Ken Holmes is a familiar name to many in the forestry industry for his work as a harvesting contractor. However, in the past decade he’s also gained a well-respected reputation for the trucking business he’s created.

Ken’s trucking endeavours started with one logging truck and grew to 120 trucks at one stage, servicing forestry customers in the central North Island and Northland. Today, Holmes Group has a head office in Whangarei and a fleet of 50 trucks operating around Northland.

“I bought my first truck off Noel Galloway from Murupara back in the `nineties, when we were still logging in Kaingaroa,” says Holmes.

“It was a Mack off-highway double, and we had it working out of Murupara dispatch for Fletchers. It felt like quite a big deal at the time, investing in something that wasn’t logging gear. Not long after that I bought a Western Star stem truck off Stan Williamson – it was working in Tarawera Forest for Fletchers which is where I started my logging career, so it felt a bit full circle. I bought the first truck to shift wood and the second to create some scale.”

In 1998, Ken and Holmes Logging moved north to take up a key supplier harvesting role for Carter Holt Harvey, working in Woodhill and Riverhead forests.

“It was a big move, leaving the Bay of Plenty where I’d grown up and worked pretty much all my life. We took our Rotorua crew with us and set them up in a house, but the two trucks remained based in Murupara. They were both big off highway trucks so they couldn’t really go anywhere else,” Holmes says.

The scale of the key supplier contract meant Ken needed to focus on the harvesting side of his business for the next few years.

“We went from one logging crew to eight crews, so all our capital and focus was on expanding the harvesting side of the business at that stage. The expansion included the purchase of two swing yarders and creating a super skid in Riverhead Forest. We purchased two highway trucks, a W924 and T600 Kenworth’s fitted with old-school drop bolsters – these carted off-highway from the haulers to the super skid.

“Our first new Kenworth was a tri drive 904 to replace the Western Star in Kaingaroa. The tri drive Western Star was taken north to work on the Riverhead stems job.”

The next expansion of the Holmes Transport fleet happened when Ken’s key supplier contract with Carter Holt Harvey ended. His next move was to buy stumpage and manage sales, a strategy which included the purchase of a 140,000-tonne forest in Ahuroa, north of Auckland, in 2003.

“We cut back to just two swing-yarder hauler crews and two mechanised ground-based crews and harvested and carted close to a million tonnes of privately owned stumpage and forest over the four years.

“There was a real shortage of transport capacity in the area at that time, so we needed to create our own fleet to ship our wood. That’s when we started really investing in our own highway trucks. We were running a full-fledged independent harvesting and transport company in the end,” Ken says.

Before long, Holmes Transport had 12 trucks – mainly Foden’s before the company moved on to buying Kenworth’s.

“They stopped making Fodens around about then, which prompted us to look at Kenworths which were the premium product.”

Ken brought in long-time business friend Sam Sinclair (“He was my go-to tyre man for years when he had his own shop”) to run the trucking side of the business in Kaingaroa. Ken and Sam partnered up and purchased the first Hino highway truck together which they put on in Rotorua. Sam still works in the business today, based in Whangarei as Holmes Group’s transport manager.

Things really stepped up a level when Ken bought the Lambert group of businesses from Mike Lambert in 2006, a significant purchase and a strong nod to the new direction Ken wanted to take the Holmes business in.

“We had won the Marsden Point marshalling contract with PFP, and the attraction was that Lambert’s had spare machine capacity and all the computer software and tools to carry out that job. It was 50 trucks on top of our 12 (we merged them together, so we were running 60 trucks) as well as something like 14 companies, including stevedoring and forklift businesses,” Holmes says.

Taking on a business of that size wasn’t without its challenges.

“There were some significant challenges taking over another man’s empire,” he says. “It was especially important that we integrated some of our people into running parts of the Lambert group to establish our own culture, which we were pretty happy with.”

The acquisition of Lambert’s saw Ken shut down his harvesting operations, transitioning from working in the bush to log transport and chip, quality marshalling and the yards. The new direction gave him an opportunity to problem solve and innovate, something the qualified diesel mechanic and farmer’s son has always enjoyed doing.

“One of the changes we made that worked really well was on the wharf operations when loading logs onto the ships. Previously they carried loads up to shipside with big loaders. We found the large loaders were hugely expensive to run, both for R&M and fuel, so we changed the system to using material handling machines, Mafi trucks and wharf trailers.

