At 6.00 am on chilly winter mornings the best place to be is in bed with your eyes shut. But at 6.00 am each morning our team stand together in the cold darkness preparing themselves for another great day. I am in awe of my crew, and I respect the work they do. This is the time where Dutton Stormwater operators prove why we are who we are and why we are where we are. Soon the sun will shine bright again and we will dream of a bit of rain.

Here’s a picture of Masoud. I am always reminded of our resident Frenchman’s quote: “It’s only rain, you’re not gonna melt!”

Travels around Aotearoa

Our crew returned from a massive trip around the country servicing the stormwater devices for our national customers like Gull, NPD, Ryman, and The Church of the Latter-Day Saints. We are excited to announce that from March 2023 the duration of these trips will be halved.

We will be setting up a Class 3A truck in Christchurch which will be able to service any site. We have some of our best crew interested in flying the flag for Dutton Stormwater in the South Island and we are excited about the opportunity to grow our business and continue to add value to our customers in the South Island.

Goodbye to Sonny Chan

We have had to say goodbye to Sonny Chan. Sonny joined us 11 years ago when he decided to leave labouring on a farm in Hanau. He started as a Lollipop man at Victory Road on his first job and he ended up as our Health & Safety Manager. You will meet many people throughout your life, you will only ever meet one Sonny. Sonny is the best. I wish Sonny the best success, joy, and happiness for his new journey. My heart is always warm when I think of Sonny. Thank you, my friend.

Welcoming new crew

1. Nat is helping Claire in the accounts team. Welcome.
2. Mike has joined the Operations team and is driving our vacuum trucks. Great to have you on board.
3. Lucie is assisting the Operations team to plan and get work done. She is clear and very organised. Welcome.
4. Grant has come in to run the sales department. Full disclosure – Grant has been on my radar for many years. The time is obviously right.
5. Alok is a great Vaccum Truck Operator with a sunny attitude. What a great fit for our team.
6. Rupinder is a versatile technician who can drive a truck. I am so happy to have him on board.
7. Amy has been with us a while but has never been in front of Roman with the camera. Amy is super-efficient and amazing at asking customers to pay.

I want to wish you all the best until our next newsletter.

Thank you to our customers for your loyalty.

Thank you to our suppliers for working with us.

Thank you to our trucks for working so hard.

Thank you to my staff for directing our trucks.

Thank you.

Ed

We are a premier sponsor of the Stormwater Conference and this year we were lucky enough to be hosted in the Garden City at the marvellous Te Pai. We loved every minute of our time in Christchurch.

The lectures and workshops were enlightening as usual. The discussion hosted by Mike Hannah from Stormwater 360 on maintenance was far too short. We listened with interest to industry experts discuss the barriers to maintenance. It became apparent that the real pains when it comes to maintenance are live water in a vault and space. Hopefully these will be some considerations engineers will think about when specifying and designing these stormwater treatment devices.

Aside from the serious business of stormwater there was of course the spinning wheel hosted by Dutton Stormwater.

If your business card was pulled out of our box you had the chance to spin the wheel and whatever number it landed on, you multiply by $100. This lucky lady spun the 8!

 

As Ed prepares to visit his phenomenal parents in South Africa, we would like you to know you are in good hands.

Our GM Tracy will be running the business, and we will be doing everything we can to provide our unique ‘Dutton Service’.

We have had another wonderful Stormwater Conference in the beautiful Garden City where we learned from various industry experts. It was amazing to have a large contingent of crew down in Christchurch, especially considering our imminent expansion south next year! The personal highlight of the conference was the whole crew dancing in a circle at Fat Eddies until closing time!

New Vacuum Truck en route to Auckland.

We are trialling a new model of working. In partnership with the Waimea Group we have hired a marvellous 6500l vacuum truck. This truck is currently in Rotorua and is making its way back to Auckland, where it will focus on Soak holes!

We are committed to keeping New Zealand’s drains and filters clean.

View our Stormwater Maintenance Services

As we near the conclusion of quarter one of 2022 I would like to reach out to our customers and thank them for working with us during this outbreak. It has been a period of growth in both staff and turnover. It has also been a period of adjustment for our company.

