Garry and Cory Kennedy

Businesses like this keep many of Australia’s small towns alive. Evolving from a one-man regional operation into a local success story employing over fifty staff, Kennedy Trailers has become a multi-generational family dynasty, all born out of an insatiable curiosity and never-say-no work ethic.

When most of us sit down to watch TV, the only thought generally going through our minds is ‘where’s the remote?’, and that’s okay because being entertained is the goal.

When Cory Kennedy sits down in front of his television set, entertainment is the furthest thing from his mind. As he says, “I’ll sit there and think, ‘yes it’s a TV, but it’s a rear projection TV – I wonder how that works? I wonder where the projector actually is’. I’m constantly looking past what it actually is.”

That desire to inquire further was inherited from his father, Garry, who admits to having had an innovative way of playing with toys. “Mum always told the story of how she would buy me a truck from the toy store and by the time I was home I had the back pulled off and was trying to work out how I could put a log trailer on it,” he recalls.

For Garry back then “the hardest part was that I couldn’t weld. I was only six, so I would use bits of wood and pins to make the log trailer.”

Cory’s grandfather – Garry’s father – drove a logging truck and that fascinated him; some of his best memories are of being in the truck with his Dad and working in the shed with him, making something to fit somewhere.

Garry never set out to own a business. It was never a dream to turn his passion for dismantling toy trucks into a revenue stream. He was quite content to be paid for putting in an honest day’s work.

After leaving school, Garry did an apprenticeship as a boilermaker and “life was going along okay until 1980, when the business I was working for closed down. I needed to do something so I decided to have a go at mobile welding as my job.”

Even then for Garry it was a job, not a business. He bought an old welder, an old Falcon, a grinder, a gas set and “away I went. I worked doing maintenance on machinery, mostly at the abattoir and a rendering plant in town. A smelly, dirty job but the money was clean.

“I gradually got into doing more bush machinery work, travelling up into the forest and working on contractors’ equipment. I was doing a lot of travelling, repairing machinery and then one day this fellow asked me to build a log jinker.”

Given you’re probably reading this for entertainment – as you would generally do with your TV – so understanding the term ‘log jinker’ isn’t important, but to put you into the Kennedy frame of mind, a log jinker is basically a trailer designed to carry long logs. There are two types of jinker trailers, one for normal bitumen roads and the other for rough ground in the forest. Off-road trucks have up to nine axles to provide ground pressure and effective traction, and have highly specialised suspensions and tyres.

So Garry’s response to the request was, “yes I’ll have a go at anything.” Probably not the response from most of us, but that’s the Kennedy way.

And that’s how this trailer manufacturing business began. “That’s when I was working at the back of Mum and Dad’s house in a little twenty-by-twenty shed. I was always like that, thinking I’ll have a go at anything and I’ll do it.

“And even then, building that jinker trailer, my thought process was, ‘I can do that’, but very soon I thought, ‘what have I got myself into now?’ So, in the end I bought a frame from another manufacturer and worked around that and that was my first trailer.”

Garry made his second trailer by cutting up an old trailer and then to make what would become the Kennedy benchmark, a folding skel, Garry improvised. “They’re called skel trailers because it’s just a trailer frame, or skeleton, and I actually drew that out on the concrete, cut the beams and made it up.”

A proud Cory interrupts, saying, “would you believe Dad did the concept work for that on a cork-board with a Kellogg’s box and drawing pins?” Garry admits, “I drew it up to scale and it worked just about spot-on. I used the same concept when we made our first side-tipper as well.”

The business started to grow, and Garry was working ridiculous hours to meet the demand. He used to simply say: “it’s got to be done” and that was to become not only his personal mantra but also his nemesis.

Garry built the business on a promise of delivering, which was achievable when the demand was manageable, but demand was growing. Garry was still a one-man band and Cory says he was just running out of hours in a day.

Cory comments that “Dad would say, ‘we said we’d have it done, so we’ll have it done’, and it was getting tougher so that’s when my brother Lynden and I came into the business. I was nineteen and Lynden was twenty and we hit the ground running.

“Lynden runs the operations and the financial side, and he keeps a pretty tight ship, and I cover anything that’s not operational. These days Dad is purely sales.”
Both sons were being groomed for the business well before they joined, although it was never official. They were products of their father.

“Dad used to spend a lot of time at work, so we would always be out in the paddocks playing on the motorbikes, driving around in paddock-bombs and repairing them,” Cory recalls. “We’d even make up our own bull-bars and attach them. It was a very practical upbringing and probably set us up well to work in the business.”

Garry continues, “Cory has picked up a lot of the way I look at things, promising we’ll get it delivered on time, whereas Lynden has a strong logistics focus and keeps us from over-committing. He’s more realistic in understanding the pressures of delivery times.”

Cory confesses that “Lynden and I are like the yin and yang: two completely different personalities but it works really well. And it’s great to be working with Dad, it’s a great feeling to be working side-by-side, then being able to share a beer at the end of the day.”

The impact of the GFC was a defining moment for the Kennedy family business. Garry remembers the impact as being “brutal”. Cory says it was a turning point. “One day we had work, the next we didn’t,” he recounts.

