When contractor Tony Hill needed a swing yarder urgently to keep his forestry operation alive, he found himself reaching back to a conversation he'd had five years earlier.But it wasn't a finance broker or a bank manager he called for help. It was Frankie Davidson.
Tony was running a harvesting crew for Kuru Contracting when he first crossed paths with Frankie, co-owner of TDF Solutions.
“Ricky Kuru rang me out of the blue and said, ‘I've got some fellas coming up and they want to spend the day with you and see how your crew operates’,” Tony recalls.
One of those visitors was Frankie Davidson.
“Ricky said, ‘he’s a really good man to know – one day you might need him’. We ended up spending quite a day nosing around and stuff.”
During the visit, the conversation turned to Tony's future.
“He asked me what my goals were. I told him straight up – I wanted to own my own crew one day.”
Frankie liked what he saw.
“He said, ‘good on you. I think you're going to do it. Here's my number – if you ever need anything, give me a call’.”
For the next five years, neither man picked up the phone. Then winter arrived. And everything changed.
A business at a crossroads
By winter 2025, Tony had established his own operation and was running two crews. But a wet season threatened to bring everything to a standstill.
“We were road line logging and it just got too wet,” he says. “We couldn't get roads in, the ground-based crew was grinding to a halt and we were running out of trees.”
The options weren't appealing.
“We could have parked up and probably waited for a slow death,” says Tony.
Instead, an opportunity emerged to take over a yarding contract within the forest. The challenge was that Tony needed a swing yarder – and he needed it fast.
That's when he remembered Frankie.
“I knew if anyone could help, it would be TDF.
“Frankie still had my number and remembered who I was, and we went from there. Straight away I got the help and turned around a swing yarder in about three weeks.”
A locally available Madill 123 swing yarder had come onto the market.
“I just gave them the lead on it – I said look there’s a swinger local, it’s a good machine, it’s got good bones, I know the yarder, can we jump on this?”
TDF identified the opportunity immediately and moved quickly.
“Frankie knew the machine and knew it was a good buy,” says Tony. “They didn't hesitate. They said, ‘yes, we can make this work’.”
Around three weeks later, the deal was completed and the machine was operating. For Tony, the speed of the process was just as important as the machine itself.
“I'd only owned the crew for about eight months. A traditional lender probably would have taken a lot longer, if they approved it at all.”
The yarder didn't just solve a machinery problem, it kept the business moving.
Building more than machinery ownership
The machine was financed through TDF's lease-to-purchase programme, giving Tony access to critical equipment...
