Family firm still putting people first

TWO WEEKS ago, 24-year-old Katie Nimon turned her back on the advertising world in Auckland because she has diesel in her veins.

With an honours degree in marketing and advertising there were many paths she could follow, but she took the one back to Nimon and Sons, where the Iona College student first worked when aged 14.

Her work colleagues found her choice "interesting".

"Every time somebody talked about buses or Hawke's Bay, that's what I want to do - just talk about it. That's me."

She has no qualms about the wording of the company name.

"Nimon and Sons is perfect."

She started last week as marketing manager, the fifth-generation at the firm.

Australian-born John Giles Nimon founded the company in 1905, buying Hastings firm WG Beecroft, for which he had worked for the previous 10 years.

J Nimon and Sons operated a small team of horse-drawn buses and its first car, a seven-seater Studebaker, in 1910.

Studebakers steadily replaced horses and in 1915 the company acquired a 25-seater, built from a horse-drawn body mounted on a truck chassis.

Napier coachbuilders Bate and Bell made a 30-seater soon after JG Nimon died in 1916.

The eldest of his six children, John Joseph (Joe) Nimon, who drove the horse-drawn buses as soon as he had left school, took over the business. When he and brother Bill were overseas in World War I the role fell on the teenaged shoulders of third brother Cecil.

Joe Nimon returned from the war to resume running the business, mixing the job with community work.

Joe's only son John was an engineer off to join the RAF in England, until he met Diana Geddis and they married in 1955.

Working as a driver and mechanic for Nimon and Sons, he did not see a lucrative future in buses and bought a refrigerated truck for long hauls to Auckland.

It was the start of national refrigerated trucking firm Roadair, which over 40 years grew to 170 trucks and trailers, with depots in Havelock North, Auckland, Palmerston North, Blenheim, Christchurch and Dunedin, before its sudden demise in 1996.

He was awarded an MBE for services to refrigerated transport but also grew the bus company. When he succeeded his father as managing director of Nimon and Sons in 1963, it had six buses but, when a terminal illness forced his son Bill to take over the reins with family members, the company had 84.

John Nimon died from leukaemia in 2003.

The family trust had long resisted pressure to sell its Havelock North depot in Martin Place, so Bill Nimon was surprised to find a sale agreement.

"As happens when people die, we didn't quite know what he was doing," he said.

There was an escape clause if the company could not find another suitable property "which we couldn't because as soon as they found it was us the price would double everywhere".

Five years later, at the peak of the property cycle, the company received an offer from Foodstuffs, which was rejected.

The supermarket chain upped its offer to $9 million.

"A hell of a good price."

He said he was never tempted to sell the business along with the land. The company had a duty to its employees' families and there was a tradition to maintain.

"We could have just sold everything and put the money in the bank, but when you think about how the money was earned - all in dollar bus fares. It is very hard to earn and you just don't flick it away."

The depot site remains empty, with the sale seen by some commentators as a blocking move to retain Foodstuffs' Havelock North monopoly. An approach from Foodstuffs to the fire service to buy an adjoining strip of land was rejected.

The bus company first bought an orchard in Whakatu, then a site across the Karamu Stream in the existing Whakatu industrial area.

The council has since bought the orchard for the Whakatu Arterial Link, a planned road between Pakowhai Rd and State Highway 2 near its current intersection with Napier Rd.

"We got half what we paid for it but that's all right, because we did all right over here."

Sheep graze the Whakatu depot's front paddock, belonging to Wool World At Clifton Station, where the company regularly takes tourists.

"Everybody scratches each other's back, you have to do that."

Last week Nimon won the Supreme Tourism Award at the Hawke's Bay Tourism Awards, also winning the Activity and Attraction Award.

Tours for visiting cruise ship passengers comprised just 10 per cent of company turnover but a lot more effort.

It runs some of the cruiser tours itself and for third parties, but bookings are fickle. A tour that needed five buses from one cruise might need just one bus for the next.

Most were half-day tours because of limited berthing times.

