Changing of the Guard

SRH Milk Haulage Operations Manager, Blair Harvey is receiving her due as a young leader to watch in the future.
Blair Harvey, SRH Milk Haulage Operations Manager.

At just 30 years of age, Blair Harvey has spent nearly half of her life in road transport.

The notion, when put to her, doesn’t take her by surprise. If an apprenticeship hadn’t fallen through when she was 16 things might be very different.

She would likely be a hairdresser. Even at this young age she was intimately acquainted with the family business having gone on milk runs in the truck with her father, Scott Harvey, Founder and Director of SRH Milk Haulage, from the age of ten.

Like many privately owned transport enterprises involving both parents, work life and family life often blurred in those early years making it difficult to know where one begun and the other ended.

With Scott driving trucks, Blair’s mother, Regina, handled the bookkeeping.

“Growing up I just thought it was normal that everyone worked all the time,” recalls Blair. “They put their heart and soul into it but also tried to maintain a stable home environment as well.”

Milk cartage, especially farm pickups, remains, even today, a niche segment of the transport industry. This wasn’t lost on Blair as she found her feet, at first working part time after school.

“We were always polishing tanks and trying to keep everything clean,” she recalls. “Dad was very pedantic about stuff like that.”

Were it not for the fact that she had initially set out to do something totally unrelated, it might seem, at least from the outside, like it was predestined for Blair be absorbed into SRH Milk Haulage.

After about a month working part time it was Scott who immediately saw her potential. And it was Regina who reminded him that if Blair was to work full time for the business, she would always take her side and not his.

Even so, Scott insisted Blair, if she was to eventually come on board, would have to do the requisite business administration courses, which she completed in Maitland.

One particular memory stands out for Blair as to when she knew she belonged in the industry. It was at a Trucking Australia conference in Sydney. At the time she was 18. She sat down at an empty 12-seater table and wondered if anyone would join her.

“In a matter of ten minutes there were six different people from all different walks of life asking about me,” she recalls. “In the industry there’s always someone who will strike up a conversation. It was very welcoming.”

Having worked in compliance for five years following on from when national operator work diaries were rolled out, she soon developed an interest in scheduling and allocations which put her in direct contact with the drivers.

That lasted for four years before she moved up to Operations Manager, her current position.

The role involves working across every depot in the SRH Milk Haulage network, problem solving and tackling new issues as they arise. It also means working, as a bonus, more directly with her dad.

“He’s got all these genius ideas he comes up with that need somebody to put them into action,” Blair jokes. “That’s one way to explain it.”

One of these concepts materialised earlier in the year as the Super Mega Tanker, a 75,000 litre PBS `Super Pocket` milk tanker engineered and built by long-time partner Tieman. Its operating between Bunbury and Perth in Western Australia.

“It’s very interesting to see running,” says Blair. “It definitely turns heads out on the road.”

The introduction of Performance-Based Standards and its adaptation to the milk cartage sector was a watershed moment for SRH Milk Haulage, who continues to push the envelope for greater payloads with innovative high productivity units. For Blair it’s enjoyable to work alongside her father as he devises the ways and means of adding new combinations to the fleet.

“He loves coming up with different ideas, but he hates the legalities of it all,” she says. “He will order it and it’s then up to everyone to ensure it meets regulations.”

Recently, they teamed up to produce a new portable chiller, not surprisingly a crucial piece of equipment in the milk industry. The milk, as it goes through the system, is chilled another two or three degrees lower.

When it gets pumped into the tanker, which is insulated and not refrigerated, the temperature is a stable 1.2 degrees Celsius.

“The lower we get the milk temperature the better the temperature is maintained inside the tanker,” says Blair.

“It’s something totally out of our scope on the transport side but it definitely helps our customers and it’s just another thing Scott sat down and thought through.”

SRH Milk Haulage tanker combination.

Blair’s life changed three years ago with the birth of her first child. Juggling work, especially an operations role, with a kid is not easy.

“At least with other stuff you can turn off,” she says. “You can’t turn the kid off. They’re always going. I think being in the transport industry makes it tough, too. Especially our operation. We don’t stop. We run 24/7 everywhere. There’s always something happening.”

That said, no career milestone will compare with Maisie, her daughter, who helped her to reassess where she was in life.

“When I told people I was pregnant they said, ‘you will be really good at that because it’s like you babysit everyone now,’” Blair says.

“Jokes aside, it’s a job I love doing. No day is the same. It doesn’t matter if you plan for it to be the same every day. Something is different.”

Naturally Blair gets asked if she sees herself taking over the reins of the business in future. It’s something she is open to. Not that Scott is going anywhere soon.

Much of it will depend on timing or more to the point, where everyone is individually placed in their lives. There’s certainly no talk just yet, at least, of any changing of the guard.

“Dad still has a lot more years left in him and a lot on his list of things he wants to achieve before he even considers retiring,” says Blair. “Then we’ll make the best decision, not just for us, but for everyone in the company.”

Blair has already been part of the Australian Truck Association’s Future Leaders program, an annual initiative sponsored by Daimler, an experience she enjoyed immensely. Meeting with likeminded people and talking about challenges and the best ways to overcome them comes naturally to her.

“You realise you are not alone in the industry and that there are many other people trying to achieve goals comparable to your own,” she says. “It’s always good to wrap your brain around something with other people to reach a better solution. Then again, I like fixing things.”

Although she doesn’t deal with drivers on a day-to-day basis anymore, they will often still call her up to see how she is going.

“I get the gossip like a hairdresser from all the truck drivers,” she says. “So, I guess there’s some crossover after all.”

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