Like many in the logistics industry, Cantabrian Tony Marriott started work as a storeman, working at Meadows Freight at Christchurch Airport in the early 1980s. Today, he’s the general manager of one of New Zealand’s leading providers of moving services within the country and around the world. This is his story.

I left high school at the age of 16 with every intention of going back to uni after I had figured out what I wanted to do. I landed my first job in freight forwarding because, as my first manager put it, I had the best geography scores! Some 30-plus years later, I’m still in logistics and still loving it.

The old days of freight forwarding were the wild frontier of learning. There were no manuals, and most of what we learned was by observation or the old process of ‘drop ‘em in the deep end’, with the possible exception of the IATA/FIATA dangerous goods courses where anything less than 90% was a fail. University graduates were non-existent, and there were no formal qualifications other than airline courses, which I had completed within the first 18 months.

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