Above Centre Place shopping centre on Ward Street, something is happening that most people below will never notice. A team is working on the exterior of the building that will become the Pullman Hotel, removing heavy sections of pipe that a crane installed years ago. They lower them carefully, without scaffolding, without stopping traffic.
The shoppers keep moving. A rope access crew from Connect Access has been on that building for more than two years, and on most days, nobody looks up.
“If people could see what the amount of things that we’ve actually lifted and moved down, it’s super impressive,” says Brendon Kinnaird, Managing Director of Connect Access. “But because there’s no crane there, no one even sees. We’re just up there doing our thing.”
That invisibility is the essence of what Connect Access does. Working on the exterior faces of commercial buildings, industrial sites, and infrastructure across Hamilton and Auckland, rope access is how they get there.
The Danger Money That Wasn’t There
Brendon grew up loving outdoor education and had been thinking about adventure tourism when something shifted his direction. He started noticing industrial abseilers at work on buildings around the city.
“I saw abseilers around and I thought that they would get danger money,” he says. “I thought that I was chasing some sort of danger money, but then I found out that there’s not actually any danger money. It’s because it’s not actually a dangerous job.” The realisation didn’t put him off. “It’s still an exciting job.”
He went looking through the Yellow Pages, found New Zealand Industrial Abseilers (NZIA), a Hamilton rope access company, and talked his way into a job with no qualifications and only recreational abseiling experience. They took him on straight out of school, he says, and put him through all his training.
The Australia Years
What followed was a career that took Brendon well beyond Hamilton. He worked his way through New Zealand, across to Australia, onto oil rigs and offshore platforms, and into fly-in fly-out iron ore mining in the Western Australian desert, supervising welders and confined space work. He left in 2010 and came back in 2017.
In oil and gas, safety culture is not a policy document. It is the way things are done on every shift. That standard went with Brendon when he came home.
Cold Calls and Roof Paint
Connect Access came into existence around fifteen or sixteen years after Brendon had first walked into NZIA. Back in Hamilton to settle down, the job market for someone with his experience was thin. “Hamilton’s not a very big place,” he says. “Just looking in the job market, there wasn’t really too much available for a sort of project manager or anything like that.”
COVID pushed the decision into focus. “It was actually right at the start of COVID… that was when it was kind of like the nail in the… that’s when I really had to commit to it.” He pauses. “I had no other options really.”
He started with a laptop at a desk at the end of his bed, making phone calls. Cold calling building managers, trying to build trust with people who already had contractors they were comfortable with. “It was a lot of rejection. A lot of like, ‘ah, yep, we already have someone for that’.”
To stay afloat while he chased the work he actually wanted, Brendon started taking on residential roof painting. “That would provide me with enough sort of cash flow to continue to call,” he says. “While I was roof painting, I was calling property managers and trying to start quoting on abseil jobs around the city.”
For a couple of years, it went that way. A month of roof painting, one abseil job, another month, another job. “Until eventually the abseil jobs became every week.”
It took two years before he could hire his first full-time employee. The team leader who came on around that time is still with him now.
“We Use Abseiling to Fix Buildings”
When asked to explain rope access without jargon, Brendon doesn’t reach for complexity. “We basically use abseiling to fix buildings,” he says. “We use abseiling to get things done that are at height, to fix and work on things at height that you wouldn’t normally be able to get to yourself out on the exterior of a building. Anything that’s too hard to reach, not safe to get to, we can get there and then we fix the issue or clean it.”
The most common work right now includes building washing, joint seal replacements, leak detection and repairs, high-rise painting, birdproofing, and general height maintenance, including guttering work. Based in Hamilton, Connect Access covers the Waikato region and runs a regular presence in Auckland with locally based technicians, also servicing Tauranga and Rotorua.
“I think what could be done on ropes in Hamilton was underutilised,” Brendon says. “A lot of people just didn’t know, like they just don’t know to use rope access as an option.” That has changed. “Save yourself the hassle of having a massive scaffold up on the side of your building,” he says. “There’s another way. And we’re not just limited to building washing. That’s just the start of what we can do.”
