While it’s an Auckland family business, Takanini-based Steelspan has an outreach covering the whole of the country and spreading to the Pacific Islands for its in-house-designed kitset and fully built steel sheds. And it’s Steelspan’s ability to handle the whole package from design to lock-up – at least in the North Island, or from design to kitset delivery to site in the South Island and Pacific Islands – that’s been the key to its success.
“The greater part of our business offering is kitset supply, but we also have our own building team handling the entire process.”
“Clients appreciate having a single point of contact from design through to completion, and the fact that we’re able to do the actual construction as well throughout the North Island has been what’s fuelled our growth since we formed the business nine years ago,” Managing Director Patrick Whiteman says.
“The greater part of our business offering is kitset supply, but we also have our own building team handling the entire process from laying the concrete floor to fitting doors and windows. You could easily end up hiring a dozen different contractors on a single job, given the range of construction work that we do, but many of our clients are not that interested in a lot of people they don’t know running around the site – they prefer to deal directly with the people they know and trust.”
Steelspan is truly a family business, with not only Patrick and his wife, Sarita, in management roles, but their sons involved too – Riley, the CAD technician in charge of designing and planning, and Oliver, the on-site manager of the construction projects. Steelspan’s all-up staff of 10, the family plus six construction workers, including a fully qualified builder, have built their Steelspan sheds and warehouses everywhere from the slopes of Mount Ruapehu to the timber mills of Gisborne, the engineering shops of New Plymouth, to a chicken-processing plant in Foxton and commercial buildings in Kerikeri, Raglan and Tauranga.
“Many of the building components are acquired from local suppliers throughout New Zealand, and this helps with freighting to keep cost-effective,” Patrick says. He says Steelspan will custom design each shed or building to suit height, width and length requirements, ensuring innovative and cost-effective designs are within the reach of every client approaching Steelspan for an appraisal or advice.
Patrick has more than 25 years in the steel shed building game, starting out on the floor of a steel-rolling company, and working his way up to become its general manager for 12 years. He then decided it was time to launch out on his own, and he spent a couple of years consulting on steel buildings before establishing Steelspan in partnership with Sarita in 2016, initially supplying only the kitsets, and then adding construction services in response to requests from the clients.
Patrick says Steelspan has weathered the construction market downturn of the past couple of years better than most, possibly because the business activity is spread across both the residential and commercial sectors, and signs of recovery are beginning to appear in both. He says the company has plenty of capacity for increased production once the recovery occurs.
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