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privately-held business The waste master He left school with $9000 to buy into his mum’s company and turned it into Canterbury’s largest locally-owned recycling and waste outfit. For Sebastian Stapleton, it’s all about the art of the deal. By Matt Philp Sebastian Stapleton is relating the events of his annus horribilis and he’s clearly not enjoying the memory. That’s hardly surprising: 2008 came perilously close to being the end of his recyling and waste collection business, Mastagard, as the international price for recyclables collapsed almost overnight. From receiving $US250-odd per tonne, suddenly the Christchurch firm was scratching to get $US20 — if they could find a buyer at all. “I remember at our monthly board meeting — and we were looking one month behind — saying, ‘well this is going to be our last good one for a while’, and it sure was. You just can’t restructure a business to deal with an 80%-plus drop in revenue. So it was a very scary time and the scariest part was, ‘would it come right?’ We just didn’t know.” That it did come right is obvious by glancing at Mastagard’s busy offices on Ferry Rd, neighbouring the Crusaders’ stricken home stadium. The one-truck bin round Stapleton invested in while at high school is now the region’s largest locally-owned recycling and waste outfit, with a fleet of specialist trucks servicing thousands of businesses and households in Canterbury and on the West Coast. Just don’t use the word success around Stapleton. Maybe it’s that experience of 2008, or perhaps it reflects his rural Canterbury upbringing, but the 27-year-old doesn’t do self congratulation and seems allergic to complacency. “It can all change very quickly,” he says, noting that the industry he works in is fiercely contested. Even so — and making due allowances for Stapleton’s aversion to praise — Mastagard’s is a terrific bootstrapping success story and one that bears out the adage that if you’re good enough, you’re old enough. Stapleton was at Christ’s College when the chance arose to buy into Mastagard. Started by two brothers in the 1970s the company had specialised in garden waste (it was originally called MastaGardener), before the owners realised there was brass in muck and reworked the business to collect general waste. Bits of the company were later sold off, including a bin round that Stapleton’s mother bought in the late ‘90s with an eye to expansion. To cut a long story short, things didn’t go as planned and in his sixth form year Stapleton offered his mother $9000 for a half share of the business. Back up the rubbish truck a moment: where does a high school student get $9000? Turns out Stapleton’s entrepreneurial instincts were already well in play. A few years earlier he’d persuaded a couple of workers on his father’s farm to knock up a chicken run. He sourced 350 hens and, after his mother moved to Sumner, started selling trays of eggs to the restaurants and “old ladies” of the eastern suburbs. Next, after observing that some of his classmates were designing their own websites, Stapleton picked up the Yellow Pages and convinced several Canterbury businesses of the need to have an internet presence. He subcontracted all the web design work to his mates and took a cut of the action. Where does Stapleton think his entrepreneurialism springs from? “I’m not sure,” he says. “I like to help the people I care about and generally that takes money. And you don’t make real money sitting around.” Certainly he didn’t do much sitting around after buying Mastagard. With just $8000 coming in each month from the bin round, Stapleton was quickly pressed into service as a truck driver. “I hadn’t left school to be a truck driver,” he says. “And if it was a matter of driving then it was only ever going to be for a short time, purely as a means to an end.” Soon they’d bought a new truck and a compactor which allowed for far bigger collections and were marketing aggressively. Stapleton, the natural deal ContinueD overleaf Foundation sponsor Proudly supported by inspiring nz business || 47
Business link Pullquote Magna autpate dit, vole sse quat veliqui tet lore es trud modi pisl ut accum iurero dolor si ATTRIBUTE maker, used vendor financing to buy up a bunch of smaller competitors. “I’d look at these bin rounds and see what their client base meant to our business and what that revenue stream would do for us,” says the businessman, who eventually bought out his mother and now owns 60% of Mastagard. Fast forward to 2011. The nightmare of 2008 is slowly receding, but Stapleton’s company has to fight its corner against far larger and better-resourced outfits. Dominating the Canterbury rubbish and recycling market is Australian-based Transpacific Industries. There’s also EnviroWaste, roughly equivalent in size to Mastagard in the Canterbury market but with a national presence. What kind of business is the rubbish game? The fact that Stapleton’s desk is covered in pages of financials, which he has spent the morning going through line by line, gives you an inkling. “We’re an industry that from the outside would appear not particularly sophisticated. People look at waste and recycling and think, ‘how hard could it be?’ One challenge is that it is very capital intensive. And while it is relatively simple, you have to know what you’re doing. There are hundreds of different product and service options and schedules and you have to closely understand exactly what drives profitability. “On the other hand, the thing that has made Mastagard successful is the compounding nature of its 48 || unlimited.co.nz
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