It’s been a while since we ran a Driven to Succeed feature – where we profile a young professional giving it their all to make their mark on the future of New Zealand’s transport industry. Well, this cover feature should certainly make up for that because the story of Tiny Towing is really the story of the man behind it, 26-year-old Angus Hamilton.

What started in November 2020 as a man with a tow truck to cart his own four-wheel drives around, who bought a tiny house and was let down by the company contracted to move it, Tiny Towing has emerged and gone through a few iterations to become what it is today. Through the journey, Angus has found his place in the Kiwi trucking scene.

“None of my family has ever been in towing or trucks. Diggers and tractors yes, because our family background was dairy farming. I worked the holidays on farms, so I’ve always been around machinery, but never had a passion for trucks – six or seven years ago, I’d have barely known the difference between a Scania and a Volvo,” Angus freely admits.

Having graduated from Te Aroha College, Angus went farming at Te Aroha West before moving up to Whangārei to do contract milking. “I got sick of dairy farming, so went and did an engineering apprenticeship for a few years. But when I was done with that, I didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I went driving machinery in the forestry sector for a year. At the time, my dad Andy was killed in a motorbike accident, so after his funeral, I went over to the United Kingdom for a few months and visited Scotland, where our family bloodline is from,” he explains.

He returned with little idea of what to do with himself, but then a mate working at J Swap called, offering Angus work driving loaders at the company’s yard in Matamata. A four-wheel drive enthusiast since a young age, Angus had at this stage bought himself an old Hino Ranger slide deck to cart his four-wheel drives around.

“One thing led to another, and I started doing little jobs on the side with it. I ended up leaving Swaps and began operating as Matamata Piako Towing, doing local breakdowns. I’d contract back to Swaps when I didn’t have any work, but I got sick of having to wait for the phone to ring for the breakdown work.”

At this stage, Angus replaced the Hino with a few utes and a fifth wheel-equipped Ford F350 and started doing long-distance boat and caravan transport. “I started doing my licences when I bought the F350 as I needed a class 3 to drive that with a fifth-wheel trailer, but there’s no point having a class 3, so I went through my class 5. Of course, once I had that I ended up driving here and there, a bit for J Swap now and again, but nothing full time. The biggest mistake I made was getting my truck licences!” Angus says, tongue firmly in cheek.

With the business ticking along for a few months by now, Angus bought himself a tiny house out of Nelson. “I booked another company to move it for me because tiny houses weren’t my thing – I had barely driven big trucks, never mind oversize! But he had to cancel the job, so I was of the mind, ‘How hard can it be? I want my house.’ I borrowed a trailer off a friend that I could hook up to my F350, and off I went to pick up the house. It was the first time I’d gone oversize, and we brought the house all the way back up to Te Aroha. I’d never sweated so much in my life!” he says with a laugh.

Of course, that was only half the challenge … getting the house located at its new site was another case of ‘get into it and figure out how’, involving a tractor to tow it up the drive and a digger to drag it in place.

“I put a few pics on Facebook, and people came back with ‘While you’ve got that trailer can you move this?’ … So, we ended up building a trailer for the F350 because there was enough work for it,” Angus says. Nonetheless, transporting the boats and caravans remained the main line of work, with tiny houses “a side burner”.

“It grew from there, and in late 2022, we got serious about the tiny houses,” says Angus. “That’s when I changed the name to Tiny Towing Solutions.”

Today, the business operates four trucks with a fleet of specialist trailers and is well on its way to its 2000th tiny house move. If that’s not an example of being driven to succeed, we don’t know what is.