"A lot of the people we have now are second or third timers. We always try to convince them they haven't spent enough time in Hawke's Bay and there's a lot more to see, so they will come back on a plane."

School transportation is up to half of company turnover, a demanding job for drivers.

"A ratio of about seven children to one adult is required for school trips, but the bus driver is required to drive the bus safely and carry up to 80 when the only person in charge."

On Wednesday, he was informed Nimon's tender for Hawke's Bay Regional Council's urban bus services was unsuccessful.

It was awarded to Go Bus, owned by the business arms of Tainui and Ngai Tahu iwi.

"Go Bus took it off us in 2008 and they just won it back again. There were six tenderers and the reason they got it was because their price was very cheap - much cheaper."

Nimon paid their drivers better wages, he said.

"I can't in all fairness put people out to work and not pay them a fair wage. All the people that work for us are like a family.

"If you don't have happy staff, you can't grow your business.

"We have tourism-trained drivers and I was going to put them on the town run - to help enthuse people to travel by bus.

"The council decided they wanted to do it cheap but that's all right, we just don't do town runs any more."

When the urban runs were first lost, the company coped by expanding into Taupo school services. They now have a Taupo depot with 25 buses, also used for the tourism and conference market.

Charter tours are an important part of the business. Some are for tourist operators, others are in partnership with community groups. Currently it has two buses touring with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, a repeat customer.

In July, the company bought Coachlines Hawke's Bay.

"Out of that we have ended up with limousines - working for high-end customers - and the weekly run on Friday and Sunday, for the weekly boarders, to Gisborne, Taupo and Dannevirke."

Bill Nimon rolls his eyes when asked if he tendered to buy Napier City Council's Art Deco buses.

"When they said 'we are going to spend $2 million on buses', I said 'you must be joking', because I knew you could build two brand new ones for half that."

He emailed the then-Napier mayor Barbara Arnott offering free advice but was told to speak with a consultant, "who had made up his mind".

"They bought two 20-year-old buses in America, with spare parts 7000km away. I could have sold them two of my buses with plenty of spare parts.

"So they bought these things, put the billing all around the outside and they wouldn't even operate.

"We spent a lot of the council's money - a fortune - fixing them up.

"I said to them, 'you need to run one these services for a minimum of two years to get to the customer buy-in'. They didn't even wait for 12 months before selling.

"They spent all this money fixing them so they would survive and then they just dump them off for $25,000 each."

He didn't tender for them.

"I knew what they were like - I'd been fixing them. It was only last week we had one spread all over the workshop.

"The council wanted to run a service for 12 hours a day, seven days a week. You can't do that with old second-hand vehicles.

"It's a very hard industry, prices are tight and not what they should be.

"One of the reasons we have so many older drivers is because young people can't make the job a career, to make a good living."

Katie Nimon said many staff had been with the firm since before she was born and were like surrogate grandparents.

"When OSH wasn't a thing we used to have parties in the workshop and the kids would come along and we would all be hanging out - it was such a social thing."

Bill values the company history, keeping a collection of former work vehicles.

A bus he travelled to high school on was donated to the Omnibus Society, which had plans to dispose of it after losing storage space.

"I heard about it and went down with the transporter, got this thing and brought it back. We made it run, it drives and has brakes, but needs a lot of paint and work on it. It has a lovely Art Deco interior.

"There was another one they were going to sell and I told them they couldn't sell it. It was delivered the day I was born. The ownership papers are stamped with my birthday, so we kept that one too."

He also stores a 1912 Leyland truck for the Mills family trust.

"We are bursting at the seams, always. If you don't get these things and put them away, they are gone.

None of the horse-drawn vehicles remain. "Nobody thought about keeping old stuff then."

With 130 buses and 150 staff, further expansion was possible - perhaps a return to trucks - but now the growth-focus was on its Whakatu workshop and paint facility, where 70 per cent of its work was for outside companies and it will soon be a VTNZ testing station.

Both father and daughter deny being in the transport industry - they say they are in the people industry.

"I enjoy doing all the cruise ships because of all the different people," says Bill.

"I just love people, and this industry has a lot," his daughter said.