Duncan and Amanda moved their family from Wellington to Hawke’s Bay in 2007 to take on the exclusive local partnership for a major international copier brand. Their kids were seven and nine.
Duncan had a small consultancy running in the capital and Amanda was working in a senior HR role, but the pull of the Bay, where Amanda grew up and they’d once lived, was strong enough.
“I just said, why not,” was Amanda’s answer, as Duncan tells it.
Four staff, including Greig Grant-Smith who is still with HBT today, no income, and the Global Financial Crisis landing right on top of them. The business ran on fumes for two years. Where others might have panicked, they saw opportunity.
Businesses were suddenly auditing every dollar, including the supplier contracts Duncan and Greig were now competing for.
The business picked up Farmlands, Hastings District Council, Napier City Council and Pan Pac in quick succession, four clients that gave a two-year-old business the credibility to go after everyone else. Professional services firms followed.
Even the name was a statement of independence. The copier brand wanted its name front and centre. Duncan refused, choosing Hawke’s Bay Document Technologies instead, later trimmed to Hawke’s Bay Technologies, now branded as HBT.
“We wanted to build something local and ours, without the risk of having another big brand tied to it,” he says.
The competitive streak
Ask Duncan Wallace about his competitive streak and he doesn’t dodge it.
The business entered the Hawke’s Bay Chamber of Commerce Business Awards in 2010, only three years old, and made the finals but didn’t win a category.
“It’s no different to playing sport. You lose and you ask why, then you work out what you need to do differently,” he says.
Eight years, and a great deal of graft, later, HBT went back and won the Supreme Business Award outright in 2018.
The win did more than sit on the wall. CVs from experienced IT engineers, previously hard to find in the region, started landing on Duncan’s desk unprompted.
Board members and owners began calling him for advice on technology decisions, and clients weighing up a change decided the award was validation enough.
“It felt like everyone was celebrating with us,” Duncan says of the response.
That drive shows in how closely Duncan still tracks the business, even with a senior team around him.
“There’s a difference between being a control freak and being firm on where you’re heading and what you expect your team to deliver,” he says. It’s a fine line, one he admits he has occasionally had to correct himself on.
Where the business sits today
HBT now serves more than 700 clients, including many on fully managed IT contracts spanning infrastructure, legal, accounting, healthcare, manufacturing and the primary sector.
The work covers cybersecurity, cloud services built on the Microsoft stack, business phone systems, audiovisual setups, and the print and document management that started it all.
Every managed client can log into a security portal HBT built itself, benchmarking cyber resilience against SMB1001 and other standards, a unique offering.
In October 2024, the business made a significant, measured bet: a new hardware partnership with Canon, the world’s number one business print manufacturer.
24 months on, Canon has gone from third to first in New Zealand, and printers still make up around 34% of the business, proof print hasn’t disappeared, just matured alongside everything else HBT now offers.
Duncan is already looking at the next shift, launching a new division named HABIT, built around AI and business process automation alongside the technology services that got them here. Turn to the sidebar for more on that.
A team worth keeping
There are 32 staff now, up from four, in HBT’s 20th year. Duncan spreads the credit around: a senior leadership team runs each division day to day, and he’s brought in specialists in human resources and process improvement, freeing him to focus on strategy rather than doing it all himself.
“We’ve got quite a few stars,” he says, the sort of dedication any employer would be grateful to have. Amanda is still integral and works in people and culture and, by Duncan’s account, remains the one who keeps him honest.
Giving back
Community support has been part of HBT’s culture since Raffles Street, when the team printed volunteer newsletters for Cranford Hospice for nothing and put in volunteer hours besides. “Right from the get-go we started giving back,” Duncan says. “Cynical people might say that’s just a sales job, but that was the ethos.”
It is an ethos that has held. HBT still counts Cranford Hospice among the causes it backs today, alongside the Hawke’s Bay Rescue Helicopter Trust, Presbyterian Support, Waimarama Surf Lifesaving Club, Acorn Foundation, Art Deco Trust and more.
“We’re part of the community, we’re growing, we’re employing people in Hawke’s Bay, and you’re not dealing with a multinational that may not care as much about you,” he says.
That same instinct extends to how HBT builds its team. The business has partnered with EIT since 2013, drawing engineers and technical staff, including IT service desk manager Daniel Howard, from its computing graduates.
“They arrive with practical experience, not just the theory, so they can get up and running from day one,” Duncan says, encouraging other Hawke’s Bay employers to do the same.
Home ground advantage
For now, Duncan and Amanda remain firmly parked in Hawke’s Bay. Even though HBT service clients needs across NZ and beyond, plans to physically expand beyond the region are not on the agenda. Leveraging an increasingly strong network of nationwide IT partners just makes more sense.
“We could take this model and put it up in Christchurch, but how do you do that and maintain the standard? It’s incredibly hard,” he says.
19 years after painting the walls in Raffles Street themselves, that focus on doing the job properly, in one place, is still the whole point.
The business is now on its third site since Raffles Street, having outgrown the first two, and is based at 24 Austin Street, Onekawa, a prominent corner site in Napier’s business district.
“We’re gradually making it our own, and looking forward to what’s to come,” says Duncan.
Getting into the Habit – Ai service launched
Duncan Wallace, HBT’s founder, didn’t need to brainstorm with AI to come up with the name for the company’s newest division. Take HBT, add AI, and out pops HABIT.
“I just spun that, we aren’t bad marketers” he says, only half joking.
HABIT is HBT’s new arm dedicated to AI and business process automation, launching alongside the technology and print services that built the parent company.
The thinking is simple: automation intelligence matters as much as artificial intelligence, and most businesses are sitting on clunky, manual processes ready to be streamlined.
Case in point: a client with a North American distribution division was manually processing bills of lading from a fleet of trucking companies. HABIT built an automated pipeline instead, delivering what Duncan calls a huge return on investment.
The project came together in three parts: automated end-of-day reporting, cutting hours of manual prep each week; automated bill of lading validation, catching discrepancies in real time before they hit inventory or invoicing; and automated invoice processing, matching vendor data against approved charge schedules.
Looking ahead, Duncan sees AI sharpening the picture further, flagging issues before they happen, spotting anomalies beyond fixed rules, and cutting review time as the system learns what’s normal for each carrier and vendor.
“HABIT needs to be part of your business’s DNA,” Duncan says.
