DrDream maker
WITH A CAREER THAT’S (SO FAR) SPANNED THREE decades, Aaron Headington has moved from being a handson engineer to creating a specialised division of Southpac Trucks that could be best described as ‘bringing customers dreams to life’. He’s got an eye for detail and a passion for detailing and it’s for this reason he’s a Southpac Truck Legend.
Born in Auckland but travelled extensively due to his father being in the Army, Aaron left school looking for an apprenticeship in cars but to no avail.
“To be honest, I wasn’t into trucks, for as long as I can remember I wanted to be a car mechanic. I couldn’t get a car apprenticeship anywhere, so off a whim, I called in here [when it was Specialist Transport Equipment] and asked the Service Manager if they were looking for any apprentices and it turned out that they were. That’s how it all started.”
Aaron began work as an apprentice truck mechanic in February 1990 and then in July STE changed to South Pacific Trucks and became Kenworth and Foden distributors. Aaron says “I was there until late 1993 and that’s when Carter-Holt wanted to get out of trucks and we all got made redundant.”
For a short break, he took a role at Nissan Diesel, then when newly formed Southpac started up in January 1994, Mike Carliss and Maarten Durent asked me if I’d come back (did he actually leave?) “I started in February and haven’t looked back since.”
Aaron says that he never really gave his car apprenticeship dream a second thought after that, “because I found trucks a lot more interesting than cars. Everything was the same, engines, transmissions, diffs all that stuff but a lot bigger and I really liked the whole truck aspect, everything is urgent.”
Aaron preferred the engineering side of the work, the fitting and the welding but as the ‘noughties’ came around, Aaron ‘reluctantly’ moved into the office.
“About the year 2000, the service writer/receptionist left and Dave Tennant the service manager said ‘why don’t I apply for the position?’ I said why me? Why would I want to be a service receptionist?”
Apparently Dave explained that the role was going to evolve and that Aaron would be ideal.
“So I came off the floor and started as a service writer and with me coming in with mechanical experience it helped to sort out a lot of operational issues.”
He says that the position evolved into the Assistant Workshop
Manager’s job, which came with more challenges and responsibility including looking after the technicians.
“In 2002, the DAF Product Manager left and they asked if I wanted to apply for the role. I said “why me?” Why would I want to work in truck sales?”
Aaron recalls that Southpac was then very new to DAF. The guys really wanted to focus on after sales and provide the best technical support available, and also work with the factory to engineer the trucks for New Zealand conditions. My background was ideal for that so I said sure, why not and took on the DAF Product Manager’s job.”
With all three brands humming, Kenworth, Foden and now DAF, the expanded volume created an internal bottle neck; we needed to get smarter and more specialised in how the company got trucks on the road to our customers.
“Having come from a workshop background and now working in truck sales, I could see that there was an opportunity for the company to become more specialised and fill this gap.
Both Mike and Maarten said, “yep great,” but who do you think is going to run it? “I said” I don’t know, that’s up to you guys.”
‘It needs to be you’ came the answer and this time Aaron didn’t ask “why me?’
“I said yep, I’ll happily do it and it just happened to coincide with us moving into the McLaughlin’s Road building while we redeveloped the head office Wiri Station Road site, so everything just fell into place, it was a no brainer.”
Aaron recalls that it was a bit of a rough start. The entire truck market fell into a hole, just as we were expanding our new truck delivery capacity.
“Truck sales were just enough to keep us busy. However, we were starting fresh, no-one had done this before, this was a foreign concept to everybody and we just wrote the rules as we went. We created this whole new workshop out of nothing. Whether it is for basic compliance work and then off to a body builder, or a full truck fit-out. The whole idea was to take the customer’s request and make it reality.”
They called it ‘New Truck Preparation’ – basically every single new truck that Southpac imports and delivers comes to him. Aaron says the department kept morphing into something different and bigger.
“We expanded it further. We invested in sheet metal machinery and started doing our own in-house fabrication to improve the quality and timeframes the transport industry demands. And the
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