From the ground up

We catch with up Daniel Gilligan from Tasman Fencing and Landscaping, who has a passion for the industry that is contagious. He shares his love for fencing, his family, and his plans for the future. It's looking to be as busy as ever.

It's blue skies all around on-site at idyllic Grindelwald today, a beautiful little suburb situated approximately 15 minutes from the city of Launceston. Attach2 are here to catch up with Daniel Gilligan, owner-operator of Tasman Fencing and Landscaping, where the team are taking out the whole boundary fence and replacing it with a new wallaby-proof one. We have a yarn about how he and his company navigate such a diverse range of work, and with what gear.

Being in the fencing and landscaping business for around four years now, Tasman Fencing and Landscaping have grown exponentially, and now offer large-scale earthworks, cartage, land clearing, and slashing. Daniel talks to us about the company expansion, plans for the future, and his overall passion and love for the job – so much so that he sometimes loses track of time.

"The problem is, I love my job too much. We will be on a job and get distracted at work and then the missus calls up - where am I? It's because I'm sitting in the excavator tearing through some trees or something."

So where did this passion start?

Growing up on a dairy farm, Daniel was in and out of tractors since he could walk. Disinterested in farming, he moved over to Tassie around 12 years ago – coming over for a holiday and then never going back. Being around his fiancé's side of the family, who were all builders and the like, he found himself drawn to that kind of work. His dad was a bit guttered that the interest in fencing all started after he had retired from the dairy farm!

Daniel moved to Scottsdale, working in farm fencing. Right as the COVID pandemic began to unfold – he decided to branch out on his own. For roughly two years, It was just him, but the workload quickly became too much.

"I put one person on which became two which became three. Between this, another little excavator, and our big tractor, we're more than busy at the moment! We just upgraded to buying a heap of new machinery and I'm now getting into the bigger work so it's been rather fun. We work here, there, and everywhere" he explains.

Describing his main responsibilities as "keeping the other guys entertained,'' Daniel's passion for the job is evident. He is happy to be kept busy - "I need a holiday. I need two holidays" he says with a grin.

"Mostly, I just sort all the work out and my guys pretty much do it all for us – With the machinery work you've got a couple of competent operators, chuck them in there and they're more than adequate at doing anything we do, then we just follow along - building any fences or doing any landscape work afterward. There's been endless work ever since we started."

It has not only been the constant influx of jobs keeping Daniel occupied – with a new bundle of joy on the way, it is clear that his family is also a big source of pride.

"My Mrs. is a big fan of when I come home with a new excavator, she always loves that one. We've got our second child due in a fortnight, so I'll be wrapped up with that one for a little bit!"

The kids love nothing better than playing in the excavator on a weekend or wanting to go in the truck with Dad. "The kids are always around and my daughter just wants to come to work constantly. She would love nothing better than running through here all day and being a little ruckus! I'll get her on the tools one day though, when she grows up a little bit. She's very excited for the new baby whenever they rock up, any day now."

Living in Scottsdale also has other perks. Being just 20 minutes from the ocean and an hour from St Helens, they take the boat out regularly.

"We've got the buggies, which the daughter just loves going in. She's a bit of a rev head like her dad" he jokes.

Other than keeping the kids occupied and his team entertained, starting a business during a global pandemic came with some challenges. Daniel laughs as he explains, "It'd be boring if there wasn't any! The business has luckily been very well-timed in what we've done over the past few years. Even with COVID, I thought it was a tricky time to start our business, but what we do is so specialised. We're always in demand.

Meeting the right people at the right time contributed to the successful growth of the business, although some other hurdles did prove to be a barrier to keeping things on track.

"There have been a few tough times, like when I had to wait for the new excavator that took six-ten months to get here. As soon as it arrived, it went straight to work and was flat out. Luckily everything worked out well with timing. Now that I've got the extra staff on to deal with it, it's been very good since then."

The satisfying nature of the work Daniel and the team do together means that they get to completely transform wild landscapes into tidy and finished sites. We wanted to know more about the process as well as the tools required for such specific work. He talks more about the site they are on today, as well as some other projects he and the team have worked on.

"This place just gets smashed with the wallabies out here. The client wants to be able to grow something more than bracken fern. We've been ripping out the big pile of tea tree, the old fence, and a cubby house. We've been raking it together and piling everything up – In another day or so, we can get it all ship shape."

Another project he mentions was at one of the big golf courses out near Bridport - creating five kilometres of laneway through the scrub. "It was nice and sandy to work out there in the middle of Summer, but I didn't get to play any golf, so that was rather disappointing!" he laughs.

