With a career that’s (so far) spanned three decades, Aaron Headington has moved from being a hands-on engineer to creating a specialised division of Southpac Trucks that could be best described as ‘bringing customers dreams to life’. He’s got an eye for detail and a passion for detailing and it’s for this reason he’s a Southpac Truck Legend.

Born in Auckland but travelled extensively due to his father being in the Army, Aaron left school looking for an apprenticeship in cars but to no avail.

“To be honest, I wasn’t into trucks, for as long as I can remember I wanted to be a car mechanic. I couldn’t get a car apprenticeship anywhere, so off a whim, I called in here [when it was Specialist Transport Equipment] and asked the Service Manager if they were looking for any apprentices and it turned out that they were. That’s how it all started.”

Aaron began work as an apprentice truck mechanic in February 1990 and then in July STE changed to South Pacific Trucks and became Kenworth and Foden distributors. Aaron says “I was there until late 1993 and that’s when Carter-Holt wanted to get out of trucks and we all got made redundant.”

For a short break, he took a role at Nissan Diesel, then when newly formed Southpac started up in January 1994, Mike Carliss and Maarten Durent asked me if I’d come back (did he actually leave?) “I started in February and haven’t looked back since.”

Aaron says that he never really gave his car apprenticeship dream a second thought after that, “because I found trucks a lot more interesting than cars. Everything was the same, engines, transmissions, diffs all that stuff but a lot bigger and I really liked the whole truck aspect, everything is urgent.”

Aaron preferred the engineering side of the work, the fitting and the welding but as the ‘noughties’ came around, Aaron ‘reluctantly’ moved into the office.

“About the year 2000, the service writer/receptionist left and Dave Tennant the service manager said ‘why don’t I apply for the position?’ I said why me? Why would I want to be a service receptionist?”

Apparently Dave explained that the role was going to evolve and that Aaron would be ideal.

“So I came off the floor and started as a service writer and with me coming in with mechanical experience it helped to sort out a lot of operational issues.”

He says that the position evolved into the Assistant Workshop Manager’s job, which came with more challenges and responsibility including looking after the technicians.

“In 2002, the DAF Product Manager left and they asked if I wanted to apply for the role. I said “why me?” Why would I want to work in truck sales?”

Aaron recalls that Southpac was then very new to DAF. The guys really wanted to focus on after sales and provide the best technical support available, and also work with the factory to engineer the trucks for New Zealand conditions. My background was ideal for that  so I said sure, why not and took on the DAF Product Manager’s job.”

With all three brands humming, Kenworth, Foden and now DAF, the expanded volume created an internal bottle neck; we needed to get smarter and more specialised in how the company got trucks on the road to our customers.

“Having come from a workshop background and now working in truck sales, I could see that there was an opportunity for the company to become more specialised and fill this gap.

Both Mike and Maarten said, “yep great,” but who do you think is going to run it? “I said” I don’t know, that’s up to you guys.”

‘It needs to be you’ came the answer and this time Aaron didn’t ask “why me?’

“I said yep, I’ll happily do it and it just happened to coincide with us moving into the McLaughlin’s Road building while we redeveloped the head office Wiri Station Road site, so everything just fell into place, it was a no brainer.”

Aaron recalls that it was a bit of a rough start. The entire truck market fell into a hole, just as we were expanding our new truck delivery capacity.

“Truck sales were just enough to keep us busy. However, we were starting fresh, no-one had done this before, this was a foreign concept to everybody and we just wrote the rules as we went. We created this whole new workshop out of nothing. Whether it is for basic compliance work and then off to a body builder, or a full truck fit-out. The whole idea was to take the customer’s request and make it reality.”

They called it ‘New Truck Preparation’ – basically every single new truck that Southpac imports and delivers comes to him. Aaron says the department kept morphing into something different and bigger.

“We expanded it further. We invested in sheet metal machinery and started doing our own in-house fabrication to improve the quality and timeframes the transport industry demands. And the department just kept growing, to full turn key set ups, tractor units, customising exhaust air intakes, cab interiors, TV’s and whatever an owner wanted.”

Aaron says that when they started there was four of them and now they’re running at about eighteen specialist new truck technicians and still looking for more. “We’ve gone from fifty/eighty trucks a year to hundreds and we have a vision of getting even bigger than what we are today”

He says, “nowadays we know exactly what the truck means to a driver and an owner and we learnt that along the way.”

“For a lot of owner/drivers, this truck is their life. Their life savings it’s everything to them and it has to be treated as such. When we started I was really focused to  change our teams mindset from working on dirty old trucks to working on brand new vehicles, the fit, finish, looking at the details. It’s an on-going thing, I ask them ‘would you accept that?’ If they say it could be better then I say make it better, because if you’re not going to accept it, why would our customers.”

He says that communication is the key to making the whole thing work.

“Trying to take what the customer has ordered with the salesman, the salesman then trying to convert that into what he thinks the customer wants and me trying to get my head around how the salesman has put it on the option sheet. Sometimes I have to go back to the customer and ask what they actually mean by this, because the last thing I want to do is build something and have the customer turn up and go ‘it’s not what I wanted’ or ‘yes that’s what I asked for but it’s not what I want.’ Neither works for me, it needs to be perfect the first time.”

He says that some customers have a specific look in mind and when we’re trying to achieve that and getting that information out of their heads can be difficult, but we always get there in the end.

“Much of what we do is aesthetic and very bespoke, but we do carry out development work too, we come up with concepts. In this age of media and social media, we see things everywhere, a lot are on Australian trucks. They send me photos and say, ‘this is what I want’ then I’ve got to copy that without copying it.”

He says that this is making the job both harder AND a whole lot more interesting.

“I enjoy the challenge of change, we don’t like doing the same thing over and over. But with change, comes time, development, investment and all that stuff.”

‘Engineer’ Aaron is very happy in his role. “I like the company and I actually enjoy getting out amongst the trucks, talking to my guys, developing new things, coming up with engineering solutions to issues with fixes, improving durability, and making everything work to suit the customer’s requirements.”

The fact that Aaron cares about the customer’s expectations that makes him so good at his job. “We make a lot of cool products, but if a customer isn’t happy with what I’ve done, I’m not happy, because then I haven’t done my job properly. I do take it very personally.”

Sure, Aaron does say he prefers trucks over cars, but when he’s not making new truck owners dreams a reality, he’s tinkering with his own ‘98 Corvette project car. This dark horse has also been a successful race driver...

“When I started here, Dave Tennant raced Superstocks and I helped him as his pit crew for about 9-years. Then I decided that I wanted to do it for myself, so I bought a car and went racing. For 15 years I raced speedway, that was a big part of my life, I got lots of trophies, too. I was the Waikato Champ and won all the points in Auckland a couple of years in a row. I could hold my own.”

Aaron turns fifty this year and thirty one years of his life has been spent at SPT (in one way or another). He says that some days, when the office work is getting too much, he misses being ‘hands on’ but says ‘I don’t think I could go back to the tools’.

So what of the future? Aaron replies “I consider this my own department, I created it, I brought it from nothing to what it is today… so for me there is no next, it’s here. It’s a great company to work for, we’re not short of work and there’s always something different to do. In other words, more dreams to be made.”