Bold step for mates into business ownership

Buying their own business was a bold but terrifying move for Logan Drysdale and Frank Anderton. But they took the plunge and are now proud owners of landmark business, Plimmerton Motors, north of Wellington.

Logan and Frank, mates as well as colleagues, were working for a Toyota dealership in Wellington last year and looking for the next step in their careers.

“We’d both got to the stage where we couldn’t progress any further,” Frank says.

“I was at Toyota for five and a half years and Logan had been there 10 years. I was foreman and Logan was workshop controller and we worked side by side managing a workshop of 20 guys.

“I went to Logan one day and said, let’s buy our own workshop and go halves in it.”

Both had experience in the management side of the dealership and had also worked as technicians, which has proved to be key.

Diving in

“We looked at a couple of workshops, but they didn’t turn out to be what we wanted, then this one in Plimmerton popped up.

“Next day we were in here having

It’s a main road landmark with a nostalgic gas station charmand a connection to the famous Kirkcaldie family of Wellington. The workshop sits on the tennis courts for the Kirkcaldie family beach house, Tangi Moana, around 1900, as Frank recently discovered when he had to install a new hoist in the workshop.

“There was no steel in the concrete and when we dug through the floor we found the old asphalt from the courts,” he says.

It was game, set and match for the court when farmer and mechanic Alexander Reith bought the property off the Kirkcaldie family and built the workshop in 1938.

MEMBER PROFILE: PLIMMERTON MOTORS

Work ethic

Eight months on and early fears of financial disaster are gone for Frank and Logan.

“After the first couple of months of work and seeing the results of the business and realising that we weren’t going to die in debt or be destitute we found much better,” Frank says.

And the years spent working for Toyota weren’t wasted either. Logan says it taught them to have a good work ethic and they have been able to increase the customer base.

Frank says supporting the community can help with the business, and they support the local school with sponsorship, and locals recognise the name.

“We do it at our own pace and call the shots and our problems are our own making and so are our successes. We get to take the credit and the benefits for our own successes, which is really, really nice,” Frank says.

It’s not the tidiest workshop, but it has a great patina with old posters on the walls, and a bonus of buying from Ian was the business came with all the tools.

“We will repaint the front at some point but the interior has a charm to it and we will try and retain as much of it as we can, but there are some modernisations we need to do.”

Both say the move into the partnership has reignited their passion for the industry and even though they still work as hard as ever, ownership makes all the difference.

“I would highly recommend getting into your own business for young guys looking for something else, so long as have had a good amount of experience,” adds Frank.

It is an enormous two-storey home, recognised by the Porirua City Council as a heritage building, but it is a treasure that few people notice. Designed to be a holiday house for quiet weekends at the beach in Plimmerton, it is ironic that it now sits at the edge of one of the busiest roads in the country.