Industries I work in
Eleven sectors, working throughout New Zealand. The technical answers are different in every one of them. The reason for engaging somebody independent is identical.
A port perimeter and a paddock fence are the same problem
Not technically. Technically they have nothing in common: different materials, different failure modes, different rules, different people to satisfy. A perimeter that has to pass a security audit and a laneway that has to move six hundred cows twice a day are not remotely the same piece of engineering.
What they share is the commercial shape. In both cases the person paying is buying something they cannot themselves assess, from someone whose advice is inseparable from their quote, and the consequences of getting it wrong arrive years later when nobody is looking. That is true of a council reserve, a school boundary, a subdivision, a substation and a deer fence in exactly the same way.
So the service is constant even where the specification is not: work out what the asset has to do, write down what that requires, find out what it should cost, and check that it was delivered.
If your sector is not listed, ring anyway. The list is where the work has come from, not a boundary around what I will look at.
Panel fencing on a rendered plinth. What the rules require of it depends entirely on what sits behind it.
Who I work for, and what they usually need
Agriculture & Farming
Sheep, beef, dairy, deer and mixed operations, from single blocks to corporate farming groups. Layout, conversions, handling facilities and the renewal programme for fencing that was built over fifty years by twenty different people.
Lifestyle Properties
Ten hectares and a horse, or forty and a few cattle. Usually a first serious fencing spend, usually three quotes that cannot be compared, and usually a boundary shared with somebody who has an opinion about it.
Local Government
Parks, reserves, roading corridors, pump stations, landfills and council property. Standards, standard drawings, condition assessment across the portfolio, and procurement that survives an audit.
Consulting for Councils & Large Organisations Tender & Procurement Services
Civil Infrastructure
Fencing as a package inside a bigger civil contract - site security during construction, permanent boundary treatment afterwards, and the coordination between the fencing and everything else happening on the site.
Ports & Maritime
Perimeters where the specification has to satisfy an operator, an insurer and a security audit as well as the person building it, and where the environment eats anything specified casually.
Commercial & Industrial
Yards, depots, plant and storage sites. Keeping people out, keeping equipment in, and doing it in a way that still works when the site layout changes in three years.
Fence Design & Specification Quality Assurance & Inspections
Residential Developments
Boundary treatment across a staged subdivision, where consistency matters, retaining and fencing interact, and the cost per lot is a number the feasibility depends on.
Education Facilities
Schools, kindergartens and campuses, where a boundary has to manage security, sightlines, pedestrian access and a public road frontage all at once, on a fixed budget.
Parks & Reserves
Public open space, walkways, sports grounds and conservation boundaries. Long runs, hard use, limited maintenance budget, and a specification that has to look right as well as work.
Asset Management Consulting for Councils & Large Organisations
Utilities
Substations, reservoirs, treatment plants, generation and network assets. Restricted access sites where the perimeter is a compliance obligation rather than a boundary.
Property Developers
Fencing costed properly at feasibility, specified once for the whole development, procured in a way that does not generate variations, and inspected before the titles issue and everybody moves on.
Quantity Surveying & Cost Planning Tender & Procurement Services
If you have to justify the decision to somebody else
Councils, ports, utilities, schools and corporate landowners all share a problem that private owners do not: the decision has to survive being examined. By a board, an auditor, a committee, a funder, or a ratepayer with a question.
An independent specification, a documented evaluation and an inspection record are worth having for their own sake. They are worth considerably more when somebody asks, two years later, why this contractor and why this price.
If it is your own money
Farmers, lifestyle owners, developers and people in the middle of a disagreement with a neighbour or a contractor. Here the value is simpler and more immediate: knowing whether the number in front of you is reasonable, before you agree to it.
These engagements are often small - an hour, a phone call, a set of photographs read properly. They are not treated as small, because the proportion of somebody's money at stake is usually far larger than on the institutional work.
Same person, same standard, whichever of the two you are.
Twelve areas of work
Some of it is an hour on the phone. Some of it is a tender package, a condition survey across a portfolio, or an expert report for a dispute. Take whichever parts you need.
Tell me what you are trying to work out
Most people get in touch because they have a decision to make and nobody independent to check it with - a tender that does not add up, a fence line that keeps failing, a dispute that has stopped moving, or a property they are about to buy. Describe the situation and I will tell you honestly whether it needs me, and what it would take.
021 614 100- nick@customfenceconsulting.co.nz
- 130 Edinburgh Street, Waikouaiti 9510, Otago
- Monday to Friday, 7am - 5.30pm
Based at Waikouaiti in East Otago and working throughout New Zealand. Site work anywhere in the country; desk work - a tender review, a specification, an opinion on a set of photographs - can start the day you send it.