44 | CONTRACTING Excel Taranaki Local knowledge drives expansion Virginia Wright Rebecca Bar from Excel Taranaki who was Excel’s first female apprentice and now works as a technician. “To get ahead you have to risk something, you can’t stay in your comfort zone, and as opportunities have presented themselves he’s jumped at them.” The old saying of when one door closes another one opens was proven true once again in 2005 when, after 20 or so years working for a big international refrigeration and air-conditioning company, Stephen Frowde was offered a redundancy package, thereby creating the opportunity he’d been waiting for. “The vision was to get rid of the red tape,” says Blair Church, one of the four refrigeration engineers who joined him. “We wanted to have the ability to do things our way, so that we wouldn’t be working in Hawera with someone out of a Head Office in Singapore questioning whether we really needed that ladder or not” Stephen was also joined by Glenn Fendall, Phil Dixon and Dennis Carswell in the first Excel Taranaki Ltd. office in Hawera, which is still home base. The business now has 250 staff members spread across independently run Excel branches throughout the North Island. The company name refers to the way they view themselves explains Blair. “What we want to do is to excel at everything we do for our customers: at customer service and all aspects of the refrigeration and HVAC trade, (Heating, Ventilation, and Air-Conditioning), to make it the logical choice for customers to come to the Excel name.” Determined to avoid the perils of corporatisation they had found so annoying themselves, part of Excel Taranaki’s strategy as they’ve expanded has been to set up each of their new branches in partnership with someone who already lives and works in the area, thereby ensuring that they and all their branches remain wholly New Zealand owned and operated businesses with a depth of local knowledge. Central to every one of these businesses is achieving their core services to an extremely high standard, whether it’s installing large, new cooler rooms at the local freezing works, or finishing the complete HVAC fit-out from top to bottom of a new six story building in New Plymouth. It’s not surprising that they’re one of the North Island’s go-to companies for engineered solutions to refrigeration or HVAC systems that can be counted on to be both cost-effective and reliably efficient in the typically largescale buildings they work in. Excel Taranaki believe in giving back to the industry and to the community and one way they achieve this is through their extensive training and apprenticeship programmes. It typically has 30 apprenticeships learning and developing across the Excel Group, as well as a number of trade technician trainees. Excel puts time and money into giving them extra opportunities to upskill, known internally as “tooling, training, knowledge”. Additionally Excel Taranaki run an annual week of training when they bring together all their trainees and apprentices from across all branches for training exercises, familiarization with the sort of plants and sites they might end up working on and just as importantly to get to know one another as part of the Excel team. Six months ago Stephen instituted a big shift in focus for their apprentice training. “Obviously we’re a very male dominated industry,” says Blair. “He’s put a goal out there that he would like to get 50% female apprentices on board by 2025.” Blair’s clear that they will still take only the best candidate for the job, and also clear that this sort of bold move is both typical of Stephen and central to Excel’s success. “Stephen’s extremely ambitious and not afraid of failure or risk which I mean in a very good positive sense. “To get ahead you have to risk something, you can’t stay in your comfort zone, and as opportunities have presented themselves he’s jumped at them.” It’s testament to the clarity of Excel’s vision that despite their increasing size they still manage to keep that red tape to an absolute minimum. Alongside this the values of be safe, family, show respect, do the right thing and bring enthusiasm have created a culture that team members love being in. As Stephen and the rest of the Directors know, it is the people that make their business succeed. Plant, Pipe & Machinery, Scaffolding & Rigging, Welding, Fabrication & Installation
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