Tradestaff – the story so far

From Kevin Eder – Managing Director

In 1996 I had been working as an industrial consultant for one of the large multi-national recruitment organisations in Christchurch for two years. This followed three years as a sales rep after nine years working as an electrician.

It was pretty obvious to me that recruitment was what I wanted to be doing, but I really needed to be doing it for myself.

Thus Tradestaff was born in June 1996 and I opened for business in a very small office attached to a warehouse in Sydenham, Christchurch.

Many people have commented on just how appropriate the name “Tradestaff” is to our business. In fact we were damn lucky to get it, as my first choice was “Tempstaff” but that was already taken and a nice lady at the company’s office suggested Tradestaff instead. The name obviously fits us well and has become well recognised in the industry.

The early days of Tradestaff were very low budget.
The entire staff consisted of me. I was the sales crew, the interviewer, the placer, the pay lady, the cleaner, the accounts clerk and the mail girl. It was great! I had to learn how to use a computer and I had a cell phone the size of a brick.

In my first week of business I charged out 28 temporary hours. This quickly grew and by September my weekly charged hours were over 1000 and by Christmas my record week was 2644.75 hours. Not bad in only six months!

In early 1997 it was obvious that the business was going to be successful, even with unemployment at almost 9% and I needed to employ someone to help me out. I was so busy that it took me over six months to get consulting staff employed - a great advocate for using an agency to hire staff if ever there was one.

So in August 1997 Janice Lord (now McNab) and Mike Canton started their careers with Tradestaff as industrial recruitment co-ordinators. The plan was for me to relax a little and play a bit of golf, spend time with my young family etc.

That didn’t happen.
Business took off again and by the end of 1997 we were charging out over 4000 hours a week. They were fun times. We were all learning as we went along and a mixture of laughter, tequila and success made for an exciting environment. Tradestaff was a cool place to be.

Janice picked up recruiting very quickly and by early 1998 it was obvious that she really didn’t need me about to run the business. Her legend was already growing and it’s no real surprise that after 12 years she is still with Tradestaff today as our general Manager, my right hand woman, and she is the first living legend of Tradestaff.

To keep me busy it was decided that we should look to grow Tradestaff in another city. So in June 1998 we employed a payroll/accounts lady and I set off to explore other Tradestaff opportunities.

That opportunity came along in Hamilton and we opened our second branch in August 1998. Hamilton seemed like a great place to have a branch as it felt a lot like Christchurch. A big enough city, but not too big, Hamilton had the same rural feel to it that Christchurch has. It even had a river running through it like the Avon in Christchurch, only much bigger!

Just to prove that we weren’t just another recruitment company we employed one person to run the branch exactly as I had done two years before. The only difference was that the payroll was done in Christchurch. Our man on the spot was hardly from a recruitment background. In fact he was a South African banana farmer called David de Villiers.

David is a big man and about as South African as you can get although he turned up for his interview wearing an All Black tie! It is fair to say he made quite an impact on the sleepy Waikato market. His efforts in Hamilton and subsequent branches over the next four years earned him everlasting respect within Tradestaff and he is the second living legend of Tradestaff.

Waikato was an instant success. With David running the show and myself in the branch three days a fortnight we quickly had the branch operating at a level that showed that the Tradestaff formula worked. So as we grew both businesses and added new staff it became obvious that we should replicate the business further.

In those days I wasn’t really much of a flier and the flights from Christchurch to Hamilton via Wellington were the worst part of our expansion. So after a few scary journeys I started flying directly to Auckland and driving down to Hamilton. Inevitably after a few weeks we opened a branch in Auckland and the expansion was well under way. David from Hamilton helped out at that time and still grew the Hamilton branch at an impressive rate.

One of my favourite early stories involves an early consultant called Catherine Hawkins who had tiny feet. The only gumboots we could find her to wear for site visits during a particularly cold and wet Christchurch winter were pink with barbie pictures on them.

So Catherine simply got a pair of size 11 steel cap gumboots instead and wore them over her high heels when calling on messy building sites. Having a consultant less than 5 ft tall wearing huge gumboots like clown shoes ensured that everyone knew who Tradestaff was.

Meanwhile in Hamilton we had a number of clients who were saying that if we had a branch in Tauranga they would do business with us there. So in March 1999 we opened in Tauranga using the same old recipe and suddenly we had four branches.

That was pretty much it for 1999 and the expansion plans took a back seat while we caught our breath. By now Tradestaff had charged out our 1,000,000th hour and we were cooking with gas. NB. Today we charge out 1,000,000 hours every few months.