“The international market for wood chips and timber took a major hit and Tasmania basically shut down overnight. I remember heading for Tassie with eight trailers on the books, by the time I stepped off the plane three people had cancelled. It was a stressful time.”

At one stage during the GFC they sold just four log trailers in a year, but they survived and soon started going through another growth phase. This time though, Cory believes they’re better equipped to handle it; they’ve got a better sense of business.

“Dad never came into this with a view to building a business, and when I came on board it was more about helping him survive. So the pressure for me has been to learn the business and in that area we’ve put in place a board with some very good people around us.

“I tap into them a lot and also other people in the industry who’ve been successful and even some of our customers. I’ve got a number of ‘mentors’, although I wouldn’t necessarily label them as mentors.”

Now, “we’re getting smarter at delegating: working out how to fix bottlenecks on the factory floor through ‘lean manufacturing’ and working on developing leadership teams. We have fifty-eight people working for us, six contractors and we’re helping a couple of the younger guys have their own businesses, setting them up as sub-contractors.”

Kennedy Trailers are now building about a hundred-and-fifty trailers a year, seeking overseas markets, and expanding their customer base. Garry looks at the business today and is amazed at how far it’s come. Happily he can report that “we’ve never gone into a new year with as much work as we have right now.”

Cory is excited about the challenges ahead. The business “recently moved into the heavy-haulage area by linking with wind farms in the renewable energy sector. So we’re building the equipment that transports from the port to the site, which is pretty specialised stuff.

“We’ve made some inroads into the overseas market, particularly in Brazil where we’ve signed up a manufacturer to build on our behalf. Basically we’re exporting our intellectual property, it’s not moving as quickly as we’d hoped but it’s moving in the right direction.”

Although Brazil is the biggest market in the world, “in some crucial areas, they’re not close to our technology at the moment and their log transport is quite basic. So our designs really need to be tailored to what they’re doing and we want to spend some more time to make the right product for them. So taking it a little slowly is okay.”

Kennedy Trailers have had a core customer base of about forty percent long-term clients and Cory puts that down to the fact they’re a family business, based on family values. As he states, “our focus is to help our customers fix their transport problems, whatever that takes and a lot of our innovation comes from that desire to solve their problem. It really comes back to that saying about ‘working smarter not harder’, which means making life easier for our customers.

“When Lynden and I got involved in the business it was turning over six million dollars a year, which was impressive considering it was pretty much just Dad. Now our turnover is twenty million and who knows where it’ll go.”

Garry couldn’t be happier with the way business is going and is quite content to let his boys run the show. He happily says “I work for them now. I always used to struggle with delegation; I just felt I was better off doing the job myself. Now I realise by doing that I was leaving something else undone and then you’d end up with two problems. Now with Cory and Lynden in control, I’m working between them, and delegation isn’t a problem.”

Cory confesses when he first joined the business his attitude to delegating was the same.
“We would work ten hours a day in the office and then spend six hours in the factory, but the business has way outgrown that now. It’s physically impossible to do that, and also not the smartest way for us to be working.”

Kennedy Trailers isn’t your typical business success story. Garry never had a dream to own a business and then Cory and Lynden came along to help out. The driving force for all three was, ‘if there was a way to do it, how hard could it be to find out?’ then just go ahead and do it.

It’s a business built on the philosophy of looking at something and wondering how it works, and Cory can even see that philosophy already emerging in the next generation of Kennedys. Proudly he notes that “my young son is just six and he’s got the same inquisitive mind, although he’s spoilt, he’s got Lego. The stuff he makes with that is incredible. We’ve been playing around with the wind farm stuff here at work and when I get home and he’s made a self-tracking blade trailer out of Lego.

“Who knows where he got that from.”

ADVICE
While making trailers came pretty easily to the Kennedys, turning that passion into a business was a lot more difficult. One thing they learnt early was to be humble.

When asked about their advice for others in business: “Get help!” They almost shout out in unison. That brought a few laughs as both remembered some difficult moments, then Cory expands by advising to be careful about who you approach for help.

He becomes more specific by adding, “that doesn’t mean go and employ a heap of people or get a consultant; it’s more about being prepared to talk to other people and being willing to learn from them. Networking really helped us.

“You can get stuck in your own little world and think you’re doing the right thing when you’re busy. We hear it a lot in the transport game, ‘I’ve got four trucks, never been so busy’, but are they making money? One thing we’ve learned is there is a difference between being busy and making money.

“Sometimes you can’t see that for yourself until someone else points it out. They’ll highlight that while you’re focused on one thing, you’re doing something else which is preventing you from moving forward.”

Cory and Garry stress that having a good work ethic is vital and also delivering on what you promise to do. Even before treating the business seriously, Garry lived by a motto that forced him to deliver on time, every time.

“‘Your name is your word and your word is your name’, it’s something I’ve lived by and have passed onto my sons. If you give your word and say it’s going to get done, then get it done. There’ll be problems along the way, work on the fix later, don’t let that be an excuse which affects your job.”

“The guys in the factory are sick of hearing ‘right’s right and wrong’s wrong!’ We do a lot of work, including a re-work sometimes, to ensure what we’re producing is not only right by regulations and standards but is also morally right by our customers,” Cory explains.