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For half a century, since the age of 15, Rick Goodman has been self-employed. Now a special birthday gift from his family brings back memories of his early working life. BY GAVIN RILEY
Rick acquired a Ford Costcutter truck in 1960, the year he started work, and he dumped it at a Levin wrecker’s yard in the late 1970s. Wanting to give him a special birthday gift, the family found another Costcutter at “Smash Palace”, Horopito Motors near Raetihi. It was in a dilapidated state, with moss on the bonnet, and it took them a year with a lot of help from skilled friends to restore it to pristine condition (pictured above). “They had to keep it quiet from me, which was difficult,” says Rick (who according to daughter Marianne was “blown away” by the surprise gift). “They made a fantastic job of it. It looks as if it has just come out of the Ford company works. It’s even still got its original motor.”
Rick plans to put number plates on his replacement lookalike and give it a good run round the Wellington area, to make sure it can handle a long distance, before he and wife Helen take part in a truck rally in October through Auckland and down the East Cape. He realises the spartan nature of the cab means they may have to drop out at some stage and come home. “It’s not that comfortable. It hasn’t got a heater but the motor’s very hot and it’s nearly inside the cab. It’s got pulldown windows and the windscreen opens to the front so you can let some air in.” Fifty years ago Rick had no idea he would create a company, Goodman Contractors, which now has 60-plus staff. He wasn’t doing too well at school so his dairy-farmer father sold him and his equally unacademic elder brother Tony some cows to enable them to set up as share-milkers. The brothers also worked on the farm and did haymaking and disc-ing for other farmers. In 1960 their father began a job with the Ministry of Housing as a plumber overseer and told them there was work for them and their Ford County bulldozer at the ministry’s Wellington flats, carrying out earthworks, spreading topsoil and planting lawns.
“We had a major flood during construction due to a localised rain storm. The culvert at the top of the job couldn’t take the huge amount of water,” Rick recalls. “It destroyed about 30 percent of the sewer network, about 40 percent of the water main network, and 80 percent of the roading project that was underway at the time – all the kerb and channel and the metal – plus it did a lot of damage downstream to houses. We nearly didn’t survive it.” Rick rates that job as even tougher than the challenging work he experienced in the 1970s on the 16 kilometre-long Mangaweka Deviation, where for five years he co-managed the earthworks on the five kilometre-long middle section between the South Rangitikei, North Rangitikei and Kawhatau river bridges. The task involved 150,000 cubic metres of fill, 40 metres deep, on undulating land where hills rose up to 350 metres above extensive flats.
“It was the deepest railway embankment in the southern hemisphere. We used to push the material over the top and rehandle it at the bottom, about 50 metres down. Then we had to go 50 metres down a rope, and 50 metres back up another, zig-zagging rope. Eventually we got a track down.” Rick and his brother Tony worked together till 1992, when their company went briefly into receivership. Two years later he bought out his brother and changed the company name to Rick Goodman & Sons. Four years further on the company became Goodman Contractors. The name-changes were made to accommodate the involvement in the business of Rick’s and Helen’s sons, Stan, Lance and Vaughan, and finally daughter Marianne. “The children as they grew up always wanted to come and work for me. Even when they were 10 years old it was, ‘When can we start, Dad?’” Rick says.
All, along with Rick, are directors of Goodman Contractors and he says having five bosses has made “one hell of a difference” to the company’s successful operation. He adds: “We never have arguments or even heated discussions. Everything’s very simple and is talked about and agreed one way or another.” Helen Goodman has also played a key role in the growth of the business. “She’s had a great input into the whole operation, even supporting us when we had no money and it was very difficult, right through to the present day,” Rick says. The quality of Goodman Contractors’ work has been recognised several times. In 1998 the company won a Contractors’ Federation construction award for its re-alignment of 3.3 kilometres of State Highway 3 north of Wanganui, a project led by Stan, Lance and Vaughan which involved 450,000 cubic metres of earthworks plus drainage. The contract award had been criticised by disgruntled unsuccessful bidders, who considered the company was too small and too inexperienced in Transit work to do the job. So the family’s joy at winning was increased when Transit land-transport manager Rick van Barneveld praised the quality of their work at a Contractors’ Federation conference session next day.