Our second employee in Tauranga was Sara Kerr. Sara was a Canterbury girl who had moved to Tauranga, so we loved her already. Since joining us in September 1999 Sara has been an incredibly loyal and trusted staff member who now  holds the position of National Business Services Manager. This doesn’t start to describe all that Sara does for Tradestaff and she continues to be one of the most valuable Tradestaff assets.

Sara Kerr is the 3rd Tradestaff living legend.

2000 was an interesting year for Tradestaff.
Our new branches were growing considerably and the business had doubled in size over the previous year. The problem of course with growth is that it has to be funded. We were running out of money and our wage bill was getting bigger every week. It didn’t matter that we were profitable; we simply didn’t have enough cash in the bank. So we employed an experienced credit controller to manage our debtors better and ensure we had good reporting to our bank.

Despite all of this in September 2000 we opened a branch in Wellington. We had looked at Wellington previously and it hadn’t seemed like the place to be, but by 2000 we had a number of clients asking us to open there. The branch started very slowly and with our attention more on the cash flow issues at home we probably didn’t give it 100%.

It was about this time that we started to recognise that culture and our principle of being “cool and easy” was something that gave Tradestaff a real point of difference we should talk about more often. It was also at this time that Tradestaff moved to much bigger Head Office premises in Colombo street, Christchurch. Up until then we had continued to operate out of the expanded office space attached to the warehouse where we had started. Tradestaff was still operating under the radar of the big agencies and we thought we were on the way to the big time. But the next 12 months were to be a learning experience that changed Tradestaff forever.

Having established five branches, the dynamics of Tradestaff had changed. We were kind of big in some ways but, other than in Christchurch and Hamilton where business was booming, our three new branches were still finding their way. That meant that we were still pretty much unnoticed by the bigger agencies and our core business was with the smaller family-owned businesses.

Over the Christmas break and into the new year of 2001 some strange things started happening. Firstly a supplier rang and asked why we hadn’t paid our account. When we looked into it we found that a cheque had been written out and presented to the bank. Further investigation showed that in fact lots of cheques had been written out. Warning bells were ringing and a more comprehensive investigation showed that we were the victim of some serious fraud. Ultimately it turned out that we had lost over $73,000 to our “credit controller”.

The Police prosecuted and in an ironic twist he died while serving his punishment. We never recovered the money.  This led to a complete change in our head office philosophy. The innocent manner in which we had handled our accounts was gone and we had to be much more corporate-like in our business affairs. This was when Tradestaff grew up. In 2001 Tradestaff was recognised as the 8th fastest growing company in NZ.  2001 was also when we started a permanent recruitment division.

In February 2002 we opened our second branch in Auckland, this time out West in Henderson. Our Penrose branch had a large number of clients in West Auckland and we figured we could grow that business even more. This proved to be the case and we quickly followed that up with a new branch in Rotorua. As had been the case when we opened Tauranga, Rotorua was simply a case of meeting our client’s wishes.

This followed another period of consolidation, although we were still growing alarmingly fast with an average annual growth of more than 80% achieved each year over the previous five years.

By August 2002 we had become despondent about the way in which our Wellington branch was trading. We were approached by Peter Fowler, a Kiwi who had been in the UK working in recruitment for two years. Peter was offered a six-month contract to turn the Wellington branch around. If he was unsuccessful in his endeavour then he knew that we intended to close the business down when our lease expired in March the following year.

The Wellington Branch was averaging 1100 hours a week in September 2002 when Peter took over. Six months later it was averaging 2400 hours a week and by September 2003 it was up to almost 3000 hours. Peter managed the branch and under his guidance it set new records that changed the way we measured success.

Peter Fowler then moved to Tauranga working as Business Development Manager in our Central North Island region and is the 4th living legend of Tradestaff. Recently Pete left us to start his own business, the internet recruitment network www.recradar.com

2002 and 2003 also saw Rachel Weir, Linda Millar and George Eden begin their Tradestaff careers while Dave de Villiers left us to pursue a new challenge. It was also about this time that I became involved with a charitable organisation called Project K. Project K was a school based programme designed to promote the confidence and courage of young teenagers.

While in the process of setting it up in Christchurch, I saw that there were numerous parallels in the issues that many teenagers were faced with and those faced by many of our candidates in South Auckland. As a result of that I began work on our own project called The Tradestaff Foundation Programme. The basis of our foundation programme was to provide work and learning to young long-term unemployed people in South Auckland.

By March 2003 the foundation programme was ready to go. The government funding agencies told us that it would take up to two years to get ministerial approval as things took a long time to get through the system. In true Tradestaff style we went straight to the minister and had approval in six weeks, much to the annoyance of the officials.

