen to what you’ve got to say and involve your industry input into the quality of the gear you’ve got. They’ve certainly put us on the map as far as that’s concerned.”

Wayne believes that the future of the company is very sound, with family members coming through from all parties (Wayne, Dean, and the Richardson Group). He says that their future bodes very well.

“I’m very proud of the fact that family members are coming through and we can keep it going. The biggest problem with rural transporters is that succession planning is never perfect. You think you’ve got a right but when it comes to the crunch, you go to your families to carry on, and there is no interest in it and so you’re left with no option but to sell out.

“A big part of our whole process is to make sure that a succession plan is in place, hence why our name has changed. The original name of the business in 1932 was S&J McRae, and then it became known as Southland Freight Haulage. The Southland part was dropped off and it just became known as Freight Haulage Limited. Then we had a brief interlude with Transpac for about 18 months and then Transport Services [Southland] Ltd was formed and has remained for the past 35 years.”

Wayne’s view of the industry is certainly glowing, he proudly says that it’s a business where anybody that’s got some get up and go can start, drive a truck, and work their way through the business and become a business owner. 

“My parents weren’t rich by any stretch of the imagination. When I borrowed my first $30,000 to come into the industry, I paid 21.5% interest (back in the 80s). My parents had to hand over their machinery ownership papers to the bank as security. I remember realising the seriousness of the situation, if I failed, it’s not just me that fails it’s them too.

“I say, whatever you do in your life, banks can take what they like but they’ll never take the skin off your back. My attitude has been to work hard, treat people equally and respectfully. Put your head down and communicate. Communicate with the clients and communicate with the world really. You can achieve anything. I’ve been very lucky that those things have worked.”

He says that their success has been “a collective” but somebody’s got to be the driving force and point it in the right direction, adding that Dean and he complement each other in different ways. 

“We wear the place on our sleeve and there’s no job I’d get our drivers to do that I wouldn’t do myself,” says Wayne.

“My passion has always been about goals, ideas and making things happen. I’d wake at 3am and be jotting things down, drawing pictures and shapes, and by the time I got finished it would be 5am. I am always looking to see where we can save something. What are we missing? What has somebody done better than us? What can we achieve?”

He says; “We’re just humble humble people, I like to see people succeed, it doesn’t matter if it’s the opposition or who it is. If anybody wants to ask a question, which they do, they’ll ring me up and I’ll give them the straight up answer.”

Wayne ends by saying; “I like to be organised and communicate. Support your local people. Support your community and support anybody out there that needs a hand.”

It’s fair to say that understanding the need for better time management in your late teens is impressive, however, for the young Wayne it was ultimately successful as he did end up having a 60-hectare deer farm that was just up the road from his parents’ place.