This weekend in Wellington the James Blond Auckland Pirates compete in the Final Four a competition for the top four teams in New Zealand mens basketball to decide who will be the NBL champion and Wellington who qualifies fourth will be hoping for their third title in a row and the Pirates will be hoping for their first, so it will be all on with the two semi finals played on Saturday night and the grand Final on Sunday the team at James Blond Ltd will be hoping for the right result. As the naming rights sponsor of the Pirates I will be traveling to Wellington with one of my team to support and cheer them on but first I will have to get Saturday morning out of the way.

I don’t know if the housing shortage in Auckland but there seems to be a large number of people shifting at the moment and on Saturdays and Sundays our rental trucks are becoming more popular than ever with us booking out as early as Thursday over the last three weeks so if you are looking for a rental truck this weekend then at the time of writing we had 3 available so get in quick and book yours now.

Last night the  James Blond Auckland Pirates played the Manawatu Jets at the ASB sadium in Kohimarama in front of small but improving crowd and for those who attended they where treated to some very good basketball with a couple of spectacular dunks and some terrific defensive play by the James Blond Auckland Pirates, in fact since Ron Dorsey arrived to replace Tyler Newbold the Pirates play has stepped up a gear and I will be booking my ticket to Wellington for the final four very soon.

Tonight however is the big one game one of the ANBL finals series with the NZ Breakers taking on the Perth Wildcats in front of over 9000 people, this is the game between the two top teams in the competition that starts the finals qand if the Breakers can win it gives them the edge going to the three game series. The Breakers have a major injury concern over their star player Tom Abercrombie but I believe that they have the talent and the depth to step it up a level and take this series out.

If they win tonight I might even go to Perth for game 2 so if you have not brought a ticket to tonights game there are still a few left so do so now!

Yesterday we had a lady come in and rent one of our trucks and like most people she was moving house but unlike a lot of people she had not yet found anywhere to stay so her grand plan was to move her stuff into the rental truck then park it at her parents place for a couple of days whilst she found a new place to live, in her view it was a hell of a lot cheaper to rent a James Blond Ltd truck for a few days rather than move the stuff into a storage yard. You have to wonder about her forward planning but i guess it takes all sorts to make the world go round.

We have now pumped over 120.000 litres of diesel since we first got a fuel tank on the yard and as a completely worthless statistic if we had a diesel car and it did 10 litres per hundred kilometers and ran exclusively on the diesel that we had pumped from our tank at work then the car would have traveled one million  two hundred thousand kilometers thats one hell of a long way when you think of it like that and as the trucks don’t achieve that sort of economy would still mean around 900,000kms thats quite a bit of mileage on the James Blond Ltd fleet

Thursday night at the Vector Arena the NZ Breakers will line up against the Perth Wildcats in game one of the grand final series of the ANBL basketball championship and James Blond Ltd and their staff and crew will be there watching the action , having sponsored the  Breakers through thick and thin with rental cars and rental trucks over the last 6 years it is great to see such a good result from a team that not long ago where considered the easy beats of the competition. So win or loose the whole season come down to the next two or three game in the best of three finals.

Over the weekend we have been really busy as like all Easter holidays this is probably the busiest weekend of the year for us and our rental trucks have been all over the country from Kaitaia  in the far north to Wellington in the south and all points in between so if you need to move then James Blond Ltd are your choice of rental truck company with a large selection of trucks at a price to suit your budget and with unlimited kilometre rates available we are here to make it affordable.

Last night the team of staff and friends from James Blond Ltd called team Blond played their first ever game of basketball as a team and in a competition for the North Harbour Association for everyone that played it was also the first time that anyone had ever played a game anywhere, so after a bit of a nervous start the team finally got off the mark when Cameron Harris scored our first basket playing well the boys sort of stayed in it and where only down 6 points at the half time break but then in the second half it all began to fall apart as the superior fitness of the other team started to tell and they ran out eventual winners 53 to 19, so a bit of a trashing but great fun and lots was learnt.

Thor Pedersen was sent crashing to the floor 3 times and will be very sore this morning at work but he will still be there to take your orders and help with any enquiries you may have about truck rental this morning and his brother James is probably still catching his breath  after a night of running up and down the court that seemed to get longer as the night wore on.

