LINCHPINS: Scott Field and Blair Hislop are looking to product development to expand their business. PHOTOS/DUNCAN BROWN
SCOTT Field had to buy a fridge before he could buy steel for Field's Way's first engineering job.
"Everything I had bought I had paid cash for and I needed a credit rating," he said.
He was well cashed up after working with brother-in-law Blair Hislop, who got him a job
in 1991 with a UK company installing engine assembly lines at Ford Motor Company plants.
He had initially gone on a holiday to visit his sister and Blair.
Assembly line installation and full commissioning could take a year and involved a lot of travel but a ton of experience.
In 1995 Blair returned to Hawke's Bay for a wedding and while he enjoyed diving in the Red Sea, Waimarama diving was "superb".
A funeral extended the trip, then another wedding and another funeral.
"It changed our whole perspective."
They never went back.
Scott sold their UK possessions and continued working at Ford motor plants for another year, completing projects in Spain and Brazil.
Blair worked for Haden & Custance in Hastings, which makes sophisticated material-handling systems.
On Scott's return he worked for Schoolmate Sam Wood's ATI Engineering.
He caught the entrepreneurial bug.
"I thought, I can do this."
So he did, working from his father's workshop in Havelock North's Brookfield Rd in 1998.
Buying the fridge successfully opened Field's Way Engineering's account with Fletcher's steel division and he built a pool fence for a friend of a friend.
Word spread and more commissions for upmarket homes came his way.
"We ended up a one-stop-shop because you would be asked for something like wrought-iron curtain rods and then automated gates and pool fences. We'd say, yes we do pool fences - we do anything.
"We then went to steel beams across lintels - the builder comes round with his plans and we produce them.
"We ended up a-one-stop-shop on the property. Not the type of property that was a speccy - trying to produce something as cheap as possible and get a margin - it was where the client was part of the build and handpicking everything.
"It just snowballed, so I rang Blair and said, 'you've got to come down here man - I'm getting busy'."
The firm has not suffered a downturn "because we have so many strings to our bow".
"I still do curtain rods after 16 years. I just got an order last week to do half a house. They are not our target business but how do you turn away something that's easy to make?"
The company's current Whakatu location is their fourth. After Brookvale Rd they moved to nearby Te Mata-Mangateretere Road and then a disused pack house in Thompson Rd.
The Whakatu workshop is bigger than needed and they have bought the land with a partner, but they will not say it is their company's last home. Their new offices can be disassembled with a very large spanner and they want growth to continue.
To get there they have enrolled in The Icehouse Owner Operator Programme after a graduate of the programme, Cam Wylie of geotechnical engineering firm RDCL, invited them to a local presentation given by the business growth organisation.
It was co-founded in 2001 by former Heinz Wattie's CEO David Irving and the University of Auckland's Business School.
It established a Hawke's Bay office three years ago after an invitation from the Hawke's Bay Chamber of Commerce and economic development agency Business Hawke's Bay.
Scott said the presentation "struck a chord" but the cost and commitment required meant it was a year before they enrolled.
"I don't think it would have worked if just one of us had done it," he said.
"One would come in buzzing following an Icehouse day of training, bouncing ideas off the other guy who just wouldn't be on the same page."
Icehouse regional manager Michaela Vodanovich meets prospective Hastings clients at BNZ Partners and in Napier clients at her offices in The Business Hub. One week a month is spent in Wairoa and Gisborne.
She said people often started or bought a small business "and they think that by acting the same way they will be able to get a better result over time".
Her cue was "the light bulb moment" that the way the company operated needed to change for growth.
"If you want to grow, it starts with the owners," she said.
Three years on, more than 250 Hawke's Bay businesses have engaged with The Icehouse.
"This year there is an upswing in the number of businesses recognising that, if I'm to compete locally, nationally or internationally, I need to get my business processes, structures and capabilities in my business sorted or I simply won't get the results I want."
Field's Way Engineering has hired Mickey Heibner as workshop foreman "so the guys have a nice steady structure during the day and not have two bosses" while the owners each target an area for growth.
Blair is pursuing more structural steel work.
He agrees Hawke's Bay already has several structural engineering firms "but they are all really busy".
"That is where the business is headed and with Icehouse it is helping us extend our wings."
Scott is in charge of product development and working with a local inventor who has designed a trailer with a pivoting axle, lowering the trailer to the ground enabling a vehicle to be driven onto it.
He is taking it to a home show in Gisborne next month "and from then onwards we will see where we go".