Teletrac Navman Fleet Focus

Versatility is the name of the game. For quick and simple transport or recovery of a wide range of vehicles, the flat deck and ramp layout works ideally.

Mighty Kenworth W924R served as the Parks heavy-recovery unit for over a decade. Current K104 unit is certified to tow a fully-loaded HPMV truck and trailer combination.

T’S SMALL WONDER THAT THE ORANGE AND yellow trucks of Parks Towing are familiar to Christchurch residents – after all, the company has been around for the thick end of a century. But what isn’t obvious is how much Parks has grown in the past couple of decades, and the breadth of the services it now offers. Sure, if your vehicle in involved in a crash or has a breakdown, the company is likely to be on your radar (or you on theirs) but It’s almost easier to say what it doesn’t do.

Heavy vehicle recovery, commercial fleet servicing, vehicle storage and transport, machinery transport, crane truck services, engineering and design services, general vehicle maintenance and tiny homes transport are all covered, in addition to the ‘core’ towing business.

And the variety is not merely based on a ‘We’ll have a go at anything’ approach, either. All of Park’s disparate activities are carried out using dedicated, specialised equipment.

The current fleet has more than 60 units, including a stepped-deck heavy machinery transporter, a Hiab crane unit and a heavy-vehicle recovery unit as well as the more conventional smash- and breakdownrecovery trucks for cars and light vehicles.

The company’s heavy-recovery unit is a Kenworth K104 that was set up in NZ to an English spec and operated originally by Ace Heavy Haulage in Auckland.

Company general manager Stuart (Stu) Gerring explains that the unit has been considerably refined since then: “Ace spent a lot of money on it, and in our turn we have improved it further, to the point where it is the only unit in the South Island capable of towing a fully-loaded H-rated truck and trailer combination.”

He adds that the spread of activities is partly due to historical happenstance, but recently reflects a more deliberate approach: “Our marketing in the past 18 months has included the catchphrase ‘More than just towing’. We are proud of our ability to handle a wide variety of jobs and are keen to promote it. ” We are always looking for a point of difference. An example is the unit that is often used in a contract we have with the Police serious crash investigation unit. The truck uses a fold-out frame that allows a vehicle to be lifted from a crash location without the wheels turning, so that the integrity of any forensic evidence is maintained.”

The ability to broaden horizons could well be locked into the company DNA, because its founder, Matthew Park, sold up his interest in an undertakers to set up Parks Garage in 1925. His interest in trucks had been sparked by the commissioning of a specially designed funeral truck, a forerunner of a modern hearse. The regular breakdowns and mounting crash statistics of the motor vehicles of the time prompted the move into the new field of operations, trading as Parks

Hino 300 is not only equipped with rear towing frame but has all the kit to help get a stranded vehicle under its own power again.

Breakdown Ltd.

Matthew Park’s partner in the undertaking business, William Hayward, subsequently joined William Lamb to set up Lamb & Hayward Funeral Directors, a company still very active in Christchurch.

The Park family ran their company until the early 1960s, when it was bought by Brian Gorrie, who in 1994 sold it to Robert Gerring and his wife Ruth. At the time it was quite a small operation, with a fleet of around half a dozen trucks.

The line-up comprised the usual suspects for the era in terms of medium trucks – Bedford J2s and Ford D-Series and Traders. Rob recalls the first brandnew unit came a couple of years in as a result of an accident: “One of our Traders was hit by a car that came through an intersection. The driver was okay, but the truck was a write-off, and the insurance helped pay for a new unit.”

Setting up trucks in the ‘90s was generally jobbed out to local engineers, one of them being Dave Joblin of Scott’s Motors, recalls Rob. Nowadays, adds Stu, the classic hook-type tow truck has been all but completely replaced by flat-deck units that use a winch and ramp. New decks are almost all imported from the USA. As he explains, the certification required for a custom-built local job makes the imported units, tried and proven designs and built to full international standards, a better proposition.

Prior to the Gerrings buying Parks New Zealand had gone through a period of heightened competitiveness in the crash recovery industry, with several tow trucks racing to vehicle accidents in an effort to gain the work and tensions sometimes running high. However, legislation to tighten controls on operators by way of enhanced licensing standards and the later introduction of a tendering/roster system with the

Police improved matters considerably.

