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Gordon and Netta Burnside, the husband and wife team behind Brand X, talk to ALAN TITCHALL about the 40-year success of the New Plymouth-based machinery distributor.
Gordon Burnside doesn’t suffer fools and chooses his customers instinctively. He is quick to dismiss ‘bullshitters’, but generous with sharing his industry experience to those that he respects and fall into his commercial trust. When he finished his apprenticeship as a diesel truck mechanic in 1974 at a New Plymouth motor specialist in opposition to Page Vivan at the time, he couldn’t have guessed that he would end up buying into the company some 20 years later and then buying it outright in 2002. Yet he says, even back then, he had enormous respect for the two family principals, Graeme Page and Barry Vivan, who set the company up. “At the time I specialised in working on trucks like the Dodge with a 185HP V8 Perkins diesel engine, while Page Vivan specialised in re-powering those trucks with Detroit diesel engines to increase their loads,” he says. “They were bloody good at converting ordinary trucks in those days of restricted imports into real fire-breathers. Every major transport company at the time would have been a customer of Page Vivan at one time or another.” Gordon went on to work on different machinery plant in the earthworks business before packing up in 1989 and settling in Australia, where he operated a very successful fabrication business. It’s a story too long to detail here, but he then set businesses up the Philippines where he survived what one calls ‘one of life’s changing experiences’, suffice to say it included losing everything and a 30-day stint in a Philippine jail. He arrived back in hometown New Plymouth on US$100 borrowed from New Zealand Foreign Affairs, with his trusty mechanic’s tool set and the shirt on his back. “I was only back in New Zealand a couple of week when I lost the tools in a burglary and the government came looking for their US$100.” A chance run-in with Graeme Page at the time resulted in a life changing direction for both of them. “Page Vivan was keeping its head above water but not going any where, and I said, ‘let’s make this thing work – you have 50 percent and I will have 50 percent’.” It was the end of 1996. Then came Netta, an old friend of Gordon’s who was working for Nissan fleet sales in Wellington. “I rang her boss down there and said, ‘is she any good’? Awesome, he said, but I don’t know how you are going to keep her under control.” After he talked Netta into returning to her family territory of Taranaki, Gordon says he secured her loyalty through marriage. It should be said that both of them were in hysterics telling me this. “I didn’t want her running off to Porters or someone else.” Re-brandingGordon says the ‘Brand X’ name came to him while he was vacuuming the office back in his first year as a partner in Page Vivan. “Make sure you put that into the article,” Netta says laughing. “Well there was only Graeme and myself doing everything,” says Gordon defensively. “The Brand X idea came into my head as we were independent dealers, able to sell any brand with no loyalty to any of them, unless the machine itself demands our loyalty.” The brand has been in effect since 1997 and the idea of selling a brand to fit the customer’s needs has been a cornerstone in the business, say the pair. Equipment is sourced from all over the world and obviously not limited to any one manufacturer, and includes Extec, Nordberg, Hitachi, Komatsu, Cat, Finlay, and Powerscreen. A lot of gear is re-traded through the company sales yards on a 10-acre block at Waitara, 10 minutes from New Plymouth. “We imported the first mobile Nordberg horizontal shaft impactor into New Zealand and we have sold and traded it in three times. Each time we traded it back for more than the customer paid for it,” says Gordon. “It is a luxury been able to sell only the good stuff, adds Netta, referring to brands that don’t always produce winners. “If I can be so arrogant ... if we say it’s a good machine then it’s a good machine. And that works for us and the national distributor. The guys we sell the machine to still want it serviced and with the original parts. We call it friendly competition – we are doing each other a service.” Sales are both national and international. If there is one word both Gordon and Netta agree on to describe their business approach to machinery sales it is ‘opportunist’. “That’s exactly what we are,” says Gordon. “We look in the crystal ball and see where the market is moving to.” It was the reason why Brand X started importing mobile crushers in its early days. “We could see problems with resource consenting and we thought track-mobile would be the way to go – to be really mobile within a quarry or an assemblage of quarries. Screening the same.” Another opportunistic example was buying a Dieci Pegasus six tonne, 18-metre telehandler in Iceland during the country’s recent economic melt-down. They bought it very cheaply with kronas and sold it for a good profit in Switzerland, without even seeing the gear. In an age of internet dealing and brokering Brand X doesn’t seek ‘bargains’ online and, instead, relies on a network of contacts built up over many years. “You don’t get a reputation for the things you’re going to do,” says Gordon. “We have a bunch of associates around the world that we deal with,” says Gordon. “They know who we are. We have been around for 40 years we are not going to stuff them around. That’s how you find about these deal – not on someone’s website.” A family affairBrand X has seven staff, including Netta and Gordon who describe themselves as “salesmen, parts guys, mechanics, project engineers, advisors, consultants and agony aunts”. “You name it, we do it,” says Netta. With a family home and two teenage children, the pair have a unique working relationship, with Netta one of the few women in the industry who are at the coalface of machinery and equipment sales. “I report back from the field and tell Gordon what is needed, and he fossicks around the world and finds it. We have a fantastic partnership and a working partnership because we have to – there’s no room space or time for prima donnas. That won’t pay the staff wages. If there’s a problem we might raise our voices but we get it done and move onto the next thing. You have to.”
Contractor Vol.34 No.6 July 2010 |
Forty years in the machinery business is a lot of history. What started as Page Vivan Motors in New Plymouth in 1970 is now one of the country’s leading, independent suppliers of machinery and equipment to the construction and extraction industries.