Armourguard

"Once Gibbs and Farmer gained control of Freightways they had no time to lose; Gibbs remembers telling someone at a cocktail party he was paying $500,000 a week in interest, and he wasn’t exaggerating. But neither man saw the exercise as a big gamble. Farmer says: ‘We knew we could sell two businesses pretty easily; meanwhile the cash flow was good and wasn’t going to stop overnight.’ Gibbs carried out the pre-arranged deal with Mayne Nickless and then sold surplus assets, such as Grower Holdings, the canning business in Hawke’s Bay, Bandag, and some pieces of real estate, for good prices.After an intensive six-month effort they’d paid off the loan and everything left — including half of the best trading businesses, couriers, Armourguard, freight forwarding — was pure profit.[22](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477308-556173400-22) Roger France worked closely with Gibbs those six months. He was hugely impressed that ‘at no point did this huge deal they’d taken on feel out of control; everything landed pretty much where Alan had conceived it would land’.[23](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477308-556173400-23) Meantime, France observed, Farmer kept the businesses running like clockwork through an incredibly unsettling time with no damage to the cash flow or the management team."

"As a holding company, Freightways held many businesses, each of which Gibbs and Farmer sold in three large transactions in mid-1997: Armourguard, New Zealand’s largest security firm, was sold to US public company Tyco International for $33 million ($44 million in current terms); CHEP, the pallet hire business, went to Brambles for $55 million ($73 million in current terms); and Freightways Express, which contained the nine courier businesses, they sold to Ausdoc, an Australian publicly listed company, for $125 million ($167 million in current terms).[4](private://read/01jrsfvkjy84rkprtbz9amfvj8/#rw-num-note-477355-616451090-4) With hindsight, Gibbs thinks they may have made a mistake selling the courier businesses:"