One of our measures of how happy our customers are is the number of compliments our team get. For the last two months we have been receiving almost a compliment per day – which must be a good sign!

Thank you for keeping our spirits high!

Working smart in a pandemic

We have created a staggered start system where we have the ops crew working in “bubbles”, and the office is split into two, to avoid the risk of Omicron decimating our whole organization. Everyone, to a person, is working hard to be positive and do whatever they can to keep the business functioning.

Our services are still in high demand and we are ahead our workflow target for 2022 to date. Our operations crew continues to forge on bravely, despite feeling the effects of Omicron in this department. As hard as we try, we are getting positive cases, but work is still being done.

We work weekends too

At the beginning of this year we created a weekend call-out system. We have an administration person rostered on every weekend, and we a driver who can come and resolve your problem. Please call us if you have an issue on the weekend! We will sort it.

Welcoming new staff

We have taken the time to employ three outstanding people who will join us over the next three months. We will put pictures up of these individuals as they start. I am confident they will help grow our business and they will understand the responsibility that lies on their shoulders to make this company better than when they started.

Thank you to our wonderful people

Once again, I want to thank the amazing team that is Dutton Stormwater for the hard work they are doing. I want to thank them for the constant adjustments they must make. I understand your frustrations. We have come through tougher times than this, and we will come through this with our heads held high, and another knot in our story which makes us the special company we are.

Best regards,

Ed

In a year characterised by change, our company has understood the importance of providing as much certainty as possible. This certainty provides a level of comfort for customers, suppliers and most importantly for staff. We have aimed to do this by shattering all norms and benchmarking ourselves, with ourselves! These are the commitments we made:

• We have committed to our staff by promising to keep them at all costs.
• We have committed to our customers that we will be completely up to date by Christmas Eve.
• Our crew have committed to our country’s safety by all becoming vaccinated.

We have provided as much clarity to the crew as early as we could on what we would be asking of them when they got back to work. We have placed our trust and confidence in each other understanding that we are in this together and this is an opportunity for us to defy the odds again.

Finally, we have been honest with all our stakeholders – staff, banks, customers, and suppliers. I want to thank the staff, and our wonderful customers for persevering with us this year. We have grown.

Part of this growth has been personal for our crew. We have implemented our Legacy Programme where we have divided ourselves into groups and discussed James Kerr’s book, Legacy. This book discusses leadership lessons from the most successful sports team in the world. This book has fifteen lessons in leadership which we discuss on a Wednesday morning after our Wellness Wednesday. One of the enduring messages I have taken from this book has been to be a good ancestor. James Kerr’s description of Whakapapa is beautiful:

He suggests we are all standing arm in arm with our ancestors going in one direction and our future generations going in the other. “At this present moment, the sun is shining on us. However, the sun will set on our time, and we need to ensure that we have left this place in a better state than we found it.”

Apart from our own personal growth, we are on track to have grown by 10% from this time last year.

With this growth and Auckland’s unitary plan we have seen the need to have a vehicle that can suck and clean in low car parks. Hence the arrival of Trailer Trash. This 2000l vacuum unit fitted with a water-blaster has a height of 1.85m and is towed easily behind a Ute.

Carbon Neutrality by 2030

We have also set ourselves the ambitious goal of our company being carbon neutral by 2030. To this end we have replaced two of our combustion engines with electric vehicles. Our plan is to convert all our utility vehicles by 2025. From 2025 to 2030 we will embark on converting the trucks to a carbon neutral option.

We are also very proud to support Sustainable Coastlines, and really enjoyed our first coastline clean up as a team alongside Sustainable Coastlines and the local community. (Photo above).

New team members

We have introduced new staff who have made a major difference in our team.

   

 

• Edwin Tugadi is a new vacuum truck driver for us, and he brings a wealth of experience from Christchurch.
• Orlando Segarra is our new technician, and he brings experience, strong work ethic and intelligence to our company.
• Mahdi Hafzi is our new technician who is resilient, consistent and a hard worker.
• We have also managed to get Mike Beeston back out of hiding and he is now here doing what he does best, driving a large truck!
• Amy Pervan is our phenomenal accounts assistant who has brought a wealth of experience, and extremely high standards. She is so efficient and has been a massive help to Claire.

