62 | CIVIL CONSTRUCTION Diamond Civil T T Hugh de Lacy Major contract a boost for business Diamond Civil has its headquarters on Goodshed Road in Upper Hutt, and a depot in Featherston in the Wairarapa. “We’re lucky to be involved in KiwiRail’s upgrade of the Wairarapa line, trenching and installing combined services for the new signals.” Two generations of two-way trust between family and staff is the glue holding the Hutt Valley’s Diamond Civil infrastructure construction business together in the face of a market that founder Ian Woods says is currently “dire”. Ian is a hands-on person, who once had 20 staff until “the stress nearly killed me,” and he trimmed Diamond Civil back to its present dozen staff, including himself, wife Anne, daughter Emily, and sons Jesse and Alex. “I struggled to cope with that many staff, but downsizing has left me able to focus on the family nature of the business where we treat the staff as if they were family members too,” Ian says. “Now that Anne and I have our children in the business, we’re seeing the second-generation thing show up with one of our long-term worker’s own son joining the firm.” Diamond Civil has its headquarters on Goodshed Road in Upper Hutt, and a depot in Featherston in the Wairarapa, where most of its staff members are currently based. The company’s plant includes six trucks and eight excavators, and its list of specialties includes foundation construction, concrete cutting and drilling, earthmoving and site preparation, trenching, driveways and retaining walls. “The market’s in an awful state, but we’re lucky to be involved in KiwiRail’s upgrade of the Wairarapa line, trenching and installing combined services for the new signals – in fact, if we didn’t have this contract we’d be looking seriously at having to downsize to survive. “Instead, we’ve been able to take on four more staff, because the contract was big enough to invest in new equipment and upskilling,” Ian says. The contract work, expected to last about six more months, involves trenching and installing a 43km duct route along the entire railway line between the north end of the Remutaka Tunnel and Masterton. “It’s a spectacular achievement for a little family business like ours to be involved in a project like this,” he says. Ian started his working life as a cable-jointer, specialising in the trenching, hauling and ducting of telecommunications networks. He got the chance to acquire his own business on the death of the owner of a Porirua company, Diamond Services, which came with two diggers, two trucks and the tail-end of a contract installing street lighting ducting at the Dowse Interchange project for the Fletcher Higgins consortium, the main contractor. Ian is happy with the current size of the company, which he re-named Diamond Civil. While he acts as managing director, Anne and Emily handle the administration, Alex is one of the main machine operators, and older son Jesse has recently been appointed operations manager, based mainly in Featherston. Along with his managerial responsibilities, Jesse is studying for his Civil Engineering Diploma through the New Zealand Institute of Highway Technology, part of the Western Institute of Technology of Taranaki (WITT). It reflects his long-term fascination with technology, which enabled him to guide Diamond Civil through the process of learning to use the newly installed GPS guidance in its machinery. The contract work involves trenching and installing a 43km duct route along the entire railway line between the north end of the Remutaka Tunnel and Masterton.
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