Who is Sir Timothy William Wallis?
Hurricane Tim, as his friends nicknamed him, is recognised as the entrepreneur that created the deer farming industry in New Zealand. Born in rural New Zealand, the son of a Timber Merchant, he has made a significant business empire through gut instinct, learning on the job, common sense, seat of his pants flying and not a lot of formal education. His story is appealing to many New Zealanders because it is one of a man who works hard with his hands and his head, taking on the wild frontier of New Zealand and gathering a following of like minded and loyal individuals.
Despite the outward appearance of being a risk taker with an unsophisticated approach to business, closer analysis reveals a man who recognised opportunities and capitalised on disruptive technologies to exploit those resources. The history of his businesses shows an ability to see the problems of the future, envision a solution and bring together a team of people who share that vision. Even more than that, he not only set out to prove that deer farming was a viable industry in New Zealand but developed and exported the technology and processes that he had developed, influencing the development of the global deer products markets.
Wallis is that he is a determined fighter. He has had several crashes over the years in helicopters and vintage planes, some of which have left him permanently disabled but none of which have been able to subdue the energy and ambition of the man. He is a person who is very good at turning something he is passionate about into a business, from chasing deer in helicopters to creating the Wanaka International Air show.
Background, decisions and consequences
Wallis was a keen deer hunter, hunting alone cleared his thoughts and gave him time to think through some ideas of how to turn the deer plague into a potential business. Venison exports to the US had been on-going since1959 but the harsh, undeveloped landscape meant that hunting could only occur on the fringes of civilisation, leaving much of the wilderness to the ravages of the deer. Professional deer culling was the significant control mechanism of the time however the process was very slow. The hunter had to proceed on foot from the nearest road, through the bush and climb to the open tops of the mountains where the deer lived. After a kill the carcasses had to be dragged back the way the hunter had got before loading the carcass onto a transport to market.
Realising that he already had a truck fleet plying the roads, Tim decided to provide a carcass collection service to the deer hunters along the existing roadways and purchase the carcasses direct. The system was a hit with hunters and he developed the idea further by setting up chillers a various locations on the Haast road where the hunters could leave deer carcasses for collection and collect their payment. As there were limited processing facilities in the Wanaka area, Tim decided to build a processing plant and freezer facility at his Timber yard, preparing the deer products for sale to local butchers and Christchurch restaurants.
One of the consequences of this was that Wallis realised that there were other products that he could buy, transport and process. Crayfish were a lucrative export product, so armed with information on lobster prices from the U.S. markets, Tim would purchase crayfish directly from the West Coast fishermen based near Haast and transport the fresh crayfish to his processing plant. Another consequence of the deer operation came through a Chinese laundry in Christchurch. The owner turned up at the Wanaka processing plant with a suitcase of cash looking for a regular supply of deer velvet and tails to export to China. Wallis realised he was onto something now and his thoughts turned to the immediate problem: how to get the deer out of the mountains and into the market? The answer came in April 1963 on a trailer in a pile of pieces, a Bell 47 helicopter (Peat, N. 2006).
Wallis and a small group of hunting enthusiasts had decided to pool their resources and hire a helicopter. They wanted to prove that deer hunting using helicopters could be a viable commercial venture but they had a mountain to climb first. At the time there were only 10 helicopters registered in New Zealand, no pilots had ever been trained here the import licensing policy of the government made importing anything a complicated process. After hiring a helicopter and a pilot, Korean war veteran Canadian Milton Stills, the hunters trialled a system where they would establish a base camp in a area with high deer population density, then split into two groups, one lying in wait with the guns and another herding the deer down from the mountain tops. After the deer were ambushed, killed and cleaned, the helicopter would ferry the carcasses to the waiting trucks some miles distant. On the first day 11 shooters killed over 200 deer, flying out 110 carcasses to the waiting trucks which conveyed them to the processing plant before weather grounded the chopper. A few days later the venison was on its way to Germany and a small profit had been made. The proof of concept worked and the commercial deer industry in New Zealand was born (Peat, N. 2006).
In 1965 Tim decided to sell his share of his family timber business and incorporated Luggate Game Packers Ltd. He gained his helicopter pilots license, the 2nd person in New Zealand to do so, and bought a brand new Bell 47 helicopter from the factory in the United States. Tim would fly the hunting team up to the areas where herds were spotted, drop them off use the helicopter itself to herd deer towards the guns. This technique was highly effective but the helicopter crashed the first year of operations in what was to be the first of several near misses in Tim’s aviation career. In 1966 the first aerial shooting began, despite laws that forbade firearms from being carried by a aircraft, let alone firing from one. This technique involved a crew of 3, 1 pilot, 1 shooter and a gutter. After the first deer of the day was shot, the gutter would leap out and prepare the carcass while the shooter and pilot would fly off to find their next kills and then bring them back to the gutters location. (Peat, N. 2006).