From the beginning, says Rob, he could see no sense in continuing the old ways: “You could send one or more trucks out to potential job, with no guarantee you can get the work. At the same time, the drivers were diverted from handling other aspects of our trade.”

The company the Gerrings bought in 1994 had a paint and panel shop integrated. In fact, after Stu joined the firm, he spent the best part of three years learning that trade. However, both he and his father agreed that it was detracting too much from the development of the core business, and in 2009 that part of the operation was shut down. It was a decision, says Rob, that they never regretted: “We were able to find jobs for all the affected staff, and after that we were freer to develop the towing and vehicle shifting side of the business.”

Rob has had an interesting working life, He began his career as a civil engineer but, wanting to be his own boss, switched to oyster farming on the Coromandel. He and his wife did this for 10 years before selling up and making as Rob calls it a “lifestyle choice” to become more involved in a passion for skiing, relocating to National Park. A twoyear contract with Doppelmayr NZ for the installation of an aerial cableway brought the couple to the South Island. At the end of the contract, Rob wanted to get into more consistent business and was looking around when Parks came on the market.

Despite the zigzag nature of Rob’s career path, he had a background in the towing business, he explains: “My father had a garage all his life, and I was just 17 when I did my first car recovery.”

He is especially proud that after nearly 100 years the company continues to be family-owned and run:

Spacious workshop does much more than simply service the Parks fleet, but offers repair and servicing for commercial fleets and private vehicles alike. The engineering section has just built a five-car transporter for the company.

“That’s a real point of difference in this day and age, and it means we are totally committed to providing the best possible service.”

The family connection remains strong. Elder son Stu joined the company in the early 2000s and gained a thorough grounding in the business from driving a tow truck before taking over from his father as general manager. Brother David followed some years later, and today is operations manager.

Stu says that the long intervening period while Brian Gorrie owned the company meant the new owners had no contact with the original Park family, until coincidence stepped in: “After a few years we had grown to the point where we needed to shift out of the original Salisbury Street premises to a bigger site on Ferry Road where the owner was a descendant of the original Matthew Park.”

The shift to Ferry Road was prompted as much by a need to improve presentation as lack of space at Salisbury Street, explains Rob: “There, it was quite old guard – high corrugated iron fences topped with barbed wire, in an area of old houses. We wanted to improve the public perception of towing companies and the new site gave us the opportunity for a much better image.”

That image has been boosted even more spectacularly with the opening two years ago of a purpose-built complex in Christchurch’s southwest – though the fact it’s tucked away on a newlydeveloped industrial area means it’s less obvious to the casual passer-by.

Growth during the first decade and a half of the Gerring’s ownership was steady, but still confined primarily to crash recovery and breakdown services. The Christchurch earthquakes changed all that, as all available companies were pressed into shifting equipment from damaged buildings, and trucking in the machinery needed for the rebuild.

As Stu explains, that was a primary focus: “Christchurch was suddenly full of all sorts of machinery that needed shifting here and there. And though the bulk of the reconstruction work is now finished we have an ongoing partnership with several hire companies to cart their equipment – things like small excavators and scissor lifts.

“Our point of difference from other companies in the same line of work is that with our towing background we are set up to be immediately responsive and can more easily meet the expectations of the hire companies, who can in turn keep faith with their own customers who often want equipment at short notice.

“The fact that we have units always ready to go puts us at the head of the queue. And we have set the trucks up to be multi-purpose, so they can handle a variety of jobs without problems.

“Don’t get me wrong, a lot of our trucks have a primary purpose, for example the Hino we recently added that has been designed to shift diggers, with stabiliser legs at the rear – but it can also easily handle a variety of other vehicles if need be.”

The earthquake recovery work boosted the company’s fortunes, to the point where it was able to buy its first eight-wheeler heavy-vehicle transporter.

The following years, between 2013 and 2016, saw a flurry of acquisitions, significant among them being

EBS (Emergency Breakdown Services), and not long after Scott’s Breakdown – both long-established towing firms.

As Stu comments: “That has made us essentially the last of the old guard in the Christchurch area. We ran Scott’s under its existing name for some time but have gradually absorbed it into the Parks brand.