The Goodman quality was evident again in 2000 and 2001 when the company won Contractors’ Federation Wellington branch awards, first for the 3.5 kilometre alignment of State Highway 57 at Lawn Hill, Shannon, then for the construction of a geogrid reinforced retaining wall at Johnsonville. Rick’s involvement in Goodman Contractors eased somewhat in 2002 when he was elected to the Contractors’ Federation national executive, where he served five years. But even today he’s busy from 5.30am in a multitude of roles: driving, looking after a project, checking invoices from the previous day, chasing debtors, paying creditors – any task which doesn’t involve having to use a computer. “I haven’t backed right out and I don’t intend to,” Rick says. “I’ve told the boys and Marianne, I want a job for the rest of my life, please.”
Rick’s a real down-to-earth guy
“I’ve always loved the satisfaction at the end of the day’s work of seeing what you’ve done, and that you’ve done it properly,” he reflects. “Even though we bury our mistakes they never come to raise their ugly head, as is the way with engineering design, for instance. But we’re very very careful about how we do things and we wouldn’t do shoddy work just because the owner wasn’t there. “We had a case the other day where fill that was unsuitable had been left in a gully and it would have been so easy to leave it there and just cover it up. It took us four days to get it all out, and the owner never even knew. “But I couldn’t leave it there because at some stage somebody’s going to build a house on that and eventually, it could be 20 years later, it might crack the walls, and then they would start looking as to whose problem it was. “No one could trace back to what the cause was. But if you do earthworks you know how important it is to dig all that muck out and make sure there’s good compacted fill.”
“It’s impossible for the big guys to handle everything, so they look to subcontractors like ourselves for heavy earthmoving,” he says. “There are fewer and fewer people in heavy earthmoving. We own 14 motor scrapers and practically no one’s got motor scrapers. Everyone’s gone to dump trucks and diggers because it’s cheaper to get into that, but that’s not the way to move dirt in a proper, compacted and organised earthworks. “It’s fine for small jobs, but when you get big jobs, apart from cut to waste and mining, it’s not the best way of moving dirt. The motor scrapers are absolutely invaluable.” Rick says that in the past five years there hasn’t been a lot of dirt to shift, but this coming year there will be millions of cubic metres throughout the country – “and that’s when those who can move dirt will come to the fore”. Even in his own area there will be the western link road north of Wellington and Transmission Gully, plus council schemes and big subdivisions. Rick is not surprised his four adult children have not only followed him and his wife Helen into the family business but look set for the long haul. “They enjoy what we did – dirt and machinery. If you don’t enjoy that you can’t be in earthmoving,” he says.
Contractor Vol.34 No.8 September 2010 |
When Kapiti Coast earthmoving contractor Rick Goodman turned 65 recently and at the same time celebrated 50 years of being self-employed, his family gave him a present that mere money couldn’t buy.
During its working life Rick’s first Costcutter (pictured right) was used initially as a farm truck then, with water cart attached, in subdivision work. 
From there Goodman Bros started doing small excavations for individual builders, subdivisional work, tidying up sections, and pulling out trees. In 1966 they landed their first major job – a private subdivision in Ngaio, Wellington – but in 1968, the year of the Wahine disaster, the project nearly put their fledgling company out of business.
“We would have had 50 men on the job. The terrain was very, very difficult and steep. Machines came up the gully when we started filling and they couldn’t get back out again because of the depth of the fill,” Rick says.
“I used to take them to work at a very early age but I always said, ‘You can’t work for me till you’ve got a qualification, so that if ever I went out of business you’d have something to fall back on.’ So my eldest son Stan became a civil engineer in surveying and soil compaction, Lance the second one became a fitter-welder, Vaughan a plumber and gas-fitter, and Marianne a quantity surveyor.”
“It really made us proud. It was a real feather in our cap because they [the awards] stand you in good stead when tendering in the future,” Rick says
If anyone was born to be an earthmover, it must surely be Rick Goodman. At 65 he doesn’t wish he’d done anything else with his life. He loves earth and the machines which move it.
Rick is confident his family company has a solid future, citing its specialisation in heavy earthmoving as its strength.