Everybody has their ups and downs in life. You know – the usual highs and lows. But in his 50 years so far, East Coast log truck and forestry operator, Ricky Kuru’s lows have been devastatingly, destructively deep. And the highs? Extra-ordinarily, spectacularly high.
The trend started early: The kid who doted on Dad Jack (Tall Timber, NZ Logger, July 2019) and lived for the hours they spent together in truck and machinery cabs, turned into a teenager who fell out with his family over his rebellious ways…
Which saw him kicked out of school and fathering a child before he was 15, ending up behind bars… and sleeping on the streets.
Then the rebound: He found his partner for life (wife Leanne), got back close to his Dad… and then became Jack’s partner in a small business building forestry roads… that became a hugely-successful log harvesting and forestry roading operation.
After a decade or so of booming growth, Jack and Ricky’s Kuru Contracting Limited (KCL) boasted seven log harvesting crews, equipped with about $30million worth of machinery…
Only to have to sell off gear and shrink the business by a devastating 85%, when a 2011 log trade slump smashed the demand for Kiwi pine logs. Ricky and Jack worked for nothing for three years – just to keep the business alive.
Then, starting in 2017, KCL – with Ricky now the sole owner, having bought Jack out (albeit with the elder Kuru still working alongside his boy every day) – again grew into a major East Coast forestry force. To the point where it’s now back up to five harvesting crews… again with probably $30m or more worth of machinery.
Plus there’s a fleet of eight log trucks, a heavy-haulage transporter, a crane truck and two bulk tippers – the latter doing forestry roading and civil construction work.
And a Tolaga Bay base that includes a service station, shop and café, as well as the company’s workshop and offices. KCL now employs “around 97” people.
Ricky also has other projects on the go: Modular houses built in China; five quarries and metal crushers in a partnership with KCL General Manager, Ma Parata; a residential subdivision and a handful of houses (so far) in Tolaga Bay – built to attract staff… and plans for a state-of-the-art sawmill in town too.
It all looks and sounds sweet… another huge high in the Ricky Kuru life story. And it is…
Or, at least, it was: But there have been shadows over the Kuru/KCL world for two or three years now: Sadly, Ricky’s beloved Dad (and mentor) died in mid-2020 – having bravely carried on driving his bulldozer every day, as he battled cancer.
Extraordinarily, in the Ricky Kuru story, the extreme highs and lows apply to his physical state just as much as they do his business status: After Jack’s death, Ricky discovered that he has the same gene suspected of causing his Dad’s terminal cancer.
Pro-actively, in true Ricky Kuru/take-things-head-on style, he’s now had surgery to remove almost all of his stomach in...