“Each truck has three trailers staged at two pinch points: the tally station and loader, and the third behind the Mafi truck. It meant trucks could cycle continuously without any waiting time: they’d pick one up, drop it off, pick one up, drop it off. The running costs dropped shit loads, productivity went up and the cost to customer went down because you could easily move wood long distances,” he explains.

“Material handlers are those big high-cab excavator loaders. We introduced them into our operations because it meant we could high stack the timber and get a lot more wood in the areas, which is important because wharf space is expensive – being able to high-stack meant we could get twice as much wood into a space. We also used the material handlers to unload the highway trucks.”

The new wharf trailers were a custom design by Ken, manufactured by Patchells in Rotorua.

“We created these oversized trailers, with the capability of carting 25 tonne in each bank. A road truck only does 12-14 so it really added to the productivity. I built twelve and am quite chuffed that today they’re industry standard, used by all marshalling stevedoring companies here and in Australia.”

Ken sold the quality marshalling part of the business in 2013 to Port of Tauranga and turned his focus to the trucking side of the business, as well as the forklifts and loaders business which operated at Waipa. It was during this era that the fleet grew to 120, including nine chip freighters which worked 24/7 for Waipa and Claymark and some custom-built bin-in-bin trucks for Hancocks to cart bin wood in the north.

“There was a lot of growth at this time, due to winning contracts and customer demand. The industry had been retrenched, really, and it just took off and started to grow so we responded. It was definitely a highlight when we bought 20 log trucks and 9 chip freighters – all new. We had to, really, to get the fleet for big contracts,” he says.

Some of the initiatives Ken is most proud of implementing in his trucking firm are a zero-drug tolerance – “we did that early on and it made a big difference in the accident rate and in driver attitudes, too” – and putting cameras into trucks to monitor driver behaviour.

“Those cameras are a really smart concept where they track a driver’s eye movement and pick up if a driver is distracted or about to fall asleep. They’ll then buzz to alert the driver, so they know they need to take a break. We put these in all our trucks as a health and safety measure. As a result, we identified a lot of drivers who suffered from sleep apnoea and fatigue. They’d then see the doctor and have it fixed. Not only did it give them a new lease on life, it really changed our accident rate.”

The Holmes Group were also early adopters of the GPS system, being able to see all trucks and the speeds they’re each driving on one big screen – helpful technology for office dispatch and operations.

In Feb 2019, Ken sold the entire central North Island truck fleet, the off-highway trucks and the forklift companies to long-time friend and colleague Tony Sargison of Rotorua Forest Haulage. Ken retained the Northern fleet of 20 log trucks.

“We’ve since grown that to 50 trucks, which included buying part of Mangonui’s log fleet and Stokes’ log fleet and their heavy haulage business. It’s the same cycle we’ve always followed: invest in gear to service customer demand. The biggest challenge is finding drivers.

“We usually have a truck or two parked up, needing a driver. We’ve had to start bringing in drivers from overseas – the Philippines – to meet demand,” Holmes says.

“Truck drivers do a lot of hours, big days, and then they get home at the end of the week and give their truck a good wash, too. I’m impressed to see the energy drivers put into their jobs and the passion they have for trucks, as well as their ability to adapt to the changing conditions and rules. I take my hat off to them and it’s been a privilege to work alongside some really good men over the years.”

The Holmes Group fleet today are mostly Kenworth and Western Stars. “They’re good, strong American trucks. Southpac has been one of our two key suppliers over the years and their service and support through CDL in Northland is excellent. They’re a good company to deal with.”

When asked about trucks that stick out in his mind, Ken has two…

“We’ve got a K104 that we bought in the 90s – Number 40, we call it. It’s got auto shift and disc brakes and it’s quite a special truck to us. It was built by Kevin Wells, the truck salesman at Southpac – he was a mate of mine from when we worked at Clyde Engineering together after leaving school. Kevin is how my relationship with Southpac started. He had a heart attack and died young, before the truck was delivered. Number 40 is probably our pet truck. It’s sitting in a shed at the moment, not doing anything, but it has a lot of meaning to me and the business.”

The other special truck was an off-highway stems truck – it was a new Kenworth T904 (the company’s first Kenworth) that they put into Tarawera to replace a Western Star. That purchase marked a turning point in the company, investing seriously in transport as a sideline to harvesting.

After four decades in the forestry industry – from harvesting to transport – Ken still feels lucky to be a part of it.

“I’ve always been passionate about this industry. I still love being out there, on a bush skid, being involved, although it’s in a different capacity these days. In my experience you get to work with a really great range of decent people. It’s a great industry to be involved in.”