Winning Waikato’s supreme business award came amid a flurry of activity for infrastructure firm Civtec.
They are moving into purpose-built Horotiu headquarters at the start of December while in the same month opening an office in New Plymouth.
That caps off a year of growth including acquiring a Christchurch business during lockdown, which added 85 workers to the company and brought total staff to 255, with a fleet of 163 vehicles.
It has been a meteoric rise for the firm that started as a “man and a van” six years ago and has caught the wave of ultra fast fibre installation while also branching out into other areas including the three waters.
Civtec are one of two main contractors for UFF, which drove their early growth, while they are direct suppliers to council when it comes to water, with underground work the core of their business.
But they have also supported mobile tower installation, built concrete pads for water tanks, done streetlight installations, and even constructed golf course stone walls to help solve water problems.
Renae Smart accepting the award for Westpac Waikato Business of the Year.
“We have a breadth and depth of skill,” group CEO Renae Smart says. That includes everything from labouring to designers and engineers.
“What we have is we have a whole lot of people that can solve a problem and add value, and they do that at every stage of the process.”
The growth was not what they expected when Smart’s husband, Shane, said he had an idea. Back then, in 2014, they thought Shane would work four days a week on his new business, Renae would continue her IT work for the DHB four days a week, and they would have long weekends with their two young children and go to the beach.
“And that lasted about five minutes,” Renae Smart says.
Since then, they have taken a conscious approach to building the business, choosing to build their own staff numbers during the period of rapid growth, rather than taking the common subcontractor route.
“We wanted to create somewhere that felt like family. Families look after family,” Smart says.
“If we had a fully subcontracted work base, we couldn’t have that level of impact for our team.
“And there is a big responsibility with that around finding the right people, training them here, taking the time to get into a level where you can put them on a customer property. So we have all the frameworks to support that.
“It’s the right model for us at the moment with how we’re working. Who knows, it might not be the right commercial model in the future, but we’ll figure out how to make it work because it’s important to who we are.”
The Christchurch telco acquisition fitted with that approach of culture building, but it was challenging, to say the least.
“Day one was the first of April,” says Smart. “So we took on 85 people during level four lockdown, and we had to stand them all down the same day we employed them and pay 80 percent.
“We could have deferred settlement until after we came out of lockdown. But we were an essential service over lockdown, which means that business was also an essential service.”
Pre-purchase was, Civtec CEO Pele Tanuvasa remarks, “interesting” as they checked off about 50 vehicles, the offices and all the gear via video camera feed.
He says it was a stressful time. “We were obviously trying to figure out how we look after our team, a place where the lion’s share of our work, much the same as the rest of New Zealand, just fell off a cliff on day one, whilst at the same time taking on another 85 whānau members, and then trying to make sure that they were looked after as well from day one.”
“We questioned it at the time, but looking back now we absolutely made the right decision,” Smart says. “Because it was the right thing for the people and it was the right thing for our customer. We’re very big on staying true to our values.”
Those values include supporting their staff through the likes of medical insurance and free financial and budgeting advice.
“A lot of things we do are really deliberate around trying to help eliminate those stresses for our team,” Smart says. Tanuvasa says looking after customers and doing a quality job are also fundamental for their business.
“I’ll do everything that I can to make sure that the customer’s journey is as positive as possible. We’ve been quite deliberate in making sure that the team around us are the same types of people who absolutely are driven towards that.”
Smart says the Civtec leadership team comes from a range of industries and backgrounds. “We’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly, so when it came to working at Civtec we took the opportunity to design a workplace that we actually wanted to work in, very consciously from the start.
“We were very aware of the brand we were creating, the environment we were creating, and the experience that we were creating.”
The key is simple – being focused on customers. “It’s not rocket science.”
Civtec won the Westpac Waikato Business of the Year award, and also won the Growth and Strategy and Service Excellence awards.