The Foundation programme saw 15 young people sign on for a 12-month course. They were placed as temps four days a week and attended the Manukau Polytech (MIT) on the other day. Subjects such as English, Maths, Economics, Computer Studies and Job Seeking were taught. The whole aim was to change the manner in which the students acted and saw themselves in the community. The funding agencies told us that they expected two or three to survive.

Of the 15, 2 got pregnant, (not one of the subjects), 3 got permanent jobs, 5 graduated and 3 others stayed on as temps after the 12 months. While we were pleased with the outcome, it was much harder and much more demanding than we had expected. Without a significant increase of funding from the government we decided to put the Foundation programme on the back burner and instead develop our apprentice programme.

For the previous two or three years we had run a few apprentices through the Christchurch branch as construction temps. The process was simple; we employed the apprentices as temps and covered all the paper work. The clients who were assigned the apprentices were to teach the practical side of the business. I believed that we had a good programme in place and that we could replicate it throughout our branch network. Today the training business has PTE status and is a very large trainer of apprentices; not just construction based and new industries were adopted with more to come.

During this period our original Penrose branch in Auckland was moved to the current site in Manukau. It was also at this time that we decided to open a new Auckland branch in Albany. A plan was hatched to hit the North Shore with a bang and really kick it into action by selecting a hit squad of existing staff  (including me) to open the new branch.

There are some fantastic stories that come out of the first few days in Albany. It was the most fun I had at work since the very early days of Tradestaff and there is no doubt we made an impact. The result was that by the end of the week the branch was steaming ahead and it remains our fastest ever first-year-growth branch, achieving over 1000 hours a week after only six weeks of trading.

Early 2004 saw Tradestaff employ Dave Downey into the Waikato team leader’s role. Dave quickly progressed to Waikato Branch Manager. A year later he took over Tauranga, then Rotorua and most recently Napier and assumed the role of Central North Island Regional Manager.  Dave recently completed his MBA and is Tradestaff’s National Operations Manager.

In April 2004 we opened a branch in Dunedin. Then in a hurry Hawkes Bay opened in September 2004 and Queenstown a month later in October. I remember trudging through the snow looking for offices.

Suddenly it was 2005 and that proved to be a year of substantial change for Tradestaff.

A dedicated and professional Health & Safety Manager/ Human Resources Advisor, Amanda Flavell was employed to improve our health and safety plan. One of Amanda’s first jobs was to retain our Workplace Safety Management Practices with ACC. We had previously achieved primary WSMP with ACC and we asked Amanda to ensure we didn’t lose that level, but to also try and improve it to the secondary level.

Unbelievably not only did she improve it, but we zoomed past the secondary level and right up to the top ranking of Tertiary WSMP. Apart from the levy discounts (which are significant) that has given us enormous kudos within the industry and impressed the hell out of our clients. At that time only one other agency in NZ had the same level of WSMP!

In 2005 other very prominent new Tradestaffers joined the fray with our payroll guru Anna Beckett, and credit cruncher Marguaritte Rogers coming on board along with an up and comer Grant Kedian who now runs our successful Bay of Plenty operation. Meanwhile our growth showed no sign of slowing down and revenue was up by over 20%.

In June 2006 we celebrated our 10th birthday. When I looked back at the first 10 years and remembered the fun times, the successes and more than a few tears I was very proud.  It was a great weekend and an opportunity to reflect on the people we had employed and the friendships made.

Back in late 1999 we were really looking to take much of the administration work off my hands and so advertisements for a new payroll manager were taken out. The best applicant was a lady Margaret Coory who had many years of payroll experience. Margaret didn’t think we would employ her because of her age. She was 59 and wanted a job to take her through to her retirement. We employed Margaret and she was the most loyal and trusted employee ever invented right up until she retired aged 65 in 2005!  No other agency would have employed Margaret. No other agency would ever have employed many of the fantastic people we have employed in the last 10 years. Most probably wouldn’t have employed me!

In 2007 we opened more branches in Lower Hutt and Hornby and purchased a nursing agency business based in Hamilton called Holistic Healthcare. Now renamed as “Nursestaff”, that business is growing and is an important part of the Tradestaff family. Then later that year we recognized that the world economy was changing and that the recession was coming. 2008 and 2009 saw us batten down the hatches a little with only one new branch being opening in New Plymouth.

Today Tradestaff continues to do well and we see the new year of 2010 as an opportunity to grow the business and our Tradestaff story much, much more.

Whatever your relationship is with us, I hope your experience with Tradestaff is enjoyable and rewarding.

Kind regards

Kevin Eder

Managing Director