Matt Wilson hails from a family featuring plenty of engineers. He might spend the majority of his working week as a rural contractor, heading up Winton-based Superior Farm Maintenance & Sitework, but it’s clear he also has engineering nous in his DNA.
This is most evident when you consider what started as a bit of a ‘side hustle’ seven or eight years ago has now grown into a respected and reliable excavator attachment brand: Rhino. And every design the company produces for customers all over New Zealand (and in Australia and the Pacific Islands too) comes from the mind of Matt.
“Originally I thought I’d train to be a diesel mechanic, but I soon realised there was more money for a young fella in civil, so I headed in that direction instead,” he says.
“But working for some of the bigger companies, I could see real gaps in the customer service side of things from attachment suppliers. You could never get exactly what you needed. Pretty soon I figured that there was an opportunity there for someone who was working with the gear to meet the market.”
Initially designing rippers and root rakes, Matt soon moved onto excavator buckets.
Today the Rhino product line now includes a variety of buckets for both general and specialised tasks, including tilt and grab buckets, grapples and rakes. They’re all manufactured using tough wear resistant steel and suit excavators from 10-tonne to 35-tonne.
Matt favours Komatsu earth moving gear – and as such a lot of his R&D in the field is performed at the business end of his trusty Komatsu PC210-LC – but the Rhino difference is that each bucket is effectively custom designed for the client.
“It doesn’t matter what sort or size of machine our clients are working with, when they call us about a new attachment, they’re talking to me – the guy designing the bucket for them,” he explains. “I think a lot of people appreciate it if you’ve actually spent time on the tools, working with the attachments and using diggers for all sorts of jobs. We definitely don’t do the whole ‘one size fits all’ thing – we figure out what the customer needs and start there.”
Matt points to custom designed V buckets with a slightly different profile, or the attachment on the Komatsu today at a drainage job ahead of re-grassing work – a wider-than-standard bucket with a low profile, shallow back – as examples of designs he has come up with for specific purposes.
While Matt himself looks after the design side of things, Rhino manufactures its attachments in China, utilising the engineering experience of contacts Matt has been working with for 15 years.
“Tooling is so expensive these days, and in order to make a quality product for a good price, I knew from the start I’d have to look offshore to manufacture,” he says.
“The production systems in China are world class. I think the expectations of Western markets have shaped Chinese attitudes towards quality. Yeah, there was a bit of a stigma about something made in China back when I started, but I honestly don’t think those stigmas exist these days. The quality of attachments being made over there is better than a lot of Western firms these days.
“I’ve been up to the factory there 10, 15 times over the years and the advances they continually make are always impressive to see.”
Even when Matt is back home in Southland, the busy Superior Farm Maintenance & Sitework side of the enterprise means he and his team of seven are always on the move.
Covering a wide territory that stretches from Invercargill across to Te Anau and into Western Otago, Superior Farm Maintenance & Sitework do it all: silage pad construction, wintering barn site works, effluent pond construction, forestry roading, prep-work for access roads and driveways, track grading, dairy farm lane maintenance, ditch cleaning and – their specialty – end-to-end farm drainage works, including the supply and laying of pipes and drainage coils.
The variety of rural contracting work the company undertakes means that, as far as ‘proof of concept’ goes for Rhino products, the two entities create the perfect combination.
“We proudly use our own attachments on the contracting side of the business,” Matt continues. “Customers really like the fact that, not only have you spent time working on a digger so you know what works and what doesn’t, you’re also confident your own designs will do the job. We’re lucky to have a very loyal customer base around the region, and we wouldn’t want to risk our reputation by using gear that isn’t up to the task.”
While Matt says it’s been “a ripper of a season so far” on the rural contracting side of things, the opportunity to take Rhino to the next level is what’s really spurring him on in terms of his next steps.
“We’ve proven with Rhino over the last few years that there’s a market for quality attachments that are designed to spec for individual customers. I’ve built the business up in a measured way, primarily using social media and word of mouth. But yeah, I think it’s time to push Rhino to a bigger audience.”
Matt says he has recently hired a fulltime marketing manager and, after the approaching summer contracting season, will look to step back from Superior Farm Maintenance & Sitework in a day-to-day capacity in order to focus on growing the Rhino brand.
“We’ve always been a family business and that’ll remain the case, with my brother set to take over from me at Superior. And as far as a test bed for Rhino attachments goes, you can’t get a better environment, so I will always be close at hand. But there are some big opportunities for Rhino we can’t ignore – we had the general manager of Sany excavators from China looking at our buckets recently, for example.
“There are some good conversations going on, so we definitely want to make the most of those,” Matt concludes. “One way or another though, I’ll always be out in the field talking to customers. You can’t be successful in business any other way
Images by Cameron Officer