All in all a great night and we look forward to the second game

Tonight is the moment of truth for the staff and friends of James Blond Ltd with their first ever game of Basketball , led by Thor and James and joined by by Andrew and other the team have been practicing hard over the last few weeks and despite now being decimated by injury and the first game still has to be played there is a level of optimism at work and everyone is very excited about this game. No one is expecting a win but it will be interesting to see what happens and what plans coach Lloyd Thomas has for the game. I will post the results tomorrow.

This weekend is Easter and the demand for our rental trucks and vans is growing by the day and there is a good possibility that we will run out of these over the weekend so if you are planning a project that is going tgo require a rental truck or rental van don’t delay book it today call us on 0800 525 663 or make a booking online via our website, but as they say you have to be in to win!

Here at James Blond Ltd we have kept records so how many rental truck and vehicle contracts we have written each and every month since we started in 2004 when we wrote just 14 contracts in March of that year, our first month of trading and only from around the 18th of that month when the first of our rental cars where ready to go, since that time we have grown year on year month on month and finished March 2012 with 721 rental contracts written, thats quite a large difference over the last 8 years and reflects just how large a part of the West Auckland business community James Blond Ltd has become.

A large part of our business, in fact we write more truck rental contracts than any other class of rental vehicle, is to people and businesses in the West Auckland area that are either moving their possessions or have stock to deliver or collect and this keeps our rental trucks busy almost every day but of course the really busy days are still Friday and Saturday when everyone wants a truck for shifting and we never seem to have enough available but i guess thats what a booking system is for.

Effective today the 1st of April 2012 there is a new law with regard to driving trucks and what can and cannot be driven on a car licence, for those on a restricted licence the law remains the same and the maximum permissible load  is a GVM of 4500kgs on their rental truck but for those on a full licence that now increases to 6000kgs meaning that a much larger rental truck can now be driven on a car licence. For the team here at James Blond Ltd this will mean that we will have to institute a few changes to our stock of rental trucks and look to increase the size of our 3 ton fleet to take into account what will be an increased number of bookings as the public become more aware of this law change.

I wish it was easy to just go out and purchase some more  rental trucks and be ready to go but with the import regulations from Japan having been severely tightened over the last couple of years it is really difficult to import trucks into New Zealand hence there is a real shortage, last year James Blond Ltd purchased some brand new trucks and we may go down this path in 2012 but the increase in size means an increase in  cost which will mean an increase in rental prices so we have some hard thinking to do over the next few weeks.

From the 1st of April so this Sunday the maximum permissible weight that you may drive on a full car licence will increase from 4500kg GVM to 5995 GVM this means that instead of being limited to a 2 ton box truck our customers may now drive a 3 ton truck and be perfectly legal, for those customers on a restricted licence the weight restriction remains in place. This change will have a profound effect on our business as the demand on the larger trucks grows from those customers who become aware of the new law and start requesting the trucks to use.

The issues I have with this is that these trucks are larger and James Blond Ltd being pressed for space now will create more pressure on our environment plus people who will be driving these trucks are generally inexperienced with vehicles of this size so driving a larger rental truck is going to lead to more incidents of damage and accidents. However James Blond Ltd will rise to the challenge and purchase some additional trucks to meet the expected demand. Yesterday we investigated the Chinese brand Jac and more on this tomorrow.

Tonight the NZ Breakers take on the Townsville Crocs in game one of the semi final series go the Breakers!!!!

It’s funny how many of us start off with this grand plan about what we are going to do in business or life and somehow along the way things change dramatically and so it was with both James Blond Ltd and my truck rental fleet first off James Blond Ltd was just going to be a small rental company based on the side of my large car yard with maybe 10 or so rental cars and the thought of truck rentals becoming part of the fleet never even entered my mind. Then one day about six months after we had started the rental fleet i was driving past one of the car yards just down the road from me and saw a small truck for sale and i realised that this could be a great  opportunity to move into something that might develop.

James Blond Ltd has never really looked back from that moment and has grown to become a major force in the west Auckland business economy and over the next few months we have a game changing strategy that I have been thinking about for the past few weeks that will become another grand plan that will see our truck rental business grow to the next level so keep an eye out for major changes.