Mother Trucking startup to streamline lifting and shifting industry processes
A startup aiming to streamline the heavy haulage and ‘lifting and shifting’ industries has created a digital dispatch management system for drivers to run their operations more smoothly and directly from the cabs in their vehicles.
Mother Trucking, a Nelson-based limited liability startup launched in March 2023, wants to shape the future of the heavy haulage industry with a new logistics software solution.
Company co-founder, Kitti Bradley – whose father owns a truck workshop and grandfather was a truck driver – says she had repeated requests to design a digital solution to streamline processes within the industry, including dispatch management and audit trail challenges, with a focus on heavy haulage. So, with her co-founder, Jason Teunissen, she set out to create one. They called it Mother Trucking and created branding inspired by the metal bands they listened to as kids.
“Everyone loves the name!“ Teunissen says, adding that the platform will be central to cutting down time and costs in running trucking businesses.
The solution provides an end-to-end platform starting from when a driver gets their first phone call for a job, to when invoices are created and sent for bookkeeping. It creates and distributes compliance forms, time sheets and activity logs, and can also assist in locating hard-to-find building sites that are not yet on Google Maps.
“With our app, you can take photos and GPS coordinates of your deliveries – and it will all be saved in the system,” says Bradley.
Teunissen says many working from truck cabs are still using paper diaries to try and get their drivers throughout the country to coordinate with each other.
“We kept getting asked why nobody in the lifting and shifting industry was addressing the need to coordinate resources and assets for trucking jobs. That’s why we built this platform,” he says.
“What Xero does for accounting, we want to do for logistics and planning in this industry. The future is in tech and if you are not stepping up now you are going to get left behind, and for a lot of businesses that could mean having to close their doors.”
“If there’s no platform that’s dedicated to helping them, New Zealand’s infrastructure industry will go under as well,” Bradley adds.
She acknowledges that if not for Covid-19, Mother Trucking may not have even been created. With career challenges looming due to Covid lockdowns, she took the opportunity to retrain as a software developer and established an IT consultancy above her parents’ truck repair workshop in Nelson.
Following her experience in the family business, she knew she wanted to make life easier for those in the trucking industry and saw the opportunity to create a platform for streamlining processes for drivers that could be accessed on either a laptop or a cell phone.
“I hadn’t come across anything which enabled you to plan a job and dispatch from a mobile app with a complete audit trail,” says Bradley.
Mother Trucking is focused on small and medium enterprises (SMEs), as 80 percent of freight is moved by SMEs globally, not just in New Zealand. The platform is currently at the trial stage, with Nelson heavy haulage company Lift and Shift user-testing the platform, but Bradley says Mother Trucking intends to go to market with the platform later this year.
In the meantime, the platform has won Mother Trucking some awards. Bradley and Teunissen were invited to take part in The Ministry of Awesome, and the Callaghan Innovation startup programme Electrify Accelerator, and walked away with two of four prizes on offer. Bradley says Callaghan Innovation has also provided Mother Trucking with valued business expertise and mentorship.
Both Bradley and Teunissen work part-time as low-code consultants and focus on Mother Trucking during weekends and a couple of days a week.
“I’ve never created a tech startup, and only worked in an SME, so it was really good for me to learn the difference and they helped me with that,” says Bradley.
“I’ve also learned about the legal and accounting side of things, market research, how to find out information you need in order to go further, and how to communicate with clients.”
Teunissen has previously been involved in several tech companies in Europe. He says the startup’s solution has been communicated within the trucking and lifting and shifting industries primarily by word of mouth, which he says “is really big in this industry; trust is the true currency of SMEs in New Zealand.”
Mother Trucking has also received positive feedback from overseas companies.
As the startup is bootstrapped, Teunissen and Bradley have had to use their newly gained business expertise to spend money and grow their startup wisely.
“With a startup you don’t have to have seed funding, you can bootstrap until you are ready to scale.” he says.
Story by Dave Crampton in partnership with Nelson Regional Development Agency (NRDA)
Innovation Nation is an annual series celebrating stories of innovation and diversity in entrepreneurship from around New Zealand.
