The story of the Hynds group of companies is the tale of a local boy who made good in his own neighbourhood.
FORTY-ONE YEARS AGO John Hynds, now 66, left his job as a sales rep with concrete-pipe manufacturer Hume Industries to start a contracting company. His reason for the radical switch was simple – ambition. As a sales rep he was continually supplying to people who were successful and he wanted to be one of them.
He saw contractors as committed people who took on a contract to do a job and got it done. So he specialised in installing crib walls, pipes and manholes, using Hume concrete products. When Hume became involved in a major contract and could not supply him with crib blocks, the go-getting John promptly knocked the back out of the garage at his Papakura home and turned the building into a precasting operation to make the near 20,000 blocks he needed for a construction project. He never looked back.
In 1980 he expanded by buying Stevenson’s spun manhole plant in Whangaparaoa, set it up in a factory he had built in East Tamaki, and began hand-feeding 1050mm diameter manholes two days a week. When he couldn’t afford to buy a semiautomatic batching plant from the United States for $250,000, he commissioned a Wellington engineer to design what he required, bought obsolete machinery from meat and fertiliser works, obtained vibrators and block-reinforcing steel from scrap, and did the entire job for $100,000. When Contractor visited John at his bustling East Tamaki premises in early 1988, he was employing 45 staff and making spun pipe in 600mm and 1800mm diameters. He had also just bought equipment which enabled his company to double its production capacity.
His manufacturing and distribution of concrete products became so successful that he eventually disposed of the contracting side of the business to his construction manager, the late Grant Turner, and ended his work in the Contractors’ Federation (now Civil Contractors NZ) where he had been chairman of the Auckland branch, then head of the organisation’s civil and general section. John’s elder son Adrian joined Hynds Pipe Systems as a sales person in early 1990, armed with a civil engineering degree.
For the young man it was a dream come true. “I always wanted to work in the business,” he recalls. “Where I played as a little boy was among the products stored at the back of the house. There was a little mechanised skip that used to deliver the concrete mix. In the weekend I’d drive around in that with my mates.” Adult reality, however, did not initially match childhood dream. Adrian joined the company when there was a downturn in the construction industry due to the late 1980’s sharemarket crash and local government reform. At the end of 1990 he left for England only to find the start of a recession there and no demand for engineers. He managed to find work with a water authority in Bath then with the UK Government’s Department of Trade and Industry before returning home and rejoining Hynds in late 1992.
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