He was 19 when he rented space and opened a vehicle workshop in Gore, hiring a qualified mechanic who was 10 years older than him. In an ironic twist, he — the boss — served his apprenticeship under his employee.
Now, at 32 and living with his family near Dunedin, he is at the helm of HVS Motors which has grown to become one of the largest import sales companies in New Zealand.
The business was fourth in Deloitte’s Master of Growth index with 546% revenue growth over the past five years, and 37th on the Deloitte Fast 50 index. It was also the fastest-growing retail and consumer products business for Dunedin and the lower South Island.
The story of HVS Motors is extraordinary.
Its beginnings are in Gore, where Mr Gardyne grew up on a sheep and cropping farm and attended Gore High School.
At school, he did the Gateway course which provided pupils access to workplace learning. It was an opportunity to ‘‘wag a day a week’’ and spend time in a workshop in town.
He left school after year 12 and went farming for two and-half years — ‘‘I’m meant to be a farmer really’’ — before deciding to start his own workshop.
He ran it for a few years and it ‘‘went all right’’. But he needed time to grow up and become an adult and ‘‘learn some things about life’’; he had made some mistakes and learned from them, he recalled.
Mr Gardyne started doing some vehicle trading, initially in Gore, and made some contacts in the importing industry.
Selling the vehicles was not that complex — the biggest barrier was getting them ready to sell and being able to deliver them; HVS Motors kept building its own solutions to that, he said.
In 2017, the business started the year with a three-year strategy but achieved all those goals in one year. It was ‘‘chaos’’ and coincided with the arrival of Mr Gardyne and wife Kaye’s first child.
The business started that year with seven staff, a workshop and a branch in Gore. It ended it with three branches, plus a compliance centre and paint shop in Timaru, and 40 staff.
‘‘That was quite wild, I’m not entirely sure how that happened. It was pretty reckless growth,’’ he said.
A hailstorm in Timaru in 2019 saw 180 cars ‘‘written off’’ but, three days later, he opened an assessment centre for AA and Vero, working with both organisations, and hired 30 extra people to manage their way through that.
There were now 45 staff based in Timaru and what had previously been a derelict factory was now a hive of activity, the business and staff all contributing to the South Canterbury community, he said.
The business now had about 20% of market share of imports in to the South Island. Last March, it managed to hit a target of selling more than 400 cars in a month; he wanted to hit 500 cars a month by next March.
Mr and Mrs Gardyne had maintained complete ownership of the business, which now employed nearly 100 staff in various centres in the South Island. Revenue was forecast to be about $75 million this year.
The business had grown as the couple’s family had grown, and they were now expecting their third child. At times, they had lived in a house truck with their young family — including out the back of their workshop in Gore during last year’s Covid-19 lockdown — but they now lived on a lifestyle property near Dunedin.
After such a whirlwind and various acquisitions, Mr Gardyne said the focus now was on consolidating. He was keen to venture into the North Island in the ‘‘next year or two’’.
He believed his age when he went into business was an advantage, as he was ‘‘young and hungry’’. Asked for the key to his success, he said it was probably being ‘‘disciplined and focused at keeping at it’’.
Every cent had been reinvested and he had worked hard and ‘‘sacrificed a bit of lifestyle’’. He and his wife were not really materialistic — ‘‘People often do business to make money, right? Ideally you do need to make some money ... fundamentally I do business because I enjoy the business side of it’’, he said.
He had also had some very good staff and hiring a Japanese buyer had been a very positive decision. Being able to deliver 400 cars every month and support the buyers of those vehicles was logistically quite a challenge, along with getting them out of Japan and preparing them for sale.
It was really more of a logistics and manufacturing business than retail, he said.
Mr Gardyne admitted he did not know why he was so driven.
‘‘It’s so insanely psycho to do some of this, I’m surprised I managed to get on OK. I’m really still a 19-year-old trying to start a workshop.’’
