Amy Satherley, ATS Logging Ltd
Amy Satherley has a restless energy to keep improving. She’s an efficient, driven business woman, who expertly juggles her business and family responsibilities while also finding the time to study a Diploma in health and safety part time. Read more below.
Growing up in residential Perth, Western Australia, Amy Satherley didn’t ever imagine she’d end up running ATS Logging alongside her husband Toby.
ATS Logging currently operates five crews in the Hawke’s Bay region; one ground-based crew, one pole hauler and three swing yarders, working for FMNZ, Pan Pac and Ernslaw One.
The husband-and-wife team met on a night out in a Perth pub, back in 2009.
“Toby had been over in Perth for about 7 years, logging and working as a heavy-duty diesel mechanic, while I was working as a teacher,” says Amy.
“After about six months together, we came over to New Zealand to meet his family. A few months after returning to Perth, with Toby’s parents owning an earthworks company, his dad was doing forestry roading and said there was with an opportunity for us to start a logging crew, so we took it from there.
They started their ground base crew with Toby and two employees. Amy worked as a relief teacher and ran the office side of the business around her teaching job.
“I’d do dispatch and bookkeeping and health and safety and everything in my lunch breaks and at nighttime,” says Amy.
Amy made a conscious effort to learn as much as she could about all parts of the business.
“I asked the accountant ‘how much can you show me that I can do and you don’t have to do’ and I did free IRD courses to understand how tax works in New Zealand,” says Amy.
“It wasn’t just office stuff though. I operated a bulldozer, driving up and down with a trailer, and worked as a QC for a bit so that I could have that understanding of logging, especially doing the stocks and grades. I wanted to make sure we were getting good grades out and getting a good recovery, so I thought that was the best way to learn.”
As the business grew, the couple started a family. Amy juggled having small children while working from home.
Amy also made improvements by utilising technology.
“Everything was so paper based when we first started, but as we grew, we had too many staff to do everything with paper, especially for things like payroll,” she says.
“I got my brother to set up our own health and safety programme using I Auditor…Now we’re doing everything on the tablet except for hazard ID and site plans basically,” she says.
“All our pre-starts are done on tablets and phones. It took a while to get everyone on board, but seven years on and it’s going really well.”
“We have SD cards in all the tablets, so they are online on site or when the guys are back in service. The beauty of having our own system means we’re constantly changing it with feedback, and we can change it straight away because we’ve got full control over it.”
Amy says she and Toby work well together.
“We do work really well together. He takes care of operations and the mechanical side in the workshop, while I am responsible for health and safety and finances,” she says.
“Toby’s mechanical knowledge is one of the reasons we survived those early years in business; he was able to do so much of the repairs and maintenance himself, fixing things at night and on the weekends.”
They’ve gotten their business to the point where they balance work and family well (they have five children) and are grateful for the support of their awesome family.
Amy Satherley speaks on behalf of contractors about the Approved Code of Practice at the 2025 FICA Spotlight on Safety Event in Palmerston North.
Amy says their shared drive to learn and improve has helped them succeed as a husband-and-wife team.
“We work as a team and trust each other in our areas.”
“We have wanted to get people off the ground to reduce the risk of those manual roles such as tree falling and breaking out. Now we only have one manual tree faller across five crews, plus we use five mechanised fallers on winches. We also haven’t been breaking out for over seven years with the use of grapples and carriages”
Amy says she and Toby share the desire to improve the perception of logging as well.
“I guess we’re trying to change the way the industry is perceived and we’re always wanting to do it properly,” says Amy.
“From the start, logging 14 years ago wasn’t seen as very professional, especially doing woodlots – farmers generally didn’t like logging.”
“So, a big thing for us was to make that difference and show that’s not what we’re trying to do. We made a conscious decision to do things differently, keep things tidy, look after fences and things like that,” she says.
“We’re still trying to change that perception and we always want to show that you have to be skilled to be a logger. Even if you weren’t very skilled at school, you’re still a skilled, professional worker’.”
Always looking to upskill, Amy is currently studying a Diploma in Health and Safety part time as well. “Probably one of the most challenging things is that we’re working in a high-risk industry, so it never ends,” she says.
“Health and safety is constantly evolving and you feel like you never really tick everything off completely. So, you just have to keep doing your best and doing things properly.”
ATS Logging is based in the Hawkes Bay and operates five crews around the region
Amy and husband Toby accept a Hawkes Bay Forestry Award