The next two years saw growth in the company to 3 choppers and crew operating every day the weather allowed, but as a consequence the deer herds in the areas around Wanaka were in danger of being hunted to uneconomic levels. Hearing about the vast deer herds running wild in Fiordland National park, Tim decided to put together a tender for the license to hunt there from 1967-1970. Given that there was no road access to the park Tim decided to convert a coastal freighter into a floating freezer and helicopter pad. Mooring the ship in the sounds allowed the helicopters to get to any part of the park. The consequence of these decisions was a monopoly rights to hunt the biggest wild deer herds in New Zealand and the creation of a supply chain to allow for efficiency required to make the project profitable. A further consequence of these decisions was that he could run parallel operations on the infrastructure, such as crab and lobster fishing (Peat, N. 2006). The net result was control of the supply chain in a variety of products from the wild to the end users and exporters.
During the success of the Fiordland years, Wallis had been approached by Lincoln University on a project that had started in 1968. The capture of live deer for farming was an experiment being run by the university to see if sustainable deer farming was viable in New Zealand. Deer farming was illegal at the time as they were seen as a feral pest that was good only for destruction. Tim decided that there was potential in this idea and enthusiastically set about capturing live deer for the project, by jumping on them from moving helicopters. This strategy was very successful but was not for the fait hearted, however the university has access to technological innovations in the form of rifles modified to fire tranquilizer darts, stun guns and even spears tipped with tranquilizer needles. Further innovation followed as radio transmitters were attached to the darts allowing the animals to be tracked, then net guns were developed which are still in use today. Despite the risks the technology worked and soon 400 deer were being farmed at Lincoln. The consequence of this partnership was that the study demonstrated the viability of deer farming as a control mechanism for feral deer herds and the government legalized deer farming in 1969 (Peat, N. 2006).
With the beginning of deer farming the time of wild deer capture and hunting was drawing to a close. Wallis decided to transform the helicopter hunting fleet into a scenic flight company and refocused his efforts on deer farming in Wanaka. A consequence of this was that the supply of raw product was secure and less labour intensive, allowing him time to develop the marketing side of the business. Wallis decided the best way to do this was to establish relationships with the customers and traders in the target markets so he travelled extensively through Asia, Russia and North America. A consequence of this decision was the export of farming know-how to the target markets as well as the acquisition of processing know-how that would allow processing plants for high value deer products to be established in New Zealand. Another consequence of this networking was the formation of joint venture deer farms in target markets and the growth in an export trade of live deer to Korea, China, Canada and Russia from the 1970’s through to the 1990’s.
To develop the deer farming industry in New Zealand In the 1980’s Tim founded the New Zealand Deer Farmers Association. This group helped to spread the farming techniques in New Zealand with the objective of building a sustainable deer product industry as well as co-ordinating marketing efforts and acting as a lobby group with government and meat processing companies. As the industry matured in New Zealand Wallis continued to innovate, first with the importation of Canadian and Russian deer to improve the feral gene stock and later the trade in live deer semen as the technology became available. The consequences of Wallis’s vision and decisions to keep trying applying new technology to the industry have made it the significant export industry we see today. (Peat, N. 2006).
Business Lessons
There are many business lessons that can be learned from Tim’s story.
Firstly, he used existing resources to build new businesses in parallel to the existing ones. Using his timber company trucks to carry deer out of the wild was a good way to get extra utility out of that transport infrastructure. In the Fiordland days he used the deer ships to exploit other opportunities in crab and lobster capture. The lesson here is that he diversified his income base without having the change his core business processes.
Secondly, he is very good at recognising opportunities from resources and applying technology to make the opportunity pay. The development of helicopters and ships for the purposes of deer recovery had never been done before and he did it on a significant scale. The lesson here is that he knew how to make technology work for him to open access to resources that were untapped.
Thirdly, he was good at recognising the need for change and cracking on with doing it. As the deer numbers began to dwindle and competition began to hot up as others entered the market, he developed live capture and deer farming to get control over his supply chain and move the industry forward. The lesson here is that by working down and up your supply chain in a targeted way, you can get a lot more efficiency and free up resources for other projects.
Fourthly, he set about developing the industry and the product markets. Deer farming in New Zealand is a significant industry, as is the processing of deer products for export. Instead of talking about it, he went and visited the deer farms of Russia, and the processing plants of Korea to see what they did and what was possible. He overcame government red tape in New Zealand and other countries with a simple approach of good humour and an honest and friendly disposition that built trust. The lesson here is that an industry in it’s infancy needs people who are good relationship builders to go out and create the networks to sell the products.
Finally, at every step in his progress to developing this industry he has used technology as a disruptive force to break the existing status-quo. Using helicopters and ships, rifles to net guns, hunting to farming, all of these innovations have changed the industry. The lesson to be learned here is that new technology should to be reviewed in order to see if it’s opening up new opportunities for your existing business. Additionally, Tim has proved you can be the first in a brand new industry and make money which is not something that all great innovators have been successful at.
References
Peat, N. (2006). Hurricane Tim, The Story of Sir Tim Wallis, Longacre Press,
Dunedin.
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