“The purchases boosted the fleet numbers significantly – if not always with units that fitted the direction the company saw itself heading. Their original owners had made them work, but in many cases, they didn’t fit the image we were planning, and they also added significantly to repair and maintenance efforts.

“Paying someone else to service the fleet also became increasingly costly. The specialised nature of the gear also added another complicating factor. The last company we purchased, Warren Auto-Electrical, in 2016, had its own workshop, so we hired mechanics and bought the servicing work in-house. When we

closed the panel shop Dad and I never thought we would have a workshop again.”

In 2015 the company entered an agreement with Manheim Auctions NZ to relocate and store insurance total-loss vehicles prior to their being auctioned online. Not long previously, Manheim had won a contract with the IAG group to handle its written-off vehicles.

Stu admits the association as at times been quite challenging: “The basic problem was that nobody was really sure of the numbers involved. Not long after Manheim was awarded the contract, IAG brought several other insurance companies into its portfolio. We were told to expect around 150 cars at any time... but it has never dropped below 300.

“Initially, we delivered vehicles to a Manheim yard at Bromley, but it was so swamped by the numbers that at times we would have three or four trucks waiting in a queue, which was vastly inefficient. To ease the pressure we set up an extra yard, but even that was quickly filled, and we added another...and another.

“When David joined the company, he spent most of his time driving around the seven yards that by then we were operating from. There was an obvious need for proper consolidation, and we had been looking for quite some time for a site to call our own. We finally found it in a new industrial area close to the former RNZAF base at Wigram. And because we already had a workshop style component in several of the existing sites, it made commercial sense to incorporate that into the new building and to offer a dealership-style service to the wider market.”

Even the new facility has needed expansion less than two years since opening, he adds: “Originally the site was 22,000 square metres, but we have since had to buy extra blocks, bringing it up to 28,000 square metres.”

For all that there isn’t a huge amount of spare room, even allowing that many of the cars in the wrecks section are stacked three-high in metal frames, imported as flat sub- sections from China and assembled locally.

A separate area for impounded vehicles typically

This page, right: Early heavy-recovery unit with a bus in tow. Below: Lineup in the ‘80s featured Bedford and Trader models and classic hook-type towing gear. Opposite page, clockwise from top left: The W924 in all its glory; ACCO at the limit of its capacity; Hiab-style crane units have long been a feature of the Parks lineup.

carries between 80 and 120 cars.

In addition to the wrecks and impound areas, another large part of the site is given over to long term storage, handling a variety of vehicles, including ex-lease and ex-rental vehicles awaiting sale.

The new building on the site is huge, covering around 1200 square metres, a high proportion of it given over to the workshop. This offers heavy- and lift-vehicle lifts and a full range of servicing and repair work for both heavy commercial customers and private car owners. The three-strong engineering team carries out repair, design and fabrication both on- and off-site.

Comments Rob: “I’ve always wanted my own bricks and mortar. It’s taken quite a while but definitely has been worth it in the end.”

Stu says an advanced electronic dispatch system has been vital to supporting the company growth: “Like many transport companies we use Navman, which works really well, but for the past 10 years we have also used the Australian-developed LinkSoft. One of its packages has been developed for tow companies and is used by several major towing firms in Queensland and Victoria. It offers an interface between the relevant breakdown authority – like the AA here or RACQ and RACV in Australia – so that jobs can be automatically sent to the towing contractor and the data sent on to the tow truck.

“Here, several organisations, among them the AA, are integrated with our LinkSoft system. For the AA, the on-scene time to a breakdown is important, because when they are tendering to a vehicle distributor for warranty support, they can use the information on our response time to support the bid.

“When we first started with LinkSoft we were doing maybe 30 or 40 tows a day, whereas now it can be hundreds. We put it in at a good time, because there is no way a manual dispatch system could handle that. The automated data transfer has virtually eliminated the sort of communication errors that you will find in a manual system. The drivers all have tablets, allowing them to enter information from the field that goes straight into the system.”

Adds Rob: “When we bought the company, we had

General manager Stuart Gerring is proud that Parks has become more than just a towing company and sees its range of services expanding yet further.

a single receptionist/dispatcher who assigned jobs to the trucks. At night-time the phones were switched over to my number and I acted as a dispatcher, and if need be, handling the callout myself. Now we have a team of five full-time dispatchers, including a three-strong nightshift team. The team leader has a different tablet that contains all the jobs that come in during the shift.”