We have introduced a new ritual whereby staff who come on board with us are officially presented with their Dutton Stormwater hoodies after they have been with us for two months. They are now part of our story, and it is their responsibility to leave the hoodie in a better place than it was.

Highlights of 2021

One of the highlights for 2021 was the light Dutton Stormwater shone on the Stormwater Conference in Tauranga. We made our presence felt. On the night of the dinner, I took the time to stand back and marvel at our table. We had 10 of the most interesting, brilliant people I know talking about stormwater, and I felt proud. I think it shows in this photo with Gillian Blythe, Water NZ’s CEO.

We have also celebrated a resilient year with our company Christmas party, hosted with home cooked food at our home, organised by Claire and with the food served by a beautiful catering team of Dutton Stormwater children!

We wish you and your family a Merry Christmas and rejuvenating holiday!

Thank you to everyone who has worked so hard for us this year. Thank you to my daughters who support me, and most importantly, thank you to Kate for the enduring support and love you give me.

I am blessed.

Ed.

July has seen Dutton Stormwater attain another proud milestone. We have finalised our sponsorship of Sustainable Coastlines, a registered New Zealand charity doing incredible work which all Kiwis benefit from.

The protection of our natural environment is at the heart of Dutton’s company values, and we want to do all we can to achieve this. Sustainable Coastlines is on a mission to take better care of our coastlines and waterways. The Visions of both parties have an align – Both love the coasts and oceans, and want them litter free.

Sustainable Coastlines is a New Zealand charity that exists to protect the moana we all love by bringing people together to reduce plastic pollution and other litter.

Their goal is to see 60% less litter on the coastlines of Aotearoa New Zealand by 2030. They intend to achieve this by empowering communities to take action for their local beach through coastal clean-up events, educational programmes, public awareness campaigns, and litter data collection.

Since Sustainable Coastlines began in 2009, their volunteers have removed more than 1.7 million litres of litter from coastlines across Aotearoa. Most commonly, that litter includes things like food wrappers, polystyrene, rope, bottle tops, and cigarette butts. Removing this harmful litter from our marine environment makes for happier ecosystems and healthier wildlife.

But to stop the flow of plastic pollution and other litter to our coastlines, we need to look upstream. When people attend a beach clean-up and see the problem first-hand, it sparks behaviour change. Alongside the changes people can make in their everyday lives, Sustainable Coastlines enables people to ask the right questions and take action to influence broader change.

Litter data collection is a big part of this. We know there’s a problem, but having specifics about the litter in our waterways, our stormwater drains, and on our beaches helps people make decisions about where to focus their efforts. This is why Sustainable Coastlines is proud to deliver Litter Intelligence, Aotearoa’s first national litter database, which enables citizen scientists to collect litter data at their local beach. This data is available for anyone to use, and the charity works with communities, schools, businesses, councils, and government to inspire change in behaviour, policy, and practices to improve the litter problem in the places we love.

We are particularly interested in the “Love Your Coast” programmes, which target marine litter through beach clean-ups and education. Hundreds of passionate people pick up tonnes of litter which has reached the coast. However, there is a ribbon of catchment just beyond the beach awaiting the next rain. Gathered in the silt and sediments from our roads are fine pollutants, which settle in the stormwater catch pit drains in the street gutters. They contain lead, zinc, copper and other heavy pollutants. These are the invisible “nasties” which often cause our beach closures and harm our marine life.

Part of the Dutton Stormwater support of Sustainable Coastlines vision is to provide the technical expertise and equipment to assist with cleaning up these drains closest to the target beaches. We will be supplying trucks and crew to specific events to provide some heavy lifting and support beyond the beach. This is to ensure the hard work of all the people doing the clean-ups is not undone in the next downfall, and that we are all working to our strengths to meet our shared vision of protecting our waterways, beaches and oceans.

If you have an interest in supporting Sustainable Coastlines in their mission, please contact steph@sustainablecoastlines.org, or at 0274 912058.

Most importantly, let’s all do the small things in our daily life to ensure our stormwater runoff is as clean and litter free as possible.

Eventually, it all drains to the ocean.