I’m a Whangārei local, born and bred. I started out as a coachbuilder, working on motorhomes, truck bodies, and minibuses. After finishing my apprenticeship, I switched to building, and I’ve been in the trade ever since – over 30 years now. I’ve run my own building company doing everything from new builds and renos to light commercial jobs and spec homes.
  
A few years back, though, the body started complaining, so I started thinking about what I could do next. While visiting my daughter and son-in-law in Australia, they had me doing a few jobs around the place to keep me busy. I wrote up a list of materials but then my son-in-law said he would sort out the concrete and he booked the concrete taxi. I’d never seen or heard of this before – this truck pulled up, mixed exactly what we needed, and that was that. No mess, no waste. No leftover wheelbarrow full of concrete you end up dumping behind the shed. Just enough to get the job done, right there on site!

On the flight home, the idea hit me – could I do this in Whangārei? I looked into it, asked around some of the Tradespeople I know in bigger cities, and no one had heard of anything like it in New Zealand. 

I looked into the patent situation and was advised that a Concrete Courier had not been registered in New Zealand, so I copyrighted it and registered the truck and logo here and got straight to work.

I teamed up with an engineer and built the unit with him, and I was the apprentice on the job. My thinking was: if I help build it, I’ll know how to fix it if something goes wrong.

The Concrete Courier is a custom-built body on a Hino 500. It holds about 2–2.5 cubic metres of builders mix, 30 bags of cement, and 450 litres of water. The machine mixes concrete on-site in small batches – around three wheelbarrow loads at a time – with no waste, making it a practical and environmentally friendly option.
  
We’re not competing with the big concrete trucks – this is for the smaller jobs including: retaining walls, garden paths, shed slabs, spa pool pads, heat pump pads, footings, fence posts and deck piles etc. We stay on-site until the job’s done and only mix what you need. No pressure, no rush, and no leftover mess to deal with.