Covid-19 has had an impact on a previously busy and profitable part of the operation – the delivery of replacement rental cars and vans when there has been a breakdown, and the return of the affected unit. The workshop was also hit when it lost the 40 or 50 Jucy rental vans that typically it would service every week before the pandemic.

In addition, there had been a growing business in the repatriation of serviceable rental cars and camper vans, with inbound tourists picking vehicles up in Christchurch and leaving them in, say, Queenstown.

The drop in the rental activity caused by Covid has been partly offset by the shifting of import vehicles from Port Lyttelton, work that was previously carried out by Auto Despatch, says Stu: ”They had leased space in our yard to store the vehicles before they went on to compliance centres or dealers, and they mentioned they were pulling out of the Port work, so we asked could we help out – and that’s how it started.”

Until now this work has been carried out by the company’s flat-deck Hino and Fuso 4x2s, towing two-car trailers. But on the day we visit Parks, a new five-car two-deck transporter – designed and built in-house – is nearing completion in the workshop. In service, it will be hooked to a 4x2 Hino 700.

Among truck brands, Hino is the one Parks has a preference for. As Stu comments dryly: “We tow a lot of broken down trucks, and Hinos don’t show up all that often.”

He reflects on the hands-on approach the family brings to the job: “One thing I was firm on as I was moving into the management area was that I didn’t want the job to be 24/7 as it was with Dad, so we have worked to bring people into management positions that can relieve us from being on call all the time. But the family involvement does show up in a very positive way, in that the three of us can still drive a truck if needed. And customers really love it if one of the family turns up at the wheel of a unit. We even drag Dad out occasionally when things are really busy.”

Rob laughs: “Imagine a big cupboard, with me inside hanging on a hook. Every now and then the door opens, I’m given a lick with a feather duster, and turned out to work.”

The core group are ready to tackle the off-thewall stuff too, an example being the 200 metres of conveyor the three Gerrings and a couple of staff disassembled and packed in containers last year. Recalls Stu: “It was tough work – thousands of bolts, five days of solid work for five of us. The job came from us shifting machinery and factory gear postearthquake, and somebody remembered us.”

He says that health and safety and staff training have been very much a part of his journey: “There’s no best-practice document for the towing industry, so we’ve had to develop our own, from a rookie driver

Left: David (pictured) and Stu Gerring enjoy backing up the frontline drivers when needed. Even Rob, now retired, gets – as he puts it – “dusted off” and pressed into service when things become really busy. Above: By the mid-1990s the earlier hook layout was beginning to be replaced by the likes of lifting frames (below).

with a Class 2 through to a Class 5. We’ve got a fulltime health and safety and HR person who has helped enormously in further developing the work that I began. We’re currently well advanced in gaining ISO certification, which when we get it will make us the first tow operator in the country to do so.

“We work closely with the Police in bringing their new recruits up to speed on the optimal handling of a crash site. They have ultimate control, but an experienced and professional tow truck driver will make things easier for everybody in what is often a pretty fraught situation. At these training courses we get written-off vehicles and recreate a crash aftermath to help the recruits run through what needs to happen. From a health and safety point of view, once the recovery process starts the tow driver has control of the scene.

“For recruitment, we are increasingly working with schools, because it’s often easier to train a young person in your way than have to modify the ingrained habits of an experienced driver. And what might not be generally understood is that we can offer a wide range of career paths. And when we bring a new person on board, we work closely with them to identify what they want from their career and ensure we can provide that, so the time and effort we’re investing in them is not wasted if they leave.”

Stu himself has recently completed the leadership development programme offered by The Icehouse and speaks highly of the variety of the business sectors represented and the practical nature of the study.

Like his Dad, he believes in thinking progressively: “In the old-school model for a tow company you waited till the work came to you, but we have recently employed a full-time salesperson to visit corporates and drum up business. We want to raise the bar of the public expectation of what a tow company is all about.”

Rob concurs: “A towie, by description, has to think outside the square, because every situation is different. I think we’ve managed to bring that adaptability to the business.

“However, I don’t think we look back often enough to appreciate how far we’ve come from where we started. And there’s still more growth in the pipeline…” T&D