68 | T T Virginia Wright Filling a gap by fixing damaged drains Enviroflo is well equipped to sort any drainage issues. Enviroflo CONTRACTING “We started with a shovel and some pipe and hand-dug everything to begin with, then as money allowed we hired more staff and bought excavators and trucks and everything you need.” Six years ago, friends and colleagues Ryan Gebbie and Hayden Greig were working in a large Christchurch civil drainage company when they saw a narrow gap in the market they thought they could work together to fill. By that stage, the city was discovering the extent of unseen problems caused by the earthquakes in the network of drains and pipes below ground, which were starting to make themselves felt. “People don’t think about drains as long as their toilet’s flushing and sink is draining, but you can get a break in a pipe that might take years before the tree roots have grown enough to cause issues and something goes wrong,” explains Ryan. The Earthquake Commission (EQC), now known as the Natural Hazards Commision (NHC), started a drainage program looking to identify earthquake-damaged drains for homeowners. Ryan and Hayden were well-equipped to take part, with their combination of Ryan’s project- management background and understanding of pipe networks, and Hayden’s skills as a qualified drain-layer. Along with Ryan and Hayden, came Ryan’s brother-in-law Joe, a builder by trade. After a year they took on another couple of friends, and then grew steadily before expanding rapidly enough to be named in Deloitte’s 50 fastest growing companies for 2022. “We started with a shovel and some pipe and hand-dug everything to begin with, then as money allowed we hired more staff and bought excavators and trucks and everything you need,” says Ryan. Ryan’s project-management background gave him an understanding of what systems they needed as they grew, in order to avoid bottlenecks and keep hitting their targets as the work flowed. He puts their success down to finding good staff along the way, including having a lot of friends and family among the now 30-strong staff. Many came from other trades, bringing with them the knowledge of what it means to work hard and do what’s needed to get the job done. Ryan says that being competitive with their rates, expanding further in the new-builds market, and collaborating with other similar companies with sufficiently different skill sets for the synergy to work, are all key strategies for Enviroflo. Now, they are not looking to grow so much as to ensure that jobs keep coming in, allowing them to concentrate on producing the good-quality work they are known for. “People are still living in these houses when we’re working on them, and it’s a fairly disruptive process, so they just want to see everything nice and tidy and looking the best it possibly can – so we work really hard to do that,” Ryan explains. Despite the mess of dirt created by digging down to pipes a metre underground, Enviroflo aims to leave nothing more than a tidy trench line behind them, with their drainage team closely followed by one of their team of three landscapers taking care of the rest. Fences are put back, gardens tidied back up and the trench line sprayed with fertilised grass seed, which Ryan says generally takes only a couple of weeks to grow as long as it’s watered. It’s all part of the well-resourced, systems-based, efficient, people-friendly service Enviroflo likes to offer to their clients, whether for repairs, or the drainage needs of a new build. www.pipemedic.co.nz No-dig Pipe Repair Solutions. We have a wide range of capabilities to handle all trenchless pipeline repairs. Before you dig or remove surfaces, PipeMedic can diagnose your pipeline and offer a repair strategy that can be fully trenchless or partly trenchless for the most time and cost effective solution.
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