How Australia’s most successful business family, the Kennards, built two powerhouse firms

The Kennard family business traces back to 1948, with the hiring out of a concrete mixer.

With Kennards Self Storage, Sam Kennard oversees a business with more than $2bn in property assets.

The wider Kennard family would have to be one of the most underrated success stories in Australian business.

One wing has the Kennards Hire business, where customers can rent almost any tool or piece of machinery they need to complete any sort of job. The other side is the Kennards Self Storage, which as the name suggests offers storage space for just about anything that can’t fit in a customer’s house, garage or office.

It is now 30 years since the Kennards split the family business into two parts and went their separate ways. They have both been extremely successful since, as documents lodged recently with the corporate regulator show.

Kennards Hire, headed by Andy Kennard, recorded a net profit of $56m in the 2021 financial year, close to double the result from last year. Earnings before interest and tax, depreciation and amortisation were close to $185m. Revenue rose about $18m to $438m, and the business has about $280m in net assets on its balance sheet.

Kennards Hire majority shareholder Andy Kennard

Then there is Kennards Self Storage, headed by Sam Kennard. That business is a property behemoth. It more than doubled its net profit this year to $343m, compared with $150m in 2020, and revenue from renting storage increased by 13% to about $173m.

Its biggest asset is the buildings that house the storage facilities that dot suburbs and cities around the country. Kennards Self Storage has a whopping $2.17bn in investment property assets on its balance sheet, a figure that goes a long way towards a net asset base of almost $1.5bn.

The value of those property assets rose about $367m in 2021, the company’s latest financial accounts reveal.

As well as big profits, the two wings of the Kennard family shared in a combined $31m in dividends this year.

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Andy Kennard & family, Sam Kennard & family

• Ages: 78, 50
• Live: Sydney
• Estimated wealth: $839m and $1.27bn respectively
• Industries: Services, property
• Secrets of success: Building the biggest hire and storage businesses across Australia and expanding overseas

Source: The List – Australia’s Richest 250

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Kennards Hire is where the family started in business, and traces its roots back to Andy’s father Wally, who ran a small rural supply and machinery business in Bathurst, NSW.

In 1948 he hired out a concrete mixer to a neighbour who had asked to borrow rather than buy it, and the business grew from there.

Kennards now has more than 180 branches across Australia and New Zealand, which has been developed through a combination of astute acquisitions, strategic greenfield branches and organic growth.

Andy Kennard stepped down from managerial duties and the board in 2007 but remains a majority shareholder.

The remaining shares are owned by family and Kennards Hire employees. Both the Kennard family and hire business actively contribute to the Kennards Hire Foundation that backs organisations that support disadvantaged youth and environmental conservation endeavours.

Meanwhile, Sam Kennard became managing director of Kennards Storage in 1994, and now oversees a business that has more than 90 locations across Australia and New Zealand with 66,000 storage spaces and 610,000sq m of rentable space.

Sam Kennard took over from his late father Neville, Andy Kennard’s brother, who ran Kennards Hire before opening Australia’s first self-storage facility in Moorebank, Sydney, after seeing a mini storage building in the US.

Both Andy and Sam Kennard avoid the spotlight, though Sam Kennard has been an opponent of state lockdowns on social media.

The Great Kennard Split of 1991 took several months and “a lot of tears” to negotiate, Andy Kennard once told The Australian. There were many emotional disagreements over value, particularly over their father’s first property at Artarmon in Sydney.

But the wider family had started the separation process determined to sort it out between them and to do it without any cash equalisation: it all had to be done with assets. They eventually did it, and two great Australian family businesses named Kennard were created from one.