So what machines and equipment does Daniel run to cater to such a variety of tasks on-site, day to day?

"We run the All-in-One bucket and the Heli-Tilt on this machine behind me and they just go hand in hand. They're perfect for each other. With the Heli-Tilt you can get full right angles - even when we're just carving back batters and trying to dig a tree root out of the ground with the ripper you can get right in underneath pretty much anything!"

Daniel set up his excavator with a Heli-Tilt about two years ago, and says it's 'never missed a beat.' Adamant that it will go on every excavator purchase going forward, he explains the difficulties he has had with other hitches.

"On my other little excavator, it has a different brand hitch and it can't get the right angles, and the spring that's inside the hitch down in there - it collects rocks. You go to release the bucket and it won't release, because the springs are all caught up. With the Heli-Tilt, it's got a better system that can't really catch anything - well it's yet to fail us in any way and if it was going to fail we would have made it fail by now."

After talking to some of his good mates over on the mainland who were regional managers of some big civil companies, Daniel came to learn that All-in-One buckets exist for excavators. He purchased the Attach2 All-in-One bucket about a year ago, after contemplating what would work the best for their business as they specifically wanted a log-grab.

"We had a look and it just seemed like the perfect tool for what we do. The amount of times you have to dig a hole and then put something in it, or pull something out, or tree stumps - especially with the roots. You could just dig them out without hopping out of the machine and changing hitches. It does the job very well. You just have full control over what you're doing."

Compared to competitors' buckets, Daniel appreciated the heaviness of the Attach 2 All-in-One, explaining how a bucket constructed with more steel is what he requires

for the specific work he undertakes - the bucket's versatility even contributed to getting the company certain jobs.

"It's the uniqueness that gets us a fair bit of work. We've got a post driver that goes on the excavator too and you can get it in anywhere, no matter how hard the ground is. These All-in-One buckets - everyone should have one. You'll get an infinite amount of work with them. It saves you back lifting everything at the end of the day. They're worth their weight in gold."

The steel makes the buckets strong, sure – but they are also flexible in the way that they can adapt to the materials they need to interact with. Daniel tells us what this looks like in action, both tough and gentle - powerful enough to pull steel fences out, yet also able to handle fragile objects carefully.

"If there are steel posts to reuse, you can be so delicate that you can pull them out without even taking the galvanized coating off, especially with the Heli-Tilt. You could pick up a PVC pipe with it and not bust it. At the same time, you can grab a hold of a concreted-in piece of railway iron and just pull on it and she'll come out."

So what about the wrap-around service? Asking Daniel about his experience with the A2 sales team, he mentioned the importance of buying locally, and he was impressed by the speediness of the product's arrival. After being told it would be a two or three-week wait for the All-in-One bucket, it ended up coming in just three days. "I couldn't believe it when it rocked up. They must have teleported it down or something!" he jokes. He could hardly wait to get in and start having a play once the equipment had arrived.

"When I first saw the bucket, sitting on the crate there, it was like Christmas time for me. I got too excited about it and we went straight away to work with it. I couldn't find anything to pull out, so I went and found a blackberry bush to take out, just because I wanted to do something with it".

Not having to use the warranty service yet, Daniel is appreciative of how the team will still call and check in to make sure everything is running smoothly. "They always just make the courtesy phone call now and again. A couple of the guys have dropped past when we've been at work a few times and said gidday and seen how we're going - it's always nice to put a face to a name."

Due to the sometimes unpredictable nature of the work the team does, occasionally Daniel will need to order equipment for specific jobs and have them on site as soon as possible. The fact that Attach2 have readily available stock on hand was a big bonus. Expressing his thoughts on the 3-year warranty on the bucket, he quips: "If you're going to break something, three years is a long time to figure out if it's going to break!"

Daniel talks to us about his plans going forward; "We want to expand some more – even just to cope with our current workload. I'll be getting another bigger excavator just to do the larger work a bit easier, probably around the 10-tonne class - then we can still float it easily enough with our truck and trailer. For the rest of my gear, there's no reason why we wouldn't run any of the Attach2 stuff. There's just there's

no point in buying anything else. I just want to keep growing the business and keep on keeping on."

The future is looking as busy as ever for Daniel, with a constant influx of work, a daughter to train on the tools, and a new baby on the way – his sights are set on continuous expansion. Let's hope he can fit in one (or two) of those holidays!