For building owners who want to understand exactly how much that saving can be, Connect Access has published a detailed cost guide comparing rope access and scaffolding.
The Gold Standard
The IRATA certification is the qualification that matters in rope access, and Brendon is direct about why it stands apart. “IRATA is basically like the gold standard for abseiling around the world. It’s internationally recognised.” He came to it after working under other systems. “I could see that this is the best. It is the best and safest… it has the best guidelines and systems in place to follow to produce safe workers.”
There are three levels. Level 1 covers the fundamentals and requires 1,000 hours before a technician can progress. Level 2 introduces advanced rescue techniques. Level 3 is the supervisory qualification. “It pays to have a Level 3 on the job with you as much as possible.”
What separates good from great, Brendon says, comes down to exactly that.
“A good rope access technician can set up their ropes and get over the side of the building and do their job well. A great rope access technician is someone who can get 3 people over the side of the building and have a team working over the side of the building without them actually needing to be on the ropes at all, really.
“A really good Level 3 is able to direct and teach the rest of the team how to do something and how to set something up in a quick way and in a safe way and manage that from stepping back. Those are the best abseilers.”
Connect Access is +IMPAC Prequal Tōtika Scheme Assessed and holds approved installer status with Kattsafe and Rothoblaas. Safety culture, Brendon says, draws on where he has worked before. “Building a culture of safety is something that I’ve always been a part of, super high safety culture-orientated work sites, like coming from the oil and gas industry, where safety is… it’s probably the highest of all work sites.”
On site, it comes down to an open-door approach: get things reported, don’t worry about blowback. “It’s better to know about it than to try and hide it.”
For anyone evaluating providers, his advice is straightforward. Ask them to produce site-specific paperwork quickly. “Safety analysis, risk assessments, rescue plans. If they can provide that quickly, then it means it’s already in place.”
The Report Comes First
The part of Connect Access that tends to land hardest for new clients is the completion report. After every job, before the invoice goes out, the client receives a full photographic record of what was done and how. It was Brendon’s own frustration with contractors that built the system.
“If you ever have had someone work on your house or do a job for you, often you can’t quite see everything that they’ve done,” he says. “All you get at the end is an invoice and… you just see the bill.” That experience stayed with him. “The biggest thing that generated for me was… a thing I can’t stand is when I don’t know what is happening. My goal is to not have the client wonder what we’re doing.”
“Because we’re abseiling, no one can see what we’re doing.” The report fills that gap. It shows the prep, the process, and the outcome in sequence, and creates a record that holds value years after the job is done.
For property managers running large portfolios, the value is obvious. “Some of them manage 50 or 60 properties,” Brendon says. “They can’t monitor. They can’t look at every single building, but we can.”
Top to Bottom
Brendon’s goal for Connect Access is clear. “I want Connect Access to be a full-service building maintenance company that provides full building maintenance services for a building top to bottom.” He wants that in Hamilton. He wants it in Auckland. Established in both cities, covering every exterior trade a building needs.
For building owners and facilities managers who have never considered rope access, the message is simple. “They would be surprised at what they think is difficult to be done on a rope is surprisingly easy for us,” he says. “The capabilities of our teams are much higher than what people expect.”
Above Ward Street, the Pullman Hotel keeps taking shape. The team that has been there for over two years has painted the building, done demolition, installed anchor rail systems for long-term site access, and lowered heavy infrastructure down the exterior without a crane in sight. “We do what we say we’re gonna do,” Brendon says. “There’s no games at the end of the job. It’s very black and white.”
Considering Rope Access for Your Building?
If your building needs work done up high and you’d rather skip the scaffold, Connect Access can help. The team handles rope access, high-rise painting, facade and joint maintenance, window cleaning, building washing and anchor point certification for building owners, property managers and facilities teams across Auckland, Hamilton and the wider Waikato.
Every job is carried out by IRATA-certified technicians and backed by a full completion report, so you can see exactly what was done.
